Michael Treschow
The Æthelredian annalist, upon recording the English king’s death during the eventful year of 1016, comments that “he geheold his rice mid myclum geswince ⁊ earfoðnessum þa hwile ðe his lif wæs” (he held his kingdom amidst great affliction and tribulations all his life long).1 Some critics take this comment as an expression of sympathy for the hapless king.2 In its rhetorical context, however, it applies more forcefully to Æthelred’s traumatized kingdom. The comment is retrospective: Æthelred’s regal troubles denote his people’s troubles, as reiterated again and again in the preceding narrative. The sympathetic tone at Æthelred’s death arises in response to the preceding account of his reign. What evokes pity, then, is less the king’s sorry life than the miseries suffered by his nation for nearly three decades. Why does the annalist recollect these miseries here only obliquely, even though he invokes them frequently beforehand? Because it is enough, more than enough, merely to nod towards them. For the attuned reader they are both known and felt. Inherent in this rhetorical moment is the trauma of the atrocities it looks back to.
Varied Readings of the Æthelredian Annalist
Although Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the most part is terse and laconic, the Æthelredian annalist (whose annals cover the years 983–1022 in the Chronicle’s C, D, and E texts) has a more expressive style and a distinct authorial voice. His account of those years has provoked a variety of responses. Sir Frank Stenton, in his landmark study of Anglo-Saxon history, comments upon this style with a disapproving assessment of the writer behind it. While he expresses an historian’s appreciation for this “full and contemporary narrative” of Æthelred’s reign, he lacks confidence in its author’s judgment:
The anonymous monk of Abingdon who set down year by year his tale of war and misery, the treachery of one leader and the fruitless courage of another, has drawn a picture of life in his generation which may be criticised, but can never be ignored. No one who has followed the sequence of events in his restrained and sardonic prose can fail to receive the impression of an ancient and rich society, helpless before a derisive enemy because its leaders were incapable of government. It is unlikely that the author of these annals knew much about the world, and his criticism of public men is often short-sighted. He was too ready to impute treachery or cowardice to a leader who avoided contact with the enemy. Towards the end of his narrative he becomes querulous instead of ironical, and reckless in his allegations of treason.3
So Stenton writes in the first edition of Anglo-Saxon England, published in 1943, during World War II. The wording remains unchanged in the second edition (1947).4 However, in the third edition (published posthumously in 1971), there is one small, but telling, adjustment: instead of “has drawn” he now writes “had drawn a picture of life.”5 Stenton’s use of the present-perfect tense in the two earlier editions illustrates the immediacy of this narrative for him when he first wrote this history. This immediacy is also evident in his statement that the annalist “becomes querulous instead of ironical.” Stenton hears the anonymous monk’s plaintive voice but does not approve. He would have preferred him to remain sardonic. His privileging of irony over complaint does not acknowledge the famed melancholic tone of Old English literature at large. Stenton’s criticism might seem stereotypical of his generation: the annalist’s upper lip is not properly stif. But there may be more at work here than modern British sensibilities. It is worth recalling the times through which Stenton was living when the the first two editions were published, during and just after World War II, with its great horrors and atrocities: not only in battle at a distant front, not only behind enemy lines in death camps, but also in the extensive bombing of civilians in both England and Germany. Cathy Caruth speaks of traumatic memory as tottering “between remembrance and erasure, producing a history that is, in its very events, a kind of inscription of the past; but also a history constituted by the erasure of its traces.”6 Stenton’s criticism of “the anonymous monk” reflects an impulse to devalue emotional memory that is perhaps born out of reaction to his own historical circumstances.
The same year that Stenton’s third edition was published, Cecily Clark’s article on style in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle appeared. In her survey of the Chronicle’s different voices, she briefly singles out the Æthelredian annalist’s unusual “literary craft,” especially in regard to affect.7 Clark has nothing against the annalist’s “emotional range,” “heightened emotion,” and “emotive rhetoric.”8 A few years later, Simon Keynes, in his reassessment of Æthelred’s poor reputation, agrees with Clark that the Æthelredian annals “discard the laconicism associated with the writing of annals … to adopt a more literary style than had been practised in the earlier parts of the Chronicle.”9 He adds, however, that this annalist “allows himself to indulge his literary pretensions.”10 This remark reduces the annalist’s literary affect to affectation. Not surprisingly, Keynes dismisses that to which Clark drew attention: the emotional tenor of this annalist’s work. His interest is in the mechanics of its narrative coherence, which lies in “the occurrence of certain turns of phrase time and again in successive annals, binding the whole together as if it formed a continuous narrative.”11 Like Stenton, Keynes expresses mixed feelings about the value of this narrative. He sums it up as “a personal and perhaps idiosyncratic view of events,” adding that, despite “its possible imperfections …, we are left with nothing better.”12 Clark, however, had summarized the annalist’s work more generously, with a moment of appreciation for its affective qualities: “the value … of these annals lies in rendering, with literary skill, but without intellectual sophistication, the feelings of an ordinary observer of the events recorded.”13
There is no longer a general consensus that this “ordinary observer” was a “monk of Abingdon,” though most still assume that he was a monk. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, in her edition of the Chronicle’s C text, tentatively suggests that he was from Canterbury, while allowing that Keynes “argues for London” and that David Dumville is agnostic about the annalist’s provenance.14 There is one certainty, however, about this annalist: he composed this narrative before the year 1023, in which Archbishop Ælfheah’s relics were translated from London to Canterbury.15 Hence the common understanding that this narrative was written by a witness to the troubles of Æthelred’s reign, which ended on April 23, 1016.
