A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  It was a revolution of dynasty; quite unlike the Norman revolution fifty years later, the new Danish regime wanted an accommodation with the English. By marrying the widowed queen, the conqueror consolidated the bond of amity. The church consecrated at Assandun to celebrate Cnut’s victory also honoured the English dead. In June 1023, in a great ceremony of national reconciliation, the Danish court moved to expiate the murder of Archbishop Ælfeah of Canterbury by drunken Danish soldiery twelve years before. The relics of the martyr were translated from London to Canterbury and the cortège was met at Rochester by Queen Emma and the infant Prince Harthacnut. From there they accompanied the jubilant crowds on the road to the metropolitan cathedral, where the Queen presented gifts at the new shrine. Danish standing in Canterbury received a boost. Londoners were probably seething – it has been suggested that the saintly relics were in fact moved out of the city under armed guard and under cover of darkness. Cnut wanted stable community relations. It was not for nothing that the new regime was to be run ‘according to the laws of King Edgar’. After all, those laws had specifically been prepared to concede a measure of legal autonomy to his Danish subjects.

  Cnut and the business of government

  Under Cnut the units of authority formerly known as ealdordoms came to be called earldoms. For the last fifty years before the Norman Conquest the big three – Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria – were in the hands of Cnut’s appointees, or their descendants. The names can still awaken echoes. ‘Old’ Siward of Northumbria features in Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Leofric of Mercia was husband to Godiva of Coventry. A pious lady, rich in her own right and a munificent patron of churches, she is above all remembered for the ride she made through the market-place of Coventry, naked save for her long golden hair, at the challenge of her husband to have him free the townspeople of all tolls.

  Godwine is remembered as head of Anglo-Saxon England’s most famous family and father of its last king, Harold II. We are told that Cnut favoured him because of his eloquence, a man ‘profound in speech’ according to the biographer of Edward the Confessor, probably somewhat orotund, a little pompous perhaps, but what the eighteenth century would have called ‘a man of bottom’. Godwine was probably the son of thegn Wulfnoth, cild of Sussex, but although of minor English noble birth his rise to power came under the new Danish dynasty. His wife, Gytha, sister-in-law to Cnut, bore him six sons, Swein, Harold, Tostig, Gyrth, Leofwine and Wulfnoth, and three daughters, of whom Edith was to become queen of England. By 1018 he had been appointed an earl in England south of the Thames, but it was as a result of his prowess in Denmark in the suppression of rebellion in 1019 or 1022–3 that Cnut advanced him higher. Some would say too high and blame Cnut’s faulty judgement for making Godwine the over-mighty subject of Edward the Confessor’s reign.

  An earl was expected to preside at the shire courts in his jurisdiction, though it appears that royal representatives (legati) were regularly present. These royal legates or observers frequently had judicial functions and were active in Northumbria as well in southern shires. From the time of Edward the Confessor we find that local administrative responsibilities devolve increasingly upon the sheriff, who might be appointed by the earl in whose place he stood but often by the king. An earl could be expected to lead the local armed forces of the shires, though here again the intervention of the centre was important, since the king had overriding powers concerning the fyrd. Traditionally a man’s military equipment (heregeatu, literally ‘war gear’) had been supplied by his lord; it was the physical sign of the link between lord and man in this warrior society. At the man’s death it was to be restored to the lord. The convention persisted down to the Conquest and, though it became in effect a form of death duty, ‘heriot’, as it was known, was still rendered as weapons or other military equipment, varying according to the man’s rank. Cnut’s law code issued in the early 1020s listed an earl’s heriot as eight horses, together with a sizeable arms, including four swords, and sufficient gold to fit out four troopers and their attendants. With high status went great power in their locality. But English earls, unlike continental courts, remained royal appointees. Witness lists of royal charters reveal that even the most powerful, even the earls of Northumberland, were in frequent attendance at the royal court.

