1035 saw two events of significance for the future destiny of England - the death of King Cnut which saw the disintegration of his Empire, much as the deaths of Offa and Brian Borum had seen the disintegration of their achievements, and the accession to the Duchy of Normandy of William. In England, Harold of England, Cnut's illegitimate son by Aelgifu of Northampton, became Anglo-Dane Regent but the country split into its older North-South resentments as Mercia and Northumbria organised against Wessex. The following year, apparently seeking to exploit the situation, Ethelred's sons, Alfred and Edward, returned to England but Alfred was seized by Harold, savagely blinded and died at Ely. Edward understandably returned to the safety of Normandy which he seems to have considered more his natural home than England.
The Witenagemot, a council of the ruling elite, sought to resolve the situation in 1037 by making Harold King of England [Harold I] but Harold died three years later in 1040 to be succeeded by Harthacnut [Cnut II], another son of Cnut (by Emma). In 2014, Cnut II's tax collectors were murdered in Worcester and the Danes burned the local monastery to the ground suggesting tensions that ran deeper than mere squabbles between members of the aristocratic elite. Cnut II himself seems to have pragmatically seen Edward, known as 'The Confessor', as his natural successor so that there seems to have been an implicit policy that the Kingdom was best held together by an 'understanding' between the natural leader of the Danish interest and the natural heir to the English interest. What is clear from subsequent years is that the pious Edward was not holding onto power by the force of his personality. He was not a natural representative of the native English or Danish interest and consistently looked to the Continent for his values. He was legitimate, convenient and circumscribed. Cnut II died in 1042. Edward, 'the 'King's brother', son of Ethelred the Ill-Advised, was crowned in 1043 and married his powerful sponsor's [Earl Godwin] daughter, Edith in 1045.
Godwin made Edward King and expected him to continue to defer to the most powerful noble in the land. Godwin was certainly the power behind the English throne by the 1040s. Earl Godwin had risen under Cnut I as the loyal English fixer for the Danish interest and almost certainly the architect of the merger of Anglo-Danish interests into one national force. However, something went seriously wrong in 1051, when William of Normandy visited England. Edward made a fateful and foolish promise of the English succession to the Duke of Normandy during what appears to have been a court quarrel between the Godwin interest and Edward over the latter's preference for Norman advisers and friends. One senses that Edward, a weak King by most standards, was looking to his old friends from his exile to counter the constraining influence of the Anglo-Danish aristocracy who represented a past of which he had nothing but bad memories, noting that his own brother had been effectively murdered by someone from that interest in 1036. The dynastic is the personal in early medieval England and this ill-understood personal dimension would eventually seal the fate of the English line of Kings.
Godwin is not only exiled but a Norman, Robert Champert de Jumieges, is appointed Archbishop of Canterbury although he lasted only eighteen months. Whatever the religious meaning of this, its political meaning was that Edward was hook, line and sinker committed to the Norman interest as counterplay to the Anglo-Danish interest. The trajectory that leads remorselessly to the seizure of England by the Normans started in earnest in these political struggles of 1051. There is another change of fortune when Early Godwin dies accidentally. Some balance is restored with his son Harold's commitment to the
King's cause although we can safely assume that the pragmatic and cynical Harold was far more committed to his own and his family's interest.
Harold is leader of the English army. This represented a considerable force within a polity constantly threatened by invasions at the first sign of weakness and the nation craved order after the experiences before Cnut came to the throne and in the difficult period between his death and the Kingship of Edward. Edward, it would seem, was the creature of his aristocracy and his brief break out in 1051-1052 was clearly unsustainable. The result was a
decisive shift against the Norman interest. Archbishop Robert of
Canterbury was forced into exile and replaced with Stigand, clearly no
Norman.
The power of the Godwin interest expanded when Harold's brother Tostig was appointed Earl of Northumberland on the death of Siward. No doubt the intention was to have the Godwins control Northumbria, the English army and the court in a triple encirclement of a weak King in anticipation of the succession. The systematic extension of Godwin power takes another turn in 1057 when Leofric, Earl of Mercia, dies and his son Aelfgar succeeds at the price of ceding East Anglia to another brother of Harold, Garth (although Aelfgar is succeeded in turn by his young son Edwin in 1062 without incident). Yet another brother, Leofwine, takes an Earldom that covers the counties surrounding London. Looked at from Normandy, these manouevres seemed destined to make Edward's personal promise of the succession to Duke William meaningless without decisive military action by the Duke.
