There are at present three good full-length biographies of King Æthelred II with complementary strengths. Ryan Lavelle’s Æthelred II: King of the English 978–1016 (Stroud: Tempus, 2002) is probably the best of the three in dealing with military actions and developments in Scandinavia. Ann Williams, Æthelred the Unready: The Ill-Counselled King (New York and London: Hambledon Continuum, 2003), does a masterful job analysing the charter evidence to reconstruct aristocratic familial and political connections. Levi Roach, Æthelred the Unready (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), is the most ambitious of the three. Roach attempts the daunting task of uncovering something of the inner man from the few primary sources we have from Æthelred’s reign. He contends that Æthelred, sharing the world view of the Benedictine reformers, sincerely believed that the misfortunes that befell his realm were divine punishment for his and his people’s sins, and acted upon those beliefs. Roach also is to be commended for placing Æthelred into a broader European perspective.
All three biographies draw upon the work of Simon Keynes. Keynes is without a doubt the doyen of Æthelredian studies. His book The Diplomas of King Æthelred the Unready, 978–1016 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) and the many articles and book chapters that followed have fundamentally reshaped the historiography of Æthelred’s reign by challenging the traditional view as represented by Sir Frank Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). Keynes has been most influential in his demonstration of the value of charters and coins as historical evidence. His overall assessment of Æthelred and his reign can be found in his entry on the king for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/8915). He reviews the challenges faced by would-be biographers of Æthelred in ‘Re-Reading King Æthelred the Unready’, his contribution to Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow, edited by D. Bates (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006).
The political roles played by Ælfthryth and Emma are examined by Pauline Stafford in Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Ælfthryth’s activities as legal advocate and her gendered use of power are the focus of Andrew Rabin, ‘Female Advocacy and Royal Protection in Tenth-Century England: The Legal Career of Queen Ælfthryth’, Speculum, 84 (2009), pp. 273–88.
Pauline Stafford, Unification and Conquest: A Political and Social History of England in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), and George Molyneaux, The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), consider the place of Æthelred’s reign in the emergence of the kingdom of England. Stafford emphasizes the fragility of the unity of the realm. Molyneaux argues that the reigns of Edgar and Æthelred mark a watershed in the development and systematization of the administrative institutions of royal government. Æthelred’s legislation is studied in detail by Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). M. R. Rambaran-Olm, ‘Trial by History’s Jury: Examining II Æthelred’s Legislative and Literary Legacy, AD 993–1006’, English Studies, 95 (2014), pp. 777–802, connects the legislative and literary accomplishments of the third quarter of Æthelred’s reign. The best introductions to Æthelred’s coinage are Rory Naismith’s ‘The Coinage of Æthelred II: A New Evaluation’, English Studies, 97 (2016), pp. 117–39, and his European Medieval Coinage, vol. 8: Britain and Ireland c.400–1066 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), ch. 10. For economic developments and material culture in late Anglo-Saxon England, see Robin Fleming, Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400–1070 (London: Allen Lane, 2010).
Ryan Lavelle’s Alfred’s Wars: Sources and Interpretations of Anglo-Saxon Warfare in the Viking Age (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010) covers the viking wars of Æthelred as well as those of Alfred. I explore the problems faced by English kings in making peace with vikings in ‘Paying the Danegeld: Anglo-Saxon Peacemaking with the Vikings’, in War and Peace in Ancient and Medieval History, edited by P. de Souza and J. France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 173–92. Kim Hjardar and Vegard Vike, Vikings at War (Oxford and Philadelphia: Casemate, 2016), provide a well-illustrated, comprehensive examination of all aspects of Scandinavian military history during the Viking Age. For the Battle of Maldon (and the poem), see the essays in Donald Scragg (ed.), The Battle of Maldon, AD 991 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), and Janet Cooper (ed.), The Battle of Maldon: Fiction and Fact (London: Hambledon Press, 1993). Ann Williams, ‘ “Cockles Amongst the Wheat”: Danes and English in the Western Midlands in the First Half of the Eleventh Century’, Midland History, 11 (1986), pp. 1–22, considers the Saint Brice’s Day Massacre in light of Danish settlement. For the mass burial of possible victims of the massacre discovered in Oxford, see A. M. Pollard et al., ‘ “Sprouting Like Cockle Amongst the Wheat”: The St Brice’s Day Massacre and the Isotopic Analysis of Human Bones from St John’s College, Oxford’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 31 (2012), pp. 83–102. For other possible victims of the Saint Brice’s Day Massacre, see Angela Boyle, ‘Death on the Dorset Ridgeway: The Discovery and Execution of an Early Medieval Mass Burial’, in Ryan Lavelle and Simon Roffey (eds,), Danes in Wessex: The Scandinavian Impact on Southern England, c.800–c.1100 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2016).
M. Townend (ed.), Wulfstan, Archbishop of York (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), and Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan (eds), A Companion to Ælfric (Leiden: Brill, 2009), are good introductions to the lives and works of the two most important churchmen of Æthelred’s reign. The political writings of Wulfstan are edited and translated by Andrew Rabin in The Political Writings of Archbishop Wulfstan of York (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). Rabin’s collection does not include the ‘Sermon of the Wolf’, but a translation can be found in Michael Swanton (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Prose (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975). Simon Keynes, ‘An Abbot, an Archbishop and the Viking Raids of 1006–7 and 1009–12’, Anglo-Saxon England, 36 (2007), pp. 151–220, explores how Wulfstan and Ælfric responded to the viking attacks. Mary Clayton, ‘Ælfric and Æthelred’, in Essays on Anglo-Saxon and Related Themes in Memory of Lynne Grundy, edited by J. Roberts and J. Nelson (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2000), pp. 65–88, analyses Ælfric’s allusions to and criticisms of Æthelred’s kingship. Michael Lapidge (ed. and trans.), Byrhtferth of Ramsey: The Lives of St Oswald and St Ecgwine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), is the best introduction to the life and works of that eccentric writer.
The two translations of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that I prefer are by Michael Swanton (London: J. M. Dent, 1996) and Dorothy Whitelock (Norwich: Jarrold & Sons, 1961). Whitelock’s is also in English Historical Documents, Volume I: c.500–1042, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1979), which has many of the key sources for Æthelred’s reign. For the ‘Æthelred–Cnut chronicle’ in manuscripts CDE, see Alice Sheppard, Families of the King: Writing Identity in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 2nd edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), and Courtney Konshuh, ‘Anraed in their Unraed: The Æthelredian Annals (983–1016) and their Presentation of King and Advisors’, English Studies, 97 (2016), pp. 140–62. Æthelred’s law codes are translated by A. J. Robertson in The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925). P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography, revised by S. E. Kelly and R. Rushforth (www.esawyer.org.uk), provides information about and texts of Æthelred’s charters. The best source for maps relating to Æthelred’s reign is David Hill, An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981).