A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  In 1006 the Danes attacked in still greater force, arriving off Sandwich and delivering raiders to ravage at will through the counties, as was their wont, with their base on the Isle of Wight. The next year they sailed away, the better off by 36,000 pounds paid as tribute, to add to whatever they had looted the previous season. It was a respite. Why now and not earlier we do not know, but at this point the government ordered the building of warships. The bureaucracy went into action; funds were raised with the usual efficiency, with one ship funded from every 310 hides. Just two years later (1009) a fully equipped ‘ship army’, some one hundred vessels in number, was riding at anchor off Sandwich. But the national effort was sabotaged. When a certain Brihtric of Mercia laid charges against ‘Prince Wulfnoth the South Saxon’, apparently one of the fleet commanders (and perhaps father of the future Earl Godwine), Wulfnoth detached a squadron and raided along the south coast. What follows is a remarkable tale in which corruption, betrayal and administrative fecklessness would seem to have played their parts. The upshot was the destruction of eighty ships, wrecked in a storm and then torched on the beach by order of the commander himself. The king and his ministers abandoned their squadron and ‘took themselves home’ while the crews took the ships to safe haven in London. The ship levy was discontinued. Within weeks the first Danish fleet in three years was back outside a defenceless Sandwich. Its commander was Thorkell the Tall, who was to be involved in English affairs for more than a decade.

  For the best part of two years the host ranged unrestrained through the hapless shires. Now, if ever, the royal regime and the king himself earned their reputation for bad decisions (‘unraedas’) and for belated payments of gafol, made only when great damage had been done. Even after it was paid ‘for all this truce and peace they travelled . . . in bands and raided and roped up and killed our wretched people.’6 Then in 1011, thanks to treachery, raiders broke into Canterbury, ‘that [now] wretched town from where . . . first came to us Christendom and bliss’, and seized Ælfweard, the king’s reeve, the bishop of Rochester, various other senior churchmen, scores of lesser clerics and Archbishop Ælfheah himself.

  For months they hauled him about with them at the end of a rope until a ransom should be paid. But Ælfheah refused to permit any such payment. This angered them greatly and one evening at Greenwich, drunk on ‘wine from the south’, they seem to have staged a mock trial at their ‘hustings’ or ‘house court’. There, despite the reported intervention of Thorkell the Tall himself,7 the archbishop was pelted with cattle bones and finished off with a blow from the butt of an axe. The feast day of Canterbury’s first martyred archbishop (often known as St Alphege), so honoured with the approval of St Anselm, is on 19 April.

  The Chronicle gives the impression that treason and faction ruled at court, but the author was writing after Æthelred’s reign, with the bitterness of hindsight. In 1009, so the Peterborough Chronicle tells us, Æthelred at the head of an army managed to intercept the raiders trying to regain their ships. Everybody was ready to attack, but Ealdorman Eadric stopped the action, ‘as it always was’. This Eadric Streona, appointed ealdorman of all Mercia in 1007, seems to have been the moving spirit in a palace revolution the year before. The chief victims were Ælfhelm the Mercian, ealdorman of Northumbria, who was killed while out hunting as a guest of Eadric in an ambush set up by his host, and Ælfhelm’s two sons, blinded on the king’s orders while guests at the royal vill of Cookham, Berkshire.8 Both incidents outraged the primal laws of hospitality, but both are too easily believable of the court of Æthelred.

  At about the same time as he was created ealdorman in Mercia, Eadric Streona was given the hand of the king’s daughter Edith in marriage. Described by Simon Keynes as ‘a convincing villain’, he was at the heart of the royal councils for ten years; by 1012 he was recognized as at the head of the rigidly observed hierarchy of the royal ealdormen of King Æthelred, but five years later he was killed on the orders of King Cnut and his body left unburied outside the walls of London. In the intervening years he features in the murky and confused events that ended with the triumph of Cnut over the English champion Edmund Ironside. Eadric, it would appear, was ‘a most notorious traitor’ to both.

