Chapter 6
In This Chapter
● Figuring out what drew the Vikings to Britain and what they did once they arrived
● Getting familiar with England’s first kings
● Introducing famous rulers from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales
● Understanding how a Dane - Cnut - became an English king
● Describing events leading up to the Norman Invasion
For two hundred years, from the 800s to the millennium, and beyond, Britain was part of the Viking world. Everyone knows - or thinks they know - about the Vikings. Horned helmets, great longboats, and plenty of rape and pillaging. This portrayal, while not entirely wrong, isn’t entirely right either. Sure, everyone - kings, commoners, and clergy alike - suffered at the Vikings’ hands. Lindisfarne, the religious centre in Northumbria, got trashed, and so did the monasteries of Ireland: You can still see the tall towers with the doors half-way up them that the Irish monks built to protect themselves. In one sense, the Viking raids helped to bring the different peoples of Britain closer together, because they all suffered together. In another sense, England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland really began to go their different ways, slowly evolving from regions peopled by Celts and Saxons to regions with their own national identities.
In the years from the first Viking raiding ship off the coast of Britain to 1066, when the Normans invaded England (see Chapter 7 for that bit of history), a lot was going on in Britain. It was a time of national heroes - Brian Boru in Ireland and Kenneth MacAlpin in Scotland who united their countries, and England’s Alfred the Great, who was able to push the Vikings out of England entirely - and royal embarrassments like King Ethelred the Unredy, who was reduced to paying protection money to get the Vikings to leave him alone.
No matter how many times the Vikings were beaten, they always came back, and in the end their tenacity paid off. The Norse of Normandy finally conquered England in 1066 and changed British history forever.
The Fury of the Norsemen
‘From the fury of the Norsemen,’ went one Saxon prayer, ‘Oh Lord, deliver us.’ Or at least, so the story goes, although no one’s ever found a source for the prayer. But who were these people, and why did they want to set off in longboats to go and ruin other people’s lives?
‘Norsemen’ simply means ‘people from the North’, which the Vikings were. ‘Viking’ isn’t really a noun, but a verb (or if you’re really into this sort of thing, the word’s a gerund) meaning ‘going off as a pirate’: You might say you were going off a-viking for the day. Even ‘Dane’ doesn’t actually mean someone from Denmark: The term’s simply a variation on the Saxon word thegn (or, as the Scots spell it, thane), which meant ‘a warrior’. So the Saxons and the Irish tended to use the words Norsemen, Vikings, and Danes pretty much interchangeably.
A pillaging we will go
Like the Angles and Saxons before them, the Vikings came to Britain for many reasons. They came from the fjords, so going by boat came naturally to them. Britain was really only a hop, skip, and jump away. And even if they didn’t want to settle (and sooner or later they would), raiding was very lucrative and quite safe really. If they got beaten, they could always come back the next year.
Equal opportunity raiders
The Norsemen didn't just go to Britain and Ireland. They sailed west, to Iceland and Greenland (which is anything but green - they called it that to try to persuade more Vikings to go there). They even went to the land they called Vinland, which was North America, where they were driven off by the Skraelings, who were presumably either the Algonquins of Canada or the Inuit. They also sailed up the Seine to raid Paris, and they settled the area of northern France that was named Normandy after them (from the French normand, meaning Norsemen and Normans). They raided deep into Germany, and they headed east, sailing along the rivers deep into Russia. The locals called them Rus, which comes from the Norse word for 'route', and in turn the Rus gave their name to Russia. They founded Kiev and Novgorod and Smolensk, and traded with the Chinese. They pressed south and attacked Miklagard, that is, Byzantium or Constantinople (modern Istanbul), the capital of the Roman Empire. They didn't take Byzantium but many of them did join the Roman emperor's elite Varangian Guard.
The Vikings who killed the reeve at Portland (refer to Chapter 5 for that tale) were probably just on a recce, but they would’ve given a very favourable report. England and Ireland (we can more or less use the modern terms from now on) were both very wealthy, especially all those defenceless monasteries. If the Vikings had believed in Christmas, they’d have believed it had come early.
