3

The Viking Challenge

As is the case for even momentous events during Æthelred’s reign, the sources for the battle that took place near the town of Maldon on 11 (or perhaps 10) August 991 are problematic and details about what actually occurred are uncertain.1 The entry in the CDE version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is laconic:

Here Ipswich was raided, and very soon after that Ealdorman Byrhtnoth was killed at Maldon, and in that year it was decided tribute [gafol] be paid to the Danish men because of the great terror which they wrought along the sea coast. The first payment was ten thousand pounds. Archbishop Sigeric first advised this policy.²

The A version of the Chronicle, which is independent of CDE, adds that the fleet consisted of ninety-three ships, first landed at Folkestone in Kent, and was led by one ‘Unlaf’, presumably Olaf Tryggvason, the future King of Norway, who three years later would enter into a peace treaty with King Æthelred. This would be valuable information if reliable. Unfortunately, manuscript A misdates the battle to 993, and, to add to the confusion, the entry continues with events that according to CDE occurred in 994. CDE also records an unsuccessful attack on London in 994 by a fleet of ninety-four ships commanded by Olaf and Swein, the latter probably the Danish king, Swein Forkbeard.3 There is some reason for believing that Swein Forkbeard was among the viking leaders at Maldon, and that Olaf, if present, was not in command.⁴

From reading the Chronicle one might get the impression that this was a single, unitary naval force. It was not. All viking fleets that were to ravage England for the next twenty-five years – even the invasion forces of King Swein and Cnut – were composite forces, made up of individual companies (termed liths), recruited and commanded by Scandinavian nobles, united by the common goal of acquiring wealth.⁵ The crews of these ‘Danish’ raiding armies were recruited from across the Scandinavian world and beyond.⁶ ‘Viking’ is sometimes mistakenly used as a synonym for ‘Scandinavian’, which is why it is usually capitalized. On Scandinavian runestones and in skaldic poetry of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, the term ‘viking’ in its masculine form (víkingr) connoted a person and in its feminine form (víking) the activity in which a ‘viking’ participated – an overseas expedition, primarily military in nature, to acquire wealth.⁷ Unsurprisingly, ‘viking’ was a pejorative term in the writings of those whom they targeted. Archbishop Wulfstan in his ‘Sermon of the Wolf’ expressed particular contempt for English slaves who gained their freedom by joining viking crews. The Latin word most often used by ninth- and tenth-century English and Frankish writers to gloss ‘viking’ was pirata. Yet even ‘pirate’ is misleading. Vikings were, to be sure, seamen, another term often applied to them. But their targets were not vulnerable merchant ships but towns and monasteries. Ships carried vikings to their destinations. Once they arrived, they made base, secured their ships and, seizing horses, rode inland in search of plunder. The Chronicler consistently uses the Old English word here for viking forces, derived from the verb hergian, ‘to harry’.

The Battle of Maldon is best remembered today because of the eponymous Old English poem it inspired that celebrates the tragic heroism of Ealdorman Byrhtnoth and his household retainers. The poem is literature, however, not history. As such it provides a window on the mentality and values of its audience. Loyalty is lauded, betrayal and failure to fulfil one’s duty condemned. Byrhtnoth is presented as the ideal military leader, one who not only positions his men for battle, and rouses them with a battlefield oration, but who, despite his advanced age – and the historical ealdorman must have been at least in his early sixties8 – stands and fights bravely. In short, the poet presents Maldon as a sort of English Thermopylae, a military defeat but a moral victory.

According to the poem, the battle occurred along the banks of the River Blackwater, near the borough of Maldon, probably at a causeway and tidal ford over the Blackwater estuary leading to Northey Island, where the vikings had landed. Whether moved by excessive pride (ofermod), as the poet claimed, or not, Byrhtnoth would have had a compelling practical reason for acceding to the vikings’ request to allow them to cross the causeway.⁹ The ealdorman’s defensive position at the beginning of the battle may have been strong, but the lack of a fleet limited his strategic options.10 Byrhtnoth could contain the vikings on their tidal island, but he could not force them to engage on his terms or prevent them from evacuating by ship. The viking fleet had already pillaged the town of Ipswich. Byrhtnoth’s scouts presumably warned him about the imminent attack on Maldon, and he arrived on the scene in time to prevent the vikings from sacking the town and pillaging the surrounding countryside (where he himself appears to have held land). But to end the threat of further raids, he needed to engage and defeat the viking band, or at least inflict severe enough damage to force their withdrawal from England. In short, Byrhtnoth’s strategy had to be one of annihilation. By deploying his troops on the western bank of the Blackwater, the ealdorman had stalemated rather than checkmated the enemy; only by sacrificing his impregnable position could he bring the viking raiders to battle. He had a reasonable expectation of victory. There is no indication in the sources that the English were at a numerical disadvantage. The only previous battle against viking raiders in living memory had occurred three years earlier at Watchet, and that had resulted in a victory.

