by Michael Wood
Thought shall be harder, heart the keener, courage the greater, as our strength lessens. Here lies our leader all hewn down, the valiant man in the dust; may he lament forever who thinks now to turn from this warplay. I am old in age; I will not hence, but I purpose to lie by the side of my lord, by the man so dearly loved.
The Maldon poem is so powerful and moving that it is easy to accept it as a historical record accurate in all its detail. It is not. It is a literary work based on fact and undoubtedly uses literary devices to heighten the heroism and the tragedy. However, it is now argued by some that the poem has no basis in history at all and that the poet was writing forty years on with no source but the short Latin account mentioned already, the Life of St Oswald composed in Ramsey in 997–1005. In short, the details of the island, the tide, the reason for the battle, the names of all the people in it, and the last stand are all fairy tale.
All these criticisms are wildly overstated. It is true that Scandinavian personal names appear among those on the English side but this is entirely to be expected by 991 because Vikings had been living in East Anglia since Alfred’s day. The presence of a Northumbrian hostage in Britnoth’s ranks may well be explained by a valuable but difficult account from Ely, where the earl was buried, which claims that Britnoth had authority not only in Essex but also in Northumbria. The assumption of one critic that because none of the English are mentioned in the Life of St Oswald, and because it is unlikely that their names would be preserved by oral tradition, ‘it is best to accept that all are fictitious’, is disproved by the circumstantial detail available to us concerning some of the indubitably historical characters in the poem. What after all was the poem written for? In what milieu? Britnoth’s widow commissioned a tapestry to commemorate her husband’s deeds, and the poem similarly has the marks of having been produced for an audience who knew the men who died in the battle. Is it likely that a poet, writing within living memory of the event which he describes, would invent and falsify the key moments of a famous local battle? He might have used poetic motifs to ennoble the action, but that does not mean that the battle did not take place. His chief source, we may feel confident, was the oral memory of friends and people who fought in the battle ‘for their country’, as the Life of St Oswald says. The epic ideal of dying unquestioningly for one’s lord was by then an anachronism, but clearly for the poet, as for the authors of the Life of St Oswald and the Ely account, something heroic happened at Maldon; it was not merely another squalid brutal struggle ending in yet another ignominious defeat. This was why the poem was written, a fitting device to elevate the sacrifice to a higher plane. This pointed critique of the heroic versus cowardly behaviour remains most likely to have been written in East Anglia in Ethelred’s time, where we know such heroic resistance still continued under local leaders until 1016, contrasting strongly with the pathetic failures of the royal army in Wessex. Like Ulfcytel ‘the Valiant’ of East Anglia, Britnoth of Essex gave the Danes tribute in the form of spears. That was the message for the generation of 991–1016. Unhappily Ethelred and his advisers did not heed it.
THE CHRONICLER
In the 990s the raids against England grew in intensity as large royal fleets from Scandinavia and Denmark descended in the hope of rich pickings. From this point it is obvious that the weakness of the English government had become common knowledge abroad, and that its wealth was regarded as easy prey. In 994 Olaf Tryggvason of Norway and Swein of Denmark launched a concerted attack on London itself, and though the city held out, their army burned towns and villages in Essex, Kent, Sussex and Hampshire. The raids were no longer mere plundering attacks, but destructive forays designed to achieve the maximum damage and to extort the largest amount of tribute possible. The Danish armies were thoroughly professional in outlook, operating from specially constructed bases at sites such as Fyrkat and Trelleborg. When a second Danegeld of 16,000 pounds was paid in 994, two years after the first, the course of the next twenty years was determined.
The story of those years unfolds through the eyes of an anonymous chronicler who lived through these events. His account, which is part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is one of the most vivid pieces of English historical writing. It is biased, geographically, politically, personally. It was written by a man rehearsed in the homiletic style of sermons we find in Ethelred’s reign and so gifted that we may wonder whether he had come into contact with Archbishop Wulfstan, the most famous sermon writer of the period who was a close adviser of Ethelred. Our chronicler is bitter, acerbic, with a fine eye for telling irony, a technique full of taut antitheses as his frustration grew at the ineffectiveness of the English resistance. ‘In the end it effected nothing’ (999); ‘It effected no more than it had often done on many previous occasions’ (1006); ‘No more than on previous occasions were we to enjoy the good fortune or the honour of naval operations which would be advantageous to this country’ (1009). Nine times between 993 and 1013 he tells how the Danes ‘worked the greatest evil any army could do’; fifteen times in the same period he adds that the Danes did ‘as they pleased’ or ‘as is their custom’, always highlighting the inability of Ethelred to get to grips with the enemy.
