The Vikings

Edgar died two years after his coronation and was succeeded by his son Edward. The House of Wessex remained plagued by succession problems, however, and Edward reigned for only three years before he was murdered at Corfe in 978, allegedly on the instructions of his stepmother Aelfthryth, Edgar’s third wife and widow, to clear the way for the succession of her ten-year-old son Ethelred. This clutch of short reigns by short-lived kings had been favoured, since the time of Edgar, by a diminution of Viking activity in England that owed much to Harald Bluetooth’s domestic preoccupations with the unification and Christianization of Denmark. Sporadic raiding on England resumed in the 980s. England was known to be a wealthy country, and once the defeat of Byrhtnoth at Maldon in 991 had persuaded the Danish royal house that the English were too weak to defend themselves or their wealth the raids increased in frequency, with ever-larger forces demanding ever-larger sums of money in return for what turned out to be ever-shorter respites from attack.

We have already met Ethelred in Chapter 13 as he struggled to deal with the armies that Olaf Tryggvason and Sven Forkbeard brought to England in the 990s, including the agreement with Olaf never again to return with hostile intent. Olaf may have been neutralized by baptism and his ambitions in Norway, but for the next three years the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continues to record the doings of a Viking army that killed and burnt in Cornwall and Devon, razing Ordwulf’s abbey church at Tavistock, and in Wales killing the bishop of St David’s. Sven’s name was known to the English chroniclers of these atrocities and the fact that he is not mentioned suggests that he was not involved in the raiding. In 998 the army was in Dorset and carried on more or less as it pleased. It spent the winter on the Isle of Wight and in 999 sailed east again, into the Thames and up the Medway to Rochester. Most of west Kent was laid waste and everywhere, in that bleak refrain that echoes wearily through the Viking years of the Chronicle, ‘the Danes had possession of the place of slaughter’.

It was on the basis of his activities and decisions during these years that a thirteenth-century reader of the Chronicle, punning on the literal meaning of his name, ‘Noble counsel’, dubbed King Ethelred ‘Unraed’, or ‘No counsel’, later corrupted to ‘Unready’. His loyalty to alderman Ælfric of Hampshire shows that he was indeed a poor judge of character. Earlier we saw how, in 991, the year of Maldon and the first danegeld of 10,000 pounds, Ælfric, by warning the enemy, had sabotaged a plan to muster a fleet in London strong enough to trap the Viking army at sea, and for good measure fled the night before battle was to be joined, with the result that a planned annihilation of the Viking fleet resulted in the destruction of a single ship and the slaughter of its crew.² If this betrayal was common knowledge we can only wonder at the fact that he was not severely dealt with by Ethelred. And yet he was not.

Amid all this wretchedness, the revival of monastic life in England that had started with Oda and continued under Dunstan at Glastonbury went on, but even here Ælfric was part of the problem and not the solution. At one point in his career he received a letter from Pope John censuring him for his theft of property and estates from the abbey at Glastonbury, and warning him that if he persisted he would be ‘delivered for ever with Judas the betrayer to the eternal flame’.³ In 1003 the Chronicle sighs that Ælfric was ‘up to his old tricks’ again: rather than face a Viking force fresh from the destruction of Exeter the alderman claimed to be ill, pretended to vomit and left his men in the lurch.⁴ Yet we have the Chronicle’s word for it that Ælfric was one of those ‘in whom the king had most trust’.

Then the king with his councillors decided to advance against them with both naval and land levies; but when the ships were ready there was delay from day to day, which was very galling for the unhappy sailors manning the vessels. Time after time the more urgent a thing was, the greater was the delay from one hour to the next, and all the while they were allowing the strength of their enemies to increase; and as they kept retreating from the sea, so the enemy followed close on their heels.⁵

In 1000 Ethelred marched north to Cumberland ‘and laid waste very nearly the whole of it’. The Chronicle offers no reason for this. Given the record of his armies against the Vikings, it is tempting to suggest that Ethelred went there largely in order to vent his frustration on the hapless landscape. Presumably he wanted to prevent the Vikings using the region as a base for any attempt to revive the kingdom of York. The anxiety and sense of impending hopelessness at the divided and warring realm must have been symbolized for Ethelred and the English with the news that, in the year 1000, ‘the enemy fleet had sailed away to Richard’s realm in the summer’, this despite the fact that Ethelred had a peace treaty with the Norman duke, brokered for him in 991 by Pope John XV, which especially enjoined Richard to receive ‘none of the king’s men, or of his enemies’.⁶

The following year they were back again, penetrating England through the Exe, killing and burning as before. Pallig, a Danish earl who had entered into an agreement with Ethelred, offering support in exchange for gifts of ‘manors, gold and silver’, simply reneged on the agreement when the time came and joined forces with his fellow-countrymen. Again the English levies were mustered, ‘but as soon as they met, the English levies gave ground and the enemy inflicted great slaughter on them’.⁷

