London - Edward Rutherfurd [90]
The area where they settled came to be known as the Danelaw. Here, the English population had to live by Danish custom. Yet this was not so bad. The Danes were Nordic folk, their language like Anglo-Saxon. They even became Christians. And while in the Saxon south the poorer peasants gradually became serfs, the freebooting Danes led a more open life where peasants were independent, belonging to no man. After Alfred’s descendants had gradually regained control of the Danelaw and reunited England, the men of the south would still say, with a shrug: “You can’t argue with a northerner. They’re independent up there.”
However, things were seldom peaceful in the tumultuous northern world, and just before the year 1000, the Danes again descended upon the rich island.
This time they were in better luck. The English leader was not Alfred, but his inept descendant Ethelred, who, because he usually failed to take good advice – raed in Anglo-Saxon – was known as Ethelred Un-raed, the Unready. Year after year, this foolish king paid them protection – Danegeld – until at last the English, sick of him, accepted the Danish king as their monarch instead. As Leofric’s grandfather had remarked, “If I’m going to pay Danegeld I’d like to have some order.”
Nor was he disappointed. The reign of King Canute, who shortly succeeded to the thrones of both Denmark and England, was long and exemplary. His strength was feared; his simple common sense was legendary. The Danish Barnikel family found a ready welcome at his court, but so had Leofric’s grandfather and many Saxons like him. Impartially ruling England as an English king, he brought unity, peace and prosperity to the land, and if his son had not suddenly died soon after succeeding him, forcing the English Witan to choose pious Edward from the old Saxon line, England might have remained an Anglo-Danish kingdom.
Nowhere was this marriage of Saxon and Danish cultures more successful than in the growing port now known as London. Lying on the old borderland between Saxon and Danish England, it was natural that the two cultures should merge there. Though the assembly of all the citizens, summoned three times a year by the great bell to the old cross that stood beside St Paul’s, was still the Saxon Folkmoot, the court where the city fathers regulated the city’s trade and commerce had a Danish name: the Hustings. Whilst some of the little wooden churches were dedicated to Saxon saints like Ethelburga, others bore Scandinavian names like Magnus or Olaf. And along the lane that led to Westminster lay a rural parish of former Viking settlers called St Clement Danes.
On this cold winter morning, therefore, both Barnikel the Dane and Leofric the Saxon were united by a common desire: they wanted an English king.
One might suppose from his pious name that Edward the Confessor had been revered. He had not. Not only was his character petty, but he was foreign. Although Saxon born, he had been brought up in a French monastery and had taken a French wife, and whilst used to the long-established communities of French and German merchants in London, the burghers and nobles had not taken to the Frenchmen who infested his court. His Abbey said it all. Saxon buildings were usually modest timber structures full of intricate carving. Even the few stone churches sometimes looked as if they were meant to be made of wood. But the Abbey’s massive pillars and rounded arches were in the stern Romanesque style of the Continent. Not English at all.
The final insult, however, had been William of Normandy.
The Witan had three choices. Only one, a nephew of King Edward’s, was legitimate, but he was a youth, brought up abroad by a foreign mother and without a following in England. “He won’t do,” Leofric declared. Then there was Harold. Not royal, but a great English noble, a fine commander, and popular.
And then there was the Norman.
It was