The Rest Is History - 549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Following the bloody St Brice’s Day Massacre, of the 13th of November 1002, which saw King Æthelred brutally exterminating the Danes from England, the Vikings were hungry for revenge. None more so than the terrifying Scandinavian King, Sweyn Forkbeard. Having capitalised on his famous father, Harold Bluetooth’s unification of Norway and Denmark, through his aggressive christianisation of the formerly pagan peoples there, Sweyn had built up a formidable force. It was this power that Æthelred had unwisely taunted, underestimating the might of the Danes. He would pay the price only a few short months later when Sweyn’s terrible fleet landed at Wilton Abbey in Wessex - one of the greatest symbols of the House of Alfred the Great - to bleed England dry, and destroy her King. Time and time again, from this date onwards, Sweyn’s Danish raids would devastate England, even going so far as to lock the Archbishop of Canterbury in a cage…by 1013 Æthelred’s reign was essentially over, his family having fled to Normandy, and England under Danish rule. But then, the death of Sweyn Forkbeard would change everything, setting in motion another titanic war of succession, this time pitting the Scandinavian Cnut against Æthelred’s son Edmund Ironside. Who would triumph in this climactic clash of would-be kings? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the revenge of the vikings and the rise of Cnut, as 1066 and the Battle of Hastings loom into view... EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restishistory Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is the restishistory.com. When you get into an Escape Plug-in Hybrid, you get the perfect mix. You can chill in electric mode, You get the perfect mix. You can chill in electric mode, turn it up in gas mode, or get the best of both in hybrid mode. Choose how you move in the all-in-one Escape.

And right now, get 0% APR purchase financing for up to 60 months on the 2025 Escape plug-in hybrid. For details, visit your Toronto Area Ford store or ford.ca. Strange tales were told of Olaf Trigvasson's return to Norway. One day it was claimed the new king was in a fit mood to be entertained. At his side there suddenly appeared an old man, cloaked and white-haired, with only a single eye. Entering into conversation with the stranger, Trigvasson found that there was nothing the old man did not seem to know, nor any question to which he could not give an answer.

All evening the two of them talked, and even though the King was eventually persuaded to retire to bed by a twitchy English bishop who had grown suspicious of the one-eyed stranger, Trigverson could still not bear to end the conversation but continued it even as he lay on his furs late into the night. At last the old man left him, and the king fell asleep. But his dreams were strange and feverish, and waking up abruptly he cried out for the stranger again.

Even though his servants searched high and low, however, the old man could not be found, and Trigverson, brought to his senses by daylight, shuddered at his close escape. When it was reported to him that two sides of beef, a gift from the stranger, had been used in a stew, he ordered the entire cooking pot flung out. A godly and responsible act, for clearly it was out of the question for him as a follower of Christ to feast on meat supplied by Odin. Well that riveting passage finally wrought prose that was produced by none other than

our very own Hollywood's own Tom Holland in his book Millennium It's about the end of the world and the forging of Christendom. Is that what the subtitle of the book? Yeah, that kind of stuff exactly I thought a nice compliment to the reading from your own book on this subject with which we ended the previous episode So a nice segue there a perfect match We ended last time with a reading from Fury of the Vikings. Listeners may remember that Danish refugees in the wake of a terrible massacre in the towns and villages of England have fled across the North Sea to Scandinavia to bring the news to the Danish King and revenge is coming. So today in this mighty series about the events of 1066, we

turn from England to Scandinavia, to the Northlands. We look north to the world of the Vikings, which is now beginning to change. And that opening reading about Olaf Trigvason rejecting Odin's beef is a reminder of the throes of cultural and social change that are transforming Scandinavia. So Tom, you talked last time about this guy Olaf Trigverson. He is a terrifying, slightly sinister Viking leader who had beaten an English army in 991 at the Battle of Malden, who had led all these pillaging raids across southern England and has extorted a huge amount of silver from England's King Æthelred the Unready. But Olaf Trigversen is an embodiment of change in himself, isn't he?

Because he's converted to Christianity and he's been paid off by Ethelred and he has gone back to Norway. So tell us a little bit about him and why he matters. Yeah. So he's returned to Norway, the North way, the great road that kind of winds up the coast of Norway. And he is setting about transforming himself from a pagan Viking chieftain into the intimidating figure of a Christian king.

And he does this with the same buccaneering enthusiasm that he had shown in extorting cash from the English. So he goes up and down the North way and he smashes idols and he menaces local pagan leaders and he forces conversions of his countrymen at the point of a sword and he throws out Odin's beef. And I think as that story suggests, his conversion is up to a point pretty genuine. But the question then is why, why would he having imposed himself so formidable on our Christian kingdom, why would he then convert to the God of the seeming losers? And I think the answer is that everything he does is very finely calculated to make him look good, to kind of redound to his glory, to add to his potency and power.

And the truth is that even though he had extorted money from the English, he can do that because England is rich. And I think he has seen enough of, you know, this great Christian kingdom ruled by Athelred to think, well, I would quite like a bit of what Athelred has. Yeah. You know, he may, we may think of him as a loser, but Athelred is heir to Alfred the great.

He's a figure of dignity, of splendor, of wealth, and Olaf wants it. To worship Odin is basically to be parochial, to be poor, to be someone who has to be a predator and to worship Christ is to be powerful and rich and possessed of enough silver if you have to, to kind of give it out. Yeah, I think it's important for people to get that into their heads, isn't it? The Christianization of Scandinavia is the moment that really marks the end of the Viking Age. But it's not because these warlords think kindness is brilliant and I love turning the

other cheek and all that kind of thing. It's because they think Christianity is a winner's religion. People who are Christians are rich, they're powerful. And also if you're a king, you know, to have one religion, one God, that sounds great. You know, get everyone to believe the same thing and therefore believe in you. And I think it's more than just about belief. God. That sounds great. You know, get everyone to believe the same thing and therefore believe in you. And I think it's more than just about belief. It's also about the apparatus of power that Christianity provides because it's very much a literate civilization. You have bishops

