On this day of course took place, 955 years ago, the battle
of Hastings. The story gets told and retold every year. Walter Carruthers
Sellars and Robert Julian Yeatman in the revealingly named "1066 and all
that" (1930), their famous satire of how history was taught in British
schools in the early twentieth century and how adults remembered it, claimed
that, along with Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain in 55 BC, it was one of
two truly memorable dates in English history. Indeed, at this very moment the
vast majority of English secondary school students in year 7 (11 - 12 year
olds) will either still be studying, or will have recently finished, the Norman
Conquest in their Key Stage 3 National Curriculum history classes. The choice
of 1066 as being the place to begin the secondary school history curriculum is
very intentional - while one can argue that it was far from being the great
"year zero" of English history, the Norman Conquest is an inherently
dramatic story. So memorable a date is it, that banks explicitly advise
customers against choosing 1066 as their PIN number. I'm not going to join in
with the flood of posts about how William won the battle of Hastings, or what
the implications of his victory were for England. Instead, I'm going to look
back a good fifty years earlier to another very important (but less memorable)
date in English history - 1016. And to a king for whom it could be said that
all the events leading up to the Norman Conquest took place in the shadow of -
Cnut or Canute, as he's sometimes referred to.
An image of Cnut from the New Minster Liber Vitae, produced in his lifetime (c.1031)
King Cnut (r.1016 - 1035) is probably one of the five
pre-conquest English kings that most people know anything about - the others
being Offa (r.757 - 796), Alfred (r.871 - 899), Aethelred the Unready (r.978 -
1016) and Edward the Confessor (r.1042 - 1066). Perhaps what he's most famous
for, however, is an apocryphal tale first recorded by the twelfth century
historian Henry of Huntingdon (d.1157), in which Cnut sits by the seashore and
commands the incoming tide not to wet his feet and robes, yet predictably it
does. Henry of Huntingdon himself interpreted the story as showing that Cnut
was a wise and pious man, trying to rebuke the flatteries of his courtiers by
demonstrating that his power was nothing compared to that of God. However, the
story has often been spun differently to tell the exact opposite message, and
has often been brought up as an analogy for any modern political leader who
appears too arrogant or quixotic.
Cnut rebukes his courtiers by Adolphe-Marie-Alphonse de Neuville (1904)
Like with most early medieval rulers, we know almost nothing
about Cnut's childhood and adolescence. Even his date of birth is very
uncertain - he could have been born in any year between 980 and 1000, though
most modern historians opt for c.990. We know his father was King Sweyn
Forkbeard of Denmark (d.1014), who was responsible for the renewed wave of
Viking invasions on England from 1002 and who had managed to briefly become
king of England from 1013 - 1014 after starving the citizens of London into
surrendering and electing him king, facilitated by widespread dissatisfaction
among the governing elite of Anglo-Saxon England with Aethelred's rule. Its not
entirely certain who Cnut's mother was, though she seems most likely to have
been a Polish princess. The most contemporary sources, the Chronicon of Bishop
Thietmar of Merseburg (d.1017) and the Encomium Emmae Reginae claim that she
was Swietoslawa, a daughter of Duke Mieszko I of Poland, though Snorri
Sturlusson, writing in the early thirteenth century, claims she was a certain
Gunhild, a daughter of Duke/ King Boleslaw the Brave of Poland. And to further
complicate things, Adam of Bremen, whose "The Deeds of the Bishops of
Hamburg-Bremen" (completed in 1076) is one of the most important sources
for the early history of Scandinavia and the first European source to mention
the Americas, claimed that she was actually the widow of the King of Sweden.
This kind of uncertainty about very basic information is one of the many joys
of early medieval history. Its precisely the reason why you won't be seeing a
popular biography of Cnut on your bookshelves anytime soon, and why some
historians doubt whether early medieval rulers in general are biographable at
all (c.f. Sarah Hamilton, ‘Early Medieval Rulers and their Modern Biographers’,
Early Medieval Europe, 2003, p 248).
