by Ed West
Now that Ethelred was dead Canute arrived in England with 160 ships, and much of the country accepted him as king, presumably feeling that the country needed a strong leader who didn’t mind cutting off a few body parts. Many English noblemen, judging by the names of those who did homage, also supported the excitable young man, although it wasn’t all plain sailing; when Uhtred of Northumbria surrendered he was murdered by Canute’s men.
Meanwhile Edmund had the support of the Witan, or Witenagemot, literally ‘wise men meeting’, the Anglo-Saxon ruling council whose main job was to choose the king. In some tenuous ways a precursor to Parliament, it was the oldest English government body, a feature in Anglo-Saxon kingdoms perhaps as far back as the seventh century or even back to their time on the continent, although some historians think this is all romantic Victorian nonsense dreamt up to show how brilliant England has always been. Whatever the Witan actually did, it was abolished by the Normans.1
Although Canute sometimes resembles a violent psychotic maniac, Edmund Ironside was no shrinking violet either—he once threw a spear at Eadric Streona, and his throw was so powerful that the weapon bounced off Eadric’s shield and went through two men beside him. Eadric certainly deserved it.
When the Danes arrived with 160 ships Eadric changed sides and took 40 boats with him, offering his help to Canute. Later in 1016 when Edmund seemed to be winning, Eadric changed again. Then the two sides met in a decisive battle, at Assandun in Essex, in which Edmund lost; little is known about the fight except that the bishop of Dorchester was killed while saying Mass, while an abbot also died in battle (it wasn’t unknown for priests to fight at the time).
Afterwards Eadric changed sides once again, back to Canute.
And following months of fighting, Edmund agreed to joint rule with the Dane. It was Eadric, of all people, who managed to get them to meet by the River Severn in Gloucestershire, where they swapped hostages and partitioned the country. However, this was the early medieval period and no story is complete without a mysterious, untimely death. In November Edmund expired, and rumors abounded that either Canute’s supporters or Eadric had killed him in some awful way. Henry of Huntingdon, a twelfth-century historian, said Eadric murdered Edmund while ‘concealed in the pit’, i.e. a toilet; when Edmund retired there ‘for the purpose of easing nature’ he was stabbed in the backside by the treacherous nobleman. One Norman historian claimed that Eadric invented a sort of crossbow which struck Edmund ‘in the fundament’ and ‘went up as far as the lungs’ without leaving a trace;2 which seems rather out of the reach of the technology of the time.3
Now sole ruler, Canute immediately followed the Viking tradition of marrying his defeated enemy’s wife, Emma of Normandy, despite already being married to yet another Elfgifu. To add to Ethelred’s lowly standing in history, Emma was devoted to Canute, in contrast to the complete contempt and disgust she felt for her first husband.
In her officially commissioned biography, modestly titled In Praise of Queen Emma, written many years later, Ethelred’s former queen presents Canute, ten years her junior, as a dashing young Scandinavian sex machine. The book describes his invasion fleet as the stuff of erotic fiction: ‘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’. It’s true to say that the best Viking ships, the drekkars or ‘dragons’, were elaborately colored with dragon imagery and a fleet must have been a sight. While Danish men, covered in jewels and elaborate and large brooches, with gold rings on their fingers and ostentatious buckles fastening their tunics, must have looked quite dashing, in a vulgar nouveau-riche-Russian-mafia sort of way.
Emma’s book also makes Canute’s pursuit of her sound more romantic than it probably was. Apparently the Viking sent out search parties to find a noble woman and ‘obtain her hand lawfully’ but eventually they located ‘the most distinguished of the women of her time for delightful beauty and wisdom’—Emma. It sort of suggests she was wooed, when Vikings didn’t really do ‘wooing’, as such. The Chronicle only record that Canute ordered Emma ‘to be fetched as his wife’. In contrast, In Praise of Queen Emma doesn’t even mention her first husband Ethelred, a bit of a glaring omission for a memoir.
