An Alternative History of England

Cnut fights Edmund Ironside in a 13th-century manuscript CCCC MS. 26, f.80v

October is the season of conquest anniversaries. Four days after the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings falls a less well-known date: on 18 October 1016, a Danish army led by Cnut defeated the English king Edmund Ironside in battle at a place called Assandun in Essex, the last battle in Cnut's conquest of England. I wrote about that battle in detail, and the sources for our information about it, in this post from 2016, and about a visit to the area here. Like Hastings, Assandun was a battle which won a kingdom; but unlike at Hastings, the leader of the losing army was not killed, and so the aftermath was more complicated. It resulted in a treaty which divided England into two parts: Wessex for Edmund, and what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls the norðdæle, 'the northern part', for Cnut.

This division of the kingdom between north and south reflected a regional split in England which by that time already went back more than a hundred years. Parts of northern England had been settled by Scandinavians and under Scandinavian rule at various times since the ninth century, and their culture, language and perhaps political affiliations were still significantly influenced by this settlement. When Cnut's father Svein Forkbead launched a serious invasion in 1013, he seems to have felt able to count on political support from at least some among the leaders of the north for Danish rule, and he and Cnut treated the north differently from Wessex during their invasions. The division of the kingdom proposed in 1016 thus reflected a pre-existing cultural divide, of which the legacy can still be seen with extraordinary clarity today in the place-names and dialect of northern and eastern England.

The exact regions which are meant to be encompassed by the term norðdæle in the 1016 division are not entirely clear, but it probably means Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia - a huge area, stretching from the south Midlands to north Northumberland, and geographically speaking, much more than half of England. (norðdæle is the term used in ASC D; other versions of the Chronicle just mention Wessex for Edmund and Mercia for Cnut, leaving unsaid what happened to the rest of the country, but perhaps implying Cnut's control of those areas further north was already established.) Although over the course of the tenth century the kings of Wessex, Edmund Ironside's ancestors, had extended their power over the rest of the formerly independent kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, some of these areas had also been ruled by Cnut's predecessors among the kings of the Danes. By 1016 both Cnut and Edmund could claim that not only had both their fathers, Svein and Æthelred, ruled the whole kingdom of England (though in Svein's case only very briefly) but that both had ancestors who had ruled regions of the country. It would be wrong to imply that everyone in this vast norðdæle thought of themselves as culturally Scandinavian or 'Danish', or that even if they did it would necessarily have translated into political support for a Danish king; but they may not all have thought of themselves as 'English', either. Regional identities, such as 'Northumbrian', may have mattered as much or more. The point is that we are dealing with a large area and a mixed population, whose perspectives and identities would have varied considerably, and whom it is difficult to label. The chronicler's use of norðdæle seems to imply a division between Wessex vs. 'everything else', but that 'everything' included a great variety.

As it turned out, the division between Wessex and the rest of England lasted only a few weeks. Edmund died on 30 November that same year, and left Cnut as king of the whole country, which he then ruled (with Denmark, and eventually Norway too) until his death in 1035. But let's pause a little in that brief period when England was split between the two kings. It's an opportunity to think about how the movements of history which can, with hindsight, appear irresistible are actually far from being so. If Edmund had lived, and the division of the country had lasted, perhaps there would never again have been a single kingdom of England. It's a reminder that political unions which may seem to us inevitable and eternal can, in fact, fracture very rapidly.

The distribution of Scandinavian-influenced place-names in England, from this site

Since I've already written quite a bit here about Assandun, I want today to share another edited extract from my book which offers an unusual perspective on the roots of Cnut's conquest and its place in English history. What I wanted to explore in the book was how medieval writers and audiences in England, between the end of the Viking Age and the fifteenth century, understood and interpreted the history of Viking activity in this country - activity which includes not just raiding, but also this history of substantial Scandinavian settlement and periods of rule by Scandinavian kings. To understand this question, it's important to realise that our modern academic knowledge of the Viking Age, as well as the idea of 'the Vikings' which is so prevalent in popular culture, both first emerged centuries after the end of the medieval period. Almost everything you think of when you think 'Viking' comes from the 19th- and 20th-century rediscovery of medieval sources of information which were not available in medieval England, whether that's the huge amount of written sources from Scandinavia and Iceland - not accessible to English-speakers in any real quantity before the 19th century - or other sources of information unavailable to medieval historians, such as archaeology, the scientific study of place-names, linguistics, and much more. The very word 'Viking', while frequently found in Old Norse sources, was not a word used in medieval England; it was introduced into English in the 19th century, as a result of English-speakers beginning to have access to - and fall in love with! - Old Norse sagas. (There was an Old English cognate, wicing, but it doesn't have exactly the same meaning, did not survive into Middle English, and is not the origin of the Modern English word.) Instead of 'Vikings', medieval English writers tend to talk of 'the Danes' instead, which is of course a massive oversimplification given what we know about the complex and fluid make-up of the Vikings, and yet reveals something about how English writers saw them. It makes a difference that 'Danes' relates to a specific country, and one geographically close to England.

So how did England's early medieval history look if you didn't have the vast majority of the sources of information which have fed our modern understanding of 'the Vikings' - if you had never read a saga, or seen a reconstructed Viking ship or a map of the Danelaw? There are quite a lot of answers to that question, depending on the perspective, time and (especially) place from which medieval writers look back on the Viking past.

A map of Scandinavian-influenced place-names in Lincoln Museum.

One reason local history museums are so important...

In the British Library's superb 'Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms' exhibition last year, which gathered together such a glorious wealth of material from early medieval England, the one thing I came away reflecting on with some regret was the absence of discussion of what happened to the north and east of England under Viking rule. The course of Anglo-Saxon history wended its way from Kent up to Bede's Northumbria down to Mercia and Wessex, but once we reached Alfred the Great and his successors, the centre of attention was firmly in the south, and stayed there. The Vikings were seen doing their 'Viking' thing, burning monasteries and looting the Codex Aureus, but they were certainly marginal to the main story; as soon as they appeared, the focus moved south. There was, as far as I spotted, only one brief reference to the Viking kingdom of York, and only in the context of Athelstan claiming control of it; none of its kings were named, and there was nothing to suggest the importance of this kingdom which extended across the Irish Sea to Dublin. It inherently reflects a particular perspective on 'English' history to treat Athelstan as a major figure and not even give Sitric a name. There was also no mention of the many forms of evidence for the lasting impact of Scandinavian settlement in the north, and no reference to Old Norse as a spoken language in England or its significant influence on the present-day English language. Of course I wanted to see those things in part because they're my special interest, but I'm also conscious that treating that aspect of Anglo-Saxon history as marginal means overlooking an important part of the story of northern England and its particular relationships with neighbouring peoples in Ireland, Scotland, and Scandinavia (and again, we're talking about what is geographically at least half of England - not just Northumbria, but the East Midlands and East Anglia too.) This is more an observation than a criticism of the exhibition; it was so very good, and no exhibition can include everything. You might well object that the Viking rulers of Northumbria or East Anglia weren't technically 'Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms', which I suppose is true. But perhaps it's also part of the problem. Both 'Anglo-Saxon' and 'English' are terms which in this period have political force, and reflect a certain perspective on what 'England' is and what it should be. 'Anglo-Saxon England' is more an idea than a place, an idea formulated in the first instance by elites in particular times and places who wanted to bring it into being, and as historians have long been aware, it's an idea which (like 'the Vikings') doesn't always map onto how these peoples saw their own identity. So does it include the Scandinavian settlers and their descendants and those who lived alongside them? Well, that's the question. It does and it doesn't; depends who you ask. The 'Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms' way of telling the story of early medieval English history is certainly a well-established and familiar one; it already was by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, because it's the story as seen from the perspective of the people who by that time were doing most of the history-writing. But it was not inevitable that it should be so; it was not inevitable that 'the history of the kings of Wessex' should merge seamlessly into 'the history of England'. If we look closely at the sources we can find alternative histories, different ways of telling the story, where other people and other places are not marginal but central to the imagined narrative of English history.