There is another factor in the game - the Norwegians on the other side of the North Sea. Their intervention will eventually prove decisive if not to their benefit. An attempted Norwegian invasion is repulsed in 1058 but they are ever-present as a threat that almost destroyed England in the past and could do so again. But, after a decade of Harold's military victories against Welsh and Norwegians alike, an unfortunate accident brings matters to a head. Harold, still only a military leader and the leading aristocrat answerable to the king he serves, is shipwrecked off the Normandy coast (1064) and falls into the hands of Duke William. Duke William takes the opportunity to make him swear an oath to accept the promise given by Edward during the brief Norman ascendency at the English court in 1051-52. Oath-keeping is important to the Franks and Normans but a more contingent matter to the Anglo-Danes, especially when extracted in a situation where there was little choice in the matter, so, returning to England, Harold has little intention of keeping his promise, especially when his military leadership is no less proven that of William.
What is about to happen now is a perfect storm for Harold. He has alienated the greedy and ambitious Normans, he has had his eye off the ball because of his accidental absence overseas and the Norwegians are lurking on the margins waiting for an opportunity for plunder. At this point, the Northumbrians revolt against the imposed Godwin brother Tostig (1065) who is then forced into exile. The personal is again the dynastic as Tostig becomes enraged at Harold's failure to support him and then, inopportunely, King Edward dies.
Monday 28 March 2016
Wednesday 23 March 2016
980-1093: A Note on the British Margins
Regular readers will have noted that we have hardly referred to the areas outside England. There is good reason for this.The prosperity of the British Isles is concentrated in Southern Britain. England has reached a higher level of state formation at each stage in our story than its margins and it became much more linked to continental civilisation as Rome restored its moral authority. It is not a matter of disrespect but simply a recognition that the warlords and small kingdoms of the rest of Britain are still lagging developmentally behind even the rough and ready English polity and that descriptions of their infighting until the eleventh century would be about as instructive as that of African kingdoms only minimally connected to the global system in the Middle Ages.
However, Scotland has by this time become a much more developed Kingdom under Malcolm II (1005-34) and Duncan I (1034-1040) than hitherto but even Malcolm is forced to acknowledge the overlordship of Cnut of England, Norway and Denmark in 1031 without a fight. King of Scotland gives us the wrong image because what is now Scotland was carved up between multiple small kingdoms (not only Scotland but Strathclyde, Moray and the Norse-Gael 'kingdoms' of the North West as well as English eorldoms). This was not a very different situation from Ireland under Brian Boruma or Wales before the brief flowering of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn.
Famously (thanks to Shakespeare), Mac Bethad mac Findlaich murdered Duncan in 1040 and made himself King but there is no romance in this - it is just the standard competitive thuggery of petty kings (much worse was happening in England as we shall see in the next posting). 'Macbeth' is interesting, however, for his introduction of feudalism to Scotland under the influence of Norman exiles and the introduction of feudalism may have had asignificant role in ensuring the resilience of the Scottish State. Mac Bethad found himself embroiled in the struggles for power in England and an English invasion in 1054 resulted indirectly in the Kingship of Malcolm III (1058-1093) since the English appear to have restored Malcolm, son of the murdered Duncan I, to the Kingship of Strathclyde in that year while Mac Bethad's stepson Lulach lasted barely a year as King of Scotland.
Understandably, the successful Norman invasion of England and the brutal conquest of the North of England by the Normans changed the balance of power in Britain considerably. Although Scotland remained an independent entity for the vast bulk of subsequent history (until the Union in 1707), it often had to fight for that independence. The outcome was never certain. Both Wales and Ireland, on the other hand, moved steadily from near-anarchy to Anglo-Norman domination over the centuries, largely missing out (except for very brief experiments by strong men) on the national state option. We might say that Scotland got into the state formation business in the nick of time even if, in the end (or is it the end?), it had to 'sell out' (literally) to the more material business of satisfying its trading interests as the deliberate choice of its own elite in a form of quasi-submission to the Crown.
This Scottish decision, freely made by those who purported to be the leaders of its nationhood, could be seen as a dry run for the current predicament of the United Kingdom in its relationship to the larger if ramshackle European Empire - after all, what invasion could not achieve, elite greed for gold might deliver. As for the Celtic fringe, its binding to England in a dynastically driven Union only started to unravel seriously within the last hundred years, a process that is still unfolding as we write. In the end, all that may be left will be England and its satellites, Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, the Falklands and a few tiny Crown Colonies - oddities within the new Unholy Roman Empire over the Channel. As the English elite transfers its sovereignty to a larger empire, the 'Celtic fringe' becomes an important factor in shifting the democratic' balance against popular English desire for the same sort of sovereign independence that the 'Celts' have apparently made their 'raison d'etre'. For the Celtic elites, submitting to the European Empire is almost an act of defiance against past and present submission to the British Empire while the poor bloody English, ruled by foreign imperial masters since 1066, and only getting a quasi-democratic State through perpetual struggle over some 350 years, find themselves shunted willy-nilly into the next Empire that comes along. The English may yet end up being the last people on earth to be liberated from any Empire! To the Celts, this is poetic justice. To the English, perhaps the final injustice.