When was this invaluable account written? Evidence for retrospective drafting shows that the whole narrative was put into its final form after Ethelred’s death in 1016 and before 1023. Very probably it was done in 1016 or soon after. But other features of the text show that it was written at the same time that the events described took place. And indeed it would be unrealistic to think that such a detailed story could have been composed without the benefit of a contemporary chronicle to work from. Accordingly it would seem that the author himself (or possibly another annalist) kept a record throughout the period which was written down after the eventual triumph of Canute in 1016. The evidence for retrospective drafting does not mean that we do not possess a contemporary source, even though the bias of the writer enables him, with hindsight, to paint a cumulative picture of collapse which may not have been apparent to contemporaries until late in the reign.
In what part of England did our unknown chronicler actually write? Unlike the story of Alfred’s wars, his account is not easy to pin down geographically. One of its most important qualities is its national consciousness, its identification with the suffering of the people of England as a whole, the feeling for the poor and helpless left in the lurch, the conviction that everyone was betrayed by the leadership. There has consequently been a long controversy about where this man wrote. The most likely place seems to be London. The chronicler often shows local knowledge; he frequently emphasises the heroic fight put up by the citizens; above all he expresses audible relief that London continued to survive repeated attacks (‘praise be to God it still stands undamaged’ he writes in 1009). If he was indeed a Londoner, then who was he? He was clearly a churchman because he was literate and also proficient in the sermon style of writing. But we cannot tell whether he was a monk, a member of the bishop’s household at St Paul’s, or a parish priest in one of the city’s churches. He may have known Wulfstan when the latter was bishop in the city; it is certainly tempting to think that he had contacts in the royal household.
ETHELRED:WHY ‘UNREADY’?
Despite the chronicler’s strictures he is a loyalist. He rarely attacks the king personally, although he constantly harps on his errors of judgement. The people would have forgiven Ethelred, he says in 1014, if only he would govern more justly than before. His criticisms were implicit in the narrative. The blinding or killing of nobles, desertion of his troops, failure to pursue a policy to its end: so many entries indicate that the king had acted with cruelty and folly. Nothing illustrated this more than the Massacre of St Brice’s Day in 1002 when the paranoiac Ethelred gave orders (sent by letter to all his agents in the burhs according to a later tradition) to massacre the Danes living in England on the grounds that they intended to depose and kill him, along with all the members of his witan. Scholars now believe that this move was only ai
med at Danish mercenaries in the king’s pay, but as often happens events got out of hand. In many Danish parts of England this could never have been carried out, but traditions survived from Oxford, for instance, that the Danes there had taken refuge in the church of St Fritheswide, where they had been burned alive by a mob inflamed by the government’s anti-Danish rhetoric. The Danish invaders had committed many cruelties, but the average Danish farmer or shopkeeper whose family had lived in Oxford for over a century could hardly have posed a threat; they had freedom to settle among the English in English lands for around seventy years, and in ordering this terrible act of racialism, Ethelred was undoing the work of his great predecessors. How did he come to act so thoughtlessly? What was the character of the king like?
