The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (12 page)

Dunstan did not live to see his prophecy fulfilled. But in the fourth year of Ethelred’s reign it seemed to come to pass when after almost a century of absence a new Danish army arrived in England. These Vikings landed at Southampton in 982, as piratical and cruel as their ancestors of a hundred years before, probably inspired to invade by rumours that England was ruled by boy-kings and priests. In the next decade the whole of the south coast and East Anglia were continually attacked.

Ethelred had none of his great-great-grandfather Alfred’s iron will. In 991 after a Danish victory at the Battle of Maldon in Essex he notoriously made the first payment of Danegeld in England’s history–that is, he paid the Danes to go away. The first payment was £10,000, an enormous sum, and was taken from everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. But £10,000 was not enough. Encouraged by the ease with which they had obtained it, the Danes soon returned for more. They demanded £16,000, then £24,000, then £32,000–the equivalent in today’s terms of millions of pounds. Having to find the money for the Danegeld tax led to a dramatic increase in the number of free peasants forced to become serfs: many had to abandon their own subsistence farming and become farm labourers tied to the manor’s fields in order to pay back the tax money lent them by the local landowner.

The word Danegeld has become infamous ever since in English culture as shorthand for a cowardly and ultimately shortsighted course of action. Ethelred tried to buy freedom when he should have fought for it, never thinking that the Danes would ask for more when the money ran out. During his reign, the English lost the old fighting spirit that had defeated the Danes before. Morale plunged. Out of the thirty-two English counties, the Danes had soon overrun sixteen.

The whole country groaned under the assaults from the sea and the oppressive taxation. Ethelred now became known as Ethelred the Redeless or Unready. The meaning of this soubriquet has changed in the centuries since it was coined, for the English were making a rude pun out of his name. In Anglo-Saxon
Ethel
meant noble or good and
rede
meant counsel or advice. The name Ethelred thus meant good counsel. But because his actions always seemed the result of poor counsel Ethelred became known as Ethelred the Redeless, or Ethelred No Counsel.

To compound the feeling of hopelessness in England, Ethelred now married a Viking himself in order to curry favour with the Danes. He took for wife Emma of Normandy, whose father the duke was an ally of the aggressive Danish kings behind the new Viking raids. But Ethelred was incapable of a consistent course of action. In 1002 he turned on his Danish subjects living in the old Danelaw, giving secret orders that on 13 November, the feast day of St Brice, all the Danes in England should be butchered. Neighbours were told by the shire reeve to kill neighbours, hosts to massacre their Danish guests. It was a despicable act, violating all laws of hospitality, as well as intensifying racial divisions.

Gunhildis, the king of Denmark’s sister, was then living in England as the wife of an English nobleman. Unlike her brother King Sweyn Forkbeard, Gunhildis was a Christian and had pledged to improve relations between the Danes and the English. Though she threw herself on her knees before Ethelred crying for mercy and reminding him of all she had done for her adopted country, he commanded that she and her son be beheaded just the same.

But Ethelred had made the most disastrous miscalculation of his reign in refusing to spare the king of Denmark’s sister and nephew. Outraged by these murders and those of his fellow Danes, Sweyn Forkbeard avenged them by invading England in 1013. After ten years of softening England up by means of coastal raids while he made preparations for a full-scale invasion, Sweyn arrived in person at the head of an immense army. Showing as little mercy to the English as Ethelred had showed to the Danes, he killed all the English he encountered as he marched through East Anglia to Northumbria. Having received the submission of most of the country, he then besieged London–which was sheltering King Ethelred. The citizens of London, who then as now were known for their independence of mind, were preparing themselves to fight to the last man to save Ethelred.

