Æthelred the Unready
By Levi RoachYale University PressEnglish history can be notoriously both fickle and ruthless when bestowing sobriquets – sometimes simultaneously, as in the case of William the Conqueror/Bastard. Weak King John will always be “Lackland,” just as his equally weak but posthumously luckier brother Richard will always be “the Lionheart.” King Edward's somewhat excessive piety got him branded “the Confessor,” and Queen Mary's zeal against the piety of some of her subjects has made her “Bloody” Mary ever since. Neither the towering Edward III nor the mesmerizing Charles II nor the steadfast George VI nor even the blustering Henry VIII managed to attract that simplest and most prized nickname of them all, the Great.Perhaps the most galling of all these nicknames – galling because it's the most quotidian and therefore somehow feels the most accurate (like calling somebody “the Left-Handed”) – is the one bestowed by posterity on medieval King Æthelred, whose name has been dogged for a thousand years by a little bit of damningly handy word-play: looking at the various calamities of his long reign, it didn't take later writers long to come up with a play on the man's name, Æthelred the Unready.His nickname is the only thing most people have ever heard about him, and it isn't exactly flattering. As University of Exeter history professor Levi Roach points out in his new biography, Æthelred is the only Anglo-Saxon monarch to have a “mocking moniker.” And it does nothing at all to the readiness of the mnemonic that the thing is based on a misreading; the word might make a good rhyme, but it takes its sense from the old meaning of “unready” as “ill-advised,” not “ill-prepared” – it's a governmental criticism, in other words, not a personal one. A man might be rede-less and still be ready.The state of Æthelred's government has been the subject of a handful of critical histories, all of which Roach uses with skill and sensitivity. But he's right in complaining that Æthelred the man is sometimes lost in the pages of these studies, and he's right in praising Simon Keynes's work (particularly the soporifically-titled 1980 book The Diplomas of King Æthelred 'the Unready', 978-1016: A Study of Their Use as Historical Evidence) as groundbreaking in restoring some of the focus on the king himself. Roach's own book, unfailingly measured and clear in its appraisals, represents an enormous step forward in cracking the barnacles of posthumous disdain off of this much-maligned man.This particular man was born somewhere around 968 and grew up surrounded by nicknames. His father was a good king and a good man, a beefy cheerful talker who was known even in his own time as Edgar the Peaceful (he was son to Edmund the Just, who was son to Edward the Elder, who was son to Alfred the Great). His mother was a tall, thin, austere woman named Ælfthryth, and his half-brother Edward, born to a mistress, would come to be known, for all the wrong reasons, as Edward the Martyr: on March 18, 978, when Edward was a cramped, hissing, volatile teenager (and Æthelred was only ten), a dark blot bearing his father's blessing and portending forty years of bad rule, he rode into the courtyard of his stepmother's keep at Corfe in Dorset – and was knifed to death before he could even dismount. He rode into Corfe Castle as Edward the disastrous heir apparent, and two hours later his body was dropped in an offal ditch and Edward the Martyr was born.It was, to put it mildly, a bad way to start a reign, as Roach diplomatically points out:
… one imagines that Æthelred had decidedly mixed feelings about the death of a blood relative (and an anointed one at that) – gratification, perhaps, that his hopes and dreams of rule would be fulfilled, but a gratification tarnished by the underhand manner in which this had come to pass. Indeed, the English realm must have seemed something of a poisoned chalice; if Edward had been a suitable target for an assassin's blade, there was little to say that Æthelred could not be.