who can serve you as ministers that could then enable you to kind of construct the kind of kingdom that you find in England. It enables you to have more sophisticated ways, essentially of raising troops. And therefore the offer is that you can be even more bloodthirsty and extort even more money. Ultimately is the kind of the base practical reason for it. And the degree to which this is something that is very much in the air in the early 11th century is the fact that Olaf Trigvasson is not the first Viking

warlord to have clocked this. So south of the North Way you go across these icy reef strewn waters that separate Norway from Denmark and there you come to the flatlands of Jutland and there stands the seat of the kings of Denmark. And we talked in the first episode about how England is very precocious but it's not entirely unique because in Denmark at the same time as the Kyrgyz, the great dynasty of Alfred the Great, are establishing their rule over a United Kingdom of England, a dynasty of kings in Denmark are doing much the same thing. And they set up a great kind of showcase

of their dynasty's power at a place called Yelling, which is in the heart of Jutland. And it is, you know, we've already alluded to Tolkien. It is like something out of Lord of the Rings. It's a place of ancient graves and you've got gold ringed warriors with their swords and their spears standing on guard outside kind of great halls, great feasting halls. And you also have two huge mounds of earth that had been raised by Gorm.

It's a great name. Gorm the Old. Gorm the Old, who is the founder of this dynasty and had been a pagan. But the amazing thing is, is that between these two great barrows, these two great pagan piles of earth, there stands a church. And beside the church, there is a great block of granite that has been carved into the stone with an image of a crucified Christ who is entangled with serpents and it's inscribed with runes. And these runes read, and I quote, King Harold had this memorial made for Gorm, his father,

and Fiery, his mother, that same Harold who joined together all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes to be Christian. Yeah, it's an amazing site actually. I'll tell you what, it's accessible within half a day from Legoland. I know, I remember it well. It's an excellent trip. The Danish Tourist Board, if they want to sponsor us, they really ought to because I recommend it to the listeners as a long weekend. You can knock off Legoland and the Yelling Stones in the same trip. And of course this matters because these stones, the inspiration, the guy who set them up King Harold, you mentioned his, his nickname is Bluetooth and these stones showing the

integration of, of pagan and Christian. And of course, um, all Denmark and Norway being joined together are the inspiration for Bluetooth technology. Would you believe? Yes. And the symbol for Bluetooth as kind of fusion of the runes for H and B. So that the two initials of Harold Bluetooth. Yeah.

And the idea behind naming that technology Bluetooth was this idea that Harold had joined together Denmark and Norway. In fact, it was just the southern reaches of Norway. Like this is teaching all the world to sing Kumbaya. Wonderful. Of course, I mean, there was nothing touchy feely about it at all. It was a very brutal process of conquest. And you can see in this kind of great rock, this great stone with the symbol of Christ carved on it, that the process of conquest is being elided with the process of becoming Christian. And as you said, to be the servant of a kind of single omnipotent God rather than a whole host of gods, this is to be a Caesar.

This is potentially to have power that is far more prestigious than anything that the pagan world could offer. And of course, as we said, also it brings bureaucracy and bureaucracy in turn enables the organization of a treasury and a treasury enables the commissioning of infrastructure and the building of ships and the arming of ever larger armies. And the Danish king who best demonstrates this is not Harold himself, but his son, Svein Forkbeard, who at the end of the last episode, you reminded us, had cold blue eyes.

In his cold blue eyes, Tom, there was only death. Because Svein Forkbeard has just heard the news of the massacre of Danes in England. And he has also, according to some sources, heard that one of the victims is his own sister, Gunnhilde. Right. And this is a man with whom you do not want to mess. So Tietmar, the Bishop of Merseburg, said that he was, and I quote, not a ruler, but a destroyer.

And Sveinforthbeard, he may be a new kind of Dane in that he is a king in a Christianizing world, and he has more bureaucracy behind him and all of this kind of thing. So he's not a Viking Raider or a Viking Warlord, but he's just as frightening and formidable as the most sinister and blood drenched of Alfred the Great's adversaries or whatever. Yeah, I think he's a much more frightening figure, much more kind of chill and calculating than any of the pagan Vikings actually.

And either the boneless. Yes, precisely because he is starting to kind of institutionalize his menace, but you still have the slight vein of brutal comedy that you often get in Viking epics. So the story of how he comes to power, he actually topples his father, Harold Bluetooth. So in 986, he leads a rebellion against Harold and there are various stories that are told of Harold's ends and The most comical and therefore the one that we will go with Do you tell in your book not necessarily the truest but the one that you you enjoyed the most on I think it's right So yeah, so the father and son have a kind of parley on an island

They're just about you know They've got all their fleets behind them and then Harold Bluetooth goes off to go to the toilet to have a kind of parley on an island. They're just about, you know, they've got all their fleets behind them. And then Harold Bluetooth goes off to go to the toilet to have a dump. And as he sits down to start the process, an arrow is fired and it goes straight up his anus. And this will not be the last toilet themed death that we will be touching on in the course of this series. So Svein had been a comrade of Olaf Trigvason, the guy who rejected Odin's beef, but they are rivals within the world of the North Sea, aren't they?

One of them is Norway, the other is Denmark, basically. Yes. And Svein had fought with Olaf Trigvason at Malden, so was fully aware of his potential and his formidable qualities. And so therefore decides that he's going to have to eliminate him. And one of the many ways I think in which Sveinfortbeard is a frightening figure is that he's a great man for delayed gratification. So he takes his time and he slowly builds up an ever more intimidating force with which to take on the Norwegian king.

And in the year 1000, this great fleet set sail to destroy Olof Trigvison. Trigvison himself is kind of ready for it. He's got an absolutely enormous kind of dragon ship called the Long Serpent, the largest dragon ship ever fashioned. He's got 60 ships that are kind of similarly impressive and intimidating. So these two great armadas sailing out to meet one another, but Falkbeard's force is ultimately far more intimidating. Olaf Triggvissen's fleet is rapidly wiped out and ends with Triggvissen himself, who

has got golden armor, bright red cloak, so kind of very on brand. His enemies have cornered him, they're about to grab him and Olof Trygvason leaps into the sea and when Sveinfoltbeard's men tried to rescue him from the waters, he threw his shield over his head, it is said, and vanished beneath the waves. And so he dies as he had lived as a great Viking hero, a man whose name will be celebrated in song. But Swain Forkbeard has secured for himself power beyond the dreams of any previous Scandinavian king.

