1018 and 1066 E-Book

Martyn Whittock

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 356

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Viking Conquest by Cnut in 1016 both had huge impacts on the history of England and yet '1066' has eclipsed '1016' in popular culture. This book challenges that side-lining of Cnut's conquest by presenting compelling evidence that the Viking Conquest of 1016 was the single most influential cause of 1066. This neglected Viking Conquest of 1016 led to the exiling to Normandy and Hungary of the rightful Anglo-Saxon heirs to the English throne, entangled English politics with those of Normandy and Scandinavia, purged and destabilized the Anglo-Saxon ruling class, caused an English king to look abroad for allies in his conflict with over-mighty subjects and, finally, in 1066 ensured that Harold Godwinson was in the north of England when the Normans landed on the south coast. As if that was not enough, it was the continuation of the Scandinavian connection after 1066 which largely ensured that a Norman victory became a traumatic Norman Conquest.

Leseprobe

1016 & 1066

WHY THE VIKINGS CAUSED

THE NORMAN CONQUEST

Martyn and Hannah Whittock

ROBERT HALE

First published in 2016 by Robert Hale,

an imprint of The Crowood Press Ltd,

Ramsbury, Marlborough, Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

www.halebooks.com

This e-book first published in 2016

© Martyn and Hannah Whittock 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 71982 050 2

The right of Martyn and Hannah Whittock to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Dedication

To Ben Gunstone and Steve Dudley, as a reminder of all our history discussions, including those in the rain and mud!

Contents

Introduction

1   ‘1066 and All That’: So What?

2   1016: The ‘Forgotten Conquest’

3   New King … New Broom…

4   New Men and New Opportunities

5   Home Thoughts From Abroad: A Postcard From Normandy

6   Sons and Lovers: Cnut’s Two Marriages and his Competing Sons

7   Home Thoughts From Abroad: A Postcard From Hungary

8   Happy Families, Unhappy King: The Reign of Edward the Confessor

9   1066: The Viking Year?

10   The Vikings Return!

11   Pulling the Threads Together

Notes

Index

Introduction

The Norman Conquest of 1066 is indelibly impressed on the history and the public awareness of England and, indeed, the whole of the United Kingdom because it was to eventually impact on the whole of the British Isles. Yet it was not the only ‘Conquest’ in the eleventh century. Exactly fifty years earlier, in 1016, England had experienced a ‘Viking Conquest’. It is the contention of this book that it was this ‘Viking Conquest’ in 1016 that, more than any other factor, led to the much more famous ‘Norman Conquest’ of 1066. In short: the Vikings caused the Norman Conquest.

Since this book explores events of the eleventh century in England, Scandinavia and Normandy (with a brief excursion to Hungary), there are some issues that may benefit from a brief explanation at this point.

Language

The evidence from the eleventh century was written in the following languages: Old English, Latin, Norman-French and Old Norse. In the case of Old Norse, while it was spoken in various forms and dialects across the Viking world it has left fewer written examples from the period in question than the others; this is because literacy came much later to Scandinavia than to other areas of Western Europe. It does not always seem like this because a number of dramatic Old Norse written sources survive (most notably the sagas), which claim to shed light on this period. However, many of these sources date from a century or more after the events they describe and many were written in Iceland. Their evidence needs to be used with caution.

Whenever we quote from a source in these languages we always do so in a modern translation. The exception is when there is something noteworthy about a particular word or phrase that stands out as evidence. In that case we refer to it in the original language and translate it in order to explain it.

Old English and Old Norse used letters that are no longer used in Modern English. The most commonly used ones were: Æ or lowercase æ (ash), Ð or lowercase ð (eth) and Þ or lowercase þ (thorn). The last two approximated to the ‘th’ sound in modern English. The one we have employed when referring to personal names is Æ/æ because it was so commonly used and does not have a direct parallel in modern English. For this reason we refer to Æthelred, not Ethelred. However, where a name has become more familiar in a modernized form, we have used the modern appearance; therefore, for example, we refer to Alfred not Ælfred.

Elsewhere, we have only rarely used these letters when a word or phrase quoted in the original language uses them. An example would be the Anglo-Scandinavian word lið (seaborne military), which was used in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to describe both the forces of the Anglo-Saxon Harold Godwinson’s sons and those of Svein Estrithson of Denmark after 1066. Another example is the Old English word ætheling (prince, throne-worthy royal); we refer to the æthelings Edward and Alfred when discussing two Anglo-Saxon princes who were in exile in Normandy, and Edgar ætheling is the usual way that this prince is identified.

