Ryan Lavelle
How rulers of England and their neighbours viewed their control of the lowland British polity that had been emerging during the course of the tenth and early eleventh centuries remains a contentious question, one which has been thrown into sharp relief in recent years by George Molyneaux’s valuable reassessment of tenth-century England.1 For his review of England in this century, Molyneaux takes Cnut’s assumption of power in 1017, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as his starting point. Although, as Molyneux is quick to point out, Cnut’s division in 1017 of the kingdom into four (Wessex “him sylfan” (for himself), East Anglia for Thorkell, Mercia for Eadric, and Northumbria for Eiríkr) does not mean that the credit for a “kingdom of England” should go to him, Cnut’s big division may have meant that he was in effective control of more territory than his West Saxon royal predecessors had enjoyed: his loss of Lothian may have become a concrete reality after the battle of Carham in 1018, but much of the territory from the Tees down to the coast of the English Channel was more than superficially subordinate to him. Such control had been within the scope of the ambition of rulers after Æthelstan, who might style themselves, as Æthelred did, “Emperor of all the Peoples of Britain,” even while they did not quite manage to live up to this. What distinguished Cnut, however, was a new practical control. This was coupled with an ideological determination on the part of Archbishop Wulfstan, and of other heirs to the tenth-century religious reform movement, to drive the political manifestation of the English identity forward in a polity that could be realized as a “kingdom of England.”
Formulations such as the “kingdom of England” or the “territory” or “earldom” of “Wessex” may not always have been so clearly defined, use them as we may. A town or city could be identified to contemporaries more in terms of the geographical space of the settlement than in terms of the “burhware” (town-dwellers) within, but territories, whether regnes or prouinciae, remained defined by the subjection of people within them. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provides something approximating to an official record of Cnut’s reign, at least at the start of it: Cnut may have succeeded to a “rice” (kingdom), but it was “eallon Angelcynnes ryce” (to a kingdom of all the English people) that he did so.2 This chapter will examine how Cnut found himself in control of that group of people and its land, an entity far larger than the Danish area with which he had previously been engaged.3
Cnut’s Assumption of Power
Cnut, a young man aged not much more than twenty, was able to adapt himself to notions of English identity and the forms and structures of English power, and to make them adapt to him in turn. The possible identification of Cnut as an Englishman is not a new one. Whereas L. M. Larson’s Cnut of 1912 remained implacably an old Viking (albeit a politically agile Christian one), only remaining in England because of the dangers of its revolt,4 the view from Sir Frank Stenton in 1943 was that Cnut was one of the last of the barbarians to be converted by Christian civilization: although Stenton did not see Cnut as an “Anglo-Saxon” king, he praised his “enthusiastic devotion to the interests of the church in England.”5 It is worth noting how such assessments consider Cnut’s position in terms of his control of an agglomeration of territories (or even empire), or how historians at least assess him in the knowledge that he would come to control his brother’s Danish territory when the time came.
There is good justification for a focus on that transmarine achievement: Cnut had retained a large number of ships. He reacted so rapidly to the death of his brother Haraldr in 1019 that it would be surprising if he had not had Denmark in his sights in some way. Recent books by Timothy Bolton, as well as other chapters in this volume, have done much to shift the focus back to Cnut’s interests in the North Sea and its environs.6 It has been suggested that the appearance of Cnut’s name on some early Danish coins, minted according to a design owing something to an Æthelredian coin pattern, is an indication that he was recognized as a co-ruler with his brother Haraldr before 1018/1019, but the evidence is not conclusive.7 In any case, while a suggestion of joint rule might help us understand the smoothness of Danish succession in the wake of Haraldr’s death, it remains significant that by then Cnut had been recognized as king of England for two years and could only be a nominal king of Denmark. At best, he would have been in the race for the crown if we go with the idea that, in his absence, his interests there were promoted by Ælfgifu, his English wife from Northampton. The plausible but sadly unprovable assumption behind this idea is that Ælfgifu married Cnut in 1013×1014, left England in the wake of his father’s death and King Æthelred’s return from Normandy, and remained in Denmark when Cnut sailed to England in 1015.8 Cnut could not have known that his brother Haraldr would die when he did, but he did know that Haraldr would continue to rule in Denmark and that in due course he may have been expected to determine the Danish succession for his own heirs.9 When considering Cnut’s reign in England, we often reach for parallels between Cnut and William of Normandy, whose military conquest of England came almost exactly half a century after that of Cnut.10 However, William conquered and ruled England in the knowledge that he remained duke of Normandy. Sveinn Forkbeard, who embarked on conquest knowing that his patrimony was in the hands of Haraldr, his eldest son, is a closer parallel to William than Cnut in this respect. England was more than a consolation prize for losing Denmark, but for a period Cnut had to make what he could of English kingship alone.11
Conquering the Kingdom: From North to South
Edmund King, writing about the reign of King Stephen (1135–1154) in 1994, suggested that the idea of assessing the first hundred days of a presidency (with reference to that of Franklin D. Roosevelt) “can be taken back [to the twelfth century] without anachronism, for it says no more than that the first impressions created by a new regime are crucial in the establishment of its authority.”12 King applied this idea to the reign of Stephen with some success, and the formulation of “the first hundred days” is a useful tool: it can give a sense of the support for the incumbent, their hopes, dreams, and a sense of how they begin to respond to “Events.” Unfortunately, this tool has its limits in the case of Cnut. As we have seen, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes the point at which Cnut succeeded to the kingdom in its entry for 1017. Yet questions remain. Did this succession take place immediately after the death of Edmund Ironside on November 30, 1016 (and thus within the temporal boundaries of the year 1017)?13 Or does the annal refer to a coronation ceremony in the summer of 1017, a point at which Cnut’s regime could really be said to have established its authority? We should not forget, either, that the CDE version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to Cnut as “cyng” (king) in terms of his election by the Danish fleet in 1014, his return to Sandwich in 1015, and his campaigns in Mercia in 1016. It is possible that his kingship was accepted in the south of England in 1016, which would mean that Cnut was made king of the English three times in the course of four years – surely a record! The question of a coronation ceremony and its possible date is discussed below. However, while a precise assessment of Cnut’s first hundred days, if we interpret this by what he had achieved by March 10, 1017, escapes historical record, there is enough evidence about the start of Cnut’s reign in England to justify making this assessment over a longer timescale than one hundred days.