Right. So this is I think Swain Forkbeard at this point, who is this very formidable character, of course famous for his beard. We should stress this. He has this forked beard, which I think in itself is quite intimidating. Yeah. So he is the man that Ethel read the unready has basically chosen to provoke. It's mad, but I guess I thought he had no choice.

He just, he thought the Danes were a fifth column and he just had to get rid. But I mean, you've said in your notes that if he'd been facing somebody else, it might've been a reasonable calculation, but as it is, because word is bound to reach Svein Fortbeard, it's, and I quote, the worst policy decision in the whole of English history. I mean, Bridget Phillipson might have something to say about that, Tom. I say there's a case for saying. Yeah, it's in the top two.

I think it's a moral disaster, obviously, because actually murdering people who are your guests in your kingdom is a terrible look, no matter whether you have kind of apocalyptic justifications or not. But I think it's an insane misreading of not just Feind Falkbeard himself, but the capabilities of the Danish kingdom. And I guess the reason that Ethelred misreads it is that he is thinking that Denmark is still the country that it was back in the pagan days. He hasn't clocked the fact that it is starting to become a kingdom very much like his own.

And the consequences are utterly disastrous and I think that anyone in England listening to this who is currently depressed about the state of the country should sit back and reflect on the fact that it was actually a lot worse in the latter years of Ethel Redd's reign. So let's get into Svein Forkbeard's revenge. So he clearly spends the next few months mustering his forces, assembling his fleet, sharpening their swords. And then a few months after the St. Bryce's Day massacre in 1003, he lands in Wessex in the heartland of the English kingdom at the head of this gigantic fleet and

a massive expeditionary force and Tom he wants to bleeding and dry as so many raiders have done but also he's after Ethel Redd's authority the symbols of his authority and he heads for where else for Wiltshire and the Salisbury area. It does. Yeah, he does. So he first of all lands in Devon, but he storms and burns Exeter. And then he marches on my own native county of Wiltshire

and it's county town of Wilton. And Wilton is one of the great symbols of the authority of the Curda Kingz, the dynasty of Alfred the Great, and particularly of its women. So Wilton is the site of an abbey that lies under the particular protection of the royal women of the royal dynasty. And so to attack it in a way is to insult Atharad's masculinity, his inability to defend the property of his women.

And it has a kind of great spiritual potency. So two sisters of Athelstan, the first King of United England had been nuns there. Um, and in nine 55, this is very interesting for me. One of the brothers of Athelstan who had ruled in succession to him as King had granted to the nuns of Wilton, two villages in the nearby chalk Valley. One of them was a village called Bower Chalk and the other was a village called Broad Chalk and that's where I grew up. So this is very much my neck of the woods.

Yeah. And it means that I have a particular devotion to the memory of this great Abbey. Uh, and one of the great saints of the Kerdeg Kengas had also been there. So this is Edgar's daughter Edith and therefore the half sister of Athelred. She'd been very devout, very holy, much loved by the locals for her kind of kindness and generosity, but she'd also been celebrated for her tremendous dress sense. By far the most stylishly dressed nun in England and she had been criticized for this, but God demonstrated his approval of her kind of sassy dress sense by making a burning torch drop into the great chest where she kept her

clothes and the chest got kind of, you know, blackened, but her clothes completely survived. So it was a spectacular miracle. Yeah, that must have definitely happened. Well, you may scoff Dominic, but when she dies, she's only kind of in her late twenties. The memory of this extraordinary miracle is such that she is enshrined as a saint. Golly, well. So what do you say? What do you make of that?

I think it's bonkers, but I mean, God, honestly, mercy and mercy and skepticism. I have no time for Wessex as saints, to be honest with you. I just I look down on them. Well, I think that reflects poorly on you. And maybe you would have been at one with Svein. I would. I would have thrown my lot in with Svein straight away. Svein is marching on Wilton.

He's marching on Wiltshire and the Salisbury area at the head of a marauding, hairy band of Vikings. And of course it's the duty of the elder man of Wiltshire, a guy called Alfrick, to stop them, to preserve this great symbol of West Saxon royal power. And he arrives on the crest of the hill, looking down at Wilton, he sees the Viking horde. All his men are lined up waiting for him to sound the battle Trump. Yeah. And instead he's so terrified that he voids his bow and vomits all over the soil. That is the, that's what I associate with people from that neck of the woods, Tom.

That's the behavior that I've come to recognize. He runs away and Svein torches Wilton, Lutzi Abbe of its gold. And of course, you know, this is devastating to Ather Red in every way. Right. He's lost the money and he's been humiliated. This great symbol of his power has been devastated and Svein makes sure to extort everything that he can and ultimately you know he only leaves in 10.04 after Ethelred has given him yet more Dane Geld. So now we really are into

the routine of Dane Geld aren't we because the issue now is that Svein knows he can just come back again and again, hit England, get more Dane Geld and use that Dane Geld. I mean this is your Kipling lines, you know, if you pay Dane Geld you will never get rid of the Dane because Svein uses that to beef up his army, beef up his fleet and then come back the next year or two years later for more money. Yeah, it's like going to a cash point with somebody else's card. Right because every time the Danes return 10 06 10 09 they are better equipped more

formidable more terrifying. I have to say there's an absolutely brilliant book on this that I read a few years ago by a Norwegian historian called Tore Skaer called the Wolf Age and it does this in basically kind of week by week narrative. And it just goes on and on and on. Of all of these conquests. And they're one of the key characters is a guy called Thorkell the Tall. And he is very tall.

