The story of the long reign of Ethelred consists of little else than the details of Danish invasions, large payments of ransom to the raiders, and the king’s dealings with the Dukes of Normandy, at whose court he was at last obliged to take refuge.
Though many historical verdicts have been reversed in our day, Ethelred the Redeless, the man devoid of counsel—this rather than “the Unready” is the best translation of his distinguishing epithet—still remains unchampioned under the stigma of incompetence as great as was ever displayed by any occupant of the English throne. When we read the record of his disastrous reign, when we see how systematically he left undone the things which he ought to have done, and did, with fitful and foolish energy, the things which he ought not to have done, we are inclined to ask, “Was this man bereft of reason?” If he had been absolutely insane we should probably have had a distinct statement to that effect in the Chronicle, but it may, perhaps, be suggested that there was some hereditary weakness in his family which in his case affected the fibre of his brain. Royal families not renewed by any admixture of plebeian blood have sometimes shown a tendency to become worn out. We must remember that the descendants of Cerdic had now been reigning for five hundred years. As compared with the young and parvenus dynasties which were coming up into power from the ranks of sailors and huntsmen and tillers of the soil; as compared with the Norman dukes, the Capetians and the Angevins, the Kings of Wessex were an old and apparently a weakening stock. There was certainly brain-power enough in an Alfred, an Edward and an Athelstan, but perhaps even with them physical hardly kept pace with mental energy. Alfred the Great was a life-long sufferer from disease. If he and his son completed each his half century of life, that was more than was attained by most of their immediate descendants. Athelstan lived but to the age of forty-six; Edred, a chronic invalid, died at thirty; Edwy probably under twenty; even Edgar, whose reign seemed a long one, at thirty-two. Edmund and Edward the Martyr died violent deaths, and therefore they do not come into this calculation. Ethelred himself, though he lived long enough to inflict untold misfortunes on his country, died at the age of forty-eight. All this looks like a decay of physical power in the house of Cerdic, which may in some degree account for the fatal “redelessness” of Ethelred. It is true that there was a revival of the old heroic energy in his son Edmund Ironside, but even that is coupled with a very short life (we cannot be sure that his death was due to foul play); and in his half-brother, Edward the Confessor, though he lived to the age of sixty-two, there is a sort of anæmic saintliness which marks him out as the fitting son, intellectually though not morally, of his “redeless” father.
The story of the reign of Ethelred is given us in the Chronicle with a minuteness of detail such as we have not found there since the days of Alfred. It is evidently the work of a contemporary, of one who saw and groaned over the calamities of his people, and who was moved to passionate indignation by the mingled folly and wickedness of the rulers of the land. This part of the Chronicle is then a document of the highest value for the historian, and yet it is one which requires to be used with some caution on account of the motive by which it is unconsciously inspired. That motive is the strong tendency which always leads a beaten army or a beaten nation to argue that the enemy did not fight fairly, or that “the pass was sold” to them by some traitor in the camp. It is quite possible that all the accusations brought by the chronicler are true, especially that the inexplicable treasons of Elfric and Edric were as monstrous as he describes them; but it is also possible that they may have been magnified by a patriotic scribe, looking round for some scapegoat to bear his people’s sins; and in any event what we have to remember is that we are here reading what are virtually the articles of an opposition journalist. It is just possible, therefore, though hardly probable, that in some cases Ethelred’s ministers and generals, or even Ethelred himself, if they could be heard in their own defence, might somewhat mitigate the severity of the sentence passed upon them. A few of these criticisms are here inserted, but even these will hardly give a sufficient idea of the tone of condemnation which pervades the whole long reign of Ethelred in the pages of the Chronicle.[189]
998. “The Danes came to the mouth of the Frome and ravaged Dorset at their will. The fyrd was often gathered together against them, but as soon as they should have all got together, then ever for some cause was flight determined on, and so the Danes in the end always got the victory. So they quartered themselves for the second time in the Isle of Wight, drawing their provisions from Hampshire and Sussex.”