Anglo-Saxon … English … England

The people living in England before the Norman Conquest described themselves as ‘English’, living in ‘England’ (albeit using the Old English versions of these terms). These were catch-all labels that summed up the amalgamation of regional groups and recently settled Scandinavians who, together, constituted one political community under one king of England. The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ had been coined over a century earlier but was not the usual term used at the time. However, we use it today in order to identify this particular period of history. As such, it remains a useful label and we deploy it alongside ‘English’, particularly when we need to differentiate between those who had been part of the population for several centuries, in contrast to Danes and Norwegians (and the occasional Swede) who had settled more recently.

Personal names

Many of the personal names of the time can be spelled in more than one way, for three main reasons. The first is that at the time there was inconsistency; for example, ‘Harold’ is the same name as ‘Harald’. This is complicated by the fact that the same names existed in England and Scandinavia and could be spelled differently in the two areas. ‘Svein’, for example, is the same name as ‘Swein’ and ‘Swayne’. The second reason is that eleventh-century names used the letters mentioned above and so can be spelled in various ways in Modern English. The third reason is that fashions change in how later writers represent these ancient names. So, Danish ‘Knutr’ is more likely today to be spelled in an English form ‘Cnut’ but was often written as ‘Canute’ in the past. We have adopted a consistent pattern so that ‘Cnut’ is used of both rulers with that name and ‘Svein’ is used of the various men with that name. The exception is that we refer to Harold Godwinson (also known as Harold II) who became king of England in 1066 but Harald Hardrada of Norway who was killed by him in 1066. This is now quite a common convention and makes it easier to differentiate them. In the same way and for the same reason we refer to Harald Harefoot, the son of Cnut (also known as Harald I).

Two powerful and influential women were both called Ælfgifu. Emma of Normandy took this name after she married Æthelred II and before she later married Cnut; and Cnut’s first wife was Ælfgifu of Northampton. To have two such significant women (both eventually married to Cnut) carrying the same name makes for confusion so we always call them Emma and Ælfgifu. We never refer to Emma as Ælfgifu.

Harold II Godwinson married two women named Edith but both played relatively minor roles in the events we describe; therefore we have not differentiated them other than by calling the first one Edith ‘Swanneck’, since this by-name was used by contemporaries.

We have also used other by-names, when they exist, as a way of differentiating people. As a consequence, we usually use the full names of Harold Godwinson and Harald Hardrada in order to differentiate them and we call Harold Godwinson’s predecessor as king of England Edward ‘the Confessor’ to avoid confusion with Edward ‘the Exile’. This does run the risk of making these by-names sound like surnames, which they were not, as some were only used by some people at the time and then only sometimes. And others were coined later. But this is a small price worth paying if it reduces confusion for modern readers.

Titles of medieval sources of evidence

We have used the titles of medieval written sources in their original language although, on the first occasion of use, we have also given their titles in translation, in order to explain the meaning. Thereafter we tend to use a shortened form of the original-language title. An example would be the Encomium Emmae Reginae (In Praise of Queen Emma) which, after the first use, is thereafter simply referred to as the Encomium Emmae or the Encomium. This is because it has become customary to use its original title, rather than the title in translation. Other examples are the Vita Ædwardi Regis (Life of King Edward) and William of Jumièges’ Gesta Normannorum Ducum (Deeds of the Norman Dukes). In a similar way, where Old Norse sources are usually now referred to by their Old Norse name, we have continued to do so; for example Heimskringla (Circle of the World), the great saga history of Norwegian Viking kings. It also means that, should readers come across these sources in other studies, they will recognize them from these frequently used titles. Other source-names, though, are modern inventions and so only appear in modern form; an obvious example is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which after its first use in any chapter we then just call the Chronicle.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to our agent, Robert Dudley, and to Robert Hale and Crowood for their help and support in the commissioning of and the production of this book. Peter Bull, of Peter Bull Art Studio, produced the maps with a speed and flexibility that was much appreciated. We are also indebted to the historians, whose explorations of events and interpretations regarding their significance we have consulted. Hannah’s studies in the department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC) at Cambridge University (both as an undergraduate and then in an MPhil year) provided a great many insights, which assisted in the exploration of the evidence and its interpretation. All errors, of course, are our own.

Martyn and Hannah Whittock

CHAPTER 1

‘1066 And All That’: So What?