Some have formed strong opinions about this witness’s underlying purpose in composing these annals. Alice Sheppard argues that they level blame at Æthelred in order to form an argument on behalf of Cnut. The annalist, she claims, made “a deliberate … decision to write a salvation history in which he narrates the wrongdoing for which he holds Æthelred responsible.”16 Sheppard’s reading of this salvation history operates on the simplest terms. Æthelred is a rex iniquus. On account of his wickedness he is “responsible for the loss of the kingdom.”17 This depiction of Æthelred as incompetent and abusive is, according to Sheppard, “a deliberate construction,” in effect propaganda.18 The purpose of the “Æthelred-Cnut annalist” is to “legitimize Cnut” and promote his successful “performance of his lordship obligations” in contrast with Æthelred’s failure.19 Courtnay Konshuh also suggests that these annals were written on behalf of Cnut, although her reading of the annalist’s critique runs counter to Sheppard’s. According to Konshuh, these annals do not blame the king for England’s sufferings, but rather the “failed army leadership and unanrædnes (foolishness) among the nobility.”20 This annalist did not create “our negative impression of Æthelred,” which Konshuh credits to later chroniclers.21 Æthelred, unlike his advisors, gets a “rather neutral portrayal,” in parallel with “the neutral and at times even positive Viking portrayal.”22 According to Konshuh, this supposedly even-handed approach serves to promote Cnut’s project of “integrating both Anglo-Saxon and Danish cultures”; the annals “could not criticise Anglo-Saxon kingship too directly, as it was this basis which Cnut sought to build his own kingship upon.”23 These readings seem deaf to the annalist’s tone. Their varied claims about his message ignore his repetitive account of national trauma and his final comment on Æthelred’s reign: that “he geheold his rice mid myclum geswince ⁊ earfoðnessum þa hwile ðe his lif wæs.”
Levi Roach’s recent study of Æthelred does indeed take note of this final comment, but not of its rhetorical import. Instead, he reflects on the ethical meaning of Æthelred’s death in an attempt to understand it as either a “good death” or a “bad death,” concluding that the annals offer no help on the question: “the chronicler, ever one to see clouds beside silver linings, has little to say about the event, which may itself be significant.”24 How the annalist’s reticence may in itself be significant, Roach does not pursue, nor does he explain how this amounts to “seeing the clouds” – that is, to a pessimistic outlook. Roach’s inverted cloud cliché makes for a belittling remark not at all apt to the moment. What silver linings shone when Æthelred died? Cnut and his fleet were making for London, soon to besiege it; Æthelred’s son Edmund would die before the year’s end; English resistance to the long-standing Danish invasion would collapse; and Cnut would become king and conqueror.
Elaine Treharne has noted among historians of our time a tendency not to acknowledge the trauma that the English experienced around the time of Cnut’s conquest.25 For her part, she calls the annals for this period “a dramatic and intense account of the suffering of the English,”26 and wonders “why scholars do so much to erase those who were already half-erased – the silent, voiceless human hubbub behind the land-grabbers, psalm-singers and sword-wielders.”27 Treharne’s concern in Living through Conquest is with the aftermath of conquest, rather than with its prelude. Æthelred’s reign, therefore, is not her focus. Her use of the Chronicle must contend with the annalist’s more muted and restrained voice in the latter section of his annals. She argues that the sparseness of the Chronicle’s entries during Cnut’s reign, along with the general decline in literary output and book production in this period, reflects the trauma of shock and loss.28 Gaps in documentary evidence, “the literal lacunae,” make absent and silent “the sufferers themselves, particularly the faceless (noseless, earless) dispossessed and ‘wretched people.’”29 Treharne’s own concerns “insist on a consideration of the perspective of the normally silenced survivor, a ‘politics of witness,’ or ‘a representation of the unrepresentable.’”30 The muted account of what Treharne calls “continuing cultural trauma” during Cnut’s reign31 reverberates with the annalist’s earlier and more fulsome witness to the “unrepresentable” during Æthelred’s reign. Treharne herself expresses confidence in this annalist’s overall witness: “Amidst the noise of the competing voices embedded in this monastic narration is the assured statement of the historian, self-authorized to recount the formative events of the nation.”32
Salvation History?