A coin from Viking York

Here's one alternative history of early medieval England which comes from 12th-century Lincolnshire. It's predicated on the idea that the Danes, far from being late-comers to England - invaders and raiders and enemies of the English - were actually there first, and had a presence in at least parts of the country long before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons. (Though modern historians now question the traditional idea of the adventus Anglorum, 'the coming of the English/Angles', most medieval historians accepted it as established fact, so just go with it...)

This story is recorded by a writer named Geffrei Gaimar in his Estoire des Engleis, written in c.1136-7. The Estoire tells the story of the 'history of the English', in sprightly Anglo-Norman verse, all the way from the coming of the Saxons to the death of William Rufus in 1100. Gaimar wrote for a female patron, a woman named Constance Fitz Gilbert, a member of a well-connected aristocratic family in Lincolnshire. The Estoire is, therefore, intended primarily for a secular, aristocratic, French-speaking audience, which makes its version of Anglo-Danish history all the more interesting. Gaimar presents a narrative of English and British history freely drawn not only from his two main sources, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but also from romance and oral tradition which he probably encountered in Lincolnshire. It's a potent blend of history and legend, with just enough of each to keep things lively.

Gaimar tells stories about a number of semi-legendary Danish kings who supposedly ruled in England as long ago as the days of King Arthur, which here means some time in the fifth century - kings whose historical basis is not clear, though some of them do appear in other sources. The powerbase of these Danish kings is in Lincolnshire and East Anglia, but they also rule lands in Denmark itself. They're at war with Arthur and his descendants, and then when the Saxons come they're at war with them too. First there's King Adelbriht, who starts off as king of Norfolk, but then extends his rule down as far as Colchester in Essex. (Adelbriht would generally be an English name, but he's explicitly said to be Danish). His royal capital seems to be Thetford, since that's where he is when he dies, and he's buried in Colchester. His daughter Argentille marries Haveloc, the son of another Danish king named Gunter; Haveloc has been orphaned as a child and brought up in Grimsby, but there's a long story about how he rediscovers his true identity and becomes a successful king. (It's an alternative version of the Havelok legend which I've written about elsewhere and discuss at length in the book; and see also this post by Caitlin Green on Gaimar's Haveloc and Lincolnshire history) The story of Haveloc and Argentille ends with them ruling a Danish kingdom which stretches from Colchester up to the Humber, and apparently includes at least part of Denmark too.

And by this point in the story it's still only 495! It's only now that the Saxons begin to turn up in (what was to become) England. Later we meet Wasing - whose name might have something to do with Walsingham - a Danish king of Norfolk who goes to war with the Saxons of Wessex. And so when some Danish ships arrive on the coast of Dorset in 789, an incident recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which later historians often took to be the 'beginning of the Viking Age', it's not really the beginning at all:

E en cel tens vindrent Daneis
pur guereier sur les Engleis:
un senesçal al rei oscistrent,
la terre saisirent e pristrent,
mult firent mal par les contrees,
si nen u[re]nt ke treis navees.
Puis realerent en lur païs
si asemblerent lur amis;
en Bretaigne voldrent venir,
as Engleis la voldrent tolir
car entr’els eurent esgardé
e dit ke ço est lur herité,
e mulz homes de lur linage,
urent le regne en heritage
ainceis kë Engleis i entrast
ne home de Sessoigne i habitast:
li reis Danes tint le regnez,
ki de Denemarch[e] fu nez:
si fist Ailbrith e Haveloc,
e plus en nomerent ovoc,
purquai il distrent pur verité,
Bretaigne ert lur dreit herité.
(2065–86)

It was during this time that the Danes arrived to wage war on the English. They killed a certain royal steward, seized and secured the land and, despite their only having three ships, caused a great deal of damage throughout the region. They then returned home and enlisted their allies with the intention of coming to Britain to seize the island from the English, for they had reached the decision between them, and claimed that this country was part of their heritage, and that many of their ancestors had established an inheritance claim before any English had even arrived or before anyone from Saxony came to live there. King Dan, who was born in Denmark, had ruled over the kingdom, as had Adelbriht and Haveloc, and they named others in addition who had done so. It was on this basis that they claimed it to be true that Britain was their rightful inheritance.

Geffrei Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis: History of the English, ed. Ian Short (Oxford, 2009), pp. 114-15.

According to this story, Viking attacks on England aren't opportunistic raids of plunder but a coordinated attempt at national expansion. The Danes are would-be conquerors who target England - and actually the whole of Britain - specifically because their ancestors had once ruled there, not only Adelbriht and Havelok, as described above, but also this mysterious 'King Dan'. King Dan does not appear in any other sources from England, but there are several references in Scandinavian historical writing to a king named Dan, progenitor of the Danes. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus begins the first book of the Gesta Danorum by naming the brothers Dan and Angul as the originators of the Danish and English nations, respectively. According to Saxo, this Dan was the grandfather of Sciold/Scyld, from whom the Scyldings were descended (the Scyldings are the Danes in Beowulf, Hrothgar et al, and Cnut seems to have considered himself a Scylding too). Dan is also found in some other Scandinavian sources: a King Dan is mentioned in the twelfth-century Chronicon Lethrense as a king who ruled Denmark in the time of the Emperor Augustus and gave his name to the Danes, and Snorri Sturluson, in the prologue to Heimskringla and in Ynglinga saga, says that Dan was the first person to be called king by the Danes.

King Dan is probably a purely legendary figure, a back-formation from the name of the Danes, as Angul is from the English. It's possible that Gaimar and these Scandinavian sources arrived at the same name independently (it would be a natural etymological deduction!) but it's also possible that the ultimate source of Gaimar’s information was connected to these beliefs about Danish history - an Anglo-Danish tradition in Lincolnshire, perhaps. This East Midlands perspective, with its specific focus on ties to Denmark (rather than, for instance, Norway) is itself likely to be very different from ideas which might have been current elsewhere in northern England.

Cnut and Edmund in CUL MS. Ee 3 59, f. 5

And that brings us to Cnut. When Gaimar tells the story of Cnut and Edmund Ironside meeting to divide England between them in 1016, he has Cnut inform Edmund that they are both the sons of kings who have ruled the country, but that his ancestors held England many years before the coming of the Saxons:

e bien sachez, loi[n]gtenement
l’urent Daneis nostre parent:
prés de mil anz l’out Dane aince[i]s
ke unc i entrast Certiz li reis.
Certiz, ço fu vostre ancïen;
e li reis Danes fu le mien.
Daneis le tint en chef de Deu,
Modret donat Certiz son feu:
il ne tint unkes chevalment,
de lui vindrent vostre parent.
Pur ço vus di, si nel savez,
si vus od mai [vus] combataz,
l[i] un de nus ad greignur tort,
ne savom liequels en ert mort.
Pur ço vus vol un offre fere
e ne m’en voil de rien retrere:
partum la terre dreit en dous,
l’une partie en aiez vus,
l’altre partie me remaigne!
(4315–33)

Our Danish ancestors, I’ll have you know, have been ruling here for a very long time. Almost a thousand years before king Cerdic came to the throne, Dan was king. Cerdic was your ancestor, and king Dan was mine. A Dane held the land in chief from God. It was Mordred who granted Cerdic his fief; he never held it in chief, and your family is descended from him. In case you don’t already know, I’ll tell you that if you fight me, one of us is going to be in the wrong more than the other, though we don’t know which one of us will die as a result. This is why I’m willing to make you an offer – one that I will not seek to back down from: let us divide the kingdom exactly in two, with one part going to you and the other remaining with me.

Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis: History of the English, ed. Ian Short, pp. 234-7.

