Danegeld

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Coin of the kind paid as tribute to the Vikings in England. Penny from Canute the Great , beaten in London.

Danegeld is the name of a ransom or tribute that was paid to the Normans in England and France . Contemporaries did not use this term. Only Eduard the Confessor (1042-1066) spoke of the exemption from Danegeld.

There are a number of rune stones that deal with Danegeld: one of the Grinda stones in Södermanland, the rune stone of Yttergärde in Orkesta, the Väsby stone in the Ösby district, and one of the Lingsberg stones all in Uppland . The taxes from England are gjald there , also called Knutsgjald . The latter probably refers to the last donation of Knuts the Great in 1018, which is likely to have rewarded his troops with it. This designation can be used for dating. Because the Viking trains to England started again around 980 and led to the first Danegeld payments with which the peace was to be bought. After the fights in 1016 and 1017, the last Danegeld payment was made in 1018. After that, Knut's rule in the newly created North Sea region was consolidated, and the Viking campaigns ceased.

According to the context on the rune stones, Gjald is not so much an asset as a badge of honor, which is still praised on the double memorial stone: On the Yttergärde stone (Runeinnskrifter fra Uppland 343, 344) an Ulf reports that he was in England received three gjalds , the first from Tosti , the second from Torkel the High , the third from Knut himself. Tosti is generally identified with the Sköglar-Tosti mentioned in Snorri , a distinguished warrior from the end of the 10th century. Torkel the High was a Viking leader known from English sources who was appointed Jarl of East Anglia by Canute in 1017 . The Grinda Stone reports that Gudver received his share of the Gjald and also fought valiantly in Saxland. The latter probably refers to the Viking incursions in Friesland in 994, which are also described by Adam von Bremen , where he calls the Vikings Ascomanni . On the Ling Bergstein that Ulfrik in England two is said Gjald 've taken. On the Väsby stone it says that everyone in England received gjald . From this news it appears that not only did Danes haunt England's coasts, but that there were also many Swedes in the ranks.

The term denotes a levy that was intended to encourage the Danes to refrain from their raids. It has its origins with Æthelred in his contract of 991 after Ealdorman Brihtnoth's death in the Battle of Maldon . The chronicles report that this was the occasion to pay a tribute of 10,000 pounds of silver to the Danes. The driving force was Archbishop Sigerich , so that later authors called it Siricius-Danegeld. These Danegeld payments were a specific feature of Æthelred's reign. In 994 16,000 pounds of silver were paid, in 1002 it was 24,000 pounds, in 1012 it was 48,000 pounds. Torkel the High came there with 45 ships to collect the tribute, then he placed himself under Æthelred. With this payment, the character of the tribute changed. From now on, the levy was used to maintain the Norman army in defense of the country. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle now describes the levy as gyld , stang gyld in individual cases also heregyld (payment, heavy tax, army tax). In 1018 Canute the Great raised a tribute totaling 82,500 pounds of silver, with which he rewarded his troops. The bulk of coins from Æthelred's time in Scandinavian hoards confirms these reports.

The Anglo-Saxon chronicles referred to the levy as a tributum or scholarship . This is how the corresponding tributes to the Danes in France were named. The expressions tributum, census, munus, pecunia pro pace and pensum appear there. In the sources 13 such payments can be found in France in the years 849 to 926, in England 9 in the period from 865 to 1012. The French payments were made by agreement between the French king and the Viking chiefs and amounted to between 300 and 12,000 Pound of silver (in 884). The first payments in England (865, 872 and 876) were apparently only local in nature. Only the payment of 991 had a nationwide character.

It is not known on what basis the first English tribute payments were made. Only for 1040 can you see that 4 marks = 8 pounds of silver had to be paid for each ship's rudder, but that says nothing about the distribution among the inhabitants.

