by Neil Oliver
Back in England, Aethelred had been working hard to persuade his subjects that, humiliating payments of Danegeld notwithstanding, he was in control of his kingdom. In AD 1000 he led an army on a punitive attack on Cumberland — almost certainly in a bid to demonstrate his muscle. A fleet was dispatched at the same time, heading for the same destination and with a view to hobbling the Vikings operating around the Irish Sea, but bad weather made it impossible for the two forces to meet up. The expedition petered out, but the point had been made nonetheless.
Aethelred’s nickname of ‘Unready’ is easily misunderstood. For modern readers it suggests a man who was unprepared, or taken by surprise. In the language of the Anglo-Saxons, however, it meant ‘ill-advised’ and may refer to the short-sightedness of a policy like paying off the Vikings with Danegeld. England was fabulously rich and Aethelred could comfortably afford the sums he was laying out — but there were surely other advisors around able to counsel against the plan. Dishing out silver by the hundredweight might win the odd brief respite, but it encouraged others to come and try their hand at extortion as well. Apart from anything else, it just looked bad — weak — and has been described by one historian as ‘asking gold to do the work of steel’.
It was with a view to trying a wholly different tactic therefore that Aethelred ordered the slaughter of every ‘Danish’ man in the kingdom, on 13 November 1002. The official motivation for the killing was the discovery of an alleged Danish plot to kill the king, but while the paperwork from the time describes the move as ‘a most just extermination’, it was almost certainly the act of a king determined to turn the tables on a nation that had tormented him.
Whether the move was the king’s own idea, or yet more advice from some of those who had his ear, it was certainly a bold and ruthless tack to take. Since the order was issued on the feast day of the fifth Bishop of Tours, the ensuing horror was remembered as the St Brice’s Day Massacre. The resultant death toll is unknown, but historians believe many thousands died — apparently including Gunnhild, daughter of Harald Bluetooth and sister to Svein Forkbeard. The sources are unclear on the manner of her death, but she was certainly the wife of Pallig, a Danish-born eoldorman and erstwhile advisor to Aethelred. Gunnhild was in England as a hostage — a show of Olaf Tryggvasson’s good faith and insurance against any possibility of him reneging on his promises.
A glimpse of the real human cost of the attempted genocide was revealed in 2008 when archaeologists were called in to St John’s College, Oxford, in advance of building work in the quadrangle. What they found was a pile of skeletons — bodies that had been unceremoniously dumped in a ditch around 1,100 years ago. The remains of perhaps 39 separate individuals were eventually excavated and removed for further study, and the story told by their bones was one of savage brutality.
Ceri Falys, the bone specialist who carried out the analysis, catalogued scores of injuries inflicted on the victims — all of them young men. She found many had received multiple wounds, any one of which would have been enough to kill. Most upsetting, though, she noticed that the majority of the injuries had been inflicted from behind, on men trying to flee from their attackers. ‘Usually when people have been involved in hand-to-hand combat or are attacked you get evidence of this on the bones,’ she said. ‘You get cut marks on the forearms as they raise their arms to defend themselves, but we have minimal evidence of this on these skeletons. It seems that whoever was attacking them, it is likely they were just trying to run away.’
Laid out on trestle tables, the skeletons made for troubling viewing. One man, a large and powerful individual judging by the mass of his long bones, had been felled by a catastrophic blow to the back of both legs. The force had been enough to pass through not just the flesh, but through both thigh bones as well. He must have dropped like lumber, and the resultant blood loss and trauma would surely have been fatal. His attacker (or attackers) had not stopped there. His pelvis had been punctured by the point of a sword or spear. Someone had stood over him as he lay facedown on the ground and driven a weapon into his buttocks with such force it had gone through all the soft tissue, into the bone and right out the other side.
Next to him was the skeleton of a man whose skull bore multiple hack marks. Any one of them would have been sufficient to kill but his assailant had rained blows down on the back of the man’s head again and again. His pelvis too had been pierced through, also from behind. All the skeletons bore similar damage — testament to killings that were more butchery than simple execution. It was violence driven not just by the requirement to kill, but by hatred.
