2

The Years of Youthful Ignorance

Æthelred was no older than twelve at the time of his coronation. Because of his youth, the new king probably had little say in matters of state. Rather, a de facto regency apparently headed by the queen mother and her two great allies, Ealdorman Ælfhere of Mercia and Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, ruled in his name.1 The return of Ælfthryth to political influence is signalled by the reappearance of her name in positions of honour in the witness lists of charters issued in her son’s name. Unsurprisingly, Bishop Æthelwold and Ealdorman Ælfhere were among the first beneficiaries of the new king’s favour.² What is perhaps most striking is how little the political establishment changed. With few exceptions, those who attested Æthelred’s charters were the same bishops, ealdormen and even royal household men who had served his brother and father. The two archbishops who had supported Edward’s claim to the throne, Dunstan of Canterbury and Oswald of York, remained important presences in the boy-king’s court. Edward’s murder had simply replaced one king with another.

The power of tenth-century English kings was limited not by political theory but by the necessity of ruling through and with the co-operation of lay and ecclesiastical elites. This would have been the case even if Æthelred had been of age and his succession had not been tainted by the murder of his brother. Royal governance centred on the person of the king. The power of a monarch was most directly felt in his physical presence, and one of the great advantages of itinerant kingship was that it allowed local elites to see and interact with the king and his court in their own localities.3 Royal itineraries, however, were determined by the location of the king’s estates and palaces, and those were concentrated in the south. Of the twenty-five meetings of the witan that can be identified from the sources for King Æthelred’s reign, only one was held north of Oxfordshire. In this Æthelred acted no differently from either his predecessors or his successors, including the Danish kings Cnut, Harold I ‘Harefoot’ and Harthacnut, whom one might have expected to have held court at least occasionally in the ‘Danelaw’, the region formerly under Danish rule, comprising East Anglia, the east Midlands and northern England, that was distinguished by Scandinavian-influenced legal customs.⁴ This made the loyalty of the ealdormen and bishops of Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria all the more critical. Although kings appointed ealdormen, their choices, at least at the beginning of their reign, were largely limited to members of the great families. A true ‘new man’ was a rarity. ‘Politics’ took the form of competition among the great families for the power and wealth that came from royal patronage. A ‘peacekeeping king’ such as Edgar ruled in partnership with his ealdormen, bishops, abbots and leading thegns, exercising his power and authority effectively to support the Church, establish peace at home and maintain hegemony over the neighbouring British kingdoms.

In a sense, the child-king was a rex pacificus by proxy. The only major military action in the first years of Æthelred’s reign was a ravaging expedition into Wales conducted by Ealdorman Ælfhere in alliance with one Welsh ruler against another.5 The reappearance of small fleets of viking raiders coinciding with Æthelred’s succession would look significant in retrospect but in the early 980s would have been seen merely as local disturbances of the peace. During the regency, the attacks on monastic property that had roiled the reign of Edward ceased. The trauma of the killing of a consecrated king may have played a role in the restoration of peace and order. From the near silence of the sources, England seems to have been well ruled during Æthelred’s minority. The institutions of government that had developed during the reigns of Edmund, Eadred and especially Edgar functioned smoothly even with a child as king. The Church did particularly well, as the majority of grants made in Æthelred’s name during the first few years of his reign were to monasteries.

The restoration of peace and the enrichment of the Church reflect not only the political influence of Bishop Æthelwold and archbishops Dunstan and Oswald, but that of Queen Ælfthryth as well. Edgar had rewarded his wife’s support of monastic reform by making her the legal advocate for all the realm’s nunneries, a role that she embraced. Belying the posthumous caricature of her as the wicked stepmother, Ælfthryth had consistently been one of the most ardent lay supporters of monastic reform. In this new political landscape, those who had taken advantage of King Edward’s weakness to seize land from the monasteries now had to make their amends. Æthelwold’s hagiographer Wulfstan the Cantor, writing in 996 or soon after, relates how the enemies of Bishop Æthelwold came to Winchester during the rededication of the Old Minster in 980 to make peace with the bishop by bowing their heads to him, echoing the ceremony by which a man commended himself to a lord – that is, became his retainer – kissing his right hand and asking for his blessing.6 One suspects that this type of reconciliation was not uncommon in the first years of Æthelred’s reign. In terms of the monastic reform movement, Æthelred’s minority represented a return to the policies of his father.