Meanwhile, William the Conqueror was able to turn his attention to Scotland in 1072. Malcolm made obeisance and gave his son Duncan up as a hostage. When the Conqueror's successor, William Rufus, was distracted by a civil war in Normandy, Malcolm tried his luck with an invasion of England in 1091. He was faced with an Anglo-Norman army that was so formidable that he came to his senses and recognised Rufus as overlord, thanks to the mediation of Edgar Atheling and Robert Curthose. However, Malcolm and Rufus quarrelled over property rights and war broke out again. Malcolm was killed in 1093 in an Anglo-Norman ambush. Nevertheless, although defeated, Malcolm can be reasonably said to be Rufus' equal or near-equal to all intents and purposes. Whatever the balance of power, it is true that, by the end of Malcolm's reign, Scotland was holding its own as a viable State. This was not quite the case in Wales and Ireland.
Wales was no different from Scotland a century or so earlier, or indeed England before and even after Offa, in being, normally, a quasi-anarchy of small principalities. Harold Godwinson waged a campaign against Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, King of Gwyneth and Powys since 1039, in 1056, one year after Gruffydd had become King of Wales, following the same trajectory as Brian Boruma and indeed Offa in England. In all these cases, a strong man made himself lord over a whole people but the whole enterprise then collapsed into its former state on his death (in this case, in 1063). The Danish Empire of Cnut (as we shall see) similarly fell apart on his death in 1035. In Gruffydd's case, the English clearly saw his emergence as a potential threat and mounted a further invasion in 1063 after an surprise attack on his court the year before. Gruffydd was forced to hide out in Snowdonia and was murdered by some of his own men in what appears to have been a vendetta. Wales seems to have presented no direct threat to the Anglo-Normans by the time of their arrival on the scene and was relatively easily contained.
In Ireland, the Danish presence around the city that they founded at Dublin (analogous to the trading centre of York or Jorvik in Northern England), alongside the unifying campaigns of King Brian Boruma, helped to kick start the process of state formation in the second island of the British Isles even if it was mostly to prove abortive. By the final quarter of the century, the Danish presence is fully Christianised and mostly committed to peaceful trading so what we have is not the struggle we saw in England between rival ethnic communities. Southern British Kings, both English and Danish, had access to more significant resources in their struggle to own a much more valuable asset than Ireland. Brian Boruma represented only the first stage in Ireland's potential for statehood through his steady, often bloody, slow but still only partial unification of the country as a proto-polity. It is a chaotic business - Boruma dies at the great battle of Clontarf (1014) that is supposed (wrongly) in legend to have defeated Danish raiders and 'saved' Ireland. Ireland is more conceptually united after than before his death but it cannot be called by any stretch of the imagination a coherent well administered state and the unification process stalls as the English equivalent once did after Offa.
However, Scotland has by this time become a much more developed Kingdom under Malcolm II (1005-34) and Duncan I (1034-1040) than hitherto but even Malcolm is forced to acknowledge the overlordship of Cnut of England, Norway and Denmark in 1031 without a fight. King of Scotland gives us the wrong image because what is now Scotland was carved up between multiple small kingdoms (not only Scotland but Strathclyde, Moray and the Norse-Gael 'kingdoms' of the North West as well as English eorldoms). This was not a very different situation from Ireland under Brian Boruma or Wales before the brief flowering of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn.
Famously (thanks to Shakespeare), Mac Bethad mac Findlaich murdered Duncan in 1040 and made himself King but there is no romance in this - it is just the standard competitive thuggery of petty kings (much worse was happening in England as we shall see in the next posting). 'Macbeth' is interesting, however, for his introduction of feudalism to Scotland under the influence of Norman exiles and the introduction of feudalism may have had asignificant role in ensuring the resilience of the Scottish State. Mac Bethad found himself embroiled in the struggles for power in England and an English invasion in 1054 resulted indirectly in the Kingship of Malcolm III (1058-1093) since the English appear to have restored Malcolm, son of the murdered Duncan I, to the Kingship of Strathclyde in that year while Mac Bethad's stepson Lulach lasted barely a year as King of Scotland.
