A Brief History of the Vikings (24 page)

His son Canute, a youth in his late teens, received pledges of allegiance from the other Viking leaders in Gainsborough. As far as the Norsemen were concerned, Canute was the rightful heir, and tragic though Forkbeard’s death was, England remained a part of the Danish hegemony. The English, however, had other ideas – Forkbeard had been ‘king’ for only five weeks, and had never been crowned.
¹⁵
Claiming Forkbeard’s demise to be caused by the wrath of God, the ruling clique swiftly dispatched ambassadors to Normandy, where Aethelred was living in exile among his in-laws. Within two months, Aethelred was back, promising a new order and a better deal for the English. Enough locals believed him to flock to his banner again, and the restored English king marched with an army on the traitorous region of Lindsey.

Canute faced an army of Englishmen, bolstered once more by Viking mercenaries – Olaf the Stout was back in Aethelred’s service, and Thorkell the Tall continued to serve the English.
He also faced trouble back home; he was the king of the English, but not of Denmark, since that role was reserved for his elder brother Harald II. Meanwhile in Sweden, King Olof Skötkonung signalled his defiance by appointing a bishop whom Forkbeard had vetoed. Canute gathered up his fleet and set sail, pausing at Sandwich to order the mutilation of the hostages he had inherited from Forkbeard. Having set the luckless individuals ashore, Canute sailed to Denmark, where he struck a deal of some sorts with his elder brother. It was in Harald’s interest to get Canute out of the way in a kingdom of his own, and England presented the ideal opportunity. The kings appear to have agreed some kind of joint authority (Danish coins were struck in Canute’s name), and a year after he arrived in Denmark, Canute was ready to head back and claim England for himself.

In the intervening period, Aethelred Unraed had not enjoyed much luck. His eldest son, named Aethelstan in honour of the great English unifier of old, died in June 1014. In September of the same year England suffered some of the worst flooding in record. Fully expecting Vikings to return, Aethelred organized a conference designed to reassure all parties that, regardless of whether or not they had been
willing
to pledge allegiance to Forkbeard, all would be forgiven if only they would pull together and resist any further attacks.
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The conference was a disaster. Some allies, it transpired, were trustier than others. Two northern leaders, in-laws of the absent Canute, were murdered by another earl, kicking off another vendetta among the English nobles. Edmund Ironside, one of the sons of Aethelred’s first marriage, seized much of the north of England for himself and married the widow of one of the murder victims. Aethelred might have been the nominal king, but England was still a divided nation. The behaviour of Aethelred’s son in the north verged on rebellion – Edmund
Ironside received pledges of allegiance from the lesser nobles, and issued proclamations in his own name. Meanwhile, the south coast was largely in the hands of Wulfnoth, the infamous noble who had once stolen half the English fleet. Upon Wulfnoth’s death sometime around 1014, the region passed to his son Godwine.

Aethelred died in 1016, after a long but troubled reign. No more than a child when he became king, he had been buffeted by the interests of his regents as England tore itself apart. In his attempts to play Vikings off against each other, he had only served to encourage more alliances between his feuding nobles and their sometime enemies. When Aethelred died, leaving England to the disobedient Edmund Ironside, Canute was back with 160 ships and an avowed intention of regaining control of the country. Sources, once again, are contradictory, but he seems to have enjoyed the support of Thorkell the Tall for his attack on London. With London Bridge apparently repaired after the supposed assault of Olaf the Stout, the Vikings seized Southwark again, and bypassed the bridge – either by dragging their ships along the bank, or through a newly dug channel. With Edmund Ironside trying to raise an army in the west, the defence of London fell to his stepmother, Queen Emma, a remarkable woman who saw seven kings rule England in her lifetime, two of whom were her husbands, and two her sons. Trusting more to the support of the Mercians than the West Saxons (i.e. keeping to the north of the Thames), Edmund Ironside finally caught up with the Danes at Brentford, where he crossed the Thames and dealt a crushing blow. The Danes regrouped in the east, marching through Essex, and fought the Saxons again at the disputed site of
Assandun
(either modern Ashingdon in south-east Essex, or Ashdon in the north-west). The list of combatants includes an impressive number from far-flung parts of Edmund’s kingdom,
from Dorset in the west to the faithful Ulfkell Snilling in the east. Assandun may, finally, have brought the English together, but only for them to experience defeat there at the hands of the Danes.