But there was no need. The minute he saw Sweyn’s tents going up round the city walls, Ethelred, who was as indolent as he was cowardly, announced that he could not endure the boredom of a long siege. He fled in the night to Normandy, where he had sent his wife Emma and their two children to be protected by her brother. Sweyn would have become ruler of England had he not died suddenly, leaving Denmark and England to his son Cnut, a superb military strategist. But the English still harboured fond thoughts of their ancient West Saxon monarchy. At their invitation a reluctant Ethelred returned to England to lead the resistance against Cnut. When Ethelred died soon after, in 1016, the struggle was carried on by his son Edmund, offspring of an earlier marriage to an Englishwoman, and thanks to his tremendous physique known as Edmund Ironside. After six battles the two kings realized that they were so evenly matched that it was better to come to a power-sharing agreement. By the Treaty of Olney, a small island in the Severn river, Cnut became king of Northumbria and Mercia while Edmund Ironside remained King of Wessex. On Edmund’s death in November 1016 the ealdormen of Wessex chose Cnut to be their king as well and England was once again ruled by a single monarch.

To give greater legitimacy to his reign Cnut now married Ethelred’s widow Emma of Normandy, the mother of the future king Edward the Confessor. Although Cnut did not kill any of the old Anglo-Saxon heirs to the throne he did the next best thing. He despatched Edmund Ironside’s two sons to the king of Sweden with orders that they be executed. In the event they were preserved on account of their innocent appearance before being sent south-east to the court of the king of Hungary; their descendants married into both the Hungarian and Scottish royal families. Meanwhile the only other two serious claimants to the English throne, Emma’s sons Alfred and Edward, were protected in Normandy by their uncle Duke Richard. They were growing up more Norman than English.

England prospered under Cnut. By 1027 he had successfully invaded Scotland, forcing the king of the Scots, Malcolm II, to do homage to him as his vassal or under-king. Quite soon Cnut felt sure enough of his position in England to despatch home the remnants of the Danish army with which his father had seized England. Unlike the old West Saxon kings, however, he was perpetually watched over by a giant palace guard, his 3,000 Danish ‘housecarles’, and he still had a large standing navy. But though Cnut gave a good deal of English land to fellow Danes, there was no dispossession of the native aristocracy as there would be later under the Normans. He relied on English advisers to help him rule.

Cnut was in many ways very similar to the old German kings. He loved the military life, and evenings were passed relating campaigns in his great hall. But as a simple soldier what mattered to him was the truth, and he despised the flattery that many English courtiers used to curry favour with him–as the best-known story about him illustrates.

The king with several Englishmen was walking by the sea. ‘Your Majesty,’ said the boldest and most sycophantic Englishman, ‘we were thinking that Your Majesty is so powerful that everything in our country obeys you. Why, even the waves would obey you if you commanded them.’ At last Cnut had had enough of their absurdities. Turning on them he told them to bring a chair down to the waves and set it a little way from where the tide was coming in. ‘Now,’ he said, seating himself on the throne and watching the waves wet his feet, ‘I bid the waves retreat, but they pay no attention to me. I am not a fool, and I hope that next time you embark on silly compliments that you expect me to swallow, you will remember this and hold your tongues.’

The diminutive Cnut gave England an important new legal code. It reinforced the position of the Church and restated many of the ancient English customs as well as innovatively requiring every freeman to be part of the hundred and the tithing (a ten-man grouping within the hundred). By making its subjects responsible for preventing criminal activities by their fellows the kingdom became more orderly. Cnut was anxious to differentiate himself from other Vikings and to join the commonwealth of Christian nations. Attracted by the splendour and ancient nature of the Church, he went on pilgrimage to Rome to attend the coronation of Conrad II as Holy Roman Emperor, and could not resist exploiting the occasion to get customs relief for English pilgrims. The Danes who had accompanied him to England were made to adopt Christianity and he sent English bishops to Norway and Denmark to convert their populations. Cnut’s insistence that Sunday be kept as a day of rest and his enforcement of Church tithes soon won him the support of the Church bureaucracy, as did his sense of his royal duty as a moral preceptor.

The Danegeld Cnut exacted from his English subjects was enormous. Nevertheless some important Saxon families came to prominence during his reign. Cnut was often called away from England to rule his immense Nordic empire overseas, which consisted of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, as well as the Hebrides, and his English advisers had to rule in his absence. One particular Saxon family, the Godwins, who were thanes from Sussex, began a rise to power which would eventually lead to the throne. They profited from Cnut’s decision to divide England for administrative purposes into four earldoms, covering areas which followed the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms–East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex. Unfortunately these earldoms had the effect of undoing much of the political unity of England created by Alfred and his descendants. Regional loyalties revived around them and became a source of weakness when a national will to resist was needed against the Normans. At first the earldom of Wessex was ruled by Cnut himself, but by 1020 the energetic and crafty Godwin had flourished sufficiently to become earl of Wessex. And as a result of his friendship with Cnut he was married to a Danish lady connected to the court.