The Danish conquest of 1016 and the Norman conquest half a century later had much in common, although in Canute’s case he started off ruthless and then mellowed, while William the Conqueror began in a conciliatory way and progressively got more unpleasant. To start with, Canute ruthlessly murdered a number of opponents, among them four of the leading native noblemen, but Canute was fair-minded in his own way: he soon had Eadric executed for betraying his own people for Canute. Emma’s book is gleeful when discussing Eadric’s death; according to her account Streona came to Canute and demanded payment for his help in betraying Edmund, and so Canute told a Norwegian called Eric: ‘Pay this man what we owe him: that is to say, kill him.’
Henry of Huntingdon recalls that Eadric told Canute he’d killed Edmund, to which the Dane replied ‘for this deed I will exalt you, as it merits, higher than all the nobles in England’ and then had him decapitated and his head stuck on the Tower of London (which didn’t exist then, which slightly ruins the story). The Chronicle simply stated that Eadric was ‘slain … very rightly’. In contrast Emma’s biographer said Canute was lenient to those who had been loyal to his enemy, for he ‘loved those whom he heard to have fought previously for Edmund faithfully and without deceit’.
Canute’s first act was to raise £82,000 of Danegeld, which he awarded to himself, giving most of it to his own army on condition that they head home, adding a crucial ingredient that Ethelred missed—threatening extreme violence if they returned.
A Viking ruled England for the first time, but though a bloodthirsty killer in his youth, the new king also became a fanatical Christian. In 1023 he held a national ceremony of reconciliation, having Archbishop Aelfeah’s remains taken from London to Canterbury behind a procession of both groups. The body of the martyred archbishop had become a focus of anti-Danish sentiment so he wanted it out of the way of London (whatever Canute’s religious beliefs, there was always an ulterior motive for everything he did).
The king was very fond of great showy events like these; after Edmund’s death Canute visited his grave in Glastonbury and referred to him as his ‘brother’, a somewhat two-faced gesture considering he’d had Edmund’s actual brother Edwig murdered in 1017. By now all of Ethelred’s male heirs by his previous wife were dead, except the children of Edmund Ironside, two very young boys called Edward and Edmund. Canute had them sent to his half brother Olof in Sweden with the order to have them quietly killed, but Olof took pity on them and secretly sent the boys off to Hungary, which was sufficiently far out of Canute’s reaches.
Canute ruled harshly, and this made him tremendously popular. He held a meeting in Oxford where both Englishmen and Danes accepted the laws of King Edgar, and this became a legal code that all subjects, whatever nationality, had to obey. Under Canute a Danish community flourished in London. There was a Densemanestret in the Strand and a Denscheman parish in Westminster, both with churches of St Clement of the Danes.4 He divided England into four parts, largely handing it out to his friends,5 and lots of Danes became quite rich; men such as Hakon, Hrani and Eilifr were made jarls, a Scandinavian title that became the English ‘earl’. This replaced the older Saxon title of ealdorman, (although alderman remained as a position in local government until abolished in 1973). Canute also appointed a series of local governors, or reeves, in each county, who came to be called shire-reeves, or sheriffs; today their role in England is largely ceremonial and consists of putting on an ostrich feather hat once a year to greet the Queen, but the eleventh-century position of sheriff was much closer to the Wild West idea—you got to ride around on a horse and occasionally kill bad guys.
Today Canute is known as ‘Knut the Great’ in Scandinavia, but in England he is best remembered for an incident in 1023
when he tried to push back the waves at Southampton, apparently under the illusion that being the most important politician in Scandinavia made him able to control the sea. In Canute’s defence, he was only trying to prove to sycophantic courtiers that he was merely a man, with the words: ‘Let it be known to all people that the power of kings is empty and weak. Only one person is fit to be called king. That is the Lord God who is obeyed by heaven, by earth and by the sea!’
But the story became twisted, probably by gormless peasants who missed the point and told their friends they’d heard the Danish king shouting at the sea. The moral of the story is—never try to be clever, as most people are too stupid to get it.