Scattered skirmishes continued, with the tide now turning in favour of the Danes. Eventually, their armies fought to a standstill, the two rival kings agreed to meet on an island in the River Severn. There, they agreed that the land would be split between them in a similar power-sharing arrangement to that which Canute had with his brother in Scandinavia. The lands north of the Thames were Canute’s. South of the Thames (i.e. the ancestral domain of the Kings of Wessex) was in Edmund’s hands. It was enough of a compromise that both parties could call themselves the victor – both held large areas of land under a kingly title, and both agreed that the other would inherit the lands of whoever died first.

Edmund Ironside suddenly passed away on 30 November 1016. Although there is no mention of foul play, it certainly seems suspicious – the young king was barely in his twenties, and Canute was not above skulduggery when the opportunity presented itself. Whatever the reason, Canute was now the ruler of all England – Canute the Great, as he is remembered, a local translation of the Danish
Knud den Store
.

Wanting no part of the squabbles that had so hobbled the reign of Aethelred, Canute put his own people in charge at all places of strategic importance. Thorkell the Tall was rewarded for his double defection with the earldom of East Anglia, while Earl Erik of Trondheim, the aging son of Hakon the Great, acquired Northumbria. A couple of local turncoats were given brief roles in Canute’s government, but many were purged, either through their own misdeeds or through Canute’s machinations. Canute, whatever the methods he employed, was remarkably successful in reconciling the disparate factions of
his kingdom. He is, after all, the king who supposedly ordered his throne to be set on the seashore, so that his courtiers might observe that he was unable to command the rising tide. Canute’s legendary paddle, a folktale which comes to us through the twelfth-century
History of the English
by Henry Huntingdon, reminded the assembled nobles that, although they might be Angles, Saxons, Danes and Swedes, all of them, their king included, were subject to the Christian God, whatever gross flatterers might say.

In an attempt to establish a link with the previous dynasty, Canute sent for Aethelred’s widow Emma, who had so boldly resisted his army in London. Emma became the wife of Canute the Great, in a match decried by a contemporary satirist as a bull ravishing a queen.
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Canute and Emma, both together and separately, would somehow be the parents of several monarchs, until the ruling dynasty of England crashed to a messy end with the death of Edward the Confessor. After the battles, mutilations, banishments and natural attrition of several generations, only one of the secret cliques behind Aethelred’s throne survived to see the latter half of the eleventh century, and that was the family of Wulfnoth, the man who stole half of Aethelred’s fleet. Wulfnoth’s son Godwine ensured that his daughters married into the royal family, and after the Confessor, his eldest surviving male heir, Harold Godwinson, was ideally placed to seize the throne for himself.

Canute paid off the Vikings in his entourage, causing most of the raiders to return to Scandinavia or leave England in search of plunder elsewhere. When his elder brother died, Canute sailed for Denmark with an Anglo-Danish fleet that enforced his sovereignity over the old territories of Forkbeard.

Many in England might have considered the new king’s reign to be a return to relative peace. The period saw the establishment of communities of Danes in London itself – the
Thames riverbank or ‘Strand’ gaining a
Densemanestret
and Westminster gaining a
Denscheman
parish, both eventually with churches sacred to St Clement of the Danes.
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Canute kept the English free of most Viking predation, and enacted new laws, many of which were slightly polished old laws, written up for him by the Saxon bishop Wulfnoth. However, peace restored in one area only caused pressure elsewhere in the Viking world. Canute was forced to lead an army against his sometime ally Thorkell in 1023, when East Anglia attempted to exhibit a little too much of the old Viking spirit. He may have secured a series of advantageous tributary treaties with the kings of Scotland, but faced increasing unrest back in his homeland. While Canute could legitimately claim to be the overlord of a North Sea empire that stretched from Cornwall to Sweden, it was also
over
-stretched. He suffered a military defeat against Swedish rebels in 1026, and was forced to make a prolonged expedition to Norway in 1028 to deal with a predictable return of old enmities.

