Edgar’s coronation ceremony impressed contemporaries – as was intended – and it is the first English coronation of which a full account survives. It also impressed foreigners as well since its text, almost unaltered, was used for coronation ceremonies as far afield as Normandy, Hungary, Milan and perhaps Poland. Even the French coronation, which had at first so influenced the West Saxon, now adopted the magnificent structures, rhythms and rhetoric of Edgar’s service. What is most remarkable of all, however, is that the substance of Edgar’s service has endured in England to the present, so that the same rituals were enacted and often the same words (in English rather than in Latin) rang out in Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953 when Elizabeth II was crowned queen, aged twenty-seven and a week after Whitsuntide.
II
Only two years after the ceremony in Bath, Edgar died, still only in his early thirties. Immediately there was trouble, since, for all the political sophistication of England, there were no fixed rules of succession. Edgar left two surviving sons: the elder, Edward, by his first wife, and the younger, Æthelred, by his third, Ælfthryth. Edward was crowned king at Kingston. But Ælfthryth, who had shared in the triumph of Edgar’s second coronation at Bath, felt that her son should have taken precedence. The opponents and advocates of monastic reform, the political hot potato of the day, also took sides: the former supported Æthelred and the latter Edward. The result was one of the darkest deeds in Anglo-Saxon history. On 18 March 978, only three years after his accession, Edward was attacked and killed at Corfe in Dorset by his half-brother’s retainers, probably on the orders of his stepmother. Edward seems to have been a violent and unattractive young man, but the manner of his death meant that he quickly joined St Edmund as one of England’s two most popular royal saints. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle commemorated the transformation from sinful king to royal martyr in verse:
Men him murdered,
But God him glorified.
He was in life an earthly king;
He is now after death a heavenly saint.
Despite the horror at the assassination, the murder succeeded in its purpose and Æthelred became king.
Æthelred II had one of the longest reigns in English history and is still remembered today as one of our most disastrous kings. This is largely because of his nickname: ‘Æthelred the Unready’. The proper Anglo-Saxon form of his nickname, however, was Unraed, that is, ‘badly advised or counselled’. It is a pun on his name Æthelred, which means ‘noble counsel’, and it is a product of hindsight first appearing almost a century after his death.
It is also unfair, at least for the earlier decades of the reign. True, his brother’s murder tainted his accession and Æthelred himself sowed wild oats in his youth. But, by the 990s, England was enjoying something of a golden age of church-building, and legal and administrative reform. It had also developed a politics of astonishing maturity. There was a rich and powerful aristocracy, whose ranks included scholars and eccentrics as well as soldiers and statesmen. At its apex stood the royal court. This too was peopled with familiar figures: there was a scheming queen mother, an ambitious, foreign queen consort and an unpopular and, as it turned out, treacherous royal favourite. The witan, which looked more and more like a proto-parliament, solemnly debated the issues of the day but rarely came up with a solution. Taxes rose to unheard-of levels. There were scandals, faction-fighting and palace coups. Give or take the odd murder or mutilation, it is a picture that could come from any time in the next thousand years of English history, till the death of aristocratic politics in the second half of the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, the essential charge against Æthelred II remains. In his reign, England faced a renewed Viking attack. His ancestor Alfred had made his name and his dynasty’s reputation by the courage and resourcefulness with which he had seen off the first. Æthelred, in contrast, failed either to muster an adequate response himself or to inspire others to do so. The result was more than a personal failure. For, without adequate royal leadership, the English achievement of the tenth century turned against itself and the country became a rich, tempting and finally defenceless prey.
The Vikings had always been a dangerous enemy. But, when they returned to England in the 990s, they were stronger and better organized than ever. This was because, in Denmark as in England, the previous century had seen a rapid growth in royal power. Probably under the leadership of their first Christian king, Harold Bluetooth, the Danes had created a formidable military machine. It centred on purpose-built, circular fortresses, such as Trelleborg on the west coast of the island of Zealand. They are laid out with geometrical precision and embody engineering and organizational skills of a high order.
Trelleborg’s initial purpose was to enable the Danish king to impose order on Denmark itself. But the Danish warrior-elite did not take kindly to order and there were many rebels. These rebels, dispossessed at home, probably formed the first wave of the renewed Viking attack on England. But they did so well that the Danish kings decided to take over the campaign themselves. The full force of the formidable military machine of Trelleborg was now to be turned on England. It was blitzkreig, even shock and awe, as the English troops assembled on the East Anglian coast were about to find out.
In 991, the Viking fleet sacked Ipswich and then made landfall on an island in the Blackwater estuary near Maldon in Essex. The whole of eastern England was threatened. The Danes’ first move was to send a messenger to the English, demanding money to buy them off. The English commander, the ealdorman Byrhtnoth, retorted that they should come across the causeway, which linked the island to the mainland at low water, and fight it out like men.
The battle began badly for the English, as Byrhtnoth, who was easily picked out by his height and grey hair, was killed in the first engagement. But his men, outnumbered and outgeneralled though they were, fought on till they were overwhelmed. It was a defeat, but, in its way, a glorious one. The result was that, like the victory of Brunanburgh, the defeat at the Blackwater became the subject of another notable Anglo-Saxon war poem: The Battle of Maldon. The poem captures perfectly the Dunkirk spirit of the doomed army. But it also tells us in remarkable detail about the men who composed it: these are no faceless, helmeted figures, but real, named individuals. There is an aristocrat from the Midlands, called Ælfwine, a local man, the Essex ceorl (yeoman) called Dunnere, and, from far-off Northumbria, a warrior called Æscferth.
So every region of England was represented in this roll-call of the army and each rank of society from the top almost to the bottom. The result was to emphasize the unity of England as a country in which a common sense of nationhood overrode distinctions of locality and class. The poem is propaganda, of course; but it is unusual propaganda at a time when, in most of Europe, horizons were much narrower and loyalty to a local warlord came first and last.
The Battle of Maldon may succeed as literature. But it failed to stimulate another, Alfredian, campaign of resistance. Instead, in the immediate aftermath of the defeat, the English decided, on the advice of the archbishop of Canterbury, to pay a tribute or Danegeld to the Vikings. The intention was to persuade them to leave; the result, of course, was to encourage them to come back for more. And with each raid the violence, and the payments, rose: £10,000 was paid in 991, £16,000 in 994, £24,000 in 1002 and £30,000 in 1007.
The Viking campaign of 1006–7 marked a turning point. Thoroughly contemptuous now of the lack of effective English resistance, the raiders behaved with a flamboyant insolence. They made camp at Cuckhamsley Hill, the meeting place of the Shire Court of Berkshire. And they marched with their spoil past the gates of Winchester itself. They had struck into the heart of Wessex, and neither the shires nor the burhs, it seemed, availed anything. The reason, of course, was that these were