Anglo-Danish Empire - A Companion to the Reign of King Cnut the Great

Anglo-Danish Empire A Companion to the Reign of King Cnut the Great Edited by Richard North, Erin Goeres, and Alison Finlay MEDIEVAL MIP

ISBN 978-1-5015-1981-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-1333-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-1337-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932367 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Ringerike style grave slab, from St Paul’s Churchyard, supplied courtesy of the Museum of London Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Abbreviations IX List of Figures XI List of Maps XV List of Tables XVII Acknowledgments XIX Erin Goeres and Richard North Prologue “King of Danes, Irish, English and Island-Dwellers”: An Audience with Knútr inn Ríki 1 Part I: Cnut’s Conquest Andrew Reynolds 21 Chapter 1 London into the Age of Cnut: An Archaeological Perspective Julian M. C. Bowsher 65 Chapter 2 Coins of Æthelred II and Cnut the Great from London Excavations John Clark Chapter 3 Early-Eleventh-Century Weapons from the Site of Old London Bridge: A Reassessment 75 Simon Keynes 97 Chapter 4 The Reign of King Æthelred the Unready in Multiple Maps

VI Contents Zoya Metlitskaya Chapter 5 The Æthelredian Fragment of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Personality of its Author 113 Michael Treschow 129 Chapter 6 Æthelred’s Death and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s Tone David McDermott 145 Chapter 7 King Edmund II Ironside and the Siege of London, 1016 Part II: Cnut’s Kingdom Ryan Lavelle 169 Chapter 8 Cnut, King of the English, 1017–1019 Eleanor Parker Chapter 9 “In London, Very Justly”: Cnut’s English Reputation and the Death of Eadric Streona 191 Barbara Yorke 209 Chapter 10 Cnut’s Interaction with Winchester: A Reassessment Simon C. Thomson 235 Chapter 11 Heroic Legend: Sigmundr Fáfnisbani in the Court of King Cnut Russell Poole 255 Chapter 12 An Icelander in Cnut’s Court: The Case of Sigvatr Þórðarson

Contents VII Richard North 277 Chapter 13 Behold the Front Page: Cnut and the Scyldings in Beowulf Part III: Cnut’s Empire Jesper Hjermind Chapter 14 “Vuiberg Hic Coronatur Rex Dacie”: The Crowning of King Cnut in Viborg, 1019 305 Marie Bønløkke Spejlborg 337 Chapter 15 King Cnut of England and the Danish Homelands Caitlin Ellis Chapter 16 Cnut’s Ecclesiastical Policy in the Context of His English and Danish Predecessors 355 Eldbjørg Haug Chapter 17 Cnut’s Gift of a Swithun-relic to “Dacia”: A Gift to Denmark or Norway? 379 Laura Amalasunta Gazzoli 399 Chapter 18 Cnut, his Dynasty, and the Elbe-Slavs Jakub Morawiec Chapter 19 Cnut’s Reign in England and Denmark: The Western Slavonic Perspective 419 Barbara E. Crawford Chapter 20 St. Clement of Rome: Patron Saint of Cnut and the Dynasty of Denmark 431

VIII Contents Timothy Bolton Epilogue Cnut and the Potential Uses and Abuses of the Late Narrative Sources from Northern Scandinavia 459 Notes on Contributors 485 General Bibliography 487 Index 535

Abbreviations AD Anno Domini (see also CE) AJ Archaeological Journal ANS Anglo-Norman Studies AntJ The Antiquaries Journal ASC Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, gen. ed., Dumville and Keynes; trans. Swanton ASE Anglo-Saxon England ASPR Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records ASSAH Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History BAR British Archaeological Reports BL British Library BNJ British Numismatic Journal CCHAG Corpus Christianorum: Hagiographies CE Common Era (see also AD) CR Coin Register (annually in BNJ; see General Bibliography) DN Diplomatarium Norvegicum EETS The Early English Text Society EHD 1 English Historical Documents, ed. Whitelock EHD 2 English Historical Documents, ed. Douglas and Greenaway EHR English Historical Review EMC Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds (www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/ coins/emc) EME Early Medieval Europe HSJ Haskins Society Journal ÍF Íslenzk Fornrit KB Det Kongelige Bibliothek (Copenhagen) KLNM Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder (og vikingtid) LArch London Archaeologist MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica MoLAM Museum of London Archaeology Monographs MoM Maal og minne MS Mediaeval Scandinavia N&Q Notes & Queries NMS Nottingham Medieval Studies NOWELE North-Western European Language Evolution PAS Portable Antiquities Scheme PBA Proceedings of the British Academy SRG Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi SS Scandinavian Studies TLAMAS Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society vv. verse(s) VMS Viking and Medieval Scandinavia https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513336-203