There is a reference in the poem the Battle of Maldon to someone referred to only as the ‘hostage’ from Northumbria fighting on the English side, and the presence of a man from the northern Danelaw in an army led by an Essex alderman may perhaps have been an attempt to insure against betrayal by holding an important hostage from an area thought to be sympathetically inclined towards the invaders.⁸ The English, 130 years after the partitions enforced by the Great Heathen Army, remained deeply unsure where the loyalties of the Scandinavian settlers in the east and north of the country lay: over the generations, had they become acculturized to an English way of being and seeing? Or had they retained a strong ‘tribal’ sense of Scandinavia as their homeland that was leading them instinctively to support each fresh band of invaders that arrived from across the water? The atmosphere of fear and paranoia at Ethelred’s court reached an unsustainable intensity in 1002. In that year the king ‘and his councillors’ decided again to attempt to buy off the attackers, and alderman Leofsige was sent to meet the fleet with an offer of 24,000 pounds and maintenance. The Chronicle then reports that the king received a warning that the Danes proposed to ‘deprive him of his life by treachery and all his councillors after him, and then seize his kingdom’.⁹ Roger of Wendover adds the detail that Ethelred’s informant was a man named Huna, one of the king’s leading military commanders. Huna, ‘beholding the insolence of the Danes, who after the establishment of peace had grown strong throughout the whole of England, presuming to violate and insult the wives and daughters of the nobles of the kingdom, came in much distress to the king and made his doleful complaint before him’.¹⁰ Roger seems to hint here that Huna may have been the instigator of what followed, the attempted genocide of Danes in England. From the fact that it took place on 13 November, the campaign became known as the St Brice’s Day Massacre.

The documentary evidence for the massacre is slight. To the rumour of a Danish plan to kill him and take over his kingdom, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle adds only that ‘the king ordered to be slain all the Danish men who were in England - this was done on St Brice’s Day’.¹¹ A retrospective reference occurs in a charter concerning St Frideswide’s Abbey in Oxford.¹² In a striking inversion of the roles historically assumed in such encounters a terrified group of Danish ‘Vikings’ in flight for their lives from a violent mob of armed English ‘Christians’ had sought refuge in a Christian church. The Christian mob violated the sanctuary and set the church on fire. Those inside burnt to death. In 1004 an unrepentant Ethelred ordered that the church be repaired:

For it is fully agreed that to all dwelling in this country it will be well known that, since a decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle among the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination, and this decree was to be put into effect even as far as death, those Danes who dwelt in the aforementioned town, striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ, having broken by force the doors and bolts, and resolved to make a refuge and defence for themselves therein against the people of the town and the suburbs; but when all the people in pursuit strove, forced by necessity, to drive them out, and could not, they set fire to the planks and burnt, as it seems, this church with its ornaments and books.

To complain, as the king does, that in their search for sanctuary the Danes had broken the bolts on the church doors is an indication of the degree of hatred that lay behind Ethelred’s order, as is the claim that those who set fire to the church did so only because they were ‘forced by necessity’. A legacy of this hatred are the patches of what was alleged to be the skin of excoriated Danes that were still to be found in the late nineteenth century on the doors of churches at Hadstock and Copford in Essex, on the north door of Worcester Cathedral and the door of a chamber in the south transept of Westminster Abbey. Only one has been positively identified as human skin, though we might think one is enough.¹³

Those on the other side of the history of this relationship, like the Norman William of Jumièges, described horrors of a Hieronymous Bosch-like intensity, with Danish women buried to the waist only so that their breasts could be savaged by dogs, and Danish children who had their brains beaten out against door-posts. William insisted that Ethelred had ordered the massacre for no good reason at all, but was only a man ‘transported by a sudden fury’. The twelfth-century cleric Henry of Huntingdon was also horrified:

Anonymity and unmarked graves are the characteristics of a genocide, which may explain why only two victims of the massacre are known by name, both of them aristocrats. One was Pallig, the Danish earl who had taken Ethelred’s money in 1001 and then deserted him to join his fellow Danes. The other was his wife Gunnhild, a Christian and a sister of Sven Forkbeard, who had offered herself as a voluntary hostage to the English. Whether St Brice’s really was a full-scale massacre involving a great many unrecorded deaths or, as seems more likely, a localized ‘day of terror’, with a handful of high-profile victims including a known traitor, that was intended largely to frighten Anglo-Danes away from any thought of collaborating with the invaders, it had no deterrent effect on the Danes in Denmark. In 1003 Sven returned at the head of an army that destroyed Exeter and the following year burnt Norwich. William of Jumièges tells us that a group of young men who had escaped made their way from London to Denmark to inform Sven Forkbeard of the murders of members of his family. This has sometimes been proposed as the provocation behind Sven’s return, but while the idea has strong narrative appeal it overlooks the equally compelling financial and political attractions of mounting a major assault on the country. The raiding that had softened up the south of the kingdom over the preceding years, the vast and debilitating payments demanded, the Danes’ evident disdain for an enemy unable to defend itself, and the encouragement of the repetitive ease of victory against a thoroughly demoralized population, all these must have combined to make it clear to Sven that finally, after 200 years of pinching, hairpulling, punching, kicking and worse from Viking bands of various sizes, the English were ready to be taken.