Given that the bones have been radiocarbon-dated to between AD 960 and 1020 it is clearly tempting to imagine they were victims of the St Brice’s Day Massacre. In the case of Oxford, the sources describe how the Danes there — Christians all — fled to their nearby St Fridewide’s Church in hope of sanctuary. Their English neighbours then barricaded them inside and burnt the building to the ground. In addition to the wounds on the skeletons, Ceri also found some of them were charred. Since there was no evidence of a fire in the ditch in which the bodies were dumped, they must have come into contact with fire elsewhere — further evidence that these were victims of Aethelred’s justice.
In all, the skeletons from St John’s College paint a gruesome picture — of fearful men running for their lives from those who had once been neighbours, even friends; of crazed violence meted out to men unable to defend themselves; of men burnt to death. Once the killing was over, the bodies were collected from wherever they had fallen and, Christian or not, they were denied even the courtesy of burial rites. Instead they were heaped into a ditch and left to rot for a thousand years and more.
Just or not, ill advised or not, the massacre did nothing to deter the Vikings. Still they came, and still Aethelred paid them off — and with ever larger sums. Though he could not stop the invaders, it was not for want of trying. Unready he may have been, but he certainly put in an effort to make life as difficult as possible for those forces ranged against him. He commissioned the building of a fleet, so the Viking ships might be tackled at sea, and also put in place the means to recruit fighting men at short notice. The tactics were well intentioned and practical, but ultimately ineffective. While Svein was ever on the rampage — perhaps driven in part by the urge to avenge his sister — he was not alone. As the millennium wore on there were Norwegians and Swedes too, including Thorkell the Tall. One of the quasi-legendary group of Viking mercenaries known as Jomsvikings, ‘blades for hire’, Thorkell led the force that ravaged eastern England until Aethelred came up with 48,000 pounds of silver.
In 1010 Thorkell’s men raided Canterbury and, as well as helping themselves to all the gold and silver they could carry, they collected numerous high-status captives for ransom. Chief among them was Aelfheah, the archbishop who had baptised Olaf Tryggvasson. The price on his head was 3,000 pounds of silver but Aelfheah ordered his people to refuse any payment on his behalf. For his audacity he was beaten to death by his captors, apparently with meat bones during a drunken feast. Thorkell was appalled by the murder and promptly turned his back on his erstwhile colleagues, preferring to serve Aethelred himself. It was in fact Thorkell the Tall who helped defend London against a Viking attack led by Svein Forkbeard in 1013.
Not even a Jomsviking was enough to defy Svein indefinitely, however, and despite the reverse at London the Viking invasion of 1013 finally achieved the ultimate goal. Broken and defeated at last, Aethelred abandoned his kingdom and fled to Normandy in December of that year, accompanied by Thorkell. On Christmas Day 1013 Svein Forkbeard was proclaimed King of England. He established a base at Gainsborough, in Lincolnshire, but took ill within weeks of his greatest triumph. During the first week in February, 1014 he died and the embalmed body of the all-conquering Viking was sent back to Denmark for burial in a church he had had built at Roskilde.
At Svein’s side when he died was his teenage son, Cnut, but rather than accept a Danish boy as their king,
the English opted for the devil they knew. Aethelred duly returned from his brief exile but, despite being handed the most unexpected of reprieves, he failed to capitalise on it. In a volatile situation that might have benefited from a steadying hand, Aethelred succeeded only in alienating his supporters. Even Thorkell cut him adrift and by the end of 1015 it was young Cnut’s star that was in the ascendant. Having been run out of England in the wake of his father’s death, he had secured the support of his elder brother, the newly crowned King Harald II of Denmark. By the end of 1015 he was back in England, with 200 ships and 10,000 men, and Aethelred seemingly had little stomach for the necessary fight.
The defence of England fell increasingly to his eldest son, Edmund, and before the end the young prince’s efforts in the face of Cnut’s Danes would earn him the nickname ‘Ironside’. He had demonstrated leadership and determination, but the tide was against him. At the Battle of Assandun, or Ashingdon, in Essex, on 18 October 1016, his Englishmen were utterly destroyed by the invaders. Treachery played its part in the defeat, in the form of a Mercian eoldorman named Eadric Streona, who has gone down in history as the greatest Anglo-Saxon traitor.
