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.
Thursday, 17 March 2016
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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