There was a severe famine in 1005 and the Danes sailed back to Denmark, only to return the following summer. They recorded more triumphs against the levies of Wessex and Mercia, rested briefly at a safe base on the Isle of Wight and marched on through Reading, putting to flight an English force at East Kennet. At the conclusion of the campaign the inhabitants of Winchester were subjected to the humiliating spectacle of Danes marching past the gates of the city on their 50-mile trek back to the sea, burdened in their progress only by the amount of booty they had taken.

In 1007 another danegeld was offered, 36,000 pounds this time. In 1008 Ethelred ordered a massive programme of ship-building, but with the new fleet assembled at Sandwich and ready for action all its potential was dissipated by quarrelling and accusations of treachery among his military commanders. A Sussex alderman named Wulfnoth defected, taking twenty ships with him, and went off raiding and harrying along the south coast like any Viking. Eighty ships that set off to arrest the renegade took a terrible battering in a storm and those that survived were burnt by Wulfnoth. The remainder of Ethelred’s ‘great fleet’ headed for London, ‘thus inconsiderately allowing the effort of the whole nation to come to naught, so that the threat to the Danes, upon which the whole of England had set its hopes, turned out to be no more potent than this’.¹⁵

A ubiquitous demoralization had taken hold of the English. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle resorts to cataloguing their woes, as though the act of numbering and listing might calm its agitation. Ethelred and his councillors had resigned themselves to offering the Vikings yet another danegeld in 1011, and the chronicler notes: ‘By this time they had overrun (i) East Anglia, (ii) Essex, (iii) Middlesex, (iv) Oxfordshire, (v) Cambridgeshire, (vi) Herefordshire, (vii) Buckinghamshire, (viii) Bedfordshire, (ix) half of Huntingdonshire, and to the south of the Thames all Kent and Sussex, and the district around Hastings, and Surrey, and Berkshire, and Hampshire, and a great part of Wiltshire.’¹⁶ ‘In the end,’ we learn, ‘there was no leader who was willing to raise levies, but each fled as quickly as he could; nor even in the end would one shire help another.’¹⁷

England was reverting to a chaotic parody of the structure of several kingdoms that had obtained at the very outset of the insular Viking Age. One late incident in particular strikes a brutal echo of the anti-Christian violence that had been a keynote of the Viking raids in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Early in August 1009 the people of Canterbury had been threatened by what the chronicler calls an ‘immense army’ under a Jutland earl, Thorkel the Tall. On that occasion they had bought themselves off with the payment of a local danegeld of 3,000 pounds. Two years later Thorkel’s army returned and were admitted to the city by Abbot Ælfmær of St Augustine’s. Bishop Godwine of Rochester was captured, as was an abbess named Leofrun and the Archbishop himself, Ælfeah or Alphege, the man who had sponsored Olaf Tryggvason’s confirmation at Andover in 994. Ælfmær was permitted to escape, Alphege was taken back to the ships.

With a cruel precision the Vikings’ demand for money had been rising incrementally by half each time, from the 16,000 paid in 994 through the 24,000 in 1002 to the 36,000 of 1007. A few months later, following the raid in Canterbury, they were camped in idle and arrogant triumph in Greenwich, just outside London, and awaiting a payment of 48,000 pounds. An additional 3,000 demanded as a personal ransom for the release of this most important of prisoners was almost enough to observe the symmetry of previous demands. The main payment had been handed over in April. The subsidiary demand had still not been met. According to Thietmar of Merseburg this was at the express command of Alphege himself, on the grounds of the ‘dire poverty’ of the see.¹⁸ On the evening of Sunday 19 April, bored and angry with their prisoner for his intransigence, and drunk on imported wine, Thorkel’s men turned on Alphege and made him their after-dinner entertainment, pelting him with bones, stones, blocks of wood and the skulls of cattle. King Hrolf and his Champions, one of the Icelanders’ fornaldarsögur, or sagas set in mythical times, offers a fictional example of the attack as a form of rough humour,¹⁹ and Cnut’s own retainers were bound by a law that punished ‘persistent audacity’ among then by ostracizing the offender at mealtimes, when he might be ‘pelted with bones at any man’s pleasure’.²⁰ The attack on Alphege was savage and sustained. Finally, as an act of mercy it seems, someone struck him on the head with the back of an axe, and the spiritual head of the Christian Church in England was dead. To the English it must have seemed as though every dreadful millennial prophecy of the end of the world was about to come true.

