In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (translated by G. N. Garmonsway)

  Almost as soon as this fiasco was consummated an immense Danish fleet came to Sandwich, extorted tribute from Kent and ravaged through Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire down to the Isle of Wight. While these disasters happened the king and his witan seem to have met in Bath, but their solution to all this was to issue a penitential edict (‘decided on when the great army came to the country’), declaring a kind of moral state of emergency and calling for prayer and fasting to make the Vikings go away.

  To supplement this there was an experiment in the coinage, the so-called Agnus Dei type with the lamb of God and the Holy Spirit on the reverse, which, it was hoped, would bring the wisdom of God to the English. This iconography, and the Bath edict related to it, bear the unmistakable signs of Wulfstan, now the dominant spiritual figure at court. In fact it is uncertain whether the type was ever issued. Only thirteen examples from widely separated mints have survived to modern times of what is perhaps the most beautiful of all English coins. Small as this number is, it is enough to suggest that the coin was indeed put out, but only as a limited issue, possibly as a royal donation to local churchmen, to show the king’s renewed spiritual determination. But by the end of 1009 we may surmise that events had taken such a turn for the worse that the gesture was seen as meaningless:

  1010 … And when the enemy was in the east, then our levies were mustered in the west; and when they were in the south, then our levies were in the north. Then all the councillors were summoned to the king for a plan for the defence of the realm had to be devised then and there, but whatever course of action was decided upon it was not followed even for a single month. In the end there was no leader who was willing to raise levies, but each fled as quickly as he could; nor even in the end would one shire help another …

  1011. In this year the king and his councillors sent to the host and craved peace, promising them tribute and provisions on condition that they should cease their harrying.

  They had by this time overrun (i) East Anglia, (ii) Essex, (iii) Middlesex, (iv) Oxfordshire, (v) Cambridgeshire, (vi) Hertfordshire, (vii) Buckinghamshire, (viii) Bedfordshire, (ix) half of Huntingdonshire, and to the south of the Thames all Kent, and Sussex, and the district around Hastings, and Surrey, and Berkshire, and Hampshire, and a great part of Wiltshire.

  All these misfortunes befell us by reason of bad policy, in that tribute was not offered them in time; but when they had done their worst, then it was that peace was made with them. And notwithstanding all this truce and peace and tribute, they went about everywhere in bands and robbed and slew our unhappy people. Then in this same year between the Nativity of St Mary and Michaelmas, they besieged Canterbury, and made their way in through treachery, for Aelfmaer, whose life archbishop Aellheah had saved, betrayed Canterbury to them. And there they seized the archbishop Aelfheah …

  Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (translated by G. N. Garmonsway)

  MARTYRDOM AT GREENWICH

  The army retired with their prisoner to Greenwich and remained there from the autumn of 1011 until Easter 1012. During this long period there is no evidence that even this extremity raised Ethelred to the decisive action which the chronicler (and others) seem to have hoped for. Before Easter the chief members of the witan met in London (curiously there is no mention of the king) and remained there over the festival until all the Danegeld they had agreed to pay had come in from the shires. The week after Easter 48,000 pounds in silver was paid to the Danes in their camp at Greenwich: about twelve million coins if it was paid in money. Then on the Saturday things became even worse. Despite the huge payment made to them, the Vikings became incensed against the archbishop because ‘he was not willing to offer them any money and forbade any ransom to be given for him’. The chronicler adds that they were drunk, for French wine had been brought to them, presumably from plundered merchantmen in the Thames. On the Saturday night, 19 April, they led the archbishop to their tribunal and pelted him to death with bones and the heads of cattle, one of the Vikings striking him on the head with the blunt end of an axe head. This crime probably took place on the spot where Greenwich church now stands, for when Aelfheah was canonised the Church would no doubt have taken pains to find out exactly where the martyrdom took place and to build the church on the very place. The church is dedicated to St Aelfheah today.

