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.
Showing posts with label Cnut. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cnut. Show all posts
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, 27 February 2016
940-1035: The Church and Kingship from Edgar to Cnut
The last time we gave detailed consideration to the Church was back in the middle of the Eighth Century. Since Theodore's determination to ensure that the British Church was orthodox and operated well within the Catholic sphere of influence, its position as provider of administrative skills to a succession of warlords and petty kings vying for supremacy over England had borne fruit during the era of the Heathen Danish threat in a close identification between Catholicism and the fate of the English Kings. The identification of the Church, the Kingship and the Nation to this day provides the basis for classical British Country Toryism. The seeds of the modern Conservative Party were sown in the bloody battles of the Ninth Century.
As in the period of Theodore, the age is defined by a man, Dunstan (909-988), successively Abbot of Glastonbury, Bishop of Worcester, Bishop of London (957) and Archbishop of Canterbury (960). He refounded Glastonbury as a monastic house in 940 in his early thirties but his importance lies in the theatre of Edgar of Wessex's coronation as 'Emperor of Britain' in Bath on May 11th, 973. Zadok the Priest was sung for the first time (an institution that lasts to this day in Royal Coronation ceremonies). The coronation was followed by a second act in which eight sub-kings of Britain and Wales pledged fealty to Edgar at Chester and then symbolically rowed him on the River Dee while Edgar held the rudder.
Edgar, in fact, died the next year but the point was made - English overlordship is pre-sanctified by the Church in a complex set of ceremonies in which religious and political power are merged along Roman lines. The problem for the English Kings is that the Kingship that the Church sanctified need not necessarily be English if an alien King guaranteed Catholic cultural hegemony. The exploitation of this self interest or cynicism or realism (depending on your point of view) by Danes and Normans is part of the story of the next century.
This is also an era of foundations and so of royal patronage (the Church really does not seem to care who the patron is so long as the patronage follows through) - not only Glastonbury but Westminster Abbey (965), Crowland Abbey (c. 966), Oxford Cathedral (begun 1004) under English Kings and Gloucester Abbey (1017), Buckfast Abbey (1020), and Bury St. Edmund's (1032) under Cnut, the Dane. The original binding of Christianity and Kingship was closely linked to the external threat to the English presented by the invading Heathen Danes but the English Kings, in creating a Kingship detached from the people, also created a transferrable property.
In the first half of this period this would not have been an obvious problem. As far as English Kings, People and Church were concerned, there was one common enemy, the Heathen Dane, and the next round of raids played very much to type. From 980 the Danes return to Britain in force. They repeat the savage attacks on Northern Christianity that they perpetrated in the 790s: Iona is raided in 986, with the murder of the Abbot and six monks on the White Sands and, in 993, the Lindisfarne community is forced south to settle in 'a little church of wands and branches' in Durham.
The Danish wars of this period are for a later posting but Canterbury Cathedral was one casualty in 1012 with the then-Archbishop, Alphege captured and held at Greenwich where he was to be murdered by Danes at a drunken feast, apparently because he refused to sanction an attempt to redeem him with gold because (it is said) he did not want the English people burdened with the cost. To be charitable to the Church in its flip-flopping between ethnic Kings, there might have been merit in its intercessionary and protective role although this would have little effect on the Norman pogroms of the English North in the 1060s.
By the end of the Tenth Century, the Danes had become a complex melange of Heathens and Christians. The Danish Kings accepted Christianity, albeit at first superficially, even if their warlords were just as likely to be Pagan as not - at least until they had all smelt the way the wind was blowing. Harald Bluetooth was the first Danish King to be baptised some time in the 960s but it is clear that the raiders of the 980s had not followed his example. Naturally any Catholic acceptance of a Danish King in England would be contingent on the proven acceptance of Catholicism and the Church. By the 1010s the Church is perfectly happy to switch allegiance and give support to a Danish kingship on that basis.
Catholic approval of Cnut's overlordship of England, a valued province, is important enough that, by 1027, Cnut is making a pilgrimage to Rome to demonstrate his allegiance to the Pope in preference to his Heathen roots and those of his homeland. It is interesting in this context that not only are the later monastic foundations under Danish Kings (see above) but the new stone Bury St. Edmund's sponsored by Cnut exists to honour an East Anglian King murdered by the Great Heathen Army. Cnut also arranged in 1033 the transfer of the bones of Alphege (now a Saint) from St. Paul's Cathedral to Canterbury.
This succession of acts of homage to Catholicism must be seen in the context of the legitimacy that Cnut wished to have conferred on him by the Church in order to help rule a Kingdom that extended across a huge area of Scandinavian Europe and in which his homeland Heathens were now outnumbered by Christians. The Empire's pacification (and it is interesting to see how quickly it all fell apart after his death) required considerations not unlike those of Constantine so many centuries before. A lesson for all Early Medieval Kings has to be that the Church is only a very contingent ally: it will go where the power lies so long as power endorses the catholic vision, a strategy that would be followed with more conscious deliberation six centuries later by the Society of Jesus and may be being followed today by Pope Francis in his shift to populism. For Catholicism, the survival of the institution, the Church, is everything because it means the survival of the 'faith'.
