A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (48 page)

London held off the enemy and the citizens and such notables as were there chose Edmund to succeed; they may even have had him crowned king. An assembly at Southampton elected Cnut king. All that summer, inconclusive battles and manoeuvrings saw the advantage tip first one way then that. Edmund threw back a Danish siege and found reinforcements to defeat another one. A contemporary German source mentions a report of 24,000 coats of mail being held in London.
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It appears that Queen Emma/Ælfgifu remained, sharing in the ‘heroic resistance that was remembered in the North’.
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At Otford Edmund defeated an army led by Cnut himself, which persuaded Eadric Streona to come back on side. In October the English king summoned yet another army ‘of all the English nation’, among them the force led by Eadric Streona. On 18 October 1016, at the battle of ‘Assandun’ in Essex, either at Ashingdon or Ashdun, Streona and his people swapped sides once again. Cnut won the encounter but Edmund recouped his forces. After more campaigning in the West Country, Edmund was able to conclude a treaty at Alney, Gloucestershire, that agreed a division of England by which he became king of Wessex while Cnut held Northumbria, Mercia and presumably East Anglia. It was a notable outcome for the house of Cerdic. In February 1014 the uncrowned Swein Forkbeard the Dane died acknowledged king throughout England. By late 1016 his son had been forced to concede the heartland kingdom to the native claimant. King Edmund Ironside had raised levies time after time in many shires and forced the invader to terms. But on 30 November he died, possibly of a lingering battle wound. Perhaps his
half-brother, the boy-prince Edward (later the Confessor) had fought in his last battle. Christmas that year we hear of him in Ghent.

No source at the time of Edmund’s death suggested foul play, but some sixty years later there was a rumour going the rounds in Germany that he had been poisoned. Later still, Gaimar’s
Estorie des Engleis
(c. 1150) names Eadric Streona. It is not so much the bizarre mode of assassination – shot with an arrow up the anus, presumably up the down vent of a cantilevered first-floor privy – that’s intriging here as the fact that, more than a century on, the fate of the last full-blooded Englishman to rule the country was still of interest. Edmund left two sons who found exile in Hungary: Edward, to whom we shall come later, and Edmund. Cnut was said to have made a pilgrimage to his rival’s tomb at Glastonbury and to refer to him as his ‘brother’: good theatre, perhaps by someone who liquidated Edmund’s brother Eadwig.

About this time, an assembly of English notables in London renounced any allegiance to Edmund’s sons, proclaimed amity between the Danes and the English and swore loyalty to Cnut. In addition foreigners were to be permitted to live in peace and the official celebration of the Feast of Edward ‘the Martyr’ was promulgated. Thus the murder of his half-brother came back to haunt Æthelred Unræd even in death. His entire reign was impugned and his descendants utterly discredited also by association. Cnut’s inauguration, by contrast, tied the Danish conqueror directly into the traditions of English kingship by the honour he did to the Martyr.
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Cnut confiscated English estates with which to reward his followers; it was the normal pattern in the tradition of the gift-giving war leader. He made his most powerful ally, the chief Norwegian magnate Eirik, earl in Northumbria, and Thorkell the Tall earl in East Anglia. Clearly a great power in that province or earldom, he may for a time have considered challenging Cnut himself, but Thorkell’s English career was ended by banishment. There was nothing to match the root and branch dispossession of the
Anglo-Saxon establishment that followed 1066. The overthrow and death of Eadric Streona was a necessary security precaution against a threat waiting to materialize. Thanks to that famously efficient English tax-raising bureaucracy Cnut was able to pay off followers with immense silver handshakes that sent them happily back to their home territories set up for life. By 1018 most of the fleet was dispersed and agreement had been reached, ‘according to the laws of Edgar’, between the English and their new master.

