The White Council

Re: Rangers of the North (again!!)

Tolkien and Inklings Discussion

: : : [snip]

: : : : : Well there isn't much of a contradiction if you consider the matter. I would say that the personal side of the relationship was not unlike the connection between Napoleon and the Old Guard. The guardsmen were jealous of the banter they could enjoy with their emperor, and he is recorded as being very informal with them on occasion - they were not known as Grognards (grumblers) for nothing. Also the Byzantine emperors had close relationships with their Varangian guardsmen on whom their personal safety lay. Indeed some ex-huscarles entered the Varangian Guard after Hastings - they probably would not have considered their basic employment as having changed. Both the Varangians and Napoleon's Guard were paid professional soldiers, not close kin of their leader or part of his household as such. : : : : The personal relationship in most cases would begin when the Huscarle was appointed and sworn in, it was not a pre-requisite for entry. One has to remember that in Anglo-Saxon society the "Oath-breaker" was just about the lowest form of life, so once sworn into service a soldier could, in theory at least, be thought of as reliably loyal.

: : : Yes, but you must ackowledge that the Varangian Guard and the Old Guard were full-time, paid soldiers. The huscarles were not. They were the "flower of Anglo-Saxon males" as Poitiers laments after they are dead. Most of the huscarles were land-owning Saxons. Many were thegns and other members of the Saxon aristocracy. They did not stay with Harold at all times, nor were they always employed in a military capacity as the "Guards" were. And as for many Saxons joining the Varangian Guard after the Norman Conquest (a fact which is certainly true), they did look upon this as a change. Some sources lament that the greatest Saxon warriors and leaders were forced to mercenary themselves in faraway lands. A distinction was made between serving lord and country and hiring out to foreign kings. The reason they left is because their lands were taken by William and given to Normans.

: I always thought that the Huscarles were so unusual for their time because they were professional soldiers and formed a sort of embryonic standing army. Although the huscarles would have been recruited from the upper reaches of society - in A-Saxon terms gesithcundmen or eorlas - I doubt if many would have been thegns or drengs in the sense of landowners (though they probably claimed thegnly rank as a social position). The rural landowners would have been part of the "Select fyrd" or would have led their own retainers and neighbours as part of the general levvy of the fyrd as a whole. The huscarles (though many may have been related to landowners) were particularly useful to the king by the fact that they had no duties or responsibilities other than fighting. When not on campaign a landowner is responsible for the running of his estates; when not on campaign the huscarles formed the enforcers of the king's authority, also being used as garrison troops in key localities, they were always immediately ready for war.

Some archeologists see traces of a professional caste of warriors right back to the Roman Iron Age, they build a good case but.....

: Some, perhaps a minority, of the huscarles were financed by grants of land, or rather the monetary revenue from certain parcels of land. It appears that the huscarle was an absentee landlord - no doubt a reeve (gerefa) was responsible for estate management. This gift was directly from the king (or Ealdorman) not inherited, so the huscarle was directly indebted and therefore more likely to be loyal. Other huscarles were paid in cash and kind (armour,clothes,food etc). That this system was possible highlights a little known fact, that Late Anglo-Saxon England was the most sophisticated state in Christendom outside of the venerable Byzantine Empire. No other state had such a well developed cash economy, the English silver penny was a stable and intensively used coin. It was minted to exacting standards of weight and purity and old issues were periodically recalled and freshly minted coin struck. So important was the coinage that a number of kings punished moneyers who adulterated the silver content with castration and the loss of a hand.

: : In Denmark at least, there was a time-honoured tradition of lords having a following (hird) of full-time troops serving as a guard. Knud had his famous Huskarls, I seem to remember that we even have a written codex for them, and, as we all know, Knud was more a King of England than anywhere else, so I would guess that even had it not existed before, professional Huskarls would have been established after his time.

: As Neithan says the Anglo-Scandinavian world had a well developed system wherby warriors could move from court to court selling their swords. Harald Hadrada in his young days, at various times was in the pay of the Grand Prince of Kiev and the Emperor of Byzantium. The Icelander Egil Skallagrimson served the English king Athelstan, Thorkell the Tall served both Svein of Denmark and Ethelred of England. How the monetarily rather poorer Scandinavian kingdoms could support these professional troops is not clear to me, though the numbers could merely have been smaller.