Our chronicler never talks of Ethelred personally, only once evincing some sympathy for his difficulties at his death when he speaks ‘of much hardship and many difficulties’ that he had to endure. Later sources contain the tradition that the king was ‘graceful in manners, beautiful in face, comely in appearance’. As for his personality, the royal charters, the soberest of sources, show a man unable to punish offenders, constantly self-justifying, a man prone to act with impulsive cruelty at the wrong moment, a man who chose his advisers badly. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle account, which forms the basis of our view of Ethelred, bears this out and can be supported in much of its detail. Writing in the 1120s, William of Malmesbury preserves an interesting tradition about the king. ‘After deep reflection it seems extraordinary to me that a man who, as we have learned from our elders, was neither very foolish nor particularly cowardly, should have passed his life in such wretched terror of so many calamities.’ But William’s other comments may also be taken to reflect the story handed down by his elders, namely that Ethelred was lethargic, sybaritic, vicious, wilfully violent, arrogant, and torn by the adversity of his fortune. The nickname Un-raed from which the modern corruption ‘Unready’ is derived is only recorded in the twelfth century, but there seems no reason to doubt that the pun was thought up by some wit at the time. ‘Ethelred’ is a compound of two Anglo-Saxon words aethel and raed, meaning ‘noble counsel’. Unraed means ‘no counsel’, with connotations of evil counsel, treachery and so on. The pun then could mean that Ethelred was given bad advice, did not take advice, or simply that he was unwise; it could mean worse, that he was guilty of acts of evil. Certainly unraedas were what England was plagued with: all these disasters befell us through unraedas, ‘bad policies’, says the chronicler in 1011, and does so again in 1016. The pun is a clever one and there is no reason to think it only arose nearly two centuries later, as some have thought. The nickname is quite in keeping with the irony displayed by the chronicler. Why, then, did people think him a ‘bad king’?
GOOD KINGS AND BAD KINGS
We know well enough what people thought made a good king in later Anglo-Saxon England. Old English accounts of Alfred, Athelstan and Edgar provide us with ample material on which to base our opinions. And even though the really damning accounts of Ethelred’s reign of nearly forty years were put together near its end and had the advantage of hindsight – the Sermon of the Wolf by Wulfstan, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle itself – we can see here too how much the personal magnetism of the king mattered in Anglo-Saxon England. Athelstan ruled ‘by terror of his name alone’, he ‘struck all the peoples round about with fear’ (Asser had said the same of Offa); he had constantia but was ‘like a thunderbolt to his enemies’. As for Edgar, ‘no host however strong was able to win booty for itself in England while that noble king occupied the royal throne’. And why? Because hostile kings, ‘fearing his prudentia submitted without fighting’. The virtues of these kings were plain. They were hard but just, they had ‘greatness of soul’. Like Alfred they were battle winners and like him they had fortuna, luck on their side.
Ethelred had no luck: he was unlucky to become king in the way he did; unlucky that Danish attacks should come so hard on the heels of his accession; unlucky in the strength, skill and staying power of the Danish leaders who attacked him. Even so, the successful kings of the Dark Ages had contributed to their own luck. And the English, as they were to show later, could still fight and win under a good leader. It is Ethelred’s lack of any of those qualities which his contemporaries really felt to count, which is so damning. It is not modern research which has condemned him. The fact that recent historians have been able to reveal the efficiency of the Anglo-Saxon administration under Ethelred does not prove that he was himself efficient. On the contrary the strength of the national kingship organisation built up by his predecessors demonstrates the weakness at the top in Ethelred’s time. Moral failure in a king had drastic results in early medieval society, and that is exactly what Ethelred’s own adviser Wulfstan wrote in his numerous theological and political tracts which reflect his whole experience of the Danish wars: ‘There are eight columns which firmly support lawful kingship,’ he wrote in his Institutes of Polity (c. 1020), ‘truth, patience, liberality, good counsel, formidableness, helpfulness, moderation, righteousness.’ Ethelred failed in no small measure because he lacked these qualities, and for all his words, the enigmatic Wulfstan was unable to make the king act up to them.
‘IN EVERY WAY IT WAS A HARD TIME’
The ten years between 997 and 1007 were spent in constant hostilities. Year by year the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives us a record of devastation: Cornwall, Wales, and Devon (997), Dorset (998), Kent (999), Hampshire and Devon (1001), Exeter and Wiltshire (1003), Norwich and East Anglia (1004), Kent and central England (1006), punctuated by famine (1005: ‘the most severe in living memory’) and increased payments of Danegeld (24,000 pounds in 1002, 30,000 in 1007). There were heavy defeats for the local levies, despite sometimes stubborn and brave resistance especially under Ulfcytel of East Anglia. And always the chronicler’s lamentations. ‘Time after time the more urgent a thing was the greater the delay … so in the end these naval and land preparations were a complete failure and succeeded only in adding to the distress of the people, wasting money and encouraging their enemy’ (999); ‘in every way it was a hard time, for they never ceased from their evil deeds’ (1001).