A date to remember

In thirty-three years of teaching History in secondary schools one of the authors has frequently asked students to discuss with their families three key events in English history for which they can offer a date. Checking in the library or on the Internet is not allowed, and it must be knowledge of event and date or nothing! Over the years, as one might imagine, a huge number of events and dates have been offered. Nevertheless, three stand out because they occur again and again. These are the Norman Conquest (1066), the Great Fire of London (1666) and England winning the World Cup (1966). Clearly, the recurrence of the number ‘6’ has something to do with this and once some people start with ‘1066’ they are, self-evidently, very quickly on something of a ‘66-roll’!

Of these three dates, though, 1066 always occurs the most. It is a date firmly fixed in the popular imagination. More than this, for most people it seems to mark a kind of historical watershed. Before it we find ourselves in a world inhabited by people called Æthelred, Harthacnut and Ælfgifu; afterwards there is a reassuringly familiar world peopled by men and women called William, Henry and Matilda. It is not, therefore, surprising that when, in 1930, W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman wrote their parody of English history they chose to entitle it: 1066 and All That.

Since this book is so concerned with the events leading up to and causing the trauma of that year it is worth asking some questions. Why is this date so important? Does it justify its place in the popular imagination? Should it really be seen as one of the great milestones of English – and indeed of British – history? As might be expected in any kind of historical debate there is more than one point of view about these questions. Indeed, one might conclude from a general overview of the study of history that to put two historians together will result in the generation of at least three opinions. The study of history is, by its very nature, deeply rooted in debate, argument and controversy. The key events may be relatively easy to fix in time and place (although this should not be taken for granted) but the significance, causation and consequences of events are quite another matter. Here the study of history has argument hard-wired into its character; controversy is endemic. And, for all its iconic status, the events of 1066 are not free from this debate.

An event, the importance of which has been much over-played?

It can be argued that we make too much of the changes brought by the events of 1066 and the Norman Conquest. Much survived these events and provided a lot of the underlying ‘landscape’ of settlement, taxation and government on which would be played out the events of the next century and well beyond this.

When it came to government, William I, the ‘Conqueror’ (ruled 1066– 87) continued Anglo-Saxon traditions in his newly conquered English realm. He kept the same coronation service, but added ‘by hereditary right’ and ‘grant of God’ to the royal titles used; William II (ruled 1087– 1100) then added ‘by the grace of God’ to his official seal. William the Conqueror clearly wanted to present himself as the legitimate inheritor of what had come before. He kept the royal seal in a style comparable to that of Edward the Confessor, but added the king as a knight on one side to remind people of his conquest.

William continued to use the Anglo-Saxon chancery (the official writing office where the Great Seal, used to seal important documents, was kept). No such office had existed in Normandy, but William increased its use and importance; the chancery and royal clerks were very useful in running the country when William was in Normandy. He continued the use of royal writs (official letters giving orders from the king to local areas). These assumed the existence of a strong and centralized government and state, where people in the regions followed royal orders. Again, these had not existed in Normandy and William saw how useful they were. He actually increased their use (first in Old English and later in Latin after 1070).

He kept the well-organized old system of shires, sheriffs (local royal officials), shire courts and hundred (local) courts. At first, Anglo-Saxons remained in post as sheriffs (such as Edric in Wiltshire and Tovi in Somerset), but after 1070 these sheriffs were replaced by Normans. Anglo-Saxon law codes remained in use alongside local juries who gave verdicts under oath on the basis of local knowledge.

Finally, William kept the efficient Anglo-Saxon tax system (the geld) and the fines from courts went, as before, to the king, via sheriffs. A system that had milked a prosperous nation and sustained it through decades of Viking Wars now served the new Norman government. The royal Treasury stayed at Winchester. There had been what we would now call ‘regime change’, but system continuity! Alongside this, William kept the Anglo-Saxon money system, operated at the same mints and by the same moneyers as under his predecessor, Harold II Godwinson; there were similar designs on coins before and after the so-called watershed of 1066. It seems that ‘1066’ had not affected the pound in your pocket (well, the silver pennies, to be precise). It purchased the same pottery and the same food stuff at the same markets.

An event, seared on its century and on the development of the English nation?

