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.

871-899: Alfred the Great

Alfred the Great, already a highly experienced warrior, comes to the throne with the Danes on a roll as they push their advantage. The year after his accession in 871, they occupy London. In response to their puppet, Ecgberht I, being expelled in Northumbria and replaced by Ricsige in 873, they occupied the bulk of North East England. This left Ricsige and the Anglo-Saxons only with Bernicia - the northern portion between the Tees and the Forth. The Danes now held Deira between the Humber and the Tees. Ricsige was said to have died in 876 of a broken heart as a result, to be replaced by Ecgbehrt II, last recorded King of Northumbria dead only two years later.

The onslaught continued - Burgred of Mercia was driven out (he died in exile in Rome to be succeeded by Ceolwulf II) and Mercia taken by the Danes in 874. From there, in 874, they renewed their attacks on the East of England. The Danes (led now by Guthrum, Oscytel and Anund) moved south to attack Wessex in 875, leaving behind a Kingdom in York (Jorvik) founded by Haldan Ragnarsson. The aim is obvious - to bring all of England under a network of Viking Kingdoms and displace the Anglo-Saxon monarchies as once the Anglo-Saxons displaced the post-Roman Cymri.

The momentum for the Danes, however, is beginning to be lost. A Danish fleet of 120 ships was wrecked off Peveril Point (Swanage, Dorset) in 877. In 878, the Danes appeared to agree to quit Exeter and Wareham (Dorset). This latter, however, was a ruse. Guthram made a surprise attack on Alfred at Chippenham (Wiltshire) and the King was forced to hide out at Athelney Abbey (Somerset). He recovered to lead an Anglo-Saxon army drawn from all over Southern England which defeated Guthrum at the Battle of Edington. The Treaty of Wedmore (879) resulted in the baptism of Guthrum - an important symbolic act. In return, Alfred ceded all England north of Watling Street to the invader. In essence, he had saved (in theory) Southern England at the expense of Northern England and East Anglia.

Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Danes was seen in Christian terms. It is not accidental that the peace treaty that recognised the Danish 'right to remain' required the symbolic baptism of Guthrum the invader and his adoption of an English name, Athelstan, in order to rule East Anglia as a Danish Kingdom. The implication is that Wessex was too tough a nut to crack for the Vikings but that Wessex in itself was not strong enough to expel the Danes as settlers from England as a whole. The Danish Army settled in East Anglia in 880, creating what would become the Danelaw under ultimate English suzerainty.

By this 'deal', Mercia south of Watling Street returned to Anglo-Saxon rule but under changed conditions - it is now ruled by an Ealdorman (Ethelred) who acknowledges the overlordship of Wessex. Alfred re-takes and occupies London in 886. A second treaty with Guthrum (who dies in 890 without an effect on the settlement) formally recognised the Danelaw between Thames and Tees, with Watling Street between Chester and London as the frontier. Sacrificing the North seems to have strengthened Wessex to the point that, with all rival Kingdoms now destroyed by the invaders, what is left can be called England for the first time with some credibility.

We have scarcely mentioned the Church for some time for the very simple reason that its alliance with the Anglo-Saxon monarchies was firm by necessity. The Danish invasion was a Heathen invasion, perfectly willing to extirpate Roman ways. Northumbrian Christianity is effectively exiled. The Lindisfarne monks took their sacred relics (the bones of St. Aidan and the head of St. Oswald), place them in St. Cuthbert's Coffin and, with the Lindisfarne Gospels, went on walkabout in Northumbria and Galloway, seeking to evade the Viking horde from 875. Only in 883 do they find a more permanent home at Chester-le-Street in County Durham.

In the south, of course, the Church is not merely preserved but prospers. Shaftesbury Abbey was founded in 880, for example. The King himself started to learn Latin after the second treaty with Guthrum. The identification of Church and English State was complete. Interestingly, Rome seemed around this time to have been concerned about a revival of paganism in Britain and that this was not simply a matter of Heathen invasion. The history is obscure but Pope Formosus was threatening to excommunicate England in the 890s if it did not deal with the problem. The Papacy was in some disarray at the time so this may have had more to do with the stance of the English Church in relation to Papal ambitions than any serious surge in pagan belief but it is possible that tensions over monarchical rule and the successes of the Heathens might have drawn many back towards ancient traditions. Conversely, Alfred's determined allegiance to the Church may equally have been a weapon in ensuring cohesion for an English people under siege from without.

The two treaties with Guthrum were, however, only treaties with Guthrum and not with all possible Danish invaders. Another large Viking force (under Haesten) attempted an invasion of England by way of the Thames Estuary but it does not get very far. The momentum had been lost. Alfred has unified the resources of the relatively wealthy Southern English in a way that was not possible only half a century before. Haesten's force arrived in 892 but had dispersed by 896. Alfred died in 899 to be succeeeded by his son, Edward the Elder.