Understandably, the successful Norman invasion of England and the brutal conquest of the North of England by the Normans changed the balance of power in Britain considerably. Although Scotland remained an independent entity for the vast bulk of subsequent history (until the Union in 1707), it often had to fight for that independence. The outcome was never certain. Both Wales and Ireland, on the other hand, moved steadily from near-anarchy to Anglo-Norman domination over the centuries, largely missing out (except for very brief experiments by strong men) on the national state option. We might say that Scotland got into the state formation business in the nick of time even if, in the end (or is it the end?), it had to 'sell out' (literally) to the more material business of satisfying its trading interests as the deliberate choice of its own elite in a form of quasi-submission to the Crown.
This Scottish decision, freely made by those who purported to be the leaders of its nationhood, could be seen as a dry run for the current predicament of the United Kingdom in its relationship to the larger if ramshackle European Empire - after all, what invasion could not achieve, elite greed for gold might deliver. As for the Celtic fringe, its binding to England in a dynastically driven Union only started to unravel seriously within the last hundred years, a process that is still unfolding as we write. In the end, all that may be left will be England and its satellites, Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, the Falklands and a few tiny Crown Colonies - oddities within the new Unholy Roman Empire over the Channel. As the English elite transfers its sovereignty to a larger empire, the 'Celtic fringe' becomes an important factor in shifting the democratic' balance against popular English desire for the same sort of sovereign independence that the 'Celts' have apparently made their 'raison d'etre'. For the Celtic elites, submitting to the European Empire is almost an act of defiance against past and present submission to the British Empire while the poor bloody English, ruled by foreign imperial masters since 1066, and only getting a quasi-democratic State through perpetual struggle over some 350 years, find themselves shunted willy-nilly into the next Empire that comes along. The English may yet end up being the last people on earth to be liberated from any Empire! To the Celts, this is poetic justice. To the English, perhaps the final injustice.
Meanwhile, William the Conqueror was able to turn his attention to Scotland in 1072. Malcolm made obeisance and gave his son Duncan up as a hostage. When the Conqueror's successor, William Rufus, was distracted by a civil war in Normandy, Malcolm tried his luck with an invasion of England in 1091. He was faced with an Anglo-Norman army that was so formidable that he came to his senses and recognised Rufus as overlord, thanks to the mediation of Edgar Atheling and Robert Curthose. However, Malcolm and Rufus quarrelled over property rights and war broke out again. Malcolm was killed in 1093 in an Anglo-Norman ambush. Nevertheless, although defeated, Malcolm can be reasonably said to be Rufus' equal or near-equal to all intents and purposes. Whatever the balance of power, it is true that, by the end of Malcolm's reign, Scotland was holding its own as a viable State. This was not quite the case in Wales and Ireland.
Wales was no different from Scotland a century or so earlier, or indeed England before and even after Offa, in being, normally, a quasi-anarchy of small principalities. Harold Godwinson waged a campaign against Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, King of Gwyneth and Powys since 1039, in 1056, one year after Gruffydd had become King of Wales, following the same trajectory as Brian Boruma and indeed Offa in England. In all these cases, a strong man made himself lord over a whole people but the whole enterprise then collapsed into its former state on his death (in this case, in 1063). The Danish Empire of Cnut (as we shall see) similarly fell apart on his death in 1035. In Gruffydd's case, the English clearly saw his emergence as a potential threat and mounted a further invasion in 1063 after an surprise attack on his court the year before. Gruffydd was forced to hide out in Snowdonia and was murdered by some of his own men in what appears to have been a vendetta. Wales seems to have presented no direct threat to the Anglo-Normans by the time of their arrival on the scene and was relatively easily contained.
In Ireland, the Danish presence around the city that they founded at Dublin (analogous to the trading centre of York or Jorvik in Northern England), alongside the unifying campaigns of King Brian Boruma, helped to kick start the process of state formation in the second island of the British Isles even if it was mostly to prove abortive. By the final quarter of the century, the Danish presence is fully Christianised and mostly committed to peaceful trading so what we have is not the struggle we saw in England between rival ethnic communities. Southern British Kings, both English and Danish, had access to more significant resources in their struggle to own a much more valuable asset than Ireland. Brian Boruma represented only the first stage in Ireland's potential for statehood through his steady, often bloody, slow but still only partial unification of the country as a proto-polity. It is a chaotic business - Boruma dies at the great battle of Clontarf (1014) that is supposed (wrongly) in legend to have defeated Danish raiders and 'saved' Ireland. Ireland is more conceptually united after than before his death but it cannot be called by any stretch of the imagination a coherent well administered state and the unification process stalls as the English equivalent once did after Offa.