999. “The army again came round into the Thames and moved thence up the Medway to Rochester. Then came the Kentish fyrd against them and there were they firmly locked in fight. But, alas! the Kentish men too quickly gave way and fled, because they were not supported as they ought to have been. Thus the Danes held the place of slaughter, and took horse and rode far and wide as they chose, and ravaged well-nigh the whole of West Kent. Then the king took counsel with his witan, and decided that they must go against the enemy with ship-fyrd and also with land-fyrd. But when the ships were ready, then some one delayed from day to day and harassed the poor folk who were on board the ships, and ever, when things should have been forwarder they were later, from one time to another, and so they let the army of their enemies grow, and they were always retiring from the sea and the Danes were ever following hard after them. Thus at the end the great ship-fyrd accomplished nothing but oppression of the people and waste of money and the emboldening of their foes.”
1006. “The Danish fleet came to Sandwich, and the crews did as they had ever done, harrying, burning, murdering wheresoever they went. Then the king called out all the people of Wessex and Mercia, and they lay out all the autumn, arrayed against the enemy, but all availed nothing as so often before; for in spite of all this the Danish army marched just where they pleased, and the fyrd itself did the country folk every harm, while neither the home army (inn-here) nor the foreign army (ut-here) did them any good. As soon as the weather grew wintry, the fyrd went home, and the Danish army after Martinmas, November 11, came to their resting-place in the Isle of Wight and helped themselves to all that they wanted from every quarter. Then in mid-winter they sallied forth through Hants and Berks to their comfortable quarters at Reading, and there did as they pleased, kindling their beacons [blazing villages] wherever they went. Thus fared they to Wallingford which they burned down, and they then went along Ashdown to Cwichelms-law,[190] and there abode, out of pure bravado, because it had been often said that if once they got to Cwichelms-law they would never get back to the sea. They then went home by another way. The fyrd was assembled at Cynete (?), and they there joined battle, but soon was that [English] army put to flight, and afterwards they carried their booty down to the sea. Then might the people of Winchester see the invading army, insolent and fearless, marching past their gates to the sea; and they spread over fifty miles from the sea, gathering food and treasure.”
It would be tedious to follow the chronicler’s example and relate in detail all the events of these successive raids, which recur with melancholy monotony through thirty years. The reader is therefore referred to the accompanying table for the list of the districts successively ravaged by the invaders.
| Year. | |
| 982 | Portland, by three ships’ crews landing in Dorsetshire. (London burnt; possibly an accidental fire.) |
| 988 | Watchet in Somerset. Goda, a Devonshire thegn slain. |
| 991 | Ipswich ravaged. Battle of Maldon. Brihtnoth slain. First payment of gafol (tribute) to the Danes. |
| 993 | Bamburgh stormed. Great booty taken. Both banks of the Humber ravaged. |
| 994 | Brave defence of London, attacked by Olaf and Sweyn. Essex, Kent, Sussex, Hampshire. Second payment of gafol. |
| 997 | Cornwall, Devon, Wales, Watchet, Lydford, Tavistock. |
| 998 | Mouth of the Frome, Dorset, Isle of Wight. Sussex and Hants forced to supply provisions. |
| 999 | Rochester: Kent. |
| 1001 | Battle at Alton in Hampshire. Devonshire. Taunton burnt. Exmouth defended. Penhoe and Clist (in Devon). Bishops Waltham in Hampshire burnt. |
| 1002 | Marriage of Ethelred with Emma of Normandy. Massacre of St. Brice’s Day. Third payment of gafol. |
| 1003 | Exeter stormed and looted. Wilton, Sarum. |
| 1004 | Norwich, Thetford. Brave defence of Norfolk by Ulfkytel. |
| 1005 | Great famine throughout England. |
| 1006 | Sandwich, Isle of Wight, Reading, Wallingford, Cwichelms-law. |
| 1007 | Fourth payment of gafol. |
| 1008 | Ships ordered to be built all over England. |
