The story of the long reign of Ethelred consists of little else than the details of Danish invasions, large payments of ransom to the raiders, and the king’s dealings with the Dukes of Normandy, at whose court he was at last obliged to take refuge.

Though many historical verdicts have been reversed in our day, Ethelred the Redeless, the man devoid of counsel—this rather than “the Unready” is the best translation of his distinguishing epithet—still remains unchampioned under the stigma of incompetence as great as was ever displayed by any occupant of the English throne. When we read the record of his disastrous reign, when we see how systematically he left undone the things which he ought to have done, and did, with fitful and foolish energy, the things which he ought not to have done, we are inclined to ask, “Was this man bereft of reason?” If he had been absolutely insane we should probably have had a distinct statement to that effect in the Chronicle, but it may, perhaps, be suggested that there was some hereditary weakness in his family which in his case affected the fibre of his brain. Royal families not renewed by any admixture of plebeian blood have sometimes shown a tendency to become worn out. We must remember that the descendants of Cerdic had now been reigning for five hundred years. As compared with the young and parvenus dynasties which were coming up into power from the ranks of sailors and huntsmen and tillers of the soil; as compared with the Norman dukes, the Capetians and the Angevins, the Kings of Wessex were an old and apparently a weakening stock. There was certainly brain-power enough in an Alfred, an Edward and an Athelstan, but perhaps even with them physical hardly kept pace with mental energy. Alfred the Great was a life-long sufferer from disease. If he and his son completed each his half century of life, that was more than was attained by most of their immediate descendants. Athelstan lived but to the age of forty-six; Edred, a chronic invalid, died at thirty; Edwy probably under twenty; even Edgar, whose reign seemed a long one, at thirty-two. Edmund and Edward the Martyr died violent deaths, and therefore they do not come into this calculation. Ethelred himself, though he lived long enough to inflict untold misfortunes on his country, died at the age of forty-eight. All this looks like a decay of physical power in the house of Cerdic, which may in some degree account for the fatal “redelessness” of Ethelred. It is true that there was a revival of the old heroic energy in his son Edmund Ironside, but even that is coupled with a very short life (we cannot be sure that his death was due to foul play); and in his half-brother, Edward the Confessor, though he lived to the age of sixty-two, there is a sort of anæmic saintliness which marks him out as the fitting son, intellectually though not morally, of his “redeless” father.

The story of the reign of Ethelred is given us in the Chronicle with a minuteness of detail such as we have not found there since the days of Alfred. It is evidently the work of a contemporary, of one who saw and groaned over the calamities of his people, and who was moved to passionate indignation by the mingled folly and wickedness of the rulers of the land. This part of the Chronicle is then a document of the highest value for the historian, and yet it is one which requires to be used with some caution on account of the motive by which it is unconsciously inspired. That motive is the strong tendency which always leads a beaten army or a beaten nation to argue that the enemy did not fight fairly, or that “the pass was sold” to them by some traitor in the camp. It is quite possible that all the accusations brought by the chronicler are true, especially that the inexplicable treasons of Elfric and Edric were as monstrous as he describes them; but it is also possible that they may have been magnified by a patriotic scribe, looking round for some scapegoat to bear his people’s sins; and in any event what we have to remember is that we are here reading what are virtually the articles of an opposition journalist. It is just possible, therefore, though hardly probable, that in some cases Ethelred’s ministers and generals, or even Ethelred himself, if they could be heard in their own defence, might somewhat mitigate the severity of the sentence passed upon them. A few of these criticisms are here inserted, but even these will hardly give a sufficient idea of the tone of condemnation which pervades the whole long reign of Ethelred in the pages of the Chronicle.189

998. “The Danes came to the mouth of the Frome and ravaged Dorset at their will. The fyrd was often gathered together against them, but as soon as they should have all got together, then ever for some cause was flight determined on, and so the Danes in the end always got the victory. So they quartered themselves for the second time in the Isle of Wight, drawing their provisions from Hampshire and Sussex.”