Byrhtferth gives an account of the Battle of Maldon in his Life of St Oswald that is long on rhetoric and short on details. For both the Maldon poet and Byrhtferth, the significance of the battle was less its outcome than the death of Byrhtnoth. ‘When the aforesaid leader was killed,’ Byrhtferth writes, ‘ealdormen and thegns, men and women, everyone of either sex, were deeply moved.’¹¹ Here Byrhtferth probably does not exaggerate. Based on his position in the witness lists, Byrhtnoth ranked second only to Æthelwine among Æthelred’s ealdormen at the time of his death. By all accounts, he was an able administrator and a judicious royal counsellor, as well as a patron of monastic reform. Byrhtnoth had been also one of the few remaining links between Æthelred and his father Edgar’s court. The manner of his death was what was most shocking. No ealdorman had fallen in battle in living memory. No English army had suffered defeat on the battlefield in four decades.12 The true historical significance of Maldon is that the battle dramatically exposed England’s military vulnerability.

When the vikings returned in 980 to begin a new age of raiding and invasion, they found a peaceful and wealthy England ripe for pillaging. It was certainly a well-administered, or at least highly administered, kingdom, in which the central government had in place mechanisms for the maintenance of internal order and the raising of revenues. But one should not mistake bureaucratic efficiency and ideological sophistication for military strength. The military system that King Alfred had created to defend Wessex and that his son, daughter and grandsons used to conquer the Danelaw had deteriorated by the time Æthelred ascended the throne. The civil defence system that Æthelred inherited relied on royal armies (termed fyrds in the sources) raised by ad hoc levies of landowners and their retainers. They were summoned by royal command in the case of national efforts, and by ealdormen in defence of localities. Military service, whether on land or sea, was treated as a tax on land, with individual landowners owing and responsible for a quota of soldiers based, roughly, on the value of their property. Anglo-Saxon armies were organized by shire and hundred, and were not only assembled but also led by royal reeves and ealdormen. As in The Battle of Maldon, the professional core of the army consisted of the household troops of the king, ealdormen and great magnates. Maintenance of the warships of King Edgar’s mighty fleet was left to local authorities, and by 991 many were no longer in serviceable condition. None of England’s many towns were defended by permanent military garrisons; even those with walls were little more than places of refuge for the surrounding population. This was a military designed for peacetime, and an indicator of the country’s remarkable security and stability. At least in this sense, Æthelred and his advisers were unready to meet the new viking threat.

Ealdorman Byrhtnoth’s defeat at Maldon in 991 convinced Æthelred and his counsellors of the gravity of the situation and the wisdom of purchasing peace. The Chronicler blames the policy on Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury, and, with the benefit of hindsight, is clearly critical of the decision. He knew that this was to be but the first of many such payments, which would become increasingly heavy as the invading armies grew larger and hungrier. The £10,000 offered to the raiders in 991, however, was probably the only way to stop them from ravaging at will.

Payment of tribute was one traditional method of dealing with vikings. It had been practised by both Carolingian and English kings in the ninth century, including Alfred the Great. The problem was that truces thus purchased were temporary. The Chronicler gives the impression that the viking fleet, termed consistently the here (raiding army), continued to operate in English waters for the next four years. The £10,000, however, bought time for the English to prepare militarily. The following year, Æthelred, on the advice of his counsellors, ordered ‘that those ships that were worth anything’ – an indication of the condition of Edgar’s once formidable fleet – should be assembled in London. Rather than taking command of the fleet himself, King Æthelred entrusted it to Ealdorman Ælfric of Hampshire, Earl Thored of York, Bishop Ælfstan of Rochester and Bishop Æscwig of Dorchester, and ordered them to attempt to trap the here at sea or in the estuary.13

