Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/258

 2 i8 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE who were defeated and driven out, or who left home volun- tarily to escape starvation or dependence, took ^Xav'ia to the sea and to plundering more prosperous about 800 lands. At home economic and social inequality increased, and the most successful of the chieftains devel- oped into kings. By the middle of the ninth century, Gorm the Old ruled in Denmark, Eric in Sweden, and Harold Fair- Hair in Norway. When these kings began to tax and tyran- nize over the free yeomen, many of these joined the stream of emigrants. As this more peaceable and agricultural class added itself to the earlier outlaws and freebooters, the expe- ditions and invasions of the Northmen into other countries began to show a change from mere piracy and plundering to more systematic conquest and settlement. The Northmen had begun to attack Charlemagne's empire at the close of the eighth century, and he not only had to Ravages of fig nt them on his northern frontier, but wept to the North- se e their long galleys in the Mediterranean. Soon FrTnkish 6 they came across the North Sea every year in Empire the j r s hip S w ith sails striped with gay colors and with the high bows and sterns fashioned into the beaks and tails of fantastic monsters. Then they rowed — for their vessels were propelled by both sails and oars — up all the rivers from the Elbe to the Garonne, reaching the very heart of what is now France and Germany as well as frightfully harrying the coast regions. These heathen spared not even churches and monasteries; they burned towns and so dev- astated the country that the peasants hardly ventured to raise any crops. They burned the church of St. Martin at Tours which neither Huns nor Arabs had been able to reach, and they sacked even such inland cities of southern France as Limoges. The chroniclers of the time were in despair at the sad state of Christendom and at the same old cruel tale of pillage and slaughter which they had to set down year after year. The incapable successors of Charlemagne were seldom able to catch these invading bands, or to defeat them if they did overtake them, for they fought furiously in their hel-