More English coins from around the turn of the millenium has been found in Scandinavia than in England, monetary poor?? Further, who were the traders of the north sea, north Atlantic and Baltic (as far as The Caspian Sea), monetary poor?? They were not as rich as the great nation of England, but rich enough to support an army/navy and a cultural boost in the high middle age.

: : : : As for foreigners in the Huscarles, there were certainly some Scandinavians, who at the time of Hastings I would class as foreigners ie. not Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Danes from the Danelaw. King Harold's brothers and probably other Ealdormen (or Earls/Jarls) kept their own small companies of Huscarles. Harold's rebel brother (who's name escapes me for the moment) one time Earl of Northumbria, was married to a daughter of the Count of Flanders had a number of Flemmings in his Huscarles.

: : : Tostig, brother of Harold, by having Flemish huscarles was using family members, at least by marriage. The urstwhile Earl of Northumbria was a notable dealer with foreigners and not a great example of a good Saxon. It was Tostig, in fact, who encouraged Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, to attack England. He was subsequently defeated and slain at Stamford Bridge, as was Tostig. And as for Scandinavians, they were not entirely foriegn either. You make a distinction between the Anglo-Danish of the Danelaw and the Danes, not one that would have been made in the 11th century. I would not count the Danes as too foreign in certain parts of England at the time.

: : Me neither, since at this time, English culture was permeating Denmark (coins, towns, churches etc- we have a number of towns founded in the 11th century that are very "English" in their outlook).

: In many ways Britain and Scandinavia formed an interrelated culture zone at this time, but the primary settlement of Danes in England had taken place some 200 years before Hastings. In that time the Danes of the Danelaw had become more or less culturally assimilated into England and English and Danish had melded into various local dialects. It isn't much more than 200 years ago that Britain and America became separate countries, and today the British and Americans still share many cultural and linguistic traits, but an American in Britain is quite definitely a foreigner and vice-versa. Normandy was founded at roughly the same time as the Danes settled in the Danelaw, but at the time of Hastings could the Normans be thought of as identical with the Danes of Denmark?

No, but then, the scandinavian (Danish too) settlers of the Normandy, were never more than a warrior aristocracy leaving little impact on the foreign culture they settled in (apart from their energy and drive), whereas the Danish settlers of England were many, many more as well as also settled as farmers (just look at the names and English language of the old Danelaw) in a culture very similar to their own- the Angles and Jutes came from Jutland and the Saxons from the culturally similar areas in North Germany. They could thus continue their own culture and lifestyle (though many converted). Also Danes continued to be seen as somewhat different until the invasions of the late 10th century where they were all annihilated in a large massacre (allegedly the murder of his brother-in-law, Ulf and sister, was what prompted Sven Tveskæg to invade and conquer England).

: : : :The Norman Earl Ralph (pre-conquest appointed by the half Norman king Edward the Confessor) based in Hereford, undoubtedly had fellow countrymen in his military force. Though I would say that the vast majority of Huscarles would have been drawn from Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Danish sources.

: : : Edward the Confessor, in fact, surrounded himself with a large number of Normans, one of the grumbles against him that was "going round" during his rule. It can be said with some veracity that Edward himself is in many ways responsible for the Norman Conquest. But Edward was, as you mention, half Norman. Thus his association with Normans, as soldiers, huscarles whatever, should not be surprising or out of the ordinary.

: : : Well, that is all I have time for, even though I am greatly enjoying this thread. . .

: : I would believe that the tradition of a Hird of professional soldiers was very much a Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon one, the Normans seem (to me) to have used a different system. : : An interesting source for this is Saxo's story of Rolf Krake and his hird, we know that Olav the Fat had the Bjarkemaal (most important part of the story and a sort of Codex for the Hird (I love it)) cited to his own following before Stiklestad, this means that it was generally known in the Viking Age and that the thought of a professional Hird was not foreign to the magnates of that time. : : NT Again