So, very sensibly, the Vikings started off by attacking monasteries. After all, the Saxons were ever so thoughtful to put their really important religious centres, Iona and Lindisfarne, on undefended islands just off the coast. The location was just right for seagoing raiders coming from the north. The Vikings must have thought it would be a sin not to raid them and probably wondered why the Saxons hadn’t done it years ago.
Setting up base on the Isle of Man
The great thing about coming from Scandinavia was that all sorts of areas that the Saxons and the Picts thought of as remote, like the Orkneys or the Hebrides, were actually very easy to get to. Take the Isle of Man, for instance. Most people in Britain and Ireland probably hardly gave the Isle of Man a thought, but the Vikings did. If you look at a map from their angle (shown in Figure 6-1), you can see why.
To the Vikings, Britain and Ireland were simply two parts of a group of islands with a big sound (the Irish Sea) running down the middle, and in the middle of the sound is a very handy island, the Isle of Man. So they seized it, and found Man gave them control of the whole area. The Viking parliament, Tynwald, still survives on Man - the oldest parliament in the world.
Figure 6-1: The Viking view of Britain and Europe
Long ships and tall tales
The Vikings took their raiding very seriously. Their ships were long, but they weren't packed with men because they needed room for a lot of luggage: Food, weapons of course, and sometimes even the chief's tent or his bed. Planning a raid took a lot of thought and care. Those who were planning a trip would listen carefully to people who had got back from raiding and judge whether going back to the same place was worth it or whether striking out somewhere new would be better.
Without doubt the Vikings knew just how to scare the wits out of people. Although most of the written evidence about the Norsemen comes from people like the Lindisfarne monks, who were on the receiving end of a Viking raid, so much evidence exists of people being absolutely terrified of these guys that we can't just put it all down to biased reports and scare stories. The Norse raiders seem to have had a neat trick of sliding a live snake down a hollow tube and then forcing the tube and the snake down some poor monk's gullet. But even without these little refinements, the Vikings were so fierce and apparently invincible that no wonder people were scared of them.
Nevertheless, we do need to put the Viking image in proportion. For example, many Viking helmets have been found, but not one of them has horns. The traditional image of the Vikings' horned helmets probably comes from people thinking the Vikings must have looked scary and a horned helmet seems scarier than a helmet without horns. More importantly, when they weren't raiding, the Vikings could be much the same as other folk, ploughing, harvesting, hunting - they even played chess, as you can see from those rather beautiful Island of Lewis chessmen in the British Museum. But the best fun for a Viking was drinking in the mead halls and listening to a bard retelling one of the long Viking sagas, like Sigur the dragon-slayer, or the sayings of Odin. Then after dinner, there was just time to torture a hostage or two, and then it was early to bed.
Some Seriously Good Kings
Monks just moaning and wailing was no good: Someone was going to have to fight back. King Offa of England and Charlemagne of France sank their differences for a time and agreed to work together to keep the Channel safe for shipping, but keeping the Norsemen at bay required a bit more than that.
Vikings were settling in Dublin and sailing inland up the Liffey. They seized the Hebrides and northern Scotland (Hebrideans think of themselves as Nordics rather than Scots to this day). And they settled at Thanet in Kent. Under their terrifying leader Ivar the Boneless (because he was so slippery, you just couldn’t catch him), the Norsemen also took the Northumbrian capital, York, and killed the Northumbrian king. The story goes that they opened up his ribcage and pulled his insides out through his back in what they called the ‘Blood Eagle’, but, like so many grisly Viking tales, this is almost certainly not true.
Several Saxon and Celtic kings answered the Viking challenge - some with spectacular success, some not. But in almost every case, battling the Norsemen was not only an objective in itself (they had to get rid of these guys), but also a means to an end: Consolidating power and creating nations.
Scotland the brave: Kenneth MacAlpin
Scotland was vulnerable to Norse attacks because the Scots and the Picts were still fighting each other (head to Chapter 5 for details on how the brouhaha started). The Picts were still trying to crush their neighbours, the Irish Scotti, who had come over from Northern Ireland and set up a kingdom called Dalriada, and the Britons who lived in the Kingdom of Strathclyde. But all these people were going to have to unite if they were to stand a chance against the Vikings. The question became how to unite these warring factions.