Cnut died in 1035 aged only forty, like many a campaigner worn out by a life in the saddle, and his empire died with him. It had been held together partly by fear of his formidable personality. But its break-up was also a sign of changing times. For the previous 200 years the dominant force in Europe had been Scandinavian, whether it was the landless Vikings themselves or their kings. But for the next century European history would be shaped by those descendants of the Vikings, the Normans, who had settled in northern France after receiving a grant of land from the French king and theoretically becoming his vassals. Thirty-one years after Cnut’s death, the military genius of the Normans would conquer England, and their Duke William would become known as William the Conqueror.

The Normans were first alerted to the possibility of England as a new fiefdom when they heard news of the struggle for the royal succession in that kingdom. Their informants were the Norman servants of Cnut’s widow Emma. Was the rightful heir to the English throne Cnut’s eldest son, the Dane Harold Harefoot, who did briefly succeed his father, or was the better claim that of Alfred and Edward, the sons of the last Saxon king of England, Ethelred? There were also in Hungary the sons of the heroic Edmund Ironside, potential heirs to the royal West Saxon throne. Matters were further complicated by Cnut’s favourite son Harthacnut, by Emma of Normandy, whom Earl Godwin had fixed on as a suitable pawn to further his own ambitions, though he claimed to be representing the interests of a fatherless son.

Godwin now took Queen Emma and the considerable royal treasures into what he called ‘safe custody’ and began to promote Harthacnut’s cause. Thanks to the backing of the Danes and the city of London Harold Harefoot had taken the crown and he expelled Emma and Harthacnut to Bruges. Only a few years later, when Harold Harefoot died in 1040, Ethelred’s elder son Alfred ventured out of hiding in Normandy to claim the throne in London before Harthacnut could return. But the masterful Earl Godwin was having none of that. On his secret orders Alfred was arrested, blinded, incarcerated and subsequently murdered in the monastery at Ely, and Harthacnut was crowned king.

Godwin, whom the chroniclers describe as a man ‘of ready wit’, managed to overcome the feeble Harthacnut’s protests at the death of his half-brother by paying him some of the treasure he had accumulated over years of plotting. But on the death of Harthacnut in 1042, which ended the short line of Danish kings, Godwin moved rapidly to become the mentor of Ethelred’s younger son Edward. Known to history as Edward the Confessor, he was also living in Normandy and was now the outstanding candidate for the throne.

But Edward, whose nickname arose out of his religious disposition, as he was said to go to confession at least once a day, was not the natural material of which rulers are made. It is said that, lost in uncertainty, he threw himself on his knees before the burly Godwin and asked what he should do. Godwin promised that if Edward would place himself entirely in his hands, grant great offices of state to Godwin’s sons and marry Godwin’s daughter, he would shortly see himself acclaimed king.

And so it proved. Controlled by Godwin, on Easter Sunday 1043 Edward the Confessor was crowned with tremendous pomp at his ancestor Alfred’s capital of Winchester, specially chosen to remind the country of his royal West Saxon blood. Edward married Edgitha or Edith, Godwin’s beautiful and cultured daughter, but he remained more like a monk than a husband, and indeed more like a monk than a king. Above all, the new monarch was a Norman first and foremost. Far from being proud that he was an Anglo-Saxon king, Edward’s passion was for everything Norman. Norman monks had brought him up when his mother decamped to live with Cnut; the Norman language and Norman customs were what he was used to and what he preferred. As soon as he came to the throne, he surrounded himself with Norman advisers, which helped protect him against the overpowering Godwin, of whom he was always afraid given the rumours about his role in the terrible death of his brother Alfred. As a celebration of Norman culture Edward soon began to build a great church in the Norman style on the north bank of the Thames which would become Westminster Abbey.