Thursday 17 March 2016
1016-1035: The Reign of King Cnut
If ever there was a gangster-type in early medieval English history, it was Eadric Streona, Ealdorman of Mercia, hit man and enforcer for Ethelred the Poorly Advised and a man who was at the centre of every bit of rumness going on as Danes and Anglo-Saxons slugged it out for control of the Kingdom. In 1015, he had betrayed his own father-in-law Ethelred and switched sides to Cnut, then back to Edmund Ironside, only to walk away from the decisive battle at Assandun, probably in a deliberate act of treachery. He may have been implicated in Edmund's murder. It is a sign of Cnut's consummate ruthlessness and good judgment that one of his most decisive early acts was to kill Eadric and three other allied nobles somewhat ostentatiously at Christmas 1017 for 'treachery' to his own liege lord (Edmund). Eadric is replaced, however, not with a Dane but with a loyal Anglo-Saxon, Leofric - an approach very different to that we will see from the Normans.
We have already reviewed the way the Church became a useful tool for the King and the King for the Church in creating reconciliation between peoples whose mutual hatred had probably reached a pitch of frenzy and fear by the time of Cnut's accession. We should equally be aware of Cnut's determination to restore a proper relationship between Crown and subjects which was one of submission, sanctified by the Church, regardless of ethnic origins.
The ethnic blindness of the State as a core (later 'liberalised') value represents the basic disinterest of Crown power in the petty enthusiasms of its subjects, given the need for order to run a family business profitably. It is an attitude that will compete with democratic racism at the height of the British Empire but find its fulfilment again in the liberalism of the modern British State. Intellectual justifications for anti-ethnicism in modern liberal society may be less decisive in the practice than the blunt realities of maintaining good order under 'auctoritas', an attitude that derives in turn from the techniques for the maintenance of power linked to 'romanitas' for which the Church was still the prime vector of ideas.
Already King by right of conquest, Cnut becomes King formally with his acceptance by an Assembly at Oxford where he promised to obey the laws of Edgar the Peacable, essentially to be a King working within primarily Anglo-Saxon custom and law. By 1028, he is not only King of England (sub-divided into Four Kingdoms which are really viceroyalties in 1017) and of Denmark (from 1019) but of Norway. This latter brings overlordship of the Northern Viking sea-going community (Orkney, Shetland, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man and Greenland). In 1031, Cnut travelled to Scotland (by this point invasions are no longer required) and forced Malcolm I of Scotland to acknowledge his overlordship.
By this time, Cnut could rightly be called an Emperor. The period is now looked on as a valuable nearly two decades of peace and prosperity for England, giving it perhaps a taste for ordered submission to Kings and Empires. This is not to say that Cnut is not anything other than a plunderer like all conquering Kings but only that, unlike the later Normans, he is happy to share the opportunities with the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy for the sake of good order. By 1025, although it was illegal to sell Anglo-Saxons even slaves overseas, it was widely rumoured that Cnut's sister was running a very profitable human trafficking operation exporting English girls to Scandinavia for sex and domestic servitude. Whether true or not (there are reasons to be cautious), the very fact of the rumour suggests awareness of this aspect of conquest as plunder which is, after all, the very basis of monarchy despite all the constraining religious gloss and romantic sentiment put upon it.
We have already reviewed the way the Church became a useful tool for the King and the King for the Church in creating reconciliation between peoples whose mutual hatred had probably reached a pitch of frenzy and fear by the time of Cnut's accession. We should equally be aware of Cnut's determination to restore a proper relationship between Crown and subjects which was one of submission, sanctified by the Church, regardless of ethnic origins.
The ethnic blindness of the State as a core (later 'liberalised') value represents the basic disinterest of Crown power in the petty enthusiasms of its subjects, given the need for order to run a family business profitably. It is an attitude that will compete with democratic racism at the height of the British Empire but find its fulfilment again in the liberalism of the modern British State. Intellectual justifications for anti-ethnicism in modern liberal society may be less decisive in the practice than the blunt realities of maintaining good order under 'auctoritas', an attitude that derives in turn from the techniques for the maintenance of power linked to 'romanitas' for which the Church was still the prime vector of ideas.
Already King by right of conquest, Cnut becomes King formally with his acceptance by an Assembly at Oxford where he promised to obey the laws of Edgar the Peacable, essentially to be a King working within primarily Anglo-Saxon custom and law. By 1028, he is not only King of England (sub-divided into Four Kingdoms which are really viceroyalties in 1017) and of Denmark (from 1019) but of Norway. This latter brings overlordship of the Northern Viking sea-going community (Orkney, Shetland, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man and Greenland). In 1031, Cnut travelled to Scotland (by this point invasions are no longer required) and forced Malcolm I of Scotland to acknowledge his overlordship.