[1] Imaginative reconstruction of Canterbury Cathedral in the late
Anglo-Saxon period (c.1025), based on archaeological and documentary
evidence. Drawn by Ivan Lapper. © Canterbury Archaeological Trust Ltd.
As in the period of Theodore, the age is defined by a man, Dunstan (909-988), successively Abbot of Glastonbury, Bishop of Worcester, Bishop of London (957) and Archbishop of Canterbury (960). He refounded Glastonbury as a monastic house in 940 in his early thirties but his importance lies in the theatre of Edgar of Wessex's coronation as 'Emperor of Britain' in Bath on May 11th, 973. Zadok the Priest was sung for the first time (an institution that lasts to this day in Royal Coronation ceremonies). The coronation was followed by a second act in which eight sub-kings of Britain and Wales pledged fealty to Edgar at Chester and then symbolically rowed him on the River Dee while Edgar held the rudder.
Edgar, in fact, died the next year but the point was made - English overlordship is pre-sanctified by the Church in a complex set of ceremonies in which religious and political power are merged along Roman lines. The problem for the English Kings is that the Kingship that the Church sanctified need not necessarily be English if an alien King guaranteed Catholic cultural hegemony. The exploitation of this self interest or cynicism or realism (depending on your point of view) by Danes and Normans is part of the story of the next century.
This is also an era of foundations and so of royal patronage (the Church really does not seem to care who the patron is so long as the patronage follows through) - not only Glastonbury but Westminster Abbey (965), Crowland Abbey (c. 966), Oxford Cathedral (begun 1004) under English Kings and Gloucester Abbey (1017), Buckfast Abbey (1020), and Bury St. Edmund's (1032) under Cnut, the Dane. The original binding of Christianity and Kingship was closely linked to the external threat to the English presented by the invading Heathen Danes but the English Kings, in creating a Kingship detached from the people, also created a transferrable property.
In the first half of this period this would not have been an obvious problem. As far as English Kings, People and Church were concerned, there was one common enemy, the Heathen Dane, and the next round of raids played very much to type. From 980 the Danes return to Britain in force. They repeat the savage attacks on Northern Christianity that they perpetrated in the 790s: Iona is raided in 986, with the murder of the Abbot and six monks on the White Sands and, in 993, the Lindisfarne community is forced south to settle in 'a little church of wands and branches' in Durham.
The Danish wars of this period are for a later posting but Canterbury Cathedral was one casualty in 1012 with the then-Archbishop, Alphege captured and held at Greenwich where he was to be murdered by Danes at a drunken feast, apparently because he refused to sanction an attempt to redeem him with gold because (it is said) he did not want the English people burdened with the cost. To be charitable to the Church in its flip-flopping between ethnic Kings, there might have been merit in its intercessionary and protective role although this would have little effect on the Norman pogroms of the English North in the 1060s.
By the end of the Tenth Century, the Danes had become a complex melange of Heathens and Christians. The Danish Kings accepted Christianity, albeit at first superficially, even if their warlords were just as likely to be Pagan as not - at least until they had all smelt the way the wind was blowing. Harald Bluetooth was the first Danish King to be baptised some time in the 960s but it is clear that the raiders of the 980s had not followed his example. Naturally any Catholic acceptance of a Danish King in England would be contingent on the proven acceptance of Catholicism and the Church. By the 1010s the Church is perfectly happy to switch allegiance and give support to a Danish kingship on that basis.
Catholic approval of Cnut's overlordship of England, a valued province, is important enough that, by 1027, Cnut is making a pilgrimage to Rome to demonstrate his allegiance to the Pope in preference to his Heathen roots and those of his homeland. It is interesting in this context that not only are the later monastic foundations under Danish Kings (see above) but the new stone Bury St. Edmund's sponsored by Cnut exists to honour an East Anglian King murdered by the Great Heathen Army. Cnut also arranged in 1033 the transfer of the bones of Alphege (now a Saint) from St. Paul's Cathedral to Canterbury.
This succession of acts of homage to Catholicism must be seen in the context of the legitimacy that Cnut wished to have conferred on him by the Church in order to help rule a Kingdom that extended across a huge area of Scandinavian Europe and in which his homeland Heathens were now outnumbered by Christians. The Empire's pacification (and it is interesting to see how quickly it all fell apart after his death) required considerations not unlike those of Constantine so many centuries before. A lesson for all Early Medieval Kings has to be that the Church is only a very contingent ally: it will go where the power lies so long as power endorses the catholic vision, a strategy that would be followed with more conscious deliberation six centuries later by the Society of Jesus and may be being followed today by Pope Francis in his shift to populism. For Catholicism, the survival of the institution, the Church, is everything because it means the survival of the 'faith'.
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| Canterbury Cathedral in the Late Saxon Period (c. 1025) - Reconstruction by Canterbury Archaeological Trust [1] |
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