Cnut is claiming that the Danes have a prior claim to England dating back to centuries before the foundation of the kingdom of Wessex, long before Cerdic and Edmund Ironside's other ancestors had ever come to the country. Numerous other medieval chroniclers have versions of a story about this meeting between Cnut and Edmund (I wrote about some of them in a previous version of this post), but no one else includes this bold claim to ancient Danish sovereignty. From a historical point of view this clearly can't be accurate, but what's interesting is that Gaimar treats it as basically a sound and legitimate argument: it's only repeating what has already been shown several times in the Estoire, and Edmund Ironside is said to admire ‘how humbly and how justly the good king spoke to him’. Edmund agrees to the division of the country along the lines proposed by the Danish king, and his response to Cnut’s argument implicitly accepts it as a valid interpretation of the history. Cnut’s offer to divide the kingdom, in this light, is a magnanimous one: he has a prior claim to rule the country, and is generously conceding part of it to Edmund to put an end to the fighting. (Most medieval and indeed many modern retellings of this story would put it the other way around - that Edmund is the one conceding something rightfully 'his'). Morally and historically, Cnut is on the strongest side.

So what's going on here? Gaimar's narrative is a fascinating mash-up, combining Anglo-Saxon historical sources with the newly popular world of Arthurian romance beloved by the Norman aristocracy; but the firm belief in Danish right to rule and the general sympathy with Danes over Saxons suggests that at least some of this material has its roots in the Anglo-Scandinavian society of 12th-century Lincolnshire, where Gaimar was writing. It's worth pointing out that in the 1130s Danish claims to rule England were not only the stuff of distant history, but also of the fairly recent past: there were serious threats (or promises, I suppose, depending on your view) that the Danes would invade England on and off well in the 1080s. Yet, as the title of the Estoire suggests, the Danes and Saxons all form part of the 'History of the English' - and so, implicitly, do the French-speaking audience of the Estoire. Gaimar retells the story of pre-Conquest England for a Norman aristocratic audience who may have seen themselves as the latest in a long line of conquerors, relatively new to England but nonetheless heirs to its land and its history. Danes, Saxons, Normans - 'English' is a capacious term which expands to include these new arrivals.

A coin from Viking East Anglia

Of course, the Estoire is not actually wrong to suggest that the Danes had a long-established history in England, or that they had ruled in the East Midlands: Adelbriht and Haveloc and King Dan are (probably) fictional, though there may be a grain of truth in their stories, but certainly there had been Danish kings of East Anglia of whose existence we can be confident. The Estoire just locates this history about five centuries too early, perhaps as a way of claiming primacy over an alternative version of pre-Conquest history: that centred on Wessex. It's the Wessex version we get almost everywhere else in late Anglo-Saxon sources, and in most of the Anglo-Norman chroniclers who follow them - the version which sees the creation of a kingdom of England, ruled from the south, as the teleological end-point of Anglo-Saxon history. So in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's account of Assandun, for instance, the chronicler can insist by fervent repetition that Edmund is fighting on behalf of 'all the English people', while Cnut is an outsider whom only traitors support:

Se here gewende eft up on Eastseaxan, 7 ferde into Myrcan, 7 fordyde eall þæt he oferferde. Ða se cyning geahsade þæt se here upp wæs, þa gesamnade he fiftan siðe ealle Engla þeode 7 ferde him æthindan, 7 offerde hi innon Eastseaxan æt þære dune þe man hæt Assandun, 7 þær togædere heardlice fengon. Þa dyde Eadric ealdorman swa swa he ær ofter dyde, astealde þæne fleam ærast mid Magesætan, 7 swa aswac his kynehlaforde 7 ealle þeodæ Angelcynnes. Ðær ahte Cnut sige, 7 gefeaht him wið ealle Engla þeode. Þa wearð þær ofslægen Eadnoð biscop, 7 Wulfsie abbod, 7 ælfric ealdorman, 7 Godwine ealdorman, 7 Ulfkytel of Eastenglan, 7 Æþelward Ælfwines sunu ealdormannes, 7 eall seo duguð of Angelcynnes þeode.

[The [Danish] raiding-army turned back up into Essex, and went towards Mercia, and destroyed all that they overtook. Then when the king [Edmund] heard that the army was inland, he gathered all the English people for the fifth time and travelled behind them, and overtook them in Essex at the hill which is called Assandun, and there they fought a hard battle together. Then Eadric the ealdorman did as he had so often done before, and first began the flight with the Magonsæte, and so betrayed his king and lord and all the English people. There Cnut had the victory, and won for himself the whole people of the English. There Bishop Eadnoth was killed, and Abbot Wulfsige, and Ealdorman Ælfric, and Ealdorman Godwine, and Ulfcytel of East Anglia, and Æthelweard, the son of Ealdorman Æ[thel]wine, and all the best of the English people.]

The chronicler here uses 'Engla þeode' and 'Angelcynnes þeode' interchangeably, and both should probably be translated as 'English people' (þeod might equally be translated, with caveats, as 'nation'). But it's important to be alert to the extent to which this use of 'English' is propagandistic, deliberately exclusionary, defining 'the English people' to mean 'Edmund Ironside and his supporters'. It is a much more restricted definition than that put forward by the French-speaking Gaimar 120 years later, for whom Engleis potentially includes anyone living in England. Here, 'English' is made to exclude not only people of Danish birth, like Cnut, but even those among the English who were supporting him; by going over to the Danes, they have somehow forfeited their 'Englishness'.

But would people have recognised this restricted definition in Lincolnshire, or other parts of the former Danish-ruled areas of England? Might some of them have thought there was another version of history in which a concept and term like 'all the English nation' could readily encompass Danes and Danish kings, since it had done so in the past? That was certainly the approach Cnut himself took as king: ready to rule like the kings of Wessex from Winchester, but happy to be compared to long-ago Viking kings who had ruled from York. One of his poets lauded him by reminding the king and his followers that:

Ok Ellu bak,
at, lét, hinns sat,
Ívarr ara,
Jórvík, skorit.
Ok senn sonu
sló, hvern ok þó,
Aðalráðs eða
út flæmði Knútr.

Ívarr, who ruled at York, had Ælla’s back cut with an eagle. And Cnut soon defeated or drove out the sons of Æthelred, every one.

Ivar is the famous Ivar the Boneless, Ælla a Northumbrian king who was one of his victims, and it was 150 years or so from their time to Cnut's. Whether Cnut or his supporters really did trace the precedent of a Danish England all the way back to King Dan, this poem too finds a precedent for Danish rule in an alternative reading of English history which places its Danish kings front and centre. Here it's the West Saxons who are a footnote, the sons of Æthelred (like Edmund Ironside) who are the ones driven away, marginalised, swept out of the mainstream by history's apparently inevitable onward tide. It could easily have been that way. It very nearly was.

A pendant of Thor's hammer found in Lincolnshire,

one of many found across the areas of Scandinavian settlement in England

On the coast of Yorkshire on a September day

It's the time of year for a favourite story of mine, which seems like a good opportunity to break a long blogging drought. Here's a short summary of an episode which I discuss in further detail in my book, as a taster to induce you to notice that it's currently on sale...

Harold Hardrada's army landing in England, in a 13th-century English manuscript

(CUL MS Ee.3.59, f.31)

On or around 18 September in the autumn of 1066, the king of Norway, Harald Hardrada, arrived on the coast of Yorkshire with a large army. In his company was Tostig, the brother of Harold Godwineson, king of England, who had joined forces with the Norwegians against his brother. Harold Godwineson himself was occupied elsewhere, on the south coast, having spent the summer awaiting a Norman invasion which had not - yet - come. Soon after their arrival the Norwegian forces won a battle at Fulford, near York, but were defeated a few days later by the English king at Stamford Bridge. In this battle, Harald Hardrada was killed. Accounts of the Norwegian invasion of 1066 in medieval English sources tend to be fairly brief, since it came to be overshadowed by the Battle of Hastings a few weeks later; but in Scandinavian history Harald Hardrada was a major figure, and so many Old Norse sources tell detailed and powerful narratives about the last days of his life. Written centuries after the events they describe, they are not really intended to be reliable sources for what actually happened in 1066; instead, they show us how later Norse writers thought about this period of history, which was (among other things) a turning-point in England's relationship with the Scandinavian world.