  ETHELRED’S FALL

  The next year, 1013, the English empire which had existed since Athelstan’s day finally came apart. Swein of Denmark opened his campaigning season as usual in August when his fleet arrived off Sandwich, but this time he sailed round East Anglia into the Humber and up the Trent to Gainsborough, which was to be the chief Danish base for the next two years. In rapid succession there then submitted to the Danish king the Northumbrians, the people of Lindsey, the Five Boroughs, and finally all the Danes north of Watling Street. Swein then took hostages, provisions and horses from all the shires, and leaving the ships and hostages in the charge of his teenage son Canute, he struck south forcing the surrender of Oxford and Winchester. However he failed with London, because once more the citizens resisted ‘with the utmost valour, because king Ethelred was inside’.

  Ethelred was now virtually a king without a country. Swein turned westwards and at Bath the thegns of the western shires met him and submitted, giving him hostages. After this, Swein returned to his ships and the whole nation accepted him as king. Nothing remained for the unbowed, obdurate and resourceful citizens of London but to submit too and pay tribute. ‘At this time nothing went right for this nation,’ says the chronicler. Ethelred himself remained for a while with his fleet in the Thames, sending his wife and sons to his brother-in-law in Normandy, and after a forlorn Christmas in the Isle of Wight he joined her there in exile. The line which extended through Edgar and Alfred to Cerdic, the oldest and most prestigious pedigree in Europe, seemed to have lost its patrimony for good.

  ‘NOTHING WAS EVER DONE’: HARD ON ETHELRED?

  We have followed the narrative of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle this far, but had Ethelred really been as ineffective as the chronicler says? Recently other kinds of sources – archaeological finds, coinage, charters – have revealed that in the second half of Ethelred’s reign practical decisions were taken by the king to improve the worsening military situation. There was for example the creation of ‘emergency burhs’, transferring mints from less well-protected towns to reoccupied Iron Age hillforts. In this way the king’s coinage continued to be issued and renewed in the customary six-year cycles right up to Ethelred’s exile – an indication of the underlying efficiency of the administration.

  As early as c. 997 the mints of Barnstaple, Totnes and Lydford may have been temporarily removed to an as yet unidentified fort called Gothaburh in the interior of Devon. In 1003 the mint at Wilton was set up behind the great Iron Age ramparts of Old Sarum where it survived Swein’s attack unscathed although Wilton itself was sacked. Such instances grow more frequent as the reign progresses. In 1009 the small mints of Ilchester, Crewkerne and Bruton in Somerset were concentrated within the huge banks of South Cadbury which was refortified with stone walls and gates (so the fort which had last seen action in the Arthurian wars was once more in the thick of things). In the same year the Chichester mint reopened at nearby Cissbury. Dorchester’s moneyers may have worked for a time at Eanbyri (Henbury near Wimborne, Hean byrig, ‘the high burh’). Others await identification, such as Brygin and Niwan near Shaftesbury, and the ‘newly fortified town’ of Beorchore mentioned in a charter of 1007. Archaeologists suspect that at the same time many of the old burghal defences, such as Wareham, Wallingford and Cricklade, may have been refurbished in stone. This picture surely adds up to a thought-out governmental defence policy which is not recorded in the chronicles of the time.

  Nor was this kind of initiative confined to the domestic front. Chance hints in foreign sources show that Ethelred and his advisers also worked through diplomacy to combat the growing Viking threat. The papal a
rchives reveal that Ethelred’s ambassadors were in Rouen in 991, negotiating with Duke Richard of Normandy for an agreement to prevent Viking fleets sheltering and refitting in Norman harbours. A subsequent English naval attack on the Cotentin peninsula of Normandy (in c. 1000) was presumably to the same end. Similarly, Ethelred’s marriage to Richard’s daughter Emma in 1002 should be seen in the context of this foreign policy.