999. “The army again came round into the Thames and moved thence up the Medway to Rochester. Then came the Kentish fyrd against them and there were they firmly locked in fight. But, alas! the Kentish men too quickly gave way and fled, because they were not supported as they ought to have been. Thus the Danes held the place of slaughter, and took horse and rode far and wide as they chose, and ravaged well-nigh the whole of West Kent. Then the king took counsel with his witan, and decided that they must go against the enemy with ship-fyrd and also with land-fyrd. But when the ships were ready, then some one delayed from day to day and harassed the poor folk who were on board the ships, and ever, when things should have been forwarder they were later, from one time to another, and so they let the army of their enemies grow, and they were always retiring from the sea and the Danes were ever following hard after them. Thus at the end the great ship-fyrd accomplished nothing but oppression of the people and waste of money and the emboldening of their foes.”

1006. “The Danish fleet came to Sandwich, and the crews did as they had ever done, harrying, burning, murdering wheresoever they went. Then the king called out all the people of Wessex and Mercia, and they lay out all the autumn, arrayed against the enemy, but all availed nothing as so often before; for in spite of all this the Danish army marched just where they pleased, and the fyrd itself did the country folk every harm, while neither the home army (inn-here) nor the foreign army (ut-here) did them any good. As soon as the weather grew wintry, the fyrd went home, and the Danish army after Martinmas, November 11, came to their resting-place in the Isle of Wight and helped themselves to all that they wanted from every quarter. Then in mid-winter they sallied forth through Hants and Berks to their comfortable quarters at Reading, and there did as they pleased, kindling their beacons [blazing villages] wherever they went. Thus fared they to Wallingford which they burned down, and they then went along Ashdown to Cwichelms-law,190 and there abode, out of pure bravado, because it had been often said that if once they got to Cwichelms-law they would never get back to the sea. They then went home by another way. The fyrd was assembled at Cynete (?), and they there joined battle, but soon was that [English] army put to flight, and afterwards they carried their booty down to the sea. Then might the people of Winchester see the invading army, insolent and fearless, marching past their gates to the sea; and they spread over fifty miles from the sea, gathering food and treasure.”

It would be tedious to follow the chronicler’s example and relate in detail all the events of these successive raids, which recur with melancholy monotony through thirty years. The reader is therefore referred to the accompanying table for the list of the districts successively ravaged by the invaders.

Dreary and depressing as is the general course of the narrative of these successive invasions, we have in the early years of the war, not from the chronicler but from an unknown contemporary poet, a graphic account of a battle in which the Northmen were valiantly met and all but defeated. The hero of the battle was Brihtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, brother-in-law of the half-king Athelstan, and champion of the monks against Elfhere of Mercia. The scene was laid at Maldon in Essex, where the dark stream of the Blackwater begins to discharge itself into its broad tidal estuary. The date was 991, the thirteenth year of Ethelred. The poet brings before us the ealdorman Brihtnoth arraying his men-at-arms on the shore of the Blackwater. He rides up and down their ranks, bidding them hold their shields with firm grasp and fear naught. He alights from his horse and stands beside “his friends, his own hearth-warriors,” of whose staunch service he has often made proof. While he is standing on the bank a Viking herald shouts forth his threatful message: “The bold sailors have sent me to thee to say that thou must forthwith send to them a ransom of golden rings. It will be for your profit by this payment to forego the flight of spears; and you shall then have peace with the men of the sea.” At this Earl Brihtnoth gripped tight his shield and shook his slender ashen spear and poured forth his words of wrath: “The tribute we will give you is naught but flying spears, the edge of deadly iron, the old and trusted sword. Go back and tell the folk who sent thee, that here stands an earl with his warriors who will defend this country, the land of noble Ethelred, to the uttermost. Now that you have visited our land you shall not depart all softly to your homes bearing no marks of battle on your bodies. Rather shall point and edge settle our differences: grim will be the sword-play ere we pay you tribute.”

After this interchange of defiances, the troops on either side were drawn up in battle array, but it was some hours before they could close in conflict. The estuary of the Blackwater was still filled by the flowing tide, and one bridge over the narrower part of the stream, by which the enemy might have crossed, was valiantly defended by three Saxons. “Finding these bridge warders all too bitter,” the Northmen moved up stream to find a ford. The earl, in the pride of his soul, allowed many of the hateful people to come to land, shouting aloud: “Listen, warriors! Free space is now granted you to come quickly to us. Come as warriors to the war. God only knows who shall hold the field of slaughter.” “The wolves of rapine” tramped through the water, holding high their shields over their heads, and found, when they reached the shore, Earl Brihtnoth waiting to receive them. He had bidden his men “to weave the war-hedge with their shields” (that is to make the shield-wall) and hold it firmly against the foe. Then rose high the war of battle, the ravens gathered together at the sound, and with them came the eagle, greedy for his prey.