Sven Forkbeard left Denmark for England with his conquest fleet in the summer of 1013 and went ashore at Gainsborough, in Lindsey. The people of Lindsey and of the Five Boroughs hailed him as king, and soon afterwards he received the submission of ‘all the Danes to the north of Watling Street’. It marked a reversion to something like the state of affairs after the invasion of the Great Heathen Army, and was for Ethelred a bitter confirmation of his doubts about the loyalties of his Anglo-Danish subjects. Sven then headed south. Oxford surrendered, as did Winchester, seat of the ancient capital of the royal house of Wessex. The west country capitulated, and by the time Sven turned north again ‘the whole nation accepted him as their undisputed king’.²¹ In the year of the St Brice’s Day Massacre, Ethelred had arranged a diplomatic marriage between himself and Emma, daughter of Richard I of Normandy and of the Countess Gunnor, and sister to the ruling Duke Richard II, who had succeeded his father in 996.²² As a tactic it turned out to be as little successful as Christian baptism, danegeld payments, giant fleets or ethnic cleansing, for when Sven resumed his large-scale raiding in England in 1003 he had done so with the collusion of Duke Richard, whose reward for his involvement was that familiar Viking unit of wealth, a share of the booty.²³ This was in continuing and flagrant disregard of the 991 treaty that had promised a peace ‘that should remain ever unshaken’.²⁴ But at such a time, perhaps only a flagrant regard of the treaty would have been worthy of note. With the arrival of Sven’s conquest fleet Emma and her children fled for safety to her brother Richard’s court in Normandy. Shortly afterwards they were joined there by Ethelred, a melancholy benefit of his marriage and not at all the one he had been looking for.

Then, on 2 February 1014, a matter of months after achieving the goal for which he had more or less consciously striven for over twenty years, Sven died. The Danes and Anglo-Danes chose his son Cnut to succeed him; but the reaction of the English was well-caught in the report of Sven’s death in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as ‘the happy event’.²⁵ In one last throw of the dice a group of English leaders invited Ethelred to return. He accepted and was duly restored to the throne. Cnut remained in Gainsborough until late April. The people of Lindsey agreed to provide him with horses and join him in his struggle with Ethelred, but for once Ethelred and the English army caught their opponents by surprise. Many of Cnut’s supporters were killed and Cnut himself driven out to sea. Passing Sandwich on his way back to Denmark he put ashore the hostages who had been given to his father, having first cut off their ears, noses and hands.

It was at this juncture, in the brief hiatus of legal kingship that followed, and with the horrific martyrdom of his brother archbishop, Alphege, still vivid in the memory, that Wulfstan, archbishop of York, composed a sermon for the edification of his fellow-countrymen which, punning on his name, became known as ‘The Sermon of the Wolf to the English’. The opening lines of it identify 1014 unequivocally as the year ‘when the Danes persecuted them [the English] the most’, and proceed straight to the point:²⁶

Wulfstan shared with Alcuin two centuries before him the almost heroically masochistic conviction that all the troubles that had befallen the English were of their own making. In so far as they mattered at all, the Vikings were important only as the instruments of God’s punishment. In his sermon he even tried to shame his Christian audience by contrasting the degree of religious observance unfavourably with that of the worshippers of Heathen gods. Though much of his rhetoric was generalized he made several points that had a quite specific reference to the prevailing crisis. He lamented the decline in respect for God and the law that had taken place since the days of King Edgar, naming in the litany of woes the increase in stealing, killing, sedition, pestilence and ‘wavering loyalties among men everywhere’. Traitors were to be found in both Church and state. He railed against the continuing sale of Christian slaves to foreign markets, and abominated in particular the practice of men banding together to buy a female slave for their sexual gratification before selling her on. He articulated the horror of the conservative at a world that was not merely changing but turning upside down, lamenting along the way the humiliations and dreadful demoralizations visited on the English by the conquering armies of the Vikings:

Though any slave runs away from his master and, deserting Christianity, becomes a viking, and after that it comes about that a conflict takes place between thegn and slave, if the slave slays the thegn, no wergild is paid to any of his kindred; but if the thegn slays the slave whom he owned before, he shall pay the price of a thegn. Very base laws and shameful tributes are common among us, through God’s anger, let him understand it who can; and many misfortunes befall this people again and again . . . The English have been for a long time now completely defeated and too greatly disheartened through God’s anger; and the pirates so strong with God’s consent that often in battle one puts to flight ten, and sometimes less, sometimes more, all because of our sins. And often ten or a dozen, one after another, insult disgracefully the thegn’s wife, and sometimes his daughter or near kins-woman, whilst he looks on, who considered himself brave and mighty and stout enough before that happened. And often a slave binds very fast the thegn who previously was his master and makes him into a slave through God’s anger. Often two seamen, or maybe three, drive the droves of Christian men from sea to sea, out through this people, huddled together, as a public shame to us all, if we could seriously and rightly feel any shame. But all the insult which we often suffer we repay with honouring those who insult us; we pay them continually and they humiliate us daily; they ravage and they burn, plunder and rob and carry on board.²⁷

There was a historian in the times of the Britons, called Gildas, who wrote about their misdeeds, how with their sins they angered God so excessively that finally he allowed the army of the English to conquer their land and to destroy the host of the Britons entirely. And that came about, according to what he said, through robbery by the powerful, and through the coveting of ill-gotten gains, through the lawlessness of the people and through unjust judgements, through the sloth of the bishops and the wicked cowardice of God’s messengers, who mumbled through their jaws where they should have cried aloud.²⁹