By this time, Cnut could rightly be called an Emperor. The period is now looked on as a valuable nearly two decades of peace and prosperity for England, giving it perhaps a taste for ordered submission to Kings and Empires. This is not to say that Cnut is not anything other than a plunderer like all conquering Kings but only that, unlike the later Normans, he is happy to share the opportunities with the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy for the sake of good order. By 1025, although it was illegal to sell Anglo-Saxons even slaves overseas, it was widely rumoured that Cnut's sister was running a very profitable human trafficking operation exporting English girls to Scandinavia for sex and domestic servitude. Whether true or not (there are reasons to be cautious), the very fact of the rumour suggests awareness of this aspect of conquest as plunder which is, after all, the very basis of monarchy despite all the constraining religious gloss and romantic sentiment put upon it.
Monday 7 March 2016
979-1016: Ethelred the Poorly Advised
Danish raids start up within a year of Ethelred's accession in 979. The Danes are responding to a political reality: Ethelred's difficulties in re-uniting the Kingdom after the murder of Edward the Martyr. We have already looked at the immediate effect of the raids on the Church but matters become truly serious in 991 when, at the Battle of Maldon, the Danes inflict their first major victory over the English (led by Byrhtnoth of Essex) in over a century. The raids intensify on English weakness so that the English King is reduced to paying out what amounts to protection money (called Danegeld) to buy off the raiders - 10,000 pounds of silver in 991 alone. It is not a strategy that works particularly well. The raiding is now led by a serious player indeed. Sweyn Forkbeard, King of Denmark, leads the attack in 994. The implication is no longer just plunder or even settlement but possible control of the total asset. There is nothing decisive for a while but there is another raid in 997 and the situation remains unstable until Ethelred makes a most serious blunder.
Before that mistake, Ethelred makes another, a fateful step for his line and for the English people, arguably still the last peoples who have yet to be liberated from the imperial yoke to be created within the next century. In 1002 he marries Emma, daughter of Richard Duke of Normandy, in a desperate attempt to draw this militarily formidable Christianised Viking Duchy into his orbit as an ally. His second and more immediately foolish blunder, in that same year, was to try to exterminate the Danes settled in England in the infamous St. Brice's Day Massacre. In Oxford, the Danes sheltered in St. Frideswide's Minster Church only to have it burned down with them inside.
What happened was nasty bit of genocidal mania, triggering analogies with modern Balkans thuggery. It takes the shine off any righteous outrage felt by the English at their own treatment by the Normans later in the century - but there we have it, a bit of ethnic cleansing that was, in political terms, worse than cruel, it failed. Even if the targets were unreliable Danish mercenaries (according to some archaeological evidence), the King spoke in brutal terms after the massacre and without remorse: "a decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination." What actually happened is disputed but it may have been the worst set of massacres in several places between the undoubtedly even more brutal killings of Boudicca and William I. Certainly, whoever was advising the King was judged by history to have been a fool but the bigger fool was the man who took the advice.
Killing peasants is one thing, killing the daughter of King Sweyn's sister, Gunhild (who just happened to bear his mother's name), and all her family in Oxford must count as beyond stupidity. A year later (2003), Sweyn responded to the massacres, landed on the East Anglian coast and sacked Norwich. It might be noted here that we probably allowed ourselves a dash too much cynicism about the Church's motives in eventually switching sides from the English to the Danish Kingship but it is reasonable to suppose that burning innocent people to death and desanctifying and destroying a holy place through mass murder would have upset even the most hardened and political bishop even if the King placed the blame firmly on the massacred. Ethelred may have been sensitive to this since he was quick to order its lavish rebuilding.
Indeed, the pressure we have noted on the Danish King (yes, we know this is a spoiler) to recognise the English 'martyrs' murdered by the Danes could be seen as a strategy of reconcilation between ethnic communities that was managed by the Church to show that murder as an instrument of policy has political costs. On the Continent, the Church was also taming the Normans and the Franks through the institution of at least minimal rules to limit the barbarism of war. This was a process, designed to protect the innocent, that would take on a life of its own with the later notion of the 'just war' and the diversion of violence into the Crusades against the Saracens. Given the nature of barbarian culture, this internally civilising effect of the Church must be granted to it, even if its malign redirection of violence outwards is something we are still living with.
