Canute the Great

Danish king of England, Denmark, and Norway (r. 1016-1035)

• Born: c. 995
• Birthplace: Jelling?, Denmark
• Died: November 12, 1035
• Place of death: Shaftesbury, Dorset (now in England)

Canute’s conquest and strong kingship gave England a period of peace and prosperity that began to repair damage, destruction, and demoralization wrought by centuries of Viking attacks. A fierce young Viking himself, Canute matured into a ruler who appeared to be the ideal Christian king, lawgiver, and protector of his people. However, Canute’s very success not only foreshadowed but also helped to bring about the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Early Life

Canute (kuh-NYEWT) Sveinson was born probably in the Danish royal residence of Jelling in Jutland. His was a Danish royal name, and the standard spelling “Canute” is an Anglicization of the Latin form Cnuto of the Viking name Cnut, Knut, Knutir, or still other variant spellings. Canute seldom used his Christian name, Lambert, which he took when he was finally baptized, probably during the 1010’. The obscurity surrounding Canute’s birth and childhood derives both from the fact that he was a younger son, having an elder brother Harold, and from the cultural isolation and political turbulence of Denmark around the year 1000.

Canute’s father was Sweyn Forkbeard, who was king of Denmark from 987 to 1014. Sweyn’s father, whom Sweyn’s army slew in battle, was Harold II Bluetooth, king of Denmark (r. c. 950-987). Sweyn had been baptized as a child but apostatized, rose to power on a tide of Viking heathenism, and persecuted Christianity. Sweyn was a wild Viking sea rover who had dreams of becoming king of a dual monarchy of Denmark and England.

Canute’s mother was a Polish princess who took the Danish name Gunnhild. She was the daughter of Mieszko I, duke and first ruler of Poland. Gunnhild’s brother Bolesław I the Brave, duke of Poland from 992 to 1025, would become in 1025 the first king of Poland. Canute’s mother belonged to the Polish ducal and royal house of Piast, which embraced Christianity in self-defense because the Germans employed conversion of the Slavs as the pretext for conquest. Neither Sweyn nor Gunnhild were devout Christians, and their son Canute was reared a heathen Viking.

Many Northmen during the Viking Age took Christianity very lightly. King Olaf II, who is revered in Scandinavia as Saint Olaf of Norway, was Canute’s contemporary and rival, and another fierce Viking mercenary warrior. Saint Olaf fought for the English and Norwegians against both Sweyn and Canute until Canute’s soldiers finally slew him in Norway in 1030. Saint Olaf left his mark on England when in 1013, fighting for Ethelred II, the Unready (r. 978-1013 and 1014-1016), against Sweyn, he had his Viking war party pull down London Bridge, perhaps originating the old nursery rhyme.

Christianity and heathenism were practiced together by many Vikings, who might wear amulets combining the Cross of Christ and the Hammer of Thor or sculpt Viking stones such as those at Gosforth Church in Cumberland combining the Crucifixion, Thor’s heroic feats, and the heathen apocalypse Ragnarok. Sagas tell of baptized Vikings who prayed to Christ when seas were calm but in rough seas and storms prayed to Thor.

Young Canute was sent to be fostered with Thorkell the Tall, a redoubtable Viking mercenary, at Jomsborg on the Baltic Sea at the mouth of the Oder River. Jomsborg was fabled in saga as a Viking military community that was organized like a heathen monastery for mercenary soldiers and pirates. What religious instruction Thorkell gave his foster son was probably heathen, because as late as 1020 in England, Thorkell was implicated in cases of witchcraft and murder in his own family that had heathen overtones. There were powerful tensions in Viking society and within individual Vikings between Christianity and heathenism.

The names of the Viking age are emblematic of its rough and violent culture and politics: Ivar the Boneless, Erik the Priest-hater, Eric Bloodaxe, Thorkell the Skull-splitter, John the Wode or Berserk, Ragnar Hairy-breeches, the poet Eyvind the Plagiarist, and the musician Einar Jingle-scale. One favorite Viking art form was called “cutting the blood-eagle,” in which the Viking would mutilate the corpse of an enemy by splitting the chest and artistically pulling back the ribs. One Viking earned the contemptuous surname “the Children’s Man” because he refused to play one of the merriest Viking games, “Impaling the Baby on a Spear.” There is little wonder that Christian priests in Western Europe added to the Mass the new petition, “From the fury of the Northmen, O Lord, deliver us.”