In his 1994 biography of Cnut, the first book-length study of the ruler since 1912, M. K. Lawson emphasizes the agency of “the most successful of all pre-Conquest rulers in Britain.”14 For all the praise, nonetheless, one cannot help but read Lawson’s Cnut as a figure enveloped by an existing system of English governance and ecclesiastical networks, rather like an incoming Prime Minister stifled by the established policies of Whitehall civil servants. Others have seen the institutions as a machine that could be used: James Campbell’s insistence on the state-driven mechanisms of Cnut’s housecarls was, for him, a validation of the institutions of the kingdom that Cnut had inherited.15 The late Timothy Reuter provided an abiding image of the manner in which Cnut, like other political contenders in the tenth through to twelfth centuries, could step behind the controls of a car (presumably a powerful one) because of the inherent stability of the system: “like a car, it needed a driver,” he wrote, “but anyone who knew how to drive could drive it.”16
The use of these mechanisms was a choice made by Cnut, whose engagement with them was active and determined by the development of policy. The apparent ease with which Cnut slipped into forms of Anglo-Saxon kingship and then, in a winning combination with Wulfstan, has been taken to illustrate the apogee of the pre-Conquest achievement, belies just how revolutionary Cnut’s form of kingship was in contemporary English or even European terms. There was a precedent in England during this period for “Viking rulership,” a term which must be seen as a shorthand for control of a “fleet-army” and for the acquisitive features of kingship with roots in Scandinavia.17 As other chapters in this volume demonstrate, Cnut was not backward in demonstrating his kingship through war-leadership and in acquiring and distributing wealth.18 Notwithstanding the possibility that that the extant poem Beowulf was copied (or even, as Kiernan claims, composed) during the reign of Cnut (1016–1035), the maintenance of cultural links to Scandinavia was evidently not a mere political contrivance, to be picked up at will.19 If Cnut’s patronage is evident in the skaldic poem Liðsmannaflokkr (Soldiers’ Song),20 it was related to the ongoing politics of rivalry between Cnut and the man of the moment, Thorkell the Tall. Perhaps the rivalry between them stemmed from the immediate aftermath of their campaign of 1015–1016. Cnut’s patronage suggests that he was not unaware of the significance of presenting himself as a Viking in an English context.21 Matthew Townend and Roberta Frank have shown the significance of his patronage of skaldic poets for a Norse-speaking audience who were “enisled,” as Frank put it, “in a sea of Anglophones.”22 Nonetheless, the contextual evidence for the composition of Liðsmannaflokkr suggests that some of the other surviving poems which make frequent reference to the control of Norway may coincide with a later period of Cnut’s reign, when there was potential for crisis in an empire which encompassed Norway. The later skaldic poetry, in short, may not reflect the cultural direction of Cnut’s English court at the start of his reign.23
Cnut’s kingship was not simply “Viking rulership” in an “English” shell, however. Before the period 1017–1019, Cnut’s predecessors as Viking rulers in England included a range of rulers of York, such as his namesake Knútr (ca. 900 – ca. 905),24 Sigtryggr Cáech (ca. 920–927), Óláfr Sigtryggsson (941–944 and 949–952; d. 981), and Eiríkr Blóðøx (948–949 and 952–954); in East Anglia there was Guthrum, or “Æthelstan” as he became known, together with the anonymous rulers who may be identified through the St. Edmund currency of the late ninth century. The rule over areas of Britain and Ireland by the leaders of Viking retinues tended more generally to be based on places with access to bodies of water, particularly the Irish Sea, which gave rulers the opportunity to bring together maritime realms.25 Cnut’s eventual creation of an empire based around the North Sea had much in common with this Insular dynamic. What is noteworthy here, however, is that Cnut’s rule initially involved a shift from the traditional means by which a whole host of Anglo-Scandinavian rulers had asserted their control on territory in Britain. While it is difficult to generalize from only a century in which there was some form of political hegemony over lowland Britain, it is at least possible to say that the territorial foci of rulers based outside Wessex naturally differed from the foci of the majority of the West Saxon dynasty. While the territorial possessions of the latter group were concentrated in a region south of the Thames, the rule that Vikings imposed on Northumbria made use of existing structures of power in the north of England in the early tenth century.26
To some extent, a consideration of the reign of Æthelstan (924–939) provides us with a sense of the way in which political power could shift from Wessex to a different region within England when circumstances permitted, even for a ruler of the West Saxon dynasty. Although Æthelstan’s presence in Wessex was not inconsiderable, he seems mostly to have moved about the midlands and north of England, as the evidence of his assemblies to the north of the Thames suggests.27 Our view of Æthelstan is determined by the exceptional survival of evidence in charters written by a scribe who was meticulous in recording places of assembly. This evidence, though restricted to charters, does seem to be commensurate with Æthelstan’s links with the Mercian nobility and his essentially “pan-British” agenda.28
More than Æthelstan, whose Mercian connections made him “something of an outsider in Wessex,”29 Cnut was self-evidently a political newcomer whose connections lay outside Wessex. It would therefore have made sense for him to think in terms of England outside Wessex. Here I wish to stress the road not taken: the opportunity existed in the middle of the second decade of the eleventh century for Cnut to rule in a manner which shifted the center of political gravity away from the Thames valley, away from the south of England. That he chose not to do this may suggest a driver slipping behind the controls of Reuter’s car. Cnut’s concentration, nonetheless, on the south of England is all the more striking in the light of the glimpse we are offered into his father’s initial intentions in the Danish conquests of 1013–1016. In these campaigns, which appear to differ from the large-scale booty-gathering of the first decade of the eleventh century in which Sveinn was closely involved, the main playing field for Sveinn (and, by extension, Cnut) was the north of England. The fact that Sveinn started to ravage England only after he crossed Watling Street in 1013 seems to be related to a policy of cultivating, as Pauline Stafford pointed out in 1985, an ethnic “Danishness” in the “Danelaw.”30 Although, as Stafford pointed out in a later publication, Sveinn “aimed at a conquest of the English kingdom from the North, not merely a revival of the Viking kingdom of York,”31 he seems to have planned to make use of the city for his coronation in February 101432 and was initially buried there before his body was taken to Denmark.33 Cnut also had links with the social and political landscape north of Watling Street. One of these was