But he's called Thorkell. Yeah. We've established that. So he's really brutal and effective, isn't he? I mean, he keeps looting and pillaging all these towns. And so in 1011, they go for a place that's even more significant than Wilshire in the Salisbury area, which is Canterbury. Yeah, their seat of Christianity in England.

And they capture the archbishop. They lock him up in a cage and they keep him there for six months. And then they hold a great celebratory feast at Greenwich, kind of downriver from London at Easter. Yeah, on Easter Saturday. Yeah. And they get absolutely wasted and they've been eating mighty haunches of beef. And there are great skulls of oxen and bones and stuff. And they all start pelting the archbishop

with these bones and the poor guy dies. Do you know the name of the man who this is so Tolkien, the name of the man who finished the archbishop off he was called thrum. Yeah, Thorkell and thrum. Yeah. And this is again to emphasize just abject humiliation for Atheraed. I mean it's bad enough to see the great Abbey patronized by the women of your dynasty wiped out but to have the archbishop of your kingdom pelted

to death with ox bones, I mean, it doesn't get worse than that really. So in the long run, Ethelred's solution is yet again, financial. He can't fight England. It's interesting, isn't it? That England, despite being so wealthy, just doesn't have the martial tradition, the martial culture. It does. It does. And this is where I think the revisionism on Ethere gets it wrong.

Okay. He has shown that he can fight. I mean, he invaded Scotland. He launched an attack on Normandy. Spoiler alert, his eldest son will show that it's perfectly possible to raise troops and to fight. So why doesn't he do it in a convincing and effective way? I suspect that the humiliations heaped on him has broken his prestige and the resentment of him as a man who just keeps extorting money and handing it over.

Yeah. Is kind of corroding the willingness of people to kind of go the extra length for him. People basically think he's a loser and they don't want to back him up. People do think he's a loser and where I think think he's a loser. And where I think it is, it is reasonable to say that a threat is unlucky is just to emphasize the fact that he is up against something new with this. The fact that Denmark is a state rather than a kind of consortium of Raiders. I think this is something that he hasn't properly clocked, but he really should have done by this point.

He should have fought. And in 1012, I think Ethered decides the policy's not working. What I need to do is to try and specifically buy off some of these raiders and employ them as my mercenaries. And he targets Thorkell the Tall, this guy who had captured the Archbishop of Canterbury, gives him another massive bribe and wins Thorkell over together with 45 ships. Um, but the problem is that this policy, which may be 10 or 20 years before would have worked is a failure because it just makes Svein alarmed.

You know, he doesn't want to think of Athelred teaming up with someone as formidable as Thorkell. And so he decides the time has come for me to invade. And as he had done with Olaf Trigvasson, with Aethelred, he's been playing a very long game and his policy with Aethelred has been to bleed him dry of the lifeblood of silver and then to close in for decapitation. And so in 1013, that is what he does. He sails up the Humber Estuary with a huge invasion force and the Humber estuary effectively,

if you're facing Vikings from across the North sea, is like a dagger point sticking into the heart of England because it leads to York, the great second city of England and which for so long had been a Viking capital. There's loads of Danes in this area. I mean, there are people with Danish surnames. There are Danish place names. Yeah. There are all these people who perhaps for whom it is perhaps not such a stretch

to imagine having a Danish overlord rather than an English one. And it seems pretty clear at this point, doesn't it? Do you agree that Svein he's this isn't another raid. He's like, right, let's finish this now. I'm actually just going to take this over and this is going to become part of my empire. Yeah. He's been planning it and now the moment has come and he combines menace with overtures to the local aristocracy in Mercia and they are so battle scarred and weary that they start accepting Svein's terms and handing

over hostages, offering homage to Svein. And by the end of that year, 1013, Arthur Redd is effectively staring down the barrel. He no longer has the run of his country. He's bottled himself up with Thorkell in London, but he knows that he can't hold out for long, that the whole country now effectively is submitting to the Danish king. And so he orders his queen, the lady Emma, who is of course the sister of the Duke of Normandy, go on board a ship and to take with her their three children. So there's a two boys, Edward and Alfred and a

girl called Giffo. And once they're on the ship to set sail for Normandy. And this will be really important later on the fact that these children, one of whom is called Edward, so listeners should remember him, are disappearing into exile in Normandy to her homeland. Exactly. Arthur still can't quite bring himself to endure the humiliation of seeking sanctuary with the Duke of Normandy.

So instead he leaves London and he kind of hangs out on the Isle of Wight, spends Christmas there and it's miserable because effectively he is now the Viking. His court has shrunk to his fleet and in the year, he kind of gives up and in the dying days of, of 1013. So in the days immediately after Christmas, he, he decides that this is hopeless and he too set sail for the Norman court. So now the dynasty that has ruled England for so long, the dynasty of Alfred and of Edward the elder and of Athelstan has just, has gone off into exile the Danes are the masters of England and a Danish king

and a Danish king. Yeah in Svein Forkbeard and then an unbelievable George RR Martin style twist the 3rd of February 1014. Tell us what happens to Svein Forkbeard Tom. Well he dies and there are conflicting accounts about what exactly happens to him. So some say that he died in his sleep. Others that he fell off his horse and smashed his head. And others say that he was killed by St Edmund, the King of East Anglia, who back in the time of King Alfred had been shot to death by pagan Vikings and had since been enshrined as the great patron saint of the East Angles.

Let's say Edmund had appeared to Svein Forkbeard in a dream and struck him with a pole and that had finished him off. So listeners, make up your own minds. Was he killed by St Edmund in a dream with a pole or did he, as I read in another book, have a stroke near Scunthorpe? How are you basically you can divide the human race into people who think go with the stroke and Scunthorpe or the pole people. Um, what I will also say is again, over the course of this story, um, people dying unexpectedly and often it's mentioned at feasts again, this is an enduring theme

and people might want to ponder whether perhaps foul play was an operation, but we don't know. Anyway, so the Sveinfort Beat is now off the scene. And so the Witan, this great assembly of the elder men, the men who lead the various counties in England, they get together and they decide, ah, actually, maybe we should get Ethelred back. And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives the details of the invitation they sent to Ethelred.

