Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  The Vikings had always been a dangerous enemy. But, when they returned to England in the 990s, they were stronger and better organized than ever. This was because, in Denmark as in England, the previous century had seen a rapid growth in royal power. Probably under the leadership of their first Christian king, Harold Bluetooth, the Danes had created a formidable military machine. It centred on purpose-built, circular fortresses, such as Trelleborg on the west coast of the island of Zealand. They are laid out with geometrical precision and embody engineering and organizational skills of a high order.

  Trelleborg’s initial purpose was to enable the Danish king to impose order on Denmark itself. But the Danish warrior-elite did not take kindly to order and there were many rebels. These rebels, dispossessed at home, probably formed the first wave of the renewed Viking attack on England. But they did so well that the Danish kings decided to take over the campaign themselves. The full force of the formidable military machine of Trelleborg was now to be turned on England. It was blitzkreig, even shock and awe, as the English troops assembled on the East Anglian coast were about to find out.

  In 991, the Viking fleet sacked Ipswich and then made landfall on an island in the Blackwater estuary near Maldon in Essex. The whole of eastern England was threatened. The Danes’ first move was to send a messenger to the English, demanding money to buy them off. The English commander, the ealdorman Byrhtnoth, retorted that they should come across the causeway, which linked the island to the mainland at low water, and fight it out like men.

  The battle began badly for the English, as Byrhtnoth, who was easily picked out by his height and grey hair, was killed in the first engagement. But his men, outnumbered and outgeneralled though they were, fought on till they were overwhelmed. It was a defeat, but, in its way, a glorious one. The result was that, like the victory of Brunanburgh, the defeat at the Blackwater became the subject of another notable Anglo-Saxon war poem: The Battle of Maldon. The poem captures perfectly the Dunkirk spirit of the doomed army. But it also tells us in remarkable detail about the men who composed it: these are no faceless, helmeted figures, but real, named individuals. There is an aristocrat from the Midlands, called Ælfwine, a local man, the Essex ceorl (yeoman) called Dunnere, and, from far-off Northumbria, a warrior called Æscferth.

  So every region of England was represented in this roll-call of the army and each rank of society from the top almost to the bottom. The result was to emphasize the unity of England as a country in which a common sense of nationhood overrode distinctions of locality and class. The poem is propaganda, of course; but it is unusual propaganda at a time when, in most of Europe, horizons were much narrower and loyalty to a local warlord came first and last.

  The Battle of Maldon may succeed as literature. But it failed to stimulate another, Alfredian, campaign of resistance. Instead, in the immediate aftermath of the defeat, the English decided, on the advice of the archbishop of Canterbury, to pay a tribute or Danegeld to the Vikings. The intention was to persuade them to leave; the result, of course, was to encourage them to come back for more. And with each raid the violence, and the payments, rose: £10,000 was paid in 991, £16,000 in 994, £24,000 in 1002 and £30,000 in 1007.

  The Viking campaign of 1006–7 marked a turning point. Thoroughly contemptuous now of the lack of effective English resistance, the raiders behaved with a flamboyant insolence. They made camp at Cuckhamsley Hill, the meeting place of the Shire Court of Berkshire. And they marched with their spoil past the gates of Winchester itself. They had struck into the heart of Wessex, and neither the shires nor the burhs, it seemed, availed anything. The reason, of course, was that these were royal instruments but the king, Æthelred, refused to wield them. Instead, as the people of his ancestral lands were despoiled, the king spent the winter of 1006–7 in safety in Shropshire, far from the raiders’ range.

  III

  Only in foreign policy did Æthelred show any initiative with his decision to take Emma, daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy, as his second queen. The core of Normandy, named after the Normanni (‘Northmen’), had been granted by the French king to the leader of a party of Vikings in 911. The Normans had quickly assimilated to French language and culture. But they preserved an ancestral sympathy for their Viking cousins, who were allowed to overwinter in Normandy in 1000 before making the short Channel crossing to the Solent and attacking England in the spring. Æthelred’s marriage put a stop to such help. Otherwise, he might have got more than he bargained for.

