Famine – and Apocalypse?

The massacre of 1002 was followed by a great famine, in which not just the cockles but the wheat itself came close to failing as the sense of crisis and apocalypse grew sharper. Aethelred’s reign spanned the year 1000, widely believed to mark the imminent second coming of Christ. A fear of imminent apocalypse is inclined to provoke precisely the crisis which its prophets proclaim. Aethelred’s own administrators and officials were disunited, and vied with one another for a greater share of power. The Danish King, Swein Forkbeard, mounted a full-scale invasion of England, no doubt hoping to seize his own spoils from the coming millennium. In 1013, he inflicted a crushing defeat upon Aethelred’s armies, forcing the King himself to seek exile with his wife’s family in northern France. A brief return in 1014 was followed by Aethelred’s death, and the succession of his son, Edmund Ironside, himself fatally wounded at the battle of Assendon in 1016. London was handed over to the Danes.

Aethelred’s former ministers scrambled to make their own settlements with the victors, including Godwin, a minor official from Sussex, now raised up as the greatest of English quislings under Swein and Swein’s son Cnut. Godwin was married to Cnut’s sister-in-law, and in due course gave Scandinavian names to his eldest sons: Swein, Harold and Tostig. The eldest of these claimed to be not Godwin’s son but Cnut’s, suggesting a degree of intimacy between the two families that extended beyond the council chamber to the royal bed. Cnut himself, meanwhile, had married Aethelred’s widow, an act of sexual imperialism intended to stamp his authority upon the ruling English dynasty as upon England itself, now subsumed within a North Sea empire comprising large parts of Britain and Denmark and with ambitions towards the conquest of Norway. Most of those Englishmen whose careers prospered after the 1040s, and who were to play so crucial a role in the Norman Conquest of 1066, came to maturity in this period of Cnut’s reign, in the aftermath of a Danish Conquest itself no less remarkable than that later mounted by William of Normandy.