AN UNREADY AND ILL-COUNSELLED KING?
It is fair to say that Æthelred II of England (978–1016), better known to posterity as ‘the Unready’, has received something of a bad press. The only Anglo-Saxon monarch to bear a mocking moniker, he is one of England’s archetypal ‘bad kings’, frequently mentioned in the same breath as John ‘Lackland’ (1199–1216), whose ill rule famously led to Magna Carta, and Richard III (1483–5), who is generally held responsible for the death of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, the rightful heirs to the throne. At a glance, Æthelred would seem to be in the right company here: he came to the throne under a cloud following the assassination of his half-brother, Edward the Martyr (d. 978), and his reign witnessed a rising tide of viking attacks, culminating in two successive conquests of England by Swein Forkbeard (1013–14) and his son Cnut (1015–16). The latter went on to establish an Anglo-Danish regime that would rule for a quarter century, and it was only the chance death of Cnut’s sons without heirs which enabled the native English dynasty to reassert itself in 1042 (temporarily, as it would prove). Æthelred’s failure could thus scarcely be clearer, and it is all too easy to see the events of 1013–14 and 1015–16 as a prelude to that more famous conquest of England half a century later. To compound matters, there are signs that Æthelred’s actions did not meet with general approval in his own lifetime: he spent much of his later years restoring lands and rights taken from the church in his youth, and in 1014 he was forced to promise that he would rule his people ‘better than he had before’. It is, therefore, unsurprising that posterity has been unkind to Æthelred; his failings would seem to have been many and grievous.
W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, in their humorous take on English history, gave Æthelred the dubious honour of being the ‘first Weak King of England’ who caused a ‘wave of Danes’, and in so doing stood in a venerable tradition.1 Edward Augustus Freeman, the great nineteenth-century Oxford don, had asserted that Æthelred was ‘the only ruler of the male line of Ecgberht whom we can unhesitatingly set down as a bad man and a bad King’.2 Though willing to concede him ‘a certain amount of energy’, Freeman insisted that ‘it was an energy utterly unregulated and misapplied’, and in the final measure Æthelred’s reign saw ‘little but the neglect of kingly duty, little but weakness, impolicy, cowardice, blind trust in unworthy friends and even detected traitors’.3 Of course, Freeman wrote during the heyday of the so-called ‘Whig Interpretation of History’, which Sellar and Yeatman were to mock so mercilessly; like many historians of the era, he was swift to make sweeping moral judgements of a kind later scholars would eschew. Nevertheless, despite the eclipse of this approach to historical writing in the twentieth century, opinions about Æthelred remained largely unchanged. Thus, while Sir Frank Stenton, writing in the early 1940s, was prepared to acknowledge that there were signs in Æthelred’s reign ‘of a trouble which lies deeper than a mere incapacity for government’ (note the ‘mere’!), he still branded him ‘a weak king’, characterizing this period as one of ‘national degeneracy’.4 Stenton was not alone; his younger contemporary, Dorothy Whitelock, similarly wrote of ‘general disorder’ and ‘bad government’ in connection with Æthelred, and as late as 1982 Eric John could assert that Æthelred’s reign was a period ‘of almost unremitting disaster’ (though John was quick to add that ‘there is more than incapacity to Aethelred’).5
It was only as the millennium of Æthelred’s accession approached that opinions began to change. Already in 1967 David Kirby had expressed the opinion that ‘there must have been more to the Danish conquest of England than the incompetence of one ruler’, and this line of thought was taken up by Pauline Stafford in her University of Oxford DPhil thesis of 1973, in which she presented the first dedicated reassessment of Æthelred’s reign.6 Such opinions started to reach a wider audience with the publication of the papers given at the millenary conference in honour of Æthelred’s accession (1978), which included an important piece by Stafford, elaborating upon the findings of her doctoral dissertation, and seminal articles by two other young scholars, Patrick Wormald and Simon Keynes.7 The publication of a revised version of Keynes’s own doctoral dissertation, The Diplomas of King Æthelred ‘the Unready’, two years later marked another important milestone in Æthelred scholarship: far more wide-ranging than the title suggests, this offered the first systematic treatment of the period in print.8 Both Stafford and Keynes argued that Æthelred was a much misunderstood figure: though ultimately unsuccessful, he was far from incompetent and his reign witnessed many important political and administrative developments. Although this revisionist angle did not immediately convince all, it has slowly won the field: the most recent biographies of the king take their lead from such work and these arguments have found their way into textbook form in Nicholas Higham and Martin Ryan’s Anglo-Saxon World.9 There are even signs of change within popular culture. Thus, while in 1977 Christopher Logue could include the mischievous refrain ‘Ethelred! Ethelred! / spent his royal life in bed: / one shoe off, and one shoe on, / greatly loved by everyone’, in his poem on the king, Patricia Bracewell’s ongoing trilogy on the life of Æthelred’s second wife, Emma, presents a more nuanced view, taking her cue from the work of Stafford.10
The present study is written in the same spirit, as part of the ongoing reassessment of this most maligned of Anglo-Saxon monarchs. At the same time, it attempts to go beyond simple revisionism. Whether Æthelred was a ‘Bad King’ (or, indeed, a ‘Bad Thing’) will always be a matter of personal judgement, one which detracts from the more interesting and important question of why it is that he behaved the way he did. Indeed, though there has been no shortage of studies of Æthelred’s reign, surprisingly little has been written about the king himself. The two most recent scholarly biographies, by Ryan Lavelle and Ann Williams, are a case in point: these are not so much studies of Æthelred, as studies of his reign, political narratives of a high quality, but ones in which the monarch himself rarely emerges from the shadows. Yet Æthelred was at the heart of developments during these years and there are, as we shall see, a number of points at which we can get a sense of his thoughts and feelings. The aim is, therefore, to understand Æthelred rather than to judge him, to put flesh and bones on the scanty sources for these years and present a more nuanced and rounded picture of developments than can be found in traditional caricatures.
