Dragon Lords
Page 4
8. A silver penny of King Cnut (York Museums Trust)
Anglo-Danish history and the
literature of Cnut’s court
Byrhtferth wrote his Vita S. Oswaldi between 997 and 1002. Less than 20 years later, the Danes were ruling England. In the autumn of 1016, after years of bruising warfare, the English finally submitted to the young Danish king Cnut, who ruled until his death in 1035. Cnut’s reign was a unique period of cultural and literary interaction between England and Scandinavia, when England formed part of a great North Sea empire hardly equalled before or since. At the height of his power Cnut was king of England, Denmark, Norway and parts of Sweden, and may also have had some authority over Scotland and Ireland. His court was based in England, though the king himself was often absent in Scandinavia, and it must have been frequented by people from across his empire and beyond, including Danes, Norwegians and Icelanders, as well as his Norman wife Emma and her followers.28
Cnut went to some lengths to present himself as a successor to previous English kings. In 1018, in a meeting at Oxford, an agreement was reached which declared that Cnut had ‘established peace and friendship between the Danes and the English, and put an end to all their former enmity’, and both English and Danes agreed to follow the law code of Edgar, Æthelred’s father. The king’s laws, like those of his Anglo-Saxon predecessors, continued to be issued in English, and during his journeys abroad letters to his people were promulgated in English in the king’s name.29 Cnut also won the support of the English church, and began to present himself as a model Christian king: he made overtures of reconciliation towards the church, becoming a generous patron of monasteries and devotee of English saints.30
At the same time, however, and juxtaposed with this display of continuity with the English past, Cnut and his court seem to have been acutely aware of the long history of Danish invasion and rule in England. This is evident from texts composed for Cnut and his wife in Old Norse and Latin, which in their different ways celebrate and commemorate the victories of Cnut’s conquest and link them to a larger story about the Danish dynasty now ruling England. Like many Scandinavian kings, Cnut was a generous patron of poetry, and poems were composed for the king in Old Norse by skalds visiting his court in England.31 These texts, which (since they require knowledge of the Old Norse language) must have been primarily aimed at the king’s Scandinavian supporters, reveal some fascinating things about the culture of Cnut’s court, casting light on how his followers remembered the conquest in which many of them would have participated. As Matthew Townend has shown, Cnut’s patronage of Old Norse poetry continued throughout his reign, reaching its height in the late 1020s. ‘There was no jettisoning of Norse traditions – whether suddenly or gradually – as his reign in England progressed,’ Townend argues, and the poems show Cnut as he wanted to be perceived: ‘the gold-giving warrior-king, proud of his Danish origins and by no means metamorphosing into an honorary Englishman’.32 These poems reveal that Scandinavian culture and literary traditions continued to be prized by Cnut’s followers resident in England, but this was a hybrid Anglo-Scandinavian culture, which interacted with and adopted English practices. It has been demonstrated that the poems show some influence from Anglo-Saxon poetic style,33 and they present Cnut as a Christian emperor, exploiting imagery drawn from both pagan mythology and Christian piety to praise the king;34 his poets mention his close relationship with the church and his journey to Rome in 1027 as deeds which illustrate his imperial greatness. These poems were probably performed at the English court, but in a language and idiom most speakers of Old English would have found difficult to understand; they show Cnut as ruler of a great Scandinavian empire, simultaneously Christian monarch and triumphant Viking warlord.