Wulfstan was drawing some very long narrative lines here. He was asking his congregation to see a direct parallel between the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the Britons in the fifth and sixth centuries and the imminent Danish conquest of the Anglo-Saxons in the eleventh. Haunted by the similarities between the circumstances in 1014 and those under which Alcuin had written to King Ethelred of Northumbria, in the aftermath of 793, he was convinced that the hour of Alcuin’s prophecy had come - ‘Who does not fear this? Who does not lament this as if his country were captured?’ - and now urged his listeners, if they wished to avoid a fate similar to the one they themselves had visited upon the Britons, to look to the lesson of history before it was too late.

Cnut was never likely to give up what his father had exhausted himself fighting for. Adam of Bremen numbered the fleet that he returned with in 1015 at over 1,000 large ships, a sure sign that it was a very large force indeed, probably larger even than the Great Heathen Army.³⁰ The fleet sailed along the south coast of England until it reached the mouth of the Frome, and then the army went ashore and ravaged in Dorset, Wiltshire and Somerset. Thorkel the Tall, after a brief period of what some have seen as a guilty allegiance to Ethelred in atonement for the murder of Archbishop Alphege by men who were in his charge, changed sides and again joined Cnut. Ethelred, already a sick man, had to contend with a challenge for the throne by his son Edmund, known as the Ironside, which had gained some support in the north of the country. Eadric Streona, the Mercian alderman, raised an army and backed his campaign but then changed his mind and went over to Cnut’s side, having persuaded the crews of forty of Ethelred’s ships to join him.

Along with alderman Ælfric, Eadric Streona emerges as the other main villain on the English side in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s account of these last years of the Wessex dynasty. His appointment as alderman of Mercia in 1007 put him in charge of the area between the Thames and the Humber and for the next eight years made him Ethelred’s closest adviser. His marriage to one of Ethelred’s daughters made him also the king’s son-in-law. A consummate and unprincipled opportunist, he was more concerned with immediate threats to his position from rival English courtiers than the vastly greater threat of conquest posed by Sven’s armies, and in 1006 and again in 1015 he arranged the murders of prominent English rivals.

Over the next six years, as the struggle for possession of the kingdom reached its climax and the prospects of the rival factions became harder to gauge, Eadric changed sides frequently. In 1016 he was with Cnut as they ravaged and burned their way through Warwickshire. The threat to the dynasty seems finally to have reconciled Edmund to his father and he raised an army and urged Ethelred in London to join him with all the men he could muster. But the large army thus assembled simply dissipated again, Ethelred was informed that none was willing to support him, and he made his way back to London. As the dark moral farce of English resistance played out, Edmund joined forces with Earl Uhtred in Northumbria and, according to the Chronicle, ‘everyone thought that they would collect an army against King Cnut’. But by now everyone was a Viking and, instead of facing Cnut’s Danes, this English army set off ravaging in parallel with Cnut’s.

The death of Ethelred on 23 April must have greatly simplified the situation for all concerned. For several months Edmund fought on, engaging Cnut’s armies in a series of six battles between April and October of 1016, and bravely enough to entice Eadric Streona back on to his side. Eadric marched with his men to Aylesford and Edmund, in what must surely indicate desperation rather than poor judgement, accepted his offer of support. ‘No greater folly was ever agreed to than that was’, was the Chronicle’s comment.³² In the last of the series of battles, fought on a hillside on 18 October at Ashington in Essex, this Loki-like figure ‘did as he had so often done before: he and the Magesæte [men from Herefordshire and South Shropshire] were the first to set the example of flight, and thus he betrayed his royal lord and the whole nation’.³³

Eadric was one of Edmund’s advisers at the negotiations which followed on the Severn island of Alney. There a payment to the Danes was agreed, hostages exchanged and the country divided between the two kings, with Edmund taking Wessex and Cnut Mercia. When Edmund died, assassinated at Minsterworth on the west bank of the Severn on 30 November the same year, Cnut, at the age of about twenty, was left the undisputed king of England. Indeed, it might seem as though the significant lay and ecclesiastical powers in the land had already accepted him as such, coming together after Ethelred’s funeral at St Paul’s and communicating their submission to Cnut at Southampton, as a final humiliation ‘repudiating and renouncing in his presence all the race of King Ethelred’.³⁴ His formal accession took place in 1017 and he celebrated by raising what must now, despite its observing the customary incremental rise on the preceding demand, properly be called a tax rather than a danegeld. The 72,000 pounds that were raised represented the entire sum of created wealth in England in that year. Used to pay off his men, it shows more clearly than anything else the sheer size of the army Cnut had at his disposal.

