The Vikings (53 page)

Wulfstan was drawing some very long narrative lines here. He was asking his congregation to see a direct parallel between the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the Britons in the fifth and sixth centuries and the imminent Danish conquest of the Anglo-Saxons in the eleventh. Haunted by the similarities between the circumstances in 1014 and those under which Alcuin had written to King Ethelred of Northumbria, in the aftermath of 793, he was convinced that the hour of Alcuin’s prophecy had come - ‘Who does not fear this? Who does not lament this as if his country were captured?’ - and now urged his listeners, if they wished to avoid a fate similar to the one they themselves had visited upon the Britons, to look to the lesson of history before it was too late.

 

Cnut was never likely to give up what his father had exhausted himself fighting for. Adam of Bremen numbered the fleet that he returned with in 1015 at over 1,000 large ships, a sure sign that it was a very large force indeed, probably larger even than the Great Heathen Army.
³⁰
The fleet sailed along the south coast of England until it reached the mouth of the Frome, and then the army went ashore and ravaged in Dorset, Wiltshire and Somerset. Thorkel the Tall, after a brief period of what some have seen as a guilty allegiance to Ethelred in atonement for the murder of Archbishop Alphege by men who were in his charge, changed sides and again joined Cnut. Ethelred, already a sick man, had to contend with a challenge for the throne by his son Edmund, known as the Ironside, which had gained some support in the north of the country. Eadric Streona, the Mercian alderman, raised an army and backed his campaign but then changed his mind and went over to Cnut’s side, having persuaded the crews of forty of Ethelred’s ships to join him.

Along with alderman Ælfric, Eadric Streona emerges as the other main villain on the English side in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
’s account of these last years of the Wessex dynasty. His appointment as alderman of Mercia in 1007 put him in charge of the area between the Thames and the Humber and for the next eight years made him Ethelred’s closest adviser. His marriage to one of Ethelred’s daughters made him also the king’s son-in-law. A consummate and unprincipled opportunist, he was more concerned with immediate threats to his position from rival English courtiers than the vastly greater threat of conquest posed by Sven’s armies, and in 1006 and again in 1015 he arranged the murders of prominent English rivals.

Though a poor leader, on the evidence of the
Battle of Maldon
Byrhtnoth appears to have been a brave man. On the evidence of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, Eadric was neither. He shied away from confrontation with Thorkel the Tall’s army of Danes in 1009 as they were making their way back to their ships. Ethelred had them surrounded with a large force and was all ready to attack: ‘but,’ says the Chronicler, ‘as was always the case, it was alderman Eadric who prevented it’.
³¹

Over the next six years, as the struggle for possession of the kingdom reached its climax and the prospects of the rival factions became harder to gauge, Eadric changed sides frequently. In 1016 he was with Cnut as they ravaged and burned their way through Warwickshire. The threat to the dynasty seems finally to have reconciled Edmund to his father and he raised an army and urged Ethelred in London to join him with all the men he could muster. But the large army thus assembled simply dissipated again, Ethelred was informed that none was willing to support him, and he made his way back to London. As the dark moral farce of English resistance played out, Edmund joined forces with Earl Uhtred in Northumbria and, according to the
Chronicle
, ‘everyone thought that they would collect an army against King Cnut’. But by now everyone was a Viking and, instead of facing Cnut’s Danes, this English army set off ravaging in parallel with Cnut’s.

The death of Ethelred on 23 April must have greatly simplified the situation for all concerned. For several months Edmund fought on, engaging Cnut’s armies in a series of six battles between April and October of 1016, and bravely enough to entice Eadric Streona back on to his side. Eadric marched with his men to Aylesford and Edmund, in what must surely indicate desperation rather than poor judgement, accepted his offer of support. ‘No greater folly was ever agreed to than that was’, was the
Chronicle
’s comment.
³²
In the last of the series of battles, fought on a hillside on 18 October at Ashington in Essex, this Loki-like figure ‘did as he had so often done before: he and the
Magesæte
[men from Herefordshire and South Shropshire] were the first to set the example of flight, and thus he betrayed his royal lord and the whole nation’.
³³

