8

New Empires in Britain and Scandinavia, 950–1150

THE EXPULSION OF Eirik Bloodaxe from York in 954 seemed to mark the end of the Viking threat to Britain. Alfred the Great’s descendants had unified England under the House of Wessex and the last independent Scandinavian settlement in England had fallen. The reign of Edgar (959–75), the main events of which were a series of reforms to the Church and the coinage, was so tranquil in comparison to those of his predecessors that he acquired the nickname ‘The Peaceable’. A shadow, though, crossed the land after his death, as Edward and Aethelred, his two sons (by different queens), vied for the kingship. Edward, supported by Dunstan, the reforming Archbishop of Canterbury, was initially successful. But then, three years later, Edward was murdered in distinctly murky circumstances while he was visiting Aethelred and his mother Aelfthryth at Corfe Castle. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it, ‘No worse deed for the English race was done than this, since they first sought out the land of Britain.’¹

Many believed that Aelfthryth herself was responsible,² driven to murder out of ambition for her son, but such lingering suspicions did not prevent Aethelred from succeeding to the throne. The new king was just eleven or twelve years old, and the taint of regicide was hardly the most auspicious way to begin his reign. Yet, under the tutelage of his mother and advisers such as Bishop Aethelwold of Winchester and Aelfhere, the Ealdorman of Mercia, there was every expectation that his reign would be as long, peaceful and prosperous as that of his father.

Long Aethelred’s reign certainly was, but it was so disastrous that he earnt himself the nickname Unraed – which does not, as commonly supposed, mean ‘Unready’, but rather ‘Ill-Counselled’ – for his failure to prevent the catastrophe that engulfed England.³ Within a year of Aethelred’s consecration in May 979 at Kingston-on-Thames, the first Viking raids for decades saw Southampton sacked, the Isle of Thanet ravaged and bands of Norsemen spreading devastation through Cheshire. Whether the raiders were pulled by their awareness of the new king’s tender age and the dubious circumstances of his accession, or were instead pushed (as the sagas imply) by the increasing strength of the Scandinavian monarchies under rulers such as Harald Bluetooth of Denmark, is difficult to determine.

These first raids were freelance affairs and, although damaging, did not seriously threaten to destabilise England. An attack on Cornwall followed in 981, and then another on Portland in Dorset the next year. The following decade was punctuated by further raids and rising tension between Aethelred’s court and Duke Richard of Normandy, who was suspected of harbouring Viking fleets in his ports.⁴ A peace treaty between Wessex and Normandy, brokered by the papal envoy Leo, Bishop of Trevi, was signed in 991, which contained the provision that each side promised not to shelter the other’s (unspecified) enemies.

The pact may have brought hope, but it did not bring peace. Barely six months later a huge war fleet, of perhaps ninety-three ships, made its way along the east coast of England, raiding Sandwich in Kent, and then falling upon Ipswich before it came to land at Maldon in Essex. This time the attackers were led by no small-time Viking freebooter, but by Olaf Tryggvason, a man of noble blood, the son of the ruler of Viken around Oslofjord and, the sagas would later claim, the great-great-grandson of Harald Finehair himself.⁵

Maldon was the second-largest town in Essex at the time (after Colchester)⁶ and although the Vikings could easily have sailed up the River Blackwater, which is still tidal at that point, they chose not to do so and instead encamped on Northey Island, which is around a mile downstream.⁷ The island was accessible to the mainland only by a tidal causeway (which had existed since Roman times). As a result, passage to or from the island was only practicable at low tide, making surprise attacks on the Viking camp impossible, but equally impeding their ability to conduct a raid or manoeuvre to face an attacking force.

The Norsemen were soon confronted by a group of local levies led by Byrhtnoth of East Anglia, who was Aethelred’s most experienced ealdorman (the highest-ranking local official in Anglo-Saxon England), having held the position since 956. The lack of time available to call up any but the fyrd of Essex meant that he probably only had 500 or 600 men, as against possibly five times that number in Olaf’s army.⁸ The course of the battle, which is dealt with somewhat peremptorily in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (which also mistakenly puts its date as 993 rather than 991), is better known from an Old English poem known as ‘The Battle of Maldon’.⁹ According to this, Byrhtnoth lined his men up along the river, instructing them to form a shield-wall as he rode up and down on horseback to inspect the formation.

Seeing the approaching Anglo-Saxon force, the Vikings sent over a messenger to demand a payment from Byrhtnoth in return for departing in peace. The ealdorman understandably dismissed this attempt to extort a bribe. With his enemy bottled up on the island, and their only hope of reaching Maldon being across the narrow causeway where they could be easily picked off, Byrhtnoth had the luxury of being able to wait until more substantial reinforcements arrived. He arrayed his men along the river bank to either side of the causeway and waited for the Vikings’ next move.

Olaf’s men unleashed an arrow-storm against the English, a characteristic attempt to thin an opponent’s ranks before the main battle. The tide, however, was now beginning to ebb, exposing Byrhtnoth to a possible bid by the Vikings to force the causeway. At high tide, the water is around 6 feet deep, and so it was only now that such a crossing was possible. The English ealdorman ordered three champions to block the passage, which – at only about 6 feet wide, and with the water to either side still hindering any attempt to bypass them – the English warriors could have done without having to face more than a few of their opponents at any one time. The trio of Wulfstan, Maccus and Aelfhere fought valiantly ‘as long as they could wield weapons’,¹⁰ and seem to have beaten off the initial Viking assault.

The Vikings and Byrhtnoth now engaged in a further round of parlaying, with the Norsemen asking for permission to cross the causeway so that the two sides could fight on equal terms. The ealdorman is said to have agreed, allowing the Vikings onto the mainland, ‘on account of his pride’.¹¹ Exactly why he did so has been the subject of much debate, with explanations ranging from the literal – that he genuinely believed his own numerically inferior forces could beat the Vikings – to a view that he wanted to engage Olaf’s force before the Scandinavians could sail off and attack an even less well-defended town.

Whatever the reason behind it, the result of Byrhtnoth’s bravado was catastrophic. The Vikings must have surged across and, though ‘The Battle of Maldon’ poet is rather imprecise on the actual course of the combat, he refers to the Vikings as wolves, ‘beasts of battle’ who feasted on the corpses of the dead. The English formed up in a shield-wall, but were gradually overwhelmed. At the height of the fray, Byrhtnoth was struck in the arm. He broke off the shaft of the spear that had penetrated his armour, but fell to the ground, fatally wounded. At this point a certain Godric, son of Odda, mounted Byrhtnoth’s horse and fled. Thinking that their commander was abandoning them, many of the English followed him, while those who stood firm were cut down to a man.

Byrhtnoth’s body was collected by the monks of Ely Abbey and buried in the minster. The Vikings had decapitated his corpse and carried off the head, so a ball of wax was set in its place in the coffin.¹² Although the ‘Maldon’ poem may well be more literary artifice than accurate reflection of the battle,¹³ Aethelred’s forces clearly suffered a serious setback and the political effects were profound. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that later that year, the Norsemen were paid a tribute of 10,000 pounds, the first time that such a bribe had been paid to them, ‘because of the great terror that they were causing along the coast’.

Predictably, and as would be the pattern for the next two decades, the payment acted as an inducement rather than as the intended deterrent to further Viking raids. In 992, a fleet that had been assembled to head off a new Viking army was defeated, apparently betrayed by Aelfric, Ealdorman of East Anglia.¹⁴ Then, in 994, a dangerous new protagonist joined the renewed Viking assault in Britain. Svein Tjúguskegg (‘Forkbeard’) had replaced his father, Harald Bluetooth, as King of the Danes after a rebellion in 987.¹⁵ Initially preoccupied with asserting his authority over Denmark, in 994 he joined the Norwegian Olaf Tryggvason in an attack on London. Although they were driven off, their subsequent ravaging of the south coast forced Aethelred to allow the Vikings to overwinter in England and to pay them 16,000 pounds of silver to desist from further raiding. One positive result of this truce was that Olaf agreed to accept Christian baptism and to leave England for ever – a stipulation which, perhaps surprisingly, he adhered to, thus splitting up the potentially devastating alliance between Danes and Norwegians. His departure had the useful side-effect, from Aethelred’s point of view, of causing Svein, too, to return to Scandinavia to head off any attempt by Olaf to expand into Denmark.

For the next five years Aethelred enjoyed a respite, until Svein’s defeat of his rival at the Battle of Svold in 1000¹⁶ enabled the Danish king to turn his attention to England again. There had been some Viking raids in the interim, notably those carried out by an army that arrived in 997 and which for the next two years ravaged the south coast until it retired to Normandy in 1000, but these did not pose the same threat as the incursions of the early 990s. Aethelred’s displeasure at Duke Richard II of Normandy harbouring this particular Viking fleet led to negotiations that resulted in the king’s marriage to the duke’s sister Emma, and the expulsion of the Norsemen.¹⁷

It was possibly this force, pushed out of its Norman haven, that attacked Devon and Somerset in 1001 and then overwintered on the Isle of Wight. Terms were finally negotiated with the raiders, who extorted a payment of 24,000 pounds. The price of peace was rising steadily, and all the time the respite that the tributes won was growing ever shorter. Frustrated that his pay-offs to the Danes had not had the desired effect, and fearing that the invaders might soon return and even try to seize land for settlement, Aethelred resolved to take more decisive action. Sometime in the late summer of 1002 he issued an order for the killing of ‘all the Danish men that were in England’. The massacre took place on St Brice’s Day (13 November): John of Wallingford, writing in the thirteenth century, records that ‘They spared neither age nor sex, destroying together with them those women of their own nation who had consented to intermix with the Danes . . . the children were dashed to pieces against posts and stones.’