  The Viking threat did not only exist in the Channel and the North Sea. In 1000 there was a major English naval expedition in the Irish Sea which devastated the Isle of Man. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle this did not achieve its objective, which was a combined operation with a land attack on Cumbria; but it was an offensive campaign none the less.

  These hints show us that the English government was constantly experimenting, if usually without success, and they suggest that Ethelred was not paralysed by inertia to the extent that the myth asserts. But more than that we cannot say. In the end, the inner personality of this unfortunate king eludes us.

  ETHELRED, CANUTE AND EDMUND: THE FINAL STRUGGLE

  On 2 February 1014 Swein died at Gainsborough and the Danish army there chose Canute as king. But in London, says the chronicler, the English councillors advised that Ethelred should be recalled, ‘declaring that no lord was dearer to them than their rightful lord, if only he would govern his kingdom more justly than he had done in the past’. There is no better example of the reserves of feeling commanded by an Anglo-Saxon king. Ethelred sent his young son, Edward, the future Confessor, with messengers promising that ‘he would be a gracious lord to them … and everything should be forgiven, that had been done or said against him, on condition that they all unanimously and without treachery returned to their allegiance’. During Lent Ethelred came home, ‘and was received with joy’.

  At this time Canute was still at Gainsborough, holding hostages from Lindsey. With new-found military vigour Ethelred immediately led levies into Lindsey and devastated the land to punish the population for their support for Canute. Unprepared, Canute put to sea and left his erstwhile allies in the lurch, depositing the hostages at Sandwich after cutting off their hands and noses. The campaign ended ineffectually with Ethelred paying another Danegeld of 21,000 pounds to the Danish army still camped at Greenwich. To cap his misery, bad weather in the autumn brought terrible floods which drowned many and made even more homeless.

  Ethelred’s brief period of glory was over by 1015. In that year the king’s son Edmund, who was about the same age as Canute, quarrelled with his father and struck out on his own. Other English leaders, including the powerful Eadric of Mercia, decided to throw in their lot with Canute. Ethelred tried to raise further troops, but with the air full of rumours of betrayal, he abandoned his levies and retired to London. There Edmund joined him. The way was now clear for Canute to strike the final blow. He closed in on London with all his army:

  then it happened that King Ethelred passed away before the ships arrived. He ended his days on St George’s day (23 April) after a life of much hardship and many difficulties. Then after his death all the councillors who were in London, and the citizens, chose Edmund as king, and he defended his kingdom valiantly during his lifetime

  Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

  And so, almost unobtrusively, Ethelred ‘did his country the only service that was in his power by dying’, as a nineteenth-century historian wrote, harshly. He was buried ‘with great honour’ according to the later writer Florence of Worcester, in St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Florence also preserves details of the dramatic internecine struggle which followed. Although the council in London had proclaimed Edmund king, the bishops and chief men of Wessex assembled and unanimously elected Canute as king. Meeting him at Southampton, says Florence, ‘they repudiated and renounced in his presence all the race of Ethelred, and concluded peace with him, swearing loyalty to him, and he also swore to them he would be a loyal lord to them in affairs of Church and state’.

  EDMUND ‘IRONSIDE’

  Edmund responded to this political disaster with the utmost vigour. While Canute dug siege lines around London, Edmund himself made his way into the western shires of Wessex, and there he raised a small army of loyalists. Canute followed him with his ally Eadric of Mercia and other English leaders who had joined him. In June in battles at Penselwood and Sherston Edmund beat them off. The English now had a leader who gave them heart, and Edmund was able to raise further levies and launch the offensive: a daring attack on London to lift the Danish siege. He moved on the city not from the south-west, but kept north of the Thames all the time and descended from the woods north of the city at Clayhill Farm in Tottenham. His surprise move was entirely successful, breaking through the Danish earthworks, and driving Canute’s forces to their ships. He entered London in triumph, and two days later crossed the river upstream at Brentford and defeated the Danish army when it tried to make a stand on the south bank. Desperate for reinforcements, Edmund was now forced to return to Wessex to raise more levies, but when Canute retaliated by raiding into Mercia, Edmund followed him up and drove him into Kent. At Otford near Sevenoaks Canute stood his ground but when Edmund charged, the Danes were panicked ‘at the first clash of the standard bearers’ (Florence of Worcester) ‘and the host fled before him with their horses into Sheppey, and the king slew as many of them as he could overtake’ (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle).