Of course, there are major source-critical problems which confront this endeavour. As Keynes already demonstrated in his contribution to the 1978 millenary conference, our main narrative for Æthelred’s reign, preserved in the C, D and E versions of the composite work known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was written after Æthelred’s death with the benefit of hindsight: it telescopes events, presenting the Danish conquest of 1016 as the inevitable result of English cowardice and incompetence. Though divided into separate entries for each year, the author went about his work systematically: there are numerous cross-references and the effect is cumulative – he presents a woeful tale of decline and decomposition. The result makes riveting reading, but can only be used with caution to reconstruct the events of the period: though the chronicler had access to earlier sources, foreknowledge of the eventual English defeat haunts his writing at every turn.11 His main villain, however, is not Æthelred himself: though veiled criticism of the king can be detected at a few points, the real scapegoats are Æthelred’s generals and advisers, above all Ælfric of Hampshire and Eadric Streona, who fail their king and nation repeatedly in their hour of need. Like any good tale, this soon grew in the telling. When, following the Norman Conquest, a new generation of reform-minded churchmen came to write the history of the Anglo-Saxon period, they made extensive use of the Chronicle-account of these years. From this, it was easy to construct a narrative in which Æthelred’s own incompetence began to take centre stage. In an age in which divine providence was thought to guide historical developments (what historians often call ‘salvation history’ or Heilsgeschichte), Æthelred’s sticky end was felt to speak for itself: he must have done something to deserve this. The circumstances of Æthelred’s accession played into this: his predecessor, Edward the Martyr (975–8), had been murdered by Æthelred’s supporters and, though contemporary reports do not implicate the king or his family directly, later accounts were quick to make the connection, placing the blame above all on Æthelred’s mother Ælfthryth, who became the archetypal evil stepmother, a scheming Jezebel who orchestrated the accession of her son over the dead body of his elder half-brother.12 As Æthelred’s and Ælfthryth’s star fell, that of Dunstan was on the rise. Dunstan had been archbishop of Canterbury during Æthelred’s early years and soon after his death in 988 came to be venerated as a saint. The earliest account of his life, written by the elusive figure known by the initial ‘B.’ (995 × 1004, probably 997 × 1002), already ascribed Dunstan the ability to predict the future, and by the time Adelard of Ghent came to rework this into twelve shorter readings (1006 × 1011) the archbishop was credited with having prophesied the viking invasions which England was suffering at the time. This seed would also grow following the Conquest, when it combined with the bad impression made by the Chronicle-account of the period: Dunstan became the sage prelate, whose good counsel the incorrigible young Æthelred scorned to the detriment of himself and his nation.13 Thus, while posterity was kind to Dunstan, it was hard on Æthelred in equal measure, and it is no accident that the first systematically negative portrayal of the king was written by William of Malmesbury, who had an active interest in Dunstan’s cult and would later write a Life of the archbishop. William’s Æthelred is almost comic: a baby who soiled the font at his baptism, who developed a life-long fear of candles from repeated beatings by his mother with candlesticks, and whose ultimate failure had already been prophesied by Dunstan at the moment of his coronation.14 This account was to set the tone for later writers – and, indeed, many modern scholars. Inviting though such narratives frequently are, their authors rarely had access to more information than did William, and in most cases they had less to hand. Even William largely adds colour to the Chronicle-account, supplementing this with oral tales circulating in his day.15 It was as a result of his growing notoriety that Æthelred seems to have acquired his immortal epithet: unræd. This is first attested by Walter Map, writing in the 1180s, who renders it into Latin as [nullum] consilium (‘lacking in counsel’), and the earliest reference to it in something approximating its vernacular form comes in the early thirteenth-century ‘Laws of the English’ (Leges Anglorum).16 The sobriquet is, of course, a clever pun on the king’s name, which means ‘noble counsel’ and by extension ‘good counsel’. Æthelred thus becomes ‘good counsel, ill counsel’; or more colloquially perhaps something like ‘noble counsel – my hat!’ Though the designation probably predates its first attestation, there is no particular reason to believe that it was contemporary – writers remained conversant with Old English long after 1066 and the twelfth century, when Æthelred’s reputation entered terminal decline, provides the natural context for the coinage.17 Indeed, it is interesting to note that the epithet is an addition in the ‘Laws of the English’ and is not found in this work’s source, the twelfth-century ‘Laws of Edward’ (Leges Edwardi) (c. 1130); it would seem that it had been popularized in the intervening years.18 As the term unræd fell out of use in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it came to be misinterpreted as alluding to the ill-preparedness for which Æthelred was also accused by William of Malmesbury – out of the ill-advised king was made the unready one.19
