Danes II

Who Were the Danes?

By the middle of the eleventh century the Danes were a people caught between two selves. Behind them lay the great age of the Vikings, when their grandfathers had ruled England under Cnut the Great and terrorized every coast from Ireland to the mouth of the Seine. Ahead lay something quieter and stranger: a settled Christian kingdom of farmers and fishermen, still living by the same cold seas but no longer sailing them for plunder. The change took roughly two centuries to work itself out, and during those centuries the Danes were neither the raiders their ancestors had been nor quite the tidy medieval subjects they would eventually become. They were a sea people learning to pray in Latin, a people of oath and assembly learning to accept a king's writ, a people of small timber halls learning to build in stone.

Homeland and Way of Life

Denmark was a country where nowhere was more than a long day's ride from salt water. The kingdom was all peninsula and islands: the low green hills and sandy heaths of Jutland, the richer farmland of Zealand and Funen, the small wind-scoured islands of the southern Baltic, and, across the Sound, the broad grain country of Scania that belonged to the Danish crown throughout this period. Cattle did well on the moist pastures of Jutland, and butter and oxen moved south into the German lands by the barrel and the herd. Rye and barley grew in the lighter soils, and beer was the everyday drink of every household that could afford the grain. Towns stayed small and came late. Roskilde on Zealand was the old royal seat and the burial place of kings, Lund across the Sound became the seat of the Danish archbishopric and the spiritual capital of the north, and Copenhagen, fortified by the warrior bishop Absalon on what had been a fishermen's harbor, was still a modest place at the end of the period. For most Danes, though, the world was not any of these towns but a village of timber longhouses clustered around a church that was still, in living memory, a new thing.

Warfare, Power, and Limits

The Danes remained a sea people long after they stopped being raiders. The old leding, the levy that obliged coastal districts to provide ships and crews for the king's fleet in time of war, survived in one form or another through the whole period and gave any reasonably competent Danish ruler the ability to put a real navy on the water within weeks. On land they fought on foot with spear and round shield, in a style their Viking great-grandfathers would have recognized, and the heavy cavalry of France and Germany never became the heart of a Danish army. For a long stretch of the twelfth century this combination carried them far. Under Valdemar the Great and his son, working hand in glove with Absalon, Danish ships and Danish soldiers crossed the Baltic again and again to fight the still-pagan Wends of the southern coast, took the great pagan sanctuary at Arkona on the island of Rugen, and for a generation or two the Danes were the unquestioned masters of that sea. Then the tide turned. German princes pressed harder on the land border, the growing merchant fleets of the Baltic towns crowded Danish shipping, and the kingdom entered a long, bad stretch in which large portions of it were pawned to foreign creditors to pay the debts of quarreling kings. The recovery, when it came in the mid-fourteenth century, owed as much to the stubbornness of Danish farmers who went on plowing and paying taxes as to any ruler's cleverness.

Beliefs, Customs, and Society

The Christianization of the Danes had been made official in the late tenth century, when Harald Bluetooth raised the great runestone at Jelling and declared on it that he had made the Danes Christian. Official and real are not the same thing, and for generations after Harald the new faith sat lightly on a population still close to the old gods. Pagan amulets kept turning up in the graves of baptized farmers a century after the official conversion, and the parish priest, speaking Danish rather than Latin when he explained things to his flock, slowly became one of the fixed points of village life only because he was willing to meet people where they were. The reward for that patience came in the twelfth century, when Denmark threw itself into Latin Christendom with the enthusiasm of a late convert. Cistercian monasteries were founded across the kingdom, the great Romanesque cathedral of Lund rose in cut sandstone, and Saxo Grammaticus, writing his Latin history of the Danes at Absalon's request, gave the kingdom a literary past that could stand beside the histories of the French and the English. But the texture of daily belief was not in the cathedrals. It was in the long, low thatched houses shared with the cattle in winter for the warmth their breath gave, in the childbirths that killed too many young women, in the small graves that filled every churchyard, in the stories the old told by the fire that were half Christian and half something older. By the end of the period a Danish child grew up in a world where the church bell marked the hours and the saints' days marked the calendar as naturally as the tides marked the shore.

Contacts, Conflicts, and Legacy

The Danes lived at the hinge of two seas, and the herring shoals that ran through the Sound every autumn were perhaps the kingdom's greatest single piece of wealth. On the bare sand at Skanor and Falsterbo a temporary city of tents, salting sheds, and cooperage rose every autumn, stayed busy for a few weeks, and vanished again. Fishermen from every Danish island came to catch, men and women from inland villages came to gut and salt, barrel-makers came to build the casks, merchants came from as far as the Rhine and the Low Countries to buy, and priests came to hear confession and marry off couples who had met over a gutting trough. The salted fish that left in those barrels would feed Lent fasts as far away as Italy. To the west, across the North Sea, England and Flanders were old trading partners since Viking times, buyers of Danish butter and oxen and sellers of cloth and wine. To the east lay the Baltic, where Danish ships shared the water with the merchant fleets of Lubeck and the other rising German towns, and that relationship was the defining economic fact of the later medieval centuries. The German merchants needed the herring of the Sound and the grain of the Baltic plains, and everything they carried had to pass through Danish waters. Out of that geography would eventually come great wealth for the Danish crown, but in this period the Danes were more often the smaller partner, watching foreign ships tie up at their own quays. What held the people together through all of it was less the crown, which more than once came close to losing the kingdom, than the older things underneath: the village assembly where free farmers still spoke their minds, the shared language, the shared memory of the sea, and the slow, patient work of making a living from cold water and thin soil. By the time a stronger kingdom reassembled itself in the mid-fourteenth century, the Danes had been Christian for four hundred years, had built and lost a Baltic empire, and had become unmistakably themselves: a small northern people whose history was written in salt and rye as much as in parchment.