The man who worked out a solution was the Scottish king of Dalriada, Kenneth I MacAlpin, and his plan was very effective. First, he tricked his own men into believing that he had God on his side by sending a man dressed as an angel to tell them so (I couldn’t entirely guarantee that you’d get away with this trick nowadays). Then he invited all the Scottish and Pictish leaders to a peace banquet. The purpose of the banquet? To bury the hatchet. And bury it they did - in the Pictish leaders’ skulls.
MacAlpin’s intention wasn’t to join in some big anti-Viking alliance with the Angles and Saxons: What he wanted was a strong Scottish kingdom, which he called by the Gaelic name of Alba, and the Angles out of the Lowlands. He certainly did fight the Vikings, but he was also quite happy to join up with the Vikings against the Angles, thus starting a long Scottish tradition of supporting absolutely anyone who picks a quarrel with the English.
Forcing the Angles out of Scotland took a long time: Not until the Battle of Carham in 1018 did the Scots finally manage it, and they lost a lot of battles along the way. Nevertheless, it was the Alban kings founded by Kenneth MacAlpin who moved the capital out of remote Dalriada to a more central location in Perthshire and were crowned sitting on the Stone of Destiny at Scone.
We'll poke your eye out in the hillsides: The Welsh
The Welsh also developed much more of a separate identity during the Viking period. The days when Welsh kings like Cadwallader could charge around Northumbria spreading terror among the English were long gone: Gwynedd in the north and Dyfed in the south had been cut off from the rest of Britain by King Offa and his famous dyke (refer to Chapter 5 for info on that), and the Welsh had been developing stronger ties with Ireland.
The King of Gwynedd, Rhodri the Great, managed to get the Welsh to unite against the Vikings, but unfortunately, he ran into English trouble. In 878, the Mercians went to war with the Welsh, and Rhodri was killed. His son Anarawd swore vengeance. Anarawd didn’t care which Saxon kingdom had actually killed his father, he wanted to teach all the English a lesson. So he made an alliance with the Vikings against Wessex (not Mercia, mind you) and even against the southern Welsh in Dyfed (who thought he’d gone mad). Alfred the Great, the King of Wessex, had to take time out from fighting the Vikings to deal with Anarawd and force him to come to terms.
Eventually, it was King Hywel the Good who finally moulded the Welsh into a single nation, and he did it by working very closely with the English. Nations don’t always have to be formed by fighting the neighbours.
The English kings: Egbert, Alfred, and Athelstan
Important things were happening in southern England. In 829 King Egbert of Wessex was briefly recognised as Overlord of England, and although his own power was shaky - he was up against the Mercians, the Welsh, and the Cornish, not to mention the Vikings - it was a sign of the growing importance of Wessex. By the 860s the Vikings had started to settle a large area of northern and eastern England, which became known as the Danelaw (because the law of the Danes applied there). Hitherto the Vikings had been raiders, and they had left the government of the English kingdoms alone, but if they were going to start settling and introducing their laws, then they posed a real threat to the stability and security of all the English kingdoms. By 870 the Vikings had crushed East Anglia, murdered its king, and taken over most of Mercia. Only Wessex was left. But was Wessex strong enough to challenge the power of the Danes? The signs didn’t look good.
Egbert had finally won his war with the Vikings, and his son Ethelwulf had managed to join forces with the Mercians against the Welsh. But then the situation all seemed to go to pot. Ethelwulf’s sons came to the throne, but they didn’t last very long - Ethelbald 858-9; Ethelbert 859-65; Ethelred 865-71 - and they could only sit by and watch as the Vikings crushed the neighbouring kingdoms. Then in 871 the Vikings launched their long-awaited attack on Wessex. King Ethelred and his younger brother led the forces of Wessex out to meet the invaders at Ashdown. To everyone’s amazement, they won a great victory. King Ethelred died soon after, and that younger brother of his became King. His name was Alfred.
Let them eat (burnt) cake
The most famous story about Alfred dates from Saxon times. While Alfred was hiding out in Athelney marshes, he took shelter with an old woman who told him to watch her cakes while she popped out. Alfred, thinking furiously about how to beat the Danes, forgot to watch the cakes. When the old woman came back, the cakes were burnt. The woman was furious and started to beat Alfred until some of his thegns arrived, and she realised who he really was.