his marriage to Ælfgifu, identified by the D recension of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in its 1035 entry as “þære Hamtunisca” (the woman of Northampton); presumably their marriage was celebrated in 1013 or the beginning of 1014.34 Although the possibility remains that Cnut married Ælfgifu on his return to England in 1015, or even in 1016, a political alliance with midland nobles seems to have been more pressing for him in the early part of the 1013–1016 campaign. Cnut’s marriage to Ælfgifu gave him a strong familial link to her powerful kindred.35 Cnut also made use of his father’s base in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, in the aftermath of the recall of Æthelred from Normandy in 1014: while most of the English nobility deserted him, an act for which their hostages, given in the surrenders of 1013, were mutilated, the people of “Lindesige” (“Lindsey,” the Chronicle’s use of the old kingdom’s name for Lincolnshire) remained loyal.36 Although Cnut departed the south of England in 1014, returning there in the following year, the way in which he responded to the actions of Edmund Ironside and Earl Uhtred in 1016, even when his position in Wessex was looking more secure, shows that his interests lay in the north. We see him heading there in that year, an act which gave Edmund his opening to lead the resistance from London.37
It is difficult to determine precisely where Cnut spent his days after the death of Edmund on November 30, 1016, for although he may have been in Winchester for the assembly that led to the grant of land at New Minster in Easter 1019 (a crown-wearing?), Oxford is the only location we have for him in the period prior to 1019.38 Most of his other appearances are from after that year. The death of Earl Uhtred might be redated to 1018×1019, following a sensible revision of the evidence by A. A. M. Duncan in 1976, which, on the face of it, might have implications for the presence of Cnut in Northumbria, where the earl was killed. It is likely, as Duncan says, that Uhtred’s death owed more to political circumstances after 1016 and that the Anglo-Norman De obsessione Dunelmi (On the Siege of Durham) is a useful source in that respect, even though its tale about Cnut’s hand in it, with his troops hiding behind a curtain ready for Uhtred to meet his dramatic and treacherous end, does not seem credible evidence for personal intervention by Cnut in Northumbria in the years immediately after 1016.39
Once we look at the more reliable evidence for Cnut’s presence, we see him in the south of England for much of his reign, most often in the Thames valley.40 Even if, as Barbara Yorke notes later in this volume, the role of Winchester is overstated by historians,41 the broader significance of Wessex and the south of England in Cnut’s worldview of the English kingdom still stands. This makes sense, given that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records Cnut’s division of the kingdom into four, with Wessex going to Cnut himself: rather than taking from this that Cnut had assumed the powers of an ealdorman and that consequently his authority elsewhere was diminished, we might read this division as the de facto recognition that authority over England rested in the south of the kingdom. After all, the division of the kingdom at Olney (i.e., on the isle of Alney on the Severn) in October 1016 had made Edmund the first king of the West Saxons since the tenth century. The Chronicle’s claim that Cnut acceded “eallon Angelcynnes ryce” (“to all the kingdom of the English people,” my emphasis), while noting the different earls’ areas of authority, is thus an indication that a division was acknowledged even while it was a statement of an overarching sense of political identity. As Jay Paul Gates has recently observed, this was a shift toward a polity which was a kingdom in terms of geographical area, rather than in terms of a people “of the English” (i.e., of English “descent”): a subtle and important difference.42
Projections of Authority: Coronations and Title
How was this political identity manifested in this early period? There are no charters which can be reliably dated to the first year of Cnut’s reign, whether we count that as late 1016 or 1017, and we do not even have a contemporary record, let alone an account, of the coronation itself. There is some suggestion, if John of Worcester can be trusted on the matter, that Cnut’s acceptance by the West Saxon nobles at Southampton in 1016, in the wake of the death of Æthelred, was a coronation.43 Yet it is just as likely that this ceremony may have been more along the lines of the acclamation of Sveinn Forkbeard in 1013, or indeed that of Cnut after his father’s death in 1014. It is reasonable to suppose that the late-twelfth-century dean of St. Paul’s, Ralph de Diceto, was accurate in recording that Archbishop Lyfing of Canterbury presided over Cnut’s coronation at London in 1017.44
A hint that a coronation had been performed in 1017 is provided in the legal text associated with the record of Cnut’s assembly at Oxford in 1018, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in which “Dene 7 Engle wurdon sammæle to Eadgares lage” (Danes and English were agreed according to Edgar’s law).45 The legal text may record promises of coronation oaths in the manner of better-known royal coronation promises declared in charters issued by Kings Henry I in 1100 and Stephen in 1135.46 If this were indeed the case, with Archbishop Wulfstan as the author of the 1018 text, it is interesting to think of him being behind any coronation ordines of 1017. Whether he had adapted a text intended for Sveinn in 1014 we cannot know, but it would hardly be surprising if he had a role in Cnut’s coronation.47
Kingston-upon-Thames does not seem to have been used as a coronation site after the coronation of King Æthelred back in 979. The confusion generated by the Vita Ædwardi Regis (Life of King Edward), which reports that Edward the Confessor was crowned in Canterbury, rather than in Winchester as stated in the Chronicle, suggests that traditions associated with coronation could be manipulated if necessary.48 Presumably the circumstances of Cnut’s ascent to power necessitated similar manipulation. If the coronation were, as seems likely, in London, this was a bold statement, for London was the place which had offered Cnut the greatest resistance of all. There is an instructive comparison with the same use of Westminster, upstream from the City, by William the Conqueror when he had forced London into submission in 1066.49 With Æthelred’s body at St. Paul’s, Cnut’s statement would have been all the bolder if his coronation were also the occasion of his marriage to Æthelred’s widow, Emma (also known as Ælfgifu); this possibility is suggested by the circumstances of the so called “third recension” of the English royal ordo.50
As might be expected, the Chronicle emphasizes legitimacy, and this suggests that continuity was important in its presentation of Cnut. The formula, noted above, which relates that Cnut succeeded to “all the kingdom of the English,” is one common to records of the accession of Anglo-Saxon kings since the ninth century.51 Given that it took Æthelred just over a year to be crowned king (following the murder of his half-brother Edward in 978),52 and given the likelihood of a delay between Sveinn’s acclamation in late 1013 and the calling of the Witan in York in February 1014, it would seem appropriate to call the interval between the death of Edmund on November 30, 1016 and Cnut’s coronation in 1017 a pause – not an interregnum.53