But back to the story. Sweyn of Denmark remains in England until 1005 but returns home to raise more forces in 1005. He is back in 1006 and marches into the heart of Wessex through Berkshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire. Matters worsen - 80 English ships are burned to destruction in 1009 through the treachery of an English captain. This may give us a clue to the demoralisation and disaffection on the English side. Another Danish army appears that year led by Hemming and Thorkill the Tall. This new force burns Oxford in 1010 and then moves across to East Anglia where presumably it would have had considerable support from worried Danish settlers on the front-line with Anglo-Saxon Essex.
Two years later, the Danes raid Canterbury. We have already told of the murder of Alphage of Canterbury and the destruction of the Cathedral but it is clear that atrocities are not treated lightly even by the raiders. If an English captain can betray his own kind in one year, a Danish warlord, Thorkill, can be so disgusted by the murder of an Archbishop that he can switch sides and join the English in another. What we are seeing here is anarchy, inter-ethnic violence and warlordism under an incompetent King and it can only get worse unless someone gets a grip of the situation. It is at this point (1013) that Sweyn Forkbeard comes back to take decisive action (some Englishmen might by now have preferred a competent Danish to an incompetent English King), landing at Sandwich in Kent and restoring order where his writ could run. Three more years of hell are required before matters are settled.
Understandably, the Danelaw accepted Sweyn as ruler of England almost immediately. By this point, the situation has almost certainly degenerated into frightened ethnic communities who have moved from suspicion to full-on hate but it is clear that the Southern English do not have the backing of Northen Anglo-Saxons. Ethelred scuttled to Normandy and Sweyn made a triumphal progress up the River Trent, a key frontier river, to Gainsborough where he received the submission of the Northumbrians (who probably had no particular love of Wessex in any case), the men of Lindsay and the Danish settlers of North-East Mercia. Sweyn, however, died in 1014. Ethelred is briefly restored in the confusion but the Danish Army in England is quick to elect Cnut, son of Sweyn, as King in a counter move.
Ethelred's murderous ways fail to leave him even at the end. He undertakes another genocidal campaign against Lindsey (Lincolnshire) for its 'treachery' before expiring in 2016 and leaving the throne to Edmund II Ironside. In that year, Edmund and Cnut battle it out until, quite quickly, Edmund and Cnut agree to call a truce which becomes an agreement that leaves Wessex to the English line and the rest of England to Cnut. By the end of the year, Edmund has been murdered and Cnut is King. One suspects that the people of Wessex would be highly nervous at this juncture but the new King proves to be statesmanlike - of which more in the next posting.
Before that mistake, Ethelred makes another, a fateful step for his line and for the English people, arguably still the last peoples who have yet to be liberated from the imperial yoke to be created within the next century. In 1002 he marries Emma, daughter of Richard Duke of Normandy, in a desperate attempt to draw this militarily formidable Christianised Viking Duchy into his orbit as an ally. His second and more immediately foolish blunder, in that same year, was to try to exterminate the Danes settled in England in the infamous St. Brice's Day Massacre. In Oxford, the Danes sheltered in St. Frideswide's Minster Church only to have it burned down with them inside.
What happened was nasty bit of genocidal mania, triggering analogies with modern Balkans thuggery. It takes the shine off any righteous outrage felt by the English at their own treatment by the Normans later in the century - but there we have it, a bit of ethnic cleansing that was, in political terms, worse than cruel, it failed. Even if the targets were unreliable Danish mercenaries (according to some archaeological evidence), the King spoke in brutal terms after the massacre and without remorse: "a decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination." What actually happened is disputed but it may have been the worst set of massacres in several places between the undoubtedly even more brutal killings of Boudicca and William I. Certainly, whoever was advising the King was judged by history to have been a fool but the bigger fool was the man who took the advice.
Killing peasants is one thing, killing the daughter of King Sweyn's sister, Gunhild (who just happened to bear his mother's name), and all her family in Oxford must count as beyond stupidity. A year later (2003), Sweyn responded to the massacres, landed on the East Anglian coast and sacked Norwich. It might be noted here that we probably allowed ourselves a dash too much cynicism about the Church's motives in eventually switching sides from the English to the Danish Kingship but it is reasonable to suppose that burning innocent people to death and desanctifying and destroying a holy place through mass murder would have upset even the most hardened and political bishop even if the King placed the blame firmly on the massacred. Ethelred may have been sensitive to this since he was quick to order its lavish rebuilding.
Indeed, the pressure we have noted on the Danish King (yes, we know this is a spoiler) to recognise the English 'martyrs' murdered by the Danes could be seen as a strategy of reconcilation between ethnic communities that was managed by the Church to show that murder as an instrument of policy has political costs. On the Continent, the Church was also taming the Normans and the Franks through the institution of at least minimal rules to limit the barbarism of war. This was a process, designed to protect the innocent, that would take on a life of its own with the later notion of the 'just war' and the diversion of violence into the Crusades against the Saracens. Given the nature of barbarian culture, this internally civilising effect of the Church must be granted to it, even if its malign redirection of violence outwards is something we are still living with.