Cnut was fortunate. As the first legitimate Viking king of a land outside Scandinavia he inherited from his Wessex predecessors a central administration, honed from the time of Alfred the Great to a remarkable efficiency, which he was able to continue using with a minimum of adaptation. Not least because of the financial demands made on the English by Viking raiders, it had become particularly adept at the imposing and gathering of taxes. The new king kept the four main regions of his new kingdom, making Wessex the seat of his power, allowing Eadric Streona to remain in Mercia and giving Northumbria to his Norwegian brother-in-law Erik, a son of Håkon the Great or Bad and himself a former earl of Lade. East Anglia was entrusted to the powerful Thorkel the Tall. The restoration of Eadric to Mercia may have been to lull this dangerous opportunist into a false sense of security. Better advised than Ethelred, Cnut carried out a selective purge of prominent Englishmen in 1017 that included the beheading of Eadric, ‘so that soldiers may learn from this example to be faithful, not faithless to their kings’.³⁵ A son of Ethelred named Eadwig was exiled and then murdered, and the two infant sons of Edmund sent to Cnut’s tributary king Olof Sköttkonung in Sweden to be killed. Olof mercifully sent them on to a king of the Hungarians, at whose court they found a safe refuge.³⁶

Many of Cnut’s most powerful and loyal thegns or followers were rewarded with gifts of land spread across almost every shire in England. Tofi the Proud was granted estates in Surrey, Somerset, Berkshire, Essex, Norfolk and Hertfordshire, Orc at Portishame in Devon, and Bovi at Horton in Dorset.³⁷ Cnut did not, however, as the Norman King William would do after his conquest of 1066, set about the wholesale replacement of what remained of the English aristocracy after the depletions caused by his own efforts and by those of his father. He dealt with the obvious problems of loyalty and security he faced as the violent usurper of a legitimate king by employing a large permanent guard or thingalid. The recurrence of the phrase ‘harda godan thegn’, meaning something like ‘stout-hearted fellow’, on runic inscriptions on stones raised by relatives in Jutland, in south-eastern Skåne in Sweden, and in central Västergotland to commemorate the lives of these men indicates the degree to which Cnut’s recruits came from these regions.³⁸ The presence of what may have been a large number of Swedes in his retinue has also been offered as an explanation for the claim, made in a document of 1027 addressed ‘to the whole race of the English’, to be ‘king of all England, and of Denmark, and of the Norwegians, and of part of the Swedes’.³⁹ The care with which he specified ‘Norwegians’ and ‘part of the Swedes’, rather than ‘Norway’ and ‘Sweden’, is a reminder that, in these parts of Scandinavia, kingship was still a matter of personal loyalty to a leader and had little to do with modern notions of nationhood.

Though the England of which Cnut was now ruler went back in its current form only as far as the time of King Edgar in 959, in a dynastically obsessed age his accession had broken a line of West Saxon kings that went back to the middle of the sixth century. Very sensibly he wasted no time in signalling his intention to try to unite the Danish and Anglo-Saxon elements of the population into one people under his rule. Less than a year after Ethelred’s death, Cnut sent for his widow Emma from Normandy and married her, supplementing his symbolic replacement of the dead king on his throne with his literal replacement in bed. Besides being Ethelred’s widow she was also, of course, the sister of Duke Richard II of Normandy. Of the two children of this marriage her son, Harthacnut, became a king of England and her daughter, Gunnhild, the wife of a German emperor. The marriage did not spell the end of Cnut’s long-term liaison with Ælfgifu, daughter of a Northumbrian alderman, who bore him two sons.

Cnut saw as the most important aspect of his new role the promotion of himself as not merely a Christian but an unusually pious Christian. Following the precedent of Guthrum in Alfred’s time he is reported by Adam of Bremen to have rejected his Scandinavian ‘Heathen name’ and been baptized ‘Lambert’, though he seems to have made little official use of his Christian name.⁴⁰ His change of direction showed rapid results. Some time after 1020 he received a letter from Fulbert, bishop of Chartres, who, in thanking him effusively for his gift towards the rebuilding of the church there after it was burnt down in 1020, expressed himself all the more delighted at Cnut’s piety, ‘when we perceive that you, whom I had heard to be a ruler of pagans, not only of Christians, are also a most gracious benefactor to the churches and servants of God’.⁴¹ Wulfstan, archbishop of York, was retained in office and until his death in 1023 remained an influential adviser. Aware that among the Danes who had decided to stay and invest their danegelds in England many were still Heathen, his was the guiding hand behind articles in the secular law codes known as II Cnut, issued in the early 1020s. In a country that had been Christian for 300 years these set out prohibitions new to English law against certain Heathen practices: ‘It is heathen practice if one worships idols, namely if one worships heathen gods and the sun or the moon, fire or floods, wells or stones or any kind of forest trees, or if one practises witchcraft or encompasses death by any means, either by sacrifice or divination, or takes any part in such delusions.’⁴² These strictures confirm, in passing, that the everyday practice of Heathendom had more to do with shamanism, animism and nature worship than with the pseudo-classicism of Snorri Sturluson’s myths of the Aesir and the allusive world of the skaldic poets that was spun out of those myths. If our assumptions about the religious beliefs of this new wave of settlers are sound then these also cast doubt, by inference, on the boast made on the Jelling stone by Cnut’s grandfather Harald to have made the Danes Christian. The introduction of these new prohibitions may also reinforce the impression created by Wulfstan himself in the ‘Sermon of the Wolf’, that belief in Christ was faltering even among the English themselves, perhaps as a result of Christ’s apparent inability to defend his worshippers from Viking attacks.