Such accounts must be put to one side if we are to understand Æthelred’s reign on its own terms. As a near-contemporary narrative the Chronicle retains much value, but even it must be used with caution. More immediate interest accrues to the strictly contemporary evidence, above all the charters, decrees and coinage issued in Æthelred’s name. These do not tell a coherent story, but that is part of their appeal: unlike later narratives, they were not produced with an eye to Æthelred’s sticky end. Nevertheless, because they do not present us with a coherent account, we must piece one together on the basis of the scattered insights they furnish. This is no easy task, since the surviving documentary and material record represents but a fraction of what once existed – it is rather like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle with only a tiny proportion of the original pieces. Still, as work over the last four decades has shown, progress is possible. The greatest difficulty lies in establishing how and when we can infer information regarding the king and his regime from such superficially dry records, which by their nature shed light only on particular moments in Æthelred’s life and reign. Keynes’s doctoral work made him keenly aware of the limitations of these sources and in the preface to his book he commented that
having passed five years with Æthelred the Unready never far from mind, I naturally wondered from time to time whether he deserved the censure he received from posterity for manifold weaknesses of character; but far from experiencing a deepening awareness of his personal qualities as work progressed, I experienced only a deepening frustration that one has hardly the faintest idea of what he was really like.20
Keynes’s caution is understandable. Æthelred never speaks directly in the surviving sources and certainty regarding his character – like that of any medieval ruler – is rarely possible. Nevertheless, this book is written in the belief that we can reconstruct aspects of Æthelred’s personality. The key is to provide close and contextualized readings of contemporary sources, which offer windows into the thoughts and concerns of the king and his closest advisers.21
Perhaps the most important sources in this respect are royal charters (or diplomas, as they are also known). These are documents issued by the king, granting or confirming legal rights (generally over land).22 They survive in good numbers and therefore offer a relatively stable source base. In total, some eighty-four diplomas are preserved in Æthelred’s name which have good claims to authenticity, while another ten may be partly or substantially authentic. The distribution is fairly even, with an average of two to three documents a year, though there are a few spikes and troughs, with some years seeing the production of up to six diplomas (983, 1002) and others not represented at all (991–2, 1006 and 1010).23 In part, this is a product of patchy rates of survival. As a general rule, charters only survive if they made their way into the archive of a religious house, and even then preservation can be decidedly hit and miss: some archives suffered significant losses in the Middle Ages (St Paul’s, for example, was struck by fire in 1087), while others were badly hit by the dissolution of the monasteries (Glastonbury, for example). As a result, the surviving records are significantly skewed in favour of major religious centres, particularly those with stable institutional histories. Still, enough survive for this to be a relatively representative sample and when we do see major gaps, as in 991–2, 1006 and 1010, there may be other grounds for these.
Broadly speaking, charters survive in two forms: originals and copies. ‘Originals’ are those preserved as first produced in Æthelred’s reign: written in contemporary script and showing signs of their later preservation (such as folding, archival marks and annotations), they are historical records of the highest standing. Only ten of these survive for Æthelred’s reign. The rest of the documents are later copies. These take many forms, the most common being the cartulary copy. Cartularies are collections of charters, presented as a single text (or series of texts), generally comprising the documents of an individual religious house. Most of these were produced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when church archives across western Europe underwent a degree of reorganization and rationalization.24 Whatever the form, copies stand at a remove from the original and thus pose particular source-critical problems: scribes sometimes made errors when transcribing texts; moreover, it was tempting to ‘improve’ documents in the process of copying, adjusting their texts to conform to the present needs and interests of the religious house in question. As a general rule only originals are unimpeachable; any other document may have been tampered with in some way. Nevertheless, we should not be too critical. Many diplomas which survive in later copies have good claims to authenticity; moreover, by working from originals to copies, a fairly clear picture emerges as to what kinds of formulation were current. The value of originals goes considerably beyond offering a benchmark for judging other texts, however: their appearance itself often throws salient light on to the historical context in which they were issued, providing precious insights into court politics in these years.
