The Northern Crusades (6 page)

That was Slav country, and its western limit was marked very firmly, at least between the ninth century and the 1140s, by the
Limes Saxonicus
, a no-man’s-land of dense forest and hedges which covered the sixty miles between Kiel Fjord and Lauenburg on the Elbe. Weak sections could be manned from the nearest villages to keep out raiders, and,
while merchants and armies could get through, it was never a safe journey as long as this remained a political barrier.

Also to the west, if you came by land, there was an ancient trackway running from Saxony northwards up the length of Jutland to the Limfjord; this was the
ocbsenweg
or
Hœrvej
, and it was used every now and then by invaders from the south who sought to conquer the Northern world. However, since the eighth century there had been an earth-wall, extending west from Schleswig, which could be used to block this entrance; here the track had to keep to a narrow neck of dry land. After Henry the Lion had ridden through with a Saxon army for a brief raid in 1157, King Valdemar of Denmark began lengthening and strengthening this defence with a mighty brick wall, and by the end of the century his sons had secured control of the roads that led to it, down to Hamburg and Lübeck.

The western approaches by sea – the Skagerrak, Kattegat, Belts and Sound – could not be sealed off, even by the forts at Nyborg, Sprog⊘ and Copenhagen built in Valdemar’s reign, but the terrors of the North Sea and the treacherous sandbanks of the north Jutland coast still kept most English, Flemish and French mariners at a distance in the early Middle Ages; they preferred to anchor at Ribe, on the west coast of Jutland, or unload at Hollingstedt, up the Eider. Norwegian shipping was more adventurous, and had long formed part of normal Baltic traffic; but the kings of the Danes made it their business to deter the raids on Danish islands which had enriched so many Norwegians in Viking times, and they appear to have met with success in the twelfth century.

To the east, the obstacle was mainly forest, which covered thousands of square miles between the Vistula and the Gulf of Finland and clogged the drainage of thousands more. Swedes had penetrated this region by navigating the rivers, and had set up a network of colonies and tribute-collecting chieftaincies stretching as far south as the Steppe; these became the Russian city-states. By 1100, the Rus blocked the way east for Scandinavians other than merchants and mercenaries, and were sending raids westwards, towards the Baltic coastlands. Russian traders came to Gotland, Wollin, and Schleswig; but centuries of water-borne traffic had caused no large immigration from the East.

Nature thus presented certain obstacles to the intruder into this world. They were not insuperable; but they needed labour and organization to be overcome, and in the early twelfth century no outside invader or
settler had been able to secure a permanent foothold for six hundred years. Ever since Roman times, the Baltic region had been an exporter rather than an importer of men.

The peoples settled in North-East Europe
c.
1100 can be divided into four main groups by language: Norse speakers, Slavs, Balts, and Finno-Ugrians. The first three spoke languages of the Indo-European family, the last are classified as Uralian. Affinity of speech within these groups never kept them apart or led their components to merge with each other; in economic and political matters, their culture was not much affected by such differences. Nevertheless, each group seems to have had certain distinctive characteristics shared by its component peoples in matters of social organization, religion, diet and dress, and these seem to provide a fair-enough principle of arrangement. This is to walk in the footprints of the first great Northern geographer, Adam of Bremen, the schoolmaster to the cathedral community of the metropolitan of the North, who was writing his
Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum
(‘History of the Archbishops of Hamburg’) in the 1070s, and collecting much of his information first-hand – from King Sweyn II of Denmark, among others.

The first group (called Scandinavian) consisted of the people called Swedes, Götar and Danes, who spoke a variety of languages usually lumped together as ‘East Norse’; and the Norwegians, the ‘West Norse’ speakers. In those days the Norwegians occupied the coastlands of what is now Norway, as far north as the Lofoten Islands; and in addition, to the south, the shores of the Kattegat down to where Gothenburg now stands were theirs. They played a part in Baltic affairs both by trekking over the mountains into Lapland and by sailing in from the west; but the bulk of the population lived away from the inland sea, on the Atlantic side of the dividing central Scandinavian range they called ‘the Keel’, and during this period were more involved with the British Isles, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland than with the great North-East. The events of the next 300 years were to draw them increasingly away from the West, and more deeply involve them in the politics of Danes, Germans and Swedes, but for the time being they can be left to one side.