They said, no sovereign was dearer to them than their natural lord. If only he would govern them better than he had previously done. Which yeah, that's not really an endorsement, is it? But Ethelred does obviously come back. He does. So Thorkell switched sides by this point. Thorkell is now back with the Danes. Yes.

But there's a Norwegian on the scene, a guy called Olaf Haraldson and Dominic will be hearing about him again soon. He's a very stout man. Very stout. Yes. And very saintly in the long run despite being very murderous. So Olaf Haraldson helps capture London for Atharad from the Danes. He sails up the Thames and he pulls down London Bridge.

I'm never entirely sure how pulling down London Bridge helps him. But he does. And there's a kind of, there is a thesis that this is the origins of the nursery rhyme London Bridge is falling down. The other great champion of the English resistance to the Danes is Ethered's eldest son. So that's not by Emma, but by a previous queen. This is a guy called Edmund. He had scorned to flee England when Ethered and his sons by Emma had gone.

He'd stayed in England. He's very charismatic. He's very brave. And he's so formidable in battle that he wins the nickname of iron side. He's a tremendous man. Isn't he? And actually you could say he is the last English King in the sense that he is the last King to rule who is of purely English descent.

When we make this as a TV drama, he should be played by an AI de aged Sean Bean. That will give people a clue as to what happens when he's going to win. In fact, yes, more toilet based deaths are approaching, but for now he's done very well in fact, he's so cross with, with Ethel Red that he's basically kind of binned him and is, is saying, Oh, well I should be king and between them Edmund Ironside and Olaf Haraldson succeed in reestablishing the rule of the Kyrgyz. The prospects for Edmund Ironside as a future

king are all the brighter for the fact that his father by now is a dying man. And in 1016, he duly shuffles off this mortal coil, but his passing actually is barely noted because by now everyone's eyes is on Edmund Ironside. You know, he's tremendous. He's dashing. His sides are made of iron and he claims the throne. Yeah. There is however a problem because he is not the only claimant to this throne.

There is a rival and who that is and how the contest of this rival with Edmund Ironside develops, we will discover after the break. I'm David Oleshoge, historian and broadcaster. And I'm Sarah Churchwell, author, journalist and academic. And together, we are hosts of Goalhanger's latest podcast, Journey Through Time. We're going to be looking at hidden social histories behind famous chapters from the past. Asking what it was like to have lived through prohibition or to have been there on the ground

during the Great Fire of London. We'll be uncovering all of that. And we'll have characters and stories that have been totally forgotten but shouldn't have been. This week, we're looking at a terror attack that shocked New York, that cost American lives, caused millions of dollars of damage to buildings across Manhattan, that led to the establishment of new security agencies, and that helped push the United States towards war.

But it's not 9-11. This is the Black Tom explosion of 1916, the story of a massive sabotage campaign as Germany made a desperate effort to keep America from helping the Allies during the First World War. And the cast of characters for this story involves playboy diplomats, there's a stranded sailor, an opera singer who's managing a brothel in New York, and there's a hapless spy who leaves secret documents on a train. So join us on Journey Through Time and hear a clip from the Black Tom story at the end of this episode. Only a boy, you ship batterer, When you launched your boat, no king was younger than you.

So those were lines, lovely lines written by a praise singer about the very young, very impressive, very frightening son of Svein Forkbeard. And this is a man familiar to anybody who enjoys anecdotes about waves, because he is a young man called Knute. And Knute came with his father Svein to England in 1013. He's probably battle hardened even at that point. He'd probably been on previous raids. His father has been struck in a dream by St Edmund with a pole

and has died. And so Knut is now the leader of, well, he's the leader of what? Is he the leader merely of a war band or does he want to be the claimant to a grand North Sea empire that includes England as well as Denmark and Norway? He's got a dilemma, hasn't he Tom? Does he give up and basically go back to Denmark or even at this young age, does he go for it as his father was going to do?

Well, I think he actually does both. So he does withdraw from England in the wake of his father's death. But as a sign that he will be back, remember that the English nobleman, particularly around Mercia, had given him hostages. So Canute takes these hostages and he maims them, cuts off their hands, blinds them and dumps them all on the beach at sandwich. So, you know, that's, that's not fun. And he then goes back to Denmark and he, you know, he's a chip off the old block. He does what his father would have done, which is to use his rank and his power as King of

Denmark to marshal another great invasion fleet. And he also sends agents to England to secure pledges of loyalty from all the various Danish communities there, particularly in East Anglia and particularly around the Humber, because that's where the settlement is the deepest. And he also recruits large numbers of mercenaries. And it said in a biography of him by a guy who's very keen on him, there were so many kinds of shield. It was easy to believe that troops drawn from all the nations of the world were with him.

And among them is Thorkell, who has now abandoned a thread for good. So he's got these terrifying, massive lads behind him. They're tall, you know, they, they think nothing of pelting archbishops with oxen bones and they are sailing for England. And they arrive in the summer of 1015. Ethelred is dying, but not quite dead. So the question in everybody's mind is this, is it going to be Edmund Ironside who succeeds his heir or is Cnut going to finish what Svane Fortby had started and basically assimilate England into the world of the Scandinavian Empire? And Cnut and Edmund go kind of hammer and tongs and by the time that Ethered finally

dies on the 23rd of April 1016, the country is effectively divided in two. So Cnut has Northumbria and East Anglia and Edmund has Wessex and neither side can really defeat the other. And I think that the fact that Edmund has been able to secure Wessex indicates that Ethered actually had been a failure as a king. He could have fought as his son did and he didn't. And now the country is divided.

