Ethelred II, the Unready

King of England (r. 978-1013 and 1014-1016)

• Born: c. 968
• Birthplace: Unknown
• Died: April 23, 1016
• Place of death: London, England

Ethelred was the son of a powerful king and a member of one of the most successful and prestigious dynasties of the Middle Ages but was unable to cope with repeated Viking assaults. His name became associated with military and political ineptitude.

Early Life

Ethelred (EHTH-ehl-rehd) II was consecrated as king at Kingston on May 4, 979. In some respects he had immense advantages. He was the son of King Edgar, who had reigned virtually unchallenged from 959 to 975. Among his immediate relatives and ancestors were Alfred the Great, Edward the Elder, and his great-uncle Athelstan, known even to his Viking enemies as “the victorious.” His kingdom was rich and well organized, and he had no immediate rivals.

Against these advantages, however, were a string of disadvantages that may go some way toward explaining the failure of his reign. To begin with, what he was king of was not absolutely clear. By birth and long ancestry he was king of Wessex, in practice all of southern England. His ancestors, furthermore, had gained effective control over those shires of middle England that had not been settled by Viking invaders; by a combination of war and diplomacy, they had also subjected the Danish midlands, the Viking-settled North of England, and areas of Wales and Scotland. Yet none of these regions was absolutely secure. Much depended on the personality of the king.

Ethelred, furthermore, cannot have been more than thirteen when he came to the throne; his father, Edgar, did not marry his mother, Alfthryth, until 964, and they had one son before Ethelred, but he died young. Even more significant, Alfthryth had not been Edgar’s first wife, but his second or even third; by one of the former wives, probably Æthelflæd, Edgar had had a son Edward, who immediately succeeded his father as king in 975. Ethelred would not have come to the throne at all if his half brother Edward had not been murdered at Corfe Gate in Dorset in 978 or 979. Ethelred himself cannot have been responsible for this act he was too young. Blame was, however, variously ascribed to overzealous servants of Ethelred, and to Ethelred’s mother, Alfthryth. Modern historians are not entirely convinced by these accusations. Some have pointed out that stepmothers always make popular scapegoats, and others noted the signs that Edward had already made himself unpopular. Nevertheless, the murder of a king was regarded as a peculiarly horrible deed, and there is no doubt that, by popular reaction, Edward was soon elevated to the status of sainthood.

Ethelred accordingly came to the throne under a cloud, perhaps not being held personally liable for his half brother’s murder but having benefited from it and having done nothing subsequently about it. William of Malmesbury, the author of Gesta Regum Anglorum (1125; The Deeds of the Kings of the English, 1847), recorded that Alfthryth beat her son so fiercely with candles for crying over Edward’s death that he developed a phobia for candles. This may represent an early half-contemptuous view of him, no good foundation for success.

For perhaps fifteen years subsequently, Ethelred appears to have been dominated by various groups of advisers: to begin with, his mother, and then the established aldermen and bishops of England. It is striking, though, that Alfthryth ceases to figure as a witness to royal land grants from 985, though she was not dead, reappearing in this role some ten years later. In surviving documents, Ethelred appears to show traces of remorse over his behavior toward the Church during this period; he is known to have expropriated land from several religious foundations and to have ordered a harrying of his own town of Rochester in Kent to punish some disobedience or resistance. A plausible explanation is that King Ethelred escaped from the control of his mother’s “faction” after the death of the powerful bishop of Winchester, Ethelwold, on August 1, 984, and for some time was dominated by secular favorites such as Alfgar, son of Alfric, alderman of Hampshire. Ethelred, however, had Alfgar blinded in 993 and appears to have made up matters with his mother, the Church authorities, and the more established dignitaries of the kingdom.

Life’s Work

The reason may well have been increasing pressure by a new wave of Viking invaders from Scandinavia. A first wave of attempts to rule over England had been decisively defeated a century before by Ethelred’s ancestors, though at the price of leaving large areas controlled and settled by Danes or Norwegians. From about 991, Viking pressure once more grew steadily stronger. In that year, a raiding force was met and challenged by Byrhtnoth, alderman of Essex, on the river Blackwater near Maldon. Byrhtnoth himself was one of the great figures of Ethelred’s early reign, by tradition and indeed by archaeology (for his headless body has been measured of immense size and combative disposition). His courage was his undoing, however, for he accepted a Viking “dare” to level combat and was killed with many of his men. Ethelred then paid ten thousand pounds in tribute to persuade the Viking army to go away: In so doing he set up an almost inevitable contrast between his own policy of appeasement and his ancestors’ rigorously maintained one of immediate resistance.

At this point Ethelred’s career falls under the spell of the one long account of his reign, written by an anonymous compiler of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (compiled c. 890 to c. 1150), working perhaps in London. This account is so powerful, so consistent, and so incisively phrased that it has determined or ruined Ethelred’s reputation ever since. What the chronicler had to say is in essence that the Vikings continued their assaults on England from 991 to 1016, when Ethelred died, to be succeeded very soon by Canute the Great, king of Denmark. During this period, the English paid Danegeld no less than six times, the amounts rising remorselessly from the ten thousand pounds of 991 to the thirty-seven thousand of 1007 (and the eighty-three thousand of 1018). Yet not only did the wretched people of England have to contribute all this silver in taxes; they also had to suffer the consequences of continual ravaging (for the Danegeld was usually paid after the Vikings had done their looting, not before). In addition, they had to pay enormous amounts toward the upkeep of English armies and navies, though these latter rarely fought. They had in fact the worst of all worlds, paying “protection money” to both sides and getting no benefit from either. Any one of the above policies fight, surrender, or simply do nothing would have been better than all three of them, or so the chronicler implied. His contempt for his own government reached a peak in 1006, when he described the English army as the “innhere,” the “in-harriers,” and the Danish as the “uthere,” the “out-harriers.”