According to the chronicler, things had reached such a pass by the Christmas of 1006–07 that ‘the terror inspired by the host grew so great that everybody was incapable of devising or drawing up a plan to get them out of the country, or of holding this land against them’. The solution reached by the king in council was to negotiate a truce between them and pay further tribute, supplying the Danes with provisions requisitioned from all over England. In the NewYear the Danegeld was paid, 36,000 pounds according to the ‘C’ and ‘D’ manuscripts of the Chronicle. It was at this nadir of his fortune that Ethelred seems to have been cajoled into action.
‘I Ethelred the king considered first how I could most surely promote Christianity and just kingship’: so began the official version of a law code issued at the royal residence at King’s Enham in Hampshire in 1008. How much the law code was meant to be acted upon, how far merely being seen to make law was what counted in the eyes of men like Wulfstan, are still disputed by historians. But this text, which was actually written by Archbishop Wulfstan, surely reflects the mounting fears and preoccupations of the Anglo-Saxon bishops and others of their class at this moment. They were frightened of a lapse into paganism – especially in the semi-Christianised province of Northumbria where the worship of magic stones, trees and wells was prevalent, where witches and spell workers influenced people’s lives and where the priesthood was worldly, polygamous and illiterate. They feared an upsurge in slavery; already many of the poor had been sold to the Vikings, and women had been bought for sex and then sold as slaves to the invaders. They feared disloyalty and desertion from the army where, charters show us, there were many traitors to the king from the landed aristocracy, as far back as 994. They feared the depletion of the Church’s power through alienation of its estates, incomes and treasures to pay the increasingly huge Danegelds, the �
��infinite tribute’ paid for ‘the freedom of the kingdom’. Above all they feared dissolution of the bonds of the social hierarchy. The King’s Enham code shows that the people believed that God was no longer with the nation. The land must be purified. The last line of the code says it all:
We must all love and honour one God and completely cast out every heathen practice.
And let us loyally hold to one royal lord, and defend life and land together as well as ever we can, and from our inmost heart beseech Almighty God for help.
DISASTER OFF SANDWICH
Help they would need. Soon after issuing the Enham code Ethelred ‘gave orders that ships should be built speedily through the whole of England; a large warship from every 300 hides with a cutter from every ten while every eight were to provide a helmet and suit of mail’. This was the most positive military initiative of the reign so far. What happened next cannot be paraphrased; it is best left in the words of the chronicler:
1009. In this year the ships about which we spoke above were ready, and there were more of them, according to what the books tell us, than there had ever been before in England in the days of any king. They were all brought together off Sandwich, to be stationed there to protect this realm against every invading host. But no more than on previous occasions were we to enjoy the good fortune or the honour of naval operations which would be advantageous to this land. About this same time or a little before, it happened that Beorhtric, the brother of the ealdorman Eadric, made an accusation to the king against Wulfnoth, a nobleman of Sussex, and he then fled the country and succeeded in winning over as many as twenty ships, and went harrying everywhere along the south coast, and did all manner of evil. Then information was brought to the fleet that they [Wulfnoth’s ships] could easily be surrounded if the opportunity were seized. Then the aforesaid Beorhtric procured eighty ships, and thought to win great fame for himself by taking Wulfnoth dead or alive. But when his ships were on their way, he was met by a storm worse than anyone could remember: the ships were all battered and knocked to pieces and cast ashore. Then that Wulfnoth came straightway and burned the ships. When news of the fate of these ships reached the rest of the fleet under the command of the king, then it was as if everything was in confusion, for the king, the ealdormen, and the chief councillors went home, abandoning the ships thus irresponsibly. Then those who remained with the ships brought them back to London, thus inconsiderately allowing the effort of the whole nation to come to naught, so that the threat to the Danes, upon which the whole of England had set its hopes, turned out to be no more potent than this.