  Relief of a sort seemed in sight for the English in 1012. On payment of a tribute of 8,000 pounds the raiding army dispersed and a substantial force under Thorkell the Tall, at his base in Greenwich, agreed to take service as mercenaries under Æthelred, who in his turn agreed to feed and clothe them – and, as it turned out, to make them an annual payment. Regularized as an annual levy on land, the army tax (here geld), later called danegeld, continued to be levied until 1051 when it was temporarily suspended. Given its centralized administration, galvanized by Alfred and streamlined by the reforms of his tenth-century successors, England had always been pirate-friendly when it came to collecting gafol or tribute. Now the system proved able to deliver Europe’s first effective system of nationwide public taxation since the collapse of the Roman empire in the west. The last ‘danegeld’ as such was raised under Henry II in 1161. Insofar as taxation may stimulate economic activity by the need to recreate the wealth lost and by the recirculation of the revenue raised within the economy, then, notionally, danegeld could have brought benefits; but they were surely marginal! ‘If the Chronicle is to be believed then English and Anglo-Danish kings raised at least £272,147 in gelds between 991 and 1018 . . . [and] . . . much of the bullion went to Scandinavia.’9

  Thorkell provided little protection. In 1013 King Swein of Denmark invaded. He received submissions from East Anglia to Mercia, from Lindsey and the Five Boroughs, from Earl Uhtred and all Northumbria. He took his ships up the River Trent to Gainsborough, leaving them in the charge of his son Cnut. It was presumably here that the prince met Ælfgifu of Northampton, daughter of Ealdorman Ælfhelm, who bore him Swein, later king in Norway, and Harold ‘Harefoot’, to be Harold I of England. The Danes were said to have a form of marriage by seizure, in which the forcible taking of a woman was then legitimized through a payment, a sort of ransom. According to Pauline Stafford, Danish marriage at this time was monogamous, but concubinage was practised and the result could be close to polygamy.

  King Swein continued his victorious progress, crossing over Watling Street from the Danelaw, taking hostages, from Oxford for example, and doing ‘the greatest evil a raiding army could do’. He went south to Winchester and then back towards London, where Æthelred and Thorkell, his mercenary captain, were safe behind the fortifications. The actual mercenaries seem to have been still at Greenwich – where they remained! Swein did not press a siege, instead he and his army swung down into the West Country, making camp in King Edgar’s ‘imperial’ city of Bath. He received the submission of all the western thegns. Leaving the Londoners suspended in their now isolated defiance, he returned to Cnut and the ships. All the country accepted him as ‘full king’, whereupon the Londoners submitted.

  After having plundered at will for five months, Swein naturally demanded payment and compensation for his trouble – so as naturally did Thorkell for his mercenaries. After keeping Christmas on the Isle of Wight, King Æthelred was permitted to make his way into exile with his brother-in-law in Normandy. Emma had already gone, escorted by the abbot of Peterborough while the æthelings Edward and Alfred were escorted overseas by the bishop of London. Never actually crowned, Swein Forkbeard was to all intents and purposes king in England when he died on 3 February 1014 with the fleet at Gainsborough. His body was taken for burial to York.10 The fleet, Swein’s chief advisers and Cnut’s war band elected Cnut as king. Presumably the Danelaw concurred.

  The reign of Æthelred Unræd still had two more troubled years to run. But this is perhaps the time to review something of the state of England away from the battle fronts. During this time legislation became notably more exhortatory in tone and ecclesiastical in content. Where earlier codes had ‘let every moneyer . . . guilty of. . . striking false coin . . . be slain,’ we find ‘let one . . . shun .
. . false weights and measures . . . and let all be eager for the improvement of money everywhere in the land.’ Victorian historians saw in this mildness of tone evidence of a regime in despair under the recurrent incursions of Danish invaders. But the change may well be in part due to the style of Wulfstan ‘the Homilist’, archbishop of York, active in Æthelred’s government and noted for his florid style of sermonizing.

  Behind the Chronicle’s long pages of despair and horror, the charters, the laws and the coinage tell a different and more positive story. Before his messy martyrdom at Greenwich, St Ælfheah’s career had been one of creative work. In the tenth century, that miracle age of pioneer church organ-building in Europe, the best-known account is of the organ at Winchester; it was said to require twenty-four men, and more, to operate the foot bellows and was audible a mile away from the cathedral. There are those who question the accuracy of the details and doubt the possible musicality of the apparatus – but it was surely some Wurlitzer and it was apparently largely the achievement of Ælfheah.