So what's the point of the story? Well, it shows Alfred in an appealingly human light - it would've been stretching things a bit if he'd been able to plan a campaign and keep an eye on the cakes at the same time. The story also shows that he was fair: The woman was quite right to be cross, and he didn't pull rank or have her punished. Did it happen? Does it matter? The story's important because of what it tells us about how the English saw Alfred: Hero but human.
Alfred the Great - ‘King of the English'
Although the English tend to date all their history from 1066, the only monarch to be called ‘the Great’ is Alfred - who lived in the 800s - and rightly so. Alfred was a remarkable man, a scholar as well as a soldier, and an amazingly clear-sighted, even visionary, soldier at that. He was wise enough to know when to buy time, and he began his reign by doing just that: The Vikings soon recovered from their defeat at the Battle of Ashdown, so Alfred paid them to leave Wessex alone. This strategy gave Wessex time to prepare for the big showdown they knew was coming.
In 878 the Vikings under their king, Guthrum, tore into Wessex. The Saxons could hardly have known what hit them. Alfred had to go into hiding in the marshes at Athelney in Somerset and conduct a guerrilla war against the Vikings. As long as the Vikings couldn’t catch him, Alfred was a powerful symbol of resistance, living proof that the Vikings weren’t going to have it all their own way.
When Alfred came out of hiding, he gathered a huge army and fell on King Guthrum’s Vikings at Edington like a ton of bricks. In the peace settlement that followed, King Guthrum was lucky to get away with keeping East Anglia, and he even had to agree to be baptised. Alfred was his godfather.
Alfred called it the turn of the tide, and he was right. He completely overhauled Wessex’s defences and he organised the first proper English navy with a new design of ship so that he could take the Vikings on at sea. Which he did - and won. Then he marched east and forced the Vikings out of London. Alfred was definitely on a winning streak. When the Vikings came back at him; he beat them (with some very useful help from the Welsh). When King Anarawd of
Gwynedd came at him; Alfred beat him, too. By the time Alfred died in 899 his coins were calling him King of the English, the first time anyone had been called that since Offa’s day (refer to Chapter 5), and Wessex was poised to take the fight to the enemy and invade the Danelaw.
In addition to beating the Vikings, Alfred is credited (not always accurately) with the following:
● Expanding education and translating great works into Anglo-Saxon:
Ireland was still the great centre of learning - Alfred’s contemporary, King Cormac of Munster, was a great scholar in his own right - and Alfred very sensibly brought a group of Irish monks over to set up a school at Glastonbury. He even set up a school for the sons of noblemen within his own household, nurturing the future leaders of Wessex. Since so many people no longer spoke Latin, Alfred had important works translated into Anglo-Saxon. So well known was Alfred’s patronage of scholars that many years later, in Richard Il’s reign (1377-99), University College, Oxford successfully (though entirely falsely) claimed special royal privileges on the grounds that it had supposedly been founded by King Alfred the Great.
● Drawing up legal codes: Alfred drew up a proper code of laws saying exactly what rights people had, how much tax and rent they had to pay, and who they had to pay it to.
● Commissioning the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, one of the first histories of Britain: Not surprisingly for such a learned king, Alfred had an eye on how history would judge him, and he decided to get his retaliation in first. He commissioned the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a huge year-by-year story of English history from Roman times, and a biography of himself, from Bishop Asser. Which, it may not surprise you to learn, was very complimentary.
Athelstan - King of Britain
You know how it is: You get a really great leader, but then he dies, and the next ones don’t live up to him. Well, prepare yourself for a shock: Alfred’s successors were just as tough and well organised as he was. His son Edward the Elder invaded the Danelaw to start the reconquest of England. He had help from his sister Athelfled who deserves to be better known - picture a Saxon Joan of Arc, and you’ve got the idea. You can imagine their dad looking down very approvingly. But there were more excellent relatives to come.
