Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (40 page)

Æthelred buys off the Vikings

The consequences for England of Byrhtnoth’s defeat were very serious. Olaf demanded that Æthelred pay 10,000 pounds (4536 kg) of silver as tribute in return for peace. Archbishop Sigeric advised Æthelred to pay up and on this occasion, at least, he listened to a counsellor. The tribute, called
gafol
but more commonly known as Danegeld, was raised by introducing a general tax and by sales of land and privileges. This payment did get rid of Olaf but only served to advertise England’s weakness and attract other raiders. Vikings returned to the Thames estuary the next year. Æthelred ordered the fleet to gather at London to cut off the Viking fleet from the sea. Æthelred put Ælfric, the ealdorman of Hampshire, in command but instead Ælfric warned the Vikings of the impending attack and then joined forces with them. This set the pattern for the remainder of Æthelred’s reign: English efforts to fight the Vikings would be continuously undermined by disloyalty.

In 994, Viking raids on England became more intense. Olaf Tryggvason returned in alliance with Svein Forkbeard, the king of Denmark. The two were unlikely allies as Olaf’s ambitions posed a direct threat to the Danish domination of Norway established by Svein’s father Harald Bluetooth in 970. On 20 September, Olaf and Svein sailed up the Thames with ninety-four ships and attacked London, apparently thinking that they would capture the prosperous town easily. However, the townsfolk fought back ferociously and drove the Vikings off with heavy losses. Svein and Olaf moved on and ravaged Essex, Kent, Sussex and Hampshire before Æthelred resorted to the familiar expedient of buying them off, this time for 16,000 pounds (7,257 kg) of silver. Olaf spent the winter in England and was feted by King Æthelred, who stood as his godfather when he was baptised by the bishop of Winchester at Andover. Olaf swore, too, that he would never return to England again in hostility, a promise he kept. In 995 he returned to Norway and was accepted as king. Svein, who was already a Christian, also returned home and was too busy for the next five years trying to dislodge Olaf from Norway to raid England. The absence of these two dominant figures left the field open for lesser chiefs to lead raids on their own account and to form the kind of coalitions that had proved so successful for the Vikings in the ninth century. The English suffered defeat after defeat, but they did keep fighting. On 23 May 1001, the Vikings defeated the levies of Hampshire at
Æthelingadene
. For once, the
Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle
gives casualty figures that have the ring of precision about them. English casualties were eighty-one killed, including five members of the nobility. The chronicle says that the Danes had many more killed, but it was still the English who gave up the battle first. The English were failing not for lack of courage but for lack of co-ordination. Æthelred provided little overall direction for the war effort and seems to have left every shire to fend for itself. In an age when warriors expected their leaders to fight in the front ranks, the king’s reluctance to take the field in person was utterly demoralising. For Æthelred’s opponents, England’s defeats had nothing to do with a failure of leadership, however, they were manifestations of God’s anger over Edward’s murder.

Some of the raids against England were launched from bases in Normandy. It is not certain that this was with the agreement of Duke Richard the Good, but he did have a Danish mother and had other ties with the Vikings (see ch. 4). Æthelred sent a fleet on an abortive mission to attack these bases in
c.
1001 – 2. Æthelred then tried instead to use diplomacy to deny the Vikings bases in Normandy. In 1002 this resulted in a diplomatic marriage between Æthelred and Duke Richard’s sister Emma. Emma had two sons by Æthelred, Edward (later to become known as ‘the Confessor’) and Alfred. It does not appear that Æthelred received any immediate benefits from this relationship and it further destabilised his government by threatening the position of his sons by his first marriage. In the long term, however, the creation of a dynastic link between England and Normandy had far-reaching consequences for both.