  A legend was now in the making. After thirty years of military disaster, a West-Saxon king of Alfred’s line had turned things on their head by nerve, luck, magnetism and hard fighting. Seeing how Edmund’s fortune had changed, Eadric of Mercia changed sides again and joined Edmund at Aylesbury: ‘No greater error of judgement was ever made than this,’ adds the chronicler.

  THE BATTLE OF ASHINGDON

  For a fifth time Edmund called up his levies (‘all the people of England’ says our chronicler, with pardonable exaggeration, even enthusiasm). In the autumn he attacked Canute not far from the Essex coast at a place called Assandun, ‘the hill of ash trees’, now Ashingdon a few miles north of Southend. Here on 18 October was fought the bloodiest and most obstinate battle in the whole war.

  Edmund was riding on the crest of a wave, the impetus of five victories behind him. He had a large and confident army of West Saxons, East Angles (under Ulfcytel ‘the Valiant’ who had been the most resolute local commander of the previous decade) and Mercians under the reformed turncoat Eadric. He immediately took the offensive. But the battle on which so much depended was a complete disaster. ‘Then ealdorman Eadric did as he had often done before: he and the Magesaete [men from Herefordshire and south Shropshire] were the first to set the example of flight, and thus he betrayed his royal lord and the whole nation.’ According to the Latin poem in praise of Canute’s queen, Emma, written around 1035, this act of treachery had previously been agreed upon by Canute and Eadric. Eadric was by no means the only English leader to desert his royal lord during these years, in fact such double-dealing seems to have been frequent whenever Ethelred lost control over his magnates. But why Eadric acted this way, we do not know. Perhaps the answer lies in the as yet unwritten history of Mercian relations with Wessex in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The result was the destruction of Edmund’s army, the death of all the main leaders including Ulfcytel, ‘and all the flower of England perished there’.

  CANUTE ‘KING OF ALL THE ENGLISH’

  ‘Canute was victorious and won all England by his victory’, our chronicler wrote a few months later when the outcome was clear. But despite the shattering defeat at Ashingdon Edmund refused to be beaten. He retreated into Gloucestershire hoping to raise another army and renew the struggle. No wonder that he rapidly acquired the nickname Ironside, ‘for his valour’. Canute followed him and the two kings met at Deerhurst on the Severn. There they swore to be brothers, exchanging clothes, weapons and presents. They then agreed to partition the country, with Edmund ruling in Wessex and Canute in the north. (The church where this pact was made still stands at Deerhurst,
one of the finest surviving Anglo-Saxon churches.) Within a month, however, the heroic Edmund died – or was murdered with Canute’s connivance – and was buried with his grandfather at Glastonbury. Canute was now unopposed and the English councillors made him king in 1017. For the next twenty-five years a Danish dynasty would rule from the throne of the Cerdicings, and England would become part of a Scandinavian empire where before its contacts had been more closely tied to Carolingian Europe and Rome.

  There remained the legacy of war to be paid. In 1018 the last and biggest of the Danegelds was paid to Canute. The country had to raise 72,000 pounds, in addition to which the citizens of London had to provide another 10,500 pounds. Part of the host then returned to Denmark, Canute reserving forty ships’ crews to defend him. Finally, at a great meeting at Oxford, the Danes and English agreed to observe the laws of the last great West-Saxon king, Edgar. Canute’s subsequent letter to his bishops, earls and all his people, shows that through the influence of men like Wulfstan he had quickly seen what advantages accrue from an alliance with the Church in medieval kingship. Now he would be a worthy successor to Edgar.