Still, if you do go around chopping people’s ears off, don’t be too surprised if you end up surrounded by sycophants. The story only emerged about a century later so it’s hard to tell how much store should be put on it, or why it would become well-known; one would think that for the average person living in Canute’s reign the story about him cutting off all the hands and feet of hostages would be more memorable.
After the Southampton incident Canute stopped wearing the crown altogether, placing it on a statue of Christ which he kept in his court; while he even paid for the shrine of the East Anglian king St Edmund in Bury as a belated apology for his ancestors’ uncouth behaviour. (Edmund had suggested to some marauding Vikings they think about welcoming Jesus into their lives and to cut a long story short, they said no.) The king also gave generously to the Church and in later life visited Rome in the hope that the Almighty might overlook all those murders he committed.
The Danish King also ordered the destruction of all pagan idols, and eventually banned polygamy, so that under Canute’s law, ‘Foreigners, if they will not regularize their marriages are to depart from the land with their goods and their sins’. This was done to protect the peoples’ souls ‘from hell-fire’, and would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that Canute had two wives and he was a foreigner. In fact he became something of a religious fanatic, outlawing labor of any kind on a Sunday; and if a slave was forced to work by his master on the Sabbath he would be freed. Canute also ruled that if a man commits fornication (sex outside marriage) with a woman he is to be condemned, but if a woman commits it she is to become ‘a public disgrace, and her lawful husband is to have all that she owned … and she is to forfeit her nose and ears’. The law also stated that people should ‘love king Cnut with true fidelity’. Or else.
But Canute was laid-back and Scandinavian when it came to his own sexual needs. Most kings had mistresses, but Canute continued the Danish tradition of having a chief mistress, a handfast. So instead of divorcing Elfgifu when he became king and married Emma, he sent her off to Denmark to be his queen there with their young sons Sweyn and Harold, while Emma stayed in England. The two families did not get on, and in her autobiography, Emma only mentions in brief that, ‘It was said that the king had sons by another.’ Charming.
There is a surviving image of Canute and Emma in The Book of Life, made in 1031 and kept in Winchester Cathedral. It was inspired by the passage in the Book of Revelation which stated that at Judgement Day the dead would be assessed by what was written about them in a big ledger called the ‘Book of Life’. Religious houses kept their own versions containing the names of those guaranteed to go to paradise, and everyone was therefore very keen to be mentioned and avoid being cast into a lake of fire for all eternity. Luckily Emma and Canute got their names in, so they were definitely going to heaven. The accompanying picture shows the couple putting an enormous cross on the church’s altar, a rare image of an early medieval king, although not much can be said about him except that he has a beard. Canute was described as ‘exceptionally tall and strong, and the handsomest of men, all except for his nose, that was thin, high-set and rather hooked’. According to the thirteenth-century Icelandic Knytlinga Saga, Cnut had eyes ‘better than those of other men, both the handsomer and the keener of their sight’.6
The image shows the king beside some cherubic angels, and as he got older Canute became very ostentatious in his religion. He bestowed gifts on the monastery of St Omer in Normandy where he approached the building crying and beating his breast like a lunatic. He also gave a vast cross of gold and silver to the New Minster at Winchester, burial place of Alfred the Great, as well as others.
However much of this was down to politics. The major power of the era was the Holy Roman Empire, which basically covered what is today Germany, although the emperor only had a nominal control over many tiny principalities. He did however, have huge sway over the pope, and as king of Denmark Canute was aware that if the empire had the backing of the Vatican it could easily overrun his kingdom.
The eleventh century is when the ‘Dark Ages’7 really come to an end and what’s called the High Medieval Period starts. It is when many of the things we think of as medieval, such as stone castles and cathedrals, are built; it also saw the growth of monasteries and later the first universities. The role of the pope in European affairs also became established, and it was only now that he became a powerful figure in international politics, with huge influence over monarchs. Partly this was due to the spread of education, which was controlled by the Church; the Church was also a sort of industry, with monastic orders owning huge chunks of land and heavily involved in things like animal husbandry (many types of sheep were bred by monks, and beer especially owes much to them).8 All of these led to a big reduction in violence and, in the twelfth century, western Europe’s first renaissance.