The degeneracy of the English during the reign of Ethelred II, the Unready, had become so flagrant that Wulfstan, archbishop of York, in his great Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (English translation, 1939) in 1014 could thunder that the English had become indistinguishable from Vikings. There were a few exceptional Englishmen such as the holy and learned Ælfric, but more typical was the sinister, treacherous, and violent Eadric Steona, earl of Mercia. The first Viking raid had occurred at Lindisfarne in 793, the latest in 1016, and there had been vast spiritual as well as material destruction. Two episodes in the early eleventh century illustrate this degeneracy: the Saint Brice’s Day Massacre of 1002, when Ethelred ordered the English to slaughter all Danish residents in England, and the martyrdom of Ælfheah, archbishop of Canterbury, in 1013, when at a Viking feast drunken warriors pelted the saintly Ælfheah to death with table refuse. Ethelred ordered another massacre of Danes in 1014, but it was evidently less notorious and more localized than the massacre of 1002. Cruel treachery had become the norm.

Canute first made his mark as a warrior when he accompanied his father in the Danish invasion of England in 1013-1014. Even among these fierce Danes and Jomsvikings, young Canute stood out for his cruelty and ruthlessness. On the sudden death of Sweyn early in 1014, the Vikings elected Canute their leader in England. Canute thereupon committed the atrocity of mutilating Anglo-Saxons whom Sweyn had held hostage and landing them ashore at Sandwich to terrify the English. Canute also deserted his allies, the Danes of Lindsay, against whom the English retaliated brutally. In 1014, Canute sailed back to Denmark, where his elder brother Harold had succeeded their father Sweyn as king. Civil war raged on in England for the next few years, the English led by Ethelred II, the Unready, and briefly after his death in 1016 by his son Edmund Ironside. Canute decisively defeated Edmund Ironside at Ashington in 1016.

Between his victory at Ashington and his journey to Denmark in 1019-1020, Canute behaved like a Viking conqueror and ruled England oppressively. He murdered real and alleged opponents and rival claimants, divided England into four great earldoms or military districts on the Danish model, and levied an enormous Danegeld. He paid off most of his Viking mercenaries but kept enough to guard himself and garrison England. Both the Danelaw and the Anglo-Saxon parts of the realm were exhausted, bereft of English leadership, and sullen in their acquiescence to Canute’s rule. During those same years, however, Canute married the widow of Ethelred, Emma of Normandy (d. 1052), in 1017; took part in two English coronation ceremonies at Bath and Westminster, also in 1017; and summoned in 1018 a national assembly of both Danes and Anglo-Saxons who swore to uphold the good laws of King Edgar the Peaceable.

In 1018, Canute’s brother Harold, king of Denmark, died, leaving Canute as his only heir, but the Danish Vikings were restless and menacing because Canute’s kingship now placed England out of bounds for Viking pillaging and piracy. In 1019-1020, Canute went to Denmark to secure his inheritance, control the Viking sea rovers, and establish his father’s plan of dual monarchy of Denmark and England. Canute’s own vision went beyond Sweyn’, as Canute appears to have had the dream of a Northern Sea empire or thalassocracy over the British Isles, Scandinavia, and the coasts and islands of the Baltic and North Seas and possibly of the north Atlantic Ocean.

Life’s Work

By the early eleventh century in England, Danes and Anglo-Saxons regarded each other with hatred, vengeance, and distrust. Canute, who had lost an aunt, an uncle, a foster uncle, and friends in the Saint Brice’s Day Massacre of 1002 and lost his father (or so the Vikings believed) to the magic of the East Anglian royal martyr Saint Edmund of Bury (841-869), had fought against the Anglo-Saxons from 1013 to 1016 and committed many horrible atrocities. Canute seemed to promise not peace and reconciliation but bloodbath and religious persecution. Canute in 1017 was still a young Jomsviking who had been elected leader of the Danish forces in England in 1014, after the death of Sweyn. Canute may have been baptized, but baptism had meant little for Sweyn. He was known by the heathen name Canute, not by his Christian name, Lambert. Burning, pillaging, and slaughtering, Canute had shown no Christian virtues.

