4). The saxons lose the crown

Pre-reading tasks:

1. What distinguished Edgar from other Saxon kings?

2. What was Gunnhild and how is she connected with the loss of the crown by Saxon kings?

C+ When Athelstan died, two years after [the battle of| Brunanburh, and was succeeded by his halfbrother, a youth of eighteen, the beaten forces welled up once more against him. Edmund, in the spirit of his race, held his own. He reigned only six years, but when lie died in 946 he had not ceded an inch or an ell. Edmund was succeeded by his brother Edred, the youngest son of Alfred's son, Edward the Elder. He too maintained the realm against all comers, and, beating them down by force of arms, seemed to have quenched for ever the rebellious fires of Northumbria.

The legacy of Athelstan was a more united kingdom and an organization of courts and councils on a much wider basis. The result was that regional selfishness, while not disappearing, was at least tempered and therefore the unity of the land was mote likely.

C+ A hundred and twenty years had passed since the impact of the Vikings had smitten the Island. For forty years English Christian society had struggled for life. For eighty years five warrior Kings - Alfred, Edward, Athelstan, Edmund and Edred - defeated the invaders. The English rule was now restored, though in a form changed by the passage of time, over the whole country. Yet underneath it there had grown up, deeply rooted in the soil, a Danish settlement covering the great eastern plain, in which Danish blood and Danish customs survived under the authority of the English King.

There now appeared the most fearsome Viking leader. And he had the name to go with it; Eric Bloodaxe. He was Norwegian and had been King until he was deposed and did what many of his luckless predecessors had done: sailed for England and the Northumbrian coast where his Viking countrymen lived, and where there was a desire to kick out the Saxons and join with the Vikings who lived in Dublin to establish one big Viking state.

The Northumbrian Vikings welcomed Eric. King Edred, of course, did not. He fought and burned his way through the region and instead of fighting Eric Bloodaxe, threatened the Northumbrians with earthly damnation. He meant to kill them all and burn their towns. So, the Northumbrians turned against Enc. But Eric Bloodaxe returned with stronger forces and once again called himself King. And for a time it worked. But Eric Bloodaxe was killed with his son and his brother at the Battle of Stainmore, on the heights overlooking what is now called Edendale. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle dismisses it all in a single entry.

* AD 954: In this year the Northumbrians drove out Eric and Eadred succeded to the Northumbrian Kingdom.

But Eric Bloodaxe had united the Vikings of Dublin and York, although he'd failed to establish a kingdom that could rival the English. And after he died it was no longer possible for a single invader, no matter how strong and resourceful, to begin a completely new dynasty to rule England.

In 955, a twelve-year-old boy, Edgar, became King of Mercia. His brother, Eadwig, was about three years older and he became King of Wessex. Wessex was the senior kingdom in England. But Eadwig died a couple of years later and Edgar, only just into his teens, also became King of Wessex, Mercia and Northumberland. Edgar's coronation was the first to have a written Order of Service, and it is the basis of the one used today.

Edgar's reign wasn't the record of slaughter and gore normally associated with kings of this period. One of the finest historians of the Saxons, Sir Frank Stenton, noted that 'It is a sign of Edgar's competence as a ruler that his reign is singularly devoid of recorded incident.' Churchill saw Edgar's reign as one of peaceful rebuilding of the sometimes very vulnerable mix of societies.

C+The reconquest of England was accompanied step by step by a conscious administrative reconstruction which has governed the development of English institutions from that day to this. The shires were reorganized, each with its sheriff or reeve, a royal officer directly responsible to the Crown. The hundreds - subdivisions of the shire - were created, and the towns prepared for defence. An elaborate system of shire, hundred, and borough courts maintained law and order and pursued criminals. Taxation was reassessed. Finally, with this military and political revival marched a great re-birth of monastic life and learning and the beginning of our native English literature. The movement was slow and English in origin, but advanced with great strides from the middle of the century as it came in contact with the religious revival on the Continent.

The figure behind the crown at the time was the man who became St Dunstan Dunstan was a nobleman born in 925. At the age of eighteen he was created Abbot of Glastonbury, for centuries past and centuries to come, an important church. It was from Glastonbury that Dunstan helped to rebuild English monastic orders. He had been banished from England by Edgar's eldest brother Eadwig (sometimes, Edwy). Eadwig was easily distracted and on his coronation day he left the anointing celebrations to amuse himself with a woman and her daughter. He was found, in flagrante delicto, by the bishop, Dunstan. The king was upset, the woman was upset, the daughter was upset and Dunstan ended up in exile, and the daughter ended up married to the king. But a couple of years later, when Edgar became King of Wessex, the historical partnership between Edgar and the now restored Dunstan began.

C+The work of Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury was to revive the strict observance of religion within the monasteries. Another and happy, if incidental, result was to promote learning and the production oi splendid illuminated manuscripts. Many of these . were written in English. The Catholic Homilies of Elfric, Abbot or Eynsham, mark, we are told, the first achievement of English as a literary language - the earliest vernacular to reach this eminence in the whole of Europe. It must have seemed to contemporaries that with the magnificent coronation at Bath in 973 the seal was set on the unity of the realm. Everywhere the courts are sitting regularly, in shire and borough and hundred: there is one coinage, and one system of weights and measures. The arts of building and decoration are reviving; learning begins to flourish again in the Church; there is a literary language, a King's English, which all educated men write. Civilization had been restored to the Island.

Edgar became King of Wessex in 959 but, perhaps for a religious reason, his coronation was not until 973. With Dunstan as his tutor, Edgar based his whole thinking on theology and so, under Edgar, the religious communities became important. This makes Edgar different from other men. And his authority was different. It came not from the crown he wore, but from the religious significance of anointment After all, the kind of person who is anointed is a priest. Edgar became King of Wessex when he was sixteen, and in those days, a man could not be ordained priest until he was thirty. Edgar was thirty in 973, the year of his coronation, or anointment. But Edgar was not long for his throne. As one of the earliest poems in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us, he died in the seventh month of 975, and terrible times were to come.

*His son, a stripling, succeeded then to the throne; the name of the prince of earls was Edward. Then the praise of the Ruler fell away everywhere throughout the length and breadth of Mercia, and many wise servants of God were expelled.

Edgar had married twice and Edward was his son by the first marriage. But Edward's mother died and in 964 Edgar married again. His new wife was a widow of the earldoman of East Anglia. Her name was Aelfthryth and the surviving son she bore Edgar was Aethelred who was to become known as the Unready, Not much is known about Edward's reign, but the Chronicle tells of his death. *In this year on 18 March, King Edward was murdered in the evening at Corfe. No worse deed for the English was ever done than this, since first they came to the land of Britain. Men murdered him but God exalted him; in life he was an earthly King, but after his death he is now a heavenly saint.

It was said that Edward was visiting his step-mother Aelfthryth and his half-brother Aethelred at their home, in Dorset. He arrived, dismounted, was surrounded by his step-mother's servants and held while he was repeatedly stabbed until he was dead. So the finger points to Aelfthryth, but nothing known for certain. What is known is that within a month her son, Aethelred, was crowned in Edward's place.

C+ Now a child, a weakling, a vacillator, a faithless, reckless creature, succeeded to the warrior throne. ... We have reached the days of Ethelred the Unready. But this expression, which conveys a truth, means literally Ethelred the Ill-counselled, or Ethelred the 'Redeless'. In 980 serious raids began again. Chester was ravaged from Ireland. The people of Southampton were massacred by marauders from Scandinavia or Denmark. Thanet, Cornwall and Devon all suffered butchery and pillage.

At the epic Battle of Maldon in Essex, Danish Vikings on one side of the river met English Saxons on the other. The Vikings demanded gold, otherwise threatening the English with a storm of spears. The Essex alderman, a man called Byrhtnoth, refused. He pledged to defend the land of his prince, Ethelred. A writer of the time tells us that Byrhtnoth cried that ‘The heаthen shall fall in the war. Not so likely shall you come by the treasure: point and edge (in other words, spear and sword] shall first make atonement, grim warplay, before we pay tribute.'

C+These high words were not made good by the event. As the tide was running out while these taunts were being exchanged, the causeway was now exposed and the English naively agreed to let the Vikings cross and form on the south bank in order tnat battle might be fairly drawn. No sooner had it begun than the English were worsted. Many of Byrhtnoth's men toоk to flight, but a group of his thanes, knowing that all was lost, fought on to the death. Then followed the most shameful period of Danegeld. Alfred in his day had never hesitated to use money as well as arms. Ethelred used money instead of arms. He used it in ever-increasing quantities, with ever-diminishing returns. He paid as a bribe, in 991, 22,000 pounds of gold and silver, with rations for the invaders. In 994, with 16,000 pounds, he gained not only a brief respite, but the baptism of the raider, Olaf, thrown in as a compliment. In 1002 he bought a further truce for 24,000 pounds of silver, but on this occasion he was himself to break it [the truce]. In their ruin and decay the English had taken large numbers of Danish mercenaries into their service. Ethelred suspected these dangerous helpers of a plot against his life. Panic-stricken, he planned the slaughter of all Danes in the south of England. This atrocious design was executed in 1002 on St Brice'sDay. Among the victims was Gunnhild, the wife of one of the principal Vikings, the sister of Sweyn, King of Denmark.

Sweyn systematically took revenge. The carnage and the massacres were without parallel. For four gruesome years, from Norwich and Thetford in East Anglia to the downs of Kent, to the upper reaches of the Thames, to Exeter in the west country, limbless, violated, sightless victims of Viking anger were piled high. The slaughter stopped only when, predictably, .Aethelred paid more bribes. This time the price was 36,000 pounds of silver - probably three years of the national income. But it was not enough. Sweyn did leave but he returned. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells what happened next. The year was 1011 and the host described by the chronicler was the Danish invader.

* The King and his councillors sent to the host, and craved peace, promising them tribute and provisions on condition that they should cease their harrying. They had East Anglia, Middlesex, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire. Then they besieged Canterbury. And there they seized the Archbishop and kept the Archbishop as their prisoner. Then the host became greatly incensed against the Bishop, because he was not willing to offer them more money and forbade any ransom to be given for him. Moreover they were very drank. Then they took the Bishop and led him to their tribunal and pelted him to death with bones and the heads of cattle; and one of them smote him on the skull with the iron of an axe so that he sank down and his holy blood fell upon the earth and his holy soul was sent forth to God's Kingdom. The difference between the times of King Alfred and those of Aethelred was that where Alfred used gold and the edge of his sword to bring about peace, Aethelred relied on the Danegeld. Consequently money was hard to come by. So much had been paid out that it probably took Aethelred's councillors a great deal of time before they could find enough to satisfy the invaders.

C+ In 1013 Sweyn, accompanied by his younger son, Canute, came again to England, subdued the Yorkshire Danes and the five boroughs in the Danelaw, was accepted as overlord of Northumbria and Danish Mercia, sacked Oxford and Winchester in a punitive foray, and, though repulsed from London, was proclaimed King of England, while Ethelred fled for refuge to the Duke of Normandy, whose sister he had married. On these triumphs Sweyn died at the beginning of 1014. There was another respite. The English turned again to Ethelred, 'declaring that no lord was dearer to them than their natural lord, if he would rule them better than he had done before’.

This was all about fifty years before the Battle of Hastings. Aethelred's bride was Emma, whom he married in 1002. As the sister of Richard, Duke of Normandy, she was an important link in Saxon history, one of the strands that would, a half century on, bring William to Hastings: Emma of Normandy was to be the mother of Edward the Confessor.

C+...soon the young Danish prince, Canute, set forth to claim the English crown. At this moment the flame of Alfred's line rose again in Ethelred's son, Edmund: Edmund Ironside, as he soon was called. At twenty he was famous. Although declared a rebel by his father, and acting in complete disobedience to him, he gathered forces and, in a brilliant campaign, struck a succession of heavy blows... the hearts of all men went out to him. New forces sprang from the ruined land. Ethelred died, and Edmund, last hope of the English, was acclaimed King. In spite of all odds and a heavy defeat he was strong enough to make a partition of the realm, and then set himself to rally his forces for the renewal of the struggle; but in 1016, at twenty-two years of age, Edmund Ironside died, and the whole realm abandoned itself to despair. At Southampton, even while Edmund lived, the lay and spiritual chiefs of England agreed to abandon the descendants of Ethelred for ever and recognize Canute as King. The family of Ethelred was excised from the royal line, and the last sons of the house of Wessex fled into exile. The young Danish prince received this general and abject submission in a good spirit, and in 'an oath of his soul’ endorsed by his chiefs, bound himself to rule for all.

So Cnut was King, but he had a problem. And this was where Emma of Normandy appeared once more. Aethelred was dead; Edmund Ironside was dead; but Emma's sons weren't. And their father was Ethelred - hence the agreement to strike the family from its royal line, in other words, its claim to the throne. But kings don't stay kings if they rely on paper agreements. So Cnut married Emma. But he already had a wife and a son so he packed her off; first to the north as his queen there, and then later he made her Regent of Norway. Emma and Aethelred's sons were not allowed to live in England. Nothing was left to chance. And by lO16 they were living in Normandy.

Cnut was not only King of Denmark, but conqueror of Norway. Soon he controlled everything from the entrance to the Baltic Sea down to the Bay of Biscay. And so Cnut's was a careful and wary reign of assurance and cajoling. But most interesting was that he did all this from England.

C+... of all his realms, Canute chose England for his home and capital. He liked, we are told, the Anglo-Saxon way of life. He wished to be considered the 'successor of Edgar', whose seventeen years of peace still shone by contrast with succeeding times. He ruled according to the laws, and he made it known that these were to be administered in austere detachment from his executive authority.

He built churches, he professed high devotion to the Christian faith and to the Papal diadem. He honoured the memory of St Edmund and St Alphege, whom his fellow countrymen had murdered, and brought their relics with pious pomp to Canterbury. These remarkable achievements, under the blessing of God and the smiles of fortune, were in large measure due to his own personal qualities.Cnut developed a system that we would now call devolved government. People had more responsibility for their affairs, but were not independent. Cnut didn't want England to go back to warlords, and so, for example, in Cnut's England a very real Danish relationship between the throne and the people who were in charge of the regions developed. And, in the English hierarchy, the Danish title of earl emerged. The earl was appointed by the King. So, the interests of the King would over-ride those of the region. This was a change in the way that England was governed.

But by the year 1030 or so, the Danish earls had disappeared. Cnut's chief adviser, then seemed to be Godwine, Earl of Wessex, and Leofric, Earl of Mercia, both Anglo-Saxon. Here we have another important clue in the historical detective story. The rivalry of these two families, Godwine's and Leofric's, meant it was now quite impossible that England would be united against the Normans when they invaded in 1066.

C+In 1035 Canute died, and his empire with him. He left three sons, two by a former wife and one, Hardicanute [or Harthacnut], by Emma. These sons were ignorant and boorish Vikings, and many thoughts were turned to the old West Saxon line, Alfred and Edward, sons of Ethelred and Emma, then living in exile in Normandy. The elder, Alfred, 'the innocent prince' as the Chronicler calls him, hastened to England in 1036, ostensibly to visit his again-widowed mother, the ex-Queen Emma. A Wessex earl, Godwin, was the leader of the Danish party in England. He possessed great abilities and exercised the highest political influence. The venturesome Alfred was arrested and his personal attendants slaughtered. The unfortunate prince himself was blinded, and in this condition soon ended his days in the monastery at Ely. The guilt of this crime was generally ascribed to Godwin. The succession being thus simplified, Canute's sons divided the paternal inheritance.