One such is a text called Hemings þáttr, a narrative written in Iceland in the thirteenth century, which deals at length with the attempted Norwegian invasion of England, the Norman Conquest, and its aftermath. Following other Norse sources, it tells how Harald's last days were marked by a cluster of omens which seemed to show the king that his death was approaching; Harald is shown embarking on the invasion with a sense of foreboding, increasingly confident that this will be his last expedition, the end of a magnificent career. He has been talked into it by Tostig, egged on to ambition by a bitter and vengeful man - Tostig is jealous of his brother, wants power for himself, and is trying to use the Norwegian king to get it. Harald knows Tostig is using him, knows he can't be trusted, and yet agrees to support him. Almost before he has done so, the bad omens start: Harald's men have threatening dreams, sailors report mysterious fires at sea and blood pouring out of the sky, a ghost rises up from a graveyard to prophesy that the king will fall. Worst of all, before setting sail, Harald has a vision of St Olaf, his martyred half-brother, who angrily chastises him for what he is about to do. Harald is shaken and Tostig, a wily 'man of many words', has to talk him round, telling him it's just some 'English witchcraft' trying to frighten him. But the signs could not be clearer that this invasion will not end well.

By the time they reach the English coast, the relationship between the king and his English egger-on is strained. One thing that's interesting about this part of the story is how precise the geographical references are, compared to the English sources; the Old Norse sources are much more specific about locating Harold and Tostig in particular places as they travel along the coast of Yorkshire, and Cleveland, Scarborough, and Ravenser are all mentioned by name. (Sometimes medieval Icelandic writers knew more about northern England than historians in the south of England did.)

It's at Cleveland that Harald and Tostig have a terse, tense conversation:

Þeir taka land ok ganga þar upp sem Kliflond heita. Konungr spyr Tosta, 'Hvat heitir hæð su er þar er norðr a landit?' Tosti segir, 'Eigi er her hverri hæð nafn gefit.' Konungr segir, 'Nafn man þo þersi eiga, ok skalltu segia mer.' Tosti segir, 'Þat er haugr Ivars beinlausa.' Konungr svarar, 'Fair hafa þeir sigrað England er at hans haugi hafa fyrst komit.' Tosti segir, 'Forneskia er nu at trua sliku.'

They reached land and came ashore at a place called Cleveland. The king asked Tostig, ‘What is the name of the hill which is along the land to the north?’

Tostig said, ‘Not every hill here has a name given to it.’

The king said, ‘But this one has a name, and you shall tell it to me.’

Tostig said, ‘That is the howe of Ivar the boneless.’

The king replied, ‘Few who have landed in England near this howe have been victorious.’

Tostig said, ‘It’s just superstition to believe such things now.’

Ivar the Boneless was one of the most famous Vikings to invade England, and stories about him abound in both medieval English and Scandinavian literature. The context for this superstition about his burial-mound is explained in another Old Norse saga, Ragnars saga:

Ok þa er hann la i banasott, męllti hann, at hann skylldi þangat fera, er herskat veri, ok þess kvazt hann vęnta, at þeir mundi eigi sigr fa, er þar kęmi at landinu. Ok er hann andaz, var sva giort, sem hann męllti fyrir, ok var þa i haug lagidr. Ok þat segia margir menn, þa er Haralldr konungr Sigurdarson kom til Englandz, at hann kęmi þar at, er Ivar var fyrir, ok fellr hann i þeirre faur. Ok er Vilhialmr bastardr kom i land, for hann til ok braut haug Ivars ok sa Ivar ofuinn. Þa let hann giora bal mikit ok lętr Ivar brenna á balinu. Ok eptir þat berzt hann til landsins ok fęrr gagn.

When Ivar lay in his last illness, he said that he should be carried to the place where armies came to harry, and he said he thought they would not have the victory when they came to the land. And when he died, it was done as he had said, and he was laid in the howe. And many people say that when King Harald Sigurðarson [i.e. Harald Hardrada] came to England, he landed at the place where Ivar was, and he died on that expedition. And when William the Bastard came to the land, he went to the place and opened Ivar’s mound and saw Ivar, undecayed. Then he had a great fire made and had Ivar burned in the flames. After that he fought battles across the country and won the victory.

The difference between the two invaders of 1066 is shown by how they react to Ivar's burial-mound: William is prepared to risk the wrath of the great Viking by burning his bones, but Harald, already convinced he is doomed to die on this expedition, accepts the bad omen as his fate.

I'm interested in the burial-mound story, but I've written about that before, so here I'll instead explain why I also very much like how Hemings þáttr imagines the little dialogue between Harald and Tostig. Picture them, on the coast of Cleveland on a warm September day, steeling themselves for coming battle and passing the time with this ill-tempered conversation. This is the kind of naturalistic moment at which Icelandic sagas excel - more like something from a modernist novel than a medieval history. It's sparse and tense, and what matters most is what's not being said. (It will now take me three paragraphs to explain what the saga leaves unsaid...) As battle approaches, the two allies are getting on each other's nerves: Tostig thinks the king is losing his grip, and Harald is increasingly frustrated with Tostig's evasions. Harald already fears the answer to his question about the hill - he intuits that they have landed in an ill-omened place - and he wants to make Tostig confirm it. Tostig's irritable attempts at deflection suggest he knows it too, but doesn't want to say so.

Sagas of this genre are often interested in the relationship between kings and their advisors - what it is and isn't safe to say to a powerful man, and how best to say it - and there's some of that going on here, all tact and tactics as Tostig tries to distract the king from fears which might become self-fulfilling prophecies. There are also some undercurrents to do with Tostig's status as an outsider Englishman (as this saga presents him) and a Norse writer's view on whether the English in general can be trusted to speak the truth. In his ambition for power Tostig has set himself apart from his countrymen and keeps telling Harald 'you can't trust the English', speaking as if he's not one of them - but in the eyes of the Norwegians he absolutely is, in part because he's the most untrustworthy of all. Harald knows that the English hate Tostig, and Tostig knows it too - so perhaps it needles him to be called on to act as guide to the English landscape. 'You're from around here, you're supposed to know this place - tell me what that hill's called'.

And there's something memorable and almost proverbial about Tostig's brittle riposte, 'Not every hill has a name'. Not everything is an omen, he's trying to say, not everything is about something else - just focus on the job in hand! I think of that sometimes as a useful little self-rebuke against the tendency to take things too seriously. (But in this case he's wrong, of course: this is an omen.) Altogether it's a brilliant evocation of eve-of-battle nerves, and the sense of anticipation, of something momentous drawing near, is very strong. What comes next you can read about here. (And in my book - did I mention it's currently on sale?)

Immortal Vikings

Three book-related links, if you'll excuse the plug! My latest piece for History Today is now available to read online at this link. It's about the strange and intriguing story of the mysterious 'St Ragner of Northampton' - one of those medieval saint's legends which tells you relatively little about the saint it's commemorating, but is very revealing about the community which honoured the saint. In this case it seems to tell us something about the Scandinavian connections of at least one man living in medieval Northampton, and the developing legend of the fearsome Ragnar Lothbrok, now one of the most famous Vikings of medieval literature.

If you just can't get enough Ragnar Lothbrok (who can?), I also have a story in this month's BBC History Magazine about the Ragnar legend, explaining how the stories about him grew up and how, after their 'rediscovery' in the 17th century, they helped to shape the modern image of the Vikings:

These are topics I discuss at greater length in my book, along with a range of other stories about the Vikings in England - I talked about some of those recently in an interview with History Answers, which you can read here. (That's the last plug!) The story of St Ragner of Northampton is an example of something I particularly wanted to do in the book: to give prominence to these kinds of local traditions, which differ in some interesting ways from the mainstream, popular narrative about the Vikings people are most familiar with today. (Often one derived from those Old Norse sagas and poems 'rediscovered' in the 17th century, which were unknown in medieval England, in that form at least.) It made me newly aware of what a rich history so many of these English towns have - in the book I talk about stories from Northampton, Grimsby, Crowland, Bury St Edmunds, and more, all individual and fascinating in their own ways. They're a precious heritage of legendary history, celebrating the long and venerable stories of these communities across many centuries. What an incredible thing - and the Vikings are only one part of it...