So there is one key territory which remains up for grabs and that is Mercia. The Midlands. Basically the Midlands. And this is under the rule of an elder man called Edric and he is a very very kind of slippery treacherous opportunist as is conveyed by his nickname which is Strayona or the grabber. So he's very much the little finger of this story isn't he because he's always changing sides and betraying people and basically you never can be entirely sure well he's only on his he's on his own side

and he is constantly swapping from Edmund to Knute and back again. Yes, he is. So actually the description you get in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it does sound quite like kind of Littlefinger, a man of humble origins, but whose smooth tongue won him wealth and high standing. Endowed as he was with a subtle genius and incredible powers of eloquence, he surpassed all his peers in malice and treachery as well as in pride and cruelty. He's the Captain Bentine of the story. I mean, he's so treacherous that in a way he overdoes it. Right. So first of all, he sides

with Knute and tries to have Edmund assassinated. Then he goes over to Edmund, then he goes back to Canute and then he comes back to Edmund. He's a weathervane. He is tracking the shift in fortunes between Canute and Edmund as they fight each other over England. And the climactic clash takes place in the autumn of 1016 on the 18th of October at a site in Essex called Assondon. It's a very, very hard fought battle, but then treachery in the English lines. Edric Strayona, the grabber, has swapped sides yet again. In mid-battle. In mid-battle. can it wins? Prey singers celebrate his great victory at Aschengdon you worked well in the shield war warrior King Brown was the flesh of bodies

Served to the carrion birds great line, but Edmund, you know, his sides are not fashioned out of iron for nothing No, he's not gonna surrender and in the end the two men agreed that they will divide England Edmund keeps Wessex but Canute gets mercy and therefore effectively everything north of the River Thames and we've promised toilet-based misadventure. Edmund does not long outlive the agreement so on the 30th of November 1016 he dies possibly of wounds suffered in battle but another account says that he was murdered while sitting on the toilet. It's sort of true, isn't it? That basically everybody who dies in this period, there's always an account

that claims that it was while they were relieving themselves in some way. Not everyone, but it's certainly, but it's a feature. I think the features, isn't it? So we're in 1016, exactly half a century before the very famous conquest of 1066 but this is a conquest just as complete and Just as remarkable in some ways as the Norman conquest. This is a Danish conquest Yeah, the dynasty of Alfred the great has been it appears definitively driven off the throne and the Danes

I mean they really are the masters of England now under Knute. Yeah, they are. And Knute is obviously very keen on killing as many of the Curda King as the dynasty of Alfred the Great as he can. So Edmund's younger brother, he is murdered on Knute's orders. This still leaves some of them on the scene. So, uh, we've mentioned the two sons of Ethelred and Emma who have fled to

Normandy. So they are Edmund's half brothers, Edward and Alfred. So they are in Normandy and can you can't get his hands on them. Edmund, I don't know, side himself has left two sons. Canute sends them to Sweden in the expectation that they will be murdered. Yeah. That's his plan. So it's a bit like Claudia sending Hamlet to England to be murdered. Same kind of idea.

The king of Sweden doesn't murder them, but sends them on to Kiv and from there they end up in Hungary. Right. And the eldest of them, a guy called Edward will grow up to be known as Edward the exile. So there are still Koda King has out there, but there are none now in England. You know, since we raised the comparison with the Norman conquest, here's the crucial question. What happens in England?

So my sense is that actually Knute the top jobs, obviously he gives to his own supporters to Danes. So he keeps the heartland of Wessex, but Thorkell, the very tall guy who's swapped sides a few times, but has now ended up on the winning side. He gets East Anglia and another day in a guy called Eric gets Northumbria. So they're parceling out the kingdom rather as William will go on to do after 1066. And these guys aren't elder men like the Anglo-Saxons. There's something new, aren't they?

Yarls. Yeah, which becomes Anglicised to Earls. Right. So there's the same route. You can see elder men and Earl. I mean, it's the same kind of route, but to be an Earl is to live in a country that has been conquered by the Danes. Okay. There is one surviving elder man or Earl we want to call him and that is Edric Strayona, the grabber.

But again, as with William, who does try to keep some English lords in situ, but they're always rebelling against him. And so ultimately he just gets rid of them all. Edric is too slippery, too treacherous. He starts the scheme again and can it's not having that. And so he has Edric murdered in London on Christmas day 1017 and his head is put on a spike on the battlements of London and his body is thrown over the city battlements to serve As food for the dogs. That's exactly the kind of thing that you look for in a series like this, isn't it? Yes, what about so that's about the jobs. What about the crucial thing, which is about the money?

The attraction of England is that it's so rich. All of these men, these mercenaries who have flocked to Knute's banners, they have done so because they thought they were going to get the money. What happens to the wealth of England? Is it basically just parceled out and looted? Can I quote from Millennium? Do you going to quote from yourself? I'm going to quote myself.

Oh, gone. In Canute, yeah, the larcenous instincts that had long propelled generations of Northmen across the seas were set to attain their apotheosis for he had his sword at the throat of an entire kingdom. So think of all that gold. Yeah. That Danes over the course of Ethelred's reign had been extorting. There's millions of coins. Well, Ethelred's ability to do that had depended upon the apparatus of English governance. This is what enables him to raise the money. And now that apparatus of English governance is Knut's to command.

So he can do with it what he wants and in the tax year of 1018 he sets the tax rate at a hundred percent and It takes his agents months and months to extort this but by the end of the year essentially the entire Income of the kingdom for that year has vanished into Canute's treasure chests So Rachel Reeves can only dream of such rich pickings. Regular listeners will be disappointed if I don't mention Dennis Healy at this point in his 83% top rate of tax in the early 1970s. So Dennis Healy exceeded only by Canute.

But so here's the question. Top jobs given to Danes, the money parceled out an entire, you know, basically the entire income of England for a year taken and put into Danish coffers. Why is it therefore that nobody remembers the conquest of 1016 when it must have been psychologically pretty devastating, particularly for the English elite, many of whom must have lost not just their money, but their power, their status, their prestige, their self-worth, all of those kinds of things.

I think it's partly because the English are actually very familiar with the Danes and you could talk of a kind of Anglo-Danish world reaching back decades, maybe centuries. These people, their languages and now that the Danes have become Christian, their religion, there is scope there for them to merge. So culturally it's not a shock. I mean, it is a shock, but it's not as big a shock as it will be to be conquered by people speaking French. That would be a shock, yeah.