By now Cnut had also done as much as he could to scotch the snake of a dynastic comeback. Ironside’s infant children in faraway Hungary were hardly a threat. Æthelred’s sons by his Norman queen Emma/Ælfgifu, the teenage Edward and the boy Alfred, were by now ensconced in Normandy and offered no immediate danger, although they could be useful little stalking horses if a Norman duke should one day want to challenge the Viking king in England. In July 1017 Cnut married their mother. According to the lady’s biography, written under her direction some twenty-five years later, things were not quite so simple. An acid allusion to the children of Ælfgifu of Northampton states, ‘It was said the king had sons by another.’ Emma tells us that she refused even to become betrothed without a promise that if she bore a son he and no other would rule after the king. The marriage was celebrated ‘to the joy of the people’ and was soon to be enriched by the birth of a son, Harthacnut, whom, according to Emma’s apologia, the royal couple ‘kept ever with them as the future heir to the kingdom.’

It was a revolution of dynasty; quite unlike the Norman revolution fifty years later, the new Danish regime wanted an accommodation with the English. By marrying the widowed queen, the conqueror consolidated the bond of amity. The church consecrated at Assandun to celebrate Cnut’s victory also honoured the English dead. In June 1023, in a great ceremony of national reconciliation, the Danish court moved to expiate the murder of Archbishop Ælfeah of Canterbury by drunken Danish soldiery twelve years
before. The relics of the martyr were translated from London to Canterbury and the cortège was met at Rochester by Queen Emma and the infant Prince Harthacnut. From there they accompanied the jubilant crowds on the road to the metropolitan cathedral, where the Queen presented gifts at the new shrine. Danish standing in Canterbury received a boost. Londoners were probably seething – it has been suggested that the saintly relics were in fact moved out of the city under armed guard and under cover of darkness. Cnut wanted stable community relations. It was not for nothing that the new regime was to be run ‘according to the laws of King Edgar’. After all, those laws had specifically been prepared to concede a measure of legal autonomy to his Danish subjects.

Cnut and the business of government

Under Cnut the units of authority formerly known as ealdordoms came to be called earldoms. For the last fifty years before the Norman Conquest the big three – Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria – were in the hands of Cnut’s appointees, or their descendants. The names can still awaken echoes. ‘Old’ Siward of Northumbria features in Shakespeare’s
Macbeth;
Leofric of Mercia was husband to Godiva of Coventry. A pious lady, rich in her own right and a munificent patron of churches, she is above all remembered for the ride she made through the market-place of Coventry, naked save for her long golden hair, at the challenge of her husband to have him free the townspeople of all tolls.

Godwine is remembered as head of Anglo-Saxon England’s most famous family and father of its last king, Harold II. We are told that Cnut favoured him because of his eloquence, a man ‘profound in speech’ according to the biographer of Edward the Confessor, probably somewhat orotund, a little pompous perhaps, but what the eighteenth century would have called ‘a man of bottom’. Godwine was probably the son of thegn Wulfnoth,
cild
of Sussex, but
although of minor English noble birth his rise to power came under the new Danish dynasty. His wife, Gytha, sister-in-law to Cnut, bore him six sons, Swein, Harold, Tostig, Gyrth, Leofwine and Wulfnoth, and three daughters, of whom Edith was to become queen of England. By 1018 he had been appointed an earl in England south of the Thames, but it was as a result of his prowess in Denmark in the suppression of rebellion in 1019 or 1022–3 that Cnut advanced him higher. Some would say too high and blame Cnut’s faulty judgement for making Godwine the over-mighty subject of Edward the Confessor’s reign.

An earl was expected to preside at the shire courts in his jurisdiction, though it appears that royal representatives (
legati
) were regularly present. These royal legates or observers frequently had judicial functions and were active in Northumbria as well in southern shires. From the time of Edward the Confessor we find that local administrative responsibilities devolve increasingly upon the sheriff, who might be appointed by the earl in whose place he stood but often by the king. An earl could be expected to lead the local armed forces of the shires, though here again the intervention of the centre was important, since the king had overriding powers concerning the
fyrd.
Traditionally a man’s military equipment (
heregeatu
, literally ‘war gear’) had been supplied by his lord; it was the physical sign of the link between lord and man in this warrior society. At the man’s death it was to be restored to the lord. The convention persisted down to the Conquest and, though it became in effect a form of death duty, ‘heriot’, as it was known, was still rendered as weapons or other military equipment, varying according to the man’s rank. Cnut’s law code issued in the early 1020s listed an earl’s heriot as eight horses, together with a sizeable arms, including four swords, and sufficient gold to fit out four troopers and their attendants. With high status went great power in their locality. But English earls, unlike continental courts, remained royal appointees. Witness lists of royal charters reveal that even the most
powerful, even the earls of Northumberland, were in frequent attendance at the royal court.

The response of the Æthelredian state to its ordeal appears at best ‘inadequate’ and much given to exhortation, with law codes almost pleading with the population to be good. But a similar tone can be detected in Cnut’s legislation. Like Alfred himself, these later legislators believed that a right relation with God was fundamental to good government. The spirit of the age saw the terrible afflictions of the Scandinavian terror raids as just punishment of a sinful people; society should purge itself of its guilt and such penitence could and should be regulated by law. Cnut adopted the public role of good, penitent Christian. On his regular visits to Wilton nunnery he always dismounted in respect of the place. The monk of Saint-Omer, author of Queen Emma’s
Encomium
, who witnessed the king’s actions ‘with his own eyes’ as he passed through Saint-Omer on pilgrimage to Rome, saw in him a near saintly figure, the friend to churchmen, a ‘co-bishop to the bishops’.

Where Alfred had his cakes, Cnut had the tide. The story of the king seated on the seashore, the wavelets lapping at his feet as he fails to stop the incoming sea, derives from two twelfth-century chroniclers. Apparently Cnut staged this demonstration of his powerlessness against the forces of nature to silence some sycophantic courtiers. It seems entirely plausible for the hard-headed ruler of a sea-borne empire.

That empire was funded, as we learn from M. K. Lawson, Cnut’s recent biographer, by the wealth of the pre-Conquest English state. No reign better illustrates, he observes, not only the wealth of that state but also the capacities of its ‘comprehensive administrative system’. They weighed heavily on taxpayers. The records show cases of landholders dispossessed in favour of others better able to pay and churches cashing in or melting down plate or other valuables to raise the money. We have already noted the huge sums raised simply to pay off the invader’s army, even before the English started to fund his
Scandinavian expeditions (an estimated 47 million coins of the quatrefoil type, presumably to pay the £82,500 the
Chronicle
reports handed over in 1018). But England’s advanced coinage operation, with mints in production at sites throughout the country seems to have had a practical impact on the expansion of Denmark’s money economy under Cnut. During this reign the country witnessed an innovation when pennies began to be produced in Denmark at four or five royal mints. The Scandinavian contact with England through Cnut seems probably to have contributed to the evolution of the royal writ in Norway.
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And Cnut could also draw on the renowned artists of his Anglo-Saxon kingdom to bolster his fame, as when the scriptorium at Peterborough was commissioned to produce an illuminated Psalter to be sent to the church at Cologne.

For England the reign seems to have been the first great era of tax and spend – abroad: it brought little of benefit at home. Even the king’s renowned visit to Rome could bring little extra prestige to the country, given that many of its kings had made the trip before and that for some 150 years it had tendered a unique annual alms payment to the Holy See. Known as the Romescot or
Romfeoh
(more popularly as Peter’s pence or hearth penny), it seems to have originated in ad hoc donations by eighth-century kings of Wessex and Mercia, and had been formalized in the ninth. By the reign of Cnut, the collection of the penny-per-household levy had been regularized at traditional provincial collection points to be paid by midsummer’s day.

In so far as the Danes, having conquered the country, were no longer invading it, one could presumably say that Cnut’s conquest brought peace – though not, it seems without heavy policing by garrisons of
huscarls
(royal household troops). The church, it is true, generally sang his praises and with good reason. Almost certainly a baptized Christian when he arrived in England, he may have grown into a man of genuine piety. He was a lavish donor of lands and precious artefacts. Besides endowments to the ‘Danelaw’ abbeys of Ely and Ramsey, he also endowed the shrine of St Ælfheah (Alphege)
at Canterbury. It was said that later in life, he walked five miles barefoot to the church of St Cuthbert at Durham. Of course, such gifts were calculated. In what may have been his last charter of endowment, to Sherborne Abbey, he prays that his benefactions may ease his way to the heavenly kingdom. He died at Shaftesbury, in the homelands of Wessex, on 12 November 1035. He was buried in the Old Minster at Winchester, to be joined seventeen years later by Emma/Ælfgifu, his wife.