Historical Lectures and Essays | Page 7

foot on British soil; from
which he will rise with the comfortable feeling that we
English-speaking men, from the highest to the lowest, are literally
kinsmen. Nay, so utterly made up now is the old blood-feud between
Norseman and Englishman, between the descendants of those who
conquered and those who were conquered, that in the children of our
Prince of Wales, after 800 years, the blood of William of Normandy is
mingled with the blood of the very Harold who fell at Hastings. And so,
by the bitter woes which followed the Norman conquest was the whole
population, Dane, Angle, and Saxon, earl and churl, freeman and slave,
crushed and welded together into one homogeneous mass, made just

and merciful towards each other by the most wholesome of all
teachings, a community of suffering; and if they had been, as I fear they
were, a lazy and a sensual people, were taught
That life is not as idle ore, But heated hot with burning fears, And
bathed in baths of hissing tears, And battered with the strokes of doom
To shape and use.
But how did these wild Vikings become Christian men? It is a long
story. So stanch a race was sure to be converted only very slowly.
Noble missionaries as Ansgar, Rembert, and Poppo, had worked for
150 years and more among the heathens of Denmark. But the
patriotism of the Norseman always recoiled, even though in secret,
from the fact that they were German monks, backed by the authority of
the German emperor; and many a man, like Svend Fork-beard, father of
the great Canute, though he had the Kaiser himself for godfather,
turned heathen once more the moment he was free, because his baptism
was the badge of foreign conquest, and neither pope nor kaiser should
lord it over him, body or soul. St. Olaf, indeed, forced Christianity on
the Norse at the sword's point, often by horrid cruelties, and perished in
the attempt. But who forced it on the Norsemen of Scotland, England,
Ireland, Neustria, Russia, and all the Eastern Baltic? It was absorbed
and in most cases, I believe, gradually and willingly, as a gospel and
good news to hearts worn out with the storm of their own passions.
And whence came their Christianity? Much of it, as in the case of the
Danes, and still more of the French Normans, came direct from Rome,
the city which, let them defy its influence as they would, was still the
fount of all theology, as well as of all civilisation. But I must believe
that much of it came from that mysterious ancient Western Church, the
Church of St. Patric, St. Bridget, St. Columba, which had covered with
rude cells and chapels the rocky islets of the North Atlantic, even to
Iceland itself. Even to Iceland; for when that island was first discovered,
about A.D. 840, the Norsemen found in an isle, on the east and west
and elsewhere, Irish books and bells and wooden crosses, and named
that island Papey, the isle of the popes--some little colony of monks,
who lived by fishing, and who are said to have left the land when the
Norsemen settled in it. Let us believe, for it is consonant with reason
and experience, that the sight of those poor monks, plundered and
massacred again and again by the "mailed swarms of Lochlin," yet

never exterminated, but springing up again in the same place, ready for
fresh massacre, a sacred plant which God had planted, and which no
rage of man could trample out--let us believe, I say, that that sight
taught at last to the buccaneers of the old world that there was a purer
manliness, a loftier heroism, than the ferocious self-assertion of the
Berserker, even the heroism of humility, gentleness, self-restraint,
self-sacrifice; that there was a strength which was made perfect in
weakness; a glory, not of the sword but of the cross. We will believe
that that was the lesson which the Norsemen learnt, after many a wild
and blood-stained voyage, from the monks of Iona or of Derry, which
caused the building of such churches as that which Sightrys, king of
Dublin, raised about the year 1030, not in the Norse but in the Irish
quarter of Dublin: a sacred token of amity between the new settlers and
the natives on the ground of a common faith. Let us believe, too, that
the influence of woman was not wanting in the good work--that the
story of St. Margaret and Malcolm Canmore was repeated, though
inversely, in the case of many a heathen Scandinavian jarl, who,
marrying the princely daughter of some Scottish chieftain, found in her
creed at last something more precious than herself; while his brother or
his cousin became, at Dublin or Wexford or