  Emma is the first English queen to emerge fully into the light of history. She was handsome, astute and fertile. And she knew how to use a woman’s power, which consisted largely in marriage and childbearing. The result was that, from the moment she married Æthelred and took up residence at Winchester, she became the axis around which English politics turned. For Emma was determined that – let who will be king – it should be her children who would sit on the throne of England.

  Emma also had a profound effect on the politics of Æthelred’s reign. His mother, to whom he was devoted, died in about 1000. This meant that Emma was not overshadowed by her, as Æthelred’s first wife had been. Instead, she soon emerged as a political player in her own right. She may have had a role in the palace coup of 1006, in which several leading ealdormen were expropriated, executed or blinded. And she was almost certainly an ally of the man who rode to power on the back of the coup: Eadric Streona (‘the grasper’). Eadric was made ealdorman of Mercia the following year and became the king’s favourite and minister. His rise, as usually happens when a favourite monopolizes power, triggered deep resentment. This further weakened English resistance and led directly to the self-destruction of the great fleet which the English assembled to use against the Vikings in 1009.

  By this time it was clear to Swein Forkbeard, Bluetooth’s son and successor as king of Denmark, that England was his for the taking. He invaded in force in 1013, and the north and east quickly submitted to him. Then followed Winchester, until only London, where Æthelred had taken refuge, held out. But finally the Londoners, ‘because they dreaded what [Swein] would do to them’, surrendered as well. Æthelred sent Emma and his two sons by her to safety in Normandy, while he first retreated to the Isle of Wight before joining his family in exile.

  But Swein was only a winter-king of England and died on 3 February 1014. What English arms had been unable to do, English weather, perhaps, accomplished. His death was followed by a succession crisis. The Danish occupying force chose Swein’s younger son, Cnut, as king. But the English had other ideas and sent to Æthelred to invite him to return – but on certain conditions. As a pledge of good faith he sent his young son, Edward, as a hostage, to begin negotiations. The complaints against Æthelred included high taxation, extortion and the enslavement of free men. By the end of the talks, Æthelred was forced to agree to govern within the rules established by his predecessors. And the terms of the agreement still exist today, for they were copied at the time into the national book of record, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It reports Æthelred’s undertaking as follows:

  that [Æthelred] would be their faithful lord, would better each of those things that they disliked, and that each of the things would be forgiven which had been done or said against him. Then was full friendship established in word and in deed and in compact on either side.

  Embedded here in the prose of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the text, probably even the actual words, of a formal written agreement between the king and his people. It is the Anglo-Saxon Magna Carta. The circumstances in 1014, moreover, were very similar to those 200 years later. A political crisis and a foreign pretender brought the king, more or less naked, to the negotiating table. The throne would be his, but on conditions. The king agrees, since he has no choice. The terms and his consent to them are made public and the whole enshrined in a written document. The result is the first constitutional settlement in English history, and it began a tradition which descends through Magna Carta, the Petition of Right and the Reform A
cts, down to the present.

  And, even at the time, it seemed to open up a new chapter. Wulfstan, archbishop of York, soon afterwards preached a highly political sermon, almost certainly in the presence of the king and the witan, on the present discontents and their remedies:

  the rights of free men are taken away and the rights of slaves are restricted and charitable obligations are curtailed. Free men may not keep their independence, nor go where they wish, nor deal with their property just as they desire …

  Nothing has prospered now for a long time either at home or abroad, but there has been military devastation and hunger, burning and bloodshed in nearly every district time and again … And excessive taxes have afflicted us …

  But the real indication of change was that Æthelred moved decisively and unexpectedly against the Danes, who found their position untenable and retreated back home.

  Æthelred’s new resolution stemmed, almost certainly, from the new prominence of Edmund, his eldest son by his first wife. Father and son were opposites in character: the former took a firm stand on nothing but his kingly dignity; the latter, as his nickname ‘Ironside’ indicates, was a man of action in the best traditions of his house. But Edmund’s rise meant Streona’s decline, and the favourite resisted with all the black arts at his command.