With the Earl of Trondheim busy with his new possessions in Northumbria, Trondheim itself was open to seizure by anyone who could offer the locals a better deal than the incumbent Danes. Even as Canute had set sail with his invasion fleet for England, the eldest surviving heir to Harald Fairhair was making plans of his own. Deprived of his main source of mercenary revenue, Olaf the Stout embarked on a couple of raids on the English coast before returning home.
Heimskringla
strains credulity by reporting him taking the remarkable step of abandoning his longships in England, and instead packing his followers into a couple of converted merchant ships. Olaf, now nominally a Christian, was giving up on the raiding life and setting off home with a small army, not a raiding party, intent on conquest. For Olaf, the voyage back to Scandinavia was intended as a one-way trip to reclaim his birthright.
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He announced his intentions to take back Harald Fairhair’s kingdom from Canute at the point of a sword. His stepfather Sigurd called an assembly of south Norwegian headsmen, capitalizing on Olaf’s ancestry and his kinship with them. Olaf the Stout was decreed to be the ruler of Norway by common acclamation, gaining further support from many of the places through which his retinue passed. He met little resistance until he reached the north, where, predictably, Trondheim and its outlying regions rebuffed any who claimed to be its lord. Olaf was obliged to put down the Trondheim resistance by force, fighting Earl Erik’s brother Earl Svein, who enjoyed ominous support from Olof Skötkonung, Sweden’s ruler and Canute’s stepbrother.

Despite minor resistance, Olaf the Stout was able to consolidate his rule. With the north pacified, he enforced his domain as far as the border with Sweden, and with it brought Christianity to the populace. While Olaf did little that had not been tried before by Crowbone or Hakon the Good, had the benefit of a further generation of missionary influence. Faced with the prospect of violence or conversion, many acknowledged Christianity as their belief, even in the ever-resistant Trondheim region. Olaf reputedly put an end to ‘many heathen customs’, although undoubtedly they still persisted.

Sweden was next on Olaf’s list – unless he did something swiftly, he might find the same Swedish-Danish resistance in Scandinavia that had destroyed his predecessor Crowbone. But
Heimskringla
would have us believe in yet another romantic intrigue – if Snorri had his way, every Scandinavian princess would doubtless be a lovestruck damsel waiting for a heroic rescuer. Even as the aging Olof Skötkonung railed against ‘that fat man’ in Norway, his own daughter Ingigerd supposedly considered the possibility of marrying Olaf the Stout. The story probably conceals a more prosaic truth – that
Sweden was torn between the prospect of alliance with Russia or Norway. When faced with the prospect of a marriage alliance between Norway and Sweden, or continued tit-for-tat raids across their territory, the landholders of southern Sweden preferred the former option. But the Swedish king had already promised Ingigerd to Jaroslav the Wise in Russia. Olaf the Stout, however, eventually got a princess of his own, Ingigerd’s sister Astrid.

Norway was back in the hands of a descendant of Harald Fairhair, and the Swedish border was finally quiet. Olof Skötknonung seems to have been a most unpleasant father-in-law, and the passing of the Swedish crown to his son Onund Jacob in 1022 on his death was probably a large contribution to peace in the region.

Olaf busied himself with the spread of Christianity, either for genuine reasons, or simply as a handy excuse to unseat any incumbent local lords who refused to do his bidding. The 1020s passed with occasional skirmishes over religion or land (or both), but to many in Norway, it was a good time – there were constant whispers from further to the south that life under Olaf the Stout was preferable to life under Canute, and several outlying regions volunteered to join Olaf’s Norway, such as the distant Orkney isles, and Norway’s far north, where the Viking world receded into that of the Sámi.

Olaf the Stout is one of the more famous kings of Norway, and yet his reign was not all that successful, chiefly remembered for the lasting impact of Christianity. His saga recounts several incidents of unrest among his men, including an assassination attempt on their king. With Canute’s empire blockading the west, and Sweden only nominally supportive to the immediate east, Olaf the Stout was forced to seek aid at the only border available to him – the bleak regions of Halogaland and Finland to the north-east. There, Snorri speaks of a
disastrous ‘tax-collection’ expedition into Finland, which ended in fighting between Olaf’s men, and the desecration of a local temple. Although he was ready to play the simple, local ruler with the people of Trondheim, Olaf the Stout was not above demanding tribute from elsewhere, particularly distant Iceland. Like Crowbone before him, he probably hoped to squeeze the Icelanders by exerting pressure on their shipping route to Trondheim, but they refused to pay up.