The St Brice’s Day Massacre has left one of the more macabre legacies of the Viking invasions of Britain. These are the ‘Dane-skins’ kept in various churches of the former Danelaw, which are said to be the flayed skins of victims of the massacre. Most of them are almost certainly animal skins to which the grizzly legend became attached, although there is some suggestion that the skin stretched over the church door at Hadstock Church (near Saffron Walden in Essex) may be the genuine article (though whether of a Dane who perished at Aethelred’s orders is impossible to determine).¹⁸ There was great excitement in 2008 when the bones of thirty-seven adult males (mainly aged between sixteen and twenty-five) dating from the Viking era were found buried in a Neolithic ditch being excavated in the grounds of St John’s College, Oxford. Evidence of charring to the bones suggested that they might be victims of the St Brice’s Day Massacre. It was consistent with the account of a royal charter of 1004 that recorded how the Danes in Oxford, who are said to have sprouted up ‘like cockle among wheat’, took refuge in the Church of St Frideswide, and the local people – unable to gain entry to cut them down – simply burnt the building to the ground. Subsequent analysis, however, has indicated that the victims, although of Scandinavian origin, were very probably warriors who died some decades earlier, possibly executed after being captured.¹⁹ Victims of a massacre they may well have been, but not of that ordered by Aethelred in 1002.

Just like the gafol (the tribute payments to the Vikings), the cold-blooded slaughter of much of England’s Danish population had precisely the opposite effect to the one Aethelred had planned. The very next year Exeter was stormed by a Viking army led by none other than Svein Forkbeard, who is said to have sailed over to wreak revenge for the death of his countrymen.²⁰ He travelled via Normandy, where he made a treaty with Richard, who agreed to take in wounded Danes in exchange for a share of the booty. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle takes a fairly dim view of the quality of opposition to Svein’s invasion, blaming lack of organisation and treachery for their losses (in 1003 Ealdorman Aelfric of East Anglia was again accused of betraying the English cause by feigning sickness at a crucial moment, resulting in a devastating defeat for the English levies at the hands of the Danes²¹).

By 1007 Aelfric had been supplanted as the leading English noble by Eadric Streona, who was appointed Ealdorman of Mercia that year. A figure who looms large in the list of those responsible for the disasters of Aethelred’s reign, Eadric is described as having a dubious past, being complicit in the murder of Ealdorman Aelfhelm of Northumbria in 1006.²² His appointment came just after Aethelred had authorised the payment of the largest tribute yet to the Danes: of 36,000 pounds to a force based on the Isle of Wight that had been laying waste to large areas of Hampshire and Berkshire.

Aethelred managed to take advantage of a brief pause in Danish activity to reorganise the Midlands into shires and to re-form the military levy, so that every 310 hides of territory should contribute a ship to the national defence, and every eight hides a helmet and a shirt of mail.²³ He also had the fortifications of some burhs strengthened (possibly including Wareham, Malmesbury and Wallingford), and the general air of martial renewal was reinforced by the issue of ‘Helmet’ coins, which portrayed Aethelred wearing military headgear in place of the normal royal crown. He was assisted in this programme by Wulfstan, the Archbishop of York since 1002, who, as well as being a vigorous proponent of church reform, assisted the king in the drafting of all his royal law codes.²⁴

In the end, none of Aethelred’s reforms mattered. On 1 August 1009, a huge new Viking army arrived in England, led by the Dane Thorkell the Tall, who is said to have come in revenge for the death of his brother Hemming, leader of an earlier raid that year.²⁵ Aethelred’s initial response was not a tribute payment, not a military strike to cut off the Scandinavians before they could become established, or even a further massacre of Danes. Instead – doubtless under the influence of Wulfstan – he ordered a national outpouring of prayer. The legislation enacted at Bath in the first part of 1009 set out a large-scale programme of fasting, prayers and penance. During the national three-day fast there were to be processions, thirty Masses said by each priest every day, and at monasteries in particular Masses were to be said ‘against the heathen’.

The Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (‘Sermon of the Wolf to the English’), of which Wulfstan was almost certainly the author, contained an evocative condemnation of the Anglo-Saxons for their moral laxity, which had led to God’s judgement on them in the shape of the Scandinavian invaders. In a rhetorical flourish employed by previous Anglo-Saxon writers, such as Bede, the author of the Sermo pointed to the fate of the Britons five centuries before, whose similarly sinful state had caused God to allow their defeat at the very hands of Aethelred’s own ancestors.²⁶

God failed to smile on the Anglo-Saxons for their piety or to smite their Viking tormentors, and at Christmas 1009 Thorkell’s army sacked Oxford and then overwintered in Kent. In May 1010, they encountered the English army under Ealdorman Ulfcytel. In a hard-fought battle the English were driven from the field, having lost a number of nobles. With East Anglia subdued and the way open to the East Midlands, Thorkell was now joined by Olaf Haraldsson, the future King of Norway, and during a joint attack on London they are said to have pulled down London Bridge, an event commemorated in the children’s nursery rhyme ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’.²⁷

By 1011, Thorkell had overrun East Anglia, the Midlands and much of Wessex. As the despairing Aethelred desperately sued for peace, offering the by-now-customary handsome tribute to buy off the invaders, Thorkell’s army besieged Canterbury. The city fell at the end of September, and amongst the clutch of high-value prisoners taken by the Vikings was Aelfeah, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Finally, on Easter Day 1012, an English delegation led by Eadric Streona came to negotiate a peace. The payment he promised was a stupendous 48,000 pounds, the largest amount yet handed over to the Vikings. But it was not enough, as Thorkell’s men demanded a separate payment against the archbishop’s freedom. Aelfeah refused to let this supplementary tribute be raised and, angered at being deprived of an extra slice of money, a group of drunken Vikings began pelting him with ox bones, and then one struck him on the back of the head with an axe. This final blow proved fatal and so, amid the raucous squalor of an over-rowdy Viking feast, England’s leading churchman perished.

Aelfeah’s body was carried to London and soon afterwards he began to be venerated as a martyr. Of more immediate consequence was the defection to Aethelred’s side of Thorkell, long the scourge of the English, together with his complement of forty-five ships. The Anglo-Saxon king may now have felt himself secure, but in July the following year Svein once more set sail for England, this time accompanied by his son Cnut. The fleet was large and magnificently accoutred. The Encomium Emmae Reginae states: ‘On one side lions moulded in gold were to be seen on the ships, on the other birds on the top of the masts indicated by their movements the winds as they blew, or dragons of various kinds poured fire from their nostrils. Here, there were glittering men of solid gold or silver nearly comparable to live ones.’²⁸

On making landfall, Svein made his way rapidly up the Trent to Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. He received the surrender of Northumbria and the Five Boroughs; in short, much of the old Danelaw. There was so little opposition, and the surrender of northern England was so rapid, that it is hard to believe it was not prearranged. Tension between Aethelred and his sons by his first marriage (most notably Prince Aethelstan²⁹), who feared their dispossession by their half-brothers by Emma (Aethelred’s second wife), also weakened the English resolve. Svein’s host moved southwards and before long Oxford and Winchester had submitted to him. Only at London, where Aethelred and Thorkell had based themselves, was there any sign of resistance.

Svein bypassed them and moved off to Bath, where he received the important submission of Aethelmaer, son of the Ealdorman of western Wessex. The Londoners, seeing that they were now virtually alone in clinging to Aethelred’s cause, gave up hope and surrendered. In the meantime, Queen Emma and her children, Alfred and Edward, had fled to the court of her brother Richard in Normandy. Aethelred tarried a while, seeking refuge first with Thorkell’s army, which was stationed at Greenwich, and then on the Isle of Wight, before slipping across the Channel to join his wife a little after Christmas 1013. By then, resistance to the Danes had totally collapsed and Svein was acclaimed King of England. To strengthen his position, he had his son Cnut marry Aelfgifu, the daughter of Ealdorman Aelfhelm of Northumbria, thus cementing a dynastic alliance between the Danish royal family and the Anglo-Saxon nobility.

It looked as if the Danes had finally achieved their centuries-old ambition of conquering England, ironically without much of a fight. All their plans were thrown into disarray, however, by the sudden and unexpected death of Svein Forkbeard on 2 February 1014.³⁰ With Cnut’s position uncertain – he faced opposition from his brother Harald to any claim to the Danish throne – the English nobility performed a volte-face and called for Aethelred’s return.