The great transformation of Canute came after his journey to Denmark to secure his inheritance after the death of his brother Harold in 1018. Canute was in Denmark in 1019 and returned to England in 1020. Canute set out at once to reform the English laws through the work of his adviser Wulfstan, archbishop of York. Canute’s laws covered secular and religious affairs, Englishmen and Danes, and presented themselves as a return to the laws of King Edgar the Peaceable. In his legislation, Canute stood squarely in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of royal dooms and law codes, and indeed Canute’s code was so comprehensive that long after the Norman Conquest in 1066 Canute’s time was remembered as a legal golden age. Thus, Canute appeared as a great lawgiver.

Also beginning in 1020, Canute tried to seem the ideal Christian king: He made spectacular public gestures of piety; lavishly endowed shrines, monasteries, and churches; and suppressed the vestiges of heathenism. His benefactions placed literate churchmen in his debt and gained him respectability, good public relations, and a great historical reputation, since churchmen wrote the history chronicles. The assumption that Canute was cynically building a public image is borne out by the fact that his pious deeds were done very conspicuously with monastic chroniclers in attendance. For example, on one of his journeys to the north of England, Canute departed from his itinerary to walk barefoot 6 miles (10 kilometers) to Durham, where he visited the shrine of Saint Cuthbert. Another motive might have been Canute’s superstitious wish to propitiate the saints and win them to his side. His other benefactions, including lavish almsgiving, served similar public relations purposes. The most spectacular pious gesture was the magnificent translation of the relics of Saint Alphege from London to Canterbury in 1023. Canute, Emma, Harthcanute, Thorkell the Tall, and other Vikings participated. Thorkell’s role was especially symbolic because he had been present at Aelfheah’s martyrdom in 1013.

King Canute journeyed forth several times from his realm of England. He went to Denmark in 1019-1020, 1022-1023, and 1025-1027, to Rome and Scotland in 1027, and to Norway and Denmark in 1028-1029, but he spent seasons of all these years in England and never was an absentee king. Canute ruled England well. Except for his pilgrimage to Rome in 1027, which also had diplomatic significance, those trips from England were military expeditions or brief supervisory visits to his other kingdoms, which he ruled through regents. For most of his reign, Canute resided in England at his capital, Winchester, in London, or on progress around the country.

Canute’s visibility succeeded in immortalizing him in English folklore as “Good King Canute,” the hero of many edifying folktales such as “King Canute Commands the Tides to Halt” and “King Canute Subjects Himself to His Own Harsh Laws” and even his own nursery rhyme.

Merrily sang the monks of Ely,As King Canute came rowing by,“Row to the shore, knights,” said the king, “And let us hear these churchmen sing.”

This rhyme survives in an old Anglo-Saxon version that is supposed to have been extemporized by Canute himself. The reputation of Good King Canute in English folklore is well deserved because he did heal the wounds of the Viking invasions, bring Anglo-Saxons and Danes together in England, and act like the ideal Christian king.

King Canute was regal in appearance, tall, athletic in build, fair of hair and complexion, and handsome, with piercing blue eyes and a prominent, slightly aquiline, nose and a blond forked beard like his father’. For his personality, his two-faced seal may supply a clue. Canute played his part as a civilized Viking and Christian king and lawgiver very ably indeed. His coinage, portraits such as the lovely miniature of Canute and Emma in the Liber Vitœ of Winchester, skaldic praise poetry, and other contemporary descriptions of him agree that he looked the part of a great civilized Viking and ideal Christian king. Primary sources also agree that he had a bad temper, which he usually kept in check. His subjects regarded Canute with affectionate awe in which there was no small measure of terror. The Viking savage who had mutilated English hostages in 1014 did occasionally reappear in King Canute, as when he had Earl Ulf stabbed to death in sanctuary in a cathedral in Denmark in 1026. Canute died when he was barely forty and before he could realize his ambitions of a sea empire to rival the Western Roman Empire on the Continent. His empire was crumbling in 1035, but he had been set back before in 1014 and 1026 and had recovered strongly, regained power, and gained greater power.