Diplomas are written in Latin and generally conform to a standard format and layout. The core constituent parts comprise the preamble (or proem), presenting the pious motives of the donor; the dispositive section (or dispositio), recording the legal transaction and any conditions on this; the sanction, threatening divine wrath on any who infringe its terms; the boundary clause (or bounds), describing the estates involved (the one part of the document in Old English); the dating clause, specifying when (and occasionally also where) the document was produced; and finally the witness-list, encompassing those present at the time of the document’s production. Occasionally, more complex diplomas also contain a narrative section (or narratio) presenting the background to the transaction; this normally follows the preamble and prefaces the dispositive section. The issuing of diplomas was reserved for large-scale assemblies of the realm, which took place some three to five times a year. The precise mechanisms behind their production have been the subject of much debate. Some believe that they were drawn up at court by a royal writing office, while others think that they were produced locally by interested priests and religious houses.25 There is some middle ground, insofar as those who argue for centralized production acknowledge that religious houses might occasionally be charged with drawing up such documents (often in their own favour), while those who see localized production as the norm admit that there must have been some ‘central’ influence on aspects of form and formulation. The balance of probability seems to favour a degree of centralization, at least insofar as diplomas were issued in the king’s presence at royal assemblies; nevertheless, the key thing is that whoever was involved – and variety is likely to have been the order of the day here – they were in close contact with king and court: if not always ‘royal scribes’ in the strict sense, they were figures who enjoyed the ruler’s trust.26 In fact, the very dichotomy between ‘centralized’ and ‘localized’ production is perhaps unhelpful: arrangements must have been flexible, and one imagines that both the king and the recipients had some say in the resulting texts. Diplomas were thus one of the means by which rulers communicated with their subjects, taking us to the heart of contemporary politics. Indeed, recent studies emphasize the symbolic and performative nature of these documents: they are not just records of legal transactions, but active participants in power politics; they served to enact and announce new programmes.27
After charters, the next most important sources are the decrees issued in Æthelred’s name. Often somewhat anachronistically called ‘law-codes’, these texts comprise a diverse group of exhortations and injunctions to be observed throughout the realm (or large portions thereof). Written in Old English and presented as lists of instructions (generally with an opening preface), they too stem from major assemblies of the realm. Yet their audience went considerably further, as they were intended for public declamation at more local assemblies throughout the kingdom. At least six law-making gatherings are known from these years, which led to some seven or eight distinct texts. Some of these assemblies are not represented by any written ordinances, however, while others spawned as many as three sets. Later losses may account for some of this variation, but cannot do so entirely, and the impression is that the recording of such details was decidedly ad hoc: sometimes discussions led to written decrees, while in other cases matters were simply dealt with orally. In any case, none of these texts survives in anything like its ‘original’ format: they are all copies, often of a much later date. Not only were they sometimes adjusted in transmission (some only survive in post-Conquest Latin translations), but in the absence of originals we can only speculate as to how such texts circulated in Æthelred’s reign. Here opinion divides between those who see them as fundamentally pragmatic, reaching a relatively wide audience (often in written form), and those who see them as largely ideological works, whose precise textual form stands in at best a loose relationship with the original proclamation by the king.28 Particular problems attach to the decrees of Æthelred’s later years, all of which were drafted by one individual: Archbishop Wulfstan II of York (1002–23). Since these are written in the archbishop’s distinctive style and often preserved in manuscripts associated with him, it is hard to know how far they represent the king’s own desires. Behind these stand broader questions about how far we can use such ‘normative’ texts to reconstruct social realities; because they describe society as it ought to be, royal ordinances are often unreliable guides to how it actually was. Still, one should not exaggerate the resulting difficulties. It has been cogently argued that the decrees of this period were indeed widely read and applied; moreover, if these texts cannot be taken as direct windows into social realities, they still tell us much about the ambitions of law-makers and the means by which they sought to realize these.29 Even the ‘Wulfstan problem’ may be more apparent than real, as we shall see: while the venerable prelate certainly exercised a significant influence over the style and content of Æthelred’s later ordinances, this should be viewed in the context of his high standing at court. Or, put differently: the image of Wulfstan madly fabricating decrees in the king’s name sits awkwardly with other evidence of the archbishop’s active involvement in the regime.30 Thus, like the draftsmen of Æthelred’s diplomas, those charged with composing his decrees seem for the most part to have been intimates of the king, and the resulting texts thus provide further windows into debate and discussion at and around court.
On the face of it, Æthelred’s coinage presents us with fewer problems. Produced by the many moneyers dotted throughout his realm, it would seem to represent the source par excellence for the ruler’s ambitions. At some level, this is doubtless true: the coins of this period share a common design which was periodically changed, and we can be confident that Æthelred and his advisers had significant input here; they are thus statements of the regime. Nevertheless, because changes in type are common, it is not always clear how much we can read into them. For example, when in the late 980s or early 990s the Hand of God is replaced by the cross on the reverse (or ‘tails’) of Æthelred’s coins, it is hard to know whether this is symbolic of a break with the past, or simply reflects the need to distinguish the new coins from the preceding ones.31 Likewise, while it was once thought that Æthelred’s regime oversaw recoinages on a strict six-year (or ‘sexennial’) cycle, with new types being introduced in 985, 991, 997, 1003 and 1009, recent work has raised significant doubts about this.32 Shorn of such certainties, it becomes much harder to link individual types to political programmes. Still, provided due caution is exercised, coins remain a most valuable source, often enriching the picture furnished by charters and decrees. To these ‘core’ sources we may add the rich literary production of the period, above all the works written for or by members of the court, such as Archbishop Wulfstan: these years saw much writing both in Latin and Old English, which often throws significant oblique light on the king and his regime. The resulting source base is not always rich enough to permit fine-grained insights into the workings of Æthelredian politics, and we should often like to know more; nevertheless, the broad contours which emerge are clear enough.
