THE DECLINE AND FALL OF ETHELRED THE UNREADY
The Danish conquest of England
AD 1002–1035
In this great expedition there was present no slave, no man freed from slavery, no low-born man, no man weakened by age; for all were noble, all strong with the might of mature age, all sufficiently fit for any type of fighting, all of such great fleetness, that they scorned the speed of horsemen.
—The Encomium Emmae
IN THE YEAR 1002, KING ETHELRED the Unready of England got really sick of the Vikings raiding his towns and torching his subjects to death, so he decided to celebrate the obscure festival of Saint Brice’s Day by ordering the bloody execution of all Danes living in England. Across the land, Danes were put to the sword, burned alive in their homes and churches, and thrown into mass graves.
Among those killed in the Saint Brice’s Day Massacre were the sister and brother-in-law of Svein Forkbeard, the Viking ruler who ripped the crown of Denmark from the cold, dead hands of his own father, terrorized England with flame and spear, and then sent Olaf Crowbone to a watery grave at the bottom of some harbor in Norway.
And Svein wasn’t happy about having his sister and her family set on fire.
Svein went into a blood rage, got together a big army, and decided that the men of Denmark should head over and show Ethelred the Unready that ordering a Viking genocide is kind of a bad idea. By the time Svein was done, the crown of England would be firmly planted on the head of his son, a man who would rule England for twenty years as King Knut the Great.
We’ve already met Svein, but Knut’s mother was no less intense. The Viking sagas refer to her as Sigrid the Haughty, and even though it’s pronounced kind of like hottie, the dictionary definition of haughty is “arrogantly superior and disdainful,” which is way more appropriate for a respectable Viking warrior-queen. Although now that I think about it, I guess hottie could also be applicable, mostly because Sigrid was infamous for getting lots of marriage proposals and responding to them by lighting her would-be husbands on fire. Aside from Svein Forkbeard, the only suitor who was man enough to be worthy of her was her first husband, King Erik the Victorious of Sweden.
You can probably imagine the kind of child those two managed to produce.
Knut was the second son of Svein and Sigrid, and since European custom ordered that kingship always passed to the oldest son, Knut was pretty much out of luck. He was groomed for war instead of politics and sent off to a secret island fortress off the coast of Poland, where he studied hand-to-hand combat with the Jomsvikings—an order of Viking marauders so over-the-top hardcore that historians can’t determine whether they were real guys or just some ninth-century action-movie fan-fiction fantasy. Training under a massive Danish war-band leader called Thorkell the Tall, Knut mastered arts of war ranging from spear-throwing and swordplay to advanced tactical maneuvering and combat sailing techniques. Naturally, when Svein Forkbeard went off to war, this was the son he wanted by his side.
So in 1013, Svein and Knut arrived at the shores of England with one of the largest Viking fleets ever assembled—and this time, they weren’t interested in plunder; they were mad, and they wanted blood. Ethelred the Unready, being a man deserving of his unflattering epithet, didn’t know what to do. First he offered Svein money to leave. Svein refused. Then Ethelred offered money to other Vikings to help him fight against the rampaging forces of Svein and Knut. Norwegians like Saint Olaf the Fat came to England’s aid, taking the cash in exchange for the opportunity to fight the Danes, but nothing could placate the Danish rage as they cleaved through Vikings, Norsemen, and Englishmen alike in their epic wave of destruction. Ethelred’s armies were smashed. The archbishop of Canterbury—the most important religious leader in all of England—was killed at dinner after being pelted with food until he died. Knut, leading a side mission, forced a garrison to flee without a fight when he executed a bunch of English prisoners and floated their bodies ashore as a means of instilling terror.
Ethelred the Unready, seeing the end was near, did the kingly, manly thing and bolted across the English Channel for Normandy, leaving all of England at the mercy of Svein Forkbeard’s marauding raiders. Svein considered crowning himself king of England, then suddenly died of illness. It was a turn of events so weird and unexpected that the English claimed he had been brought down by the spirit of Saint Edmund (the guy who got shot full of arrows by Ivar the Boneless’s men a couple hundred years earlier).
With Svein’s death, Knut was called home to Denmark by his brother Harald, who was now the king of Denmark. The second Knut left, Ethelred the Unready triumphantly sailed back into town, expecting some kind of parade, and he was all surprised when the English weren’t really that happy to see him. They shook their heads at him disdainfully, took his crown, and proclaimed his son, Edmund Ironside, their king instead.
Naturally, this led to a civil war. Because it’s not like the English had better things to worry about, like what they were going to do when Knut came back to finish what he started.
The English fought each other, Edmund Ironside won, and then Knut came sailing back into town on a river of blood in 1016 and immediately picked up where he’d left off. Ironside raised an army of medieval knights and battled Knut for control of England. Ed put up a decent fight, but Knut and his Danish berserkers destroyed him at the Battle of Assandun, killing Ed and slaughtering much of the English nobility in the process. Knut took over the throne, crowned himself king, and, just to add insult to injury, went out and married Ethelred the Unready’s wife, Emma of Normandy. Emma’s grandpa was Hrolf the Walker, so you know she was down with Vikings, and she would go on to be the great-aunt of William the Conqueror, which owns.
Anyway, Special K’s first order of business was to exile, execute, and/or imprison all Edmund Ironside’s relatives and supporters, mostly because it’s never a good idea to have people hanging around swearing blood oaths to avenge their friends’ deaths. Then, despite the fact that this new king of England had come from a long line of people who made names for themselves doing terrible things, Knut established a twenty-year period of unprecedented peace in England. He basically went around to the different cities and counties building churches and merry-go-rounds and giving everybody high fives. He ruled fairly and justly and is now remembered as a pious and holy man, because he only assassinated people who deserved it, only took good Christian women to be his mistresses, and gave lots of gold to the Catholic Church.
In 1018, Knut’s brother Harald died, and a bunch of Norwegians got all uppity and thought they could proclaim Saint Olaf the Fat the new king of Norway and declare that Norway wasn’t part of the Danish kingdom anymore. Knut followed in his father’s footsteps, the deposed king Olaf of Norway, and reestablished Danish dominance in Scandinavia. Then, just for good measure, he took over a couple of parts of Sweden as well, and by the time Knut visited Rome to hang out with the pope and celebrate the coronation of a new Holy Roman Emperor, he was already referring to himself as “King of All the English, and of Denmark, of the Norwegians, and Some of the Swedes.”
Knut ruled for twenty years, eventually dying in 1035. We don’t know exactly when he was born, but he was probably between forty and fifty years old. His kids took over his North Sea empire, but infighting and poor leadership doomed it to failure. By 1042, England was already back in the hands of Ethelred the Unready’s other son, King Edward the Confessor.
We’ll hear more about how that worked out for them in a sec.
KNOW YOUR VIKINGS
NAME:
Knut “the Great” Sveinsson
RANK:
“King of All the English, and of Denmark, and of the Norwegians, and Some of the Swedes”
RELIGION:
Catholic
BORN:
Denmark, around 985
DIED:
Shaftsbury, England, November 12, 1035
AREAS OF OPERATION:
Norway, Denmark, England, Sweden
NOTEWORTHY:
Destroyed all who opposed him and forged a mighty North Sea empire