Great Tales From English History (9 page)

The great challenge facing England during Ethelred’s years was a new round of Danish invasions. Having left the island in peace for decades, the Vikings now returned with more rapacious raiding parties than ever. In fact, the raids were so ferocious that the Anglo-Saxons inserted a prayer in their church services every Sunday imploring God to spare them from the terror of the invaders. Ethelred resorted to Alfred’s time-honoured tactic of paying them off, but he failed to take advantage of the time the Danegeld payments gave him to strengthen and reorganise his defences. The King seemed devoid of leadership qualities.

‘When the invaders were in the East,’ recorded one of the scribes of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
with ill concealed disgust, ‘the English army was kept in the West, and when they were in the South, our army was in the North . . . If anything was then decided, it did not last even a month. Finally there was no leader who would collect an army, but each fled as best he could, and in the end no shire would even help the next.’

For many of their raids, the Danes got help from their kinsmen in northern France. In 912 the French Channel coast had fallen to the Norsemen -
Normanni
in medieval Latin - and the sheltered harbours of Normandy provided ideal staging-posts for the Danes as they raided the south coast of England. Ethelred complained to the Pope, who got Duke Richard of Normandy to promise to stop helping Danish longships that were hostile to England. To strengthen his links with the Normans, Ethelred later married Richard’s young sister Emma.

But the invaders kept coming, and in 1002 Ethelred took a desperate step: he ordered the massacre of all Danes living in England. It was a foolhardy and wretched measure that gave the excuse for some Anglo-Saxons to settle local scores - the community of Danes living in Oxford were burned to death in the church where they had taken shelter. But even Ethelred’s massacre was incompetent. There is little evidence that this dreadful ethnic cleansing was widely carried out - with one exception. Among the Danes who were killed was Gunnhilda, the sister of Sweyn Forkbeard, the King of Denmark.

It was a fatal mistake. The following year Sweyn led a huge Danish army up the River Humber, to receive a warm welcome from the inhabitants of the Danelaw. He returned in 1006 and again in 1013, fighting a campaign that eventually gave him control of all of England. England became a Danish possession, and Ethelred fled into exile in Normandy.

History books usually conclude Ethelred’s story with the confused fighting that consumed the years 1013-16, ending with the deaths of both Ethelred and his son Edmund Ironside. But one episode tends to be overlooked. Sweyn died in 1014, and in a desperate attempt to regain his throne Ethelred offered to turn over a new leaf. Harking back to the conditions that Danish communities demanded when giving their allegiance to English rulers, Ethelred negotiated a sort of contract with the leading Anglo-Saxon nobles and clerics.

It was the first recorded pact between an English ruler and his subjects. Ethelred promised that ‘he would govern them more justly than he did before’, reported the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
. The king parleyed a comeback deal whereby ‘he would be a gracious lord to them, and would improve each of the things which they all hated’. In return the nobles and clergy agreed to obey him, ‘and full friendship was secured with word and pledge on either side’.

This contract, which appears to have been sealed in writing, was one of several last-ditch measures to which Ethelred had been driven in his weakness. As his authority eroded he had turned for help to the council of great lords and bishops who traditionally gave advice to Anglo-Saxon kings, the
witan
(plural of the Old English
wita
, meaning ‘wise man’). Ethelred had used the prestige of the
witan
to bolster his appeals for taxes, for a national day of prayer against the heathen Danes and even for a nationwide fast during which just water and herbs would be consumed.

None of these frantic steps saved him. Though Ethelred was allowed back to England, he died in April 1016, and following the death of his son Edmund later that year the throne of England passed to the Danes in the shape of Sweyn’s warrior son, Canute (Cnut). But some good came of the disaster. The ineffectualness that had compelled Ethelred to enlist the
witan
and that had inspired his last-gasp promise of good behaviour helped sow the seeds of a notion that would be crucial for the future - that English kings must rule with the consent of their people.

C.AD
1010

E
LMER WAS AN ENQUIRING YOUNG MONK
who lived at Malmesbury Abbey, and who loved to gaze up at the stars. During the troubled early decades of the eleventh century, he would look to the heavens for signs and portents of things to come, but while many of his contemporaries were content to draw simple lessons of doom and disaster, Elmer gazed with a scientific eye. He noted that, if you were to live long enough, you could see a comet come round again in the sky.

Elmer applied his experimental mind to classical history, making a particular study of Daedalus, the mythical Athenian architect and engineer who was hired by King Minos to build his sinister labyrinth in Crete. To preserve the secret of his maze, Minos then imprisoned Daedalus and his son Icarus, who only escaped by building themselves wings of feathers and wax. Their escape plan was working beautifully until Icarus, intoxicated by the joy of flying, flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax in his wings. The boy fell into the Aegean Sea below, where the island of Ikaria perpetuates his legend to this day.

Elmer decided to test the story of Daedalus by making wings for himself, then trying to fly from the tower of the abbey. In an age when Britain was still suffering Viking raids, many Saxon churches had high bell-towers, both to serve as a lookout and to sound the alarm. Whenever the Vikings captured a church, the bell was always the first thing they tore down. Its valuable metal could be beaten into high-quality swords and helmets - and anyway, to capture the Christians’ unique sound was a triumph in its own right.