With true Homeric fervour the poet describes the incidents of the battle that followed. Brihtnoth was wounded early in the fight by the spear of a Viking, but succeeded in giving his antagonist a death-wound by his javelin.

Soon, however, he received another more deadly wound from a Norse arrow, and though for a little space he still fought on, ere long “to earth fell the golden-hilted sword, nor might he longer hold the hard knife or wield the well-loved weapon”. But still the hoary warrior bade the youths fight on and show a bold front to the foe, and as he lay he looked toward heaven and said:—

Uttering these words he died, and his corpse was barbarously hacked by the bands of the heathen. Soon were his two squires, Elfnoth and Wulfmaer, lying dead beside him, having freely given their lives for their lord. And now was seen the difference between the brave men and the infamous (nithings). Now fled from the battle those who loved it not. First in flight was Godric, to whom his good lord had in past days given many a noble steed, but who now leapt on his master’s horse and fled fast from the battle, spreading panic among the soldiers, who thought when they saw the well-known steed that it was Brihtnoth himself who was thus fleeing from the encounter. Offa, a thegn of Brihtnoth, upon whom the command of the remnant of the army seems now to have devolved, had said only the day before when they were holding gemot (whereat Godric had probably been speaking loud and boastful words):—

And now Godric’s cowardice made vain his words. Then did a young warrior named Elfwine, grandson of an ealdorman of Mercia, speak heart-cheering words to his fellows, reminding them of all the brave old times that they had shared together in Brihtnoth’s banquet-hall, drinking mead and talking of hard-won victories.

The poem both begins and ends abruptly, and is evidently a fragment, but we know from the Chronicle that the valour of Brihtnoth’s henchmen was vain to restore the battle, and that Maldon was a Northmen’s victory. The chief interest of the poem lies in the fact that it so vividly brings before us the devotion of the thegns to their “dear lord” (wine drihten), reminding us forcibly of the words of Tacitus concerning the ancestors of these men nine centuries before. “The man is disgraced for the rest of his life who leaves the battle-field having survived his chief. The chiefs fight for victory, the ‘companions’ for their chief.” Also, unfortunately, the poet reveals to us the existence of treachery and cowardice in the Saxon host. We shall soon come upon notorious instances of men who imitated the panic-breeding flight of the base Godric rather than the noble stand of Brihtnoth and his henchmen.

We may gather from the lay of Brihtnoth some notions of the manner of fighting in use among the Saxons. The battle was evidently fought on foot, horses being merely used to convey some of the warriors to the field of battle. The chief weapon seems to be the spear (gar or franca), and next to it the dart (dareth), though of course the sword (sweord) and dagger or knife (mece) are also used. The use of the bow and arrow (boga and flan) seems still to be rather exceptional, at any rate on the Saxon side. The chief arms of defence are the byrne or ringed coat of mail and the bord or shield made of linden wood. To “weave the war-hedge” (wyrcan thone wighagan) with closely interlocked shields is the first duty of an army on the defensive; to break the shield-wall (brecan thone bordweall) is the highest act of assailant valour.

At the outset of the battle of Maldon we heard the messenger of “the sea men” suggesting the terms on which they were ready to sell an ignominious immunity from ravage. It was in 991, the very year of that battle, that the first payment of what is generally called Danegeld was made.191 “And in that year,” says the chronicler, “it was first decided that men should pay gafol to the Danish men on account of the many terrible things which they wrought on the sea coast. That was at first 10,000 pounds. This was the counsel of Archbishop Siric” (Sigeric of Canterbury, 990–94).192 Of course this easy and ignominious remedy for the miseries inflicted by the invaders was only a palliative, not a cure, and the short breathing-time purchased by the payment not having been utilised as it was by Alfred to put the country in a better state of defence, when the importunate beggars came again, they had to be bought off at a higher figure. The following table shows the dates and amounts of the successive payments of gafol:—