Eadric was one of Edmund’s advisers at the negotiations which followed on the Severn island of Alney. There a payment to the Danes was agreed, hostages exchanged and the country divided between the two kings, with Edmund taking Wessex and Cnut Mercia. When Edmund died, assassinated at Minsterworth on the west bank of the Severn on 30 November the same year, Cnut, at the age of about twenty, was left the undisputed king of England. Indeed, it might seem as though the significant lay and ecclesiastical powers in the land had already accepted him as such, coming together after Ethelred’s funeral at St Paul’s and communicating their submission to Cnut at Southampton, as a final humiliation ‘repudiating and renouncing in his presence all the race of King Ethelred’.
³⁴
His formal accession took place in 1017 and he celebrated by raising what must now, despite its observing the customary incremental rise on the preceding demand, properly be called a
tax
rather than a danegeld. The 72,000 pounds that were raised represented the entire sum of created wealth in England in that year. Used to pay off his men, it shows more clearly than anything else the sheer size of the army Cnut had at his disposal.

 

Cnut was fortunate. As the first legitimate Viking king of a land outside Scandinavia he inherited from his Wessex predecessors a central administration, honed from the time of Alfred the Great to a remarkable efficiency, which he was able to continue using with a minimum of adaptation. Not least because of the financial demands made on the English by Viking raiders, it had become particularly adept at the imposing and gathering of taxes. The new king kept the four main regions of his new kingdom, making Wessex the seat of his power, allowing Eadric Streona to remain in Mercia and giving Northumbria to his Norwegian brother-in-law Erik, a son of Håkon the Great or Bad and himself a former earl of Lade. East Anglia was entrusted to the powerful Thorkel the Tall. The restoration of Eadric to Mercia may have been to lull this dangerous opportunist into a false sense of security. Better advised than Ethelred, Cnut carried out a selective purge of prominent Englishmen in 1017 that included the beheading of Eadric, ‘so that soldiers may learn from this example to be faithful, not faithless to their kings’.
³⁵
A son of Ethelred named Eadwig was exiled and then murdered, and the two infant sons of Edmund sent to Cnut’s tributary king Olof Sköttkonung in Sweden to be killed. Olof mercifully sent them on to a king of the Hungarians, at whose court they found a safe refuge.
³⁶

Many of Cnut’s most powerful and loyal thegns or followers were rewarded with gifts of land spread across almost every shire in England. Tofi the Proud was granted estates in Surrey, Somerset, Berkshire, Essex, Norfolk and Hertfordshire, Orc at Portishame in Devon, and Bovi at Horton in Dorset.
³⁷
Cnut did not, however, as the Norman King William would do after his conquest of 1066, set about the wholesale replacement of what remained of the English aristocracy after the depletions caused by his own efforts and by those of his father. He dealt with the obvious problems of loyalty and security he faced as the violent usurper of a legitimate king by employing a large permanent guard or
thingalid
. The recurrence of the phrase ‘
harda godan thegn
’, meaning something like ‘stout-hearted fellow’, on runic inscriptions on stones raised by relatives in Jutland, in south-eastern Skåne in Sweden, and in central Västergotland to commemorate the lives of these men indicates the degree to which Cnut’s recruits came from these regions.
³⁸
The presence of what may have been a large number of Swedes in his retinue has also been offered as an explanation for the claim, made in a document of 1027 addressed ‘to the whole race of the English’, to be ‘king of all England, and of Denmark, and of the Norwegians, and of part of the Swedes’.
³⁹
The care with which he specified ‘Norwegians’ and ‘part of the Swedes’, rather than ‘Norway’ and ‘Sweden’, is a reminder that, in these parts of Scandinavia, kingship was still a matter of personal loyalty to a leader and had little to do with modern notions of nationhood.

Though the England of which Cnut was now ruler went back in its current form only as far as the time of King Edgar in 959, in a dynastically obsessed age his accession had broken a line of West Saxon kings that went back to the middle of the sixth century. Very sensibly he wasted no time in signalling his intention to try to unite the Danish and Anglo-Saxon elements of the population into one people under his rule. Less than a year after Ethelred’s death, Cnut sent for his widow Emma from Normandy and married her, supplementing his symbolic replacement of the dead king on his throne with his literal replacement in bed. Besides being Ethelred’s widow she was also, of course, the sister of Duke Richard II of Normandy. Of the two children of this marriage her son, Harthacnut, became a king of England and her daughter, Gunnhild, the wife of a German emperor. The marriage did not spell the end of Cnut’s long-term liaison with Ælfgifu, daughter of a Northumbrian alderman, who bore him two sons.