An advocate of Danegeld, Eadric had been among the loudest voices dissuading Aethelred from confronting his Danish tormentors on the battlefield. With Cnut on British soil and challenging for the crown, Eadric moved between the English and Danish camps, seeking advancement from whoever seemed to have the upper hand at any given moment. He began the Battle of Ashingdon on Edmund’s side, but turned his coat in the thick of the fighting so as to hand victory to the Danes.
Badly wounded in the fighting, Edmund withdrew from the field. Later, on the Island of Alney, in Gloucestershire, he met with Cnut and agreed to surrender to him all the lands of England north of the Thames. It was a humiliating return to the Danelaw, more or less, leaving Edmund Ironside with little more than the territory once defined by Alfred’s Wessex. It mattered little in the end, since the English King was dead within weeks — almost certainly from unhealed wounds, of the heart as well as of the body — and Cnut assumed control of all that had been his.
Cnut was made King of England at a ceremony in London on 6 January 1017. He is remembered as Cnut the Great, but the roots of his kingship were watered with a great deal of blood, some of it innocent. Eadric was nothing of the kind and was executed the same year. Thorkell won East Anglia for his troubles but Eadwig, teenage younger brother of Edmund and a possible focus for resistance, was put to death. The ex-king’s pregnant widow and son fled into exile, never to return. Aethelred’s widow was Emma, daughter of Richard, Duke of Normandy, and Cnut recognised her value at once. When he asked her to marry him, she agreed. Her son by Cnut — Harthacnut — would succeed his father as King of England, followed by Edward, one of her sons by Aethelred, remembered as Edward the Confessor.
By 1018 Cnut’s control of his new kingdom was complete. High on his list of priorities was paying off his army. No one values the presence of thousands of unemployed Viking warriors — not even a Viking king — and Cnut was quickly at work, sweating his new asset to raise the 72,000 pounds of silver he needed to send them back home happy and rich.
His elder brother, the Danish King Harald II, died in 1018. With the backing of a predominantly English force, Cnut returned home to secure the title for himself. Within a year he was successful, ruler of a greater empire than any other Viking. By 1028 he was recognised as King of Norway and parts of Sweden too. Cnut the Great indeed.
He counted most of Scandinavia as parts of his empire, but it seems it was England he held most dear. He certainly spent the majority of his time there and his choice of wife, an English king’s widow with connections to Normandy, underlined where his heart lay.
The Euro, the currency of the European Union, might sound like a modern concept, but it is not. Taking a leaf out of Edgar the Peaceful’s book, Cnut set about standardising the coins of England and Scandinavia — so that in the eleventh century the centre of monetary union was not Germany, or France, but England. He also altered the weight of the ounce in use throughout his empire for measuring gold and silver so that it matched that of the Byzantine Empire — nothing less than an attempt to integrate his own empire into what was effectively a medieval single European market.
In 1027 Cnut was invited to Rome to watch Pope John XIX crown the new Holy Roman Emperor. Onto the head of Conrad II the Holy Father placed Die Reichskrone — the Imperial Crown — and Cnut was impressed. Conrad would subsequently give Cnut the territory of Schleswig, the land bridge between Denmark and mainland Europe, as a token of his affection. Cnut’s own daughter by Emma, Gunnhild of Denmark, would marry Conrad’s son Henry, later Henry III and Holy Roman Emperor like his father. Cnut had arrived, and he knew it.
The Imperial Crown is on display now behind the glass of a theft-proof case in the Schatzkammer museum of the Hofburg Palace Treasury in Vienna. I was not allowed to touch it, not even to open the case. It is, after all, over a thousand years old. It is unique and utterly irreplaceable. When the museum refused all requests for handling, I was only relieved. It was probably commissioned originally by Otto I, whose baleful presence had so exercised Harald Bluetooth, and then augmented by Conrad II himself. It is quite unlike any crown I have ever seen before. Rather than a round shape, surely the best fit for a head, it is octagonal and formed by eight hinged plates. On top of the front plate is a golden cross and a single arch of gold connects the front of the crown to the back, like a cock’s comb. The whole thing is made of 22-carat gold. It is this purity that gives the crown its distinctive buttery colour. Just the warmth of the light reflected from that gold is enough to snatch away a person’s breath. Then there are the jewels and pearls: 144 amethysts, emeralds and sapphires (blue and green being the colours favoured by Byzantine emperors as well). It is those gemstones that are most surprising of all, and most affecting. The technology of the day did not allow for cutting such stones into faceted shapes and so they were polished smooth instead. Rounded like river pebbles and reminiscent of boiled sweets, they are properly described as being ‘en cabochon’ — like little heads. Each stone is held in its setting by fine gold wires, to allow light to pass right through. The effect is as though each has a tiny light inside it. As well as the gemstones there are 144 pearls. The arch of the crown is decorated with scores of seed pearls that spell out the words, CHUONRADUS DEI GRATIA — Conrad, by the Grace of God, on one side, and then ROMANORU IMPERATOR AUG — Emperor of the Romans and Augustus, on the other.
