n the subject, [8]
addressed to contemporary audiences; setting forth such a state of
things,--sons selling their fathers, mothers, and sisters as Slaves to
the Danish robber; themselves living in debauchery, blusterous gluttony,
and depravity; the details of which are well-nigh incredible, though
clearly stated as things generally known,--the humor of these poor
wretches sunk to a state of what we may call greasy desperation, "Let us
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The manner in which they treated
their own English nuns, if young, good-looking, and captive to the
Danes; buying them on a kind of brutish or subter-brutish "Greatest
Happiness Principle" (for the moment), and by a Joint-Stock arrangement,
far transcends all human speech or imagination, and awakens in one the
momentary red-hot thought, The Danes have served you right, ye accursed!
The so-called soldiers, one finds, made not the least fight anywhere;
could make none, led and guided as they were, and the "Generals" often
enough traitors, always ignorant, and blockheads, were in the habit,
when expressly commanded to fight, of taking physic, and declaring that
nature was incapable of castor-oil and battle both at once. This
ought to be explained a little to the modern English and their
War-Secretaries, who undertake the conduct of armies. The undeniable
fact is, defeat on defeat was the constant fate of the English; during
these forty years not one battle in which they were not beaten. No gleam
of victory or real resistance till the noble Edmund Ironside (whom it
is always strange to me how such an Ethelred could produce for son)
made his appearance and ran his brief course, like a great and far-seen
meteor, soon extinguished without result. No remedy for England in that
base time, but yearly asking the victorious, plundering, burning and
murdering Danes, "How much money will you take to go away?" Thirty
thousand pounds in silver, which the annual _Danegelt_ soon rose to,
continued to be about the average yearly sum, though generally on the
increasing hand; in the last year I think it had risen to seventy-two
thousand pounds in silver, raised yearly by a tax (Income-tax of its
kind, rudely levied), the worst of all remedies, good for the day only.
Nay, there was one remedy still worse, which the miserable Ethelred
once tried: that of massacring "all the Danes settled in England"
(practically, of a few thousands or hundreds of them), by treachery and
a kin