They failed. Indeed, the campaign was a complete fiasco. The Chronicler blames this on treachery, which was to be a leitmotif in his narrative. According to him, Ealdorman Ælfric, ‘one of those in whom the king had most trust’, sent advance warning to the enemy fleet and, on the night before the battle was to take place, ‘scurried away from the army, to his own disgrace’.¹⁴ When the English fleet rowed out to engage the enemy, they discovered that the viking fleet had sailed off, leaving behind only one beached ship. The ships from East Anglia and London pursued the raiders but suffered defeat when they intercepted the viking fleet. Adding to the shame, the vikings captured the ealdorman’s own ship, along with its stored weapons and equipment. Ealdorman Ælfric, surprisingly, retained his office, which might indicate that the ‘treachery’ was not as blatant as the Chronicler makes it out to be. The disorder and confusion may have been due simply to inexperience. Given the generally peaceful conditions of Edgar’s reign, this was probably the first time that any of the four co-captains had been in command of either a land or naval force. Ælfric remained the Ealdorman of Hampshire, but the debacle may have lowered him in the king’s esteem. Two years later, Æthelred ordered the ealdorman’s son Ælfgar to be blinded. We are not told why.15 Earl Thored disappears from the witness lists.

This was the first time, and was not to be the last, that King Æthelred delegated command of a national army or fleet with disastrous results. Given the size of the kingdom, it made military sense that ealdormen should bear the responsibility of defending the shires under their authority, and be authorized to act autonomously. That was a primary duty of the office, although for several decades prior to Æthelred’s ascension probably only ealdormen on the Welsh and Scottish frontiers would have been called upon to do so. The return of the vikings changed matters. It is probably not coincidental that Ealdorman Æthelweard’s Latin rendering of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle emphasizes far more than its vernacular source the military role played by ealdormen in King Alfred’s defence of Wessex against the first wave of viking invaders.¹⁶ In the 980s, local royal officials, probably mostly town- or shire-reeves, responded to small-scale raiding. Because of the size of the viking fleet, Ealdorman Byrhtnoth led the Essex levy, probably augmented with forces raised from the south-east Midland counties that belonged to his ealdormanry, in defence of the town of Maldon and its surrounding areas. The viking threat was still at this point seen as a local matter to be dealt with by regional officers of the crown.

The English fleet assembled in the wake of the Battle of Maldon in 991, however, was a national force. Based on the actions of his predecessors, Æthelred, then a young man in his early-to-mid twenties, would have been expected to command the fleet in person. Instead he delegated the responsibility. We are not told why, but Æthelred was to follow this policy throughout his reign. Only three times did he lead an army on campaign. In 1000 he commanded a combined land and sea force in a ravaging expedition directed against Cumberland and the Isle of Man. Nine years later, Æthelred was at the head of an army that stood between Thorkell the Tall’s viking army and its ships, but on the advice of Ealdorman Eadric Streona thought it best not to engage. Upon his return from exile in Normandy in 1014, Æthelred conducted his third and final campaign, a ravaging expedition to Lindsey (what is now northern Lincolnshire) to punish the shire for having given its support to Cnut. On several other occasions, he was with armies or fleets that failed for one reason or another to engage the enemy. Æthelred came from a long line of warrior-kings; he himself was not one. He and his advisers may have been sensitive to appearances, however. If Æthelred did not show himself to be a warrior-king in the field, he could represent himself as one on his coins. The ‘Helmet’ penny, issued about the time of Swein’s return to England in 1003, depicts a helmeted Æthelred in Roman armour, a martial image based upon a fourth-century imperial coin.17 One can only imagine the reactions of Swein and Æthelred’s military commanders on seeing the king decked out like this.

To judge from a letter, ‘Wyrdwriteras’ (Historians), written by the homilist Ælfric, Æthelred’s reluctance to lead armies attracted criticism and perhaps even suspicions of cowardice. In this text, Ælfric responds to those critics by citing historical precedents for Æthelred’s policy of delegating military command. In the writings of Roman historians and the Bible, he observes, there are numerous examples of kings who enjoyed military success by entrusting their armies to generals. Ælfric commends that practice as prudent. The life of a king, he asserts, is too important to risk in battle, and royal responsibilities too great for a king to be preoccupied with warfare.18 Even if sanctioned by scripture, Ælfric’s argument was a radical reconceptualization of the king’s role in war. It flew in the face of what was expected of a monarch. Everyone, including Æthelred, acknowledged that the presence or absence of a king on campaign mattered. Æthelred’s own laws make this clear. The penalty for deserting an army led by the king was either death or the confiscation of the offender’s property. In contrast, a deserter of an army led by anyone else faced a fine of just 120 shillings.¹⁹