Four of the plates are decorated only with stones and pearls while the other four bear scenes and inscriptions from the Bible, rendered in cloisonné enamel and bordered with sapphires and pearls. Of the images, the one likely to have impressed Cnut the most is that of Christ enthroned as Lord of Hosts. Above the picture are the words PER ME REGES REGNANT — By Me, Kings Reign.
There is a lofty grandeur about the Imperial Crown that somehow makes the British regalia in the Tower of London seem gaudy by comparison. Perhaps it is the great age of the piece that makes the difference. The original British Crown Jewels, some of which dated back to the time of Edward the Confessor, were destroyed in 1649 on the orders of Oliver Cromwell. Determined to obliterate all symbols of royalty and monarchy, he saw to it that the gold in them was melted down and the precious stones sold off. Given that none of the items on display now dates back any further than the late seventeenth century, when set along side the thousand-year-old Imperial Crown of Otto I and his successors, they seem to smack of new money.
In any event, the image of the thing stayed with Cnut long after he departed Rome for his return journey. He had walked side by side with the new Holy Roman Emperor and by the time he got home he understood that he too was more than just a king. Back in England he commissioned his own ‘imperial crown’ — as befitted his conception of himself as nothing less than an emperor.
He was also very much a Christian ruler, having accepted baptism at some point before his king
ship began, and always at pains to show his support for the Church and its monasteries. The Liber Vitae — ‘the Book of Life’ — written in 1031 for Winchester Cathedral, begins with an illustration of Cnut. He is shown together with his wife, Emma, and he is presenting the cathedral with a gold altar cross. Looking on are some of the monks and also Christ in Majesty, flanked by Mary and St Peter. Cnut has one hand on the cross and the other on the hilt of his sword, a reminder that while his power was a gift from God, it had taken a warrior to claim it in the first place. The Book of Life was basically one kept by a religious house and listing the names of all those guaranteed entry to heaven. What makes the Liber Vitae in Winchester so fascinating is that since it was made during Cnut’s reign, we can be confident the artist of the illustration knew what the king looked like. It therefore provides us with a very rare likeness of a Viking king.
In the Knytlinga saga, written in the thirteenth century, Cnut is described as ‘exceptionally tall and strong, and the handsomest of men, all except for his nose, that was thin, high-set, and rather hooked. He had a fair complexion nonetheless, and a fine, thick head of hair. His eyes were better than those of other men, both the handsomer and the keener of their sight.’
Cnut the Great was the most successful Viking of them all. He ruled England for the best part of 20 years and when he died, in 1035, he was entombed in Winchester Cathedral. When the present building was completed in 1093, Cnut’s bones and those of other ancient kings of England were placed in specially made mortuary chests. Winchester was Royalist during the English Civil War and held out determinedly. When Cromwell’s Roundheads finally gained control of the city, they vented their frustrations on the cathedral, among other places. The ‘idolatry’ of the great stained glass window above the western doorway was especially offensive to their eyes and they used the bones from the mortuary chests utterly to destroy it. Later the good citizens of Winchester gathered up all the fragments and used them to create the stunning, abstract window that glorifies the building today. The old bones were gathered together too — but it was impossible to tell who was who. The jumble was simply split between the various boxes, so that the mortal remains of Cnut the Great are now mixed with those of everyone else. Someday genetic science may allow Cnut’s bones to be identified and gathered together in one place, but for now he and his fellow kings are a royal muddle.