9. Cnut (British Library, Royal MS. 14 B VI)
The skaldic corpus reveals that narratives of conquest played an important role in the literary culture of the Anglo-Danish court: stories of Scandinavian invasions of England, both of the immediate and the distant past, were offered to the king by his poets and presumably welcomed by Cnut and his followers. Even as the king made overtures of reconciliation to his conquered English subjects, the skaldic poems commemorate and celebrate that same conquest. Óttarr svarti’s Knútsdrápa, for instance, celebrates Cnut’s battles against the English in detail, hymning Cnut’s first voyage to England and cataloguing all the places where the Danes triumphed: Lindsey, Sherston, Brentford, London, Norwich.35 He extols Cnut’s victory over the English, calling them the ‘kindred of Edgar’ (ætt Játgeirs) – though Edgar was the king whose laws Cnut and the Danes had agreed to uphold.36 Cnut and his followers presumably enjoyed hearing about these triumphs, but the commemoration of the conquest, of course, also serves a political function; it underlines Cnut’s power and rewrites the narrative of the conquest in his favour, attributing the glory of the victory to the king and downplaying the role of supporters who might become his rivals.37
The evidence of the skaldic verse also reveals that Cnut and his court were aware of the place of the eleventh-century Danish conquest within a longer history of Scandinavian activity in England, and made use of this history for political purposes.38 The most famous example is Sigvatr Þórðarson’s Knútsdrápa, which makes reference to Ivar’s defeat of Ælla, king of Northumbria, at York in 866–7:
Ok Ellu bak,
at, lét, hinns sat,
Ívarr ara,
Jórvík, skorit.
(And Ívarr, who resided at York, had Ælla’s back cut with an eagle.)39
Alluding to Ivar in a poem designed to praise Cnut seems intended to draw an implicit parallel between Cnut’s conquest and Ivar’s victory over Ælla, suggesting a link between these two Danish invaders and rulers of England.40 As Roberta Frank argues, this reference not only glorifies Cnut by comparing him to another successful invader, it also implies a historical precedent for Danish rule in England which confers legitimacy on Cnut’s own reign, reminding those listening ‘that Cnut is heir to Ívarr’s conquests, that in possessing England the king has only reclaimed what was his by right.’41
Frank has argued that the poets’ use of the term skjöldungr is intended to have a similar political resonance, associating Cnut with ninth-century Danish conquerors of England and implying his descent from the legendary hero Scyld, who was a common ancestor in the genealogies of both English and Danish royal houses.42 This too was a term associated with the ninth-century Danish invasions, including in northern English sources: in the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, the Danish army who invaded Northumbria and defeated Ælla in battle are referred to as Scaldingi, apparently a form of ‘Scylding’.43 Kennings which describe Cnut’s opponents as the descendants of Edgar, Ælla or Edmund cast the Danish conquest as a struggle between dynasties, the latest and most successful in a long series of battles between the Danes and the English; this must have been reinforced by the fact that Cnut’s opponent, Æthelred’s son Edmund Ironside, shared his first name with a figure already almost emblematic of Viking defeat of the English, Edmund of East Anglia.44 This is a radically different interpretation of Anglo-Danish history from any we find in contemporary English sources – the Vikings’ own perspective of their right to rule England.
10. Edmund Ironside (British Library, Royal MS. 14 B VI)
11. Cnut and Emma in the New Minster Liber Vitae (British Library, Stowe MS. 944, f. 6)
References to Cnut as skjöldungr and to Danish kings who had previously ruled in England are valuable evidence for the knowledge of Anglo-Danish history and legend in Cnut’s reign, and its political uses in Danish-ruled England. Some suggestive, though less explicit, evidence is also provided by the Encomium Emmae Reginae, a Latin prose narrative commissioned by Cnut’s wife Emma during the brief reign of their son Harthacnut, in 1040–2.45 Emma, the sister of the duke of Normandy, had been the wife of Æthelred before she married Cnut in 1017; some years older than Cnut, with experience of English politics gained during her time as Æthelred’s queen, she was a
forceful and influential figure at the Anglo-Danish court.46 The Encomium was written for her by an anonymous monk of St Bertin in Flanders, and it tells the story of the Danish conquest, Cnut’s reign, and the succession crisis that followed his death in 1035. The author probably had little direct experience of England, and the account he gives must have been largely based on details communicated to him by Emma and other informants at the Anglo-Danish court.47 The Encomium is a highly valuable source, and perhaps the closest thing we can get to an official narrative of the conquest from the Danish perspective, but it is a complex text, extremely selective and partial in the information it provides, particularly when it comes to the details of Emma’s own life. It omits to mention, for instance, that Emma had been married to Æthelred before marrying Cnut – a fact of which any contemporary reader of the text would certainly have been aware.48 Although the Encomium tells the story of a successful conquest and a triumphant Danish dynasty, it was written in response to a tense political situation: after Cnut’s death in 1035, the throne was disputed between Harthacnut and Harold, Cnut’s son by his first wife, and for some years Emma herself was in a difficult position. Her son by Æthelred, Edward, returned to England after more than two decades of exile in Normandy to live at Harthacnut’s court, and there seems to have been an uneasy truce between Edward, his mother, and his half-brother. The Encomium is evidently an attempt to defend Emma from her detractors and to bolster Harthacnut’s claim to the English throne, and in order to do this it looks back to the Danish conquest of 30 years before as a foundational narrative for the Anglo-Danish dynasty now represented by Harthacnut. Its presentation of the past is shaped throughout by the needs of the present, as for instance when the text gives a lengthy account of Cnut making terms with his brother Harold, after their father’s death, about sharing the rule of Denmark; this account offers potentially significant information about Cnut’s otherwise obscure brother, but it also seems designed to provide a parallel to the situation between Harthacnut and Edward at the time the text was written.
Nonetheless, the Encomium gives us a unique and important perspective on the events of the Danish conquest. The text takes its shape from the course of Danish rule over England, beginning in 1013. The first book describes how Cnut and his father Svein set out to conquer England, the second is a brief account of Cnut’s 20-year reign, and the third tells of the political crisis which followed Cnut’s death in 1035, which is said to have been brought to an end by the accession of Harthacnut. The three books thus correspond to three generations of Danish rulers of England, the dynasty with which Emma had identified her interests. In its narrative of this period it is in some ways closer to the skaldic poems than to contemporary English sources; it praises Cnut’s father Svein, for instance, who is presented as a wise king and an effective military leader, much loved by his men.49 He is a Christian king, who on his deathbed, in his last words to his son, ‘exhorted him much concerning the government of the kingdom and the zealous practice of Christianity, and, thanks be to God, committed the royal sceptre to him, the most worthy of men.’50 We will see that this is a very different picture of Svein from the one that appears in post-Conquest English sources, where he is presented as a pagan and a tyrant with no redeeming features.51 Later medieval English historians liked to depict Cnut making atonement to the English for the sins of his pagan father, but there is no hint of this in the Encomium; there is no indication here that the Danish conquest is something for which atonement is necessary.
12. Cnut’s two sons, Harold Harefoot and Harthacnut (British Library, Royal MS. 14 B VI)
We will have cause to return to the Encomium several times over the course of this book, as it provides the first evidence for legendary stories about the Danish conquest which were to become widely known, such as the idea that Cnut and Edmund Ironside fought a duel against each other as the war reached a climax in 1016. Here we can focus on one episode, the account of the final battle of Cnut’s conquest in October 1016. The Encomium devotes considerable attention to this battle, which was fought in Essex at a place the sources call Assandun (the location has not been identified). In the Encomium this battle occurs halfway through Book II, at the mid-point of the text as a whole, and the battle and its aftermath take up five chapters of action and dialogue – almost as much space as is allocated to the two decades of Cnut’s reign. Cnut himself plays a fairly limited role in this section of the narrative: more prominence is accorded to Thorkell the Tall, who is given a crucial part to play in the battle, and on the English side to Edmund Ironside and the treacherous earl Eadric Streona. After describing the preparations for the battle, the encomiast says:
Erat namque eis uexillum miri portenti, quod licet credam posse esse incredibile lectori, tamen, quia uerum est, uerae inseram lectioni. Enimuero dum esset simplissimo candidissimoque intextum serico, nulliusque figurae in eo inserta esset [i]mago, tempore belli semper in eo uidebatur coruus ac si intextus, in uictoria suorum quasi hians ore excutiensque alas instabilisque pedibus, et suis deuictis quietissimus totoque corpore demissus. Quod requirens Turchil, auctor primi prelii, ‘Pugnemus’, inquit, ‘uiriliter, sotii, nihil enim nobis erit periculi: hoc denique testatur instabilis coruus presagientis uexilli.’ Quo audito Dani audentiores effecti.