This narration of formative events stands as a coherent and discrete section of the Chronicle, common to its C, D, and E texts, written in the early years of Cnut’s reign.33 When it takes up the Chronicle’s narrative at the year 983, preceding events have been fraught with forebodings of divine wrath. Not far from Edgar’s death in 975 and Edward’s martyrdom in 978, the Chronicle has reported on a severe famine in 976 and Viking raids beginning anew in the early 980s. Contextually, the two kings’ deaths are explications of divine wrath. In its entry for 975, the C text reports on the disasters of that year as “waldendes wracu” (the vengeance of the Lord). In the entry for 979, the D and E texts speak of “se uplica wrecend” (the heavenly avenger) and they pronounce, in regard to the Edward the Martyr, that “hine hafað his heofonlic fæder swyðe wrecan” (his heavenly father has greatly avenged him).34 And yet the greatest foreboding of impending wrath is the C text’s reported portent in 979: a shiny, multi-hued, bloody cloud appearing on multiple nights throughout the year of Æthelred’s coronation.
It may be tempting to read the annalist’s succeeding account of the troubled times throughout Æthelred’s reign as a continuation of this salvation history, furthering the explication of divine wrath. The very manuscript context of the C text invites a theological approach to the unfolding of time. Here the Chronicle is preceded first by the Old English Orosius and then by two poems, the Menologium and Maxims II. Both poems were written in the same hand as the first sequence of the C text (Scribe 1), and they stand, according to its editor, O’Keeffe, as prefatory material to the Chronicle.35 The Menologium and the Chronicle both begin their accounts of time with Christ’s Incarnation, the central moment of divine participation in Christian history. Maxims II identifies Christ’s glory with the powers of wyrd (“fate,” or “temporal becoming”). Even though the Orosius, the first text in this manuscript, was copied earlier in the eleventh century than the three texts that follow it, its matter is related.36 The theme of the Orosius is God’s avenging governance over the rise and fall of nations. God has been “longsumlice wrecende” (long taking vengeance) upon the human race “mid monigfealdum brocum ⁊ gewinnum” (with many afflictions and conflicts).37 The understanding urged in the Orosius is that all political power and authority, even that of heathen invaders, exist “ne for nanre wyrde buton fram godes stihtunge” (not because of any fate, but though God’s dispensation).38 The rise and fall of kingdoms is the expression of the divine will: “Nu we witan þaet ealle onwealdas from him sindon, we witon eac þæt ealle ricu sint from him, forþon ealle onwealdas of rice sindon” (Now we know that all political powers come from him, and we also know that all kingdoms come from him, because all political powers come from kingdoms).39
The cultural context also invites this theological view of the unfolding of time in terms of salvation history. During the last ten years of Æthelred’s reign, legislation written under the growing influence of Archbishop Wulfstan set the kingdom on a penitential course, directing it, in the face of Viking invasions, to make amends for failed piety and neglect of the divine service.40 Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi, in all its iterations, explores the nation’s widespread sinfulness under the cloud of impending doom. Similarly, Ælfric’s Sermon on the Prayer of Moses (De Oratione Moysi), in expressing nostalgia for better days (much like Alfred’s Preface to the Pastoral Care), blames abuses against the church for the disasters of the times. Ælfric draws upon the voice of God to blame the English for their woes:
Hu wæs hit ða siððan ða þa man towearp munuc-lif and godes biggengas to bysmore hæfde buton us com to cwealm and hunger and siððan hæðen here us hæfde to bysmre. Be þysum cwæð se ælmihtiga god to moyse on þā wæstene … Gif ge þonne me forseoð and mine gesetnyssa awurpað ic eac swyðe hrædlice on eow hit gewrece.41
(How then was it otherwise, after the monastic life has been cast down and God’s worship treated with disgrace, but that we have suffered pestilence and famine, and afterwards been put to disgrace by a heathen army. About such things God almighty spoke to Moses in the wilderness … If you despise me and cast aside my commandments, I too will fiercely avenge it upon you.)