Some cross-Channel comparison is provided by Geoffrey Koziol’s reading of late tenth-century Frankish charters. I wonder whether the first Cnut charters, from 1018 and 1019, survive (albeit sometimes just in the form of a grand title in a witness list) because they were the first charters declaring the legitimacy of a king who had recently been anointed, perhaps also because they were determined by the composition, associated with peace-making, which is implicit in the agreement at Oxford in 1018 (for which see below).54 Putting to one side the implicit reference to an early Cnut charter at Winchester, which will be discussed below, the survival of a Worcester lease of 1017 hints at the way in which land transactions took place independently of royal authority when that authority could not be present to establish itself in public performance.55
Policy Tensions
Despite the upheavals and tensions evident in the immediate aftermath of 1016, there is no clear instance of governance-by-ravaging in Cnut’s England. In contrast to his son Harthacnut’s reign over England (1040–1042), Cnut, in his, does not seem to have asserted a form of authority such as Timothy Reuter characterized as “state-directed Bissonic violence,” the imposition of power by brute force.56 Every king claiming control of some form of an English kingdom since 900, arguably right through to the twelfth century, faced some opposition within a decade of assuming the throne, and all responded with violence. Within living memory of Cnut’s reign, Edgar the Peaceable had attacked the Isle of Thanet in 969, ten years after becoming king of England; according to Roger of Wendover, this was to avenge some harm committed there against merchants from York.57 Edgar’s son Æthelred, made king in 978, used violence to impose his rule on Rochester in 986.58 Back in the early tenth century, the actions of English kings were characterized by violence and retribution against territory outside Wessex, even if the broader narrative might be interpreted as one of long-term strategic foresightedness.59 After Cnut, just about the only thing we see from his son Harthacnut, made king in 1040, is an attack on Worcestershire by his housecarls in 1041.60 Cnut bucks that trend, although there are ways of seeing exceptions to this reading. An easy way to explain Cnut’s apparently non-violent record is that the violence towards potential opposition during his reign took place before he acceded to the throne as sole English ruler.
The obvious issue here is the execution of English nobles in 1017, a dramatic event that was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle directly after the record of Cnut’s division of the kingdom after acceding to the throne. The record of the exile of other figures suggests that Cnut was not free from potential opposition.61 However, a charter of Cnut’s reign from early 1019 (Figure 8.1) indicates that tensions did not have to manifest themselves in warfare or “state”-directed violence for them to have meaning in a locality. Cnut gave a piece of land in Hampshire to a certain inhabitant of Winchester, “adolescens animosus et instabilis” (young, daring, and inconstant), who had evidently persuaded Cnut that this estate was free for the king to donate. As the charter records, Cnut realized the apparent mistake and took the land back, granting it once more to New Minster.62
Figure 8.1: Single sheet charter of Cnut granting an estate at Drayton (Hants) to New Minster, Winchester (S 956, dated Easter 1019). By permission of the Warden and Scholars of Winchester College.
As Simon Keynes has observed, Cnut may have been following in the footsteps of Æthelred, and perhaps also of Edgar, who had committed his errors while young and was making amends to an important ecclesiastical house.63 This may reveal something about Cnut’s sense of kingship; meanwhile Sean Miller, in his commentary on the Drayton charter, notes that two other charters, both probably from early in Cnut’s reign, refer to Cnut acting according to the wishes of Æthelred.64 However, we should note Barbara Yorke’s observation of Cnut’s relative parsimony towards New Minster.65 The Drayton charter shows that the “adolescens” was evidently still alive at the time of writing, had not been in exile, and was present in Winchester to contest the donation of the charter and the evident loss of his land. Cnut’s words (or rather the words of the charter’s draughtsman, who is influenced by the style of Wulfstan)66 have it that “penes prescriptum adolescentem litteras huic libertati contrarias. et calliditatis indagine adquisitas haberi comperimus” (there are, in the possession of the aforementioned youth, letters contrary to this privilege, and acquired by fraudulent investigation). The implication is that such letters be ignored under pain of anathema, although there is no specific injunction to do so, such as we see in King Alfred’s command, in the version of his will that survives, to destroy all earlier versions.67 There was certainly a dispute: a document from the abbot of New Minster recorded the lease, during the reign of Æthelred (978–1016), of a hide at nearby Barton Stacey to a certain Wulfmær and his wife, with the expectation that it, along with “another hide” at Drayton, would revert after their lifetimes to the church. Perhaps the young man of the Drayton charter was related to Wulfmær or his wife, or both, and had expected to receive the land at Drayton.68 If the earlier charter were used as evidence that both lands were to go to New Minster, the young man had a case. Only the Barton Stacey land had been explicitly leased, and Miller suggests there may have been another document which has not survived.69 The young man may have been right, too, to draw attention to the king’s right to grant him this land. The estate at Drayton bordered a royal estate which, according to Domesday Book, contributed to a render in kind known in Hampshire as the “firma unius diei” (farm of one day).70 This estate, which lay at Barton Stacey (and was distinct from the New Minster’s holding at Barton Stacey), was reorganised, presumably at some point in the eleventh century, in order to provide some economically viable render. In 1066 Barton Stacey was assessed for a “dimidia” (half) of one day’s farm, suggesting that some loss of economic value had taken place at some point from the full day’s farm. Land at Kings Worthy was noted as a “bereuuice” (“berewick,” meaning an outlier land-unit) to the Barton Stacey estate; the Kings Worthy land had itself probably experienced its own loss of value, given that there were multiple claimants on the larger Worthy estate from which Kings Worthy was formed (see Map 8.1).
Map 8.1: The estate at Drayton (Hants) granted to New Minster, Winchester, in 1019, with places named in the text. The boundaries of the Domesday hundreds and other eleventh-century vills are marked with regard to information in the Alecto Historical Editions Domesday Book maps. (The uncertainties of boundaries and the placement of vills have not been represented in this map, and this should only be taken as an approximate guide.)