In 1000, Svein Forkbeard triumphed over Olaf Tryggvason and re-established Danish domination over Norway. Victory had come at a price and Svein needed to refill his coffers so, in 1003, he returned to England. Svein’s government was rudimentary and he did not have either the right or the administrative expertise to levy general taxation on his subjects. Instead, Svein became a parasite on Æthelred’s own efficient administration by launching systematic plundering and tribute-gathering raids against England. Once terms had been agreed, Æthelred’s tax collectors gathered the tribute and delivered it to Svein. Svein’s armies differed from the Viking armies that had plundered in England previously. Viking hosts of the ninth century were loose coalitions of warbands, often with joint leadership, whose warriors fought for an agreed share of the plunder: they were partners in the enterprise, albeit junior ones. Svein was the sole commander of his army and his warriors fought for pay: they were employees. The number of ships in Svein’s fleets seems small in comparison to the big raiding fleets of the ninth century, putting a mere ninety-four ships to sea in 994, but they would have included several
drakkars
, a new type of very large longship with crews of sixty to eighty oarsmen and the capacity to carry up to 500 warriors on a short voyage. Drakkars were so expensive to build that they were the preserve of kings and jarls, and they were often fitted out with lavish decorations to further enhance their owners’ status. Another difference from the ninth century was that the Danes, most of them at least, were now Christian, their conversion having begun in earnest some thirty years earlier.

The
St
Brice’s
Day
massacre

Svein’s appetite for tribute may have been sharpened by one of the most curious episodes of Æthelred’s reign. England was severely raided in 1002, and the Vikings were paid off with 24,000 pounds (10,866 kg) of silver. Then, as the
Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle
puts it, ‘the king ordered to be slain all the Danish men who were in England – this was done on St Brice’s Day [13 November] – because the king had been informed that they would treacherously deprive him, and then all his councillors, of life, and possess his kingdom afterwards.’ The order cannot have been directed against the people of the Danelaw, if only because it would have been completely impractical to carry out a genocide on that scale in a single day. The probable target was the Danish mercenaries in royal service whose loyalty was suspect. One such was Pallig, who had collaborated with Viking raiders in Devon the previous year. Pallig was a man of high rank, married to King Svein’s sister Gunhilde, who was also killed in the massacre. The twelfth-century chronicler Henry of Huntingdon wrote that as a child he had talked to old men who remembered the massacre. They told him that Æthelred had sent letters to every town with orders that the Danes were to be attacked on the same day and at the same hour to achieve complete surprise. How promptly the king’s orders were carried out is unknown. One town where they were acted on was Oxford. Æthelred referred to the massacre in a charter of 1004 in which he explained that the church of St Frideswide needed to be rebuilt because the local Danes:

‘striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ, having broken down the doors and bolts, and resolved to make a refuge and defence for themselves therein against the people of the town and the suburbs; but when all the people in pursuit strove, forced by necessity, to drive them out, and could not, they set fire to the planks and burned, as it seems, this church with its ornaments and books.’

Æthelred described the massacre as ‘a most just extermination’. Excavations at St John’s College in Oxford in 2008 uncovered a mass grave containing the skeletons of between thirty-four and thirty-eight well-built young men, all bearing the marks of violent death. Many of the wounds were to their backs, showing that they had been killed while fleeing. Several of the bodies were charred, indicating that they had been burned before burial. The bones have been radiocarbon-dated to between 960 and 1020, and chemical analysis of collagen in the bones and tooth enamel shows that these men grew up in countries colder than Britain. Though certainty is not possible, this is compelling evidence that these men were Danish victims of the St Brice’s Day massacre.

In 2009, evidence of another massacre from this period was discovered during road building on Ridgeway Hill, overlooking the port of Weymouth in Dorset. This mass burial, in an abandoned Roman quarry, contained the skeletons of fifty-four young men, all of whom had been decapitated in an unusual way, using a sword blow to the front of the neck, rather than the more usual strike from the back. The skulls were piled separately from the skeletons and only fifty-one were found: it is likely that the missing skulls were displayed on stakes. Execution with a sword was usually a privilege reserved for people of high status, so the victims were not likely to have been ordinary criminals, who would have been hanged. Chemical analysis of the bones and teeth shows that these men, like those in the Oxford mass burial, grew up in cold climates and are likely to have been Vikings: one of them came from north of the Arctic Circle. Another of the victims had incisions filed into his front teeth, a painful procedure, and it is thought that these incisions would have been filled with pigment to give their owner a fierce appearance. Svein Forkbeard’s father Harald Bluetooth may have acquired his nickname after enduring a similar procedure. The method used to kill these men was described in the thirteenth-century
Saga
of
the
Jomsvikings
, about a semi-legendary band of elite Vikings said to have been founded by Harald. A Jomsviking who was about to be executed was asked what he thought about dying. ‘He said:

“I think well of death, as do all of us. But I am not minded to be slaughtered like a sheep, and would rather face the blow. You hew into my face and watch closely if I flinch.” ...They did what he asked for and let him face the blow. [The executioner] stepped in front of him and hewed into his face; and he did not flinch a whit except that his eyes closed when death came upon him.’ (trans Lee M. Hollander, University of Texas Press, 1955.)