One should not underestimate the symbolic and emotional weight placed on the king’s person. Political allegiance in the tenth century was a species of personal loyalty, with kingship regarded as the highest form of lordship.²⁰ Although the king is not present in body in the poem The Battle of Maldon, he is in spirit, as the poet describes Byrhtnoth variously as ‘Æthelred’s thegn’ (line 151) and ‘Æthelred’s earl’ (line 203). The earl dies defending the ‘kingdom of Æthelred, my lord’s people and his country’ (lines 52–4).21 The itineration of the royal court among the king’s estates and the various locales in which the witan met brought landowners directly into the king’s presence, reinforcing the pledges of loyalty they had given in their local hundreds.²²

Loyalty to the person of the king was the glue that unified an English kingdom so recently forged from separate peoples. The ætheling Edmund would discover this at the very end of his father’s reign in 1016, when he attempted to assemble on his own a national army to oppose Cnut. The army dissolved when its leaders discovered that Æthelred was not in the camp. According to John of Worcester (d. c.1140), in the absence of the king ‘the Mercians would not engage with the West Saxons and Danes’.²³ Nor should one ignore the practical military value of a leader, such as Byrhtnoth at Maldon (or, for that matter, the aged Beowulf in the eponymous epic poem), demonstrating and modelling the prowess and courage he expected from his followers. Morale and discipline were essential ingredients for the success of a shield wall, and the presence of one’s lord fighting in the front ranks at the risk of his own life increased the likelihood that his men would stand and fight. As one of the sayings in the Durham Proverbs puts it: ‘The entire army is whatever its leader is.’²⁴ And if a commander proved irresolute, it was expected that his troops would be as well. The maxim quoted by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s entry for 1003 – ‘When the commander weakens, the whole army is greatly hindered’²⁵ – is at least as old as the eighth-century scholar Alcuin, who gives a variation on it in his letter to Eanbald, Archbishop of York: ‘If he who bears the standard flees, what does the army do? … If the leader is fearful, how shall the soldier be saved?’26

The Chronicler might have responded to Ælfric that the generals whom he cited were not only successful but served their kings loyally, whereas Æthelred’s were neither, and Ælfric would have agreed. The Chronicler explicitly and Ælfric implicitly criticize Æthelred for showing poor judgement in his choice of advisers and generals. The Chronicler’s account of the viking wars is a rather monotonous litany of treachery and betrayal. He attributes the military failures of the English in both 992 and 993 to the treachery or cowardice of the leaders of the English forces. In 992 the cause had been the desertion of Ealdorman Ælfric. The following year, when a large army was raised against the vikings in the north, the English again lost because their leaders, Godwine, Fræna and Frithugist, ‘set the example of flight’.²⁷ Ealdorman Ælfric, we are assured by the Chronicler, betrayed Æthelred’s trust once again in 1003, when, ‘up to his old tricks’, he feigned illness, allowing Swein Forkbeard to sack and burn the town of Wilton and ravage the countryside at will. The poster boy for treachery, Eadric Streona, Ealdorman of Mercia from 1007 to 1017, betrayed both Æthelred and his son King Edmund ‘Ironside’ several times, for which Cnut rewarded him by retaining him as Earl of Mercia. Within a year, however, the Danish king had a change of heart and ordered that Eadric be executed, ‘so that soldiers may learn from this example to be faithful, not faithless, to their kings’.²⁸

For the Chronicler and other Anglo-Saxon authors such as the Maldon poet, cowardice, treachery and failure to do the duty owed a lord were indistinguishable.29 But one must be careful about accepting uncritically the Chronicler’s accusations. Ælfric, whom Æthelred (or his regents) appointed ealdorman in 982, retained his office until his death in 1016 fighting for Æthelred’s son King Edmund Ironside in the Battle of Assandun. Godwine, the son of Ealdorman Ælfheah of Hampshire, reappears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1016 as Ealdorman of Lindsey, while the thegns Fræna of Rockingham and Frithugist, son of Cate, appear in charters as benefactors of Peterborough Abbey. The former, an important landowner in the Danelaw and a member of Æthelred’s court, attested royal charters with some regularity between 994 and 1004.³⁰ It would have been odd that men accused of treachery in 992 and 993 would have continued to hold land and royal offices years later. It is more likely that the Chronicler, looking for a morally satisfying explanation for the English defeat, interpreted the military failures and errors by Æthelred’s commanders as acts of treachery. Some undoubtedly were, or, at least, Æthelred believed them to be, and the men he thought to be traitors were punished by death, blinding or, if the accused was fortunate, exile.