This changed in 984. On the first of August that year, Bishop Æthelwold died. Ealdorman Ælfhere had passed away the previous year. The removal of these two strong influences freed Æthelred, now around sixteen years old, to announce his coming of age by taking personal control of the royal government. His declaration of independence apparently extended to his mother, as she disappears from the witness lists of charters between 985 and 993. Others fell from royal favour at this time. At a synodal council held at Cirencester early in 985, Ealdorman Ælfhere’s brother-in-law and successor in Mercia, Ælfric cild (a term denoting that he was a youth of noble birth) was exiled ‘by the unanimous legal counsel and most just judgement of the bishops, ealdormen and all the magnates of the kingdom’.⁷ Although the ostensible reason for his exile was the ‘many and unheard of crimes against God and my royal rule’ that he had committed, including the unjust seizure of hereditary lands, Levi Roach, Æthelred’s most recent biographer, is probably right in suspecting that ‘the ealdorman’s fault lay in opposing the king’s new politics’.8

If some fell, others rose. Freed from the tutelage of his mother, Ealdorman Ælfhere and Bishop Æthelwold, the young king reshaped the court by using his royal prerogative to endow loyal followers with lands and offices. The charters Æthelred issued between 984 and 990 are anomalous in his reign as heavily favouring laymen. Æthelred also reshaped the political landscape by strategic inaction. The great ealdormanry of Mercia lay vacant between the exile of Ælfric cild in 985 and the appointment of Leofwine in 994, perhaps in response to concerns over the power that Ælfhere had exercised. Æthelred broke with tradition by not appointing the sons of ealdormen to their fathers’ offices. This has the marks of a deliberate policy aimed at reducing the regional power of the great families and asserting the king’s control over the institutions of governance.⁹ Æthelred seems to have been more comfortable dealing with his reeves (lower-ranking royal officials), who came from less powerful families. In 995 the Ealdorman of Essex, Leofsige, brought charges against two royal reeves for having allowed Christian burial for a man who had died defending a thief. The ealdorman had the law on his side, but the king found in favour of the reeves.¹⁰

Granting lands to favourites was not unique to Æthelred; the ethos of reciprocity demanded that kings be generous benefactors, and land was the most generous gift a king could bestow. Some of the estates that Æthelred gave to his followers, however, were taken from Benedictine houses in what amounted to a lesser and very localized second ‘anti-monastic reaction’. As we shall see, a penitent Æthelred would look back upon these years as a time of youthful folly during which he had allowed unworthy, greedy advisers to take advantage of his inexperience to lead him astray. The death of Bishop Æthelwold deprived the monks of Abingdon Abbey and the Old Minster, Winchester, of their most important protector. Abingdon was rendered even more vulnerable by the death of its abbot, Osgar, a few months before Æthelwold’s passing. Two new royal favourites, Ealdorman Ælfric of Hampshire and Bishop Wulfgar of Ramsbury, took advantage of the king’s youth to exploit the situation. The bishop and ealdorman, in the words of the charter, persuaded the king to reduce into servitude the ‘liberty’ of Abingdon Abbey. What this entailed was an act of simony: Æthelred had accepted money from Ealdorman Ælfric to secure the abbacy for his brother Eadwine, in defiance of the privilege of free election granted to the abbey by King Eadred and confirmed by King Edgar. Abbot Eadwine and Ealdorman Ælfric used the abbey’s lands to enrich their own followers. The king compounded this offence by taking estates belonging to Abingdon and the Old Minster, Winchester, and granting them by charter to favoured thegns. A notable beneficiary was Ealdorman Ælfric’s son Ælfgar, who not only asked for and received church lands, but even gave land he had taken from Abingdon to his wife.11