But continuity is also about who holds the power and a sense of wellbeing. On both scores there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Norman Conquest was a political and a cultural earthquake. A large group of 4,500 Anglo-Saxon aristocrats had been replaced by Normans. In 1086 (when Domesday Book was compiled) there were 180 – many very wealthy – tenants-in-chief (or barons) holding land directly from the king. Of these, only two were Anglo-Saxons. Below these were about 1,400 lesser landowners, of whom only about 100 were Anglo-Saxons. All in all, Anglo-Saxons made up only about 6.5 per cent of landowners.

Under these landowners there were about 6,000 sub-tenants; a substantial number of whom were Anglo-Saxons, but many now leased land that they had owned before Harold Godwinson’s defeat in 1066. Their ‘feel-good’ rating would have been at rock-bottom. Indeed, the Domesday Book commissioners at Marsh Gibbon in Buckinghamshire (then just called Marsh) made a rare excursion into human emotions when they recorded how the current landholder, Æthelric, worked the land ‘in heaviness and misery’.1 We can also translate this as: ‘miserably and with a heavy heart’.2 Why was this? It was because, although he had once owned the land in his own right, by 1086 he had been dispossessed and only held it by rent, as the tenant of a Norman lord, William fitzAnsculf. This was what underlay the ending of the world of the ‘Æthelrics’ and the arrival of the new order of the ‘Williams’ and their Norman associates.

Some parts of the country faced more than dispossession: they faced annihilation. After a series of northern rebellions against his rule, William took punitive action in the winter of 1069–70, in a merciless destruction of people, livestock, crops, stores and settlements that today is remembered as ‘the Harrying of the North’. It led to the death, by starvation, of tens of thousands. A twelfth-century estimate of the death-toll, by the Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis, stood at 100,000. He was aghast at the ‘brutal slaughter’ of civilians that this involved. He was convinced that such an atrocity ‘cannot remain unpunished’ by God. Given that, up to this point in his narration of the Norman Conquest, Orderic had largely dutifully followed the determinedly pro-Norman take on events provided by an earlier chronicler, William of Poitiers, this sudden condemnation of William the Conqueror is both shocking and arresting.3 The chronicler once called Florence of Worcester but now often referred to as John of Worcester, who also wrote in the twelfth century, described the land lying between the rivers Humber and Tees as being devastated. Streams of starving refugees were noted as far south as Evesham in Worcestershire. When Domesday Book was compiled, in 1086, somewhere in the region of 60 per cent of land holdings in Yorkshire were described as being ‘waste’.

It is possible that the scale of the devastation may have been exaggerated. Orderic Vitalis’ mortality figure is probably the result of fairly typical medieval over-estimation. Only one of the ‘waste’ manors recorded in Domesday Book is explicitly attributed to the events of 1069–70.4 It is further debateable ‘whether William had the manpower, time and good weather necessary to reduce vast areas of the region between the Humber and the Tyne to a depopulated, uncultivated desert.’5 However, even with these qualifications, it is difficult to dismiss entirely the impression given by those writing within a generation of the events, and also the evidence of Domesday Book. It is possible, for example, that the ‘waste’ manors were actually products of ‘an administrative or accounting device,’6 but their location in the right area at the right time looks too significant to be so lightly dismissed; and why was this ‘accounting device’ not liberally used across the country? No, when all is said and done and the data reviewed and even downgraded, the cumulative evidence that remains is still ‘both credible and compelling.’7 It suggests that something terrible happened in the north.

Culturally, many English people in the generation after the Conquest would have felt like they were living in an occupied land. While its use continued in some areas of literature, it must be recognized that for over two centuries after 1066 the English language went into social decline. Norman-French and Latin (the educated language of the Church) replaced Old English for the elite and the upwardly mobile. William gave up his early attempts to learn English, and England would not have a ruler whose first language was English until Henry IV in 1399. We eat beef, mutton and pork (derived from Norman-French boef, moton, porc); but those who care for them in the fields and barns labour with cows, sheep and pigs/swine (derived from Old English cu, sceap, Middle English pigge/Old English swin). The significance of this has been questioned but the implication remains clear: those who worked in the mud and rain spoke English, while those who enjoyed the benefits of their labour spoke Norman-French.

French remained the official language of English government until the 1350s, when the Hundred Years’ War with France made its use seem rather unpatriotic. During this period the English that was emerging was different to the Wessex-based Old English of late Anglo-Saxon government and literature. What was emerging was Middle English. Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that the trajectory of the development of the English language was irrevocably changed by 1066; and that is before we take into account the huge number of French words that entered the English vocabulary as a result of the Norman Conquest.