This sum, if we take the pound weight of silver at fifty-four shillings, would be equivalent in intrinsic value to £426,600 sterling, or if we take the “purchasing power” of money in the tenth century at twenty times its present amount, it would be equivalent to a drain of £8,532,000 from a thinly peopled and exhausted country. Probably, as the drain went on, the purchasing power of the silver that remained would be enormously increased and the above estimate may therefore be too small. The chronicler in most cases simply records the fact that the king and his witan promised gafol to the army (sometimes gafol and food) on condition that they should cease from evil; but under the year 1011, after enumerating the districts of England, equivalent to sixteen of our present counties, all of which they had ravaged in that one year, he adds: “All these misfortunes befel us through evil counsel (un-raed) because people did not choose either to pay them gafol in time or else to fight with them; but when they had done about as much evil as they could possibly do, then people made truce and peace with them.... And nevertheless for all this truce and peace and payment of gafol, they went everywhere in bands and harried the country and captured and slew our poor people.”

In order to meet these terrible demands upon the treasury, Ethelred imposed the tax called Danegeld, which was possibly the first tax paid in money and not in kind. The amount of this tax in Saxon times does not seem to be clearly stated. Abolished by Edward the Confessor in 1052, it was revived and made much more oppressive by the Conqueror long after all fear of Danish invasion had ceased, and though its discontinuance was frequently talked of, it does not finally disappear from the treasury rolls till the year 1163.193 So persistent is the clutch of the tax-gatherer when he has once fastened his claws upon his victim.

In 992 we have the first of the long series of “inexplicable treasons”194 of Elfric, ealdorman of Hampshire and Berkshire. The king and all his witan had decided that all the ships that were of any value should be collected in London. The command of this naval armament was entrusted to Ealdorman Elfric, with three colleagues, two of whom were bishops, and they were ordered to intercept the invading host while still upon the high seas. But Elfric gave private warning to the Danish leaders, and on the evening before the day on which the battle was to have been fought, he stole away by himself from the fyrd, to his great disgrace. The result was that the Danish fleet escaped, all save one ship, the crew of which was slain; and the Danes in their turn caught the ships of East Anglia and London at a disadvantage, and wrought a mighty slaughter among them, capturing the very ship, all armed and equipped, in which Elfric had been. As a punishment apparently either for this or for yet another treason, his son Elfgar was next year blinded by order of the king. And yet ten years later (1003), when a great fyrd had been collected out of Wiltshire and Hampshire, Ealdorman Elfric was again placed in command of it. “But,” says the chronicler, “he was again at his old tricks. As soon as the two armies were so near together that they could look into one another’s faces, he feigned himself sick and began retching and spewing, and called out that he was suddenly taken ill. Thus did he betray the folk that he should have led to battle. For when the general is cowardly, then is all the army terribly hindered.” This is the last time that Elfric is mentioned as in command of an army; but we hear of him (or another ealdorman of the same name) thirteen years later (1016) falling at the battle of Assandune. We may, perhaps, doubt whether he was really a deep-dyed traitor or only a man of weakly and nervous constitution, unable to face “the flight of spears” and quite unfit to be put in command of the smallest detachment of soldiers.