King Æthelred’s treatment of the church of Rochester was considerably harsher. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle laconically reports that in 986 King Æthelred ‘laid waste’ (fordyde) the diocese of Rochester.12 The Chronicle does not explain what Bishop Ælfstan had done to so anger the king. The Benedictine monk Sulcard of Westminster, writing circa 1080, attributes it to a property dispute.¹³ According to Sulcard, King Æthelred had acceded to the request of one of his thegns, Æthelsige, for an estate that belonged to the Bishop of Rochester. The bishop, who had not been consulted, forcefully evicted the thegn. The king’s response was to attack the city of Rochester and harry the lands belonging to the bishop, a response not dissimilar to that of his father to his disobedient subjects of Thanet in 969. The effects of the harrying of the diocese can be seen in the disruption of production of coins by Rochester’s mint.¹⁴ Archbishop Dunstan, according to Sulcard, reproved the king for having acted illegally in giving Rochester’s lands to his thegn and in a high-handed manner in ravaging the diocese, but the king just grew angrier.¹⁵ Bishop Ælfstan seems to have prudently withdrawn from the court, as he ceases to attest royal charters in 984 and does not reappear until 988.

But one should not see this period as a broad attack upon Benedictine monastic houses. The despoliation was localized. During these years, Æthelweard, Ealdorman of the ‘Western Provinces’, who was to gain fame for his Latin rendering of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and his son Æthelmær the Stout promoted the Benedictine movement in the shires of Dorset, Somerset and Devon.¹⁶ Ealdorman Byrhtnoth of Essex remained the protector of Ely Abbey in Cambridgeshire, while Ealdorman Æthelwine of East Anglia, son and successor of Æthelstan ‘Half King’, continued his father’s patronage of the monasteries of Glastonbury and Ramsey. It is probably not coincidental that two of the three religious houses targeted were associated with Bishop Æthelwold. As with the ‘anti-monastic reaction’ of Edward the Martyr’s reign, the appropriation of church lands should probably be understood as rooted in opportunism.

Æthelred announced his entry into manhood by choosing a wife. It is not known exactly when Æthelred married, but it was probably around 984/5 and no later than 989, as four of the king’s sons appear in the witness list of a charter issued in 993. Æthelred’s first wife is not named in any contemporary sources. Unlike Queen Ælfthryth, she attests no charters. Anglo-Norman historians give her name as Ælfgifu and report that she was the daughter of ‘Earl Thored’, who was the Ealdorman of York in the 980s.17 This is plausible if not certain. The match would have made political sense as a means of extending the king’s influence over Northumbria, the most remote part of his realm. If ‘Queen Ælfgifu’ has left no political imprint of her own, she was successful in the activity most critical for a royal consort: bearing children. The union produced six sons – Æthelstan, Ecgbert, Edmund, Eadred, Eadwig, Edgar – and two daughters. With the exception of his second son, Æthelred named his sons after his predecessors on the throne in order of their succession, beginning with the then most prestigious ruler of his dynasty. When he married his second wife, the Norman princess Emma, in 1002, he continued the practice by naming the first of his two sons by her Edward. For the second he had to turn back to Alfred. His daughters were named after his paternal grandmother Ælfgifu and his half-sister Eadgyth, both of whom were venerated as saints. These names emphasized dynastic continuity and Æthelred’s royal lineage.