The cultural impact revealed itself in unusual ways. Anglo-Saxon and Danish personal names continued to be given into the twelfth century but then went into a steep decline in favour of new Norman-inspired personal-names such as William, Henry, Geoffrey, Robert, Matilda and Rosamund. In Lincolnshire, in the 1220s, only 6 per cent of tenants in a survey of 624 people had pre-Conquest names, but 14 per cent were called William, 9.5 per cent were called Robert and 6.5 per cent were named John. By 1300, male names were dominated by John, Peter, Thomas and William; female names by Elizabeth, Mary and Anne. The Poll Tax return for Sheffield, in 1379, shows that of the 715 men listed, 33 per cent were named John, 19 per cent were named William. The only Anglo-Saxon name used was Edward and it was not found among the top eight names, which were, in descending order: John, William, Thomas, Richard, Robert, Adam, Henry and Roger.8 By the thirteenth century we find manorial clerks wearily listing ‘another William…’ as they unconsciously bore witness to a cultural result of 1066 and the Norman Conquest.

Furthermore, by being part of the Norman and later the Angevin empires, the centre of gravity of English foreign relations was pulled southwards and away from northern Europe and Scandinavia. This significantly altered features of the centre of gravity that had previously existed from 900 to 1066 as a result of the Viking Wars and Scandinavian influence in England during this earlier period of time.

1066 … a defining date

So, 1066 and the Norman Conquest can easily justify its place in the public consciousness. It was an event of immense importance. It deserves the depth of study it gets and its high profile and, indeed, its iconic status. Anniversaries related to it are justified and fire the imagination. Furthermore, attempting to understand why it happened is a crucial part of exploring the national story. Encouraging those outside of the academic world to grapple with this process is well worthwhile because, as well as being dramatic and engaging, 1066 has altered who we are as a nation. 1066 deserves its air-time! And so does the exploration of why it occurred.

But this raises an interesting point, with regard to those causes and our awareness of them, that is both intriguing and puzzling. In thirty-three years of teaching History at secondary level, the year 1066 has always topped the poll when it comes to historic date-popularity. But nobody ever mentioned the ‘Viking Conquest of 1016’. Not once. Never…

CHAPTER 2

1016: The ‘Forgotten Conquest’

The ‘Viking Conquest’ of 1016

It is the contention of this book that the ‘Viking Conquest’ in 1016 led to the much more famous ‘Norman Conquest’ of 1066. In this sense, the Norman Conquest of 1066 was the culmination of the so-called Viking Wars that had raged across the British Isles for the previous 300 years. These wars were not a continuous conflict. Rather, they were a set of conflicts that had hammered England and its neighbours and which culminated in 1016 in the conquest of England by a Viking king of Denmark, at the head of a mixed Scandinavian army. The victorious Viking king was Cnut and he succeeded in achieving a totality of victory that had eluded previous Viking raiders and invaders. In order to see how this Conquest led to the eventual Norman Conquest, we need to first examine exactly how this ‘Viking Conquest’ of 1016 occurred. But before we explore the actual events of 1016, it will be helpful to set it in context and to construct a brief résumé of the Viking Wars that led up to this momentous event.1

The background to 1016: the Viking Wars, Phase I…

The Viking attacks on Anglo-Saxon England fell into two great phases. The first phase started in the late eighth century. The first recorded attack occurred in 789 when a royal official (the king’s reeve) was killed by a group of Vikings at Portland in Dorset; he had ridden down from Dorchester in order to establish the credentials of the visitors and they killed him. The next major event was the much more famous attack on the monastery of Lindisfarne, which occurred in 793; it was an event that sent shock-waves across Western Europe. After this the Viking raids continued to escalate during the ninth century. They were part of a pattern of raids from Scandinavia that targeted the trading settlements either side of the North Sea and the English Channel and which caused severe damage to trade and to the political stability of the kingdoms that were on the receiving end of these raids from the sea.

The push factors behind these raids included: increasing political centralization in Norway and Denmark, as those who lost out in this process looked aboard to further their ambitions; those who had succeeded at home funding their campaigns by raiding abroad; Frankish aggression in turn prompting aggressive defence strategies from Scandinavian communities against their southern neighbours; and changes in the Islamic world disrupted supplies of silver to Scandinavia, so that alternative sources were sought by raiding. All of these combined to encourage expansion outwards, and the inability of those on the receiving end to successfully ward off these attacks meant that raiding soon turned to outright conquest and settlement.