The importance of such sources lies above all in their proximity to the ruler: they all emanate from within or were produced by members of his court. The court itself is something of an elusive entity, however: unlike its early modern and modern counterpart, the medieval court was not a physical location with set boundaries, but rather consisted of those who were with the king at any given time as he traversed the realm. Because its makeup changed significantly over the course of the year and the ruler’s reign, the court was something of a microcosm of the polity, a symbol of the broader body politic.33 By tracing the composition and operation of the court we can therefore gain an impression of Æthelred’s interests and concerns, as well as seeing who was calling the shots at any given moment. Indeed, while it might be objected that I at times use ‘court’ as a cipher for the king, inferring royal initiative where there need not have been any,34 we must bear in mind that royal politics were court politics in the Middle Ages. Kings and their counsellors were in the proverbial thick of it and we should no more expect Æthelred to have made decisions in a vacuum than did any other ruler, nor should we mistake his reliance on counsel for a lack of personal initiative. Some have, of course, expressed doubts as to whether we can speak of royal ‘policies’ at all in the Middle Ages, since monarchs of the period were more reactive than proactive, often making it up as they went along rather than pursuing long-term plans.35 But the evidence from Æthelred’s reign suggests that the term is not entirely out of place, provided it is defined sufficiently broadly. While there is ample evidence of improvization, certain core aims can be detected behind many of the king’s actions, and it is the contention of this book that if we listen carefully to the strictly contemporary sources – and above all the royal charters – we can often catch echoes of the debates and discussions going on around the king. From these it is clear that Æthelred was anything but a passive bystander. Further insights are offered by the king’s personal relationships; how he interacted with his mother, (half-)siblings and sons, not to mention friends and associates, can also tell us much about Æthelred’s interests and how these developed over time.36 In the end, we cannot expect to reconstruct all aspects of Æthelred’s personality and the gaps which remain are immense; nonetheless, the effort is worthwhile.
Comparison with other rulers of the early and central Middle Ages offers further means of approaching Æthelred. The focus here has tended to be on the king’s English ancestors, above all his great-great-grandfather Alfred the Great (871–99). The attempt is therefore to cast the net wider, considering not only Æthelred’s Anglo-Norman and Angevin successors in the British Isles, but also his immediate counterparts in what were to become France and Germany. That Æthelred shared a great deal with these figures should not be doubted: not only did he face similar structural challenges to many of them, but he was related to most by blood or marriage, numbering amongst his great-aunts queens of both France and Germany (i.e. West and East Francia).37 The picture painted is thus one of a rather more ‘European’ Æthelred, a ruler who not only enjoyed close contacts with the continent, but also can be compared with other continental monarchs of the early and central Middle Ages.38 Particular attention is given to those monarchs who faced similar structural challenges to Æthelred, such as Charles the Bald of West Francia (840–77) and Henry I of East Francia (919–36), who were confronted with foreign invasion, or Otto III of Germany (983–1001) and Louis IX of France (1214–70), who came to the throne as boys. Particular points of similarity emerge with the ninth-century Frankish emperor Louis the Pious (814–40) and the eleventh-century Salian ruler Henry IV of Germany (1056–1106). However, like all good foils, these serve not only to identify similarities, but also to reveal differences; they point to both the general and the specific.
We must also bear in mind the challenges posed by the biographical endeavour itself. Pierre Bourdieu has warned of what he calls the ‘biographical illusion’, that is, the illusion created by the biographer, who structures and gives meaning to his subject’s life, presupposing the individual lifespan to be a natural and coherent entity.39 In doing so, he raises fundamental issues: do we remain the same person across the entire span of our lives (is the child Æthelred in any meaningful sense the same individual as the adult?); and, if not, is a human lifespan itself a meaningful division of time? More to the point, he notes the common conceit of biographers, who place their subject at the centre of developments, shaping the narrative around this figure. Though Bourdieu has modern biographers in mind, similar charges can be laid at the door of their more historically minded counterparts, who also find themselves in cahoots with their subjects, trying to shape the past around these figures’ activities. The medieval biographer faces particular challenges here: the perennial paucity of source material and the formulaic nature of much of what survives make it especially tempting to infer personal involvement where there need have been none.40 Be that as it may, one hesitates to designate an individual lifespan an arbitrary period of study, at least when the individual in question is a king and the period in question is the Middle Ages. If modern historians are at times guilty of ascribing too great a coherence to their historical actors, they are certainly not alone in doing so: in the Middle Ages, as in the antique world before, the lives of powerful rulers were the points around which narratives were formed. In this respect, focusing on the individual need not involve overlooking context; as Jacques Le Goff notes, biography can itself be a means of examining broader themes of government, economy and society.41 That the biographer’s subject is, in the end, partly a product of his own contrivance should not be denied; the same is, of course, true of all historical writing.42 The picture presented in what follows is therefore very much that of ‘my’ Æthelred; others can and will produce different pictures, ones no less valid for being based on different presumptions and conjectures. Nevertheless, it remains my conviction – old-fashioned though it may sound to some – that real progress can be made by close engagement with the evidence for the life of an individual such as Æthelred. Indeed, though the Æthelred presented in what follows is on one level emphatically ‘mine’, he is at the same time deeply embedded in the sources of the time and thus not entirely the product of my (or anyone else’s) contrivance. Hence if, by some miracle of modern science, Æthelred were able to look down upon these pages, I should like to think that he would be able to recognize elements of himself therein – warts and all.