Modern aeronautic experts have recreated Elmer’s flight, and they calculate that his launch platform must have been at least 18 metres high, which corresponds to the height of surviving Saxon church towers. They also presume that he built his paragliding equipment from willow or ash, the most lightweight and flexible of the woods available in the copses of the nearby Cotswolds. To complete his birdman outfit, the monk must have stretched parchment or thin cloth over the frame, which, we are told, he attached to both his arms and his feet. Today the ravens and jackdaws that live around Malmesbury Abbey can be seen soaring on the updrafts that blow up the hill between the church and the valley of the River Avon, and Elmer may have tried to copy them as he leapt off the tower and glided down towards the river.

According to William of Malmesbury, the historian who recorded Elmer’s feat in the following century, the monk managed a downward glide of some 200 metres before he landed - or, rather, crash-landed. He did catch a breeze from the top of the tower, but was surprised by the atmospheric turbulence and seems to have lost his nerve.

‘What with the violence of the wind and the eddies and at the same time his consciousness of the temerity of the attempt,’ related William, ‘he faltered and fell, breaking and crippling both his legs.’

William of Malmesbury probably got his story from fellow-monks who had known Elmer in old age. The eleventh-century stargazer was the sort of character dismissed as mad in his lifetime, but later seen as a visionary. In his final years Elmer’s limping figure was a familiar sight around the abbey - and the would-be birdman would explain the failure of his great enterprise with wry humour. It was his own fault, he would say. As William told it, ‘He forgot to fit a tail on his hinder parts.’

AD 1016-35

K
ING CANUTE (CNUT) WHO RULED THE
English from 1016 until 1035 and who tried to turn back the waves, has gone down in folklore as the very model of arrogance, stupidity and wishful thinking.

One day the King invited his nobles down to the beach as the tide was coming in, ordering his throne to be placed where the waves were advancing across the sands. ‘You are subject to me,’ he shouted out to the water, ‘as the land on which I am sitting is mine . . . I command you, therefore, not to rise on to my land, nor to presume to wet the clothing or limbs of your master.’

Not surprisingly, the sea paid no attention. According to the earliest surviving written version of the story, the tide kept on coming. The waves ‘disrespectfully drenched the king’s feet and shins’, so he had to jump back to avoid getting wetter.

King Canute’s soaked feet are a historical image to rival King Alfred’s smoking cakes, and, as with the story of the cakes, we get our evidence not from an eyewitness but from a manuscript that was not written until about a hundred years later. In the case of Canute we can identify the storyteller precisely as Henry of Huntingdon, a country clergyman who lived on the edge of the Fens around 1130 and who wrote a
History of the English
in praise of ‘this, the most celebrated of islands, formerly called Albion, later Britain, and now England’. An enthusiast for his local wetlands - ‘beautiful to behold . . . green, with many woods and islands’ - Henry compiled his history from other manuscript histories, most notably Bede and the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, and from the personal memories of people who had lived through the great events.

Henry was a conscientious reporter. His account of his own times has a careful ring, and if I were putting money on it I would feel safer betting that Canute got his feet wet than that Alfred burned the cakes. History’s mistake has been the belief that Canute really did think he could stop the waves - according to Henry, the King thought quite the opposite.

‘Let all the world know,’ cried Canute as he retreated from his throne and contemplated his wet feet, ‘that the power of kings is empty and worthless!’ He shouted at the waves, in other words, to convey the message that he was
not
as all-powerful as he might seem, and he embellished his point with an additional, religious, lesson. ‘There is no king worthy of the name,’ he proclaimed, ‘save God by whose will heaven, earth and sea obey eternal laws.’

The King of Heaven was the king who mattered, was his second message; and after this episode on the beach, according to Henry of Huntingdon, Canute never wore his golden crown again, placing it instead atop a figure of Jesus Christ. This tallies exactly with what we know of Canute’s entire reign. As the son of the Viking Sweyn Forkbeard who had ousted Ethelred the Unready, he was anxious to emphasise that his family had converted from paganism and was now Christian. He gave generous gifts to embellish the cathedrals at Winchester and Canterbury, and also donated royal estates to support the abbey at Bury where pilgrims were starting to pray to Edmund, the saintly king who had been so cruelly murdered by a previous generation of Danish invaders (see p. 55). It was a matter of reconciliation.

Canute was a battle-hardened Viking chief who had slaughtered mercilessly to secure his power. In later years he liked to take the helm of the royal ship, so he could steer himself when he was travelling along the Thames, and if you attended his court you were likely to be jostled by Icelandic bards ready to declaim the latest epic poem. In the course of his reign he took control of both Denmark and Norway, to create a huge North Sea empire that stretched from Greenland to the Baltic and from the White Sea off north-western Russia to the Isle of Wight. But Canute had a touching wish to be considered English. He always saw England as his power base, and he understood that the key to success there was reconciliation between Anglo-Saxon and Dane.