Canute had two sons who succeeded him and ruled briefly as kings of England. By his Anglo-Danish concubine, Ælfgifu of Northampton, he had Harold Harefoot, who ruled as regent for his younger legitimate half brother from 1035 to 1037 and then took the kingship himself and ruled from 1037 to 1040. By his lawful Christian wife, Emma of Normandy, Canute had Harthacnut, who ruled England from 1040 to 1042. Canute had another illegitimate son named Sweyn, who died in 1036, and a legitimate daughter named Gunnhild, who, before she died in 1038, was briefly married to Henry, the son of the Western Roman emperor Conrad II. All of Canute’s offspring died young, and in 1042, there succeeded the son of his old enemy Ethelred II and Emma of Normandy, Edward the Confessor, who ruled England from 1043 to 1066. Dynastically, Canute’s usurpation proved only a brief Danish interruption of the English succession and historically only a breathing space. He did not make drastic changes in government, law, or administration but was content to salvage the Anglo-Saxon institutions.

Significance

Canute the Great was the first Viking ruler who was admitted to fellowship with pope and emperor and the Christian kings in Christendom. He envisioned a great northern thalassocracy that would rival the Holy Roman Empire or surpass it. He achieved but part of his vision, and even that crumbled before his death. Still, he gave England nearly twenty years of peace, prosperity, and good government. Less happily, Canute’s earldoms, housecarls (members of body guard), intricate dynasticism, and very success as an alien usurper set precedents for the Norman Conquest of 1066. As king of the English, Canute deserves the epithet “the Great” for saving the monarchy, which Alfred the Great had begun and Ethelred II, the Unready, nearly demolished.

Danish Kings of England, 1016-1066

Reign

• Monarch

1016-1035

• Canute the Great

1035-1040

• Harold I Harefoot

1040-1042

• Harthacnut

1043-1066

• Edward the Confessor

1066

• Harold II

Note: Both Edward and Harold II were of mixed Danish and Saxon ancestry.

Bibliography

Barlow, Frank. The English Church, 1000-1066: A Constitutional History. London: Longmans, Green, 1963. Learned monograph that is somewhat critical of Canute and skeptical about his religious sincerity, but it contains fascinating details about Canute that are otherwise inaccessible.

Brondsted, Johannes. The Vikings. Translated by Kalle Skov. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965. Still indispensable for background on the Vikings.

Campbell, Alistair, ed. Encomium Emmae Reginae. London: Royal Historical Society, 1949. Reprint. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A primary source, published with the editor’s critical apparatus and commentary. Very important for the study of Canute.

Davidson, H. R. Ellis. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1977. Indispensable for understanding Viking heathenism. Includes a bibliography and index.

Fisher, D. J. V. The Anglo-Saxon Age, c. 400-1042. London: Longman, 1973. A full narrative nicely incorporating research and interpretation.

Fletcher, Richard. Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England. New York: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 2002. Addresses the often brutal history of Anglo-Saxon times, including the roles of Canute and Ethelred II in that history. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Larson, Laurence Marcellus. Canute the Great, 995 (circ.)-1035, and the Rise of Danish Imperialism During the Viking Age. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1970. The standard biography, although outdated on many details and general interpretation. It has stood the test of time far better than most works of history because of its reliance on primary sources.

Loyn, H. R. The Vikings in Britain. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995. The author devotes three chapters to the early raids and subsequent large-scale invasions of England by Scandinavians. A highly regarded history of the Viking Age and a useful overview with some insights on Canute.

Marsden, John. The Fury of the Northmen: Saints, Shrines and Sea-Raiders in the Viking Age A.D. 793-878. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Details Viking depredations on monasteries, particularly Lindisfarne, quoting medieval sources extensively. Views the Vikings as barbarian pirates and the monasteries as repositories of civilization.

Rumble, Alexander R., ed. The Reign of Cnut: King of England, Denmark and Norway. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994. Explores Canute’s reign, with an introduction placing him in historical context and chapters on his Scandinavian empire, military exploits and achievements, possible influence on urban policy and place-names in England, coinage, and more. Includes several appendices, a bibliography, and an index.

Stenton, F. M. Anglo-Saxon England. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. A classic history of the period and the standard source for reference purposes.

Whitelock, Dorothy, David C. Douglas, and Susie I. Tucker, eds. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. 2d ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. The basic primary source, contains very brief entries, by year, for Canute’s reign. Editorial footnotes are judicious but abbreviated.