The Fates of the Sons of Ragnar

Publication day is fast approaching for my book, Dragon Lords, which explores a range of medieval legends about the Vikings in England. These legends - some well-known, others not at all - offer a kind of alternate history of the Vikings, as they were perceived by medieval English readers and story-tellers long after the end of the Viking Age. How did medieval writers imagine the Vikings intervening in English history, and where, and why? The answers to those questions are sometimes very surprising. I discovered all kinds of wonderful stories in the course of researching this book, and over the coming weeks and months I'll share a few of my favourites here...

Some of these legends were very popular in medieval England, and are widely recorded from across the country - for instance, the story of Havelok, a Danish king of England who (legend said) was brought up in poverty in Grimsby, is attested in a large number of sources and was generally accepted as historical fact. Other stories are recorded in detail, but only from one or two sources - so we know a version of the legend, but can't guess where else, or in what different forms, it might have been known. And then there are some which have to be reconstructed from scattered references and allusions, which attest to widespread interest in and tales told about particular Viking warriors, but don't give us anything like as detailed a story as we would wish to have.

In the last category, the most interesting example is the English legends about the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok, one of the best-known Vikings in Old Norse literature - especially famous today, of course, because of Vikings. That show and most modern tellings of the story are based (roughly) on the detailed legends of Ragnar and his many famous sons - Ivar the Boneless, Ubbe, Bjorn Ironside, and all the rest - recorded in medieval Scandinavian sources, texts which mostly date from the twelfth century and later. The historical origins of Ragnar himself are very uncertain, but Ivar and Ubbe and some of the other sons were certainly real people (not necessarily all brothers, nor 'Ragnarssons' in the earliest sources), who invaded, raided, and ruled in Ireland, England and elsewhere during the second half of the ninth century. They made a huge impact at the time, and in later sources they were among the most celebrated warriors of the Viking Age - famous for their notorious cruelty and wickedness as well as for their successful conquests.

A 19th-century version of Ragnar's death

England, especially Northumbria, features prominently in the Scandinavian legends about Ragnar and his sons, because it was not only part of the Ragnarssons' area of rule but also the site of Ragnar's death. However, most of the stories you may know about Ragnar - how he got the name 'Lothbrok', his fights against serpents, his succession of warrior wives, his defiant last words as he lay dying in a snake-pit - are only recorded in the Scandinavian texts, and are not found at all in English sources. Medieval English writers do, however, record some different variations of the 'Lothbrok legend', and there are also stories attached to individual sons. It's clear from the surviving evidence that there's a connection between the Scandinavian traditions and the English ones, but we can't be sure exactly what that connection may be; since we're dealing with what was in origin almost certainly a collection of oral traditions, not written down until many years after they were first told, the surviving textual record doesn't necessarily help us to reconstruct where and when these stories developed. (Though there have been various theories!)

One key idea the traditions do have in common is that Ragnar - who is never actually called by that name in English sources, where he's only 'Lothbrok' - was killed, cruelly and perhaps unjustly, in England, and that his sons invaded England to avenge his death. In the book I look in detail at the different versions of this story, and explore what it seems to suggest about how medieval writers in eastern England - particularly East Anglia - interpreted Viking invasion rather differently from the standard view of most medieval historians.

Ivar and Ubbe invading England to avenge Lothbrok, from a 15th-century English manuscript (BL Harley 2278, f. 47v); 

note the names 'Lothbrok', 'Hyngwar' and 'Ubba' in the surrounding text

But just as interesting are the scattered references to the fates of Lothbrok's sons, which connect them with particular places in England in some surprising ways. One of my favourites comes from a brief note, written on the blank leaf of a twelfth-century manuscript of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica - a later writer adding a bit of 'extra history' of which Bede could never have dreamt! The manuscript now belongs to Pembroke College, Cambridge, but it was probably written at Tynemouth Priory, a monastery on the coast of Northumbria which was once a place of great royal connections. Several of the early kings of Northumbria were buried there, and one of the additional notes in the manuscript records information on that subject.

The ruins of Tynemouth Priory (Picture: JohnArmagh)

Other notes, however, deal with the sons of Lothbrok, in English and in Latin. In English we get a little bit of verse:

Yngvar and vbbe beorn wæs þe þridde
loþebrokes sunnes loþe weren criste

Which means 'Ivar and Ubbe, Beorn was the third, Lothbrok’s sons, hateful to Christ.'

That's all - if there was ever more, it's lost! In Norse legend Lothbrok has at least eight sons, sometimes more, but in English sources, as here, he usually has just two or three: most often Ivar and Ubbe, with or without the addition of Beorn (i.e. the equivalent of Bjorn Ironside). There's some alliterative wordplay in this verse on the name Lothbrok and the Middle English word loþe, which means 'hateful' or 'hostile' (both seem possible translations here). Old Norse sources have an elaborate story about the name Lothbrok which interpret it to mean loðbrók, 'shaggy breeches', and explain that Ragnar got that name because he wore woollen breeches coated with tar to defend himself from venom-breathing serpents. This may, however, be a post-hoc interpretation, and scholars have suggested other possible non-serpent-related etymologies for the name (which is not recorded until the late eleventh century, long after the lifetime of the historical Ragnar and his sons). But to medieval English ears, the loth bit must have seemed very appropriate for a Viking so famously loathsome, and this two-line verse is not the only place where the name is interpreted in that way.

In addition to this verse, the Tynemouth manuscript also offers a note in Latin which gives some information on the supposed fates of Ubbe and Beorn. Some English sources are fairly sympathetic towards the sons of Lothbrok, but not here - they are characterised as very wicked, hostile to Christianity, and richly deserving of the punishments which struck them down. Ubbe, we are told, caused terrible devastation and slew many Christians, and was then punished by being killed by God at a place called 'Ubbelawe' in Yorkshire. Ubbelawe is also mentioned by an earlier source (Gaimar's early twelfth-century Estoire des Engleis) which instead locates it in Devon, and says that Ubbelawe was actually the name of Ubbe's burial-mound - the name means Ubbe's hlæw, an Old English word for a burial-mound which is also preserved in names like Cwichelmeshlæw. Anglo-Saxon sources record that one of the brothers of Ivar was indeed killed in battle in Devon in 878; apparently later sources decided (or knew) that brother was Ubbe, and that Ubbelawe was the site of his burial. There have been attempts to identify Ubbelawe with a landmark near Appledore, on the Devon coast, which has now been lost to the sea, but which in the eighteenth century was known as Ubbaston or Whibblestan.

And meanwhile - the Tynemouth manuscript goes on - Beorn attacked a nunnery on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, and violated the nuns there. But he too was suddenly struck down by an act of God, swallowed up by the earth – horse and armour and all – as he was riding at Frindsbury, near Rochester. To this day, the note says, there is a deep fissure in the road at Frindsbury, twenty feet wide, where Beorn was engulfed by the earth, and the water at the bottom of it is always tinged red, as if with Viking blood. (Isn't that amazing!) It's not at all clear where this story might have come from, especially since Tynemouth is a long way from Rochester; in the Scandinavian sources, Bjorn Ironside retired from raiding to live happily ever after as a prosperous king of Sweden - but that's not so satisfying a moral...