The bones have been radiocarbon-dated to 980 – 1030 but, as is the case with the Oxford burial, it is impossible to say with any degree of certainty that the Ridgeway Hill grave contains victims of the St Brice’s Day Massacre. It is perhaps more likely that they were Vikings captured during an unsuccessful raid. The English may, therefore, have enjoyed more successes against the Vikings than the relentlessly negative narrator of the
Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle
was willing to admit.

Svein apparently faced little resistance to his campaign in 1003. An army gathered to confront him in Wiltshire but at the last moment its commander, the unreliable ealdorman Ælfric, feigned illness and no battle took place. Svein returned in 1004 and raided in East Anglia, sacking the important town of Norwich. The ealdorman Ulfcytel, who was probably of Danish ancestry, tried to buy Svein off, but he soon broke the truce. Ulfcytel raised what forces he could and fought back: both sides suffered heavy casualties but once again the Danes prevailed. The
Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle
blames the defeat on the failure of the East Angles to give Ulfcytel the support he needed. Famine forced Svein to withdraw from England in 1005, but he was back the next summer, overrunning the south of England before withdrawing to the Isle of Wight for the winter. Æthelred asked for a truce, negotiations followed and in 1007 Svein received an enormous
gafol
of 36,000 pounds (16,329 kg) of silver. This was enough to satisfy Svein and he returned home to Denmark. Æthelred used the respite to build more ships and manufacture more armour. There is also archaeological evidence that town defences were strengthened around this time, often with new stone walls replacing earth and timber ramparts.

Thorkell the Tall

In 1009 the new fleet, the largest ever raised in England, was mustered at Sandwich in Kent in readiness for further Danish attacks. Æthelred himself took command. Danish fleets did not usually attempt to sail to England directly across the North Sea, preferring to hug the coasts of Denmark, Germany and Frisia until they reached the mouth of the Rhine and made the short crossing to Kent. Sandwich was, therefore, the ideal place to station the fleet if it was to have any chance of intercepting a Danish fleet before it even landed. However, at the muster a dispute broke out between two leading nobles, Brihtric and Wulfnoth Cild. Accused by Brihtric of unspecified offences, Wulfnoth seized twenty ships and set off on a plundering expedition along the south coast. Brihtric set off in pursuit with another eighty ships, but these were caught in a storm and wrecked. When news of the disaster reached Sandwich, the king fled and the remainder of the fleet broke up in confusion. ‘And the toil of all the nation thus lightly came to naught,’ lamented the chronicler. Then, at the beginning of August, a large Danish fleet landed at Sandwich completely unopposed: it was soon reinforced by a second Danish force. The leader of this new Danish army was Thorkell the Tall. The son of a Danish jarl, Thorkell had been a commander in Svein’s army but was now acting on his own behalf. Thorkell may simply have been out to enrich himself, but it is equally possible that he intended to use success as a Viking leader as a springboard to seize power at home, as Olaf Tryggvason had done.

The arrival of Thorkell’s army marked the beginning of the end for Æthelred’s regime. As the
Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle
tells it, the story has a clear villain: Eadric Streona, the ealdorman of Mercia. Eadric found royal favour by acting as Æthelred’s hit-man, murdering Ælfhelm, the ealdorman of Northumbria, who had backed the wrong side in a power struggle at court. Eadric’s reward was to be appointed to govern Mercia, one of the most senior offices in the land. Eadric went on to earn an unenviable reputation for base treachery. Eadric was first singled out for criticism in the
Chronicle’s
entry for 1011. The English army, led by Æthelred in person, had succeeded in cutting the Danes off from their ships and the men were eager to attack, but Eadric somehow persuaded Æthelred against it and the Danes escaped. Thorkell spent the next two years criss-crossing Wessex and East Anglia, plundering and burning. English resistance became increasingly disorganised. The
Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle
paints a picture of complete chaos: