Chapter 21
The Lure of English Silver
“Whim rules the child, the weather, and the field.”
- Edda of Sæmund the Wise
Harald Bluetooth had been hurried to his grave by his son, and now that the old man was safely out of the way, Svein Forkbeard was crowned. The new king was ostensibly Christian like his father, but already had a reputation as a redoubtable warrior, largely acquired by his frequent summer raids into neighboring Christian kingdoms.
There was more to this than continuing long-standing Viking traditions. The physical achievements of Harald Bluetooth – the fortifying of the Danevirke, building fortresses and bridges, and handing out vast sums of money to his lieutenants – were made possible by the enormous amounts of silver that had been pouring into the Danish peninsula. By the tenth century, Vikings had become connoisseurs of the metal, being able to compare examples from the Islamic, Byzantine, and western worlds. The highest quality, both in amount and purity were Arabic dirhams. The millions of these coins flooding into the Jutland peninsula enabled first Gorm and then Harald Bluetooth to establish themselves as gift-givers on a royal scale. In many ways, the kingdom of Denmark was built on Arab silver.
In the mid tenth century, however, the Arab supply began to dry up. Even worse, what little came from the eastern routes became seriously degraded in quality. When the Vikings first started trading with the Arabs, dirhams were roughly ninety percent silver; by the eleventh century that had plummeted to five percent. If Svein wanted to continue to act as his father and grandfather had, a new source of silver had to be found. Fortunately for the Danish king, there was a ready supply in a very familiar place.
England’s recovery from the ravages of the Great Heathen Army, had been nothing short of remarkable. Alfred the Great had been followed by a brilliant son and grandson who built up the kingdom and briefly forced even the Scots to acknowledge them as overlords. In the process, they transformed themselves from kings of Wessex to kings of England. Their success in creating a stable, prosperous state is illuminated by the nicknames the English gave them. Edmund the Just was followed by Eadwig the Fair, who was followed in turn by Edgar the Peaceful.
England was among the most prosperous kingdoms of western Europe, far surpassing the crumbling remains of the Carolingian Empire.176 Four generations of rule by Alfred’s family had given it a rare sense of security, and had overseen the golden age of Anglo-Saxon England. Unfortunately, this stability started to collapse just as the Viking kingdoms were looking to exploit new revenue streams.
The trouble started when Edgar the Peaceful died, leaving two young sons behind. The older of the pair, the thirteen-year old Edward the Martyr, was crowned, but since he may have been illegitimate, he wasn’t accepted by large parts of the north. After a short but turbulent reign he was assassinated under cloudy circumstances, and his ten-year old half-brother Athelred the Unready became king.177
There were suspicions from the start that Athelred’s men were involved – although seemingly without his consent – and the slain king’s body was unceremoniously dumped in a grave ‘without royal honors’. What is clear, is that neither brother had control of government, but was surrounded – as all kings generally are – by grasping, ambitious courtiers acting in their name. Direction of the government began to founder, and power began to devolve to the nobility.
Athelred the Unready has one of the more unfortunate nicknames in English history. The Anglo-Saxon word ‘ræd‘ means ‘counsel’ or ‘advice’, and so the king’s name ‘Athelred’ would translate as ‘noble-counsel’. ‘Unræd’ or ‘Unready’, therefore, would mean ‘without-counsel’, probably referring to the low quality of advice the king got, not his state of preparation. It’s also a pun on the king’s name: “Noble-counsel un-counseled.” Ironically, this may have been because he was showing signs of actually becoming a strong king. In the first decade of his reign, he managed to break the power of the great magnates and centralize power in his own hands. The king wanted to keep his own counsel.
Unfortunately for Athelred, however, just as he was getting to grips with the machinery of government, the Vikings returned. The second great wave of Viking attacks was, like the first, launched by Norwegians. In 991, a fleet of more than ninety ships arrived, led by the adventurer Olaf Tryggvasson.178 The local forces proved hopelessly inadequate to stop them, and the Vikings plundered Essex at will. Finally, in August an Anglo-Saxon army under the command of a seasoned veteran named Byrhtnoth, stood up to them. The English commander gallantly, but rather foolishly, allowed the Vikings to cross from the island they were on to the mainland, but fell early in the fighting. Those who stayed and fought were slaughtered to a man, the rest fled in a panic.
The disaster convinced Athelred that his army wasn’t dependable, so he elected instead to buy the Norwegians off as a short-term solution. This led to a hemorrhaging of silver which illustrates both the wealth of England and the ineffectiveness of the strategy. Athelred paid the Vikings ten thousand pounds of silver, but after collecting it, Olaf Tryggvasson continued to raid, this time with the newly crowned Svein Forkbeard and his Danes along for the ride.
The two plundered the south, taking all major towns except for London where they were bloodily repulsed. Despite this little victory, Athelred again turned to the Danegeld, paying the two Vikings sixteen thousand more pounds of silver to leave. This time, the king attached the usual condition of baptism. When it was awkwardly discovered that both were already baptized Christians, the ceremony was switched to confirmation, with Athelred standing in as a sponsor for Olaf.