After 1018 until 1051 the citizens were charged a conge , but contemporaries felt it to be a continuation of the danegeld. Eduard the Confessor dissolved the Viking army and abolished the tribute in 1051. Until 1162 it was levied in the form of a property tax. The tax was reintroduced under Richard the Lionheart . It was designed as a property tax throughout the Anjou empire . William the Conqueror wrote out the levy again in 1066, 1067, 1083 and 1084. Under him the Danegeld turned into a tax to the king. The sources, especially the Domesday Book , now describe Danegeld as a property tax. At the same time, the sources suggest that this tax has already been taken over by Eduard the Confessor, who had abolished the original Danegeld. The normal rate was 2 shillings per hoof . This tax rate was also retained under Henry II, when the tax was now called hidagium . However, it cannot be proven that the tax was actually levied every year under Wilhelm the Conqueror and Wilhelm Rufus , especially since the rates under these rulers were very high: 6 shillings in 1083 to 1084. Wilhelm II wrote them out in 1096 and calculated 4 Shillings per hoof.

In France the rates for the tribute of 866 varied from 1 to 6 denarii for the different types of land owned by unfree people. In addition, there was the military ban of 60 solidi , which one had to pay instead of military service. Merchants paid 1/10 of their fortune and clergymen were valued secundum quod unusquisque habuit . It cannot be determined to what extent this key applies to all subsequent deliveries.

The names in the Leges Henrici primi and the Leges Edwardi Confessoris show that the origin of this tax was still in the consciousness in the 12th century. 1130 it is mentioned as a fixed annual fee. The English historian Heinrich von Huntingdon (1080–1160) summarized the contemporary attitude to the royal tax as Danegeld: modo ... ex consuetudine, quod Dacis persolvebatur ex ineffabili terrore. Henry II levied an annual tax with the name Danegeld in the second and eighth year of reign , but in reality it was now a hidagium (tax for a hide = English hoof), which happened to be given this name. The actual Danegeld had "disappeared" completely from payment transactions. Within a century and a half, the concept of Danegeld developed from a tribute to the Danes to a tax to combat the Danes, then to an army tax par excellence to a normal levy.

reception

The best-known reception of the Danegeld comes from the British writer Rudyard Kipling in his poem of the same name, Dane Money . The poem contains the famous sentence "once you have paid him the Danegeld / You never get rid of the Dane." And was published in 1911 in the book A School History of England .

literature

  • Heinrich Beck , Henry Royston Loyn :  Danegeld. In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (RGA). 2nd Edition. Volume 5, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1984, ISBN 3-11-009635-8 , pp. 225-227.
  • Adam of Bremen: Bishop history of the Hamburg church. In: Sources of the 9th and 11th centuries on the history of the Hamburg Church and the Empire. Darmstadt 1978, ISBN 3-534-00602-X .
  • Henry Royston Loyn: Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest. Social and Economic History of England. 2nd Edition. Longman Group, 1991, ISBN 0-582-07296-4 .
  • Herluf Nielsen: Danegeld. In: Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder. Volume 2, Copenhagen 1957, Col. 639-641.
  • Reinhold Schmid: The laws of the Anglo-Saxons in the original language with translation, explanation and an antiquarian glossary. 2nd Edition. Leipzig 1858.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The story of Harald Graumantel Chap. 11.
  2. ↑ a b c d Beck p. 226.
  3. ↑ II Adam, chapter 31.
  4. ↑ Loyn s. 226.
  5. ↑ a b c Nielsen Sp. 640.
  6. ↑ a b c d Loyn p. 227.
  7. ↑ a b Nielsen Sp. 639.
  8. ↑ Nielsen Sp. 640 f.
  9. ↑ Nielsen Sp. 641.
  10. ↑ § 15: Denagildum quod aliquando Þingemannis dabatur, id est xii denarios de unaquaque hyda per annum. (Schmid p. 446) "Þingemannis" were probably Thorkell's followers or Cnut's court.
  11. ↑ § 11: Denegildi redditio propter piratas primitus statuta est. (Schmid p. 496).
  12. ^ CR L Fletcher, Rudyard Kipling: Dane money . In: A School History of England . Clarendon Press, 1911, OCLC 459783637 .