  The response of the Æthelredian state to its ordeal appears at best ‘inadequate’ and much given to exhortation, with law codes almost pleading with the population to be good. But a similar tone can be detected in Cnut’s legislation. Like Alfred himself, these later legislators believed that a right relation with God was fundamental to good government. The spirit of the age saw the terrible afflictions of the Scandinavian terror raids as just punishment of a sinful people; society should purge itself of its guilt and such penitence could and should be regulated by law. Cnut adopted the public role of good, penitent Christian. On his regular visits to Wilton nunnery he always dismounted in respect of the place. The monk of Saint-Omer, author of Queen Emma’s Encomium, who witnessed the king’s actions ‘with his own eyes’ as he passed through Saint-Omer on pilgrimage to Rome, saw in him a near saintly figure, the friend to churchmen, a ‘co-bishop to the bishops’.

  Where Alfred had his cakes, Cnut had the tide. The story of the king seated on the seashore, the wavelets lapping at his feet as he fails to stop the incoming sea, derives from two twelfth-century chroniclers. Apparently Cnut staged this demonstration of his powerlessness against the forces of nature to silence some sycophantic courtiers. It seems entirely plausible for the hard-headed ruler of a sea-borne empire.

  That empire was funded, as we learn from M. K. Lawson, Cnut’s recent biographer, by the wealth of the pre-Conquest English state. No reign better illustrates, he observes, not only the wealth of that state but also the capacities of its ‘comprehensive administrative system’. They weighed heavily on taxpayers. The records show cases of landholders dispossessed in favour of others better able to pay and churches cashing in or melting down plate or other valuables to raise the money. We have already noted the huge sums raised simply to pay off the invader’s army, even before the English started to fund his Scandinavian expeditions (an estimated 47 million coins of the quatrefoil type, presumably to pay the £82,500 the Chronicle reports handed over in 1018). But England’s advanced coinage operation, with mints in production at sites throughout the country seems to have had a practical impact on the expansion of Denmark’s money economy under Cnut. During this reign the country witnessed an innovation when pennies began to be produced in Denmark at four or five royal mints. The Scandinavian contact with England through Cnut seems probably to have contributed to the evolution of the royal writ in Norway.15 And Cnut could also draw on the renowned artists of his Anglo-Saxon kingdom to bolster his fame, as when the scriptorium at Peterborough was commissioned to produce an illuminated Psalter to be sent to the church at Cologne.

  For England the reign seems to have been the first great era of tax and spend – abroad: it brought little of benefit at home. Even the king’s renowned visit to Rome could bring little extra prestige to the country, given that many of its kings had made the trip before and that for some 150 years it had tendered a unique annual alms payment to the Holy See. Known as the Romescot or Romfeoh (more popularly as Peter’s pence or hearth penny), it seems to have originated in ad hoc donations by eighth-century kings of Wessex and Mercia, and had been formalized in the ninth. By the reign of Cnut, the collection of the penny-per-household levy had been regularized at traditional provincial collection points to be paid by midsummer’s day.

  In so far as the Danes, having conquered the country, were no longer invading it, one could presumably say that Cnut’s conquest brought peace – though not, it seems without heavy policing by garrisons of huscarls (royal household troops). The church, it is true, generally sang his praises and with good reason. Almost certainly a baptized Christian when he arrived in England, he may have grown into a man of genuine piety. He was a lavish donor of lands and precious ar
tefacts. Besides endowments to the ‘Danelaw’ abbeys of Ely and Ramsey, he also endowed the shrine of St Ælfheah (Alphege) at Canterbury. It was said that later in life, he walked five miles barefoot to the church of St Cuthbert at Durham. Of course, such gifts were calculated. In what may have been his last charter of endowment, to Sherborne Abbey, he prays that his benefactions may ease his way to the heavenly kingdom. He died at Shaftesbury, in the homelands of Wessex, on 12 November 1035. He was buried in the Old Minster at Winchester, to be joined seventeen years later by Emma/Ælfgifu, his wife.

  Some lucky beneficiaries certainly had reason to bless the memory of King Cnut. Further than that, to the nation at large, the legacy was scant and dubious. As with the Norman Conquest, just thirty years later, ‘the immediate effect was a vast dispersal of English wealth abroad.’ Whereas there was none of the wholesale destruction for which the Normans were to be responsible, ‘architectural reminiscences of the Danish conquest and rule are non-existent.’16 The rivalries between the three great earldoms that, thanks to Cnut, became dominant in the nation’s affairs were to cause much trouble in the next reign and his ramshackle Nordic ‘empire’, bar a few trading concessions, brought little benefit to England.