Next up was Athelstan, Edward’s son (illegitimate but don’t tell anyone), and Alfred’s grandson, and they would both have been proud of him. Athelstan began by expelling the Vikings from York, and then he reconquered Northumbria. The Scots and the Vikings teamed up to try to put a stop to him, but Athelstan took them on at Bromborough on Merseyside and slaughtered them. Literally - according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - the ground was slippery with blood. Bromborough was Athelstan’s greatest triumph. He was an ally with the Welsh and the Mercians, and he’d beaten the Scots and the Vikings: Athelstan called himself King of All Britain, and he deserved the title.
The Vikings Are Gone - Now What?
Let’s take stock of the situation. By the 940s or so, the people of Britain were doing fairly well. The Welsh had been united by King Hywel the Good (read about him in the section ‘We’ll poke your eye out in the hillsides: The Welsh’ earlier in this chapter) and had found that lining up with Wessex (see the section ‘Athelstan - King of Britain’) was a very smart move. The Scots had come off worst in an attack on Wessex and had had to give Strathclyde to Athelstan and recognise Athelstan as Lord of Britain. The Scottish king, Constantine II, had decided to retire to a monastery.
But most importantly, Wessex is riding high. The Kings of Wessex had more or less conquered England, and kept on good terms with the Welsh. They’d beaten the Scots and taken Strathclyde, and they weren’t expecting any more trouble from the Vikings. Why not? Because Wessex had beaten the Vikings.
Those Norsemen weren’t invincible: Alfred and Edward the Elder and Athelstan had all shown that. Of course plenty of Norsemen were still living up in Northumbria, but they were Athelstan’s subjects now, and they would have to learn to like it.
Of course, the Vikings tried to come back - they always did. The Viking king of Dublin teamed up with Eric Bloodaxe (best Viking name in the book) to take York back, but Athelstan’s half-brother Edred kicked them out again.
Still, give or take the odd raid, from the 930s to the 990s - a span of 60 years - Britain was largely free of Viking attacks. You can see this period of peace in the stunning artwork that dates from this time - beautiful carvings and metalwork and gorgeous illustrated books and manuscripts. All thanks to the Kings of Wessex. You can see why the English call Alfred ‘the Great’. If there were any justice, Athelstan would be called the Great, too.
And then, ever so slowly, the situation went pear-shaped.
They're back - and this time it's personal
Just when you thought that period of history was all over, the Vikings came back. In 991 a huge Viking invasion force landed on the English coast. Who was there to meet them? Ethelred II, one in a long line of Wessex kings. Unfortunately, he wasn’t one of the successful ones.
Ethelred to the rescue - not!
King Ethelred the Unredy rushed to meet the invading Vikings at Maldon in Essex. Disaster! The Battle of Maldon became one of the biggest Viking victories ever. The Norsemen even wrote an epic poem about it, just to rub it in. Ethelred was faced with a choice. He could:
● Carry on fighting the Vikings and hope for better luck next time.
● Give the Vikings Essex and hope they would be satisfied.
● Pay them to go away.
Ethelred chose the last option: He paid the Vikings to go away. The Saxons called this arrangement Danegeld - we’d call it a protection racket. To be fair, even Alfred the Great, at the start of his reign, had paid the Danes to go away. But he did it to gain a bit of time so he could be ready for the Norsemen when they came back (see the section ‘Alfred the Great - King of the English’ earlier in this section for details). Biding time doesn’t seem to have been Ethelred’s strategy, though. Every year, the Vikings came back, beat up some of Ethelred’s men, and then negotiated that year’s Danegeld rates. You’d have thought Ethelred would have got a clue from all those Norse cries of ‘Bye bye, Ethelred. Same time next year, ja?’
You really shouldn't have done that
In 1002 Ethelred did a very silly thing. He gave orders for a terrible massacre of thousands of Danes - men, women, and children - at Oxford. He wanted all the Danes and Norse and Vikings to take note. They took note all right, but if Ethelred thought the senseless bloodbath was going to scare them off, he was badly wrong.
The Danish king, Svein Forkbeard (don’t you just wish you had the courage to call yourself that?), launched massive reprisal raids on England. Ethelred offered Danegeld; Svein told him the rates had shot up. Svein’s men even raided Canterbury and murdered the Archbishop. (They pelted him with bones after dinner, and if you’re wondering how anyone could die from that - what can they have been eating? - they finished him off with an axe. Which probably renders the bones irrelevant to the cause of death, but they make a good story.) And Svein, to coin a phrase, had not yet begun to fight.