As part of his international political strategy Canute had his daughter Gunnhild married off to the Emperor Henry, although it went badly wrong. She was accused of adultery and to prove her innocence had to endure man-to-man combat, which was the way trials were done, except being a woman she could nominate someone instead to fight her accuser. Unfortunately this accuser was a giant and no one would take him on except a page boy who won against all odds. Gunnhild was cleared of the allegation and refused to ever sleep with her husband again. (In retrospect divorce lawyers are not the absolute worst things in the world.)
A paranoid man by nature—perhaps reasonably—Canute eventually fell out with most of his cronies, including Thorkell, who he had arrested in 1021. Two years later there was a reconciliation, mainly because Thorkell had a big army of super-vikings with him. As a result, Thorkell ruled Denmark in Canute’s name, and they swapped children as hostages, with Thorkell’s son ending up marrying Canute’s niece (another Gunnhild). Hardicnut, Canute’s son by Emma, lived with Thorkell in Denmark, leaving his mother and father at the age of five to be raised by a man who his father had tried to kill; unsurprisingly he didn’t grow up to be the most mentally balanced of young men.
Having already conquered England, in 1025 Canute invaded Norway with a Danish-English army, but on this occasion Olaf the Stout, now King Olaf II, beat him. After the battle Canute and his brother-in-law Ulf spent an evening playing chess. Canute made a mistake, Ulf took one of his knights and an argument broke out. The following morning Canute get one of his underlings to kill Ulf—in church.
In 1028 Canute finally conquered Norway and some of Sweden, and went to Rome for a coronation.9 He liked the idea of being a Christian monarch but in reality he was a Viking, and still came from that world. By his law ‘the heirs of a thegn who stood nearest to the king were required to give him two saddled and two unsaddled horses; two swords; four spears and shields; a helmet, corselet, and fifty mancuses of gold, before they took to their inheritance.’
Canute died in 1035, aged just forty; had he lived longer he might have established a lasting union between England and Scandinavia. As it is, despite being reasonably popular at the time, he is now mostly just remembered as the man with a slightly rude name who shouted at the sea.
Geoffrey of Cambrai wrote an epigram about Canute saying of him that: ‘Often leaving the joyous banquets of his own table, He became a companion of poor monks. Putting aside pomp, amid a needy crowd, a fellow slave
, he served the slaves of God’. Well, that’s one way of looking at it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lady Godiva
According to Emma’s book, her son with Canute was named Hardicnut, ‘tough knot’, because it was prophesized that he would excel over ‘all men of his time by superiority in all high qualities’. Alas no. As with King Edgar, a great king was succeeded by two sons from two different wives, neither of whom were up to much. After the old Viking’s death in 1035 and his no doubt instantaneous ascension to Heaven the leading earls met by the Thames to decide who got to succeed him; the river was the barrier between Wessex and Mercia and the senior men of the two old kingdoms were divided over the not-very-thrilling choice.
At first Elfgifu’s son Harold, nicknamed Harefoot because of his swiftness of action, was proclaimed regent, with Hardicnut being nominally in charge of the area south of the Thames, but after two years Harold just made himself full king, as his half brother was stuck in Scandinavia.
Harold was unpopular, described as ‘an arrogant fellow of bad character’,1 and Queen Emma put a rumor around that he was actually the son of a priest and a servant girl, a common myth down the ages put about by enemies of the ruling monarch.2 And over in Normandy Ethelred’s sons by Emma, Edward and Alfred, had a far better claim to the throne. Soon a letter was sent to them, supposedly from Emma in England, with the passive-aggressive sign-off ‘queen in name only’, suggesting they invade and claiming the boys’ position was threatened by a usurper who was gaining supporters, i.e. Harold. Emma later claimed in her biography that the letter was a forgery, organized by Harefoot, although she may have been embarrassed that she had encouraged such a cack-handed invasion by her sons that was inevitably going to end badly. This was the first Norman invasion of England, and it wasn’t quite as successful as the later one.