Few English kings have had a worse popular reputation than Æthelred II (r. 978–1016), ‘the Unready’. He is remembered, if at all, as the king who lost England to viking invaders. Until fairly recently, accounts of Æthelred’s reign have focused on his unsuccessful attempts to counter increasingly devastating viking raids that culminated in two Danish conquests of England, the first by King Swein ‘Forkbeard’ in 1013 and the second by Swein’s son Cnut the Great in the year following Æthelred’s death. At least in popular memory, Æthelred ‘the Unready’ stands in opposition to his great-great-grandfather Alfred ‘the Great’, the latter as a symbol of English success and the former of failure.
Æthelred’s byname, which has become so firmly attached to him that it appears even in works that reject its implications, is a misleading play on words that encapsulates the king’s declining reputation. Like Alfred’s designation as ‘the Great’, it was not a contemporary judgement. The soubriquet, a vernacular pun, is first alluded to in a work of the late twelfth century.1 Names of the Anglo-Saxon elite were most often composed of two word-elements, which linked the child’s name to those of his or her parents or a kindred group. Æthelræd, a name associated with the West Saxon royal dynasty, literally means ‘noble counsel’ in Old English. By the late twelfth century, and probably before, detractors were mocking Æthelred with a sarcastic vernacular pun on his singularly inappropriate name. Rather than Æthelræd, a prudent king who followed noble counsel, he was Unræd, a ruler whose policies were foolish or ill-conceived. The similarity between the Middle English noun unræd, poor advice, and the adjective unrēdī, ill-prepared, coupled with the characterization of Æthelred by medieval chroniclers as a slothful king, led to the gradual transformation of Unræd into ‘the Unready’.2
The byname stuck because English historical writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found it an appropriate characterization. For them, Æthelred was the archetype of a passive, lazy ruler who preferred to purchase peace rather than fight for it.
Academic historians are by nature revisionists and it is perhaps unsurprising that the traditional view of Æthelred has been challenged. Recognizing that the main narrative source for Æthelred’s reign preserved in the C, D and E manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a retrospective account written in the wake of the Danish conquest and tinged with the pessimism of hindsight, these scholars have highlighted the importance of balancing it with strictly contemporary historical evidence, such as royal charters, coins and law codes.3 The result has been a much more nuanced understanding of Æthelred, one that provides perspective by balancing the narrative of military defeat with consideration of the positive developments that marked his long reign.
To view the England over which Æthelred ruled just through the lens of viking conquest is tantamount to historical tunnel vision. England was a wealthy country with a robust commercial and urban economy – which is what made it so attractive a target for vikings. It was also one of the most highly centralized states of the early Middle Ages, as evidenced by a monetary system so tightly controlled by the crown that coins were periodically withdrawn from circulation and reissued with new designs. England’s shire and hundred courts and corpus of royal legislation, to which Æthelred contributed significantly, laid the foundations for English common law. The late tenth and early eleventh centuries were a period of ecclesiastical reform, and, associated with it, a golden age of Anglo-Saxon art and literary production. And contrary to his byname, Æthelred responded to the ever more dangerous waves of viking raiders and invaders with energy, innovation and flexibility, if not success.
No degree of apologetics, however, can alter the ultimate fact that Æthelred failed in the most basic duty of a medieval king, to defend his realm, although the blame for that failure was not his alone. Nor can it fully absolve him from the political violence and intrigue that plagued his court. Both were in large measure consequences of forces beyond his control: the fragile unity of the nascent English kingdom, the intense rivalries of the aristocratic families who filled the ranks of Æthelred’s ealdormen and military commanders, and a hydra-headed enemy that grew ever more voracious. The challenges Æthelred faced in his nearly thirty-eight-year reign were serious, and, ultimately, he, his advisers and generals were unable to overcome them.