In 994 a united effort for the conquest of England was made by a Norwegian and a Danish chieftain. The Norwegian was Olaf Tryggvason, great grandson of Harold Fair-hair, hero of a hundred romantic stories, “fairest and strongest of all men and in prowess surpassing all men talked of by the Northmen”. He had already visited England as a foe and had borne a chief part in the battle of Maldon. The Dane was Sweyn, son of Harold Blue-tooth, whose early career has been already described. In the autumn of 994 the two comrades with ninety-four ships sailed up the Thames and fiercely attacked the city of London on September 8, the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, thinking to set it on fire. “But there,” says the Chronicle, “God be thanked, they experienced more harm and mischief than they ever thought that any citizens should do unto them. For the holy mother of God showed her mild-heartedness unto those burghers and delivered them from their enemies.” The marauding bands then departed and “wrought the most ill that any man could do in burnings and harryings and man-slayings by the sea coast of Essex, in Kent, in Sussex and in Hampshire,” and after “they had worked indescribable evil,” the king and his witan decided to make the second great gafol payment of £16,000, and “the army” after once mustering at Southampton, was billeted through the whole land of Wessex while the silver was being collected. The terms of peace being thus settled, Ethelred sent a solemn embassage to Olaf, consisting of Elfheah and Ethelweard. Both these were in their different ways men worthy of note. Elfheah or Alphege, who was at this time bishop of Winchester, became twelve years later archbishop of Canterbury, and as we shall see suffered cruel martyrdom at the hands of the Danes. Ethelweard, an ealdorman of Wessex, seems to be clearly identified with the chronicler generally known as Ethelweard, who was of royal blood (being descended from Alfred’s elder brother, Ethelred I.), and whose turgid and obscure narrative occasionally sheds a glimmer of light on the dark places of Anglo-Saxon history. The English ambassadors conducted Olaf to Andover; and there he was led “with much worship” into the presence of Ethelred, who bestowed upon him kingly gifts and received him from the bishop’s hands, when the baptismal rite had been performed. Under the spell of these new religious influences, Olaf promised that “he would never again come against the English race in unfriendly guise,” a promise which, as the chronicler says, he well fulfilled. Next year (995) he made himself master of the Norwegian kingdom, and succeeded in inducing all the Norwegian chiefs, north and south, to become converts to Christianity. After a reign of five years full of romantic adventures,195 the Norwegian hero fell in a great sea-fight against the combined forces of his former ally, Sweyn of Denmark, and his namesake, Olaf of Sweden. For fourteen years (1000–14) Norway lay under the yoke of the confederate kings. The increase of power thus obtained by Denmark may have had something to do with the success of Sweyn’s schemes for the conquest of England.

Powerless as Ethelred was to defend our island from her foes, he could at least imitate their ravages in that portion of it which was not under his immediate rule. “In the year 1000 he marched into Cumberland and harried very nearly the whole of it.” Even here, however, his unrivalled genius for failure showed itself. His ships—the remnant probably of those collected in the previous year—were to have met him at Chester and co-operated in his campaign. This they failed to do, but “they sailed to the Isle of Man and ravaged there”. These last words throw a little light on what is otherwise not only an obscure but an utterly purposeless proceeding. We know from other sources that Man was an island stronghold of the Norse pirates, and there are, as we have seen, indications that from thence a stream of Scandinavian settlers passed into Cumberland towards the close of the tenth century. It is true that Norse rather than Danish seems to have been the character of the settlement in the Isle of Man, but as the Scandinavian sea-rovers were still acting generally in concert against the English, this fact need not prevent us from seeing in this Cumbrian raid an act of energy on Ethelred’s part against the Danish invaders.

Two strangely contrasted events, a marriage and a massacre, fill up the record for 1002. There had been apparently some desultory warfare between Ethelred and Richard the Good, son of Richard the Fearless, duke of Normandy. An expedition against the Cotentin, the western horn of Normandy, had proved, like many of Ethelred’s undertakings, unsuccessful, and now the English king, his first wife being dead, in order to strengthen himself by a foreign alliance, sued for and obtained the hand of Richard’s sister Emma in marriage. The bride was brought over to England with much pomp in the spring of 1002 by the magnates of the realm who had been sent to escort her. An attempt was made to change her name to the Saxon Aelfgyfu (Elgiva), but the Norman “Emma” is that by which she has ever been known in history. She bore to Ethelred two sons, Alfred and Edward (the Confessor). Queen Emma, who was known as the “gemma Normannorum,” was probably beautiful after the fair type of her Scandinavian ancestors, but her character is not an attractive one, and indirectly her connexion with the royal family of Wessex wrought much harm to England. Henry of Huntingdon (writing of course after the Norman conquest) makes the extraordinary statement that “from this union of an English king with the daughter of a Norman duke, the Normans justly, according to the law of nations, challenged and obtained possession of the English land”. He goes on to say, however, that a certain man of God had prophesied that because of the enormous crimes of the English people, their addiction to murder, treason, drunkenness, and neglect of the house of the Lord, “an unlooked-for dominion should come upon them from France, and even the nation of the Scots, whom they held most vile, should also rule over them to their deserved confusion”.