Ten-year-old Æthelred was surrounded by his father's old advisors, “ealdormen” of long experience, heavy-browed powerful churchmen and bishops … and his mother, who might just possibly have known what was going to happen to her stepson Edward during his visit to her home that day in March. A popular doom-and-gloom tract – out of Ireland, naturally – at the time was called “The Twelve Abuses of the Age,” and under the heading of rex iniquus, the unjust king, readers were warned that his reign “is said to bring disaster to his nation in the form of foreign invasion.”As Irish mothers have known since before the snakes left, you'll never go wrong predicting the worst. Such predictions were especially easy in this case, because little Æthelred came to power in a kingdom being battered by near-constant waves of foreign invasions. Ever since the first Viking raid, on Lindisfarne in 793, England had been the target of systematic Nordic plundering-raids of advancing complexity and ambition. Major cities like York had been captured and pillaged, and although Æthelred's ancestor Alfred the Great had successfully repelled the Vikings in his own day, the attacks had kept coming, decade after decade. Over the years, including while Æthelred was growing up, the most common kingly response was to pay protection money whose purpose was both to mitigate the severity of the attacks and get those attacks to stop. By the time the young king came of age, this policy of, as Roach puts it, “buying time with money” was fully incorporated into the working model of monarchy – so much so that as Æthelred neared his majority, he seems to have been concentrating on other things, from attacking the deep-rooted powers of the Church and the nobility in his land to kicking against the controls of his mother and the realm's most powerful ealdormen, a little teenage rebellion Roach handles with his usual even-handedness:
Whatever the precise cause, the phenomenon is sufficiently well attested that it need not indicate that Æthelred's regents were particularly overbearing, nor that the young king was particularly defiant. That said, this is exactly how it must have felt to Æthelred: it is clear that he resented the influence of his guardians and sought to escape this at the first opportunity. This is understandable: Ælfthryth was a commanding woman and Æthelwold himself was a man of principle, not compromise – one imagines that they were not the most pliant of regents.
It's easily possible to think that young Æthelred eventually came to miss the very power structure he'd pushed against. The powerful and eloquent Bishop Dunstan died in 988, and Bishop Oswald died in 991, ealdorman Æthelwine died in 992, all of this, as Roach puts it, “leaving Æthelred bereft of his father's old guard of faithful counsellors.” This situation is almost certainly the root of whatever nebulous posthumous judgement would later solidify into Æthelred being “rede-less,” a man acting without wise counsel.He'd have greater need of that wise counsel than most English monarchs, because during his reign the scale and dedication of the Viking attacks that visited his real periodically increased by an order of magnitude. This plague of plundering reached a terrifying peak in 991 at the Battle of Maldon, in which a tightly organized band of two or three thousand Viking warriors routed a force of English defenders and killed the powerful warlord of Essex. In the bleak aftermath, Æthelred was urged by all his advisors to formalize the “Danegeld” in the form of an enormous cash payment to buy off the invaders.It did little good; protection money never does. The Vikings kept harrying coastal England, and the king sought a tighter alliance with Duke Richard of Normandy partly in the hope of encouraging Normandy to stop being such a reliable safe haven for Viking fleets. The alliance took the form of Æthelred marrying Richard's strong-willed daughter Emma in 1002, and its main unintended by-product may have been an increase in Æthelred's paranoid overconfidence: in November of 1002, acting it seems on rumors and sketchy leads, the king ordered the execution of all the Danes then living in England. There's some question about how serious or widespread the actual bloodshed was, but regardless the event that came to be known as the St. Brice's Day Massacre, much like the murder of Edward the Martyr only more directly, became a dark stain on Æthelred's legacy, a stain that presents a fairly formidable obstacle to a biographer seeking to give his subject a new and perhaps sympathetic polish. Roach gives it his best try:
It is not hard to understand historians' distaste for the St Brice's Day Massacre, which raises ghosts of Europe's more recent experiences with genocide and ethnic cleansing. Still, we do not have to approve of Æthelred's actions in order to comprehend them. Indeed, for all that modern parallels may inform, it is important to bear in mind that this act was not on the same scale, nor was it probably intended to be.