Drayton may itself have had some importance as a piece of royal land. If the Wulfmær of the earlier lease were a thegn who witnessed “fairly low down the list of ministri between 986 and 1005,”71 we might justifiably infer that he got the sort of long-service award due to royal thegns from a royal estate. Whether or not Drayton was the sort of bookland that King Alfred famously wrote of thegns deserving, it was hardly unreasonable for a son to expect to receive it.72
It is perhaps revealing of this young man’s expectation of receiving royal land that Drayton lies on the other side of the Barton Stacey estate from a neighboring royal estate, that of Hurstbourne. The blurred lines between what a king could and could not use as he saw fit are revealed by the fact that Hurstbourne is said to have been amongst “terras ad pertinentes filios” (the lands belonging to the royal sons) which Edgar had granted to Abingdon Abbey, presumably during a time of bolstering estates at the forefront of monastic reform in the 960s.73 Early in King Æthelred’s reign, the land had been brought back under royal control. Later (we cannot be sure when, but presumably in the last decade of the tenth or first few years of the eleventh century), Æthelred, writing in a charter for Abingdon, had to make amends for the lands’ reacquisition by providing some other lands to the abbey by way of compensation. If that is not enough evidence of blurred lines, there is Cnut’s grant of land nearby, at what later became Abbots Worthy, apparently to Archbishop Lyfing in 1026.74
Evidently the Drayton dispute was far from having ended in Easter 1019, when the New Minster charter recording the transaction was drawn up. The charter provides hints that Cnut’s acquisition of power in Wessex had presumably involved negotiation, buying the favor of the local nobility, perhaps comparable with the position of Godwine, a man who rose to prominence as earl of Wessex under Cnut. Such men were characterized by Robin Fleming as “Englishmen short on family histories but long on personal loyalty.”75 Presumably this is evidence that at the start of his reign, or perhaps during the period after or shortly before the death of Æthelred, Cnut came to Winchester, or at least to a place close enough to the city for him to be subject to this kind of petitioning by figures who may have been influential locally, but who were not so important that they dominated the wider political landscape. Worth returning to here is the phrase “adolescens animosus et instabilis” (young, daring, and inconstant) which aptly echoes Cnut’s own position at this time, even if he was striving not to live up to the last of these words.76
If the aforesaid young man had been useful to Cnut prior to 1019, the charter might indicate that he was no longer in favor; perhaps Cnut now sought the favor of the New Minster and was willing to sacrifice his wishes in order to gain this. The fact that the charter records an injunction against the possession by the young man of certain “litteras” (letters), said in the Drayton charter to be fraudulent, while tacitly acknowledging the continuing existence of this youth, suggests that a dispute was still in progress to which even the charter could not give full confidence of resolution. In terms of Cnut’s early reign, it says something of the limits of Cnut’s power, and of his need for negotiation, that he appears not to have had the full power to dispose of this young man in 1019, as he had of other awkward Englishmen in 1017.
The Drayton charter is a small and local issue, however. Tensions could also heighten and be defused on a larger scale and Cnut’s early reign sees a profligacy of peace-making. The agreement between Edmund and Cnut in the autumn of 1016 provides a clear example: the D manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to the “norðdæl” (north part), of the kingdom being Cnut’s in that agreement, a word echoed in the Chronicle’s use of the verb “todælde” (divided) with regard to the division of the country in 1017.77 Oxford, a location which reflected the divisions of 1016 and 1017, saw the third of these agreements, resulting in a declaration of a legal code in 1018. Given that Cnut had mutilated hostages in 1014, presumably in recognition of the breaking of a peace agreement made between English nobles and his father, the declaration of a peace with Cnut had to be taken seriously.78
Paul Dalton has drawn attention to the making of peace at river and island sites, and of course the agreement at Olney in 1016 has particular importance in that respect.79 Oxford, however, means something more. As a place on the interstices between Mercian and West Saxon territory, on a river with islands and a long crossing across marshy ground which was not unlike the Ravning Enge bridge at Haraldr Bluetooth’s complex at Jelling, home of Knútr’s Danish dynasty, Oxford could be read as a place of territorial liminality.80 The making of an agreement in Oxford in 1018 might be compared with another agreement there in 1035, which saw the nobility of Wessex and Mercia meeting in the wake of the death of Cnut.81 Clearly the inter-territoriality mattered. In St. Frideswide’s church in Oxford, according to a charter of Æthelred of 1004, a group of Danes had sheltered from a mob from the town and suburbs.82 The church was burnt down with the death of those inside, so presumably Oxford had a strong memory of this ethnic hostility. Oxford may therefore have been a sensible location for a statement of reconciliation, particularly as this town had been a specific target of Sveinn’s destructive campaign in the Thames Valley in 1013, when its people surrendered to him.83
There were further memories associated with the town. A tower in Oxford had seen the deaths of Sigeferth and Morcar, chief thegns of the “Seofonburgum” (“Seven Boroughs,” a chronicler’s synonym for Danelaw territory), at the instigation of Eadric in 1015. This event seems to have impelled Cnut to come back to England, perhaps because the dead thegns were kin to Ælfgifu of Northampton. In the twelfth century, William of Malmesbury read the 1004 charter of Æthelred as a record of the deaths of the followers of the thegns in 1015, confusing them with the Danes of the town who had been burnt at St. Frideswide’s on St. Brice’s Day (November 13) 1002.84 Only three years had passed between the death of Sigeferth and Morcar in 1015 and the Oxford agreement of 1018. If a tradition which explicitly confused the refuge and burning of 1002 with the 1015 events in the St. Frideswide’s charter can be posited, this is most likely to have developed at a point closer to William of Malmesbury’s own time than Cnut’s (assuming, that is, that a second church-burning did not take place in 1015).85 While the traditions of transference in the episode were an important element for identifying the traditions of what C. E. Wright famously noted was the oral “saga literature” of Anglo-Saxon England, there remains something to be said about the episode for Cnut’s contemporaries. If his contemporaries were fully aware that Sigeferth and Morcar were not killed on St. Brice’s Day 1002, we should be sensitive to the manner in which events could still become linked in popular memory, often quite quickly. Oxford had been a place where people identified as Danes were burnt in the recent past, and others who were identifiably linked to Cnut’s family, who had been murdered by Eadric, who was himself executed by the new king in 1017. Surely these links gave extra weight to the choice of Oxford as a place of reconciliation under Cnut.