After narrating the payment of the third gafol to the Danes (24,000 pounds), the chronicler proceeds: “In that year the king ordered all the Danish men who were in England to be slain on St. Bricius’ Day, November 13, because the king was informed that they wished to plot against his life and afterwards against the lives of all his witan, and so to have the kingdom easily for themselves”. A most extraordinary statement is this, describing an event even more unintelligible than the other events in this inexplicable reign. The alleged murder of all Danish men reminds us of the Sicilian Vespers, but the historical parallel may be deceptive. The Chronicle speaks only of the murder of “Danish men”; the statements of later Chronicles extending the massacre to women and children are probably oratorical amplifications. Henry of Huntingdon gives us an interesting personal touch when he says: “In our boyhood we heard from some very ancient men that the aforesaid king sent letters to each city, according to which the English on the same day and hour, either hewed down the unsuspecting Danes with their swords or, having suddenly arrested them, burned them with fire”. Notwithstanding statements like this, it may be safely asserted that all the thousands of Danish men who were scattered over England, in the Danelaw and elsewhere, did not perish on St. Brice’s Day. Nor is this probably the Chronicle’s meaning. We learn from another version of the Chronicle that in the previous year (1001) Pallig, whom we know to have been a Danish jarl and brother-in-law of King Sweyn, “fell off from Ethelred, contrary to all the assurances that he had given him, although the king had well gifted him with villages and gold and silver”; and that he had joined the Danes who were invading Devonshire. On the somewhat doubtful authority of William of Malmesbury we are assured that this Pallig, his wife and child were killed in the massacre. This may suggest to us that the real character of the event of St. Brice’s Day was a kind of coup d’état; the summary and treacherous execution of all the Danes who of recent years had flocked into Wessex and taken service in the court and camp of Ethelred. Even so, the deed was sufficiently atrocious, but not impossible, as the murder of all the Danes on English soil would certainly have been.

Passing over some important events, among them the brave defence of East Anglia by its ealdorman Ulfcytel (“No worse hand-play did the Danes ever meet with from Englishmen than that which Ulfcytel gave them”), we come to the year 1008, for which the Chronicle gives us the following important but perplexing entry: “Now the king bade that through all England men should regularly build ships, that is for 300 hides ... and for 10 hides a skiff, and for 8 hides a helmet and coat of mail”.

There is evidently something omitted in this sentence, and it is generally agreed that the “Worcester” version of the Chronicle which fills up the lacuna with the words “one great ship” has much to recommend it, though the scribe himself may not have understood correctly the meaning of the passage. We may perhaps draw from it this conclusion, that in each county every unit of three hundred hides was called upon to furnish one large warship; the owner of ten hides (1,200 acres?) a light skiff not much bigger than a boat, the owner of eight hides (960 acres?) a helmet and a coat of mail. Whatever difficulty there may be in this obscure passage, it is interesting to note that we have here the origin of “ship-money”. The great case of Rex v. Hampden in the Exchequer Chamber was connected by a distinct chain of causation with the Danish sea-rovers’ movements in the early years of the eleventh century. As usual, these large preparations came to nothing, although (says the chronicler) “as the books tell us, never in no king’s day were so many ships seen in England as were now gathered together at Sandwich”. But domestic dissension and one man’s treachery ruined all (1009).

The new traitor who now emerges from obscurity, and for the next ten years exercises a malign influence on England’s fortunes, is Edric Streona, who was in 1007 set over Mercia as ealdorman. Florence of Worcester ascribes to him the murder of Elfhelm, ealdorman of Northumbria, in a forest near Shrewsbury, and thus draws his general character: “The aforesaid Edric, son of Ethelric, was a man of low origin, whose tongue had procured for him riches and rank, clever in wit, pleasant in speech, but one who surpassed all the men of his time in envy, faithlessness and cruelty”. We have here a more dangerous type of man than his predecessor Elfric; a man who will not be afraid to lead armies to battle, though it may be to their deliberately planned ruin; a man who will have the courage to plot and execute crimes which would have been too much for the delicate digestion of Elfric. Edric had a large band of brothers, who no doubt shared the profits and the enmities which attended his sudden elevation. One of these named Brihtric accused a nobleman named Child Wulfnoth to the king, evidently hoping to profit by the forfeiture of his estates. Thus driven into rebellion, Wulfnoth took to piracy, persuaded twenty ships’ crews out of the king’s fleet to join him, and ravaged the southern coast like a Dane. Brihtric with eighty ships went forth against him, boasting that he would bring back Wulfnoth, alive or dead, but he was overtaken by a terrible storm which battered and thrashed the ships and drove many of them on shore. These Brihtric burned; the others were with difficulty conveyed up the Thames to London. Thus, through the intrigues of one man, Edric’s brother, did the great naval force waste its energies on an inglorious civil war, “and we had not,” says the chronicler, “the happiness nor the honour that we hoped to derive from an efficient navy any more than in previous years”. Of course now, when “the immense hostile army came to Sandwich, there were no ships to meet it”. The Danes landed in Kent, besieged Canterbury, were bought off by a special local gafol of 3,000 pounds, and marched on into Berkshire, harrying and burning. For once Ethelred showed some energy, made a levy en masse of his people, outmarched the Danes and was on the point of cutting off their retreat to their ships. The English peasant soldiers of the fyrd were keen to attack them and avenge the burning of their homesteads and the slaughter of their brethren, “but it was all hindered, now as ever, by Edric the ealdorman”. In November the invaders took up their winter quarters in Kent, drawing their supplies from the counties on both sides of the Thames, “and many a time they attacked the town of London. But God be thanked, she yet stands sound and well, and they have ever fared ill before her walls.”

