In 997[1] a Danish fleet entered the Tamar, went up to Lidford, crossed to Tavistock, burned the church there, and carried off an immense amount of booty. In 998 the Danes ravaged Dorsetshire and Hampshire; and though English armies were sent against them, the pirates were invariably victorious. In 999 they sailed up the Medway, disembarked at Rochester, defeated the local forces, and ravaged West Kent. Ethelred collected a fleet as well as an army; but the latter did no good to his cause, and the former, owing to delay on the part of the leaders, was not ready until too late.[2] It is probable that this expedition, like several previous descents, was bought off, and that the refusal of Malcolm of Cumbria to contribute money for the purpose was the cause of the hostilities which Ethelred waged against him with success in the following year.
But a nearly contemporaneous descent upon Normandy, whither some of the Danes had retired, was a failure; nor is this to be wondered at. It is tolerably clear that Ethelred's naval forces were no longer in hand, and were in fact in a state bordering upon mutiny. A fleet destined to support the king on his Cumbrian expedition, instead of accompanying him, had gone away on its own account and ravaged Maenige, which some take to have been Man and others Anglesey.[3]
In 1001 the Danes reappeared, this time at Exmouth, where they were joined by a foreigner named Pallig, who had received favours from Ethelred, and had sworn fealty to him. Great havoc was wrought in Devon and Somerset, and, the forces of the realm having failed to eject the pirates, a humiliating bribe of £24,000 was given them to induce them to depart in the following year.[4]
Then it was that Ethelred bethought himself of getting rid of the bloodsuckers who were preying upon his ever weakening inheritance by murdering all the Danes resident in England. The crime, or as much of it as was possible, was perpetrated on St. Brice's Day, November 13th, 1002,[5] and in the massacre a sister of Sweyn, Prince of Denmark, who had banded himself with Olaf in 994, perished. This circumstance seems to have sealed the fate of England. The massacre thinned out the Danes who lived in what had in earlier times been the Danelagh, and who had for generations fitted out piratical expeditions against the rest of the