In penance for his previous misrule, Aethelred was forced to agree to govern ‘more justly than he had before’, and to ‘improve each of those things which they all hated’.³¹ His promise to declare ‘every Danish king outlawed from England for ever’ must have come more easily to Aethelred, but there remained the problem of the Danish fleet, which had declared Cnut as king, and which was still supported by a group of Prince Aethelstan’s partisans. The alliance ranged against him was too strong, however, and Cnut retired to Denmark, pausing briefly at Sandwich to drop off some of his hostages, whose noses and ears he had hacked off.

Aethelred’s second, brief reign was scarcely more tranquil than his first period on the throne. After the necessary business of dealing with those who had supported Cnut, including the murders of Sigeferth and Morcar (the principal nobles who had remained loyal to the Danish cause to the end), Aethelred fell seriously ill in the summer of 1015. Unfortunately, the king’s incapacity coincided with the return of Cnut, who had come off worst in the tussle for the Danish throne with his brother Harald and had opted instead to try for a tilt at the English crown.

The situation was further complicated by the appearance of Edmund Ironside, Aethelred’s second son, with a fresh army and a new force recruited by Eadric Streona. In theory, Edmund (whose nickname derived from his reputation for great bravery) was in open revolt against his father, but Eadric, who might have rallied loyalist sentiment to Aethelred, in the end defected to Cnut, taking with him forty precious ships. Further confusion arose when Aethelred seemed to rally in the autumn, rendering Edmund’s position distinctly uncomfortable. He managed to entice his father to join him in person, but some of Aethelred’s advisers persuaded the ailing king that Edmund was in fact plotting to depose him and so he returned to London.

The complex three-cornered fight for England unwound in 1016, beginning with the death of Aethelred in April. Cnut’s position was already reasonably secure in the Danelaw, and just before the king’s death he had been preparing for an assault on London. While the witangemot, the royal council,³² opted to recognise Edmund as king, the Danish fleet finally reached London in early May and laid siege to it.³³ Cnut is said to have demanded an enormous ransom of 60,000 pounds to allow safe passage for Queen Emma, who was marshalling the defences, and her two sons. Edmund, however, had slipped away to the West Country, where he raised another army and, after skirmishes with Danish forces that Cnut had sent to intercept him, managed to relieve London.

In an effort to regroup, Cnut moved northwards to Essex and Mercia and then struck south again, pushing Edmund back into Kent. At this point Eadric Streona, whose reputation for perfidy seems to have been well earned, decided to defect once again and join Edmund. The combined English forces pursued Cnut, overtaking him somewhere in Essex at ‘a hill which is called Assandun’³⁴ (or Ashingdon). The battle that followed was a disaster for the English – the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that the treacherous Eadric fled from the battlefield and his withdrawal began a rout. The dead included Ealdorman Aelfric of Hampshire, Ulfcytel of East Anglia, Bishop Eadnoth of Dorchester, Abbot Wulfsige of Ramsey and a clutch of other nobles. Edmund, however, survived, but with his chances of seizing undisputed control of the English crown dashed, he was forced into an agreement with Cnut at Alney, which left him in control of little more than Wessex, while his Danish rival was recognised as sovereign in the North, Mercia and East Anglia. This uneasy and highly unstable arrangement cannot have been destined to endure for long without renewed conflict between the unwilling co-rulers. In the event, Edmund never really recovered from wounds he had received at Ashingdon, and on 30 November 1016 he died. After three years of confusion, Cnut was now unrivalled King of England.

The complex political manoeuvrings during the crisis of 1013–16 revealed the weakness of the Anglo-Saxon position, in that decades of failure to face up to the Danish challenge had left the country divided and prone to factionalism amongst the nobility. But it equally demonstrated its underlying strength, as the Danes had only been able to overcome English opposition because of the unusually rapid attrition amongst the Anglo-Saxon royal family (with Aethelstan, Aethelred and Edmund all dying in rapid succession). Even now, Cnut’s position was ambiguous, and it was only in 1017 that he was ‘chosen’ to be king.³⁵ He made few concessions to the native English nobility, setting Scandinavians as earls over East Anglia (Thorkell) and Northumbria (Erik, his brother-in-law). The mercurial Eadric Streona was left in place as Ealdorman of Mercia, but only until Cnut was reasonably sure that he would face no major rebellions. At Christmas 1017 the new king had his untrustworthy ally murdered, putting to a brutal end a career that had seen the Mercian ealdorman support at one time or another almost every one of the various claimants to the English throne.

Cnut further cemented his position by marrying Aethelred’s widow Emma, which provided him with a connection to the royal house of Wessex, as well as handily creating a marriage alliance with the Duchy of Normandy (as Emma was Duke Richard’s sister). It also set aside Cnut’s still very much alive first wife Aelfgifu, by whom he had two sons, Svein and Harald.³⁶ In 1018, he also raised an enormous levy to pay off the warriors whom he had brought over with him from Denmark. The sum, around £82,000 of silver, was the largest tribute ever paid to a Viking army, exceeding, ironically, all those that had been paid out by Aethelred in an effort to stave off their depredations.³⁷

Harald, who had succeeded Svein Forkbeard on the Danish throne, died in late 1018 or early 1019 and Cnut rushed to Denmark with a small force to secure his kingship there. In England he had retained the services of only forty ships, enough to provide security, but not, it turned out, to deter conspiracies, and news of a plot in 1020 brought him rushing back across the North Sea, after which he had Eadwig, another of Aethelred’s sons, put to death.³⁸ The other possible contenders for the throne, the children of Edmund Ironside, were too young to pose a threat. After a spell in Sweden they had in any case ended up in far-off Hungary. Edward and Alfred, Aethelred’s sons by Emma, were also not of an age to be seriously considered as replacements for Cnut, although their presence in Normandy was at a rather less comfortable distance for the pro-Danish faction in England.

Throughout Cnut’s rule the majority of appointments to senior positions remained Scandinavian. Thorkell the Tall, who had played such a pivotal role in the progressive Danish conquest under Svein and Cnut, proved to be a worryingly over-mighty subject. On Thorkell’s recall to Denmark in 1023 he almost destabilised the king’s rule there, forcing a rapid reconciliation and return to England. For the most part, however, Cnut’s rule in England after 1020 was tranquil, supported by a tactical alliance with Archbishop Wulfstan of York, who kept the Church and the remaining Anglo-Saxon nobility onside.

Cnut’s struggle with Olaf Haraldsson of Norway left him preoccupied for much of the 1020s, particularly after Cnut’s defeat at the Battle of Holy River in 1025, and it was only following Olaf’s death at the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030 that he was able to return to England.³⁹ This final period of Cnut’s direct rule in England also saw the emergence of the native Anglo-Saxons, who (together with their families) would dominate the English scene for the next thirty years, beginning with Leofric, who became Ealdorman of Mercia around 1032, and Godwine, whose career began as a local notable in Sussex in the 1030s.⁴⁰

When Cnut died of natural causes in 1035, the Danish kingdom of England was barely twenty years old, but it had only another seven years to live. Cnut’s regular absences in Denmark (as well as a pilgrimage he undertook to Rome in 1027) meant that England was never truly integrated into a larger Scandinavian empire and its institutions (and, in the case of the Church, those running them) remained overwhelmingly English. Cnut’s death triggered yet another succession crisis – his three sons each found themselves in a different part of his empire: Svein, with his mother Aelfgifu, had been sent in 1030 to govern Norway; Harthacnut, his son by Emma, had been established as joint king in Denmark. This left Harold (known as Harefoot), his younger son by Aelfgifu, in England. Harold had not been appointed to an earldom or other senior position, a possible indication that Cnut intended his empire to remain intact under Harthacnut. However, just as Cnut died, Svein was expelled by the Norwegians, who then attacked Denmark, occupying Harthacnut’s attention and preventing him from travelling to England to secure his throne.

Even though Harthacnut had the powerful support of Earl Godwine of Wessex, the countervailing alliance of Queen Emma and Earl Leofric of Mercia – both keen to prevent the Wessex earl from becoming too dominant – had led to a messy compromise under which Harold was recognised as king north of the Thames, while Emma would act as regent in the south, but very much under Godwine’s watchful eye. It all seemed like an unhappy repetition of the short-lived division of England in 1016 (and a reminder that, whatever the subsequent history of England as a united nation, its union was by no means secure in the mid-eleventh century). Then, in 1036, Emma decided to make a bid for power over the whole kingdom by bringing over her two sons by Aethelred, who were still languishing in exile in Normandy.

Edward and Alfred’s position had been significantly weakened by the death of their protector, Duke Robert of Normandy, in July 1035 while returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This left them nominally in the care of the new ruler, William, who was just seven or eight years old, and whose supporters had more than enough on their hands securing the young duke’s succession. Edward and Alfred nonetheless left the sanctuary of Normandy, heartened no doubt by their backing of their mother by Cnut’s old housecarls, who were stationed at Winchester. Edward sailed to Southampton, but, finding little support there, withdrew to France. Alfred, however, landed further east and was soon arrested by Earl Godwine’s men as he tried to make his way to Emma’s court. Many of his companions already having been killed, Alfred’s eyes were put out and he died of his wounds at Ely in February 1037.

