England's Royal Dynasties Part 5: Edgar the Peaceable to Æthelred the Unready – Danegeld and Decline

This is Part 5 of England's Royal Dynasties, our daily series on the kings and queens of England and Britain, from the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to King Charles III.

In Part 4 we watched Edward the Elder, Æthelflæd and Athelstan turn Alfred's Wessex into a single kingdom of England. This part covers the next two generations, and it reads like a rise and a fall. Edgar the Peaceable ruled a rich, settled kingdom and was crowned in a ceremony that still shapes British coronations. His son Æthelred inherited that kingdom as a child, faced the return of the Vikings and ended up paying them tens of thousands of pounds of silver, only to be driven into exile by a Danish king.

How do we know?

Our main narrative source is again the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. For Edgar's reign it is short and partly written in verse, including a poem on his coronation at Bath. For Æthelred's reign the main account was written after his death by someone who knew how the story ended, and it is bitter: again and again the English army gathers, achieves nothing and goes home. Historians treat that tone with some care, because it was shaped by the defeat of 1016.

We also have the kings' law codes, hundreds of charters, a large surviving coinage, and church writings such as the lives of the reforming bishops. Later writers of the twelfth century, such as John of Worcester and William of Malmesbury, add colourful stories. Where a story comes only from them, we will say so.

Edgar's road to the throne

Athelstan died in 939 without children. His half-brothers Edmund I (939–946) and Eadred (946–955) spent much of their reigns fighting to keep York and the north, which repeatedly took Scandinavian kings. Edmund was killed in a brawl in 946. The last Viking king of York, Eric Bloodaxe, was driven out and killed in 954, and after that the north stayed in English hands.

Edmund's sons followed. The elder, Eadwig (Edwy), became king in 955 while still a teenager, quarrelled with leading churchmen and, in 957, lost the lands north of the Thames to his younger brother. Edgar was chosen king in Mercia and the Danelaw in 957, and when Eadwig died in 959 he became king of all the English, aged about 16.

Edgar the Peaceable (r. 959–975)

Edgar's nickname, "the Peaceable", describes his reign rather than his character. There were no major Viking invasions and no great battles. That was partly luck, but it also reflected strength. Edgar kept a powerful fleet, and the Welsh and Scottish kings acknowledged his overlordship.

The coronation at Bath, 973

Edgar had been king for fourteen years before his most famous ceremony. On Whitsunday, 11 May 973, he was crowned and anointed at Bath by Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury. The Chronicle celebrates it in verse:

Here was Edgar, of Angles lord, with courtly pomp hallow'd to king at Akemancester, the ancient city; whose modern sons, dwelling therein, have named her Bath.

Why wait so long? One common explanation is that Edgar was then about 30, the age at which a man could become a priest, so the timing made kingship look almost sacred. This is a historians' theory, not something the sources state. What is certain is the result. Bath Abbey calls the ceremony the template for all later coronations, including that of King Charles III in 2023. Even a small detail survives: two bishops led Edgar into the church, and two bishops, today those of Bath and Wells and of Durham, still stand beside the monarch at a coronation. Edgar's queen, Ælfthryth, was also crowned, the first consort known to have been crowned queen of England.

Soon afterwards Edgar sailed with his fleet to Chester, where, says the Chronicle, six kings met him and promised to be "his allies by sea and by land". Two centuries later the story had grown: John of Worcester has eight kings rowing Edgar along the River Dee while he steered. The meeting is recorded early; the rowing is the later embellishment.

Government and the church

Edgar's kingdom was one of the best-governed in Europe. A single coinage, re-minted to a standard design across the country around the 970s, is a sign of strong royal control. English law continued under shire courts and royal officials, while Edgar allowed the Danish-settled areas to keep their own customs.

His reign is best remembered for the Benedictine Reform. With three powerful churchmen, Dunstan of Canterbury, Æthelwold of Winchester and Oswald of Worcester and York, Edgar backed the replacement of married clergy with monks living under the Rule of St Benedict. A common rule for English monasteries, the Regularis Concordia, was agreed at Winchester. Monastic writers loved him for it, which is one reason his reputation is so shining.

Edgar died on 8 July 975, aged only about 31, and was buried at Glastonbury.

Edward the Martyr (r. 975–978)

Edgar left two young sons by different mothers. The elder, Edward, became king, but the nobles were split, and some backed his half-brother Æthelred, the son of Queen Ælfthryth. On 18 March 978, Edward visited Corfe in Dorset, where Æthelred was living, and was killed by Æthelred's retainers. The Chronicle calls it the worst deed done among the English since they came to Britain. Edward was soon honoured as a saint, which is why he is known as "the Martyr". Later stories blamed Ælfthryth herself, but no contemporary source says so.

Æthelred II (r. 978–1013 and 1014–1016)

Æthelred was still a boy (his exact birth date is unknown) and was crowned at Kingston in 979. He would reign for 38 years, one of the longest reigns of the Anglo-Saxon period, but it began under the shadow of his brother's murder.