Between 991 and 994, Æthelred and his advisers alternated between paying tribute and at least attempting to fight the viking raiders, who apparently continued to operate in English waters without interruption. By 993 the here was a composite fleet of ninety-four ships under the command of several captains, the most prominent being Olaf Tryggvason, a Norwegian adventurer who claimed to be of royal blood, and Swein Forkbeard, King of Denmark. The two were anything but natural allies. Like so many other viking warlords in the ninth and tenth centuries, Olaf was a would-be king who went a-viking to obtain the wealth and support necessary to realize his ambitions at home. His goal was to take the throne of Norway, which placed him at odds with Swein, as Danish kings had long regarded Norway as a tributary state.31 King Swein’s reasons for conducting viking raids also arose from the political situation in Scandinavia. In 993 Swein’s hold on the Danish throne was probably secure. But the kingdom that he had wrested from his father, Harald Bluetooth, was no longer as dominant a power in Scandinavia as it had once been. Towards the end of Harald’s reign, the rulers of both Norway and Sweden had repudiated his lordship. England offered Swein the wealth and prestige he needed to return them to the status of tributary rulers.

Swein’s and Olaf’s ambitions were in direct conflict. What brought the Danish king and the Norse adventurer together was their common goal of plundering the riches of England, and they had been fabulously successful in this endeavour. This culminated in September 993 with an attack on the largest city in England, London.³² London was also the most well-defended town in England and withstood the first of several sieges it would undergo during the viking wars. The Chronicler, who may have been a Londoner, comments proudly that the vikings wished to set the city on fire but ‘suffered more harm and injury than they ever imagined that any burgesses would do to them’, which he attributes to the mercy of ‘the holy Mother of God’. Olaf and Swein broke off the siege and turned first to ravaging along the coasts of Kent, Sussex and Hampshire, followed by riding inland and ‘wreaking indescribable harm’ as widely as they could. On the advice of Archbishop Sigeric, Ealdorman Ælfric and Ealdorman Æthelweard, King Æthelred offered to pay them £16,000 and provide them with supplies to desist.33 Viking leaders always welcomed the prospect of a negotiated ‘peace’. Not only was it a less risky way to acquire wealth, but, just as importantly, it was the surest means of securing provisions. With winter looming, the prospect of having the English providing food and drink rather than having to forage for them was appealing to the several thousand men who made up the viking here. The Scandinavian fleet took up winter quarters at Southampton while the English officials raised the tribute money and gathered food from throughout the country to feed them.

Seeing an opportunity to divide his enemies, King Æthelred sent Bishop Ælfheah of Winchester and Ealdorman Æthelweard to Southampton to invite Olaf to meet with him at the royal palace of Andover, thirty miles to the north.³⁴ As a sign of good faith, the king sent hostages to the fleet to guarantee Olaf’s safety. The bishop and ealdorman then conducted Olaf to Andover ‘with great honour’.³⁵ Although the Chronicler does not mention them, Olaf was accompanied by two lesser Scandinavian captains, Jostein and Guthmund. Conspicuous by his absence is Swein. Æthelred’s intention went beyond securing a cessation of hostilities. The £16,000 and supplies that he had given to the here wintering at Southampton had done that much. Æthelred’s ultimate goal was to transform this here into a force that could be used to deter and oppose other viking armies. The £22,000 Æthelred paid the three viking leaders was for a general peace (woroldfrið) rather than a mere truce. The treaty Æthelred negotiated with the viking leaders at Andover stipulated that

(1.1). If any hostile fleet harry in England, we are to have the help of all of them; and we must supply them with provisions as long as they are with us.

(1.2). And each of those lands which affords protection to any of those who harry England shall be regarded as an enemy by us and by the whole here.36

As the Danish historian Niels Lund observes, II Æthelred, as it is called, reads more like a contractual agreement of employment for mercenary troops than a peace treaty.³⁷ Those who accepted the peace were to defend England against future raiders and aid Æthelred against foreign rulers who harboured them. Because viking leaders and their crews were to reside among the English, the treaty prohibits anyone from seeking vengeance or compensation from them for ‘the slaughter and all the harrying and all injuries committed before the truce was established’.³⁸ Æthelred endowed some of the fleet’s leaders, most notably a Dane named Pallig, with estates in return for a pledge of loyalty, in an attempt to embed them into existing political and social structures.³⁹ Others were housed as military units in towns.