Godwine now threw his weight wholeheartedly behind Harold’s kingship and Emma fled to the court of Count Baldwin V of Flanders, a far safer haven than Normandy during the turbulent minority of her great-nephew William. Harold’s remaining three years on the throne were relatively uneventful.⁴¹ A storm loomed in 1040, when Harthacnut finally made peace with the Norwegians and gathered a large fleet of some 60 ships to press his claim on the English throne. A civil war was averted only by Harold’s death at Oxford on 18 March, after which the royal council hastened to send envoys to offer the crown to his brother, who had made his way to see Emma in Bruges and was gathering his invasion force there.

Harthacnut did not endear himself to his new English subjects. Virtually his first move was to levy another large Danegeld of £21,000 to pay off half his fleet, whose crews had been denied the rewards they might have received if the expected campaign had gone ahead. He also had his brother’s corpse disinterred and abused, and allowed Earl Eadwulf of Bamburgh to be killed while under safe conduct; and, not coincidentally, he then granted Northumbria to Eadwulf’s killer, the Dane Siward. He did, however, permit the safe return of Edward from Normandy. Harthacnut’s motive in this is unclear; he may have felt his main native English rival for the kingship was best kept under close supervision, while many other English notables, including particularly Earl Godwine, were associated with Harold’s rule and so could not be trusted as collaborators.

Whether Danish king and English prince might have worked harmoniously together in the longer term was never tested, as Harthacnut died suddenly in June 1042 after attending a wedding feast at Lambeth. He was just twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and is said to have been taken ill as ‘he was standing at his drink, and he suddenly fell to the earth with fearful convulsions, and those who were near caught him, and he spoke no words afterwards. He died on 8 June.’⁴²

Harthacnut was the last of Cnut’s surviving children, both Svein and Harold having already died. The only plausible claimant for the English throne, therefore, was Edward, although at thirty-seven, unmarried and with no children, there must already have been worries about whether he would provide a suitable heir. In the absence of a Danish candidate, the nobility rallied around Edward, and he was crowned at Winchester on 3 April 1043. Very likely as part of the settlement between them, Edward married Godwine’s daughter, Edith, in January 1045, thereby cementing the Wessex earl’s position as, in effect, a member of the ruling family. The one remaining political uncertainty was the rights that King Magnus of Norway claimed over the English throne, on the grounds that Harthacnut – as the Norwegian king maintained – had made an agreement that whichever of the two sovereigns died first, his lands should be inherited by the survivor. At the time of the treaty Harold (and not Harthacnut) was King of England, so the agreement, even if it did exist, was of very dubious validity. In any case, Magnus chose not to send a fleet to England to press the point. His claim, however, would cast a very long shadow and was used by Harald Hardrada, his successor as King of Norway, as the legal pretext for his invasion of England in 1066.⁴³

Relatively little is known of Svein Forkbeard’s domestic rule in Denmark – his preoccupation for much of his reign with adventures in England and his struggle to maintain Danish influence in Norway and prevent Olaf Tryggvason securing control there saw to that (although the Encomium Emmae Reginae does praise him for his peaceful rule over the country). The reign of his son Cnut, who inherited the throne in 1018 on the death of his brother Harold, had more of an impact in Denmark, but once more the Danish king’s constant involvement with England left him comparatively little time to attend to his Scandinavian patrimony. It was not until 1028 that he secured control of Norway (which he had temporarily lost to Olaf Haraldsson) and so re-created the empire of his father. Elsewhere his influence began to extend into Scotland, where in 1031 he received the submission of King Malcolm II and two other rulers, one of whom may have been Macbeth, the mormaer (steward of Moray), who was later to be immortalised by one of Shakespeare’s plays. In the Irish Sea, Cnut’s fleet may have taken part in 1030 in a raid against North Wales in support of a Dublin Irish outpost there.⁴⁴ Both developments suggest that, with his core possessions in Scandinavia and England relatively secure, Cnut was looking to expand his control beyond them.

Positive effects of Cnut’s North Sea empire on Denmark included his introduction of a new coinage, based on Anglo-Saxon models, and his importation of churchmen from England as part of a bid to assert the independence of the Danish Church from the see of Hamburg-Bremen in Germany. This caused relations with the German archbishops to descend to such a low point that in 1022 Archbishop Unwan captured Bishop Gerbrand of Roskilde while he was returning from England and forced him to swear an oath of obedience to Hamburg-Bremen.

In 1027 Cnut went on a pilgrimage to Rome. It was probably motivated more out of a desire to show that he was an established Christian monarch, and to be viewed as the equal of his counterparts elsewhere in Europe, than from any sense of piety. Its effects in Scandinavia were almost disastrous, as the kings of Norway and Sweden (Olaf Haraldsson and Anund Jakob) joined together to unseat him in alliance with his own brother-in-law Ulf, who was acting as regent for Cnut’s son, Harthacnut, in Denmark. On his return from the pilgrimage Cnut put down Ulf’s rebellion comparatively easily, to the extent that he was able to visit Rome again in 1028, but a large part of the rest of his reign was taken up in asserting his claims over Norway. His death in 1035 left Harthacnut in control of Denmark. Cnut had probably originally intended him to be King of England too, but attacks by Magnus of Norway meant that he was forced to remain in Denmark and acquiesce in his half-brother Harold Harefoot’s seizure of the English throne.

Denmark experienced another period of Norwegian rule from Harthacnut’s death in 1042, when the Danes chose Magnus of Norway to be their king, until 1047, when Harthacnut’s cousin, Svein Estrithsson,⁴⁵ was recognised as ruler. The continued threat from Norway under Harald Hardrada stifled any Danish ambitions either for expansion or for consolidation at home, and the treaty in 1064 between the two countries that brought an end to half a century of intermittent warfare must have come as a relief to both kings.

Norway, which had lain in the shadow of the Danish kings for most of the mid- to late tenth century, finally emerged as a fully independent kingdom again under Olaf Tryggvason. His father was Tryggvi Olafsson, the ruler of the eastern part of Viken, whom Harald Bluetooth of Denmark had deposed in the 970s.⁴⁶ Harald was born around 963 after his mother Astrid escaped her husband’s killing by Harald Greycloak, one of the sons of Eirik Bloodaxe. Suggestions that he was descended from Harald Finehair through an alleged liaison with a Sami girl called Snaefrith are, however, almost certainly a later gloss to lend legitimacy to a claim to the Norwegian throne that otherwise looked distinctly shaky.⁴⁷ Mother and baby hid in Sweden for three years, as Harald Greycloak’s agents desperately sought to locate and dispose of a serious threat to his rule. Eventually Astrid managed to flee, first to Sweden and then towards Russia and the court of Prince Vladimir of Novgorod, with whom her brother Sigurd had taken service. However, on the way there the pair were attacked by Estonian Vikings and taken into slavery. They were separated, and although Astrid was freed by a wealthy Norwegian, Olaf remained in servitude. Then, six years later, Sigurd happened upon the boy at a Novgorod slave market and asked what family the fine-looking youth was from. The response made him realise that he had found his long-lost nephew, and Sigurd bought him from the farmer in whose service he had been and took him back to the royal court, where Olaf was brought up.

At the age of eighteen Olaf embarked on the conventional career of a Viking, joining in raiding expeditions, including one on Bornholm (to the east of Denmark), and making a short-lived marriage to Geir, the daughter of King Boleslav of Wendland (into whose lands he had been storm-driven). He then turned his attention to the British Isles, and was probably present at the Battle of Maldon in 991, before joining forces with Svein Forkbeard. The failure of their joint army’s attack on London in 994 led to Olaf’s acceptance of baptism under the patronage of Aethelred II of Wessex, although the payment to him of a geld of some 22,000 pounds of silver⁴⁸ was an additional incentive. As part of the treaty, Olaf agreed not to attack English interests and to leave English vessels abroad in peace if he came across them. With a seasoned army of Vikings, a handy treasure chest to provide for their pay and the newly acquired status of a Christian prince, Olaf decided on a venture that was not denied to him by the terms of his agreement with Aethelred – an attempt to gain the throne of Norway. He had probably heard that the position of Jarl Håkon of Hladir (who had ruled Norway under Danish overlordship from the 970s, and after 985 more or less independently) was weakening.⁴⁹

It was in northern Norway, in the Trøndelag, that the newcomer received greatest initial support – it is possible that the independent-minded men of the region chafed at Håkon’s rule and had contacted Olaf while he was still in England. Olaf landed at Moster, to the south of the Hardangerfjord, and made his way rapidly northwards. As it happened, he arrived back in Norway at just the time that Håkon was killed, his throat apparently cut by his own thrall, Kark.⁵⁰ The possibility that the Danes might take the opportunity of the ensuing confusion to throttle Norwegian independence must have worried the Trøndelagers, and so Olaf was proclaimed king at the thing in Trondheim. With this support, he then set about securing the rest of Norway.