The St. Brice's Day Massacre caused violent aftershocks, the foremost of which has always had a pleasingly novelistic derivation: the story went that one of the victims killed during the massacre was the beloved sister of King Swein Forkbeard of Denmark – and that this death fueled the Viking king's wrath to such a pitch that he invaded England the following year with a very large and determined army and ransacked the country with single-minded discipline in an annual series of assaults until finally, in 1013, he managed to conquer it all. Æthelred fled to Normandy with his family, and Forkbeard was acclaimed King of England.Being a rapacious bloodthirsty homicidal maniac can be wearing on one's arteries, however, and a little more than a month after Swein's ad hoc coronation, he keeled over dead. The succession back in Denmark carried on in its time-honored way, but in England, the very large Viking force hailed one of Forkbeard's younger sons, an energetic, charismatic man named Canute, to be the country's new king.This didn't sit well with the old king, naturally. A consortium of England's relegated power brokers, after a taste of proxy rule from Denmark, had been scheming to restore Æthelred to power – having first extorted from him sweeping but meaningless concessions to be a kinder and more just ruler than he'd been in the past (he was the first English king-in-exile to make these kinds of promises, but he wouldn't be the last) – and not long after King Forkbeard's pickled corpse was sent on its way back to Denmark, Æthelred was back on English soil, fighting for every inch of that soil with his rival king, Canute.Æthelred died in April of 1016 with that fight still raging and its outcome very much in doubt – indeed, as Roach's account makes clear, there's a strong argument to be made that Æthelred stopped being king when he fled the country in 1013: his conqueror had taken his crown by force, and that crown had been passed on to the conqueror's son, who held it by force against an invading usurper and would fight for it successfully against the usurper's son Edmund (nicknamed “Ironside,” proving once again the bad luck Æthelred had with nicknames) … legitimate English successions are made of precisely this kind of stuff.It underscores the desperate look of Æthelred's reign, which began in fratricide, bottomed out in genocide, and ended striving for regicide. “It is important to go beyond the simple task of seeking silver linings beside clouds,” Roach writes a trifle awkwardly:
The contention of the present book is less that Æthelred was a 'good' king than that he is too complex and interesting to be dismissed as a 'bad' or 'weak' one. Or, in other words, if Æthelred failed – and in some sense he clearly did – it is our task to understand why.
A later writer, while setting up a straw man of approval to attack, tells his readers that he's heard it related that King Æthelred “was neither very foolish nor excessively cowardly.” That writer then goes on to demolish the memory of the old king, and Roach is not the first historian to point out the obviously political nature of virtually all the sources for Æthelred's life and times. He was a king who not only spent vast sums of money paying the Vikings not to sack his kingdom but also ended up losing that kingdom to a Viking king in the end anyway; for any number of perfectly human reasons, such a king makes a very tempting target. Even as late in the day as 1952, the great Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness felt free to take a gleeful swipe at Æthelred in his mordantly funny novel Gerpla (here translated by Philip Roughton): “Many Englishmen came to parley with King Sweyn and pledge him their allegiance, stating that they preferred their king to be a foreign, heathen patricide and sworn enemy of Christians than a native, devout Christian king who carved bones in peacetime and vomited in wartime, and never commanded his troops against anyone but his own subjects.”But in fact, Roach doesn't go as far as he could have in his mild-mannered attempts to rehabilitate the memory of poor maligned Æthelred the Unready: here was a young king who came to power in the most precarious of possible circumstances and yet quickly asserted his own will against his half-brother's assassins; a young king who sought to curb the overweening power of the splendid nobles and churchmen of his day; a young king whose legal and social reforms get a refreshing amount of attention from Roach but none at all from popular historical memory; a young king who faced repeated, implacable invasions-waves that came crashing against his unevenly prepared country; a young king who acted with punitive decisiveness against the enemy lodged inside his borders … a young king, in other words, who faced a bewildering array of challenges for four decades while better-nicknamed men all around him were losing, falling, compromising, and dying. It's a story full of bloody frustrations, yes, but it lacks only the right bard to find Æthelred the Fighter somewhere in the jumble of beached longships, burning thatch, and satchels of appeasing silver.Roach's book is the most extensive and convincingly balanced life of Æthelred the Unready to appear in many years. It isn't quite a bard's account, but it briefly raises the hope that such an account might soon appear.It's a fleeting hope, alas. Coming next year in the Yale English Monarchs Series? Canute … nicknamed the Great.____Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston. He reviews for The National, The American Conservative, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.
