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The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Danes
John McLaren Ralston
Engraver: E. Dalziel
1878
Wood engraving
14 cm high by 10.7 cm wide (5 ½ by 4 ¼ inches)
Headpiece for Chapter I in Dickens's A Child's History of England, p. 1.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [See below for commentary.]
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There was but one man of note, at this miserable pass, who was true to his country and the feeble King. He was a priest, and a brave one. For twenty days, the Archbishop of Canterbury defended that city against its Danish besiegers; and when a traitor in the town threw the gates open and admitted them, he said, in chains, "I will not buy my life with money that must be extorted from the suffering people. Do with me what you please!" Again and again, he steadily refused to purchase his release with gold wrung from the poor.
At last, the Danes being tired of this, and being assembled at a drunken merry-making, had him brought into the feasting-hall.
"Now, bishop," they said, "we want gold!"
He looked round on the crowd of angry faces; from the shaggy beards close to him, to the shaggy beards against the walls, where men were mounted on tables and forms to see him over the heads of others: and he knew that his time was come.
"I have no gold," he said.
"Get it, bishop!" they all thundered.
"That, I have often told you I will not," said he.
They gathered closer round him, threatening, but he stood unmoved. Then, one man struck him; then, another; then a cursing soldier picked up from a heap in a corner of the hall, where fragments had been rudely thrown at dinner, a great ox-bone, and cast it at his face, from which the blood came spurting forth; then, others ran to the same heap, and knocked him down with other bones, and bruised and battered him; until one soldier whom he had baptised (willing, as I hope for the sake of that soldier’s soul, to shorten the sufferings of the good man) struck him dead with his battle-axe. [Chapter IV — "England under Athelstan and the Six Boy-Kings," 15]
Avery, Gillian, ed. Charles Dickens: "A Holiday Romance" and Other Writings for Children with All the Original Illustrations. Everyman edition. London: J. M. Dent, 1995.
Dickens, Charles. A Child's History of England". Illustrated by John McLaren Ralston. Household Edition. London: Chapman & Hal1, 1878. XVIII.
_______. A Child's History of England in Works. Centenary Edition. 36 vols. London: Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910-12.
Created 7 March 2021