He began by gaining the adherence of the chiefs of Vestland, who acknowledged him as their king at the Gula thing in 996 in exchange for a fair degree of autonomy under the local chieftain Erling Skjalgsson, although they did also agree to accept baptism.⁵¹ The exact progress of Olaf’s subjugation of Norway, and indeed of his propagation of Christianity, is bedevilled by serious disagreements in the sources. Adam of Bremen, who reviled the Norwegian king because of his attempts to establish an autonomous Norwegian Church, alleged that ‘Some relate that Olaf had been a Christian, some that he had forsaken Christianity; all, however, affirm that he was skilled in divination, was an observer of the lots and had placed all his hope in the prognostication of birds . . . In fact, as they say he was also given to the practice of the magic art, and supported as his household companions all the magicians with whom that land was overrun and, deceived by their error, perished.’⁵² The Icelandic sources, in contrast, have a touch of the hagiographical about them, as they laud Olaf’s sanctity and his success in Christianising Norway.

Although suggestions that Olaf Tryggvason destroyed pagan temples in the Trøndelag may be transferred from his successor Olaf Haraldsson, he did base himself there, founding a small town near the mouth of the River Nid as his royal capital. He wished, no doubt, to avoid Hladir, the old base of the jarls. This new town became known as Nidaros and later Trondheim. His presence did not make the hearts of the men of the Trøndelag grow any fonder, while his comparative neglect of the inland areas of Norway meant that by 1000 his grip on the whole country was beginning to slacken. His enemies had also begun to make common cause, and Svein Forkbeard, Olof Skötkonung of Sweden and Eirik, the son of Håkon, the former Jarl of Hladir, all of whom had much to gain by Olaf’s downfall, began to muster armies against him. Olaf’s most significant ally was his brother-in-law Erling, whose network of connections stretched as far as the Trøndelag, through the marriage of his sister to Sigurd of Trondenes, from one of the most influential north Norwegian families.

In 1000, disaster struck while Olaf was on his way to Wendland. He had opened hostilities with Denmark, claiming that Svein Forkbeard owed him Zealand as the dowry for his sister Tyra.⁵³ Having made little headway, he was making his way to the Wendish court to forge an alliance that would create a threat to the east of Denmark and so reduce the growing pressure on Norway from Svein. On his way there, Olaf fell into an ambush at Svold off Rügen (near the modern town of Stralsund in Pomerania), where Svein and Olof Skötkonung were lying in wait for him.

The sight of Olaf Tryggvason’s flagship, the enormous Long Serpent,⁵⁴ must have given his enemies pause for thought, although initially they were even overawed by a rather smaller vessel that belonged to Erling Skjalgsson. The battle, once joined, was hard fought, but gradually Olaf’s ships were overcome and, at the very end, rather than face capture by the Danish king, he jumped in full armour into the waves. Although Snorri Sturluson recounts that many men believed he had been rescued by a passing Wendish ship, and some even swore that they had encountered him in the Holy Land, he concludes that ‘King Olaf never again returned to his kingdom in Norway’.

Despite his rapid elevation to the status of a national saint, Olaf’s rule over Norway had lasted barely five years. He had, however, succeeded in consolidating Norwegian independence from Denmark, and his English connections and his cultivation of ecclesiastical links with England (as opposed to Germany) had also helped boost the standing of the Norwegian Church.

After Olaf’s death Norway was partitioned, with the Swedes receiving coastal territories in Gautland, Svein Forkbeard taking direct possession of the Viken, while the rest was divided between Jarl Eirik Håkonarson of Hladir – who, as Svein Forkbeard’s son-in-law, was in effect subject to Danish interests – and his brother, Jarl Svein. Meanwhile in the west, Olaf Tryggvason’s former faithful follower Erling still held sway until Jarl Eirik dispossessed him of much of it, though never quite pushing Erling from his control of Rogaland.

The man who rescued Norway from both Danish overlordship and its fragmented state was another Olaf, whose support for Christianity marks the real start of the religion’s dominance in the country, and whose untimely death gave him the status of the first Norwegian royal saint. His date of birth is conventionally given as 995, although the coincidence with the death of Olaf Tryggvason (whose spiritual heir the second Olaf in many ways was) is probably indicative of a selective moulding of the facts to shape the desired narrative. Ari Thorgilsson paints him in the íslendingabók as a great-great-great-grandson of Harald Finehair, but again this is almost certainly an attempt to lend his claim to the throne a legitimacy that he did not in truth possess.⁵⁵ Snorri Sturluson portrays him more prosaically as the son of Harald Grenske, a minor king who ruled a territory around Viken.⁵⁶ His mother Åsta remarried after Grenske’s death, and to her second husband she bore another son, Harald Hardrada, a half-brother who was to be the source of much trouble for Olaf Haraldsson.

Little is known for sure of Olaf’s youth, although Snorri Sturluson in his St Olav’s Saga ascribes to him an almost conventional early career as a Viking in the Baltic, taking part in raids on the coasts of Denmark, Sweden, Gotland and Estland and returning to spend the winters in Novgorod.⁵⁷ At just fifteen years old, if the traditional date of his birth is to be believed, he took service with Thorkel the Tall in the army that ravaged the south of England in 1009–11 (and which brutally murdered Archbishop Aelfeah). When Thorkel allied with Aethelred in 1012, Olaf took his share of the £48,000 with which the King of Wessex had bought off the Viking army. He took his followers southwards, where he plundered in Spain, before travelling to Normandy in 1013. There he was well received by Duke Richard II and agreed to convert to Christianity. Olaf also met the exiled English King Aethelred II and accompanied him on his return to England in February 1014 after Svein Forkbeard’s death. Although he initially retook large parts of England for Aethelred,⁵⁸ the return of Cnut the following year and the seeming eclipse of the cause of the House of Wessex made Olaf reconsider his position, particularly as a number of leading Norwegians (including Jarl Eirik Håkonarson) had accompanied the Danish king to England, leading to something of a power vacuum in Norway.⁵⁹

Olaf set sail for Norway with two merchant ships and just over 250 men. It was a small force for the enterprise that he proposed, but he expected to gain support in his ancestral territories around the Oslofjord. Equally, though, Olaf must have feared the opposition of Erling Skjalgsson, his one remaining plausible rival still actually present in Norway. He landed at Selja in Sogn on the west coast, and defeated a small force led by Håkon Eiriksson, who had inherited his father’s lands – a setback for Olaf’s opponents that Snorri puts down to the young jarl being only fifteen at the time. Olaf moved rapidly north and captured Nidaros, but was then driven out by local forces loyal to Jarl Svein.

Olaf escaped the clutches of the men of Trøndelag, however, and in March 1016 the fleets of the two sides met at Nesjar on the Oslofjord. Svein had with him all the leading chieftains of the Trøndelag. Olaf’s men may have been better equipped, and Jarl Svein’s quarrels with his subordinates led to a disjointed leadership, which ended with his flight and that of most of his followers. With the prospect of the return to Norway of Jarl Eirik, Svein’s brother, following Cnut’s final victory in England in 1016, Olaf now hurried to subdue all his remaining Norwegian rivals, and in particular Erling Skjalgsson, whom he had the Gula thing deprive of most of his privileges.

Internal opposition to Olaf came to a head through the meddling of Cnut of Denmark, who resented the alliance he had made with Olof Skötkonung of Sweden in 1019, and who was also displeased that Olaf had refused to accept Danish overlordship. In spring 1022, Olaf summoned Erling Skjalgsson to Tønsberg to answer for his attempts to reassert himself in the Gula thing. Trouble between the two culminated in rebellion in Vestland in 1024, after which Erling’s successful opposition to the execution of one of the rebels inflicted a damaging blow to Olaf’s prestige.

By spring 1024 the rift between Olaf and his most powerful Norwegian vassal had become irreparable, and Erling sought the assistance of Cnut, who was more than happy to aid anyone ill disposed to Olaf’s growing power. Erling’s two sons, Aslak and Skjalg, visited England and appear to have secured promises of assistance from Cnut. Finally in summer 1026, provoked by an alliance between Olaf and Anund Jakob of Sweden (who had succeeded Olof Skötkonung in 1022), Cnut set sail in person for Norway with a large fleet. The Swedes and Norwegians had been separately harrying the coastal areas of Zealand and Skåne, but, faced with the superior force that Cnut had assembled, they retreated northwards to the mouth of the Helga-á (Holy River) in Skåne. The details of the battle are obscure – Jarl Ulf, who had been Cnut’s regent in Denmark, is reported as fighting on both sides – but what is clear is that Cnut came out victorious; Anund Jakob headed swiftly back to Sweden, while Cnut had the (possibly) treacherous Ulf murdered in Roskilde. Olaf’s supporters in Norway began to melt away. A verse by Olaf’s skald Sighvat Thorðarson laments that Cnut’s wealth meant that he was able to buy the support of neutrals in Norway: ‘the king’s enemies are walking about with open purses; men offer the heavy metal for the priceless head of the king’.⁶⁰

Olaf was not a man to give up easily and he rallied support, evading capture until Cnut had returned to Denmark, whereupon he re-emerged to confront his arch-rival Erling. On 21 December 1028, their two fleets clashed at Sola. Apart from his flagship, which could carry 240 men, Erling had mostly just fishing vessels and other small ships under his command, and he was quickly surrounded and captured. Olaf promised him quarter, but in a hot-blooded scene one of his followers, Aslak Fitjaskalle, split the captive chieftain’s skull in two with his axe. Olaf, horrified, turned to Aslak and remarked that with that blow he had struck Norway out of his hand.