Between 866 and the 890s the raids turned to settlement and obliterated every Anglo-Saxon kingdom with the exception of Alfred the Great’s Wessex (the kingdom of the West Saxons). This kingdom alone survived when the Vikings destroyed the other kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia and Mercia. In each of these they transformed the political landscape as Viking (mostly Danish) warlords took over the reins of power from the eclipsed Anglo-Saxon royal families. Others, below them in the social scale, became the new local landowners.

The survival of Wessex meant that this Viking conquest was incomplete. By reorganizing his fighting forces, building fortified bases (‘burhs’) and even experimenting in new warship construction, Alfred the Great succeeded in creating a kingdom that was not only able to withstand Viking attacks but was also able, in the reigns of his son and grandson, to conquer the eastern and northern regions of England that had been lost to Danish Viking settlement and political control.

As a result, the Viking attacks declined in the face of the victories of Alfred’s son Edward the Elder (ruled 899–924) as he set out to extend the areas under his control. In this he was assisted by his sister, Æthelflæd the ‘Lady of the Mercians’ and her husband Æthelred, ruler of western Mercia after it became closely allied with Wessex. (Æthelred should not to be confused with the later English king Æthelred II, better known as ‘Æthelred unræd’ or ‘Æthelred the unready’.) Together they conquered the East Midlands and East Anglia and brought it under the control of the West Saxons. This combination of West Saxons and Mercians created a newly styled ‘Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’.

Resurgent Vikings challenged Edward the Elder’s son and successor, Athelstan (ruled 924–939); but then met a dramatic defeat at his hands at the battle of Brunanburh in 937. After Athelstan’s death, new arrivals of Norse Vikings – originally from Norway but by this time rulers of a Viking kingdom in Dublin – challenged the southern Anglo-Saxon kings for control of the lands north of the river Humber. There the Viking kingdom of York continued as a focus for resistance to the kings from the south. Curiously, perhaps, this resistance combined Scandinavian Vikings with local Northumbrian Anglo-Saxons who preferred a Viking king based in York to a southern Anglo-Saxon king from the traditionally rival kingdom of Wessex! Politics are complicated and there was no simple ethnic divide between Scandinavian Vikings on one side and Anglo-Saxons on the other. This continued until the death of Eric Bloodaxe, the last Viking King of York, in 954.

The Viking Wars Phase II … why did the Vikings return?

From 954 until 980 it seemed as if all this upheaval was finally a thing of the past. England had become a united kingdom under one ruling dynasty: the one provided by the West Saxons. Indeed, under the rule of King Edgar (ruled 959–75), political stability was finally imposed on this newly united Kingdom of England.

Edgar established an efficient system of coinage and taxation, and this was accompanied by the construction of a naval force that deterred further Viking raiders.2 It was therefore all the more shocking when, in the reign of Edgar’s second son, Æthelred II (ruled 978–1016), the Viking raids resumed. The failure of Æthelred to successfully resist the new wave of raiders led to him later being given the nickname of unræd, an Old English word meaning ‘no counsel/wisdom’ or the ‘ill advised’. This was a bitter comment on his actual name since, in Old English, Æthelred meant ‘royal counsel/wisdom’. In the twenty-first century he is remembered as ‘Æthelred the unready’ since the nickname unræd sounds like the modern English word ‘unready’.3 It was shortly after the death of Æthelred II in 1016 that the Danish king, Cnut, finally succeeded in conquering England and achieved his ‘Viking Conquest’.

Exactly why Phase II of the Viking Wars (which led to conquest in 1016) occurred is a matter of much debate among historians and archaeologists. The exhaustion of the silver mines that had previously supplied the Islamic world appears to have disrupted trade routes between the Middle East and Scandinavia.4 This caused real problems for Viking-Age communities in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, because they relied on this silver to reward followers and pay tribute to their superiors in the social order.5 It was to get their hands on this silver that Viking raiding parties seized slaves, in order to turn them into cash when they sold them on to Arab traders or to middlemen who traded with Arabs. At the same time, the growing power of rising states in what is now Russia meant that raiding there for silver was becoming more difficult. All in all there seems to have been a significant decline in the eastern trade routes, and this undoubtedly explains why Swedish Vikings eventually joined in the new phase of Viking attacks on England. (Before this, the raids on the British Isles had been undertaken by Danes and Norwegians.)