Both Vikings were satisfied, and each returned home to their respective countries soon after. In Olaf’s case, this had less to do with the ceremony than it did with the thousands of pounds of silver that came with it. Olaf intended to make himself king of Norway, and now he had the resources to do it.
Svein Forkbeard watched these developments with interest. Olaf Tryggvasson was slightly older, and the two were close allies, but he probably watched his colleague’s career with mounting tension. In 997 Olaf successfully seized the throne from Svein, and set about founding a new capital at Trondheim. One of his first building projects was a church – Norway’s first – which he used as a propaganda tool in his goal of forcibly converting the Norwegians to Christianity.
The new king, known for his prodigious strength, must have been an imposing figure. Not only did he compel his reluctant jarls into the new faith, but he also imposed it on Norway’s far-flung territories with the result that the Faeroes, the Orkneys, and Iceland had all accepted Christianity by 1000. Even Greenland was well on the way to do the same. That same year a converted Leif Erikson left Olaf’s court on his voyage of discovery.
Although deeply resented by many of his subjects, it wasn’t Olaf Tryggvasson’s religion that proved his undoing. A few years before, Svein Forkbeard had married off his sister to a Baltic chieftain. The union had proved unhappy, and against Svein’s wishes, the woman had fled to Norway where she was not only given shelter by Olaf Tryggvasson, but taken as his wife. This ill-timed act convinced the Danish king that Olaf was his enemy.
Forkbeard had been wary of his old colleague for some time. Much of Olaf’s success at converting people was due to his massive flagship The Long Serpent, which cruised up and down the fjords, imposing the king’s authority.179 It was well known that Olaf wanted to expand his territory. He had already tried to marry the widowed queen of Sweden, and there were was a belief that he was now attempting to set himself up as king over all of Scandinavia by insinuating himself into the Danish royal family.
The fears resulted in a Danish-Swedish alliance, and a combined fleet of seventy ships that managed to ambush Olaf as he was sailed between Denmark and Norway. The Norwegian fleet of eleven ships was quickly overwhelmed, with only The Long Serpent successfully resisting. When it was clear to Olaf that even his great flagship was lost, he leapt overboard, clutching his weapons to speed his descent.
The triumphal Svein Forkbeard divided Norway up with his allies, taking most of the south for himself. He was now the most powerful Scandinavian king, having restored most of his father’s territorial holdings. It was at this moment, with Forkbeard at the height of his career, that Athelred the Unready, made the worst mistake of his reign.
While the Scandinavian kings had been occupied, Athelred had been trying vainly to stem the increasing Viking tide. Buying off Olaf and Svein had only demonstrated that extortion worked, and in the immediate years after, the English king had handed out another 108,000 pounds of silver in increasing installments.180 In his frustration, Athelred came to believe that his northern subjects in the Danelaw were either harboring or encouraging the raids. The paranoia made it easy to believe that there was a Danish plot on his life, so on the 13th November, 1002, he ordered the liquidation of every Dane in the kingdom.
The slaughter, remembered as St. Brice’s Day Massacre for the feast day on which it took place, was among the more foolish things Athelred ever did. The population of the Danelaw may have had some vestigial Scandinavian traditions, but they had repeatedly demonstrated loyalty to the English crown since the days of Athelred’s grandfather. One of the thousands who died in the bloodbath was Svein Forkbeard’s sister Gunnhild, who had settled in England with her Danish husband.181 Not only did Athelred alienate his own citizens, but he also earned the animosity of a Danish king at the peak of his powers.
Svein wasted no time. The next year he was in England harrying the west, but was driven off by a combination of unexpectedly stiff local resistance, and a famine which made it difficult to live off the land. As he gathered additional troops, other independent Vikings kept up the pressure. The Jomsvikings, led by their leader Thorkell the Tall, conducted a profitable raid in Canterbury that netted forty-eight thousand pounds of silver from Athelred’s government. It should have been more, since they captured the archbishop of Canterbury, the same man who had presided over the ceremony welcoming Olaf into the faith. But the stubborn cleric had refused to allow his parish to pay a penny for him, and the annoyed Vikings beat him to death.182
By 1013, Svein Forkbeard was ready, and he invaded England in force, not to punish Athelred, but to overthrow him. The hapless English king, who had seen his reign begin with such promise, was deserted by most of his subjects. The great-grandson of Alfred shamefully fled to Normandy, leaving England to the Vikings. London surrendered in December and Svein Forkbeard was crowned on Christmas Day of 1013.
Svein had accomplished what even the ferocious Ivar the Boneless had failed to do, but he didn’t enjoy his new crown for long. Within a few weeks he fell ill, and by February he was dead. The body was washed, embalmed, and attended to by Svein’s teenaged son Cnut, and then sent back to Denmark for burial. The great Viking dream of conquering England seemed over just as it had begun.
Ironically, it was only now, with the Viking spirit half-tamed and the days of the sea-wolves vanishing, that the most successful – and least appreciated – of the sea-kings arrived.