So, that's what happened to Ubbe and Beorn. What of Ivar? Ivar's name usually appears in medieval English texts as Inguar or Hinguar, and this explains another story not unlike the one of Beorn, though recorded in a different source. This is a late fourteenth or early fifteenth century collection of texts from Hyde Abbey in Winchester, which says that it was Ubbe who was swallowed up by the earth with his horse while he was riding, and Ivar (Hinguar) was drowned while crossing a ford in Berkshire. The place where he died came to be named after him, Hyngarford – modern Hungerford.

A pretty and peaceful river in Hungerford today...

The name of Hungerford probably, alas, has nothing to do with Ivar; but we might link this supposed etymology to the fact that Hungerford is one of the places known to have celebrated the late-medieval festival of Hocktide, often explained at the time as a commemoration of victory over the Danes. These are both retrospective - and very late - explanations of existing names or customs which account for them by linking them to the Vikings, whom late-medieval writers knew had indeed fought battles in this area of Wessex. Since there were few things medieval writers liked more than speculating about etymology, especially names, it's not surprising that some bright spark spotted a link between Hungerford and Ivar. What's important about these details is not whether they tell us anything about the real Ivar, Ubbe and Beorn - almost certainly not, though you never know! - but what they suggest later medieval writers found interesting about them. Here, it's explaining local names or landscape features by connecting them to famous Vikings, whose names clearly meant something to a contemporary English audience, even without the elaborate legends which were attached to them in Scandinavia.

In recent years, archaeologists have been exploring the possibility that one of the men among the Viking army buried at Repton in Derbyshire may in fact be Ivar the Boneless himself. That's a fascinating idea, and Ivar's death and grave were apparently of as much interest to medieval historians as they are to modern archaeologists, since we have not only this reference to Hungerford but also, more importantly, the Old Norse legend about 'Ivar's howe'. This is the story of Ivar's burial-mound on the coast of Cleveland in Yorkshire, from where the spirit of this fiercest of Vikings posthumously guarded the English coast against invasion. Until, that is, William the Conqueror got wise to this, and went north to burn his bones and break the spell...

Repton

Barrow Mounds - and a Book!

More than two months since I last posted on this blog! I don't think such a thing has ever happened before - but I return with some exciting news, so I hope you can forgive me ;) First, here's my latest column for History Today, about a landscape imbued with power and memory and the Viking army who defied its curse in 1006:

There are some historical events which only come sharply into focus when you stand on the spot where they took place. I was reminded of this recently when I visited an unassuming hillside mentioned in a memorable story in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, concerning something which happened during a Viking raid on southern England in the reign of Æthelred II. It is a slightly mysterious story, a glimpse into a long-vanished landscape of power that now only survives half-hidden in the name of a Berkshire barrow mound.

In the winter of 1006 a Danish army was ravaging Wessex, raiding its way through Hampshire and Berkshire without much effective resistance from the English. It sacked and burned the towns of Reading and Wallingford before travelling along the Berkshire Downs, finally reaching a place the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls ‘Cwichelmeshlæw’, that is, ‘Cwichelm’s mound’. There, it records, the army ‘waited for what they had been proudly threatened with, because it had often been said that if they reached Cwichelmeshlæw they would never get to the sea’. But the threatened response never materialised and the Danes did make it back to the sea, a ‘proud and undaunted army’ flaunting its spoils as it marched past the gates of Winchester on its way to its ships.

Cwichelmeshlæw (now called Cuckhamsley Barrow or Scutchamer Knob) was a significant local landmark, set in a landscape that by 1006 was already rich in history. It is a mound standing in a prominent position on the ancient track of the Icknield Way, high on the Berkshire Downs. Though probably a prehistoric barrow, it takes its name from Cwichelm, a seventh-century king of Wessex; Cwichelmeshlæw may have been believed to be his burial-mound or the site of one of his battles.

Read the rest here. The really exciting news, though, is that this piece is a sneak peek at my upcoming book: Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England, which will be published by IB Tauris at the end of April. In the book I examine a range of medieval narratives and legends about the Vikings in England, looking at how medieval audiences from the eleventh century onwards imagined England's history of Viking invasion, settlement and rule. These include the English legends about Ragnar Lothbrok and his sons (quite different from the Norse variety which you might know from Vikings!); Siward of Northumbria, the dragon-fighting earl descended from a bear; Lincolnshire's Danish hero, Havelok, and the founding of Grimsby; and stories about the Vikings in English folklore, from burial-mounds to blood-stained flowers. (Cuckhamsley Barrow is there, of course). Stay tuned for more details in the coming months!

The Danish Conquest, Part 9: Bloodshed in the North

1016 in the D version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (BL Cotton Tiberius B IV, f. 66)

1016 was a dramatic year in England. On this blog we've been marking the 1000th anniversary of Cnut's conquest of England by following the course of this long-drawn-out conflict, and in the spring of 1016 things were finally coming to a head.

In the last installment, back in the autumn, we saw Cnut returning to England from Denmark with his fleet and raiding across Wessex. Meanwhile, King Æthelred was ill, and at odds with his son Edmund Ironside; the king's closest advisor, the Mercian ealdorman Eadric streona, had just defected to the Danes (not for the last time).

Six months on, the situation was not looking much better for Edmund and the English. Early in 1016, with Cnut's forces now increased by the addition of Eadric's ships, Edmund began to summon up an army, but he could not look for much help from his ailing father. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (E) begins its entry for 1016:

Her on þissum geare com Cnut cyning mid his here .clx. scipa. 7 Eadirc ealdormann mid him ofer Temese into Myrcan æt Cræcilade. 7 wendon þa to Wæringscire innon þære middewintres tide. 7 hergodon 7 bærndon 7 slogon eall þæt hi to comon. Ða ongan se æðeling Eadmund to gadrienne fyrde. Þa seo fyrd gesomnod wæs. þa ne onhagode him buton se cyng þære wære. 7 hi hæfdon þære burhware fultum of Lundene. Geswicon þa þære fyrding. 7 færde ælc mann him ham. Ða æfter þære tide þa bead mann eft fyrde be fullum wite. þæt ælc mann þe feor wære forð gewende. 7 mann sende to þam cyninge to Lundene. 7 bædon hine þæt he come ongean þa fyrde mid þam fultume þe he gegaderian mihte. Ða hi ealle tosomne comon. þa ne beheold hit naht þe ma þe hit oftor ær dyde. Þa cydde mann þam cyninge þæt hine mann beswicon wolde. þa þe him on fultume beon sceolden. Forlet ða þa fyrde. 7 cyrde him eft to Lundene.

[In this year King Cnut came with his army of 160 ships, and Ealdorman Eadric with him, over the Thames into Mercia at Cricklade, and then turned into Warwickshire during the midwinter festival, and they raided and burned and slew all that they came to. Then the atheling Edmund began to gather an army. When the army was assembled, they would not be satisfied unless the king were there and they had the support of the garrison from London. So they gave up the campaign, and everyone went home. Then after the festival the army was commanded again, under full penalty, that every man who was able should come, and the king was sent to in London and asked to come to join the army with all the support he could gather. When they were all come together, it was no use, any more than it had often been before. Then the king was told that they were going to betray him, those who should have supported him; he left the army, and went back again to London.]

This picture of disorganisation and general mistrust among the English leaders is typical of the chronicler's narrative of these years (whether accurately or not), and he sounds especially jaded here. The Chronicle goes on:

Ða rad se æþeling Eadmund to Norðhymbran to Vhtrede eorl. 7 wænde ælc mann þæt hi woldon fyrde somnian ongean Cnut cyng. Þa ferdon hi into Stæffordscire. 7 into Scrobbesbyrig. 7 to Legeceastre. 7 hergodon hi on heora healfe 7 Cnut on his. 7 wende him þa ut þurh Buccingahamscire into Beadafordscire. 7 þanon to Huntandunscire. andlang fennes to Stanforda. 7 ða into Lincolnescire. þanon to Snotingahamscire. 7 swa to Norðhymbran to Eoforwicweard. Ða Uhtred geaxode þis. ða forlet he his hergunga 7 efeste norðweard. 7 beah þa for nede. 7 ealle Norðhymbran mid him. 7 he gislode. 7 hine man ðeah hwæðere ofsloh. 7 þurcytel Nafanan sunu mid him. 7 þa æfter þæs se cyng Cnut gesætte Yric into Norðhymbran to eorle. eall swa Uhtred wæs. 7 syððan wendon him suðweard oðres weges eall be westan. 7 com þa eall se here toforan þam Eastron to scipon. 7 se æþeling Ædmund wende to Lundene to his fæder. 7 þa æfter Eastron wende se cyng Cnut mid eallum his scipum to Lundeneweard.