His words turned out to be prophetic, for in the wake of Erling’s murder, Olaf’s support dissolved, as the people of Rogaland, Hordaland and Agder rallied to the dead man’s sons, and many of his former supporters lapsed into, at best, guarded neutrality. Olaf soon realised that his cause was hopeless, and he fled via Sweden to the court of Yaroslav at Kiev.⁶¹ It was not long, however, before Olaf received the good news that Jarl Håkon Eiriksson had drowned in a shipwreck off the Pentland Firth in Scotland. Meanwhile, Anund Jakob was chafing at Cnut’s new position of dominance and so was quite happy to contribute 400 Swedish Vikings to a renewed attempt by Olaf on the throne.

Olaf had also raised a force of 240 warriors in Russia, and in the summer he made his way into northern Norway, where he met up with his young half-brother Harald. Olaf’s return was met with near-universal opposition in the Trøndelag, and a large force of local farmers joined forces with men from Hålogoland (even further to the north). Levies were raised from Rogaland, Hordaland and Sogn to the south to produce a force, which, at more than 14,000 men, was said to be the largest Norway had ever seen. Olaf, in contrast, could muster barely a quarter of that number.

In the resulting battle at Stiklestad on 29 July (or 31 August⁶²) 1030, the outcome was almost inevitable: Olaf’s army was crushed and he was killed. The one notable survivor was Harald Hardrada, who escaped the battlefield and ultimately made his way to Russia. The victorious Cnut reneged on previous promises to give Norway its liberty and handed it over to the rule of his son, Svein, and his English mistress Aelfgifu.

Apart from his struggle against Erling, which sapped much of his energy, and the near-constant attempts by Cnut either to reduce him to the status of a subordinate king or to unseat him, Olaf is best known for bringing Christianity to Norway. It is likely that the new religion had already become embedded to some extent in western Norway (with the encouragement, albeit brief, of Olaf Tryggvason and Håkon the Good). The process was also promoted by the proximity of western Norway to England; many men from these regions would have come into contact with Christianity during their service in the various Scandinavian armies that attacked the country during the late tenth century, while Erling Skjalgsson had been a Christian since at least the mid-990s.

Olaf, however, took a more direct approach to the spread of Christianity, in line with his general attempt to reduce the power of local chieftains and centralise power on the royal court. Adam of Bremen describes how Olaf had women who clung to paganism burnt as witches, while at a thing held at Moster in 1024 he declared that Christianity would henceforth be the religion of all Norwegians. In these actions he was encouraged by an English bishop named Grimkel – a sign of the Norwegian king’s desire to remain separate from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Germany. A section of the Gulathing Laws (dating from about 1250) stipulated that the Christian feast days and fast days were to be observed, as they had been laid down by ‘St Olav and Grimkel and the Moster Thing’, an indication that Christian Church and Christian monarchs were now working hand in hand – the one to extirpate the remnants of paganism, the other to use Christianity to provide divine sanction for the increasing power of the monarchy – and of both parties’ wish to reduce the role of traditional chieftains in the secular and sacred spheres.

Olaf’s posthumous reputation for sanctity grew under the guidance of Bishop Grimkel, who had his body translated from the battlefield to lie in the church of St Clement at Nidaros (which the king had had built some twenty years before). Here, a series of miracles were ascribed to the ‘saintly’ Olaf, no doubt much to the chagrin of Svein and his mother, whose rule was becoming increasingly unpopular. A new set of exactions, which included a ban on anyone leaving Norway without royal permission, and the ordaining of a Christmas ‘gift’ to the court from every householder (including a quantity of malt, a large ham and butter), fuelled the sentiment that Norway was now being ruled by foreigners. When Grimkel opened the royal grave a few years later, he found Olaf’s body uncorrupted – thought in medieval times to be a sure sign of the sanctity of the deceased. By 1040, just ten years after Stiklestad, the Olaf cult seems to have been well established; a work by the former royal skald Sighvat speaks of a blind man being cured when water with which the king’s body had been washed shortly after the battle splashed up against his face, while by the mid-eleventh century there were churches dedicated to St Olaf throughout the northern world, in Iceland, Scotland and England, including one at York.

Relying on the posthumous (and saintly) support of his father, and on the thoroughgoing unpopularity of Svein’s regency, Olaf’s son Magnus (whom he had left behind in Kiev when he set out on his ultimately fatal return to Norway in 1030) returned to claim the Norwegian crown in 1035. Cnut had recently died and, deprived of the powerful protection of his father, Svein fled to Denmark and the court of his brother, Harthacnut. The latter was not so willing to give up Danish claims on Norway, and the period after 1035 saw a tussle between Magnus and Harthacnut, with fleets mustered on both sides, until a treaty between the two made at the Göta River in 1040 brought an end to hostilities and agreed that should either die without a male heir, the survivor would inherit both kingdoms. The pact came into operation in 1042 when Harthacnut died with no son, and Magnus was duly elected King of Denmark. He neutralised opposition from Svein Estrithsson (the son of the Jarl Ulf whom Cnut had had murdered after the Battle of the Holy River) by appointing him regent of Denmark and then, when Svein proved too independent-minded, driving him out of the country altogether.

By 1045, secure in both Norway and Denmark, and with a massive victory against the Wends in 1043 under his belt, Magnus was thought likely to turn his attention to England (which ought, by the terms of his agreement with Harthacnut, to have fallen to him as well). In 1045, the English king, Edward the Confessor, stationed a fleet off the Kent coast at Sandwich, waiting for a Danish-Norwegian fleet to arrive. Yet Magnus sent no expedition, and before long would be so preoccupied with a new rivalry with his uncle, Harald Hardrada, that England gained itself a twenty-one-year-long reprieve.

The emergence of a unified kingdom in Sweden lagged far behind the consolidation of centralised monarchies in its Scandinavian neighbours. The historical division between the kingdom of the Svear (based around Lake Mälaren) and the Götar (to the east and west of Lake Vättern) was deep-rooted and the dense forests which separated them impeded the rise of political units that incorporated both regions. The earliest king of whom we have any literary mention, who ruled around Birka when St Anskar’s mission arrived there in the 820s, seems to have had a fairly circumscribed domain and depended, moreover, on the support of a local assembly for the exercise of his power.

Even Olof Skötkonung (c. 980–1022), the first king to be associated with both the Svear and the Götar, while his authority was strong in a core area around Sigtuna in Svealand, probably exercised at best only partial control in Götaland. Olof’s position as the first genuinely Christian king in Sweden (he was baptised at Husaby about 1008), and his foundation of Sweden’s first mint at Sigtuna in 975, makes for a deceptively simple comparison with his contemporaries Harald Bluetooth of Denmark and Olaf Haraldsson of Norway, whose achievements in unifying their respective countries are far better attested.

For at least two centuries Sweden, however, remained more a federation of provinces than a unified kingdom. Olof was succeeded by his sons, Anund Jakob (1022–c.50) and Emund (c.1050–60), but the Swedish kingdom was overshadowed by its increasingly assertive neighbour to the south, and in the 1020s Cnut of Denmark actually controlled Sigtuna for a time. Around 1060 a new dynasty emerged to rule Sweden, this time more closely associated with the kingdom of the Götar. Stenkil, who married one of Emund’s daughters to enhance his claim to the throne, was chosen as king by his fellow aristocrats and had his power-base in Västergötland. But neither his rule nor that of the four sons who followed him was particularly secure, with several of the brothers exercising co-regencies, while the country was riven by pagan uprisings in 1084 and 1120. In the first, King Inge was deposed when he refused to perform time-hallowed pagan rituals (although he had his revenge when he seized back his throne around 1090 and had the main cult centre at Uppsala destroyed).

By the 1120s, the Svear kingship had become fragmented and it seemed that Sweden’s political destiny might lie in Balkanisation rather than unification. The next decade, however, brought resumed consolidation of royal power, following the accession of Sverker I, an aristocrat from Östergötland. He oversaw the arrival of the Cistercians in Sweden, who established a monastery at Alvastra in 1142, a sign of the growing influence of the Church, which in turn helped enhance royal authority. Even so, Sweden did not enjoy a stable monarchy, as Sverker was murdered in 1156 by Erik Jedvardsson, who led a rival aristocratic faction based in Västergötland and then seized the crown for himself.

The partisans of the two families contested the Swedish crown for the next century, until the death in 1250 of the last of Erik’s descendants, Erik ‘the Lisping and Limping’. Despite the often turbulent alternation of power between the Erikssons and the Sverkerssons, the administration of the kingdom became more established and the extent of royal authority gradually increased. Erik Jedvardsson is associated with the establishment of the law-code of Uppland (although this was a provincial, not a national, code and was finally codified only in the thirteenth century). He also conducted a raid into Finland in the 1150s (described by his supporters as a ‘crusade’ against the pagan Finns), which was a sign of the growing confidence and ability of the Swedish kings to project their power outside their traditional heartland. Erik was assassinated in Uppsala in 1160, probably on the orders of his immediate successor, Magnus Henrikson, whose one-year reign was the only break in the dynastic stranglehold of the feuding Erikssons and Sverkerssons.