Where Cnut really comes to the fore of the historical record
is when he led his invasion of England in 1016. At that time, his brother,
Harald II, ruled as King of Denmark. Aethelred the Unready had been invited
back to rule as King of England in 1014, after reaching a constitutional
settlement with the Witan – the regular assembly of the bishops, abbots, ealdormen
(half-way between the post-conquest earl and sheriff), kings thegns (quasi-baronial
figures) and thegns (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of knights or gentry) of the
kingdom, which already operated on a doctrine of virtual representation (by
Aethelred’s reign it was claiming to speak for the English people and sometimes
relayed the concerns of free peasants about the oppressive behaviour of royal
officials onto the king) - that placed limits on his power and required him to
reform the state apparatus, which was becoming quite expensive and burdensome,
and hold his officials to account for their oppressive behaviour. John R Maddicott
in “The Origins of the English Parliament, 924 – 1327” (2013) describes it as
the first constitutional settlement between crown and subjects in English
history, and indeed Cnut and Edward the Confessor would have to make similar
agreements in 1018/ 1020 and 1041, setting some important precedents for
political thought and practice in centuries to come (see Maddicott, pp 35 – 41).
Cnut invaded England in April 1016. King/ Duke Boleslaw the Brave of Poland
sent contingents of warriors to assist him, pretty clear evidence that Cnut’s
mother was a Polish princess – whether Boleslaw was Cnut’s cousin or his uncle
is, however, uncertain. Aethelred died and a very interesting situation arose.
While Aethelred’s chief counsellors and the citizens and garrison of London
elected Edmund Ironside, Aethelred’s eldest surviving son, to be the new king,
a much larger body of representatives from the Witan, including bishops, abbots,
ealdormen and thegns, assembled at Southampton and swore to renounce Aethelred’s
descendants and elect Cnut as their king provided he promised to be a faithful
lord to them. Cnut and Edmund Ironside then fought each other to a stalemate at
Assandun before coming to an agreement – Edmund would rule Wessex and Kent
(everything south of the Thames) and Cnut would rule Mercia, East Anglia and
Northumbria (everything north of the Thames). Edmund died later that year on 30
November 1016, leaving Cnut as sole ruler of England.
Cnut soon proved himself to be an astute and effective
ruler. After he had paid off his army and fleet, he decided to keep the Geld –
the land tax (the first of its kind since the disappearance of the ancient
Roman land tax in the West in the sixth and seventh centuries AD) introduced in
the reign of Aethelred, funnily enough for the purpose of paying off the Danes.
He used the Geld to fund a permanent standing fleet and to pay for permanent standing
contingents of troops, the huscarls and the lithsmen. As the historian James
Campbell has argued while calling these contingents a standing army may be
straining a point, to deny them the functions of a standing army would be to
miss a point as they were paid annually, included men of varied status and
served as a mobile field force, as garrisons, as the nucleus of a larger army
supplemented by levied free men and as tax collectors (see James Campbell, the
Anglo-Saxon State, pp 201 – 206). In effect, Cnut created a kind of embryonic fiscal
military state not unlike that of the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm I of
Brandenburg-Prussia (r.1640 – 1688) many centuries later. In 1020 Cnut,
following in the tradition of Anglo-Saxon kings going back to the seventh
century, issued a royal law code written in Old English (Anglo-Saxon
administrative documents were mostly written in the vernacular, rather than
Latin) that as well as containing new laws also provided authoritative compilations
of earlier law codes. the laws of King Ine of Wessex (688 – 726), King Alfred
the Great and King Edgar the Peaceful (r.959 – 975), thus signally his respect
for his Anglo-Saxon predecessors and for his subjects’ native traditions of law
and government. Cnut also created a substantially reconstituted and remodelled
England’s governing class. Much of the West Saxon nobility had been decimated
in the renewed Viking invasions from 991 to 1016, and many other figures would
soon fall following Cnut’s rise to power, including the treacherous royal
counsellor Eadric Streona (a possible inspiration for Wormtongue in Tolkein’s Lord
of the Rings). Cnut replaced the various ealdormanries with a smaller number of
provincial earldoms and appointed trusted subordinates to be in charge of them
as earls – an earldom was essentially a provincial governorship, it was not yet
the hereditary noble title it would later become. Some of his appointees were native
Anglo-Saxons/ Englishmen from lesser thegnly (gentry) backgrounds – for example,
Godwin was appointed Earl of Wessex and Kent and Leofric was appointed Earl of
Mercia. But he also appointed a number of Scandinavians – firstly Thorkell the
Tall then Osgod Clapa served as earls of East Anglia and Siward (who features
in Shakespeare’s Macbeth) as Earl of Northumbria. Whether or not this meant that
he created a loyal and efficient service aristocracy or a bunch of overmighty
subjects has been much debated by historians since the late nineteenth century.