  Just one of the kingdoms of King Cnut the Great (in Danish, Knud den Store; in Norwegian, Knut den Mektige), the country seems to have bankrolled his Nordic empire. It was a measure of Cnut’s statecraft that he manipulated ‘Englalond’s’ fine governmental machine without the permanent dispossession of its governmental and aristocratic elite. He did replace Æthelred’s ealdormen and from 1018 to 1023, apart from Godwine and a small number of new English king’s thegns, he relied principally on Nordic earls and thegns in the upper reaches of his administration. But after 1023 he promoted more loyal English followers. On at least three occasions English troops followed his banner in wars in Scandinavia. In 1028 they helped him assert his overlordship in Norway with King St Olaf the Good or ‘the Stout’. There his English consort Ælfgifu and her son Swein ruled for a time but they were driven out by the Norwegians in favour of the dead Olaf’s son, Magnus I, and were forced to flee to Denmark.

  At home, the English saw war on only one occasion, when in 1027 Cnut made a foray into Scotland to enforce the submission of Malcolm, king of Scots. This same year he made his famous pilgrimage to Rome, reviving a tradition of earlier kings of Wessex, and was received by Pope John XIX. He also attended the coronation of Emperor Conrad II. Negotiations between the two monarchs would benefit English merchants with toll reductions and some years later Cnut’s daughter Gunnhild would marry Conrad’s son Henry (the Emperor Henry III), though Cnut never matched King Æthelstan’s continental dynastic networking. At his death he was followed in Denmark by Harthacnut, barely sixteen years old. The boy was promoted by his mother Emma to succeed Cnut in England but opposed by the Londoners who supported Harold, his son by Ælfgifu of Northampton. In 1037 Harold won general recognition.

  Cnut’s marital status certainly left a few puzzles at his death. For Pauline Stafford, in her book Queens, Concubines and Dowagers (1983), it was a clear example of polygamy. Ælfgifu, his English wife, had borne him both Harold and Swein before his politically useful marriage to Emma/Ælfgifu of Normandy, his predecessor’s widow; recognized as full wife from the start. For Stafford the two women are to be considered ‘simultaneous wives’ though with different ‘spheres of influence’. The church seems to have made little protest over the arrangements during Cnut’s lifetime (given the benefactions it received that is, perhaps, not to be wondered at), though after his death the perspective may have shifted.

  Disputed successions

  Though half English by birth and ‘acknowledged as full king over all England’, Harold was apparently not popular. And his birth was an issue. Scandal, no doubt assisted by Emma, also claimed that he was illegitimate, not just because he was not Cnut’s son by the Englishwoman, but because he was not her son at all: since Ælfgifu of Northampton was unable to have children, she had had the child of a serving maid smuggled into her bed. Such was the story detailed in the Encomium. The question of bastardy may have been a factor at the back of the mind of Archbishop Æthelnoth of Canterbury when, with a dramatic gesture, he refused to hand over the coronation regalia (crown, sceptre, anointing ampula, etc.) and forbade Harold or any bishop to remove them. Harold took the throne nonetheless – even though Harthacnut had been accepted as king by Godwine and Wessex. Æthelred’s sons by Emma, Edward and Alfred, were in Normandy.

  In the last years of the Danish ascendancy in England, according to the Norman chronicler William of Jumièges, the Norman Duke Robert, nephew of Cnut’s queen Emma, came to look upon her sons by the long-dead Æthelred of England as his brothers. They had after all spent most of their lives among his people. It seems he even assembled an invasion fleet on their behalf, though it was scattered by gales in the Channel. As early as 1033, we find Norman charters that accord Edward the title of ‘king’ in England.