Although in his later writings Ælfric begins to encourage resistance to the Viking invaders, he still uses divine wrath to explain English misfortunes.42 In salvation history, justice functions on the principle of debit and credit; misfortune punishes sin and corrects waywardness. Or, as Nietzsche succinctly summarizes such logic in On the Genealogy of Morality, “Everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off.”43
Context aside, however, this logic finds no expression in the Æthelredian annals themselves. The only payment at work here is the infamous and ever-increasing Danegeld, expended in vain to purchase safety for the Angelcynn, only to be exacted again, at an even steeper rate, once Cnut has conquered and become king. The annalist does not resort to divine wrath to account for English misfortunes; the noun wracu (vengeance) and the verb wrecan (to avenge) do not occur in his narrative. Although he levels blame at failed and foolish English leadership, he is not a homilist; he does not call for repentance or provoke an abject awareness of sin. Although he makes claims a few times about God’s intervention, his history is not theological. Nor is it philosophical, for these annals do not describe a dialectic of suffering. While Wulfstan and Ælfric sought to convict the people of their sinfulness and their deserved punishment, the narrative of this annalist makes no connection between national suffering and moral impurity.
The annalist’s few references to divine power have to do with deliverance, not with judgment. These moments of deliverance might at first even look encouraging, but the grim irony of succeeding events undermines any hope of a sustained deliverance. In the entry for 994, Óláfr Tryggvason and Sveinn Forkbeard attack London with a large naval fleet and begin setting the city on fire. To their surprise, they are heavily rebuffed by the Londoners: “ac hi þær geferdon ge maran hearm ⁊ yfel þonne hi æfre wendon þæt him ænig buruhwaru gedon sceolde” (but they suffered greater injury and harm than they ever thought that any citizenry could do to them).44 The attack happens on the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, and she is credited with the citizens’ successful defense of their city: “Ac seo halige Godes modor on þam dæge hire mildeheortnesse þære buruhware gecydde ⁊ hi ahredde wið heora feondum” (But the holy mother of God revealed her mercy on that day to the citizenry and delivered them from their enemies). The Viking army withdraws to the surrounding countryside, but no further displays of heavenly mercy impede their violence. On the contrary, “hi þanone ferdon ⁊ worhton þæt mæste yfel ðe æfre æni here gedon meahte on bærnette ⁊ heregunge ⁊ on manslyhtum ægðer be ðam særiman on Eastseaxum ⁊ on Centlande ⁊ on Suðseaxum ⁊ on Hamtunscire. ⁊ æt nyxtan naman heom hors ⁊ ridon swa wide swa hi woldon ⁊ unasecgendlice yfel wircende wæron” (they departed and wrought the greatest harm that every any army could perform, with burning, plundering, and slaughtering along the coast, first in Essex, then in Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire. And then they took horses and rode as far as they wanted and were inflicting unspeakable harm).
The annalist makes no further mention of divine intervention during Æthelred’s reign. However, late in the long entry for 1016, amidst the events that follow closely upon Æthelred’s death, he again declares that God gives the Londoners a local and momentary deliverance. The newly crowned King Edmund, after raising Cnut’s siege on London, has returned to Wessex to gather more forces, whereupon Cnut’s army returns to London to besiege it anew: “ac se ælmihtiga God hi ahredde” (but almighty God delivered it).45 What shape that deliverance took, the annalist does not say. He instead reports that the army withdrew into Mercia and there “slogon ⁊ bærndon swa hwæt swa hi oferforan, swa hira gewuna is, ⁊ him metes tilodon, ⁊ hi drifon ægþer ge scipu ge hyra drafa into Medwæge” (they slew and burned whatever they came upon, as is their custom, and they provided themselves with food and drove their ships and herds into the Medway). The irony here is not only that God’s deliverance of London deflects destruction upon others, as in 994, but also that Londoners do not, in the end, escape the Vikings’ oppression. Before the year ends, the soon-to-die King Edmund has withdrawn to Wessex and the Londoners must come to terms with Cnut’s army, purchase peace, and allow the Danes to bring their ships into the city for winter quarters. The annalist makes no other reference to God, except in a note of praise for London’s stalwart endurance throughout 1009 and in the hagiographic treatment of Archbishop Ælfheah’s martyrdom in the entries for 1011 and 1012.
Pain and Suffering
Perhaps the annalist gestures these few times toward the divine good will as momentary signs that, amidst all these depredations, God is not heedless, as in the simple words of the children’s hymn: “God sees the little sparrow fall.” Other than that, his annals have no theology, much less a case for salvation history. As Cecily Clark puts it, there is no sophisticated argument underlying them; they are the pained recollections of the “ordinary observer.”46 This observer does not describe the afflictions and tribulations during Æthelred’s reign in detail. He does not attempt to represent them. However, he attests to them over and over again and appeals to the reality of the trauma they bring with them. His grief at English suffering becomes more palpable as his narrative gets closer to the time when he was writing. And yet already in the entry for 991, when he comes to the Battle of Maldon, he begins to warm to his theme. The defeat at Maldon, preceded by a raid in Ipswich and a slaughter in Watchet, prompts the decision to buy off the Danes with tribute “for ðam miclan brogan þe hi worhton be ðam særiman” (because of the great terror that the Danes wrought along the coast).47 This “great terror” conveys an embodied response to sustained violence. What the Danes “wrought” in order to produce such terror, he names while leaving the contours to the imagination of his readers or to the memory of those who experienced it: the sudden attacks, the burning, the slaying, the capturing, and the looting. The succeeding years of Æthelred’s reign unfold under the cloud of this great terror, even the immediately succeeding years. In 992 there is a “micel wæl” (great slaughter); in 993 the invading army “micel yfel worhton” (wrought great harm); and in 994, as noted above, after their first departure from London, the invaders “worhton þæt mæste yfel … on bærnette ⁊ heregunge ⁊ on manslyhtum” (wrought the greatest harm … with burning, plundering, and slaying), and “unasecgendlice yfel wircende wæron” (were inflicting unspeakable harm).
This annal for 994 marks a shift in style. Here the annalist becomes more rhetorically effusive and begins to use repetition of phrasing, the rhetorical strategy noted by both Clark and Keynes.48 Burning, plundering, and slaying are the terms of a formulaic phrase that the annalist repeats more than anything else – his “most constant refrain,” as Clark puts it.49 Only two other times, however, does he actually use this triplicate form to denote violence suffered at the hands of the Vikings. In 1006 a great fleet comes to Sandwich, “⁊ dydon eal swa hi ær gewuna wæron, heregodon ⁊ bærndon ⁊ slogon swa swa hi ferdon” (and did what was ever their custom, they plundered, burned, and slew wherever they went). In the fateful year of 1016 Cnut brings his army across the Thames in midwinter, “⁊ heregodon ⁊ bærndon ⁊ slogon eal þæt hi to common” (and plundered, burned, and slew all that they came upon). More frequently the phrasing is in duplicate, with either burning and plundering, or burning and slaughtering. In 997 after the invading army raids in Cornwall and Devonshire, it goes into Somerset, “⁊ þær micel yfel worhton on bærnette ⁊ on mannslihtum” (and there did great harm in burning and slaying).50 The same year they turn south down the River Tamar “⁊ ælc þing bærndon ⁊ slogon þe hi gemitton” (and they burned and slew everything they met). In 1001, after the invading army was repulsed at Exeter, “Þa wendon hi geond þæt land ⁊⁊ dydan eal swa hi bewuna wæron, slogon ⁊ bærndon” (they went throughout the land and did just as they were accustomed to do: they slew and burned).51 In 1003 Sveinn leads his army to Wilton, “⁊ hi þa buruh geheregodon ⁊ forbærndon” (and they plundered the town and burned it down). In 1004 Sveinn brings his fleet to Norwich, “⁊ þa buruh eall geheregode ⁊ forbærnde” (and completely plundered the town and burned it down).52 Two weeks later they come to Thetford, “⁊ þa buruh heregodon ⁊ forbærndon” (and they plundered the town and burned it down). In 1006 the annalist notes again, calling to mind the “micel broga” in 991, the great (thus constant) fear in the face of this violence:
Ða wearð hit swa micel ege fram þam here þæt man ne mihte geþencan ⁊ ne asmeagan hu man hi of earde adrifan sceolde oþþe ðisne eard wið hi gehealdan, forðan þe hi hæfdon ælce scire on Wesseaxum stiðe gemearcod mid bryne ⁊ mid heregunge.53
[Such a great fear arose at that invading army that no one could conceive or comprehend how they should be driven from the land or this land defended against them, because every shire in Wessex they had harshly branded with burning and plundering.]
In 1009 the invading army went through Hampshire and Berkshire, “⁊ heregodon ⁊ bærndon swa hiora gewuna is” (and plundered and burned, as is their custom). In 1010, after a decisive victory in Cambridgeshire, with several English nobles slain, the invading army “.iii. monþas hergodon ⁊ bærndon, ge fyrðon on þa wildan fennas hi ferdon, ⁊ men ⁊ yrfe hi slogon ⁊ bærndon geond þa fennas” (plundered and burned for three months, then also journeyed into the wild fens, and throughout the fens they slew and burned men and cattle). And in 1016, as noted above, shortly after Æthelred’s death, Cnut and his army, repelled from London, departed for Mercia “⁊ slogon ⁊ bærndon swa hwæt swa hi oferforan, swa hira gewuna is” (and they slew and burned whatever they came upon, as is their custom).54
Sometimes this phrasing refers not to Danish but to English violence, as in Æthelred’s attempt at a victorious return to the throne in 1014, with his retaliatory attack on Lindsey: “⁊ man þa hergode ⁊ bærnde ⁊ sloh eal þæt mancynn þæt man ræcan mihte” (and they plundered and burned and slew all the people that they could reach).55 The strategy proves ineffective, in the annalist’s account, since Cnut simply withdraws and perpetrates his own atrocities by maiming his hostages. The episode recalls the ineffective and costly misuse of a newly raised English “scypfyrd” (fleet) in 999, and the futile expedition in 1000, where Æthelred plundered Cumberland “swiðe neah eall” (nearly entirely) and also plundered the Isle of Man, but without engaging the invading army and to no tactical advantage; his army retreated to Normandy but returned the next year to attack Exeter and venture into Devon and Somerset, “⁊ wæs æfre heora æftra siþ wyrsa þonne se æra” (with their every incursion worse than the one before).56 Æthelred’s slaughter of the people of Lindsey also recalls the St. Brice’s Day Massacre in 1002, which likewise serves to provoke further destruction, plundering, and burning in 1003.57 The English, by the annalist’s account, not only experience horrific violence, but their attempts to counteract it with like violence lead only to further trauma.
The annalist’s expressions of despair regularly link sustained Danish violence with English strategic failure. In the annal for 999, he laments the ineffectiveness of the Kentish “fyrd” (militia) in its battle against Danish invaders in Rochester: “ac wala þæt hi to raðe bugon ⁊ flugon” (but, alas, that they too readily retreated and fled).58 The victorious Danes go on “⁊ forneah ealle West Kentingas fordydon ⁊ forheregodon” (and destroy and ravage nearly all West Kent). More famously, in the entry for 1011, he complains, “Ealle þas ungesælða us gelumpon þuruh unrædas” (all these misfortunes came upon us because of bad policy). He then summarizes what those misfortunes entailed: “hi ferdon æghweder flocmælum ⁊ heregodon ure earme folc, ⁊ hi rypton ⁊ slogon” (they ventured everywhere in bands and plundered our poor people and captured them and slew them). This use of the verb rīpan is unique in the Æthelredian annals, whereas the preceding verb hergian (to plunder) occurs eighteen times and its intensified form, forhergian, twice. Although rīpan can much the same as hergian (to plunder), here the two verbs seem not to be used in synonymous parallelism. Here rīpan is more closely paired with slēan and suggests something distinct from hergian, some further act of violence. The poor people are not only plundered of their goods but are themselves also taken as spoil – enslaved.
The complaint in the annal for 1011 does not mention burning or conflagration, even though the annalist otherwise emphasizes this Viking practice. This omission demands some attention. Thought the annalist’s account the verb bærnan occurs twelve times, its intensified form forbærnan a further nine times, the noun bærnet twice, and the noun bryne once. In that “most constant refrain” of burning, plundering, and/or slaying, the Viking action of burning is the most constant of all, paired five times with slaying (slēan) and six times with plundering (hergian / forhergian). Conflagrations function in these annals to underline the destructiveness of the invading army. In the annal for 1010, after the Danes plunder and burn the countryside for three months and journey into the fens to burn and slay some more, the verb forbærnan occurs a further three times to describe the many conflagrations they leave behind. In the annals for 1006, after their long summer campaign of, plundering, burning, and slaying “swa hi ær gewuna wæron” (as they were accustomed before), they journey to their winter-quarters, “⁊ hi a dydon heora ealdan gewunan, atendon hiora herebeacen swa hi ferdon. Wendon þa to Wealingaforda ⁊ þæt eall forswældon” (and they always followed their old custom and kindled their war beacons wherever they went; they came to Wallingford and burned it to the ground). Their gewuna (custom) of kindling herebēacen (war beacons) is a reiteration of their gewuna of plundering, burning, and slaying. Though the word is left out in the annal for 1011, conflagration is implicit by virtue of its otherwise regular occurrence.
When the annalist, at Æthelred’s death in 1016, sums up that he “geheold his rice mid myclum geswince ⁊ earfoðnessum” (held his kingdom amidst great affliction and tribulations), his words echo with the “most constant refrain” of plundering, burning, and slaying. The preposition “mid” does not, then, set up an adverbial phrase of manner or quality (“with”), as though it spoke to Æthelred’s experience. It sets up an adverbial phrase of circumstance (“amidst”) that speaks to the experience of his kingdom. The annalist’s phrasing continues his witness to traumatic times.