In 1013 Svein launched a full-scale invasion. He wasn’t after Danegeld this time: He wanted the throne. The Danes of Danelaw flocked to him, and he marched down to London. You couldn’t see Ethelred for dust. Ethelred’s son Edmund Ironside (incidentally, the first decent name the Saxons have come up with) carried on the fight and managed to force the Danes to agree to divide the kingdom, but Cnut, Svein Forkbeard’s son, murdered Edmund before it could happen. With Edmund dead, Svein Forkbeard became King of England. He ruled for a short time before he died and handed the kingdom over to Cnut. Or, as he is better known, King Canute.
After everything all those Kings of Wessex had achieved, England was now ruled by the Danes. Well, thank you, Ethelred the Unredy.
Showdown in Ireland
While the Danes were taking over England, those Danes who’d settled in Dublin were having a fine old time, not just because of the night life, but also because the Irish were always fighting each other and the Vikings (or Dublin Norse, as they get called) started up a very lucrative business hiring themselves out as mercenaries to whichever side wanted them. The Irish got quite attached to the Dublin Norse and were very sorry when in 902 the King of Leinster (one of the kingdoms in Ireland) pushed them out. But as Vikings were wont to do, they soon came back, and they didn’t need to wait long before the mercenary business picked up again.
The Ui Neill clan were the High Kings of Ireland. They had been for years and the other clans resented it deeply, especially the Kings of Leinster. But although the Ui Neills were able to dominate the Irish clans, they weren’t able to defeat the Dublin Norse; in fact, in 914 more Vikings arrived and settled in Waterford, to the south of Dublin, and the Ui Neills didn’t seem able to do anything about it.
The man who emerged to challenge both the Ui Neills and the Vikings was Brian Boru, the King of Munster. Boru loathed the Vikings, who’d decimated his tribe and killed his mother when he was a child. Boru had fought his way to the kingship of Munster and built up such a power base in the south of Ireland that in 998 High King Malachy Ui Neill agreed to divide his kingdom with Boru, and in 1002 Boru took over the High Kingship himself.
Like Alfred, Brian Boru was a patron of scholars, but he was also a formidable fighter, which was just as well, because he had plenty of enemies, among them the Dublin Norse and the King of Leinster.
The Dublin Norse also got in touch with the Vikings of Orkney, Iceland, and Norway. By 1013, they were all ready. They rose up in a mighty rebellion against High King Brian Boru, and the following year he faced them in battle at Clontarf. And crushed them. But Brian did not live to savour his victory: One of the Vikings fleeing the field killed him.
Clontarf broke the power of the Dublin Norse, but Brian Boru’s death led to further civil war in Ireland. Which, as the Danes said, was very good for business.
If you want to learn more about Brian Boru and the Dublin Norse, have a look in Irish History For Dummies (Wiley).
Scotland Wasn't much better
The Scots were having a difficult time keeping the English at bay, beating off Viking attacks, and stopping people from taking Strathclyde, which is what everyone seemed to end up doing. The fact that the Scots couldn’t agree who should be king didn’t help any. When the Scottish king, Malcolm I, lost to the English, his own people murdered him, and soon everyone was fighting for the crown.
It's (not so) good to be king - at least not in Scotland
Here’s a handy guide to the murder and mayhem of the Scottish court:
954 Men of Moray murder King Malcolm I. New king is Malcolm’s cousin, Indulf.
962 Danes kill Indulf. New king is Malcolm’s son, Dubh.
966 Indulf’s son, Culen, has Dubh kidnapped and murdered and his body dumped in a ditch. Culen then becomes king.
971 The King of Strathclyde kills Culen in revenge for Culen raping the king’s daughter. New king of Scots is Kenneth II.
995 Kenneth II is murdered, possibly by a booby-trapped statue (!), and Constantine III becomes king.
997 Constantine III killed in battle - against Scottish rebels led by his cousin, Kenneth, and Constantine’s own illegitimate son. Kenneth becomes King Kenneth III.
1005 Kenneth III is killed by his cousin, who becomes King Malcolm II.
And then things get really interesting.
‘Is this a dagger 1 see before me?’