Æthelred marked out Olaf for special treatment. He sought a more personal relationship with the ambitious viking adventurer, preferably one in which he would be the superior. The instrument he chose was one employed by earlier Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian kings, Christian spiritual kinship. Olaf apparently had been previously baptized. At Andover, Æthelred stood sponsor at his confirmation by Bishop Ælfheah; by doing so, he transformed an enemy into a spiritual son.40 The transaction was consummated by Æthelred, in his role as gift-giving lord, bestowing upon Olaf gifts befitting a king. Olaf, however, did not become Æthelred’s mercenary captain, a role that another viking chieftain, Thorkell the Tall, would play in the last years of his reign. But he did the next best thing. Enriched with English treasure and accompanied by English missionaries, Olaf returned to Norway to seize the kingship in defiance of Swein’s claims over that kingdom.⁴¹ For once the Chronicler approves: ‘And then Olaf promised – as also he performed – that he would never come back to England in hostility.’⁴² Æthelred got more from this than simply the removal of one viking chieftain. As he and his advisers hoped, Olaf’s return to Norway created domestic problems for Swein of Denmark. After a popular uprising had disposed of the de facto ruler of Norway, King Harald Bluetooth’s erstwhile client Earl Håkon Sigurdsson, the Norwegians took Olaf as their king. Swein followed Olaf back to Scandinavia, and formed a coalition against him with his stepson King Olof Skötk0nung of Sweden and Earl Håkon’s son Erik. Five years later, Erik, with Danish and Swedish support, avenged his father by ambushing and killing Olaf as he returned from a campaign in Pomerania in the Battle of Svold.

As Æthelred and his advisers foresaw when they made peace with Olaf, Jostein and Guthmund, it was only a matter of time before other heres would come, lured by the prospect of wealth. In 997 a viking fleet ravaged Wales and the south-western shires of England. Rather than oppose them, some of Æthelred’s new Danish mercenaries succumbed to the temptation of easy loot and returned to their old ways. Over the next two years, this viking fleet raided along the coast of southern England from Cornwall to Kent. The failure of local forces to end the marauding persuaded Æthelred and his advisers of the necessity of a national response. The king ordered that both a land-fyrd and a ship-fyrd be assembled. The Chronicler claims that in the end this achieved nothing ‘except wasting the people’s labour and money, and emboldening of their enemies’.43 The waste of time, labour and money due to incompetence and treachery is a theme that runs throughout the Chronicler’s narrative of the viking wars. But here, at least, one may question the accuracy of his assessment. In the summer of 1000, the viking fleet left England for Normandy without the inducement of tribute.

Æthelred took advantage of the departure of the vikings to launch a land and sea campaign in 1000 against the kingdom of Strathclyde (Cumberland) and the Isle of Man. The sources do not explain why, but it might have been precipitated by a resurgence of Hiberno-Norse viking activity in the Irish Sea following King Brian Boru’s expulsion of the Norse from Dublin in 999, or by the threat of a Scottish invasion. The campaign also announced to neighbouring British kings that Æthelred had not abandoned his father Edgar’s imperial claims to be ‘ruler of the whole of Britain’.⁴⁴ Perhaps that is why Æthelred atypically took personal command of the expedition. The army led by Æthelred harried Strathclyde, and the English fleet, which failed to rendezvous with the land forces as planned, ravaged the Isle of Man. The respite from viking raids was brief. A large viking fleet returned to England the following year, ravaging Hampshire, Devonshire and the Isle of Wight. The Hampshire levies engaged them at Æthelingadene (Dean, Sussex). Although the Danes won the battle, they suffered heavier losses than the English. The casualties of the English numbered eighty-six, which included two high-reeves and two king’s thegns, a figure that puts into perspective what the Chronicler meant by a ‘great slaughter’.45 The vikings continued west to Devon, where they were joined by Pallig, one of Æthelred’s Danish mercenary captains, ‘with those ships he could gather’.⁴⁶ Despite receiving a payment of tribute, the viking army continued to ravage Devonshire. The Devonshire fyrd led by the king’s high-reeve met the vikings at Pinhoe but was put to flight. After pillaging and burning estates in Devonshire, the viking army ravaged the Isle of Wight before making winter camp there.