But back to the story. Sweyn of Denmark remains in England until 1005 but returns home to raise more forces in 1005. He is back in 1006 and marches into the heart of Wessex through Berkshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire. Matters worsen - 80 English ships are burned to destruction in 1009 through the treachery of an English captain. This may give us a clue to the demoralisation and disaffection on the English side. Another Danish army appears that year led by Hemming and Thorkill the Tall. This new force burns Oxford in 1010 and then moves across to East Anglia where presumably it would have had considerable support from worried Danish settlers on the front-line with Anglo-Saxon Essex.
Two years later, the Danes raid Canterbury. We have already told of the murder of Alphage of Canterbury and the destruction of the Cathedral but it is clear that atrocities are not treated lightly even by the raiders. If an English captain can betray his own kind in one year, a Danish warlord, Thorkill, can be so disgusted by the murder of an Archbishop that he can switch sides and join the English in another. What we are seeing here is anarchy, inter-ethnic violence and warlordism under an incompetent King and it can only get worse unless someone gets a grip of the situation. It is at this point (1013) that Sweyn Forkbeard comes back to take decisive action (some Englishmen might by now have preferred a competent Danish to an incompetent English King), landing at Sandwich in Kent and restoring order where his writ could run. Three more years of hell are required before matters are settled.
Understandably, the Danelaw accepted Sweyn as ruler of England almost immediately. By this point, the situation has almost certainly degenerated into frightened ethnic communities who have moved from suspicion to full-on hate but it is clear that the Southern English do not have the backing of Northen Anglo-Saxons. Ethelred scuttled to Normandy and Sweyn made a triumphal progress up the River Trent, a key frontier river, to Gainsborough where he received the submission of the Northumbrians (who probably had no particular love of Wessex in any case), the men of Lindsay and the Danish settlers of North-East Mercia. Sweyn, however, died in 1014. Ethelred is briefly restored in the confusion but the Danish Army in England is quick to elect Cnut, son of Sweyn, as King in a counter move.
Ethelred's murderous ways fail to leave him even at the end. He undertakes another genocidal campaign against Lindsey (Lincolnshire) for its 'treachery' before expiring in 2016 and leaving the throne to Edmund II Ironside. In that year, Edmund and Cnut battle it out until, quite quickly, Edmund and Cnut agree to call a truce which becomes an agreement that leaves Wessex to the English line and the rest of England to Cnut. By the end of the year, Edmund has been murdered and Cnut is King. One suspects that the people of Wessex would be highly nervous at this juncture but the new King proves to be statesmanlike - of which more in the next posting.
Saturday 5 March 2016
955-979: An Interlude of Three Kings
The next quarter century can be disposed of quite quickly as an interlude of Anglo-Saxon complacency between periods of Danish threat under three successive kings - the unpopular Eadwig the All-Fair (955-959), nephew of Edred, Edgar the Peaceable (959-975) and his ill-fated 13 year old son, Edward the Martyr (975-979).
Eadwig's reign is marked by a rebellion by his brother Edgar who is proclaimed King of Mercia in 957 (effectively ruling all England north of the Thames) before he acquires the throne in 959 on the death of his brother. Edgar unites the Kingdom. It is his reign that sees the high point of Church-State relations that we discussed in the previous posting in which Archbishop Dunstan, having engaged in a dynamic process of monastic reform, used his religious authority to buttress the authority of the King as 'Emperor of Britain' in 973.
Edgar's death in 973 placed the Kingdom in a very vulnerable position. Edward the Martyr was murdered at Corfe Castle and became revered as a martyr but his death handed the throne to the notorious Ethelred II the Unready. Within a year, the Danish raids had begun again.
Eadwig's reign is marked by a rebellion by his brother Edgar who is proclaimed King of Mercia in 957 (effectively ruling all England north of the Thames) before he acquires the throne in 959 on the death of his brother. Edgar unites the Kingdom. It is his reign that sees the high point of Church-State relations that we discussed in the previous posting in which Archbishop Dunstan, having engaged in a dynamic process of monastic reform, used his religious authority to buttress the authority of the King as 'Emperor of Britain' in 973.
Edgar's death in 973 placed the Kingdom in a very vulnerable position. Edward the Martyr was murdered at Corfe Castle and became revered as a martyr but his death handed the throne to the notorious Ethelred II the Unready. Within a year, the Danish raids had begun again.
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