One of the challenges for modern readers of the sources for and histories of Anglo-Saxon England is dealing with a plethora of similar-sounding unfamiliar names. How to spell these names is a choice that all authors dealing with this period must confront, as Old English contained letters that have since disappeared from the language. In this book, I have followed a naming convention generally employed in scholarly works which involves retaining the letter Æ, pronounced like the ‘a’ in ‘cat’, if it begins a name, but replacing other letters unique to Old English with their modern equivalents. Thus a name such as ‘Ælfþryð’ appears as ‘Ælfthryth’. Modern spellings have been used for names that remain current, e.g. ‘Alfred’ rather than ‘Ælfræd’, and ‘Edgar’ rather than ‘Eadgar’, and for all identifiable place names. The reader might note that ‘viking’ is not capitalized. This is by intention. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the word ‘viking’ was not used as a proper noun to denote a specific ethnic group. Rather, it referred to an activity, participation in an overseas raiding expedition, as I explain further in Chapter 3.
The primary sources for King Æthelred’s reign also require some comment and explanation. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the major narrative source for political events during his reign (978–1016), is actually an umbrella term for five separate manuscripts in Old English and several others in Latin translation. The earliest of these manuscripts was copied in the late ninth century, the latest in the mid twelfth century. By scholarly convention, the vernacular manuscripts are identified by the monastery in which they were compiled or kept, and cited by the letters A to E. All of them share a common stock up to 891, when the lost archetype was probably composed at King Alfred’s court and distributed to various monasteries. The texts remain substantially the same until the death of Alfred in 899, at which point they diverge, as chroniclers in the monasteries in which they were kept added notices of events of local interest. Three of the manuscripts, C, D and E, contain the same narrative, with minor variations, for the years 983 to 1022. The author of this self-contained chronicle, referred to here as the ‘CDE version’, has been identified as a London cleric, writing around 1023. I refer to him as ‘the Chronicler’ in this book. Manuscript A has only three entries for all of Æthelred’s reign, the years 984, 993 (correctly 991) and 1001. They are important, none the less, because these annals are independent of and earlier than the Chronicler’s accounts of the same events.
The narrative of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle can be checked against another valuable written source: charters, documents that record grants of land and rights and privileges over land. Charters issued by kings are known as diplomas. By convention, Anglo-Saxon charters are cited by their ‘Sawyer’ or ‘S’ number, referring to the annotated list published by historian Peter Sawyer in 1968. Historians have long appreciated the value of charters for a wide range of topics, including royal administration, political ideology, legal practices, the Anglo-Saxon Church and even landscape history. Most Anglo-Saxon charters are straightforward records of transactions, written in a standardized format using formulas that help identify the monastic archive or royal agency that produced them. Some of Æthelred’s charters, however, are atypical, in incorporating narratives explaining how the estates came into the king’s hands. Because charters served as legal title to possessions, English monastic houses in the centuries following the Norman Conquest undertook to preserve them in cartularies, and it is only in copied form that the overwhelming majority of purported Anglo-Saxon charters survive. Unfortunately, the monastic compilers of cartularies, intent on defending the endowments and privileges of their houses, did not hesitate to concoct pious forgeries to replace lost charters. Even authentic charters were ‘improved’ during the process of copying to better support the houses’ claims. Approximately seven dozen authentic charters have been identified for Æthelred’s reign.
Law codes and legal tracts represent a third important written source. Æthelred was a prolific legislator. His law codes provide a window on to crime and punishment in Anglo-Saxon society in the early eleventh century, as well as the ideological claims of the crown. Æthelred’s law codes are conventionally cited by Roman numerals ‘I’ to ‘X’ and referred to by the place that they were promulgated. ‘II’ is the Treaty of Andover and ‘IX’ and ‘X’ are fragments of either lost codes or, possibly, alternative versions of ‘I’ and ‘V’. ‘I’ and ‘III’ refer to a meeting of the royal council at Bromdune at which a code now lost was issued.