Unable to dislodge them from their base, Æthelred and his advisers decided to pay tribute. In return for ceasing their ‘evil-doing’, the English agreed to pay the viking army £24,000 and supply them with provisions.⁴⁷ Once again, tribute bought a respite from viking attacks, which Æthelred used to take preventive counter-measures. A standing problem was the aid that vikings had been receiving from Duke Richard II of Normandy in violation of a treaty that Æthelred had made with the duke’s father. A decade earlier, Duke Richard I, himself the descendant of vikings, had allowed Norman ports to be used as staging grounds for piratical raids on England. By 991 tensions between Æthelred and the Norman duke had become serious enough to warrant papal intervention.48 A papal legate brokered a peace treaty between the king and the duke that featured a promise not to give refuge to each other’s enemies. The ‘unshaken peace’ created by this treaty apparently lapsed with the death of Duke Richard I in 996. The surest way to close the ports of Normandy to vikings was to establish a strong personal tie with his son, Duke Richard II. This was done through a marriage alliance. In 1002 Æthelred took the duke’s sister Emma as his wife. (The fate of Æthelred’s shadowy first wife and mother of his first eight children is unknown.) Perhaps in consequence of negotiations between Æthelred and Duke Richard II, Emma was consecrated queen at the time of the marriage.⁴⁹ She was also given the English name Ælfgifu, after her husband’s sainted grandmother. In her second marriage, to Cnut in 1017, after the death of Æthelred, Emma-Ælgifu was to emerge as a more potent political force than even Ælfthryth had been.

There would be no rivalry between these two formidable women. The dowager queen had passed away in either the spring of 1001 or 1000.⁵⁰ In 1002 Æthelred issued a charter ‘for the care of the souls of my father Edgar and my mother Ælfthryth’, confirming the lands of the nunnery that his mother founded at Wherwell, Hampshire, and to which she may have retired in her waning years.⁵¹ To this the king added his mother’s estate at Æthelingadene, the site of the battle of the previous year. In conformity with the Regularis Concordia, he also granted the nunnery the privilege of free elections in consultation with the bishop.⁵² He honoured Wherwell further with an oblation of one of his daughters, who subsequently became its abbess. As Levi Roach notes, the proem to the charter concludes suggestively with a quotation from the Bible: ‘Honor your father and mother that you may be long lived upon the land.’53

Æthelred took advantage of the lull in viking attacks to correct what he now saw as a miscalculation. Not only had the Danish mercenaries failed to defend his lands as they had pledged to do, they had joined with his enemies. Particularly infuriating were the actions of the Danish jarl Pallig. Contrary to all the pledges he had given and despite the estates and gold and silver that Æthelred had bestowed upon him, Pallig deserted the service of Æthelred and reverted to his viking ways. He gathered together as many ships as he could from the Danes in Æthelred’s employ, and met the viking fleet as it arrived in Devon. But instead of fighting the raiders, as he was obliged by the treaty and their oaths, Pallig and his followers joined the vikings in pillaging Devon.⁵⁴ In early November 1002, Æthelred was told of a plot by Danes dwelling in England to kill him and all his counsellors. The king’s response was the so-called ‘Saint Brice’s Day Massacre’, undoubtedly the darkest stain on his posthumous reputation. Æthelred ordered that ‘all the Danish men who were among the English race be killed on Brice’s Day’ (13 November).⁵⁵ That something along these lines was actually carried out is attested by a charter issued by Æthelred two years later to the monastery of St Frideswide in Oxford. The king granted to the monks a new privilege for their lands because the old deeds had been lost when the townspeople burned the church during a massacre of Danes:

To all dwelling in this country it will be well known that, since a decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle [wild wheat] amongst the wheat [Matthew 13:25], were to be destroyed by a most just extermination, and this decree was to be put into effect even as far as death, those Danes who dwelt in the afore-mentioned town, striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ, having broken by force the doors and bolts, and resolved to make a refuge and defence for themselves therein against the people of the town and the suburbs; but when all the people in pursuit strove, forced by necessity, to drive them out, and could not, they set fire to the planks and burnt, as it seems, this church with its ornaments and its books.56

The charter’s allusion to the biblical parable of the cockle among the wheat can be read as justifying not only the royal edict itself but also the extreme manner in which it had been carried out in Oxford, as the parable instructs that the invasive weeds should be gathered together and burned. By likening the Danes to the cockle of the parable, the king signalled his approval of what was an egregious violation of the ‘peace of the church’.⁵⁷ That the townspeople of Oxford had been willing to burn down a church in order to kill their Danish neighbours who had sought – and probably expected – to find sanctuary there is an indication of the intense anger and hatred engendered by more than a decade of viking depredation. The Danes of Oxford were clearly a people apart.