Cnut saw as the most important aspect of his new role the promotion of himself as not merely a Christian but an unusually pious Christian. Following the precedent of Guthrum in Alfred’s time he is reported by Adam of Bremen to have rejected his Scandinavian ‘Heathen name’ and been baptized ‘Lambert’, though he seems to have made little official use of his Christian name.
⁴⁰
His change of direction showed rapid results. Some time after 1020 he received a letter from Fulbert, bishop of Chartres, who, in thanking him effusively for his gift towards the rebuilding of the church there after it was burnt down in 1020, expressed himself all the more delighted at Cnut’s piety, ‘when we perceive that you, whom I had heard to be a ruler of pagans, not only of Christians, are also a most gracious benefactor to the churches and servants of God’.
⁴¹
Wulfstan, archbishop of York, was retained in office and until his death in 1023 remained an influential adviser. Aware that among the Danes who had decided to stay and invest their danegelds in England many were still Heathen, his was the guiding hand behind articles in the secular law codes known as II Cnut, issued in the early 1020s. In a country that had been Christian for 300 years these set out prohibitions new to English law against certain Heathen practices: ‘It is heathen practice if one worships idols, namely if one worships heathen gods and the sun or the moon, fire or floods, wells or stones or any kind of forest trees, or if one practises witchcraft or encompasses death by any means, either by sacrifice or divination, or takes any part in such delusions.’
⁴²
These strictures confirm, in passing, that the everyday practice of Heathendom had more to do with shamanism, animism and nature worship than with the pseudo-classicism of Snorri Sturluson’s myths of the Aesir and the allusive world of the skaldic poets that was spun out of those myths. If our assumptions about the religious beliefs of this new wave of settlers are sound then these also cast doubt, by inference, on the boast made on the Jelling stone by Cnut’s grandfather Harald to have made the Danes Christian. The introduction of these new prohibitions may also reinforce the impression created by Wulfstan himself in the ‘Sermon of the Wolf’, that belief in Christ was faltering even among the English themselves, perhaps as a result of Christ’s apparent inability to defend his worshippers from Viking attacks.

There was a huge symbolic value in Cnut’s response to a request in 1023 from the Church to translate the mortal remains of the martyred Archbishop St Alphege from St Paul’s in London to Christ Church, Canterbury. The tomb was opened by members of the Canterbury community under the hostile gaze of the monks of St Paul’s and a crowd of angry Londoners. Cnut not only provided a protective escort for the translation of the saint’s remains but accompanied the body as it was carried across the Thames on a ship to Southwark before being handed over to the archbishop, Aethelnoth.
⁴³
In the same year Cnut made the richest of his gifts to the church of Canterbury, granting the port of Sandwich to Christ Church. His wife Emma also played her part in fostering the image of a pious royal house. After Alphege’s body had lain three days at Rochester she arrived with her son Harthacnut to pay homage, and then accompanied the processional group to Canterbury. She was a patron of churches both in England and abroad and a collector of relics herself. In the year of St Alphege’s translation she acquired a particularly powerful relic from Benevento in Italy, the arm of St Bartholomew, and made a gift of it to the Canterbury monks.
⁴⁴

On the death of his childless older brother Harold, in 1019, Cnut had inherited the throne of Denmark. He made a short journey home to claim the crown formally, and seems to have taken with him a number of bishops who had been consecrated in England, probably by the archbishop of Canterbury. As the close ties in Christian kingship between temporal and spiritual power became ever more apparent to Cnut in his new role, this may have been his way of trying to curb the influence of German rulers in Denmark, through their patronage of the Hamburg-Bremen archbishopric which, since the time of Louis the Pious and the missionary activity of St Anskar, had been the natural seat of ecclesiastical authority in the north, once the conversion of the Scandinavian peoples became an established political goal. Cnut’s actions were certainly seen as an attack on the authority of the German see by its archbishop, Unway.