All in all, through a mixture of effective statecraft and strategic use of
royal patronage supplemented by political communication that signalled
continuity with his predecessors, Cnut managed to consolidate a firm hold over
England. A clear sign of how much political stability and internal and external
peace England enjoyed under Cnut was that he was able to go on a pilgrimage to
Rome in 1027. There, he nabbed a chance to attend the coronation of the Holy
Roman Emperor, Conrad II (d.1037), the first emperor of the Salian dynasty
(c.1024 – 1125), at St Peter’s, making him the first (and last) English king to
attend an imperial coronation.
Cnut also expanded his power to other realms, creating what
some historians have called a “North Sea Empire.” In 1018, after his brother
Harald II’s death, he became King of Denmark, and began to win some influence
and possibly overlordship over the Norse colonies in Ireland – the coins of the
Norse kings of Dublin from 1017 to 1025 bear Cnut’s quatrefoil legend rather
than the traditional legend of the Norse kings of Dublin. Later in 1027, after
Cnut’s pilgrimage to Rome, King Malcolm II of Scots (the grandfather of the
King Duncan who features in Macbeth – quite a few Shakespeare characters finding
their way into this, aren’t they) would pay homage to Cnut and accept him as
his overlord – this would lead the Burgundian monk Raoul Glaber, writing in the
1030s, to claim that Cnut had some kind of imperial overlordship over all the
British Isles. King Cnut would then exploit an internal political crisis in
Norway to take control there when the Norwegian nobles and peasants, who were
disatissfied by the rule of King Olaf Haraldsson, invited him to become their
king in 1028, and in 1029 Olaf was exiled to the Viking principalities in Russia.
Cnut also managed to, besides his pilgrimage and attendance of Conrad II’s
coronation, deepen ties with Germany with Germany and the Empire and secure Danish
control of Schleswig-Holstein by marrying his daughter Gunhild to Conrad’s son,
Henry (the future Emperor Henry III).
Coin of Olaf Haraldsson
When Cnut died, he left two sons to succeed him. The first
was Harald Harefoot, the son of a concubine or a common law wife (a wife not
married in a church ceremony with ecclesiastical sanction but still recognised
as a wife under Danish law). There was still very little stigma around illegitimacy
in Western Europe in this period (that would only really come into place in the
twelfth century), not least among recently Christianised peoples like the Danes,
so there was no obstacle to Harald Harefoot becoming king. The other was
Harthacnut, the son of Cnut’s wife Emma of Normandy (984 – 1052), the widow of
Aethelred the Unready and mother of Edward the Confessor. Harthacnut succeeded Cnut in Denmark and
Harald Harefoot in England. Harald was opposed by much of the political
community in England, but Earl Godwin was able to sway the Witan in favour of
Harald’s candidacy – maybe he really was an overmighty subject. Harald Harefoot
died in 1040, and was succeeded by Harathacnut. The following year, Harthacnut
invited his half-brother Edward the Confessor, who had spent almost all his
life living in exile in Normandy with his maternal cousins (the dukes of
Normandy), to return to England in 1041, no doubt at the persuasion of his
mother. He was also designated as his successor, with the Witan making it
conditional that Edward agree to uphold the laws of King Cnut and govern the
kingdom justly. A year later Harthacnut died, as recounted by the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle after experiencing a seizure whilst drinking, or perhaps he might
have been poisoned. Thus it was thanks to Cnut’s choice of marriages that
Edward the Confessor was able to come to the throne in 1042 at all, and that,
well, set the stage for everything to come.
