POLITICAL HISTORY 



apparently did come to the coasts of Britain on Viking raids in his 

 unregenerate days. Later ages, which thought of him as a saint, 

 transferred him to the side of Christianity. But the story of his presence 

 in the Thames at all is merely another instance among several of con- 

 fusion between him and Olaf Tryggvasson. St. Olaf's church upon the 

 Surrey side in Tooley Street, that is St. Olaf's Street, owes its dedication 

 merely to his subsequent popularity in the north of Europe, not to any 

 local connexion with the neighbourhood of London Bridge. There 

 were three St. Olaf's churches north of the Thames too. 



The Thames and Surrey formed the bases from which the next 

 most famous attempt upon London was made by the Danes. Sweyn 

 had been received generally as king when Ethelred fled the country. 

 Then on Sweyn's death Ethelred had been recalled, and Cnut carried 

 on the contest with him and his son Edmund for the English crown. 



Three times at least in those calamitous years there is direct mention 

 of the Danes having traversed Surrey. In 1009 they had crossed the 

 Thames from north to south at Staines and marched through Surrey to 

 the lower Thames. In 1013 Swegen himself had marched from 

 Winchester to London. In 1015 Cnut had gone westward from Kent 

 to Frome in Somersetshire. In 1016, on May 7, a fortnight after 

 Ethelred's death, Cnut brought his fleet into the Thames and beset 

 London. He there made the famous ditch round the works at the foot 

 of London Bridge whereby his ships might come above the bridge. Two 

 opposite mistakes have been made about this exploit. It has been on 

 the one hand derided as impossible, and on the other hand the course of 

 Cnut's channel has been laboriously traced. The Norsemen had done a 

 similar thing at Paris more than a hundred years earlier, dragging their 

 ships round on the left bank of the Seine. The feat was easier in the 

 Surrey marshes, for every spring tide, if not ordinary high tides, over- 

 flowed a good deal of what is now Southwark and Lambeth, so that it 

 was only needful for Cnut to cut through two or three causeways and 

 embankments to enable his vessels to scrape over the flats. But what 

 made the feat easy has made any attempt to recover his exact line of 

 action impracticable. When the gaps in the causeways were mended 

 no marks remained of the route. At any rate the attack on London 

 failed. Later in the year it was renewed, but Edmund, the new English 

 king, crossed the Thames into Surrey at Brentford and cleared the 

 southern side of the river of the Danes, pursuing them to Sheppey, 

 whence they crossed into Essex. Edmund followed them and was 

 defeated in Essex. The kingdom was then divided between the rivals, 

 Edmund taking Wessex and Cnut Mercia and East Anglia. London 

 went with the latter and admitted the Danes, who had failed to enter 

 by force before. It would be interesting, but it is impossible, to know 

 whether Southwark was included with London, or whether the Danes 

 had one end of the bridge, the Englishmen the other. Edmund's death 

 on November 30 of the same year left both to the former. More than 

 twenty years of continual warfare and ravage must have left few houses 

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