The Swedes and Götar, who had been joined into one commonwealth
for centuries, were by contrast almost wholly east-facing; they had no western coastline until the thirteenth century, only an upriver port at Gamla Lödöse, and their coastline on the other side began round Kalmar and went north as far as the Bothnian Gulf. Inland, the Swedes were settled most thickly in the area of modern Stockholm and Lake Mälar, the Götar in the area of the two great lakes Vätter and Väner. South of them there was a mountainous and forested region called Småland, where settlements were very sparse and political affiliations somewhat unclear, and the coastal district called Blekinge, over which the king of Denmark had had some sort of authority since the time of Old Canute – which was how Canute ‘the Great’ was usually described. Then came the Danes: the Scanians and Halländingar, inhabiting the fertile and temperate coastal valleys of what is now south-west Sweden; the Danes of the islands, of whom the most numerous were the Zealanders; and the Jutlanders, who occupied the whole peninsula down to the Eider and Kiel Fjord.

Most Danes and Swedes were peasants, living in small rural communities, raising grain crops – chiefly barley, sometimes wheat, oats and rye – and keeping cattle, swine and ponies. The pattern of agriculture varied, but on the whole the resources of a village were shared out in much the same way as you would find in southern England at this period: two-or three-field crop-rotation, cleared grazing land in commons, fenced or unfenced according to season, with collective responsibility for keeping boundaries and respecting local custom. Outside this pattern there were the ‘fringemen’, who lived off the forest, coast and mountain by fishing, trapping, hunting and mining, and the burghers – artisans, tradesmen and innkeepers settled in boroughs and ports. This was the working population.

Foreign observers, such as Adam of Bremen, were moderately impressed by the prosperity attained at least in Denmark: they could see abundance of corn, cattle, horses and butter, and tall, well-favoured people, if somewhat uncouth and boozy. However, medieval writers tended to judge a nation’s prosperity by the level and style of the consumption of its ruling class, and they have to be corrected by referring to other standards. The archaeology of medieval Danish villages reveals little trace of fatness: the villagers were living close to starvation, in the shadow of the three great menaces of the time – bad years, bad health and greedy landlords. For the peasants were to a large extent unfree:
either thralls, or villeins owing service to lords or poor men working for others.

The village and its inhabitants were sometimes owned by one man; sometimes the economic units into which its resources were divided – the
b⊘l
– were separately owned, or halved and quartered among owners; but in any case it was landownership, great or small, which sorted people out. All over the fertile districts of Denmark and Sweden villages were overlooked from far or near by the ring-fence and high-roofed hall of the landowner or bailiff, who took some of what the others could raise, and by the rather similar-looking church, which took a little more. In other places, the village freemen kept the biggest share of the community’s land in their own hands, and set their few slaves or hired men to work it. Out in the woods, particularly in Sweden, there were many communities of free peasants who both ploughed for themselves and carried the sword or spear of respectability; but, on the whole, where there was a freeman, there was also a slave. And, despite the huge differences in wealth between poor and rich freemen – between the owner of half a
b⊘l
, and the owner of 500
b⊘l
, as we find in twelfth-century Denmark – they shared a legal status: they were the
bondær
(‘dwellers, inhabitors’), who made up the political nation, whose forebears had done well from military service, piracy, trade or, perhaps, good husbandry.