  He was abbot of Bath at the time of King Edgar’s coronation there (973) and was consecrated bishop of Winchester in October 984. He continued St Æthelwold’s various works to beautify the city’s churches. For the past four years, for example, work had been in progress at the New Minister, at King Æthelred’s expense, on a tower 115 feet (35 m) high, topped by a golden weathercock. Each of its external registers was carved. The first was devoted to the Virgin, who was depicted surrounded by the lords and citizens (principes et cives)of the heavenly Jerusalem, a great queen within the court.

  Religion could be the mainspring of political action. In 1009, the response of King Æthelred and his advisers in council at Bath to the advent of Thorkell’s army had been to promulgate a national three-day programme of prayer, fasting and barefoot processionals. It was not the prescription of nursery-minded cowards, nor of a cynical religious elite looking to manipulate a backward peasant populace, but the response of a government, a millennium away from us, believing that national security be found in group penitence and supplication to a concerned god. Regrettably, salvation was not delivered.

  When Swein Forkbeard died and Cnut was proclaimed his successor, King Æthelred was in Normandy. Æthelstan, his eldest son by his first wife, seems to have been lying low in England, possibly in company with his younger brother Edmund. The English decided to call back Æthelred on condition he govern them better than before, and he agreed on condition that they behave with greater loyalty. He returned in the summer of 1014 and raised an army to challenge Cnut, who abandoned allies from Lindsey and East Anglia and departed for Denmark, leaving behind brutally mutilated hostages on the beach at Sandwich.

  Briefly the English royal family seemed to be back in business: the king with his heir at his side, their Danish enemies leaderless. Suddenly, in the morning of 25 June 1014, Prince Æthelstan received his father’s permission to make a will. Its bequests embody the ideal of a warrior lord in his mead hall – a war trumpet, a drinking horn and a number of swords of ancient and honourable provenance, one of which, the sword of King Offa of Mercia, he willed to his brother Edmund. Æthelstan was already desperately sick and died later that day. He was buried in the Old Minster, Winchester. The following year the kingdom would have to face the return of Cnut. But the moment of harmony had passed.

  There were divisions in the English camp. Most people reckoned that Eadric Streona was all powerful at court. Thus, when Edmund opposed Eadric’s interests over the lands of the rich widow Ældgyth, it could be interpreted as disloyalty to his own father. Her husband Sigeferth had been killed, his lands confiscated and she had been imprisoned on the king’s orders. In 1015 Edmund freed the lady from her house arrest, married her and appropriated the family lands in the east Midlands in the region of the Five Boroughs ‘and the people [i.e. the people who mattered] all submitted to him.’ He had the lady, but he also held the historic sword of Offa – a potent talisman for the Mercian English.

  Meanwhile Cnut was receiving submissions including from Wessex and the Mercians under Eadric. An army raised by Edmund refused to fight when Æthelred did not come to lead it – was this perhaps due to the influence of Eadric? But Edmund had the support of Uhtred of Northumbria in a campaign through Cheshire and the northwest Midlands, ‘Eadric’s Mercia’ so to speak. Like Eadric a royal son-in-law, Uhtred has been described as ‘quite simply the most important man in the north of England’.11 He also was the enemy of Eadric Streona, who was siding with Cnut. When the Dane succeeded in occupying York, however, Uhtred agreed to a meeting in one of his manor halls to make his formal submission. He was murdered in his own hall for his pains, almost certainly with Cnut’s connivance. Beside the earl, forty of his followers were slain by a rival northern magnate, Thurbrand ‘the Hold’, in a bloodbath that started a sixty-year feud. Edmund’s cause had lost a powerful friend. He headed for London to join his father.

  Æthelred, by now in his mid-fifties, died in London on St George’s Day, 23 April 1016. It had been a long reign and for the most part inglorious. Wulfstan the Homilist recorded harrowing sights of thegns watching listlessly while their womenfolk were serially raped by Danish raiders, and of ordinary citizens so terrorized that they made no attempt to intervene as crowds of their fellow countrymen and women were driven shipboard into slavery by just three or four seamen. Gossip later claimed that Cnut’s sister had run a profitable trade in the export of English girls as slaves to Denmark.