It is difficult to read this charter and not think of modern-day ethnic cleansing. Certainly, that is what Norman and Anglo-Norman historians beginning with William of Jumièges around 1060 believed it to be. Paralleling their account of Queen Ælfthryth, these writers describe in ever more horrendous detail the brutal and pitiless slaying of defenceless women and children.58 But, as with all the sources for this period, the St Frideswide’s charter cannot be taken at face value. Æthelred’s edict could not have been sent to ‘all dwelling in this country’. There were no massacres in the Danelaw or even evidence of tensions between inhabitants of Danish and English descent, if such a distinction even made sense in 1002. Men with Scandinavian names continued to frequent Æthelred’s court. The crucial question is who were the ‘cockle’ in Oxford? In 2008 archaeologists uncovered in the grounds of St John’s College, Oxford, a mass burial containing the skeletons of a minimum of thirty-six males. With the exception of two twelve- or fourteen-year-old boys, these men ranged in age from sixteen to forty-five, with the majority in their twenties. They had all died violent deaths: the skulls of twenty-seven had been broken, and all had been repeatedly stabbed. Some had healed scars from earlier wounds, as might be expected of viking raiders or mercenaries. Significantly, in light of the St Frideswide’s charter, about a third had charred bones. Radiocarbon and isotopic analyses have dated the bones to between 960 and 1025 and identified the men as being of Scandinavian origin. If these were victims of the Saint Brice’s Day Massacre, as seems likely, the killing in Oxford had not been indiscriminate but was targeted against males of military age, mercenaries residing in the town.⁵⁹ The Saint Brice’s Day Massacre is therefore best understood as Æthelred’s solution to the mercenary problem.60

The following year Swein resumed his raiding of England. By the 1060s, stories circulated that had Swein returning to exact vengeance for the massacre. According to both the Norman historian William of Jumièges and his contemporary the German chronicler Adam of Bremen, the Danish magnates demanded that Swein avenge the murders of their friends and kinsmen. The twelfth-century chronicler William of Malmesbury makes Swein’s motivation more personal, explaining that he was avenging the deaths of his sister Gunnhild and her husband Pallig, but his account is chronologically muddled and there is no evidence that Swein even had a sister by that name or that Pallig and his wife were victims of the massacre.⁶¹ It is possible that Swein had heard reports of the killings, but if they were directed against mercenaries in Æthelred’s employment, he might not have been all that upset by the news. It is more likely that his return was a consequence of his having successfully re-established Danish hegemony within Scandinavia.

Over the next two years, Swein raided throughout southern England. The Chronicler, always on the lookout for traitors, incompetents and cowards, blames the burning of Exeter on the town-reeve, a French commoner (ceorl) whom the new Norman queen had appointed. The burning of Wilton, according to the Chronicler, was the fault of Ealdorman Ælfric, who feigned illness to avoid engaging Swein with the shire forces of Hampshire and Wiltshire. More atypically, the Chronicler praises the heroism of Ulfcytel of East Anglia, a king’s thegn who seems to have fulfilled the duties of ealdorman without the title. In 1004 the Danes sacked and burned the town of Norwich, which led Ulfcytel and the witan of East Anglia to attempt to negotiate a peace. After the Danes violated the peace and Ulfcytel’s plan to destroy their ships failed, Ulfcytel raised as large a force as he could on short notice to intercept the Danes as they returned to their ships laden with booty from Thetford. The Chronicler for once approves of the efforts of an English military leader. He excuses the decision of Ulfcytel and his counsellors to pay tribute by saying that the raiders had come so unexpectedly that they had had no time to raise an army. Although the English lost the battle, in which many of the leading men of East Anglia fell, the Chronicler praises the bravery of the outnumbered East Anglians, adding that the Danes themselves admitted that they would never have made it back to the ships if the English had been at full strength and that ‘they had never met with harder hand-play in England than Ulfcytel gave them’.62 One may see in this the influence of a now lost poem much like that of the Battle of Maldon.

Where Ulfcytel’s courage and resolution failed, famine succeeded. In 1005 England suffered a famine ‘such that no one ever remembered one so grim before’. The viking fleet sailed back to Denmark, although the Chronicler bitterly notes that they would soon return.⁶³