Conclusion: A Legitimate King
Useful as it might be for Cnut to portray himself as a legitimate king of the West Saxon royal dynasty, the smoothness with which this happened should not fool us into believing that this was his only option. In the circumstances, such a portrayal was a sensible option to take. A reshaping of Cnut’s presentation of kingship was necessary between 1014 and 1017, leading to a declaration of law in 1018. Cnut’s claim to Denmark was realized in 1019 and not before, because his legitimacy as king of England remained a live issue. Despite his conquest of the English kingdom, the æthelings, young men with royal claims through kingly descent, were still at large, as noted by Simon Keynes, who cites the naming of Edward, son of Æthelred, as “king of the English” in a Ghent charter dated to 1016. Although this charter was most probably copied in the 1040s, Keynes calls it “evidence of a kind that … Edward had passed through Flanders shortly after his expulsion from England, in search of help at the shrine of saints.”86 One English ætheling was trouble; two were the makings of a dynasty, and Edward’s brother Alfred was also at large. Cnut could not afford to ignore Edmund Ironside’s sons, either. For all that the stories of these boys turned into legend, there is evidence that they presented a longer-term danger too.87
Looking beyond this chapter’s narrow chronology by nearly a decade, we may see the context for a new dynamic in Cnut’s reign in the actions of a new duke, Robert “the Magnificent”: in power in Normandy from 1027, Robert was prepared to support his English cousins Edward and Alfred more actively after a period of relative calm across the Channel. Although trouble in Scandinavia required Cnut’s attention for much of the second half of the 1020s, the potential relocation of Edmund Ironside’s body to Winchester, from his south-western repose in or around 1032, shows a renewed attention to legitimacy at a time of potential pressure.88 Given the type of kingship that Cnut had chosen, English legitimacy mattered to him. It may be instructive to note that Cnut’s early royal policy changed around the time when Emma gave him a son, Harthacnut Cnutsson, probably in ca. 1018.89 Before an ætheling arrived who could be linked to the kinship of the West Saxon royal family through this anointed queen, Cnut could not afford to present himself as anything less than a legitimate English king.
Notes
1
Molyneaux, Formation of the English Kingdom, 1–4, referring to ASC (CDE), s.a. 1017.
2
(CDE), s.a. 1017: ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 103; (D), ed. Cubbin, 63; (E), ed. Irvine, 74; (D), trans. Swanton, 154. For the official standing of the Chronicle, see Brooks, “Why is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle about Kings?”; Konshuh, “Anræd in their Unræd.”
3
Darby, in Domesday England, 90, suggests a population of between 1.2 and 1.6 million south of the Tees in 1086, a number which we may assume to have been slightly smaller at the start of the century. The modern measure of the area of England is 130,279 sq km (approximately 70,000 hides south of the Tees in Domesday Book). See Abels, “English Logistics and Military Administration, 871–1066,” 262. Compare also with Denmark’s 42,931 sq km (more like 60,000 sq km when Skåne and territory in modern Sweden are taken into account; the loose hegemonic control over parts of Norway focused on the Oslo Fjord area is more difficult to define in terms of land measurements).
4
Larson, Canute the Great, 112, 162–79.
5
Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 397. On this issue, see Ellis in this volume, p. 357.
6
Bolton, Empire of Cnut and Cnut the Great. In this volume, see particularly Spejlborg, pp. 337–53, and Bolton, p. 459–84.
7
Blackburn, “Do Cnut’s First Coins?” This is discussed critically by Jonsson, “Coinage of Cnut,” 223–24, more positively by Bolton, Empire of Cnut, 155–56, and then less favourably in his Cnut the Great, 52, n. 91. I am grateful to Gareth Williams for discussion of this.
8
For Ælfgifu’s position, see Bolton, “Ælfgifu of Northampton”; however, for the suggestion that she was in England for much of Cnut’s early reign, based on a reference in the Thorney Abbey Liber Vitae and the “of Northampton” byname in ASC (D), s.a. 1035, see Lawson, Cnut, 123–24.
9
Bolton, in Cnut the Great, 130, deals with the question of Harald’s unpopularity in Denmark in the problematic Annales Ryenses, though does not countenance his deposition; a picture of unpopularity may not be a world away from the unrest in Denmark at the time of Cnut’s arrival there in the Vita Ædwardi Regis, ed. Barlow, 10–11 (chap. 1).
10
Conquests in England, ed. Ashe and Ward, the outcome of the other major conference which considered “Cnut 1016 in 2016,” relates to the parallels between Cnut and William more explicitly than the current volume.
11
Lund, however, notes Cnut’s influence in Denmark during his brother’s lifetime as a useful comment on the principle of the elder son retaining the patrimonial territory, also drawing a significant parallel with the experience of William of Normandy’s conquest in 1066, in “Cnut’s Danish Kingdom,” 28–30.
12
King, in “Introduction,” 9–10, notes the concept in Schlesinger, Age of Roosevelt, 1–22. This approach was not followed, however, in King’s more recent biography, King Stephen.
13
See Metlitskaya earlier in this volume, pp. 113–28.
14
Lawson, Cnut: England’s Viking King, 196–98, esp. 196.
15
Campbell, “Some Agents and Agencies of the Late Anglo-Saxon State,” 203–4; see also Hooper’s reading of housecarls as a private group, in “Military Developments in the Reign of Cnut”; both, admittedly, were most interested in Harthacnut’s housecarls, in ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 107 (s.a. 1041) and ASC (D), ed. Cubbin, 66 (s.a. 1041).
16
Reuter, “The Making of England and Germany, 850–1050,” 58–59.
17
Viking kingship in Britain is discussed in Downham, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland.
18
For economic and social ties see Spejlborg in this volume, pp. 337–53; a perspective on the longer-term background of Cnut’s conquest is provided by the classic paper by Wilson, “Danish Kings and England.” Assessments of Cnut’s career in England as a “Viking” leader may be seen in Bolton, Cnut the Great, 53–91, who also notes (p. 89) that a reliquary seized in battle was kept intact and later was presented to Canterbury, and in my own shorter study, Cnut: North Sea King, esp. 20–21. A military perspective (albeit one which foregrounds Thorkell and Sveinn rather than Cnut) is provided by Howard, Swein Forkbeard’s Invasions.
19
Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript, 18–23, 270–78. On the dating of the manuscript, see also North in this volume, pp. 277–79.
20
Text edited in “Liðsmannaflokkr,” ed. Poole.
21
Poole, Viking Poems on War and Peace, 86–90; the historical context and dating associated with the events of the last stages of the conquest is discussed in Poole’s “Skaldic Verse and Anglo-Saxon History,” 284–86. An alternative reading might relate Liðsmannaflokkr to a commemoration of glory days as part of the brief reconciliation of Thorkell and Cnut in 1023, following similar motives of reconciliation through the commission of artworks by quarrelling Carolingian brothers in the mid-ninth century (for which see McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms, 174).