The chronicler, furthermore, said repeatedly that there was no lack of readiness to fight on the part of the English people. The levies were, however, continually betrayed by treacherous and cowardly leaders, such as Alfric in 992 and 1003 and alderman Eadric, “the grabber,” in 1009 and 1015, or by internal division and ineptitude, as shown by Eadric’s brother Birhtric in 1009 again. Over all of this Ethelred seems only to have presided. The chronicler’s account of low morale and confusion is largely confirmed by such documents as the “Sermon of the Wolf to the English” given by Archbishop Wulfstan of York around 1014.

Nevertheless, one has to note that the chronicler wrote from hindsight, from a time when the Danes had in fact conquered England, and also that his view was a “worm’-eye view,” not based (unlike earlier parts of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) on official sources and good information. If one looks again, and skeptically, at his account, one can discern some signs of royal good intentions at least. Ethelred tried to counterattack in 1000 by leading a naval force against the north of England. In 1002, he made a diplomatic marriage to Emma, sister of the powerful duke of Normandy, and in the same year tried to eliminate the Danes in loyal areas of England by the Saint Brice’s Day Massacre. In 1008-1009 especially, his government not only organized a massive navy to fight the Danes but also imposed on the country a gigantic three-day penitential fast. It is true that none of these measures worked, the massacre in particular being counterproductive and the navy of 1009 expending all its energies in civil war. Still, Ethelred’s government showed no sign of running out of ideas; while in a peculiar way the sporadic outbursts of English defiance, like the resistance of London in 1013, were on the whole encouraged by the presence of the king.

The English did, however, weary in the end of defeat and taxation , perhaps especially after the failures of 1009, the martyrdom of Ælfheah, archbishop of Canterbury, in 1012 (pelted to death with ox bones by drunken Vikings), and the arrival of King Sweyn of Denmark in 1013. Northern areas made a separate peace. Southern England remained loyal, but only with conditions. In 1015, Ethelred’s own son Edmund Ironside defied his father to pursue the traditional Wessex policy of giving battle. In confused circumstances, with even prominent Vikings such as Thorkell “the tall” changing sides, Ethelred finally died in London on Saint George’s Day, 1016. His son Edmund succeeded, and fought Sweyn’s son, the formidable Canute the Great, to a draw; on Edmund’s death later that year, however, English resistance came to an end, and the country for the first time acknowledged a Dane as king in all areas.

Significance

Ethelred’s nickname still seems apt. It is based on an Anglo-Saxon pun, which notices that Ethelred means literally “noble counsel” and adds to it the Anglo-Saxon compound noun “unraed,” which means “no-counsel” or perhaps “bad-counsel.” This could mean that Ethelred did not accept advice; more likely, however, it means that he himself had no plans. He merely reacted to circumstances. For all that can be said for his government’s ability to make laws, mint coins, and collect taxes, this remains a fair judgment. Ethelred started badly, was initially surrounded by men older and stronger than himself, and never managed either to prevent factional fighting or to impose his own leadership. This was explicable and even excusable, but never praiseworthy. “Unraed” is a good short description of him, and was probably coined (though not recorded) in his own lifetime.

Anglo-Saxon Kings of England, 802-1016

Reign

• Ruler

802-839

• Egbert

839-856

• Æthelwulf

856-860

• Æthelbald

860-866

• Æthelbert

866-871

• Ethelred (Æthelred) I

871-899

• Alfred the Great

899-924

• Edward the Elder (with sister Æthelflæd)

924-939

• Æthelstan

939-946

• Edmund the Magnificent

946-955

• Eadred

955-959

• Eadwig (Edwy) All-Fair

959-975

• Edgar the Peaceable

975-978

• Edward the Martyr

978-1016

• Ethelred (Æthelred) II, the Unready

1016

• Edmund II Ironside

1016

• Ascendancy of Canute the Great (Danish line begins)

Bibliography

Ashdown, Margaret, trans. and ed. English and Norse Documents Relating to the Reign of Ethelred the Unready. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1930. Useful edition and translation of documents from both sides of the Viking invasions.

Campbell, Alistair, ed. Encomium Emmae Reginae. London: Royal Historical Society, 1949. Discusses the life of Ethelred’s widow Emma, a woman who remained influential long after her first husband’s death.

Hill, David. An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England, 700-1066. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1981. Invaluable maps of the confused political boundaries, campaigns, and countermarchings of Ethelred’s reign.

Howard, Ian. Swein Forkbeard’s Invasions and the Danish Conquest of England, 991-1017. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 2003. Discusses propaganda and legend in the context of King Sweyn’s invasions, as well as possible explanations.

Jones, Gwyn. A History of the Vikings. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. A very good introduction to Viking culture in Scandinavia and its expansion into Britain.

Keynes, Simon. The Diplomas of King Æthelred “the Unready,” 978-1016. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Though highly specialized, this study attempts to get behind the familiar accounts of Ethelred’s reign to the reality of its internal politics.

Lavelle, Ryan. Æthelred II: King of the English, 978-1016. Charleston, S.C.: Tempus, 2002. A biography covering Ethelred’s reign.

Stenton, F. M. Anglo-Saxon England. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Still the best overall account of the king and of the period, given in great detail.

Whitelock, Dorothy, David C. Douglas, and Susie I. Tucker, eds. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. 2d ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Translation of the major early account of the life and work of Ethelred.