| 1009 | Failure of the new navy. Canterbury, Isle of Wight, Sussex, Hants, Berks, both banks of the Thames, Oxford. London vainly attacked. Local payment of gafol by East Kent. |
| 1010 | Ipswich, Thetford, Cambridge, Oxfordshire, Bucks, Bedford, Tempsford (in Bedfordshire), Northampton, Canning Marsh (in Somerset). |
| 1011 | Canterbury. |
| 1012 | Martyrdom of Archbishop Alphege. Fifth payment of gafol. |
| 1013 | Mouth of the Humber, Gainsborough. King Sweyn at Sandwich. Northumbria and all the country north of Watling Street submit to him. Oxford, Winchester, Wallingford, Bath, Devon and London submit to Sweyn. Flight of Ethelred and his family to Normandy. |
| 1014 | Death of Sweyn (Feb. 3), Ethelred recalled. Canute, son of Sweyn, King of the Danes, occupies Lindsey. Mutilation of Northumbrian hostages by Canute. Sixth payment of gafol. |
| 1015 | Dorset, Wilts, Somerset ravaged. |
| 1016 | Warwickshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire; along the fens to Stamford. Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, York, submission of Northumbria, London repeatedly attacked. Death of Ethelred (April 23). Edmund Ironside king. Battle of Assandune. The kingdom divided between Canute and Edmund. Death of Edmund Ironside (Nov. 30). Canute sole king. |
Dreary and depressing as is the general course of the narrative of these successive invasions, we have in the early years of the war, not from the chronicler but from an unknown contemporary poet, a graphic account of a battle in which the Northmen were valiantly met and all but defeated. The hero of the battle was Brihtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, brother-in-law of the half-king Athelstan, and champion of the monks against Elfhere of Mercia. The scene was laid at Maldon in Essex, where the dark stream of the Blackwater begins to discharge itself into its broad tidal estuary. The date was 991, the thirteenth year of Ethelred. The poet brings before us the ealdorman Brihtnoth arraying his men-at-arms on the shore of the Blackwater. He rides up and down their ranks, bidding them hold their shields with firm grasp and fear naught. He alights from his horse and stands beside “his friends, his own hearth-warriors,” of whose staunch service he has often made proof. While he is standing on the bank a Viking herald shouts forth his threatful message: “The bold sailors have sent me to thee to say that thou must forthwith send to them a ransom of golden rings. It will be for your profit by this payment to forego the flight of spears; and you shall then have peace with the men of the sea.” At this Earl Brihtnoth gripped tight his shield and shook his slender ashen spear and poured forth his words of wrath: “The tribute we will give you is naught but flying spears, the edge of deadly iron, the old and trusted sword. Go back and tell the folk who sent thee, that here stands an earl with his warriors who will defend this country, the land of noble Ethelred, to the uttermost. Now that you have visited our land you shall not depart all softly to your homes bearing no marks of battle on your bodies. Rather shall point and edge settle our differences: grim will be the sword-play ere we pay you tribute.”
After this interchange of defiances, the troops on either side were drawn up in battle array, but it was some hours before they could close in conflict. The estuary of the Blackwater was still filled by the flowing tide, and one bridge over the narrower part of the stream, by which the enemy might have crossed, was valiantly defended by three Saxons. “Finding these bridge warders all too bitter,” the Northmen moved up stream to find a ford. The earl, in the pride of his soul, allowed many of the hateful people to come to land, shouting aloud: “Listen, warriors! Free space is now granted you to come quickly to us. Come as warriors to the war. God only knows who shall hold the field of slaughter.” “The wolves of rapine” tramped through the water, holding high their shields over their heads, and found, when they reached the shore, Earl Brihtnoth waiting to receive them. He had bidden his men “to weave the war-hedge with their shields” (that is to make the shield-wall) and hold it firmly against the foe. Then rose high the war of battle, the ravens gathered together at the sound, and with them came the eagle, greedy for his prey.