The Stenkyrka Stone (Monument from the Island of Gotland showing viking ships.)—The Valleberga Stone.
In 1021, toward the close of the year, we read of the exile of Thurkil the Tall, who will be remembered as an old Jomviking, the brother of Earl Sigvaldi, and the leader in the descent of these vikings upon England in 1009. We do not know where the exile sought a new home, but one is tempted to conjecture that he probably returned to the old haunts at the mouth of the Oder. It is an interesting fact that a few months later Canute found it advisable to make a journey to that same region.
In the entry for 1022, the Chronicler writes that "in this year King Canute fared out with his ships to Wiht," or, as one manuscript has it, to "Wihtland." Apparently, the movement, whatever it was, did not interest the scribe; far more important in his eyes was the news that Archbishop Ethelnoth, when in Rome to receive the pallium, was invited to say mass in the papal presence, and was afterwards permitted to converse with the Holy Father. Historians have thought with the monk that the journey with the fleet can have had but little importance, that it was merely a mobilisation of the navy at the Isle of Wight, perhaps for the purpose of display.
It was the Danish historian Steenstrup who first suggested that Wiht or Wihtland probably did not mean Wight in this case, but the old Witland that we read of in the writings of Alfred: Wulfstan the wide-farer informed the royal student that "the Vistula is a mighty stream and separates Witland from Wendland and Witland belongs to the Esthonians."[217] Evidently the Angles understood Witland to be the regions of modern Prussia east of the Vistula. That Canute's expedition actually went eastward seems extremely probable for we read that the next year he returned from Denmark and had become reconciled with Earl Thurkil.[218]
There were Danish colonies at the mouths of the Oder, the Vistula, and the Düna[219]; all these, no doubt, submitted to the conqueror from England. The expedition probably first went to Jom in Wendland; thence eastward to the Prussian regions of Witland and the still more distant Semland, a region near the Kurisches Haff that is reported to have been conquered by one of Harold Bluetooth's sons.[220] Canute's possessions thus extended along the Baltic shores from Jutland almost to the eastern limits of modern Germany; he may also have had possessions farther up the eastern coast of the sea. It is not likely that these possessions were anything more than a series of stations and settlements; but these would serve as centres of influence from which Danish power would penetrate into the interior to the protection of Danish trade and commerce.
Later English writers have a story to tell of this expedition, especially of the valorous part that was played by the Earl Godwin. In the expedition against the Vandals, Godwin, without first informing the King, made a night attack on the enemy and put them to rout. When Canute prepared to make an attack early in the morning, he missed the English and feared that they had fled or deserted. But when he came upon the enemy's camp and found nothing there but bloody corpses and plunder, light dawned on the King, and he ever afterward held the English in high esteem.[221]
Jomburg apparently retained its old pre-eminence as the centre of Danish control on the southern shore. The King's brother-in-law, Ulf, seems to have been left in control, probably with the title of earl. But after the death of Thurkil, who had been left as viceroy of Denmark, Ulf was apparently transferred to that country and Canute's son Sweyn, under the guidance of his mother Elgiva, was appointed the King's lieutenant in Wendland.[222]