(Now [the Danes] had a banner of wonderfully strange nature, which though I believe that it may be incredible to the reader, yet since it is true, I will introduce the matter into my true history. For while it was woven of the plainest and whitest silk, and the representation of no figure was inserted into it, in time of war a raven was always seen as if embroidered on it, in the hour of its owners’ victory opening its beak, flapping its wings, and restive on its feet, but very subdued and drooping with its whole body when they were defeated. Looking out for this, Thorkell, who had fought the first battle, said: ‘Let us fight manfully, comrades, for no danger threatens us: for to this the restive raven of the prophetic banner bears witness.’ When the Danes heard this, they were rendered bolder.)52
This draws on a motif which appears in various forms in Scandinavian literary tradition: the raven banner which predicts success or failure in battle. In English sources, this banner is linked with the army of Ivar and Ubbe and their brothers, men who were later identified as the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok. The first reference to a raven banner in an English text is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 878, which refers to a battle in Devon in which an unnamed brother of Ivar was killed and the Danes’ banner was captured, ‘which they called “Raven”.’53 Although there is no indication of a legend attached to the banner at this point, parallels to the description given in the Encomium can be found in later texts from Iceland, Scandinavia and England. In the twelfth-century Annals of St Neots, the Chronicle’s reference to the events of 878 is expanded with a comment that the banner was woven by the sisters of Ivar and Ubbe, and that the raven moved like a living bird if the army were to be victorious, but hung down motionless if they were to be defeated.54 Cnut’s raven banner therefore seems to derive from the same body of semi-historical legend as the reference to Ivar in Sigvatr’s Knútsdrápa, and like that reference it may be intended to place Cnut’s conquest within the context of a long history of Danish triumphs over English kings.
The Encomium’s sense of the importance of Assandun is shared by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and by Óttarr’s Knútsdrápa, which both memorialise this climactic battle from their different perspectives.55 For the chronicler, writing probably early in Cnut’s reign, this was the battle by which Cnut won control of the whole English nation: the Chronicle lists by name the most important of the English dead, condemning Eadric Streona for betraying king and country with his cowardly flight, and lamenting that all the chief men of the English nation were killed that day.56 For Cnut’s poets, of course, this battle was a great triumph to celebrate. Óttarr extols Cnut’s victory:
Skjǫldungr, vannt und skildi
skœru verk, inn sterki;
fekk blóðtrani bráðir
>
brúnar Assatúnum.
(Strong Skjǫldungr, you performed a feat of battle under the shield; the blood-crane [raven/eagle] received dark morsels at Ashingdon.)57
In light of the Encomium’s reference to the raven banner, it is notable that Óttarr also associates Cnut’s victory at Assandun with a battle-hungry bird. This could of course be a straightforward instance of the traditional ‘beasts of battle’ motif, but the choice of a bird – called a blóðtrani ‘blood-crane’ (probably a raven, although the kenning could also refer to an eagle) – is nonetheless strikingly reminiscent of the story told in the Encomium. It fits well with Óttarr’s address to Cnut as skjöldungr in the same verse, conceivably another reference to ninth-century Danish conquerors of England which would associate this crucial battle with past Danish victories. It suggests that there is a historical precedent for Danish rule in England, and that with his conquest Cnut is following in the footsteps of great Danish kings of the past; it associates the eleventh-century king with his larger-than-life predecessors of centuries before, mythologising his conquest and perhaps (since the raven, of course, is Odin’s bird) conferring some kind of mysterious supernatural favour upon it.