The Vikings return

Viking raids resumed in 980. These were different from the settler armies of Alfred's time. They were professional fleets from Denmark and Norway, often led by ambitious kings, who came for silver. On 10 or 11 August 991 a fleet defeated and killed Ealdorman Byrhtnoth of Essex at Maldon, a battle remembered in a famous Old English poem. In the poem the Vikings are trapped on Northey Island by the tide, and Byrhtnoth, "in his pride", lets them cross the causeway to fight a fair battle, which they win. In the same year, said the Chronicle, "it was resolved that tribute should be given, for the first time, to the Danes": 10,000 pounds of silver.

Danegeld

These payments are now known as Danegeld, a word used later; at the time it was simply "tribute" or "gafol". The Chronicle records the amounts climbing: 16,000 pounds in 994, 24,000 in 1002, an even larger sum in 1007, and 48,000 in 1012. Paying bought time but encouraged more raiders. A Chronicle entry for 1006, in a modern translation, sums it up: "in spite of it all, the Danish army went about as it pleased."

There is a surprising piece of evidence for this: large numbers of English silver pennies of Æthelred's reign have been found in Scandinavia, where much of the tribute ended up.

The St Brice's Day massacre, 1002

In 1002, said the Chronicle, the king "gave an order to slay all the Danes that were in England", because he had been told they planned to kill him and his council. It was carried out on 13 November, St Brice's Day. In reality it could not have meant every Scandinavian-descended person in the Danelaw. A royal charter of 1004 confirms that in Oxford, Danes who took refuge in St Frideswide's church were burnt inside it.

Collapse, 1009–1016

A huge Viking army led by Thorkell the Tall ravaged southern England from 1009 to 1012 and captured Archbishop Ælfheah of Canterbury, who refused to let himself be ransomed and was killed by drunken Vikings at Greenwich in 1012. In 1013 Sweyn Forkbeard, king of Denmark, invaded in earnest. The north submitted to him, then the rest of the country, and Æthelred fled to Normandy, where his second wife Emma was the duke's sister.

Sweyn died in February 1014. The English council invited Æthelred back, on condition that he "govern them better than he did before". He returned, but the struggle against Sweyn's son Cnut went on, and Æthelred died in London on 23 April 1016. His son Edmund Ironside fought five campaigns against Cnut that year before losing the Battle of Assandun in October, and died on 30 November, leaving Cnut king of all England.

Legend vs evidence

"Unready" is a mistranslation. His Old English name Æthel-ræd means "noble counsel". The nickname unræd, first recorded long after his death, means "no counsel" or "bad counsel". It is a pun, "Noble counsel, no counsel", not a claim that he was unprepared.

Was he really a failure? For centuries he was seen as weak and cowardly. Many historians now argue that he faced a far stronger enemy than Alfred did, and that his government kept working: it raised enormous taxes, issued laws drafted by Archbishop Wulfstan, and kept minting good coins. The verdict of "bad counsel" may say as much about the chroniclers as about the king.

The Oxford skeletons. In 2008 archaeologists found the remains of more than 30 young men (reports give 34 to 37) in a mass grave at St John's College, Oxford, and the find was widely linked with St Brice's Day. A later study of their bones suggested a Scandinavian origin and a diet with lots of seafood. Some researchers now think they may have been a captured raiding party executed in the same period rather than local victims of the massacre. The link is possible, but not proven.

Where to see it today

• Bath Abbey, Somerset: the present church is later, but it stands on the site of Edgar's coronation, and the abbey marked the 1,000th anniversary in 1973.
• Corfe Castle, Dorset (National Trust): the later castle ruins stand above the place where Edward the Martyr was killed.
• Maldon, Essex: the causeway to Northey Island is linked to the battle of 991.
• St John's College, Oxford, which marks St Brice's Day and the 2008 burials.
• Coins of Edgar and Æthelred in the British Museum and in Scandinavian museums.

At a glance

Next in the series

In Part 6 England becomes part of a Scandinavian empire. We follow Sweyn Forkbeard and his son Cnut the Great, who married Æthelred's widow Emma, ruled England, Denmark and Norway, and gave his name to a famous story about the waves. Until then, read more about the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons, or go back to Alfred's wars in Part 3.

Sources

• The Royal Family, Edgar (r. 959–975)
• The Royal Family, Ethelred II 'The Unready' (r. 978–1013 and 1014–1016)
• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, tenth-century entries and eleventh-century entries, Avalon Project, Yale Law School
• Bath Abbey, The coronation of King Edgar
• English Heritage (1995), Battlefield Report: Maldon 991, published by Historic England
• St John's College, Oxford, Remembering St Brice's Day at St John's
• A. M. Pollard et al. (2012), 'Sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat': the St Brice's Day massacre and the isotopic analysis of human bones from St John's College, Oxford, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 31:1
• BBC News (2012), St John's College skeletons 'may belong to Viking raiders'