Soon after his death a cult grew up around the site of Erik’s murder, and he came to be regarded as Sweden’s first royal saint. Although this cult was unofficial at first, it was promoted by his family and supported by the Church at Uppsala, particularly after its selection as the site of a new archbishopric in 1164. By 1256 the veneration of Erik had received papal sanction, when a Bull of Alexander IV granted indulgences to pilgrims who visited his grave.

Erik’s son, Knut, who became king in 1167, enjoyed a comparatively tranquil reign after a revolt in 1170, dying naturally in 1195. He was the first ruler to be regarded outside Sweden as ruler of both the Svear and the Götar, being addressed as such by Pope Alexander III in 1171–2.⁶³ Knut also made Sweden’s first treaty with a foreign power (Duke Heinrich of Saxony) and reintroduced a Swedish-minted coinage after a 150-year break following the time of Olof Skötkonung.⁶⁴ Sweden had experienced no dramatic wars of unification and no one ruler who could be singled out as its unifier. Even so, in 1200 – although the country had a long way to go to the establishment of a strong central administration, permanent taxation and a national law-code, all developments that took place under the Folkung dynasty (which came to power in 1250) – its political unity, at least, was reasonably assured.

Norway and Sweden were not the only Scandinavian countries to yield a royal saint in the eleventh century. Denmark had St Knud of Odense, and even little Orkney was not to be outdone: the chronic divisions between the earls from the late tenth century would ultimately lead to the islands having their very own royal patron. The death of Earl Sigurd in 891⁶⁵ had been followed by a period of rule by Einar, the illegitimate son of Earl Rognvald of Møre, who rejoiced in the unusual nickname Torf-Einar (‘Turf Einar’), possibly because his mother was said to have been a slave and so associated with menial tasks such as the cutting of turf.⁶⁶ The new Orkney earl’s principal difficulty was in his dealings with Harald Finehair of Norway. His father, Rögnvald, was killed by Halfdan Háleggr (‘Long Legs’), the Norwegian king’s son, who promptly fled to Orkney and expelled Einar. The deposed earl bided his time briefly in Scotland and then returned to defeat Halfdan, whereupon (according to the saga) he performed the rite of the blood-eagle on him by carving his ribs out and then pulling his lungs through his back, to create a bloody simulacrum of an eagle.⁶⁷

Understandably furious, Harald made a second expedition to the Orkneys, but, in view of the mitigating fact that Halfdan had burnt Torf-Einar’s father to death, he contented himself with imposing a fine of sixty gold marks. Einar, meanwhile, made the best of a bad situation by insisting that the odal rights of the leading men of the islands became his property, in exchange for paying the portion of this enormous fine, which the more modest landowners could not afford. These preciously guarded rights had allowed the holder of odal land to pass it on, but not to alienate it outside the land without permission. Little more is known of Torf-Einar than this single incident and that he ‘ruled over Orkney for many years’. His death was followed by the first of many divisions of the earldom into three parts, which would ultimately sap its strength and undermine its claim to primacy amongst the Viking lordships of the Northern Isles. Two of the three heirs, Arnkell and Erlend, joined forces (or were forced to join) with Eirik Bloodaxe in his campaign to secure the kingship of York and were killed in the ambush at Stainmore that resulted in Bloodaxe’s own death in 954. The remaining son of Torf-Einar, Thorfinn Hausakljúfr (‘Skull-splitter’), was not initially able to assert his rule over Orkney, for Eirik’s widow Gunnhild and their sons based themselves there for a while before returning to Norway.

After Thorfinn’s death in 976, Orkney was torn apart in a series of dynastic killings that saw Ragnhild, the daughter of Eirik Bloodaxe and the wife of Thorfinn’s son Arfinn, implicated in the assassination of three successive earls (two of them her husbands) and in fratricidal murders which included that by Earl Ljot of his brother Skuli, who was conspiring with the Scots. A semblance of stability was finally restored in 980 with the accession of Earl Sigurd whose rule lasted until 1014. His reign, together with that of his son Thorfinn (1014–65), saw the peak of Orkney’s power, when its influence reached as far as the Isle of Man and Ireland. Sigurd succeeded in retaining a toehold in northern Scotland in Caithness, after a battle early in this reign where he secured the support of the Orkneymen by promising to return to them the odal rights that his ancestor Torf-Einar had extorted from them; it was the first battle in which Earl Sigurd unfurled his famous raven flag, a banner under which his men would fight many engagements. In 987 and 988 he invaded the Isle of Man, defeating King Godfrey and returning with a huge amount of treasure (and the rights to collect tribute), which enabled the Orkney earl to fund raiding expeditions for the rest of his reign. It is possible that the Burray Hoard, consisting of a large number of silver neck-rings, represents part of Earl Sigurd’s treasure. Even this, however, does not match the Skaill Hoard, the largest ever discovered in Orkney, found in 1858 by a schoolboy named David Linklater, who was chasing a rabbit into its hole. Its components weigh 18 pounds, and it dates probably from the period 950–70, some decades before Sigurd’s rule.

In 995, Sigurd met his match when he encountered Olaf Tryggvason on his way back to Norway. Having become a Christian the previous year, Olaf was in a fierily evangelical mood when he met Sigurd at Osmundwall on the island of Hoy, where they had both by chance put in. The Norwegian prince threatened Sigurd with death and the ravaging of the entire Orkneys if he did not accept the new religion. Faced with a clearly superior force, Sigurd quickly agreed to abandon the ways of his ancestors and was baptised. The Orkneyinga Saga implies that the whole of Orkney followed suit, but it is probable that the conversion was much more gradual, with the patronage of the earls accelerating rather than completing the process.⁶⁸

Sigurd met his death at Clontarf in 1014, as part of the grand coalition that King Sihtric of Dublin had summoned to contain the growing power of the Irish high king Brian Boruma.⁶⁹ He had been initially sceptical about joining this and it took the promise of lands in Ireland and the hand of Sihtric’s mother, Gormflaith, to persuade him to participate. The force that he brought, containing men from the Orkneys, Shetland and the Hebrides, is indicative of the reach of the Orkney earl. It availed him little, for the enchantment of his raven banner, which was supposed to guarantee victory to its bearer, failed him and huge numbers of Orkneymen fell, Sigurd among them.

Orkney was divided once more, this time between Sigurd’s three grown-up sons, Sumarlidi, Einar Wry-mouth and Brusi. A younger son, Thorfinn, was left in the care of his grandfather, King Malcolm of Scotland, and it was only after the death of Sumarlidi that the young man gained possession of one-third of Orkney. A quarrel, however, broke out between Einar, Brusi and Thorfinn (and his protector Thorkell Fosterer) over Caithness, which Thorfinn held, and which he argued did not count as part of the Orkneys for the purpose of the division into thirds. After a feast held in 1020 at Thorkell’s hall at Hlaupandanes (Skaill, Deerness), which was supposed to lead to a reconciliation, the Fosterer murdered Einar, whereupon Brusi claimed that he should inherit his murdered brother’s third, while Thorfinn maintained that the surviving brothers should split the earldom equally. Both earls appealed to Olaf Haraldsson of Norway, once again binding Orkney closer to the Norwegian sphere of influence, as Olaf’s final decision was that the disputed third was forfeit to the crown of Norway, although it was then entrusted back to Brusi as regent.

Only in 1029 did Thorfinn succeed in gaining control of the contested third and anything like the power that would justify his later nickname of ‘The Mighty’. Even so, it is probably not a coincidence that he was able to do so at just the time that Olaf was exiled from Norway and then soon afterwards killed at the Battle of Stiklestad. Thorfinn’s royal capital was on the Brough of Birsay, a small island whose relative difficulty of access by a tidal causeway provided suitable security at a time when attacks by raiders (or even relatives) was a constant possibility. It had previously been a Pictish settlement (the remains of a well still mark the principal survival from that period), and its reuse as a Viking royal centre is one indication of continuity between the two cultures. The outlines of the foundations of the Viking buildings can be seen on the island even today, together with the ruins of the church that may have been the ‘Christchurch’ – the first cathedral on Orkney – possibly built during the reign of Earl Thorfinn (although its square tower and general Romanesque appearance may suggest a date a little later, in the early twelfth century). There is a degree of uncertainty regarding its identity, however, and there is an alternative view that the present church on the larger neighbouring island of Birsay may in fact represent the first church.⁷⁰

Brusi’s son, Rögnvald, had been left in Norway as a hostage against his father’s good behaviour as Orkney earl. He fought on Olaf Haraldsson’s side at Stiklestad (where he is said to have helped the young Harald Hardrada escape from the battlefield). He assisted in Magnus the Good’s return to Norway in 1035, and the grateful new Norwegian king bestowed on him both his father Brusi’s portion of the Orkney earldom as well as the royal third. Thorfinn was preoccupied with campaigning in the Hebrides and Ireland and was forced into a grudging acceptance of this diminution of his power. The unsatisfactory compromise came apart when a new force destabilised the equilibrium, with the arrival in 1046 of Kalf Arnasson, who was said to have killed Olaf Tryggvason on the battlefield of Stiklestad and whose niece, Ingebjorg, was Thorfinn’s wife. Kalf came with a powerful host, which Thorfinn used to defeat Rögnvald Brusason at the Battle of Rauðabjorg and drive him out of the Orkneys into exile in Norway. Rögnvald did not stay away long, however, and, although he only had a single ship and its crew, he slipped back to Orkney, caught Thorfinn unawares and almost killed him by setting light to the house in which he was staying.