Emma of Normandy (a key player in it all) as depicted in the Encomium which she herself commissioned the writing of
As was stated earlier, Cnut was responsible for the rise of
Earl Godwine, and under the new regime, headed by a 40 year-old who had spent
most of his life in France, Earl Godwin managed to use his political leverage, which
as we have already seen was very great, to win more power for his family. He
managed to get Edward to marry his daughter, Edith, and by 1046 four out of seven
earldoms were in the hands of Godwin and his sons Sweyn and Harold. Godwin was
also married to Gytha, a Danish noblewoman and a relative of Cnut’s. Gytha’s
nephew, Sweyn Estridsson, managed to become King of Denmark in 1047 after having
defeated Magnus the Good, the son of the exiled King Olaf of Norway who had
seized control of Denmark and Norway in the power vacuum following Harthacnut’s
death. Sweyn II tried to take control of Norway after Magnus’ death but was prevented
from doing so by a charismatic old-school Viking adventurer, Harald Hardrada,
who the political community in Norway chose instead to be their king. Indeed, before
his invasion of England in September 1066, leading up to the battle of Stamford
Bridge, Harald Hardrada would try to take Denmark off Sweyn on multiple occasions.
Edward and much of the political community in England would
come to resent the overbearing influence of Godwin and his family and in the
late 1040s they did much to discredit themselves. Edith, for whatever reason,
failed to produce Edward a son. Sweyn Godwinson abducted (and possibly raped)
the abbes of Leominster in 1046, had his earldom promptly confiscated and was
sent into exile, before being invited back, murdering his cousin Bjorn and
being sent into exile again in 1049 – he died in Constantinople in 1052, on his
way back from the Holy Land. And Earl Godwin did much to discredit himself when
the Witan vetoed his attempts in 1047 for the English navy to be sent to help
his nephew Sweyn II against Magnus because, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
“it seemed unwise to everybody.” These events would create tensions that would
almost ferment a civil war and result in the entire Godwine family being exiled
from England in 1051. Later in 1051, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Edward
would invite his cousin Duke William the Bastard of Normandy to visit England,
and may have temporarily designated him as his successor (which William may
have then interpreted as binding), thus setting the stage for 1066. Of course,
the Godwin family would bounce back and in January 1066 no one could doubt that
Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex and Kent, was the most powerful magnate in
England, hence why, whether by the prudent decision-making of the Witan or by a
carefully planned coup, he was able to succeed Edward the Confessor as king of
England.
Thus, without Cnut, none of the three contenders in the great
struggle of 1066 – Harold Godwinson, William of Normandy and Harald Hardrada –
would have been in the position to claim the throne of England, indeed Harold
Godwinson wouldn’t have even existed given that Cnut was responsible for
bringing his parents together. Indeed its very odd that William the Conqueror
gets singled out for his Scandinavian connections because his great-great-great
grandfather, Rollo (d.930), was a Viking, while Harold Godwinson was literally
half-Danish. William the Conqueror may have been a direct descendant of Rollo,
but he was also the 8x great-grandson of Charlemagne, and its pretty clear both
from William’s own personality and style of rule and from what mid-eleventh
century Norman government, society and culture was like that the Frankish
heritage mattered a great deal more than the Viking one. But lets not get too sidetracked
from our general conclusion, that the events of Cnut’s reign were fundamental
in setting the stage for the Norman Conquest, and that the events of 1066 were
basically the three most formidable warlords in Northwest Europe fighting over
the debris of Cnut’s legacy.