I have, in short, attempted to be sympathetic to the king without whitewashing him, producing an analysis in which error and defeat have a part to play, but one alongside chance, contingency and sheer bad luck. The account proceeds chronologically. The reasons for this are threefold. First, for Æthelred, unlike many rulers of the earlier Middle Ages, we are fortunate enough to have a sufficient density of source material to sustain such treatment.43 Second, since Æthelred reigned for some thirty-eight years (longer, that is, than any of his immediate predecessors or successors), approaching his life thematically risks presenting too static a picture; breaks and changes of direction can be seen at many points, as we shall see, and must be given their due. Finally, precisely because we can discern such changes and developments, a chronological approach promises the clearest insights into how the king’s thoughts and feelings evolved over the various stages of his life and reign. Still, thematic treatment is not entirely eschewed and at times specific issues are handled separately, either in asides to the main text or in dedicated sub-chapters.
The first chapter deals with Æthelred’s youth and the reign of his father, Edgar, describing the world into which the prince was born (c. 966×9–75). Particular attention is given to social and political developments in these years – the growth and institutionalization of royal authority; monastic reform – and the role of his mother Ælfthryth. The second takes the story from Edgar’s death through the reign of Æthelred’s elder half-brother, Edward the Martyr (975–8), to his own earliest years on the throne (978–84), when a de facto regency ruled on his behalf. Here the focus is on the succession dispute between Edward and Æthelred and the death of Edward at the hands of the latter’s sympathizers, events which were to cast a long shadow. The third chapter then details the first years of Æthelred’s majority rule (984–93), when the king struck out against the politics of his erstwhile regents, despoiling churches and promoting new favourites. These actions clearly upset the balance and Chapter 4 examines their legacy (993–1002), tracing how in the face of escalating viking raids in the 990s Æthelred came to interpret these as divine punishment for his earlier misdeeds. The king’s solution was to re-embrace the teachings of his father, mother and the reformers, restoring church rights and promoting the cult of his half-brother Edward. The fifth chapter reveals how the concerns visible in the 990s became desperation in the years following the turning of the millennium (1002–9). In the face of mounting attacks, the king and his advisers were now forced to attempt ever more drastic solutions to the ‘viking problem’: first, in 1002, they ordered the execution of ‘all Danish men’ within the realm (probably those mercenaries who had recently entered into royal employ); then, in 1005–6, the king undertook a dramatic purge of his court. Finally, the last years of Æthelred’s life, the subject of Chapter 6 (1009–16), offer a tale of decomposition: during this time matters went from bad to worse, and if there is any period of Æthelred’s reign for which traditional clichés hold, it is this one. Like the audience to a Shakespearean tragedy, we thus know where the story is going; however, we must bear in mind that Æthelred and his contemporaries did not. Every effort is taken to adopt their standpoint, appreciating how events unfolded without presupposing the king’s eventual failure. The result is a picture of a ruler who, for all his failings, tried hard in the face of what were often overwhelming odds; a king who was neither unready nor ill-counselled, but certainly ill-fated.
1W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London, 1931), 12.
2E.A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, I, The Preliminary History to the Election of Eadward the Confessor, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1877), 260–1.
3Ibid., 261–2.
4F.M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1971), 374 and 394. These remarks are to be found in the first edition of 1943.
5Whitelock, EHD, 47; E. John, ‘The Return of the Vikings’, in The Anglo-Saxons, ed. J. Campbell (London, 1982), 192–213, at 193.
6D.P. Kirby, The Making of Early England (London, 1967), 116; P. Stafford, ‘Royal Government in the Reign of Æthelred II, A.D. 979–1016’ (DPhil diss., Univ. of Oxford, 1973).
7Ethelred the Unready: Papers from the Millenary Conference, ed. D.H. Hill (London, 1978).
8S. Keynes, The Diplomas of King Æthelred ‘the Unready’, 978–1016: A Study in their Use as Historical Evidence (Cambridge, 1980).