[Then the atheling Edmund rode to Northumbria to Earl Uhtred, and everyone thought they intended to gather an army against King Cnut. They went into Staffordshire and into Shrewsbury and to [Chester], and they raided on their side, and Cnut on his; and [Cnut] then turned out through Buckinghamshire into Bedfordshire and from there to Huntingdonshire, along the fen to Stamford, and then into Lincolnshire, from there to Nottinghamshire, and so to Northumbria towards York. When Uhtred heard this, he left his raiding and hurried north, and submitted out of necessity, and all Northumbria with him, and he gave hostages; but nonetheless he was killed, and Thurcytel, son of Nafena, with him. And after this King Cnut appointed Erik as earl in Northumbria, just as Uhtred was, and afterwards went southwards by another route, down the west. And then all the [Danish] army came to the ships before Easter, and the atheling Edmund went to London to his father, and after Easter King Cnut went towards London with all his ships.]

Effectively this was Cnut's conquest of the north. The Chronicle only details his route up through the Midlands into Northumbria, but Scandinavian sources tell us that along the way he was fighting battles in 'green Lindsey', and at Hemingbrough in Yorkshire. No wonder Uhtred made haste to meet him! As the most powerful man in the north of England, head of the family who had ruled Northumbria from Bamburgh for several generations, Uhtred was an important ally of Edmund and Æthelred; his murder, supposedly committed under a promise of safe-conduct, delivered the north to the Danes. Sources disagree on the immediate cause of Uhtred's murder: the C version of the Chronicle blames it on the advice of Eadric streona (which seems possible, but is a bit suspicious, given the habit of blaming everything on Eadric streona). A later but better-informed northern source says that Uhtred was killed by a man with whom he had a long-standing feud, Thurbrand Hold, and that his death began a series of revenge killings which lasted right into the 1070s. It's sometimes hard to get a clear picture of what was going on in the complex world of Northumbrian politics, but it seems here that Cnut had waded right into the middle of it. In Uhtred's place Cnut appointed (perhaps not straightaway, but certainly by 1017) England's first ever earl, a word which now began to be used in England instead of ealdorman: the Norwegian Eiríkr Hákonarson, one of his most experienced supporters.

Bamburgh from afar

And down in the south, both armies were now converging on London, where by mid-April Æthelred was entering the last days of his life.

The Danish Conquest, Part 7: Murder at Oxford

Two years ago, I began a series of posts marking - in real time, as far as possible - the 1000th anniversary of the Danish Conquest of England. This was a lengthy struggle, which resulted in the Danish king Cnut driving the English royal family into exile and ruling England from 1016-1035. During those decades England was part of a great pan-Scandinavian empire, but this period in English history is relatively little known, especially by comparison with the Norman Conquest which took place half a century later. I considered some reasons why that might be so here. This series of posts is an attempt to trace the long and fascinating story of battles, invasions, shifting allegiances, murders, marriages, and betrayals, as recorded in the history and poetry of the time. Links to all the posts in the series so far can be found here.

If you're new to my blog, you may not have been aware of this series, because it's been more than a year since the last installment - not because I forgot about the project (honest) but because there was a long hiatus in hostilities between the spring of 1014 and the summer of 1015. Let's recap: Svein Forkbeard, king of Denmark, invaded England in the summer of 1013, after a targeted and swift-moving campaign which involved making alliances with some key players among the English nobility. (This will become important in a moment.) By the end of the year Svein had driven the English king, Æthelred, into exile. But Svein's reign in England lasted less than two months: he died suddenly in February 1014, and Æthelred returned from exile, making a bargain with the witan that he would rule England more justly than he had before. Within a few months he had managed to force the Danish army, now led by Svein's young son Cnut, back to Denmark. Last summer, we saw Cnut sailing away with a final gesture of unpleasant defiance: returning the English hostages who had been given to his father with their hands, ears and noses cut off. A number of Danish ships under the command of the formidable Viking leader Thorkell the Tall stayed in England, still taking large payments of money from Æthelred, but apparently not giving their full allegiance to either the English or the Danish king.

Between Michaelmas 1014 and the summer of 1015, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, our most detailed narrative source, doesn't tell us what was going on in England. The gap itself is interesting. One of the advantages of this kind of real-time project, attempting to follow events more or less in the sequence that they happened, is that you are forced to notice gaps and pauses as much as events, the absence as well as the presence of information. Writing a narrative of any historical period, we mostly have little choice but to skip over the times for which we don't have any details; but a year is a long time, and a lot can happen. What was Æthelred doing? Was he consolidating his position, 'ruling more justly than before'? Was he holding fire on his internal enemies, waiting to strike? We can't really know.

But in summer 1015, while Cnut was still in Denmark, things started to get tense in England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (E) says:

On þissum geare wæs þæt mycele gemot on Oxonaforda. 7 þær Eadric ealdorman beswac Sigeferð 7 Morcær þa yldestan þægenas into Seofonburgum. bepæhte hi into his bure. 7 hi man þær inne ofsloh ungerisenlice. 7 se cyng þa genam eall heora æhta. 7 het nimon Sigeferðes lafe 7 gebringon binnon Mealdelmes byrig. Þa æfter litlum fece ferde Eadmund æðeling to. 7 genam þæt wif ofer þes cynges willan. 7 heafde him to wife. Ða toforan natiuitas sancte Mariæ ferde se æðeling wæston norð into Fifburgum. 7 gerad sona ealle Sigeferðes are 7 Morcares. 7 þæt folc eall him tobeah.

[In this year was the great assembly at Oxford, and there Eadric the ealdorman betrayed Sigeferth and Morcar, the foremost thegns in the Seven Boroughs; he lured them into his chamber, and in there they were dishonorably murdered. And the king then took all their possessions, and ordered Sigeferth's widow to be seized and brought to Malmesbury. Then after a little while Edmund the atheling journeyed there, and took the woman against the king's will, and married her. Then before the Nativity of St Mary the atheling journeyed from the west, north into the Five Boroughs and rode at once into all Sigeferth and Morcar's territory, and the people all submitted to him.]

This is the English aristocracy in chaos. A 'great assembly' held at Oxford was probably an attempt at peace-keeping, reunification of Æthelred's kingdom after it had fallen piecemeal (and not always reluctantly) to the Danes two years before. In the Anglo-Saxon period Oxford was (strange as it is to think of!) border-territory, on the frontier between Wessex and Mercia - formerly independent kingdoms, all part of 'England' by the eleventh century, but ruled by different interests and with some sense of regional identity, nonetheless. Lying at the meeting-place of roads and rivers, Oxford was a key strategic location; two years earlier, it had been the first town in the south to submit to Svein, by force, after the north had declared allegiance to him. Perhaps the assembly of 1015 was held in Oxford as a kind of neutral territory, a symbolic gesture to bring the north and south together in a reunited country under the restored king. But it didn't work out that way.

A map of Saxon Oxford, from this site

'Eadric the ealdorman', better known as Eadric streona, was one of Æthelred's closest advisors, and he may well have been acting on the king's orders when he secretly and treacherously murdered Sigeferth and Morcar, the most powerful thegns in the Midlands (they ruled a territory based around the 'Five Boroughs' of Lincoln, Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, and Stamford). In 1013 the Five Boroughs had submitted to Svein very quickly, and Sigeferth and Morcar had not only led the submission to the Danes but probably arranged for their kinswoman Ælfgifu of Northampton to marry Cnut. After this defection it seems that Æthelred did not trust them, and perhaps this summary killing at the Oxford assembly was delayed punishment for their rejection of the English king - who had promised on his return that he would 'forgive all injuries against him', and didn't.