  Meanwhile, Harold marched on Winchester where Emma had claimed control of the royal treasure hoping to hold the fort for her son, Harthacnut of Denmark. In fact, Harold, called ‘Harefoot’ was able to seize the greater part and assumed the rule. His cause was supported by Leofric, earl of Mercia and his wife Godiva, the Londoners, a group of Northern lords and his mother Ælfgifu of Northampton, who held great feasts to win friends and influence important people. But the party of her great opponent, Hathacnut, king of Denmark and Queen Emma’s favourite, was the man who would soon prove the most important in England, and whose faction the Godwine of Wessex led.

  Neither Edward nor Alfred seems to have been considered. Some time in 1036 both arrived back in England, perhaps summoned by a letter purporting to be from their mother at Winchester, perhaps attempting invasion. Norman sources tell us that Edward made a landing on Southampton Water but was forced to retire by the local levies while Alfred, crossing over from the region of Boulogne on the Channel coast, probably somewhat later, was intercepted by men of Godwine’s household who took him to King Harold; it was said he was blinded and died of his wounds. Some of his followers were blinded, others sold into slavery.

  An assembly of great men at Oxford decided that England should be divided between Harold as king of Mercia and Northumbria, and Harthacnut as king of Wessex. A new coinage was struck in both names, but from the second year of the issue Harold’s name came to dominate, even appearing on coins struck at Winchester where Emma was still ensconced with Harthacnut’s supporters. In 1037 Harold drove them from the city and finally became king of all England. Edward had made good his return to Normandy while, two years into her second widowhood, his estranged mother was into her second exile, this time at Bruges with Count Baldwin of Flanders and his ‘royally born’ wife Adela. But Emma would soon return. Harthacnut lingered in Denmark until he came to terms with Magnus of Norway in 1039 and, with ten ships, sailed for Bruges. Following Harold’s death on 17 March 1040, Emma sailed from Flanders with Harthacnut. Their fleet was solemnly welcomed by Earl Godwine, who made him the present of a splendid warship manned by eighty elite warriors fitted out with valuable weapons and wearing gold armlets.

  In his brief reign Harthacnut won a reputation for brutality. When men of Worcestershire killed two of his tax collectors, the king dispatched a force to ravage the county, kill the male inhabitants and burn down the city. Kings were permitted to take such punitive action: in the twelfth century, for example, Louis VII of France authorized action in Champagne in which hundreds of people died, murdered in the streets or burnt alive in the churches where they had sought refuge. Harthacnut did not go to these lengths, but maybe his officers were excessive. The city was duly burnt and pillaged, large tracts of the shire plundered by the troopers, and if few men were slaughtered it was because most had fled in good time.

  In the following year Harthacnut invited Edward back from Normandy. He himself was perhaps already ailing. At any rate, Edward took ‘some kind of oath as king’ and,
according to the Encomium, belittled his own claims in favour of his half-brother. Harthacnut died of convulsions at a wedding feast on 8 June 1042. Edward, ‘the Confessor’ to be, now made a secure entry on the English scene. It was his turn to receive a warship from Godwine, the great courtier. Still more magnificent than Harthacnut’s, it carried 120 men, had a gold-embroidered purple sail and a ‘golden dragon at the prow . . . that belches fire with triple tongue’. (Was it what the Byzantines called a siphonophore, that is fitted with a Greek fire flame-thrower?) According to Godwine’s supporters, Edward owed his throne to the earl’s intervention with the English magnates. Edward, though, had long regarded himself as true king and had been named as such in charters issued in Normandy during his exile.

  Briefly, after a lifetime in the corridors of power under Harthacnut and for a time under Edward, Queen Emma may have exercised real power. Named as mater Regis (‘king’s mother’) and invariably placed next after the king,17 she features in many charter witness lists. In 1043 her son Edward moved against her. She was attacked without warning at Winchester by the earls Godwine, Leofric and Siward, and deprived of untold treasure in gold and silver. All her lands were taken into the king’s hands and he returned to her only enough for her needs. The reasons are unknown, though rumours were rife: she had refused reasonable request to yield the land; she had been hard on her son; she had been having an affair with Bishop Stigand, her spiritual adviser, who was deprived of his see at Elmham at this time. Years after her death, a story was going the rounds in Canterbury that she had been offering to fund an invasion of England by Magnus of Norway.