  London held off the enemy and the citizens and such notables as were there chose Edmund to succeed; they may even have had him crowned king. An assembly at Southampton elected Cnut king. All that summer, inconclusive battles and manoeuvrings saw the advantage tip first one way then that. Edmund threw back a Danish siege and found reinforcements to defeat another one. A contemporary German source mentions a report of 24,000 coats of mail being held in London.12 It appears that Queen Emma/Ælfgifu remained, sharing in the ‘heroic resistance that was remembered in the North’.13 At Otford Edmund defeated an army led by Cnut himself, which persuaded Eadric Streona to come back on side. In October the English king summoned yet another army ‘of all the English nation’, among them the force led by Eadric Streona. On 18 October 1016, at the battle of ‘Assandun’ in Essex, either at Ashingdon or Ashdun, Streona and his people swapped sides once again. Cnut won the encounter but Edmund recouped his forces. After more campaigning in the West Country, Edmund was able to conclude a treaty at Alney, Gloucestershire, that agreed a division of England by which he became king of Wessex while Cnut held Northumbria, Mercia and presumably East Anglia. It was a notable outcome for the house of Cerdic. In February 1014 the uncrowned Swein Forkbeard the Dane died acknowledged king throughout England. By late 1016 his son had been forced to concede the heartland kingdom to the native claimant. King Edmund Ironside had raised levies time after time in many shires and forced the invader to terms. But on 30 November he died, possibly of a lingering battle wound. Perhaps his half-brother, the boy-prince Edward (later the Confessor) had fought in his last battle. Christmas that year we hear of him in Ghent.

  No source at the time of Edmund’s death suggested foul play, but some sixty years later there was a rumour going the rounds in Germany that he had been poisoned. Later still, Gaimar’s Estorie des Engleis (c. 1150) names Eadric Streona. It is not so much the bizarre mode of assassination – shot with an arrow up the anus, presumably up the down vent of a cantilevered first-floor privy – that’s intriging here as the fact that, more than a century on, the fate of the last full-blooded Englishman to rule the country was still of interest. Edmund left two sons who found exile in Hungary: Edward, to whom we shall come later, and Edmund. Cnut was said to have made a pilgrimage to his rival’s tomb at Glastonbury and to refer to him as his ‘brother’: good theatre, perhaps by someone who liquidated Edmund’s brother Eadwig.

  About this time, an assembly of English notables in London renounced any allegiance to Edmund’s sons, proclaimed amity
between the Danes and the English and swore loyalty to Cnut. In addition foreigners were to be permitted to live in peace and the official celebration of the Feast of Edward ‘the Martyr’ was promulgated. Thus the murder of his half-brother came back to haunt Æthelred Unræd even in death. His entire reign was impugned and his descendants utterly discredited also by association. Cnut’s inauguration, by contrast, tied the Danish conqueror directly into the traditions of English kingship by the honour he did to the Martyr.14

  Cnut confiscated English estates with which to reward his followers; it was the normal pattern in the tradition of the gift-giving war leader. He made his most powerful ally, the chief Norwegian magnate Eirik, earl in Northumbria, and Thorkell the Tall earl in East Anglia. Clearly a great power in that province or earldom, he may for a time have considered challenging Cnut himself, but Thorkell’s English career was ended by banishment. There was nothing to match the root and branch dispossession of the Anglo-Saxon establishment that followed 1066. The overthrow and death of Eadric Streona was a necessary security precaution against a threat waiting to materialize. Thanks to that famously efficient English tax-raising bureaucracy Cnut was able to pay off followers with immense silver handshakes that sent them happily back to their home territories set up for life. By 1018 most of the fleet was dispersed and agreement had been reached, ‘according to the laws of Edgar’, between the English and their new master.

  By now Cnut had also done as much as he could to scotch the snake of a dynastic comeback. Ironside’s infant children in faraway Hungary were hardly a threat. Æthelred’s sons by his Norman queen Emma/Ælfgifu, the teenage Edward and the boy Alfred, were by now ensconced in Normandy and offered no immediate danger, although they could be useful little stalking horses if a Norman duke should one day want to challenge the Viking king in England. In July 1017 Cnut married their mother. According to the lady’s biography, written under her direction some twenty-five years later, things were not quite so simple. An acid allusion to the children of Ælfgifu of Northampton states, ‘It was said the king had sons by another.’ Emma tells us that she refused even to become betrothed without a promise that if she bore a son he and no other would rule after the king. The marriage was celebrated ‘to the joy of the people’ and was soon to be enriched by the birth of a son, Harthacnut, whom, according to Emma’s apologia, the royal couple ‘kept ever with them as the future heir to the kingdom.’