Malcolm II linked up with the King of Strathclyde and beat the English at the Battle of Carham in 1018 - one of the most important dates in Scottish history. The battle more or less settled the border along the River Tweed, where it is today.
But when Malcolm died (killed in battle against the men of Moray, in case you’re wondering), there was trouble. His grandson, Duncan, seized the throne. This is the same Duncan who appears in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, where he’s portrayed as a nice old man; in reality, he was young and a really nasty piece of work. Not a particularly good leader either: He tried to attack Durham, but only had cavalry - not much use against high stone walls. The English cut his men to pieces and stuck their heads along those same walls as souvenirs. Then Duncan lost against the Vikings - twice. No wonder Macbeth reckoned he could do better.
Macbeth was an important Scottish nobleman (he may well have been helping the Vikings, not fighting them the way Shakespeare shows it), and Duncan didn’t go to his castle in 1040 to stay the night: He went to attack it. And, true to form, he lost. Duncan was probably killed in the fighting; some like to say that Macbeth killed him in open combat. When (or how) Duncan died doesn’t matter: That he was dead is the important point. Everyone gave a sigh of relief, and Macbeth was elected High King of Scots. He remained king for 18 years, which is a bit longer than Shakespeare allows him and a major feat for the Scotland of those days.
Macbeth was actually quite a good king and very devout: He went on pilgrimage to Rome and gave a lot of his money away to the poor. In the end, it was Duncan’s son Malcolm who had it in for Macbeth. Malcolm ran off to complain to the English, who joined up with the Danes (the Danes were ruling England by now) to invade Scotland on Malcolm’s behalf. An almighty battle occurred at Dunsinane in 1054 (Shakespeare gets that bit right), but it took another three years of conspiring and plotting before Malcolm was finally able to kill Macbeth in battle. With a dagger? No, more likely with an axe.
Cnut: Laying down the Danelaw
Everyone - the Irish, English, Welsh, and Scottish - had to submit to Cnut, the Dane who became king on Ethelred’s watch (see the earlier section ‘You really shouldn’t have done that’ for details). Cnut was one of those really powerful kings like Offa (see Chapter 5) or Athelstan (see the earlier section ‘Athelstan - King of Britain’ in this chapter) who controlled the whole of England so that even continental monarchs sat up and took notice.
Of course, the little problem existed that Cnut had seized the throne, and some of Ethelred’s family might not like that, but Cnut had a very simple way of dealing with possible challengers: He killed them. As soon as the crown was on his head, Cnut rounded up every relative of Ethelred’s and every leading Saxon he could lay his hands on and had them all put to death. He even reached over the North Sea and took Denmark off his brother Harald. No one who knew Cnut thought there was anything remotely funny about him (even though, much later on, the English took to calling him Canute in an attempt to make this formidable king a figure of fun). But Cnut was a very good king in many ways. He reformed the law and gave England twenty years of peace. Perhaps Danelaw wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
The Messy Successions Following Cnut
After Cnut, the Dane who ruled all of Britain - despite what the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish kings may have thought (see the earlier section) - the question became who would be king when he died? And finding the solution got a bit complicated, because everyone started having two wives (in Cnut’s case, both at the same time) and several people had more or less legitimate claims to the throne. Here are the various claimants - hold tight:
● Ethelred the Unredy had two wives. With Wife 1, he had a son, Edmund Ironside, who got killed by Cnut. End of that line. With his second wife, Emma of Normandy, he had two sons, Alfred and Edward (also known as Edward the Confessor). Note: Ethelred and Emma were so worried about the Viking threat that Emma took the boys over to Normandy for their own safety, so they grew up more Norman than English. Remember this fact - it will be important.
● When Ethelred died, Cnut married his widow, Emma. They had a son, Harthacnut. But Cnut had already married a ‘temporary wife’ called Aelfgifu of Northampton. He and Aelfgifu had two sons, Swein, who became King of Norway, and Harold ‘Harefoot’.
As you can see, lots of half-brothers were knocking around, and they were all determined to have their day as king.