By a coincidence (happy for silver-poor Vikings and unhappy for newly silver-rich Western Europeans) the discovery of new silver sources in the Harz Mountains in the 960s meant that Western Europe was now experiencing an abundance of silver, which was used in coins and ornaments. For Vikings intent on replenishing their stocks of silver this provided an immense opportunity, both by stealing large amounts of silver and by threatening extreme violence unless they were bought off. This is why huge quantities of English silver pennies turn up on archaeological sites in Scandinavia: somewhere in the region of 37,920,000 individual silver pennies were shipped across the North Sea, and finds of English silver pennies in hoards from Scandinavia increase massively in the period 978–1035. About 35,000 such coins have been discovered in Scandinavia to date.6 They are testament to the extortion of vast amounts of wealth from England during this period.

This policy of extortion was further stimulated by the emergence of more unified Viking-Age kingdoms in Denmark and in Norway. This gave rulers there greater resources with which to fund military adventures abroad, and since their tax-raising systems were nowhere near as developed as those of Anglo-Saxon England, the deficit could be rectified by raiding England.

In Denmark a more unified state emerged in the early tenth century. This was under King Gorm and later, in the 960s, this trend was accelerated when Harald Bluetooth extended Danish rule into Norway. This increase in Danish royal authority led to the construction of a massive military barracks-complex at Trelleborg on Zealand, where a circular fortress (probably dating from around 980) was constructed. This was just one of four similar complexes. Their construction probably dates from late in the reign of Harald Bluetooth and they probably protected his royal authority from both internal and external threats. Denmark was becoming a serious military power as its royal authority became better able to unite and utilize resources. At the same time, Harald became a Christian and was responsible for the conversion of the Danes. The unifying nature of Harald Bluetooth’s reign inspired the Swedish IT company Ericsson to call its open-wireless technology ‘Bluetooth’ since, like Harald, it unites and utilizes otherwise scattered resources.

However, it was not only Denmark that was experiencing greater unification. In Norway too, after a decisive naval battle at Hafrsfjord in 872, Harald Finehair came to dominate a generally more united Norwegian kingdom. His power tailed off the further north he went, but his achievement helps explain the increased presence of Norwegian Vikings – alongside Danish ones – in the armies that descended on England in Phase II of the Viking Wars. They would not, however, be as influential as Danes, since Harald Finehair’s unification was built on less secure foundations than had been achieved in Denmark. On his death, Norwegian unity fractured and Danish kings were quick to take advantage of this and interfere in Norwegian affairs, often ruling areas of Norway through subservient local earls.

This period of weakness was reversed in the late tenth century when a Norwegian, Olaf Tryggvason (died c.1000), briefly managed to occupy the Norwegian throne independently of Denmark. He, too, was active in raiding England, as we shall shortly see. When he died this Norwegian independence was threatened and after the death of his successor, Olaf Haraldsson (St Olav) in 1030, the Danish king, Cnut, re-established Danish control over Norway for a time. However, Norway was restless under Danish rule and when Cnut died, in 1035, Olaf Haraldsson’s son, Magnus the Good, took back the Norwegian throne. He himself was succeeded by a tough warrior-king named Harald Hardrada, who invaded England at a critical point in 1066 and then was killed at the battle of Stamford Bridge on 25 September 1066.

This is getting ahead of our story, but it shows just how significant Scandinavians were in the history of England in the period running up to 1066 and in the events of that momentous year. But to return to the events leading up to 1016, what is clear is that a recently unified Denmark and a more unified Norway posed a massive threat to England. A great storm was gathering in Scandinavia and it was soon to break on England with dramatic results. And, as this ‘storm’ broke, it would be two Viking rulers who would play a major part in the events leading to the ‘Viking Conquest’ of 1016. These two rulers were Olaf Tryggvason of Norway and Svein Forkbeard of Denmark.

The first of these, Olaf Tryggvason, ruled Norway from 995 to c.1000. The grandson of Harald Finehair, he came from a Norwegian royal family that had an interest in – and a knowledge of – England. Earlier members of the family included Eric Bloodaxe, who had been King of York until 954. Like Harald Bluetooth in Denmark, Olaf Tryggvason played an active role in promoting the Christian conversion of Norway. However, we know frustratingly little about him due to the late arrival of literacy in Scandinavia. From the English side he appears in a few short references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. From the continent the only other near-contemporary account is Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum (Deeds of the Archbishops of Hamburg), which was written in about 1070. In the late twelfth century he also featured in two Icelandic sagas.7 These, though, are very late sources and it is clear that by the time they were written history and legend were firmly intertwined. A similarly late source was compiled by an Icelandic writer named Snorri Sturluson, in his Heimskringla (Circle of the World). This was intended as a history of Norway from prehistoric times to 1177 and was written in about 1230.

