Epilogue and Conclusion

His father’s death and his anointing as king freed Edmund to mount a forceful resistance, one which earned him the byname ‘Ironside’. As Cnut continued to ravage across Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria, King Edmund raised a large army. He pursued Cnut and brought him to battle, inconclusively, at Penselwood in Somerset and then at Sherston in Wiltshire. A third battle at ‘Assandun’ in Essex proved decisive.1 Edmund lost the battle when Ealdorman Eadric Streona, who had ostensibly returned to Edmund’s side, treacherously left the battlefield with his forces.² Edmund, who had probably been wounded in this or one of the previous battles, was forced to sign a treaty with Cnut, conceding to the Dane all of England north of Wessex. When Edmund died about a month later, Cnut became king of all England, bringing to an end the viking wars.

Æthelred’s reign of nearly thirty-eight years was the longest of any Anglo-Saxon ruler. If he had died in AD 1000, history would have remembered him more kindly. His story might have been that of a child-king’s who, after a misspent youth, matured and embraced his father Edgar’s commitment to monastic reform. He ruled a prosperous and well-ordered kingdom. The vikings would have played a subordinate role in this narrative, with the defeat at Maldon perhaps a catalyst for Æthelred’s spiritual awakening and harbinger of things to come in his successor’s reign. But Æthelred lived for sixteen more years, and during that time conditions steadily worsened as England suffered under wave upon wave of destructive viking raids, until one became a campaign of conquest.

However, the military failures and ultimate defeat of the English cannot be blamed on their king’s lack of effort or reluctance to act. Æthelred’s actions were those of an energetic ruler committed to the defence of his kingdom and willing to try whatever might work. But the military challenges were great. England had enjoyed peace for a generation and its military defences were ill-prepared to counter this hydra-headed enemy, as early defeats in the field dramatically revealed. Tribute, if paid in a timely fashion, was a prudent response, but it bought only a respite. Even if that fleet dispersed, it or a new one would appear the following year, encouraged by previous successes. The size of the kingdom of the English made it difficult to defend, and its fusion of Wessex, Mercia and the Danelaw was recent and still incomplete. Even given England’s precocious governmental development, the ability of the king to exert his will grew weaker the further one receded from the kingdom’s West Saxon core. Æthelred had to rely on loyal, competent ealdormen and reeves to rule and to defend the realm, and too many of them proved to be neither. In part this was his fault: he was not the best judge of character, at least when it came to filling secular offices. He was also unable or unwilling to contain familial rivalries among the kingdom’s nobility, a problem that had plagued his predecessor’s reign, and either turned a blind eye towards or condoned extrajudicial violence committed by favourites. This helps explain why so many looked to their self-interest and submitted to Swein and Cnut, despite the oaths of loyalty they had sworn to Æthelred. Most directly, the failure was military. Æthelred might be criticized for his reluctance to lead troops in the field. But his and his advisers’ greatest deficiency was a lack of a coherent strategic vision. One may question the Chronicler’s theme of treachery and disloyalty, yet he was a keen observer and appreciated that the root cause of defeat was not the policies but their faulty implementation and the inconstancy with which they were followed. As a result,

When the enemy was in the east, then the army was in the west; and when they were in the south, then our army was in the north. Then all the counsellors were ordered to the king, and it then had to decide how this country should be defended. But whatever was then decided, it did not stand for even a month. In the end there was no head man who wanted to gather an army, but each fled as best as he could; nor in the end would one shire help another.3