But I think also, Canute may have conquered England, but he displays something akin to a kind of cultural cringe. So in 1018, which is the year that he's extorting his 100% tax rate, he allows himself to be persuaded by the Archbishop of York, who's a very distinguished scholar, very holy man, into upholding the laws of the Kyrgyzstan. So the laws of Edgar and of Ethelred essentially, you know, that he, he promises he will rule as though he belonged to the dynasty of, of Kurdic and of Alfred the great. And the reason that he's happy to do this is because he does not want to

rule as a Viking warlord, he wants to rule England as a Christian King. Um, he, you know, he's grown up surrounded by English bishops in Denmark, Harold Bluetooth and Svein Fortbeard had not allowed bishops from Germany to serve there because the Germans are a far more present threat the Saxon monarchy. So all the bishops in Denmark basically are English and the Archbishop of York Wolfstan, he can serve Knut as a kind of Gandalf was a Merlin or a Merlin. Yeah. He's at his side. And this sense of intimacy that Knute has with his new kingdom is evident in his very bed, because although he is

a Christian, he remains sufficiently a Northman that he thinks nothing of having two wives, both of them kind of English in his bed. And the question of what exactly these two women, what exactly their status are is highly contested. Okay. So are they both wives? Is one of them a concubine? So Pauline Stafford, who's kind of the great expert on, on the role of queens

in the 11th century England, she says concubine wife is too stark a distinction to capture this shifting situation. And the reason for that will be evident when I describe who these two women, these two wives, concubines, queens, whatever, who they are. So the first one, she's from Northampton, isn't she? And she's an elder one's daughter. And she has the brilliant name of Elf Gifu. Which confusingly is the same name that Emma, Arthur Redd's wife from Normandy had been

given when she came to England, which is why we need to not call her that. Yeah, so Elf Gifu had married Canute in the early days of Svein's invasion and almost certainly this was a kind of dynastic marriage. So as we will see, she is probably related to the leading Mercian family. She's a kind of pledge of their, of their alliance with the Danes and Knut and Elfgifu seem to have got on tremendously well. So Elfgifu gets pregnant very, very quickly, gives birth to a boy who is named Svein after his adorable grandfather and in 1015 Knut sends her back to Denmark with the baby. Knute returns to Denmark as well, gets her pregnant again, and she gives birth to another

boy, Harold, who in due course in the 12th century will come to be called Harefoot. So he's not called Harefoot in this period, but we'll call him that. We should call him that. We've got too many Harolds. From the other Harolds. Yeah. So Canute clearly respects Elf Gifu very highly, not just as a woman who can give him sons, but also as a political operator. And when he returns to England to fight Edmund Ironside, he leaves Elf Gifu to

administer part of Denmark for him. Right. And in 1030, so that's kind of a decade and more on, there's an even more striking example of his faith in her. Because by this point, his elder son, Svein, is a teenager and Knut thinks, I'd quite like him to be King of Norway. So he sends Alf Gifu, Svein and a big war band off to Norway to conquer it and install Svein as king. And it's true that it doesn't go brilliantly. Elf Gifu does conquer Norway, but she rules very, very harshly. The Norwegians rebel and in 1035, she and Svein are kicked out and Svein dies soon after

of wounds sustained in battle. So Elf Gifu is back in Denmark, but she's still very much a kind of potent presence on the scene and still has cards to play as we will see in due course. Well, let's say, let's just park her to one side. So there's Elf Gifu and her son who is Harefoot. Harold Harefoot. Yeah. Now you said that there were two wives of Knute and this really is a

twist to his great twist because he has married the widow of his father's former adversary, Ethelred. He is married Emma of Normandy. He has in 1017. So she must be a fair bit older than him, right? She's still very new, Bile. Okay, that's good to know. As we will see. And so you could say this is kind of classic Viking behavior, taking to bed

the woman of your defeated enemy. Right. But I'm sure that that's a kind of part of the dynamic, but essentially Canute is marrying her because she had been married to Ethel Red and anointed as his queen and so she is a living link to that tradition of West Saxon monarchy going back centuries and centuries. Emma's mother had actually been a Dane. So she's half Danish and probably speaks Danish.

But her value to Canute is essentially that she is, even though she's half Danish, half Norman, she is an English queen. She's the embodiment of England. And by marrying her, he is in a sense marrying England. And so his marriage to her is blessed by the church. And this is the big point of difference between her and Alf Giffo. Alf Giffo's marriage had not been blessed by the church. Doesn't need to be. This isn't an age where it's a given that the church will bless every wedding. But the fact that Emma's has been enables her to say, I am Knute's legitimate wife and any children that I give him, they are entitled to the throne of England.

So this speaks to Knute's political sensitivity and sophistication, doesn't it? He's not just a Viking warlord. He has, you know, as you put it in your notes, he's waded through blood. He has ruled by the sword and by terror. He's won his crown. And yet once he's done that, he is sufficiently skillful to recognize that there are continuities he wants to preserve. He wants to work with

the existing traditions. He clearly wants to conciliate is the wrong word, but ultimately he knows he will have to work with the English. England is his prize and he wants it to thrive under his overlordship. And I guess, you know, he's also Christian, which means he's got a lot in common with the people of England. The figure he reminds me of is Augustus. He's not a man of similar achievement, but the willingness to be unspeakably brutal where necessary and then when it's no longer necessary to park that side and to kind of promote himself as a figure of peace.

Very, very formidable. That's just good politics, isn't it Tom? Right. So this guy who, as you said, had waded through blood, he allows Wolfstam, the Archbishop of York, to write laws in his name that proclaim the Christian virtues of humility and self-restraint. So as Wolfstam writes, and Canute puts his name to this, for the mightier or of higher rank a man is, so the deeper must he atone for wrongdoing, both to God and to men. Knute has disinherited the oldest royal line in Christendom, but he becomes, I'm delighted to say, a regular visitor to the restored

and rebuilt nunnery at Wilton. And he rides there with Emma and he dismounts respectfully outside the holy precincts and he walks in and he prays among the tombs of the women of the house of Wessex. And he is a Viking, a Northman from the frozen limits of the world. But in 1027, amazingly, he takes time off from ruling this great North Sea empire that he's forged in Norway, Denmark, England. I mean, it's a lot, but he's able to go on pilgrimage to Rome and there in the heart of the ancient city to kneel before the tomb of St. Peter and in the words of his biographer, diligently to speak St. Peter's special favor before God.