22
Frank, “King Cnut in the Verse of his Skalds,” 108; Townend, “Contextualizing the Knútsdrápur.”
23
Townend, in “Contextualizing the Knútsdrápur,” 152–62, provides an important discussion of dating. See Lavelle, Cnut: North Sea King, 83–85; and Poole, pp. 255–76, and North, pp. 284–93, in this volume.
24
Possibly one with the Hardacnut (i.e., Hǫrða-Knútr) given as the father of Guthred (i.e., Guthfrith) in the Historia de sancto Cuthberto (chap. 13), datable to the mid to late eleventh century in Northumbria; see North in this volume, p. 298.
25
See Downham, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland, with a consideration of the Irish Sea basis of Viking kingship in England at 97–123.
26
Hadley, Northern Danelaw; “‘Hamlet and the Princes of Denmark.’” On the political significance of York, see also Rollason, Northumbria, 500–1100, 214–30.
27
Hill, Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England, 85, 87.
28
Molyneaux, “Why were some Tenth-Century English Kings?”; Foot, Æthelstan: First King of England. The geographical significance of a deliberate link between Wessex and Mercia might be noted ca. 926 in the Grateley law code; see Lavelle, “Why Grateley?”.
29
Foot, Æthelstan: First King of England, 18.
30
Stafford, East Midlands in the Early Middle Ages, 124–25, 135–43; Stafford is at pains to point out that “Danish” identity was not a monolithic feature and was subject to manipulation; see also Innes, “Danelaw Identities.”
31
Stafford, Unification and Conquest, 65–67, esp. 65.
32
Plans for a coronation in York are suggested by Wilcox, “Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi as Political Performance.”
33
For a discussion of the evidence, see Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle, “Royal Burials in Winchester,” 234–35.
34
ASC (D), ed. Cubbin, 65 (s.a. 1035); probably with good reason, there is no Chronicle entry recording the marriage to Ælfgifu.
35
Bolton, “Ælfgifu of Northampton”; see also Insley, “Politics, Conflict and Kinship,” albeit Insley reads the marriage as dating to 1015×1016.
36
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 99 (s.a. 1014); (D), ed. Cubbin, 59 (s.a. 1014); (E), ed. Irvine, 71 (s.a. 1014); there is, to my knowledge, no specific study of the context of Gainsborough, but for its riverine significance, see Stafford, East Midlands in the Early Middle Ages, 13. For recent work on the strategic importance of Lincolnshire mints in the reign of Æthelred, see Gareth Williams, “Military and Non-Military Functions of the Burh,” 155–56.
37
ASC (CDE), s.a. 1016. For a view of the strategy of Edmund Ironside in this period, see McDermott in the previous chapter, pp. 147–64.
38
See, however, Yorke later in this volume, pp. 209–34.
39
Uhtred’s death, recorded in ASC (CDE), s.a. 1016, but not specifically attributed to that year. Durham sources are more circumspect about his survival past that point: Duncan, “The Battle of Carham, 1018”; see also the assessment of the evidence in Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, 236–40. The narrative on Cnut’s presence at Uhtred’s death, De obsessione Dunelmi, is given in Morris, Marriage and Murder, 3.
40
Hill, Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England, 91.
41
Yorke in this volume; a more maximal reading may be found, in Roffey and Lavelle, “West Saxons and Danes,” 17–25.
42
Gates, “Ealles Englalandes Cyningc”; also noted in Beech, “The Naming of England.” The clearest statement on the political importance of the notion of the Angel-cynn remains Wormald, in “Engla Lond: Making of an Allegiance.”
43
Lawson, Cnut: England’s Viking King, 82, citing John of Worcester’s Chronicle, s.a. 1016.
44
Historical Works of Ralph de Diceto, ed. Stubbs, II, 169 (Abbreviationes Chronicorum, s.a. 1017). See Lawson, “Archbishop Wulfstan and the Homiletic Element,” 157.
45
ASC (D), ed. Cubbin, 63 (s.a. 1018). The Worcester Chronicle (D) is alone in saying this was according to Edgar’s law. The adaptation of an Old Scandinavian sammæli for a sense of “being in agreement” may be instructive, although Pons-Sanz, in “Norse-Derived Vocabulary,” 283–84, notes that an earlier eleventh-century Kentish use of this term (in S 1455) may show that it is non-specific; see also my own comments on friðmal and formæl in Æthelred’s 994 agreement with the Vikings, in Lavelle, Alfred’s Wars, 329. I consider the significance of Oxford as a location below, on pp. 186–88.
46
EHD 1, 452; for Henry and Stephen, see EHD 2, 432–5; Kennedy, “Cnut’s Law Code of 1018”; see also Stafford, “Laws of Cnut and Anglo-Saxon Royal Promises.”
47
The circumstances of 1066, recorded in the “first-draft” history of the Carmen de Hastingae proelio (Song of the Battle of Hastings), give a sense of how compromise could be reached with two prelates in a London-based coronation. Although Archbishop Stigand of Canterbury is written out of the official history of post-1066 England, the Carmen, a pro-Norman view of events, notes the significance of his presence at Westminster at a ceremony involving the Archbishop of York; see Carmen de Hastingae proelio, ed. and trans. Barlow, 46–49. For the possible use of a previous ruler’s ordo in a later ceremony (Harold’s, in the coronation of William), see Nelson, “The Rites of the Conqueror.”
48
Vita Ædwardi Regis, ed. Barlow, 14, has it at Canterbury; ASC (CDEF), s.a. 1043, at Winchester. The consensus, however, on which see Barlow, Edward the Confessor, 61, is that Winchester was the place of consecration. On Kingston-upon-Thames, see Keynes, “Burial of Æthelred the Unready,” 142–43. Here I develop observations made in Lavelle, Cnut: North Sea King, 31–32.
49
See Bates, William the Conqueror, 247–56.
50
For Æthelred’s body and his links to London, see Keynes, “Burial of Æthelred the Unready.” Stafford, in Queen Emma and Queen Edith, 174–78, addresses Emma’s role in the “Third Recension of the Second Ordo” in Corpus Christi College Cambridge, MS. 44. I gratefully acknowledge Liesbeth van Houts for discussion of this issue.