Most Danish and Swedish
bondær
owed some form of allegiance or respect to the powerful dynasties, the kingly lines, which personified the peoples and exercised public authority as well as owning private wealth. They were newly rich families which had clothed themselves in royal traditions that went back to the legendary past; the Knytlings of Denmark copied English and German rulers. However, despite the importance of the kings, for most practical purposes the
bondær
were self-governing, in peace if not in war. Each local district (
herred
in Denmark,
hundrad
in Sweden) was run by an assembly of landowners, the
ting
or thing, which could meet as often as once a week; and each province, group of
herreder
or island lay under the jurisdiction of a larger assembly, meeting perhaps twice a year, the
landsting
.

The
landstinge
were used by kings as military musters, and political councils, and the smaller assemblies were expected to hear the king’s representative and follow him to war or peace-keeping duty, but in both cases the
ting
was normally ruled by local opinion and local grandees, the ‘honourable’ men. Social stability rested on these sessions – peace
between kin-groups, collective intimidation of the unfree, pursuit of the outlaw, fair dealing in trade, demarcation of boundaries, the deterring of intruders. And, when the king died, plenary gatherings of the
bondær
assembled to acclaim or reject members of the royal families with a claim to succeed – even if this sometimes only meant ratifying, or anticipating, the verdict of battle. In the early twelfth century the freeman and his lord were still running Denmark and Sweden without much interference from above, and kings who fell foul of assemblies were badly treated. In 1131 the son and heir of King Nicholas of Denmark was accused of murder and publicly defamed by the
ting
at Ringsted, and the King had to exile him to Sweden to avoid bloodshed; in 1153 Sweyn 111 was assailed by jeers, hisses and stones at the Scanian
landsting
⁸
. In Sweden it was worse: if the king wanted to attend an assembly among the Götar, he had to be formally inducted, and when King Ragnwald rode up unasked to the
ting
at Karlaby in the 1120s he met ‘a shameful death’.
⁹
However, times were changing; kings were growing stronger.

They were much richer than other landowners. In both countries they held accumulations of royal estates and the right to stipulated amounts of food, drink, silver and transport in each district. They could ride or row from place to place with armed retinues, ‘eating their way round their kingdoms’, and spending the great festivals at their larger halls entertaining the great men; the gluttony and drunkenness of which they and the Slavic princes were accused must have been in part a consequence of this form of social control. In addition, the Danish king had rights over his burghers – mint money, a ‘midsummer-geld’ from town property-owners, tolls, protection money from guilds and foreigners – plus a right to take fines from certain kinds of malefactor, a right to appropriate wrecks on the kingdom’s shores, and rights over various natural resources; and he took the inheritances of heirless men. All this brought in wealth, and his position was further strengthened by a qualified right of command over the two national organizations which all men were bound to obey: the
letbing
, or military levy, and the Church. The
letbing
has been mentioned above (
p. 15
), and its working will be described below. The Church had taken a long time to get established (
c.
815 to
c.
1020), but by the 1070s there were seven bishops carrying out their duties under the protection of the Danish king, and these duties included attendance at local assemblies, helping in local defence and assisting the ruler with advice, hospitality, writing and prayer. Until
1103 they acknowledged the archbishop of Hamburg–Bremen as their spiritual overlord, although it was the king who put them into their sees; after 1103 the bishop of Lund became metropolitan archbishop of the Scandinavian churches, and the king of Denmark had a
Reichskirche
of his own, like the Emperor.

Denmark was beginning to look like the other kingdoms of Latin Christendom, and under the rule of Nicholas (1104–34) and Valdemar I (1157–82) the resemblance was to become much more marked. The first charters and stone churches had appeared in the 1070s; the first monastery shortly afterwards. Pope Gregory VII had written to the Northern kings as members of the Christian commonwealth, and Paschal II recognized the murdered Canute IV (d. 1086) as a martyr for the Catholic faith. St Canute’s brother, Eric I, went on a pilgrimage to Byzantium, and the great nobles were following the example of the kings in endowing churches; sometimes they became bishops, and it was no longer necessary to import most of the senior clergy from Saxony or England. In the tenth century the kings had accepted the name of ‘Christian’ on behalf of their subjects; now this inoculation had taken effect.