9R. Lavelle, Aethelred II: King of the English, 2nd edn (Stroud, 2008); A. Williams, Æthelred the Unready: The Ill-Counselled King (London, 2003); N.J. Higham and M. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven, CT, 2013), 335–86. Cf. I. Howard, The Reign of Æthelred II: The King of the English, Emperor of All the Peoples of Britain, 978–1016 (Oxford, 2010).
10C. Logue, ‘An Archaic Jingle’, Times (17 Nov. 1977), 14; P. Bracewell, Shadow on the Crown (New York, 2013), and The Prince of Blood (New York, 2015). See also J. Woods, Eadric the Grasper (Scotts Valley, CA, 2009), for another broadly revisionist (albeit rather more idiosyncratic) take on these years.
11S. Keynes, ‘The Declining Reputation of Æthelred the Unready’ (1978), rev. and repr. in Anglo-Saxon History: Basic Readings, ed. D. Pelteret (New York, 2000), 157–90, at 158–68. See also C. Clark, ‘The Narrative Mode of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle before the Conquest’ (1971), repr. in and cited from her Words, Names, and History: Selected Writings of Cecily Clark (Cambridge, 1995), 3–19, at 10–15; A. Sheppard, Families of the King: Writing Identity in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Toronto, 2004), 71–120; N. Brooks, ‘Why is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle about Kings?’, ASE 39 (2010), 43–70, at 51–2; and C. Konshuh, ‘Anraed in their Unraed: The Æthelredian Annals (983–1016) and their Presentation of King and Advisors’, English Studies 97 (2016), 140–62.
12P. Stafford, ‘Queens, Nunneries and Reforming Churchmen: Gender, Religious Status and Reform in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England’ (1999), repr. in and cited from her Gender, Family and the Legitimation of Power: England from the Ninth to the Early Twelfth Century (Aldershot, 2006), no. XI, 24–30; K.A. Fenton, Gender, Nation and Conquest in the Works of William of Malmesbury (Woodbridge, 2008), 106–14.
13C. Cubitt, ‘Archbishop Dunstan: A Prophet in Politics’, in Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks, ed. J. Barrow and A. Wareham (Aldershot, 2008), 145–66.
14William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum II.161–180, ed. R.A.B. Mynors with R.M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), 268–320; with Keynes, ‘Declining Reputation’, 168–73.
15E.A. Winkler, ‘England’s Defending Kings in Twelfth-Century Historical Writing’, HSJ 25 (2013), 147–163, esp. 150–6. See also A. Williams, ‘The Dangers of Invention: The Sack of Canterbury, 1011, and the Theft of Dunstan’s Relics’, in Cathedrals, Communities and Conflict in the Anglo-Norman World, ed. P. Dalton, C. Insley and L.J. Wilkinson (Woodbridge, 2011), 27–40, esp. 38–40.
16Walter Map, De nugis curialum, Dist. 5, ch. 3, ed. M.R. James, rev. C.N.L. Brooke and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), 412; Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3 vols. (Halle, 1903–16), I, 62, n. **; with Keynes, ‘Declining Reputation’, 173–4. For a possible earlier case, see Herman, De miraculis S. Edmundi, ch. 4, ed. T. Licence, Herman the Archdeacon and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin: Miracles of St Edmund (Oxford, 2014), 14 (with the editor’s observations at n. 73).
17On post-Conquest knowledge of English, see E. Treharne, Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020–1220 (Oxford, 2012), 91–187.
18Leges Eadwardi Confessoris, ch. 34.2, ed. B. O’Brien, God’s Peace and King’s Peace: The Laws of Edward the Confessor (Philadelphia, PA, 1999), 192.
19Keynes, ‘Declining Reputation’, 174–5.
20Keynes, Diplomas, xviii.
21See, e.g., P. Stafford, ‘Political Ideas in Late Tenth-Century England: Charters as Evidence’ (2001), repr. in and cited from her Gender, Family and the Legitimation of Power: England from the Ninth to the Early Twelfth Century (Aldershot, 2006), no. VII; and C. Cubitt, ‘The Politics of Remorse: Penance and Royal Piety in the Reign of Æthelred the Unready’, Historical Research 85 (2012), 179–92.
22Technically a charter is any document relating to the holding or transfer of legal rights, while a diploma is a charter issued in the name of public authority (a ‘royal/sovereign charter’).
23Keynes, Diplomas, 47. For an invaluable overview of the corpus, see ibid., 237–68.
24P.J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 81–114; C.B. Bouchard, Rewriting Saints and Ancestors: Memory and Forgetting in France, 500–1200 (Philadelphia, PA, 2015), 9–37.