51
An important new thesis, currently being prepared for publication, on formulas such as fengon to rice for emphasizing legitimacy is in Konshuh, “Warfare and Authority in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.”
52
Although Dumville, in “Death of Edward the Martyr,” offers an alternative chronology to the reading of 978 for the killing of Edward, the delay between the king’s death and Æthelred’s consecration is still an integral part of the reading of the chronology. For the delay in early coronations, see Garnett, “Coronation and Propaganda,” 92–93.
53
On the speed of the coronation in 1066, see generally Garnett, “Coronation and Propaganda.”
54
Koziol, Politics of Memory and Identity. Charters from this period can be problematic texts insofar as they do not represent genuine charters, but their witness lists are useful. See S 951–56: http://www.esawyer.org.uk.
55
For discussion of the 1017 lease (S 1384), see Baxter, Earls of Mercia: Lordship and Power, 25–31.
56
Reuter, “Debate: ‘Feudal Revolution,’” 191, discussing Campbell, “Was it Infancy in England?” 6. Thomas Bisson’s reading of such violence is now best represented in Crisis of the Twelfth Century.
57
ASC (DEF), s.a. 969; Rogeri de Wendover chronica, ed. Coxe, I, 414–15 (s.a. 974), trans. EHD 1, 284. Roger’s detail of the killing of York merchants provides an explanation for the ravaging, but the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle emphasizes royal agency.
58
ASC (CDE), s.a. 986.
59
I discuss this issue in my paper “Representing Authority in an Early Medieval Chronicle.”
60
ASC (CD), s.a. 1041, and John of Worcester’s Chronicle, s.a. 1041.
61
ASC (CDE), s.a. 1017; (CDE), s.a. 1020. For Eadric Streona, see Parker in the following chapter, pp. 193–209.
62
S 956, in Charters of the New Minster, ed. Miller, 162–63; translated in EHD 1, 599–601.
63
Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 176–86, discusses Æthelred’s period of ‘youthful indiscretions’, noting a comparison with the Drayton charter at 186, n. See also Ellis later in this volume, p. 378.
64
Charters of the New Minster, ed. Miller, 162 (S 949 (AD 1017×1032) and S 960 (AD 1023)). Miller notes the similarity of the post-witness-list blessing in S 949, a charter granted to Fécamp in Normandy, to that of S 956: S 949 is likely to be from early in the reign of Cnut rather than later, when relations with Normandy were strained; see Lavelle, Cnut: North Sea King, xx).
65
See Yorke later in this volume, pp. 222–27.
66
Charters of the New Minster, ed. Miller, 162.
67
S 1507 (AD 872×888).
68
Charters of the New Minster, ed. Miller, 157 (S 1420 (AD 995×1005)).
69
Charters of the New Minster, ed. Miller, 158.
70
The bounds of the land are discussed in Charters of the New Minster, ed. Miller, 163–64; Domesday Book: Hampshire, ed. Munby, fol.38c (entry 1:17). I discuss this system (known elsewhere as the firma unius noctis and its meaning for royal resources in my Royal Estates in Anglo-Saxon Wessex, 13–47.
71
Charters of the New Minster, ed. Miller, 158.
72
Alfred’s Version of St. Augustine’s Soliloques, ed. Carnicelli, 48. For bookland rewards from royal estates, see Baxter and Blair, “Land Tenure and Royal Patronage”; Lavelle, Royal Estates in Anglo-Saxon Wessex, 116–22.
73
S 937; for the charter’s significance, see Lavelle, Royal Estates in Anglo-Saxon Wessex, 1.
74
S 962; for this grant, see Lavelle, Royal Estates in Anglo-Saxon Wessex, 37.
75
Fleming, Kings and Lords in Conquest England, 48. Bolton, Cnut the Great, 91, notes the importance of English “collaborators” to Cnut at this stage in his reign.
76
If S 956 can be related to the milieu of the narrative charters of Æthelred’s reign, there is something to be said for the possibility that, like the play on the name of the criminal Æthelsige related in S 886 (AD 995), there was a pun in the reference to the young man of S 956 being ‘daring and inconstant’. Given that daring was among the many attributes with which wolves were associated, and the tendency for the first element of a personal name to follow a patronym, was this young man a descendant of Wulfmær? On the nature of the representation of wolf names, see Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages, 142–45.
77
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 103 (s.a. 1017); (D), ed. Cubbin, 63 (s.a. 1017); (E), ed. Irvine, 74 (s.a. 1017); (D), trans. Swanton. 154 (s.a. 1017). On the division of the kingdom, see Reuter, “Making of England and Germany,” 56.
78
Hicklin, “Role of Hostages in the Danish Conquests.”
79
Dalton, “Sites and Occasions of Peacemaking.”
80
For the topography of the crossing at Oxford, see Dodd, “Synthesis and Discussion,” 12–16. The Ravning Enge bridge is discussed in Pedersen, “Monumental Expression and Fortification,” 71–73.
81
ASC (E), s.a. 1035.
82
S 909 (AD 1004).
83
Blair, in Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, 167–68, links the massacre of 1002 with Sveinn’s arrival in the town in ASC (CDE), s.a. 1013. On St. Clement’s Church near the Cherwell as the lithsmen’s garrison chapel, see Barbara Crawford in this volume, p. 452.
84
Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, I, 310–11, esp. 310, n. 1 (identification of the charter).
85
Wright, in Cultivation of Saga in Anglo-Saxon England, 179–82, treats this as an episode typical of transference in oral literature. It is worth noting that there are thirteen manuscripts containing the charter (see the catalogue of manuscripts under S 909), so scribal interest in the episode may also have played a part in the transmission of the story.
86
Keynes, “Æthelings in Normandy,” 177–81, esp. 181.
87
For Edmund’s sons, see Ronay, Lost King of England.
88
Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle, “Royal Burials in Winchester,” 224–26.
89
According to Kiernan, in “Square Minuscule,” 65–72, Harthacnut may have been the ætheling named in the will of the noblewoman Æthelgifu, S 1497 (normally dated 990×1001). See also Bolton, “Ælfgifu of Northampton,” who makes a case for the presence of Ælfgifu and her children in eastern Denmark, a matter which would suggest that the need for a child with Emma was a specifically English one. See also Spejlborg later in this volume, pp. 341–42.