There was a huge symbolic value in Cnut’s response to a request in 1023 from the Church to translate the mortal remains of the martyred Archbishop St Alphege from St Paul’s in London to Christ Church, Canterbury. The tomb was opened by members of the Canterbury community under the hostile gaze of the monks of St Paul’s and a crowd of angry Londoners. Cnut not only provided a protective escort for the translation of the saint’s remains but accompanied the body as it was carried across the Thames on a ship to Southwark before being handed over to the archbishop, Aethelnoth.⁴³ In the same year Cnut made the richest of his gifts to the church of Canterbury, granting the port of Sandwich to Christ Church. His wife Emma also played her part in fostering the image of a pious royal house. After Alphege’s body had lain three days at Rochester she arrived with her son Harthacnut to pay homage, and then accompanied the processional group to Canterbury. She was a patron of churches both in England and abroad and a collector of relics herself. In the year of St Alphege’s translation she acquired a particularly powerful relic from Benevento in Italy, the arm of St Bartholomew, and made a gift of it to the Canterbury monks.⁴⁴

On the death of his childless older brother Harold, in 1019, Cnut had inherited the throne of Denmark. He made a short journey home to claim the crown formally, and seems to have taken with him a number of bishops who had been consecrated in England, probably by the archbishop of Canterbury. As the close ties in Christian kingship between temporal and spiritual power became ever more apparent to Cnut in his new role, this may have been his way of trying to curb the influence of German rulers in Denmark, through their patronage of the Hamburg-Bremen archbishopric which, since the time of Louis the Pious and the missionary activity of St Anskar, had been the natural seat of ecclesiastical authority in the north, once the conversion of the Scandinavian peoples became an established political goal. Cnut’s actions were certainly seen as an attack on the authority of the German see by its archbishop, Unway.

But if political thinking did lie behind Cnut’s choice of Cantabrian rather than Hamburgian bishops, the situation changed after what was probably his most dramatic display of Christian piety. This was the pilgrimage made to Rome in 1027, to attend the coronation of the Emperor Conrad II of Germany. The invitation confirmed a wider degree of acceptance than any Scandinavian ruler had experienced before. With evident pride he related in his report of the pilgrimage that ‘they all both received me with honour and honoured me with precious gifts’, and that the emperor had paid him particular honour in the form of ‘vessels of gold and silver as well as silk robes and very costly garments’.⁴⁵ The rhetoric is a clear statement of how fiercely this northerner now longed to enter the European political and cultural mainstream. Once he had returned from Rome he made no further attempts to promote the missionary claims of Canterbury above those of the German see.

On the practical side, he had obtained assurances that English and Danish merchants would be allowed to travel freely to and from Rome without being subjected to all manner of local tolls and taxes, and he obtained satisfaction over complaints from his archbishops at the large sums of money demanded of them when they journeyed to Rome to receive the pallium. The spiritual purpose of his journey had been ‘to pray for the remission of my sins and for the safety of the kingdoms and of the peoples which are subjected to my rule’, and in the letter of report he vowed to God ‘to amend my life from now on in all things’. His reeves and sheriffs were enjoined to stamp out injustice and to ensure an adherence to the law so strict that it did not deviate, not even ‘to amass money for me; for I have no need that money should be amassed for me by unjust exaction’.

A number of the Scandinavian rune-stones that commemorate men who took Cnut’s geld ask God to have mercy on the souls of those who lost their lives attacking a Christian country in pursuit of nothing more elevated than power and money. It seems ironic, bearing in mind the effort made from the time of Charlemagne onwards by emperors, kings, bishops and missionaries to convert the Norsemen to Christianity. But if we turn the prism slightly we can see the bargain being struck here, with the English spiritual leadership eliciting these public expressions of piety from Cnut as the price of accepting his leadership. For him to have rejected the role of a good Christian king would have turned his reign into an enervating series of Christian-led insurrections. Acceptance of it paid off: at his death in 1035 Cnut was master, either directly or through his family and tributary relationships, of a compact maritime empire consisting of Denmark, Norway and England. The curious tale of how Cnut sat in his throne on the seashore and commanded the waves to go back is attested only 100 years after his death by Henry of Huntington, whose account makes it clear that the performance was designed solely to instruct his followers in the severe limitations God had placed on his powers. Homiletic tales concerning historical figures do not usually wander too far from their known characteristics. The lesson of this one must be that Cnut was a most talented, intelligent and pragmatic king.