The annalist’s critique of English leadership during Æthelred’s reign may, pace Keynes, be flawed, partial, or personal, and may be out of line with other historical evidence, but his witness to Danish (and English) atrocity demands consideration all the same. Some critics, such as Ann Williams, discredit the annalist’s witness by treating his tone as unrepresentative (or perhaps idiosyncratic):
When the account in the ‘A’ text is compared with that of the other recensions, what is striking is the difference in tone. … There is no loss of morale in the ‘A’ text’s account, and its existence warns against an uncritical acceptance of the lamentations found in the other recensions of the Chronicle.59
Williams’s warning is a move to dismiss this witness’s voice. She does not actually engage these lamentations with any critical response to “uncritical acceptance.” Her argument again prompts Elaine Treharne’s question as to “why scholars do so much to erase those who were already half-erased – the silent, voiceless human hubbub,” in this case, those who experienced plundering, burning, and slaying.60
The annalist’s repetition of his “most constant refrain” is formulaic, rhetorical, and short on detail. Even so, rhetoric need not be disingenuous. Leaving things to the imagination not only summons an affective response; it can also signal traumatic memory. In her early volume on trauma theory, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth calls for a “new mode of reading and of listening … [to] the language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering.”61 Repetition is a central concept in trauma theory. It may refer to an ongoing pattern of lived experience, “the shape of individual lives,”62 but more technically refers to memory that reiterates traumatic events without fully accessing them. In a recent volume, Literature in the Ashes of History, Caruth uses the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit (which she translates as “deferred action”) to explain how traumatic memory “archives its own history and in so doing, bears witness to the newness, and alterity, to the shock of a history it cannot assimilate but only repeat.”63 Such memory, she says, originates “as its own deferral and also as its later repetition, a fundamental deferral and repetition at the beginning.”64 The significance of this deferral for reading the Æthelredian annalist is that it accounts for his “mute repetition of suffering.” He names atrocity again and again but does not reveal its horrors and does not give voice to the cries that it draws forth. The atrocities remain remote. Central to Caruth’s trauma theory is the tenet that trauma is inaccessible and resists representation. It is worth noting, therefore, that the annalist, when reporting Archbishop Ælfheah’s martyrdom in 1012, closely describes the violence at his death. Here he is writing in a hagiographic mode, where the details of a violent death are called for to substantiate the meritorious qualities of the saint. But in recounting the sufferings of the people, he does not depict violence. Although violence haunts the reiterations of plundering, burning, and slaying, the annalist does not attempt to give the experience of violence itself representation. Unlike the sufferings of the saint, the sufferings of the people are not meritorious, nor in any way efficacious. They are only grievous. The compulsion to repeatedly remember them meets the compulsion to erase them, as Caruth has shown.65
A potent image of such repetition and erasure occurs in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, where Aeneas visits the Sybil at Cumae who will lead him into the underworld to meet his father’s shade. Before entering the temple to Apollo at Cumae, Aeneas marvels at Daedalus’s engravings on its walls. The poet adds, in an apostrophe, that Daedalus tried, but failed, to include a depiction of his son’s tragic fall from the sky:
Tu quoque
Partem opere in tanto, sineret dolor, Icare, haberes.
Bis conatus erat casus effingere in auro;
Bis patriae cecidere manus.66
[You too, Icarus, would have had a place in so great a work of art, had grief but allowed it. Twice he tried to portray in gold how you plummeted, twice your father’s hands drooped.]
Daedalus’s enervating grief reflects the lassitude of melancholy, but as such also describes the “deferred action” of traumatic memory. Caruth uses the imagery of burning to explain this process (aptly enough in the context of the annalist’s emphasis). Appealing to Derrida’s Archive Fever, she describes the compulsion both to preserve traumatic memory and to efface it:
Between the shock of the memory that effaces, and the shock of the discovery of this memory, is the event of an erasure, which is also archive fever, because it is made up of memory and is about memory, it is about the burning desire for memory and the history of its burning up.67
The annalist’s account exemplifies “literature in the ashes of history.” It documents burning and destruction across the English landscape, with town after town left in ashes. He memorializes the burning, however, as something abstract and generic, leaving unsaid (i.e., erasing) the contours of these traumatic moments.
After Cnut’s conquest and coronation, the annalist makes no more mention of plundering, burning, and slaying. He does not exclaim “Wala” (as for the year 999), or express a tender regard for “ure earme folc” (as for the year 1011), not even when, two years into Cnut’s reign, his people are compelled to pay the most extortionate Danegeld of all. His entries become brief and restrained. His resignation to an oppressive regime further mutes his account of suffering but reverberates still with the lamentation and grief that he expressed for the period of invasion. This is what Treharne calls “the silence of conquest.”68 The years of trauma have yielded to heavy oppression. Although the “mute repetitions” have now become fully mute, they remain palpable.
Conclusion: Shaping Memory
The annalist’s repetitions and lamentations express love, the very substance of love, for “without love, there is no grief … without grief, there is no love,” as Amy Hollywood writes at the beginning of “Acute Melancholia.”69 In that article, albeit in a later medieval context, Hollywood explores how the melancholic response to trauma produces the subject with its capacity for love. Personal trauma, however, does not exist isolated in the individual, as Caruth explains: “the theory of individual trauma contains within it the core of the trauma of a larger history.”70 Just so, according to Treharne, does the Æthelredian annalist’s “history of a trauma” recount “the formative events of the nation.”71 He presents this anguished love not simply as his own, but as a reaction that belongs to the “Angelcynn” (English people), shaping its memory and awareness.
