A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

England would have become an outpost of Scandinavia, and the language of modern England and
America would be Danish. In fact, Alfred built a fort and began to make forays against the
Norsemen. His messengers went out to call Englishmen to his standard. And in May 878, his army
attacked the Norsemen at Edington, not far from the white horse, and inflicted total defeat.
The sequel is completely typical of the Middle Ages. Alfred knew the Danes were in England to
stay. Three weeks after the battle, Guthrum came to Athelney with his leading men and was
baptised as Alfred’s godson. There followed days of feasting. When Guthrum left, he was a friend
and ally. The Danes went back to East Anglia and shared out the land as farmers - their portion of
England became known as the Danelaw. And Alfred went on to build himself a navy, and fortified
towns and to become a small scale Charlemagne of southern England.
Now in a sense, the most decisive part of this story is the last part - the baptism and feasting. It was
the establishment of a personal relationship that turned ‘criminal rats’ into good citizens. Like all
criminals, the Vikings had regarded their victims as abstractions, non-persons; it was the law of
xenophobia in operation. So they could pretend that moral laws were non-existent - or at least, that
they did not apply to these foreigners any more than to the reindeer I hey ate. The moment the
foreigners became ‘people’, the time for rape and pillage was over.
Charles the Simple of France was finally forced to adopt the same remedy in 911 A.D. The Vikings
had sailed up the Seine in 845, 851, S61 and 885, pillaging Paris three times and burning it twice.
In 885, they besieged the city, which held out grimly under the leadership of Odo, count of Paris;
the Parisians were forced to eat dogs, cats and even rats. Finally, the king, Charles the Fat, arrived
on the scene with a vast army, but was too cowardly to fight the Vikings; so he offered them
‘Danegeld’ and bought them off, to everybody’s disgust. Naturally, the Vikings took the money
and then went on to burn and loot the rest of the country. Understandably irritated, the Franks
deposed Charles and made Odo king; but Odo’s luck was little better and he was also forced to the
humiliating expedient of Danegeld. His successor, Charles the Simple, offered the Danish leader,
Rollo, the land we now call Normandy (Normans were originally Norsemen), and it was their
descendants who invaded England in 1066 under William of Normandy.
Oddly enough, these same Vikings became the people we now know as Russians. They raided and
traded to the north, and in 850 a Viking called Rurik made himself ruler of Novgorod. The
inhabitants of Russia were Asiatics, of Mongol stock, with a tendency to lethargy and dreaminess.
A combination of this Asiatic stock with Viking blood produced what we today regard as the
typical Russian with slanting eyes and high cheekbones.
During this period, Europe was a bloody chaos of ‘criminal rats’ fighting for supremacy. The Slavs,
under King Sviatopluk, held an empire that stretched from Germany to the Carpathians. Arnulf, one
of the German Carolingians, resisted the Slavs with the aid of a Russian people called the Magyars
(or Hungarians); it proved to be a mistake, for the Magyars were as savage and predatory as the
Vikings. They were superb horsemen who could shoot accurately with a bow and arrow from the
back of a galloping horse. Like the Vikings, they were cruel and destructive, burning villages and
setting fire to the harvest for the sheer pleasure of spreading terror. When they raided a village, they
killed all the men, mutilated the children, then tied the women on the backs of cattle and drove
them off for rape and slaughter. It was the Hungarians who put an end to Sviatopluk’s empire. They
invaded northern Italy in 899, and when the emperor Berengar led fifteen thousand troops after
them they defeated him, forced him to pay ransom money and spent another year plundering.