The years 1011 and 1012 were made sadly memorable by the successful siege of Canterbury and the murder of its archbishop. The siege lasted from September 8 to 29, and it is hinted that it would not so soon have ended but for the treason of Elfmaer, Abbot of St. Augustine’s, whose life had once been saved by the archbishop whom he now betrayed. This archbishop was Elfheah or Alphege, whom we met with seventeen years before when he was sent, as bishop of Winchester, to negotiate with Olaf Tryggvason. He had been for six years archbishop of Canterbury, when he had to witness the capture of the hitherto inviolate city of St. Augustine by the pagans. Besides the archbishop, other great persons, a king’s reeve, a bishop and an abbess were taken prisoners, but these latter seem to have been allowed to ransom themselves. “Abbot Elfmaer”—significant entry—“was suffered to depart.” The Danes searched the city through and through; and the spoil collected and the ransoms paid doubtless made this raid one of the most profitable of their speculations. The archbishop, however, was a perplexing prize. His captors had formed extravagant ideas of what an archbishop’s ransom ought to be, and when they named their price, the archbishop would not hear of his flock being subjected for his sake to such a terrible exaction; and not only would do nothing himself, but positively forbade all the faithful to take any steps towards procuring his ransom.

Seven months was the venerable captive kept in the Danish camp, while the fruitless negotiations went on. At last on April 19, 1012, when the Danes were all excited by the arrival of the largest gafol that Ethelred had yet paid them, a gafol amounting to 48,000 pounds weight of silver; and when their hearts were also merry with wine brought from the shores of the Mediterranean, the archbishop was brought forth from his prison. The rude tribunal before which he was brought bore a name long afterwards well known in England: it was called “the hustings”. The time was Saturday evening, the eve of the first Sunday after Easter; the scene strangely dissonant with the many peaceful vespers of the archbishop’s past. The drunken barbarians, singing perchance some of their fathers’ rude war-songs, began to pelt the aged prisoner with the bones left over from their banquet, with the skulls of the oxen which they had slaughtered. Even so in Valhalla, according to the Viking mythology, had the gods amused themselves by pelting the invulnerable Balder with stones and other missiles, until the blind Hoder, inspired by mischief-working Loki, hurled the fatal mistletoe, which alone had power to deprive him of life. The brutal game went on and the air was filled with the drunken laughter of the barbarians at the old man’s misery. At last one of their number named Thrum, who had been confirmed by the archbishop only the day before, with kind cruelty clave his head with a battle-axe. “He fell down dead with the blow and his holy blood was spilled upon the earth, but his saintly soul went forth into God’s kingdom.” The martyrdom, for such in truth it was, took place at Greenwich. Next day the barbarians suffered the saint’s body to be removed to London, where it was received with all reverence by the bishop and burghers of the city, as well as by the bishop of Dorchester, and by them deposited in St. Paul’s cathedral. “And there,” says the Chronicle, “does God now show forth the wonder-working power of the holy martyr.” The translation of the remains to Canterbury will be described in a future chapter. Under the altered form of Saint Alphege, the name of the murdered archbishop still appears in the calendar of the English Church, which commemorates the day of his martyrdom, April the 19th.