25Centralized production: Keynes, Diplomas, 14–153, and ‘Regenbald the Chancellor (sic)’, ANS 10 (1988), 185–222. Localized production: P. Chaplais, ‘The Origin and Authenticity of the Royal Anglo-Saxon Diploma’ (1965), repr. in and cited from Prisca Munimenta: Studies in Archival and Administrative History Presented to Dr. A.E.J. Hollander, ed. F. Ranger (London, 1973), 28–42, and ‘The Royal Anglo-Saxon “Chancery” of the Tenth Century Revisited’, in Studies in Medieval History Presented to R.H.C. Davis, ed. H. Mayr-Harting and R.I. Moore (London, 1985), 41–51. See also C. Insley, ‘Charters and Episcopal Scriptoria in the Anglo-Saxon South-West’, EME 7 (1998), 173–97; Charters of Abingdon Abbey, ed. S.E. Kelly, 2 pts, Anglo-Saxon Charters 7–8 (Oxford, 2000–1), lxxi–cxxxi; and B. Snook, The Anglo-Saxon Chancery: The History, Language and Production of Anglo-Saxon Charters from Alfred to Edgar (Woodbridge, 2015).
26S. Keynes, ‘Church Councils, Royal Assemblies, and Anglo-Saxon Royal Diplomas’, in Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. G.R. Owen-Crocker and B.W. Schneider (Woodbridge, 2013), 17–182, esp. 102–26; L. Roach, Kingship and Consent in Anglo-Saxon England, 871–978: Assemblies and the State in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2013), 78–89.
27G. Koziol, The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas: The West Frankish Kingdom (840–987) (Turnhout, 2012). See also L. Roach, ‘Public Rites and Public Wrongs: Ritual Aspects of Diplomas in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England’, EME 19 (2011), 182–203.
28Pragmatic texts: S. Keynes, ‘Royal Government and the Written Word in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, in The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe, ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1990), 226–57, at 231–44; D. Pratt, ‘Written Law and the Communication of Authority in Tenth-Century England’, in England and the Continent in the Tenth Century: Studies in Honour of Wilhelm Levison (1876–1947), ed. D. Rollason, C. Leyser and H. Williams (Turnhout, 2010), 331–50. Ideological exercises: P. Wormald, ‘Lex scripta and verbum regis: Legislation and Germanic Kingship from Euric to Cnut’ (1977), repr. in and cited from his Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West: Law as Text, Image and Experience (London, 1999), 1–43, and The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, I, Legislation and its Limits (Oxford, 1998). See also J. Hudson, ‘L’écrit, les archives et le droit en Angleterre (IXe–XIIe siècle)’, Revue historique 308 (2006), 3–35.
29C. Cubitt, ‘“As the Lawbook Teaches”: Reeves, Lawbooks and Urban Life in the Anonymous Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers’, EHR 124 (2009), 1021–49.
30See below, Chapter 5, pp. 227–35.
31See below, Chapter 4, pp. 182–3.
32See below, Chapter 1, pp. 27–8, and Chapter 2, pp. 88–9.
33See below, Chapter 3, pp. 96–100.
34Cf. the remarks of T. Reuter, ‘The Ottonians and the Carolingian Tradition’, in his Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. J.L. Nelson (Cambridge 2006), 268–83, at 268–9.
35See, e.g., K. Görich, ‘Versuch zur Rettung von Kontingenz – Oder: Über Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben einer Biographie Friedrich Barbarossas’, FMSt 43 (2009), 179–97.
36See G. Tellenbach, ‘Der Charakter Kaiser Heinrichs IV. Zugleich ein Versuch über die Erkennbarkeit menschlicher Individualität im hohen Mittelalter’, in Person und Gemeinschaft im Mittelalter. Festschrift für Karl Schmid zum fünfundsechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. G. Althoff et al. (Sigmaringen, 1988), 345–68; and J.L. Nelson, ‘Writing Early Medieval Biography’, History Workshop Journal 50 (2000), 129–36.
37S. Foot, ‘Dynastic Strategies: The West Saxon Royal Family in Europe’, in England and the Continent in the Tenth Century: Studies in Honour of Wilhelm Levison (1876–1947), ed. D. Rollason, C. Leyser and H. Williams (Turnhout, 2010), 237–53.
38See also J. Campbell, ‘England, France, Flanders and Germany in the Reign of Ethelred II’ (1978), repr. in and cited from his Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), 191–207.
39P. Bourdieu, ‘The Biographical Illusion’, in Identity: A Reader, ed. P. du Gay, J. Evans and P. Redman (London, 2000), 297–303.
40S. Hamilton, ‘Early Medieval Rulers and their Modern Biographers’, EME 9 (2000), 247–60; M. Prestwich, ‘Medieval Biography’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40 (2010), 325–346.
41J. Le Goff, ‘The Whys and Ways of Writing a Biography: The Case of Saint Louis’, Exemplaria 1 (1989), 207–25. See also J. Le Goff, Saint Louis, trans. G.E. Gollrad (Notre Dame, IN, 2009), xx–xxxii.
42J. Fried, ‘Wissenschaft und Phantasie. Das Beispiel der Geschichte’, HZ 263 (1996), 291–316.
43Cf. S. Foot, Æthelstan: The First King of England (New Haven, CT, 2011), 7–8, explaining why this is not possible for Æthelred’s great-uncle, Æthelstan.