If this was all a credible and indeed creditable act of self-reinvention, at least one group of people were not seduced. Cnut’s own idea of himself as king was expressed in the letter following his visit to Rome, which was addressed to ‘the whole race of the English, whether nobles or ceorls’, the lowest class of freemen in Anglo-Saxon England. To the eight Scandinavian court poets listed in the later Icelandic Skáldatal or ‘List of Poets’ who flocked to his court and for the duration of his reign made it a centre of patronage and composition, however, Cnut was and remained their great and triumphant Viking leader.⁴⁶ Roberta Frank’s analysis of the verse made in honour of his achievements suggests that these skalds were singing not for Cnut alone but for a wider audience of people of Danish extraction living in England, using a syntax, words and idioms that together made up a language at times so distinct as to invite the term Anglo-Danish.⁴⁷ The incidental content of the poems reinforces the sense of separate cultural identities in England, with an assumption on the part of the Scandinavian poets that their listeners were Danes first and Englishmen second. Cnut’s poets praised him for the benefits his expeditions and activities brought to Danes in Denmark and Danes in England. Their possible benefits to native Englishmen were of no interest to them.

We have noted on several occasions the innate conservatism of the skalds, well illustrated by the opposition of Hallfred the Troublesome Poet to the coming of Christianity. Religious conscience was a factor in this, but there was also the devastating effect on the skaldic art of being compelled to abandon the entire structural underpinning of Heathen myths and lore that lay behind it. In threatening Heathendom, Christianity threatened the cultural history of which the skalds were the oral custodians.⁴⁸ One poet who found solutions to these problems was the Icelander Sigvat Thordarson, regarded by Snorri Sturluson and by many later connoisseurs as the greatest skald of them all. ‘Sigvat did not talk quickly in ordinary language,’ Snorri writes, ‘but skaldship came so naturally to him that he talked in rhymes as easily as if he were talking in the ordinary way.’⁴⁹ Without lessening it, he managed to reinvent skaldic poetry by reducing its reliance on a frame of reference that would have embarrassed the Christian sensibilities of kings such as Olaf Tryggvason and Cnut, and by rationalizing the complexity of its sentence structure.⁵⁰ Just as Archbishop Wulfstan had shown an awareness of his own Anglo-Saxon roots in harking back to the start of the insular Viking Age in the ‘Sermon to the English’, so did Sigvat show what a high degree of historical awareness of themselves as Vikings these eleventh-century Scandinavians had. In the course of the ‘Víkingarvísur’, a praise-poem that enumerates the battles of Olav Haraldson, he invoked the name of the ninth-century Northumbrian king, Aella, to characterize the English as ‘all the race of Aella’ to whom Olaf had caused such suffering.

We saw earlier how, in another context, he again invoked the memory of King Aella in a line from his praise-poem for Cnut called the ‘Knútsdrápa’: ‘And Ivar, who dwelt in York, carved the eagle on Aella’s back.’⁵² The significance of these two references lies in the parallel Sigvat was drawing between the two Danish heroes, Ivar the Boneless, whose achievement as one of the leaders of the Great Heathen Army lay in his capturing York in 867 and giving the Vikings their first firm foothold in England, and Cnut, now undisputed king over all England. His long narrative line is clear: Cnut had finished the job started by Ivar. Cnut had brought to a successful conclusion a long-term military campaign pursued, with exemplary and unwavering patience, towards just this end. His was a poetic and not a political or historical analysis, but Sigvat’s choice of image gives us a piercing insight into the historical self-awareness of the Vikings. Remarkably, Cnut’s crowning as king of England in 1016 was figured in the poet’s literary imagination as the heroic realization of a plan that had been fashioned by his Viking ancestors over 150 years earlier.

After so long a gestation, the only Viking empire that warrants the term turned out to be short-lived. As the Frankish empire had been after the death of Louis, Cnut’s North Sea empire was plagued by succession problems. When he died at Shaftesbury, on 12 November 1035, he intended his son Harthacnut to inherit England and Denmark, the two most prestigious and wealthy components of the empire. But problems with the Norwegians detained Harthacnut in Scandinavia, and his half-brother Harold, known as Harefoot, Cnut’s son by Ælfgifu, seized his opportunity, ruling first as regent, then as king from 1037. By 1040 Harthacnut had settled his business with the Norwegians and was preparing a fleet to sail to England and depose the usurper, when Harold died suddenly at Oxford.

As their new king, Harthacnut at once alienated his subjects with the imposition of a large tax to pay for the fleet. Coming at a time when a scarcity had caused the price of corn to soar, it provoked widespread hardship and unrest. Tax-collectors named Feader and Thurstan, in flight from an angry mob in Worcester, were cornered and killed in one of the monastery towers. Harthacnut’s response was to raise an army, ravage in Worcester, and burn the city. Such an opening did not augur well for his reign, and there was general relief when, on 8 June, after less than two years on the throne, he collapsed and died while drinking at a wedding-feast, falling to the ground ‘with fearful convulsions’.⁵³ So ended the short rule of the Jelling dynasty in England.