Up to this point the Danish invasions of this period have been mere plundering and blackmailing raids, apparently with no thought of permanent conquest. Had that been the aim of the sea-rovers, all this cruel burning and slaughtering would have been beside the mark: for why should a conqueror utterly ruin a land which he meant to rule? In 1013, however, a change came over the character of the invasions. They became part of a regular scheme of conquest; and the old Danish king who brought with him Canute,196 his son, determined to make the country his own. Sweyn landed in the estuary of the Humber: Northumbria, Lindsey and the Five Boroughs submitted to him and gave him hostages, whom he sent to the ships to be kept under his son’s guardianship. He ordered the inhabitants to feed and mount his soldiers; he restored the full Danish dominion over all the country beyond the Watling Street as it existed in the darkest years of the ninth century. He then crossed the Watling Street, harrying the midland counties. Oxford submitted, so did Winchester. He marched against London, losing many of his foolhardy soldiers in crossing the Thames. London as usual made a brave defence. Ethelred was there, and with Ethelred a strange ally, none other than Thurkill the Dane who had commanded the invading army in 1009. It was Thurkill’s men who had captured Canterbury and murderously pelted the holy Elfheah; but according to one contemporary authority Thurkill himself had tried to save him, offering the murderers all his treasures, “except only his ship,” if they would but be merciful. Possibly the remembrance of that scene, or some lessons in Christianity which he may have learned from the captive archbishop, induced him now to lower the Raven-banner and take service under Ethelred. Possibly, too, it was this notable defection which caused Sweyn to come over in person and pluck the ripe fruit, lest it should fall into the hands of one of his subjects.

The Danish king next moved westward to Bath, and received the submission of that ancient city and of all the western thegns, each one of whom had to give hostages, who were sent like the others to the Humber to be kept under Canute’s guardianship. Even the brave citizens of London saw that it was useless further to prolong the contest. They submitted, gave hostages and joined with the rest of England in acknowledging Sweyn as “full king”. There are indications that this great revolution was prompted not merely by the desire to end in any manner the dreadful period of Danish ravagings, but also by utter disgust at the character of Ethelred, who seems to have been not merely incapable but also lustful and cruel. In the years which we have been traversing, there are some strange entries in the Chronicle recording executions, blindings, confiscations, no doubt inflicted at the command of Ethelred; and William of Malmesbury, in quoting a letter from Thurkill to Sweyn, makes him thus describe the condition of England and her king. “The land is a fair land and a rich, but the king snores. Devoted to women and wine, he thinks of everything rather than war, and this makes him hateful to his subjects and ridiculous to foreigners. The generals are all jealous of one another: the country-folk are weak, and fly from the field at the first crash of battle.” This letter is probably not authentic, but its words show what was the traditional character of “the redeless king”.

Recognising that his sceptre was broken, Ethelred sent the Lady Emma and her two sons across the sea to her brother in Normandy. He himself lingered for a while, first on shipboard in the Thames; then in the Isle of Wight, where he seems to have spent his Christmas; and then he too escaped to “Richard’s Land,” as the chroniclers call the duchy of Normandy. Thus then had Sweyn, the heathen and the parricide, king of Denmark by inheritance and of England by conquest, reached the summit of his earthly ambition: and having reached it, he was speedily removed by death. According to the legend related by Symeon of Durham, his death was a punishment for his contemptuous behaviour towards St. Edmund of East Anglia. Often had he spoken in a disrespectful manner of this martyred king, declaring that his saintship was an idle tale; and, what was more serious, he had announced to the monks of St. Edmundsbury that unless by a certain day a heavy tax which he had laid upon their monastery was paid, he would march thither with his men, give the sanctuary to the flames and put its inmates to death with a variety of torments. On the very day before his threatened expedition he was sitting on his horse at Gainsborough surrounded by the armed assembly of his warriors. Suddenly he cried out, “Help me, comrades! help! yonder is Saint Edmund who is coming to slay me”. While he was thus speaking, an unseen hand transfixed him with a spear: he fell from his war-horse and died at nightfall in great agony. Such is the legend. The Chronicle records only the simple fact that “at Candlemas on February 3, 1014, Sweyn ended his days, and all the fleet chose Cnut for their king”. The dead monarch seems to have reigned as “full king” over England for barely a month after the flight of Ethelred. His death led to a sudden shifting of the scene.