And he hasn't just gone there to pray. He's gone because that Easter of 1027, a new German emperor is being crowned in Rome. And Canute at that coronation has the place of honor at the emperor's side. And it is an amazing achievement for the great grandson of a pagan warlord. So, gone the old, you know, with his great mounds and his, all that stuff to be received with the utmost honor and respect in Rome by both the emperor and the pope. So in that sense, there's a slight Charlemagne aspect to this, isn't there? Somebody from ultimately a barbarian pagan lineage who now is standing there in Rome

in the city of the pope and the Caesars, you know, being winning respect and recognition from his peers. Yeah. I mean, Canute is a tremendously, you know, I know this is a violent age and he's very violently, but as a politician, as a, as a statesman, he's a very impressive figure. Well, it's often said that Alfred the Great is the only English King or at least King of England to be called the great, but he isn't.

Canute has also been given that subra K as Charlemagne had Charles the great. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I think, I think his, his feats of conquest and then a statecraft are very, very formidable. And just as England had recovered under Alfred, who had beaten the Danes, so also it recovers under Canute, who is himself a Dane. And I guess the obvious reason for that is that it's firstly that Canute is not kind of imposing his hundred percent tax rate.

You know, that was that was a one off, but also the Danes are no longer aiding England because it's being ruled by the Danes. Yeah. And so there is scope for the English economy and the English countryside and English infrastructure to recover. And it also seems that Canute's regime is secure because he has Harold Hereford, his son, by Alf Giffo, but he's also fathered a son on Emma who gets given the wonderful name of Halfa Canute.

Yeah. And so the fact that Canute is so strong, he rules this great empire, he has two sons, it makes the prospect of any return to the English throne of the Kyrgyz King, the line of Alfred the Great, seem utterly implausible. So you've got the sons of Edmund Ironside, including Edward the exile, they are off in distant Hungary, they are basically, you know, they're East European aristocrats They don't even speak English, right? And then you have a threads two sons by Emma. So that is Edward and Alfred They are in Normandy

It's true only across the channel, but they have the stamp of absolute losers and the person who really says yeah They're losers is their own mother. Well, because it's in her interest. She's back in England. Of course, it is. Of course it is. Because the son that she's backing is half canoe, the one she's had by canoe. Right. I mean, he's the one who's kind of ready and lined up to sit on the English throne. So it's not surprising that Emma's focus now is all on England and all on Denmark. And she doesn't really have any interest in her two sons by Athelred who are in exile in Normandy or indeed actually in Normandy itself. She's been to that she's moved on from it. Because Normandy itself at this point does not look a terribly formidable proposition because it is it's become bitterly divided.

It's succumbed to the French disease. Yeah. So in 1026, so that's a year before Canute goes on his pilgrimage to Rome. Emma's brother, Richard the second, Richard the good, he's ruled for a very long time in Normandy. He dies and he has two sons and these two sons fight over the inheritance and the elder brother wins. He rules for less than a year. One of these kind of dramatic deaths. Maybe he's poisoned again. We don't really know. And he succeeded by his younger brother who is called Robert. And Robert is pretty able, he restores Normandy to a kind of

measure of health. But then amazingly, and bizarrely, he goes on pilgrimage not to Rome, but to Jerusalem, which is very, very dangerous. I mean, it's a long way to go and very, very risky. And what makes this seem even more, I think, irresponsible is that although Duke Robert of Normandy does have an heir, this heir is firstly only seven years old. And secondly, he's not legitimate. Okay. And the name of this boy, Dominic, yeah, ladies, gentlemen is William. And then in July, 10 35, Robert has got to Jerusalem.

Fine. He's returning from Jerusalem. He is approaching Constantinople and he dies. And William is now the Duke of Normandy, but his inheritance is a terrible one. He's menaced by enemies all along the frontiers of Normandy, but even more he is menaced by the great lords of his own dukedom and England by contrast is an absolute model of stability. So ladies and gentlemen, will England remain happy and united and forward looking under

the reigns of Knute and his successors? Will Normandy fall apart and what will happen to this seven-year-old boy William? What prospects for him? Well, you can of course find out right now If you remember the rest is history club because you can listen to our next episode which is all about the rise of William of Normandy But if you're not a member the rest is history club and you want to You can sign up at the rest is historycom and you know, Bob's your uncle. But Tom, for those people who don't want to do that, we will be back on Monday with a

next thrilling chapter of this epic story. Bye bye. Bye bye. Here's that clip we mentioned earlier on. And gradually what you see in this period is mounting concern over what became called hyphenate Americans. This idea that foreign immigrant communities had divided allegiances. And so there are increasing demands for effectively loyalty tests. And Wilson gives a very famous speech

in which he uses a famous phrase, and that's a phrase that you have spent a long time studying, Sarah. And that is to ask whether these Americans who have loyalties to other nations will, when it comes down to it, whether they will put America first. And that's the phrase, right?

America first. It is a the phrase, right? America first. It is a phrase that was first popularized in this context in 1915, a year before Black Tom, in a speech that Wilson gave addressing these mounting concerns about hyphenate Americans, about whether they were real Americans or not. And the way that Wilson put it was he said, he demanded that immigrant communities stand up and state explicitly whether, he said, is it America first or is it not? And at that point, America first became an incredibly popular phrase. It basically dominates American political discourse for the next decade. Then it kind of subsided and then it has a resurgence around World

War II when it was used to talk about whether America should enter the Second World War. And then it went into abeyance for a long time until it made a dramatic reappearance in the 21st century, which listeners will be familiar with. If you want to hear the full episode, listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.