Kings for (just over) a day
When Cnut died in 1035, Harold ‘Harefoot’ (Cnut’s son by Aelfgifu) and Harthacnut (Cnut’s son by Emma) had a big row about who should succeed. Harold was the elder, but Harthacnut said that his mum was Cnut’s real wife, so there. Harold said, ‘Insult my mother, would you?’ and seized the throne.
Meanwhile, over in Normandy, Ethelred and Emma’s young son Alfred thought ‘Hang on, shouldn’t I be King?’ and crossed over to England to have words with his step-brother Harold Harefoot. But Alfred was murdered by an ambitious English nobleman with an eye to the main chance, called Godwin. (Godwin was a man to watch: Think of him as the Thegn Most Likely to Succeed in the Class of 1035. Alfred’s little brother, Edward the Confessor, certainly didn’t forget what Godwin had done).
Harold Harefoot ruled for a time and then died, and then Harthacnut came over and ruled, and fell dead in the middle of a wedding banquet (it was probably the fish). The obvious person to put on the throne was Ethelred and Emma’s rather pious and fiercely pro-Norman son, Prince Edward, ‘the Confessor’. No one could quarrel with that: Through his dad, Edward was descended from Alfred the Great, and his mum had been married both to Ethelred and to Cnut. So Edward it was.
Edward the Confessor
Although Edward was of the Royal House of Wessex, he never really liked England. His mum was from Normandy, and he’d grown up there. When he took up his throne in England, he brought a lot of Normans over with him, which didn’t go down well with the English. Edward liked to surround himself with scholars and builders: He was having Westminster Abbey built, and he wanted to look over all the details. But one problem existed, which really preyed on his mind: How to get back at the Godwins.
Edward’s nickname, ‘The Confessor,’ means pious or God-fearing, though it may just mean ‘chaste’, which in turn may just be a tactful way of pointing out that Edward and his queen, Edith, didn’t have any children. Which was a shame, really, because an heir would have saved an awful lot of trouble.
King Edward hated Godwin: He never forgot that Godwin had killed his brother Alfred. But Godwin had too many powerful friends for Edward to do anything about avenging his brother’s death. In fact, Edward even had to marry Godwin’s daughter, Edith, though he was a rotten husband and got rid of her as soon as he could.
Edward did not want a Godwin on the throne; he wanted the throne to go to William, the new Duke of Normandy. When trouble occurred at Dover between Godwin’s men and some Normans, Edward seized the opportunity to drive Godwin and his family into exile and to lock up poor Queen Edith. If Edward really did promise the throne to William, as William always claimed he did, this was probably when he did it.
Then the Godwins came back. With an army. Edward gritted his teeth, welcomed them home, pretended their banishment had all been a misunderstanding, and gave them some smart new titles. Godwin’s son Harold Godwinsson became Earl of Wessex, and his other son Tostig became Earl of Northumbria.
The two Godwin brothers went to Wales to deal with King Gruffudd ap Llewellyn, who’d united the Welsh and launched a fierce war against the English. Harold Godwinsson soon had the Welsh king on the run, and then Gruffudd’s men murdered their own king. Harold won a lot of friends through his Welsh campaign (though probably not among the immediate family and friends of King Gruffudd ap Llewellyn). A number of Saxon nobles thought Harold Godwinsson was just right to become king. Even King Edward seemed impressed with Harold. But was he impressed enough to promise Harold the throne?
The men who Would be king
All the following people had some sort of claim to Edward’s throne after his death:
Edgar the Aetheling: Ethelred the Unredy’s grandson by his first wife. That gave Edgar (Aetheling means ‘crown-worthy’) a better claim to the throne than anyone - even Edward the Confessor himself, who was Ethelred’s son by his second wife.
● Harold Godwinsson: He won the popular vote with the Anglo-Saxon council, the witenagemot - or witan for short. Harold even said Edward had promised him the throne, but then he would say that, wouldn’t he?
● William of Normandy: William was very ambitious but had no support in England. Except - crucially - from King Edward.
● Harald Hardrada: The Viking king of Norway. Harald Hardrada had a rather complex - not to say specious - claim to the English throne: Harthacnut promised Harald Hardrada Denmark, but Harald Hardrada claimed it was a package deal: Denmark and England. Not very likely, is it?
All these people were just waiting for Edward the Confessor to die, which he did on 5 January 1066. And then the fun really began.