Things were never settled simply amongst the Orkney earls. Thorfinn broke out of the burning house and managed to reach Caithness in a rowing boat. Soon afterwards he repaid the favour by descending on Papa Stronsay, where Rögnvald and his men were collecting malt for the Yuletide ale. Thorfinn’s men set fire to his house and, though Rögnvald initially escaped disguised as a priest, his hiding place was betrayed by the barking of his pet dog and he was butchered.

Thorfinn ruled Orkney for the next twenty years, enjoying more tranquil relations with Harald Hardrada after he ascended to the throne of Norway in 1047 than he ever had with Magnus. In 1048, the Orkney earl even emulated Cnut the Great’s pilgrimage to Rome by making his own visit to the Eternal City, where he was absolved of his sins by Pope Leo IX. Just after his death in 1065, Orkney became entangled once more with Norwegian ambitions, as Harald Hardrada’s fleet put in there on the way to his doomed bid to seize the English crown. The new joint earls, Paul and Erlend, were persuaded to join the expedition and were fortunate to be among the very few magnates who survived the Battle of Stamford Bridge, in which Harold of Wessex crushed the Scandinavian coalition arrayed against him.⁷¹

Although Paul and Erlend managed to rule the Orkneys in relative harmony for the next thirty years, the rivalry between their sons and grandson would bedevil the earldom for the next four generations. Paul’s son Håkon and Erlend’s son Magnus got on so badly that, in a bid to avoid bloodshed, Paul persuaded Håkon to leave Orkney and go to Norway. During his trip there in 1093, Håkon visited a seer and asked for a prediction of his future. The soothsayer, after much equivocation, reluctantly foretold that Håkon would commit a terrible crime that he could never atone for, but that he would eventually rule over the whole of Orkney.

Håkon next visited Norway, where he made the mistake of encouraging King Magnus Barelegs to raid the Northern Islands, hoping that the Norwegian king would take the Hebrides and leave the Orkneys for him to rule as sole earl. Magnus, however, was more ambitious and informed Håkon that, if he undertook such a voyage, he would take all the isles for himself.⁷² He was true to his word and, during his wide-ranging expedition in 1098–9, which encompassed the Hebrides and south Wales, Magnus captured both Paul and Erlend and shipped them back to Norway, where they died the next year.

Magnus Erlendsson was also taken prisoner by King Magnus, and offended the Norwegian king’s Viking sensibilities by refusing to take part in a battle on Anglesey, instead choosing to chant psalms while the din of battle echoed around him. Finally, however, he managed to escape his captor and made his way to England. By 1105, Magnus’s cousin, Håkon, had succeeded to the Orkney earldom, which had been briefly ruled directly from Norway by Magnus Barelegs’s son, Sigurd. The next year Magnus Erlendsson, who had been appointed Earl of Caithness by King Edgar of Scotland, returned to Orkney to claim what he regarded as his rightful share of the earldom. After Magnus received confirmation of his title from King Eystein of Norway, the two cousins settled down into the type of uneasy cohabitation that had become almost customary (and most often disastrous) amongst the Orkney earls.

Eventually, in 1114 Earl Magnus was forced out and spent twelve months in exile at the court of King Henry I of England. When he returned the next year with five shiploads of armed men he caught Earl Håkon, who was in Caithness, totally by surprise.⁷³ Matters were heading towards serious violence when the two rival earls met at a thing sometime before Palm Sunday in 1115. They were finally persuaded to suspend hostilities and to agree to meet again at Easter the following year on the small island of Egilsay.

The resulting encounter was one of the most dramatic recorded in the sagas. Each earl had agreed to bring just two ships, as a token of their peaceful intent. Magnus arrived first. As he came in to land, a huge wave swamped his ship. It was taken as a bad omen and when evening drew in, Magnus sighted Håkon’s flotilla approaching the island, composed not of a pair of vessels, but of eight warships. Magnus knew at once that he had been betrayed, but there was little he could do. His men begged him to hide, but he refused and spent the night in the small church on the island, praying for strength to face whatever the next day might bring.

At daybreak, Håkon and his men came ashore. As they approached, Magnus told his retainers not to risk their lives by defending him in the face of hopeless odds. Håkon’s followers soon violated the sanctuary of the church and dragged their master’s rival out to face execution. At first Magnus sought to bargain for his life, suggesting that he would leave Orkney and go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land; when this was refused, he offered to accept imprisonment in Scotland; and finally, when this too was rebuffed, he pleaded, saying that he was prepared to undergo blinding or maiming and be imprisoned for the rest of his life. Håkon was inclined to accept this final proposition, but his chief followers refused, saying that if he did not kill Magnus, they would kill Håkon instead.

Magnus ordered his standard-bearer Ofeig to do the deed, but he declined and the role of executioner fell to Lifolf, Håkon’s cook. The poor man was totally unaccustomed to killing, began to tremble violently and sob. Magnus reassured him and advised him ‘Stand thou before me, and hew on my head a great wound, for it is not seemly to behead chiefs like thieves. Take good heart, poor wretch, for I have prayed to God for thee, that He be merciful unto thee.’⁷⁴

The place where Magnus’s head fell to the ground, which had been rocky and barren before, was transformed, according to tradition, into a green and fertile field. A church now stands there, an abandoned shell, with a large part of its great round tower fallen. The walls of the nave are complete to the second floor, but inside all is bare, with the still emptiness containing not the merest hint of the violent murder that took place on the spot. This was not, however, the final resting place of Magnus’s body, for Håkon, in a fit of penitence, permitted it to be carried back to Birsay and buried there. Almost predictably, whispers of miracles associated with the dead earl began to circulate.⁷⁵ Håkon died in 1123, having made a pilgrimage to Rome and been absolved of his crime, and his son, Paul the Silent, and Bishop William (who seems to have been appointed around 1102 by Magnus Barelegs of Norway) tried to suppress the growing cult of Earl Magnus. William’s opposition collapsed when he was struck blind while praying in the Christchurch, and his sight was only restored by appealing for mercy at the tomb of Magnus. William then had Magnus’s bones exhumed and put to a test by fire. When the knuckle bone failed to burn and even changed shape to appear in the form of a cross, William was finally convinced of the murdered earl’s sanctity.

In the meantime Magnus had appeared in a vision to a farmer from Westray called Gunni, insisting that Earl Paul translate his relics to a new shrine in Kirkwall on the mainland. At length Gunni travelled to Birsay with an account of his dream, and the relics were duly moved to the church of St Olaf in Kirkwall. The church in which they finally came to rest, the present cathedral, was commissioned by Earl Rögnvald in 1136⁷⁶ to hold the relics of the saint (who also happened to be his uncle). Towering above Kirkwall, its stunning bright and red stone form is one of the finest pieces of northern Romanesque architecture and a strikingly large monument for such a modestly sized place. It is nonetheless indicative of the importance of Orkney in the Viking world, and particularly of the self-image of the Orkney earls, even in the twelfth century, as important players.

Although Magnus, and in particular his bones, had been the main motivation behind the building of the new Kirkwall Cathedral, and they were duly enshrined about the ‘high altar’, over time they were completely forgotten. In 1848, while work was being performed on one of the pillars near the original site of the altar close to the north arcade of the choir, a cache of bones was discovered in a box. Some thought these were the bones of Magnus himself, while others argued that they represented those of St Rögnvald (the founder of the cathedral having himself been canonised). Then, in 1919, during a major programme of restoration of the cathedral, the clerk of works noticed some loose stonework on the south side of the choir. On investigation he found a cavity, with a small oak box lying inside. The contents of this turned out to be another set of bones, of a man of around 5 foot 7 inches in height, about twenty-five to thirty-five years old, of light build and – most significantly – with a gash on the rear of the skull, of a type that might have been caused by an axe blow (the wound was clean-cut and not caused by crushing).⁷⁷ It is all so consistent with the Orkneyinga Saga story of Magnus’s death that it is almost certain these are the bones of the saint himself, translated to their last hiding place at some point in the later Middle Ages.

Having been examined, the bones of St Magnus Erlendsson were replaced in a new lead-lined casket and reinterred in the niche above the southern choir, the spot being marked by a discreet red cross in the pillar below. For a man who preferred his psalms to pillaging, it is a most appropriate resting place.