  The result drove Edmund to take over the former Viking dominions in the north and east, the so-called Danelaw, in an act of virtual rebellion against his father. At this point, the Danes reinvaded and father and son were reunited. Streona, slighted, betrayed Mercia and Wessex to the Danes, and on St George’s Day, 23 April 1016, Æthelred died. Rival meetings of the witan took place: that in Southampton elected the Danish claimant; that in London chose Edmund.

  Edmund now proceeded to show what Æthelred II, with all the time and resources at his command, could have accomplished if he had tried. In a whirlwind campaign, he fought the Danes to a standstill until finally a partition of England along the line of the Thames was agreed: Edmund took the south and the Danes the north, including London. But a month later, on 30 November 1016, Edmund died, aged about twenty-three. His Danish opponent, Cnut, who was even younger, was now acknowledged as Rex totius Angliae (‘king of all England’).

  Would the constitutional ideas of 1014 survive and flourish? Would England? In the circumstances of 1016 it seemed rather unlikely.

  IV

  Cnut, who became ‘king of all England’ in 1016, was the most successful Viking ever. His ancestors had raided England; he conquered it. They had exacted tribute; but he, as king of England, controlled English taxes, the English mints and the English Treasury, and he poured out their wealth on his Danish followers. And he did all this while barely in his twenties. No wonder his skalds, or court poets, hailed him as the true heir of Ivar the Boneless, the master of the longships and the greatest Dane of them all.

  Even before he became king, Cnut had given the English a foretaste of his ancestral Viking ruthlessness. When he had been forced to leave England after his father Swein’s death, his last act had been to put in at Sandwich with his fleet. ‘There’, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports, ‘he landed the hostages that were given to his father and cut off their hands and ears and noses.’ In 1017 it was heads that rolled. Those executed included the sons of three ealdormen and Eadric Streona himself, who Cnut seems to have felt had changed sides once too often. The purge extended to surviving members of the dethroned royal family: Eadwig, Ironside’s brother, was first exiled and then lured back to England to his death, while Ironside’s sons, Edgar the Æthling and Edmund, found refuge at the court of Hungary.

  But, by the summer, there were already signs that Cnut wished to balance ruthlessness with reconciliation. ‘Before the calends of August [16 July]’, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states, ‘the king gave an order to fetch him the widow of the other king, Æthelred, the daughter of Richard [of Normandy], to wife.’

  This statement leaves everything open. Was Cnut marrying Emma to reconcile the English? Or to buy off the Normans? Was she in Normandy? Or in England, perhaps under some form of restraint? And on what terms did the marriage take place? Emma already had two sons by Æthelred; while Cnut himself had an English wife or (as Emma preferred to call her) concubine, Ælfgifu, by whom he also had two sons, Swain and Harold Harefoot. According to Emma’s side of the story her marriage agreement with Cnut cut the Gordian knot, since Cnut promised that ‘if God should grant her a son by him, he would never appoint the son of any other wife as his successor’. Such a son, Harthacnut, was soon born, and the children of the couple’s two previous relationships were disinherited, at least as far as England was concerned.

  Emma, crowned queen of England a second time alongside Cnut in 1017 and mother of his heir, now emerged to play a leading part in a series of carefully calculated religious ceremonies which sought to lay the ghost of the recent bloody past. In 1020 Cnut went on progress in Essex, accompanied by Archbishop Wulfstan and other leading magnates. His destination was Ashingdon, where his final, decisive battle with Ironside had taken place. It had been a disastrous day for the English. ‘There’, lamented the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, ‘had Cnut the victory, though all England fought against him … And all the nobility of the English nation was undone.’ On this progress, Cnut ‘ordered to be built there a minster of stone and lime for the souls of the men who were there slain’ – English as well as Danish. Emma’s presence is not mentioned but the priest Cnut appointed to Ashingdon Minster was Emma’s client, Stigand.