To murder anyone under the guise of hospitality in this way was a particularly shocking act. Æthelred may have rid himself of two potential enemies, but he created another, and a more dangerous: his own son, Edmund Ironside, who now openly rebelled against his father. Edmund married Sigeferth's widow and reclaimed the territory of the murdered thegns from the king, building himself a power-base in the Midlands. Sigeferth and Morcar may have been Edmund's friends and allies - they had apparently been close to his brother Æthelstan, who had recently died and left them bequests in his will. After the early death of his elder brother in 1014, Edmund was Æthelred's oldest surviving son and the person best placed to inherit the throne. This break between the king and the atheling was a serious crisis.

Sigeferth's widow, the woman here seized and imprisoned and taken and married ('against the king's will' - was it against hers?) is named by a later source as Ealdgyth. We know nothing more about her, but she was probably the mother of Edmund Ironside's two sons, who spent almost all their short lives in exile after fleeing England in 1016; but one of them was the father of St Margaret of Scotland, through whose descendents the line of the Anglo-Saxon kings was grafted back into the royal family tree after the Norman Conquest. So this marriage, hasty and controversial as it was, may have left a long legacy.

Edmund Ironside and his descendents (BL Royal 14 B VI)

And what was happening in Denmark, all this while? As summer drew on, Cnut was preparing to launch another invasion. The Encomium Emmae Reginae, a Latin account of Cnut's conquest and reign written for his second wife Emma, c.1041, fills in the gap a little on the Danish side. As we saw in my last post, the Encomium tells us that Cnut returned to Denmark and reached a rather awkward agreement with his brother about how they should divide the rule of their father's kingdom. And then Thorkell turned up:

The summer sun was drawing near, and Knutr, having restored the army, hastened to return and avenge his injuries. But as he was strolling round the beaches, he observed a small number of ships out at sea. For Thorkell, remembering what he had done to Sveinn, and that he had also unadvisedly remained in the country without the leave of Knutr, his lord, sought his lord with nine ships and their crews, in order to make it clear to him that he was not acting against his safety in remaining, when he went away. When he arrived, he did not presume to approach the shore unbidden, but casting anchor, he sent messengers, and asked leave to enter the ports. When this was granted, he landed and asked his lord's mercy, and having become with great difficulty reconciled to him, he gave an oath of fidelity, to the effect that he would serve him continuously and faithfully. He remained with him more than a whole month, and urged him to return to England, saying that he could easily overcome people whose country was known far and wide to both of them. In particular, he said that he had left thirty ships in England with a most faithful army, who would receive them with honour when they came, and would conduct them through the whole extent of the country.

Encomium Emmae Reginae, ed. and trans. Alistair Campbell (London: Royal Historical Society, 1949), p. 19.

The Encomium is not to be taken entirely at face value, but I rather like this little vignette of Cnut walking along the beach, spotting ships out at sea, and then waiting on the shore to receive Thorkell's hesitant embassy. (Scenes of landing are always interesting; this one makes me think of Beowulf getting a wary welcome when he lands on the coast of Denmark.) Anyway, let's take the author's word for it that Thorkell came and urged Cnut to return to England and said 'we can easily beat the English, because we know the terrain!' So Cnut readied his ships, over which the Encomium waxes lyrical:

Then the king said farewell to his mother and brother, and returned to the area of the winding coast, where he had already assembled the fair spectacle of two hundred ships. For here was so great a quantity of arms, that one of those ships would have very abundantly supplied weapons, if they had been lacking to all the rest. Furthermore, there were there so many kinds of shields, that you would have believed that troops of all nations were present. So great, also, was the ornamentation of the ships, that the eyes of the beholders were dazzled, and to those looking from afar they seemed of flame rather than of wood. For if at any time the sun cast the splendour of its rays among them, the flashing of arms shone in one place, in another the flame of suspended shields. Gold shone on the prows, silver also flashed on the variously shaped ships. So great, in fact, was the magnificence of the fleet, that if its lord had desired to conquer any people, the ships alone would have terrified the enemy, before the warriors whom they carried joined battle at all. For who could look upon the lions of the foe, terrible with the brightness of gold, who upon the men of metal, menacing with golden face, who upon the dragons burning with pure gold, who upon the bulls on the ships threatening death, their horns shining with gold, without feeling any fear for the king of such a force? Furthermore, in this great expedition there was present no slave, no man freed from slavery, no low-born man, no man weakened by age; for all were noble, all strong with the might of mature age, all sufficiently fit for any type of fighting, all of such great fleetness, that they scorned the speed of horsemen.

And so the force which has been described, having unfastened the anchors and ropes from the shore, boarded the lofty ships and put to sea, and swept the waves with such impetus, that you would have thought that they were flying over the water in winged ships, which hardly creaked, heavy as the sea was.

Encomium Emmae Reginae, trans. Campbell, pp. 19-21.

There's poetic licence here, but perhaps not too much; anyone who marvelled at the huge reconstructed ship in the British Museum's recent Vikings exhibition can imagine how impressive Cnut's fleet must have been.

Cnut, BL Royal 14 B VI

Those winged ships flying across the water caught the imagination of Cnut's poets, too; here's how a poem addressed to Cnut (composed probably in the 1020s) describes his voyage to England:

Hratt lítt gamall, lýtir
lǫgreiðar, framm skeiðum;
fórat fylkir œri
folksveimuðr, þér heiman;
Hilmir, bjótt ok hættir
harðbrynjuð skip kynjum;
reiðr hafðir þú rauðar
randir, Knútr, fyr landi...

Vǫð blés of þér, vísi;
vestr settir þú flesta
- kunnt gørðir þú þannig
þitt nafn - í haf stafna.

Óttarr svarti, Knútsdrápa, ed. Matthew Townend, in Diana Whaley, ed., Poetry from the Kings' Sagas 1, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages I (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), Part 2, p.

That is:

Sea-chariot's destroyer, you launched ships at a young age; no younger ruler than you, O warrior, ever set out from home! Prince, you prepared hard-armoured ships, and were wondrously brave; in your rage, Cnut, you raised red shields before the land... Captain, the sail billowed above you; many prows you sent west across the sea. Thus you made your name known!

In the next post, we'll see what happened when those ships reached land. But as a foretaste, here's an extract from another poem composed for Cnut, this time by Sigvatr Þórðarson - this is what Æthelred and Edmund Ironside had to look forward to.

Ok Ellu bak,
at, lét, hinns sat,
Ívarr ara,
Jórvík, skorit.

Ok senn sonu
sló, hvern ok þó,
Aðalráðs eða
út flæmði Knútr.

Sigvatr Þórðarson, Knútsdrápa, ed. Matthew Townend in Whaley, Poetry from the Kings' Sagas 1, pp. 651-2.

That is:

And Ivar, who dwelt at York, had Ælla's back cut with an eagle; and Cnut soon struck down or drove out the sons of Æthelred, every single one.

This is a reference to one of the most famous Vikings of them all: Ivar 'the Boneless', son of Ragnar Lothbrok. In compliment to Cnut, the poet Sigvatr here brings together two Danish triumphs over English kings which took place almost exactly 150 years apart. In 867 Ivar and his brothers killed Ælla, king of Northumbria, and conquered northern England - a famous victory, and even in the eleventh century the stuff of evocative legend. Ivar's was a name to conjure with, a great Viking predecessor for a young Danish king to follow. Ivar and his brother were most famous in English history as the killers of St Edmund of East Anglia - and in 1015 St Edmund's namesake, Edmund Ironside, was about to encounter the Vikings for the first time.

Ivar's fleet, as imagined by a 15th-century English manuscript (BL Harley 2278, f. 47v)