If the early years of Æthelred’s personal rule differed from the reign of his father in his treatment of monasteries, they also differed in another respect. King Edgar’s poetic obituary in the DE version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, probably composed by Archbishop Wulfstan of York in the second half of Æthelred’s reign, remembered the king’s rule as a time when ‘there was no fleet so proud, nor raiding-army so strong, that fetched itself carrion among the English race’.18 Within a year of Æthelred’s coronation, this boast could no longer be made. In the autumn of 980, the borough of Southampton was sacked by a viking fleet of seven ships.¹⁹ The C version of the Chronicle adds that most of the townspeople were killed or taken prisoner. In that same year, the Isle of Thanet and the northern coast of Cheshire were also the targets of raids. This was the beginning of a series of sporadic coastal viking incursions in the 980s. The raiding intensified the following year, as vikings attacked ‘St. Petrock’s holy place’ (presumably Padstow on the northern coast of Cornwall), and ‘great harm was done everywhere along the sea-coast, both in Devon and Cornwall’.²⁰ In 982 three viking ships ravaged Portland in Dorset. The only battle that we hear of occurred in 988, when a local militia apparently consisting of levies from Somerset and Devon engaged a viking force that after pillaging five monasteries in southern Wales sacked Watchet on the north coast of Somerset, an Alfredian fortified town that had become the site of a mint by the late tenth century. The Chronicle reports that a Devonshire thegn named Goda was killed in the battle, and many fell with him, although it fails to say which side won the battle.21 The engagement was of sufficient significance to draw the attention of Byrhtferth at Ramsey, who treated it as a hard-fought victory. Although the English lost many men, including ‘a valiant soldier named Stremwold’, Byrhtferth assured the reader that the Danes lost even more.²²

Viking activity in Britain and France had all but ceased during the four decades preceding the sack of Southampton. That some viking raiding – or at least the threat of raids – continued during these decades, however, is evidenced by the considerable sum of £1,600 that Æthelred’s uncle King Eadred had entrusted in his will (drawn up some time between 951 and 955) to his bishops to be used for relief of famine and ‘to buy off a heathen raiding army, if the need arose’.²³ Both seem to have been real possibilities in the early 950s. More certainly, the Scandinavian chieftains of the Isle of Man, the Orkneys and the Hebrides, as well as adventurers from Ireland, continued the traditional viking way of life by ravaging coastal towns and monasteries in Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the second half of the tenth century.²⁴ The sporadic raiding along the south-western coast of England in the 980s was probably simply an extension of the viking activity that had continued in the Irish Sea.

The attacks on Southampton and Thanet may have originated in Scandinavia. Certainly, the large fleet that descended upon England in 991 did. One can only speculate why viking raids from Norway and Denmark began again in the 980s. Undoubtedly, the promise of wealth was a major factor, as it had been a century earlier. England in the late tenth century was a prosperous country, as Scandinavians would have known from reports by merchants and travellers. Archbishop Wulfstan located the roots of the viking problem of his day in the openness and hospitality of King Edgar’s court. He concluded an otherwise laudatory summary of Edgar’s reign in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle with some rueful criticism: ‘One evil deed, however, he did too much, in that he loved bad, foreign habits, and brought heathen customs too firmly into this land and attracted the foreigner here, and introduced a damaging people into this country.’25 A rich country ruled by a child-king was sufficient enticement to revive the viking spirit. Political developments within Scandinavia contributed as well, with a child-king playing a role there too. Denmark’s first Christian king, Harald ‘Bluetooth’ (r. 958–87), had been preoccupied for most of his reign with state-building, imposing Danish hegemony over the coastal regions of southern Norway and Sweden, and defending his southern border from German invasion.²⁶ The German threat ended with the death of Emperor Otto II in 983 and the accession of his three-year-old son. Meanwhile, unstable political conditions in Norway and Sweden encouraged would-be kings and ambitious jarls (earls) to go a-viking in pursuit of wealth to fund political ambitions at home.

The small-scale raiding of the 980s was a matter of local concern. In 991 a viking fleet of an entirely different order of magnitude landed at Folkestone, Kent.²⁷ After sacking the coastal towns of Sandwich and Ipswich, the vikings turned towards Maldon in Essex. There they were met by local forces from Essex led by the venerable Ealdorman Byrhtnoth. The battle that ensued was to mark a turning point in the reign of Æthelred and in the history of England.