  Emma’s role three years later in the translation of the relics of St Ælfheah is much better documented. Ælfheah was the archbishop of Canterbury who had been martyred by the Danish army in England on 19 April 1012 in an orgy of drunken violence. He was half pelted to death with meat-bones and finally felled with an axe-blow to the head. Now Emma, queen of England, with Cnut’s ‘royal son, Harthacnut’, came to Rochester ‘and they all with much majesty, and bliss, and songs of praise carried [the body] into Canterbury’.

  Long before this, however, Cnut, probably advised by Archbishop Wulfstan, had entered into a formal agreement with his English subjects. It was reached in a meeting of the witan held at Oxford in 1018. ‘The Danes and English’, as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle summarizes, ‘were united … under King Edgar’s Laws,’ which Cnut soon reissued with his own extensive modifications. Cnut then moved quickly to normalize his rule in England. Most of the Danish army and fleet were paid off with a Danegeld of £72,000 besides a separate payment by London. The sum was vast. But, for the first and last time, the Danegeld actually achieved its purpose and all but forty ships returned home. It was not quite business as usual, however, as Cnut continued the deeply unpopular tax known as the heregeld or army tax. This had first been imposed as an emergency measure by Æthelred in 1012 but Cnut kept it going to pay a standing army of housecarls or retainers. Some would have remained in England as a garrison, but many accompanied Cnut on his wanderings.

  For Cnut’s interests extended far beyond England: to Denmark, which he inherited in 1019, and Norway, which he occupied in 1028, and even to part of Sweden. The acquisition and retention of this vast empire kept Cnut abroad for most of the 1020s. But he was always careful to keep his English subjects informed. In 1019–20 he sent them an open letter from Denmark, and in 1027 another from Rome, whither he had gone to play an honoured part in the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor, Conrad II. These letters, ‘unparalleled in any other country’, complement the spirit of the constitutional settlements of 1014 and 1018. Cnut, as chief executive of England, reports to his subjects as shareholders in a common enterprise. And the analogy of an Annual General Meeting is exact. For the letters – which are addressed, respectively, to ‘all [the king’s] people … in England’ and to ‘the whole race of the English, whether nobles or ceorls’ – were evidently intended to be read out aloud at Shire and Hundred Courts and burh moots. In view of this audience, part of their message is straightforwardly populist:

  I went
myself with the men who accompanied me to Denmark [Cnut reported in 1019–20], from where the greatest injury has come to you, and with God’s help I have taken measures so that never henceforth shall hostility reach you from there as long as you support me rightly and my life lasts. Like Alfred, in other words, Cnut is claiming to have settled the Danish question; and, like Alfred, he is a king who takes his people into his confidence.

  V

  The upshot of all this is that, within a few years of his accession, Cnut the Viking had become more English than the English – at least when he was in England. Nothing better illustrates this transformation than the famous story about Cnut and the incoming tide. Cnut’s courtiers proclaimed that his power was so great that he really ruled the waves. To expose their folly, Cnut ordered his throne be carried to the seashore and placed at the water’s edge. Cnut forbade the sea to advance. But the waves ignored him and soaked his feet. ‘Let all the world know’, Cnut told his now shamefaced courtiers, ‘that the power of kings is empty and worthless’ compared with the majesty of God.

  The incident, if true, was a consummate piece of political theatre. But what really matters is that the story is only to be found in the twelfth-century English source of Henry of Huntingdon. For this is Cnut as the English wanted to remember him: the king they had severed from his harsher Nordic roots and remade in their own image as a Christian and a gentleman.

  But, of course, a king who was absent from England for almost half his reign had to delegate power. Cnut had been quick to realize this and, as early as 1017, had taken ‘the whole government of England … and divided it into four parts’: Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. Wessex, for the time being, Cnut kept for himself; the other three he gave to so many trusted adherents. The result was to hasten the transformation of the Anglo-Saxon ealdorman into the Scandinavian loan-word eorl (‘earl’). The ealdorman was a figure deeply rooted in his shire; the earl, who was responsible for several shires, was a royal appointee who ruled a vast area arbitrarily assigned by the king.