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The Saxon Downfall
The Danish Conquest of England (975-1042)

The Danish Conquest of England (975-1042)

The story of the Saxon downfall opens ominously with murder. The young King Edward, riding past his stepmother's castle at Corfe, halted at the door and asked for a cup of wine. The treacherous queen brought it herself, and while the king was drinking it made one of her men stab him in the back, that her own son, Ethelred, might get the throne. For eight-and-thirty years England was to regret that deed, for Ethelred's reign proved one of the worst in her history.

Ethelred's name of the Unready or Redeless - that is to say, "the Man of 111 Counsel" - fitly describes him. He was selfish, idle, weak. He had not the vigour to control the great earls and ealdormen in whose hands a strong king like Edgar had been able safely to leave so much of the government of the country. Instead of being useful servants of the state, these men became jealous and quarrelsome, struggling for their own power, and neglecting their duties. Upon an England in the hands of an incapable king and disloyal officials down swooped the Danes; and by this time the Danes were even more formidable than they had been in Alfred's reign. Norway and Denmark were now each of them kingdoms. The invaders were no longer plunderers, but trained warriors, obeying the commands of a king who, being sure of help from a mass of his kinsmen already settled in the country, aimed at nothing less than a complete conquest.

England's need was desperate; yet never was she left so utterly without help by her king and leaders. There was only one remedy; it was to fight, and fight hard. Yet when the invaders came they found England a prey, for, as the Chronicle says, "no shire would help other". Then, by the advice of Sigiric, who had succeeded Dunstan, Ethelred reversed Alfred's plan of dealing with Danes: instead of hard blows the miserable man gave them shillings; he tried to buy them off with the Danegeld, a tax which he made his luckless subjects pay. This contemptible policy, of course, only put off the evil day to a still worse to-morrow. The Danes, paid once, came back again and again for more, and they brought fresh swarms with them. Danegeld, first imposed in 991, was taken again in 994, in 1002, and in 1011. As Ethelred's Witan approved of the tax, it is plain that it was not the king alone who had fallen from the valour of the old days. When we read of one army "that it was the leaders first who began the flight"; of another, "when they were east, then men held our force west; and when they were south, then was our force taken north "; of another, "through something was flight ever resolved upon, and so the enemy ever had the victory"; or, again, that the king's most trusted alderman, Edric, betrayed his plans to the enemy; or, again, that after more than twenty years' harrying, the Witan had no more practical advice to recommend than a three days' fast and a daily chanting of the third psalm, "in order that God may grant us that we overcome our foes"; and, finally, that Ethelred himself would never risk his own person in a battlefield, - we feel that England has come on evil days.

Unfortunately, Ethelred's feebleness was not the worst of him: having by one act brought the Danes into England, he made them his lasting foes by another. He had recourse to treachery. Suddenly, in a time of truce, when he had got rid of the Norwegians by a treaty with their king, Olaf, and pacified the Normans by a marrjage with Emma, the sister of their duke, he caused all the Danes on whom he could lay hands to be murdered. This "Massacre of St. Brice's Day" drew down on him the whole might of Denmark, for among the victims so slain were the sister of Sweyn, King of Denmark, and her husband.

Chronology

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