According to the later sagas, Olaf Tryggvason gained early military experience in the Baltic, raiding the neighbouring tribes of the Slavs and Balts on the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic. Situated on the trade routes between the Middle East and Scandinavia, they offered rich pickings to Viking raiders. It was after this that Olaf Tryggvason, now an experienced warrior and leader, turned his attention to England. The Anglo-Saxon sources first record him as raiding Folkestone in Kent in 991, with a fleet of ninety-three ships. He was bought off with £10,000. This was a pointer to things to come: soon vast amounts of Anglo-Saxon silver would be flowing to Scandinavia to buy off Viking armies.

However, Olaf Tryggvason was not alone in his lucrative targeting of England. At the same time, Svein Forkbeard, King of Denmark, began launching raids too. Named from his distinctive facial hair, Svein Forkbeard ruled Denmark between 985 and 1014. As well as this, he briefly ruled England for five short weeks before dying in 1014. This was a prelude to the successful conquest achieved by his son, Cnut, two years later, in 1016. Svein Forkbeard appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but in a greater number of annals than does Olaf Tryggvason. His exploits were also recorded by Adam of Bremen and in Heimskringla. These, though, are not the only written verdicts on him: in addition to these sources, he also features in a document called the Encomium Emmae Reginae (In Praise of Queen Emma), which is an eleventh-century account (written c.1040–42), composed in honour of Emma, Cnut’s queen. We will hear a lot more about this document and about the Norman princess and English queen, Emma, and her marriages to both Æthelred II, ‘the unready’, and his Viking nemesis, Cnut, for she plays an important part in the interweaving of events that linked England, Normandy and Scandinavia in the early eleventh century.

According to a later Icelandic saga – the thirteenth-century Jómsvíkinga saga (Saga of the Jómsvíkings) – Svein Forkbeard was raised among the Jómsvíkings, a semi-legendary group of Viking mercenaries. Whether this is true is impossible to say, since this source (as with so many Icelandic sagas) intermingles history and legend in a manner now difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle.

What we do know, though, is that Svein Forkbeard was the son of the Harald Bluetooth who we met earlier – the king who had first unified Denmark. The family story was not a happy one, since Svein Forkbeard only became king after he had deposed his father in 985. This was the period in which he also began his raids on England: clearly, he now had the combination of ambition and resources to launch attacks on the wealthy state across the North Sea. In 994, he joined Olaf Tryggvason in a campaign of attacks on England. In the near future, tensions would develop between these two rulers over influence in Norway (an old bone of contention), but in the early 990s they had a project that benefited them both and which drew them together in an effective alliance: attacking England.

In this they were helped by a combination of a young king and dynastic instability in England: Æthelred II was only in his early teens, and some believed him to be implicated in the murder of the previous king, his half-brother, Edward King and Martyr. Vikings were adept at exploiting any sign of political division and would punish England for this in increasing measure in the years running up to 1016. The Latin version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that is found in the bilingual so-called manuscript F (compiled c.1100–1109) alleges that the problems of England in Phase II of the Viking Wars had started with the troubled accession of Æthelred II and continued from there on. England was about to pay a very high price in blood and treasure for lack of political unity.

The storm breaks on England…

We have a very detailed account of the crisis that engulfed England during the reign of Æthelred II and this is found in a source already referred to: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This vitally important document was first compiled in the late ninth century and recounted the history of Anglo-Saxon England (and especially Wessex) up to that point. To do so it drew on a wide range of sources and traditions, many of which are otherwise unknown to us today, although it also drew on other sources that have survived, which gives us an opportunity to compare viewpoints. This original version of the Chronicle no longer exists but historians refer to it as ‘the common stock’; it was distributed to a number of key monasteries, which added information to it reflecting their own viewpoints and continued to do so in the following couple of centuries. The longest continuation of the Chronicle was at Peterborough, where the monks continued to add to it until as late as 1154.

These different manuscripts of the Chronicle often offer us different viewpoints on events and are an interesting barometer of the opinions associated with particular regions and factions within late Anglo-Saxon England. Some tenth- and eleventh-century events were recorded very close to the time of the action being described. In these cases we are reading something approaching contemporary opinion. But it is opinion