The annalist’s literary qualities, his affective tone and rhetoric, do not diminish or interfere with his account of history. On the contrary, they open our attention to historically embedded wounds. His annals offer a locus for what another trauma theorist, Dominick LaCapra, has proposed as a way forward in the study of historiography: “the mutual interrogation of history and literature.”72 He says that this mutual interrogation foregrounds “the relation between historical and transhistorical force,” things particular to a particular time and things that span times and cultures.73 LaCapra proposes that “the transhistorical may be exemplified at present by the Lacanian ‘real’ – the traumatic void or break that resists or even annihilates symbolization yet may provoke it as well.”74 On the death of King Æthelred, the annalist’s resigned recollections glimpse into that traumatic void and affirm the horrors and longings witnessed in his times, in kinship with other times. “The notion of historical trauma,” Caruth says, may help us “understand the full complexity of the problem of survival at the heart of the human experience.”75 The Æthelredian annalist tugs on some of the strings in that complex problem. The undertones of grief in his account of this particular, though all too human, invasion and conquest, invites readers at the very least to heed and reflect upon the sorrows that attend survival in such a world.
Notes
1
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 101 (s.a. 1016). Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from the ASC come from this edition of the C text.
2
See, for instance, Keynes, “Declining Reputation,” 236, and The Diplomas, 227; and Roach, Æthelred the Unready, 308.
3
Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 1st ed. (1943), 386.
4
Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd ed. (1947), 388.
5
Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (1971), 394.
6
Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History, 210.
7
Clark, “Narrative Mode of The Chronicle,” 14.
8
Clark, “Narrative Mode of The Chronicle,” 13–14.
9
Keynes, The Diplomas, 230.
10
Keynes, The Diplomas, 231.
11
Keynes, The Diplomas, 231.
12
Keynes, The Diplomas, 236.
13
Clark, “Narrative Mode of The Chronicle,” 15.
14
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, lxvii; see also Keynes, The Diplomas, 232.
15
Keynes, The Diplomas, 231.
16
Sheppard, Families of the King, 85.
17
Sheppard, Families of the King, 86.
18
Sheppard, Families of the King, 86.
19
Sheppard, Families of the King, 94.
20
Konshuh, “Anræd in their Unræd,” 158.
21
Konshuh, “Anræd in their Unræd,” 158.
22
Konshuh, “Anræd in their Unræd,” 158.
23
Konshuh, “Anræd in their Unræd,” 159.
24
Roach, Æthelred the Unready, 309.
25
Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 11–12.
26
Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 54.
27
Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 55.
28
Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 11.
29
Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 55.
30
Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 55.
31
Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 67.
32
Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 55.
33
Keynes, The Diplomas, 232.
34
ASC (D), ed. Cubbin, 47 (s.a. 979); (E), ed. Irvine, 60 (s.a. 979).
35
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, xv, xx.
36
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, xxiii.
37
Old English Orosius, ed. Bately, 36 (II.i).
38
Old English Orosius, ed. Bately, 37 (II.i).
39
Old English Orosius, ed. Bately, 36 (II.i).
40
Lemke, “Fear-Mongering?,” 749.
41
Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints, ed. Skeat, I, 294: XIII, “The Prayer of Moses” (lines 152–56, 163–64).
42
Godden, “Apocalypse and Invasion,” 142.
43
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality, ed. Ansell-Pearson, trans. Diethe, 48.
44
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 87 (s.a. 994).
45
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 102 (s.a. 1016).
46
Clark, “Narrative Mode of The Chronicle,” 15.
47
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 86 (s.a. 991).
48
Clark, “Narrative Mode of The Chronicle,” 14–15; Keynes, The Diplomas, 231.
49
Clark, “Narrative Mode of The Chronicle,” 15.
50
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 88 (s.a. 997).
51
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 89 (s.a. 1001).
52
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 90 (s.a. 1004).
53
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 91 (s.a. 1006).
54
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 94 (s.a. 1016).
55
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 99 (s.a. 1014).
56
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 88 (s.a. 1000).
57
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 90 (s.a. 1001).
58
ASC (C), ed. O’Brien O’Keeffe, 88 (s.a. 1002, 1003).
59
Williams, Æthelred the Unready, 51.
60
Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 55.
61
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 9.
62
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 63.
63
Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History, 80.
64
Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History, 80 (her emphasis).
65
Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History, 78–79. See note 6.
66
Aeneid, VI, lines 30–33, in Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics of Vergil, ed. Greenough.
67
Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History, 79.
68
Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 48.
69
Hollywood, “Acute Melancholia,” 381.
70
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 71.
71
Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 55; cf. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 60.
72
LaCapra, History, Literature, Critical Theory, 12.
73
LaCapra, History, Literature, Critical Theory, 13.
74
LaCapra, History, Literature, Critical Theory, 13.
75
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 58.