List of Figures Figure 1.1 The so-called “Agas” map of London of ca. 1561 40 Figure 1.2a Number 1 Poultry in the tenth century 47 Figure 1.2b Number 1 Poultry ca. 1000–1050 (after Burch and Treveil, The Development of Early Medieval and Later Poultry and Cheapside, Figure 1.3 fig. 13) 48 Figure 1.4 The eleventh-century St. Paul’s tombstone decorated in the Ringerike Figure 3.1 style (© Museum of London) 55 The eleventh-century Cheapside jeweler’s hoard (© Museum of Figure 3.2 London) 61 Figure 3.3 Photograph of the finds from Old London Bridge, originally published Figure 3.4 as the frontispiece to the London Museum catalogue London and the Figure 3.5 Vikings (1927). The item illustrated top right (described as a pair of Figure 8.1 tongs) may not belong with the other finds. Photograph © Museum of London 76 Figure 10.1 Axe-head A23346 with decorated brass collar. Photograph © Museum Figure 10.2 of London 90 Drawing of axe-head, with detail of decorated brass collar, from Figure 10.3 London Museum catalogue London and the Vikings, 1927 90 Spearhead A23353 with decorated socket. Photograph © Museum of Figure 10.4 London 91 Drawing of spearhead A23353 with detail of decoration, from London Figure 10.5 Museum catalogue London and the Vikings, 1927 91 Figure 10.6 Single sheet charter of Cnut granting an estate at Drayton (Hants) to New Minster, Winchester (S 956, dated Easter 1019). By permission of Figure 11.1 the Warden and Scholars of Winchester College 182 The Winchester Cathedral mortuary chest bearing the names of King Cnut and Queen Emma. Photograph © John Crook 210 Cnut the Great and Queen Emma present a cross to the New Minster, Winchester. Vitae of the New Minster 1031, prefatory image, BL Stowe 944, fol 6r. Photograph: British Library 211 The second half of the inscriptions of the later-twelfth-century Purbeck marble tomb-slabs for (upper) Earl Beorn and Richard, son of William I, and (lower) Edmund Ironside, son of Æthelred II. Photograph © John Crook 225 Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture from Old Minster, Winchester, showing what may be the episode of Sigmund and the wolf known from Vǫlsunga saga. Photograph © John Crook 226 The site of Queen Emma’s manor of Goodbegot in High Street, Winchester today. Photograph © Barbara Yorke 228 Fragmentary runic inscription from church of St. Maurice, Winchester. Photograph © Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture: photographer Simon I. Hill 229 The Sigmundr stone: Photograph © Martin Biddle, “Excavations at Winchester 1965: Fourth Interim Report.” (Plate LXII) 236 https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513336-204

XII List of Figures Figure 11.2 Drawing showing all lines carved on the extant fragment 237 Figure 11.3 Suggested completion of the scenes implied by the narrative frieze, showing the degree of extension necessitated by the extant image 239 Figure 14.1 Overview of the excavated house structures at the Sct. Peder Stæde settlement 1966–1967. Notice house V, the most well-built house with wooden wall planks and curved outer walls. After Levin Nielsen, “Pederstræde i Viborg,” 25, Figure 2 310 Figure 14.2a The workshop seen from the south. In the background, the anvil pit and the forge 312 Figure 14.2b Overview of the area excavated in 2001 313 Figure 14.3a Reconstructions of the earliest smithy from 1018 314 Figure 14.3b The altered building from ca. 1020 from the Søndersø area. Drawing Sara Heil Jensen (2001) 315 Figure 14.4 (a) Gold brooch found near Hornelund. (b) Its lead patrice found at Viborg Søndersø. Photo: Lennart Larsen and Arne Vindum 315 Figure 14.5 Sherds from a watering pot made in Stamford, England from the early eleventh century. The pot of whitish clay with a green glaze had holes in the bottom. It could have been used to water rush covered earthen floors – thus keeping down the dust. Photograph: Lars Guldager 317 Figure 14.6a–c A cross-guard from a sword hilt, a chape from a scabbard together with a piece of ring mail. Drawing Mohan Subramaniam Arulanadam 318 Figure 14.7a–b Spurs and bridle fittings from Viborg Søndersø. Drawing Mohan Subramaniam Arulanadam 319 Figure 14.8 Bones of a goshawk and a kestrel, recovered from the excavations in 2001. Photograph: Geert Brovad 320 Figure 14.9 The point of the lance pole found at Viborg Søndersø. Photograph: Viborg Museum 321 Figure 14.10 Two small lead pieces. The piece to the right shows great similarities with some of the coins minted in the reign of Cnut the Great. Photograph: Lars Guldager 322 Figure 14.11 An eleventh-century shoe from Viborg Søndersø displaying possible English style influences, possibly of English origin or alternatively made by an English shoemaker in Viborg. Photograph: Lars Guldager 322 Figure 14.12 Coins of Cnut the Great, minted in Viborg. Photograph: Lennart Larsen 324 Figure 14.13 The Mammen axe with silver inlays is found in a grave dated to 970/ 971. Photograph: Lennart Larsen 325 Figure 14.14 The Asmild rune stone. Photograph: Lars Guldager 326 Figure 14.15 A row at least 15 m long of oblong postholes from trench S. It is probably much longer from trench S. Could it be a part of an extremely visible and impressive demarcation of the Thingstead area at the foot of the Thingstead itself – Borgvold? Drawing Hans Krongaard Kristensen 330

List of Figures XIII Figure 14.16 Ornaments like this in the fashion of a coin struck in Viborg under 446 Cnut the Great was presented to the English troops who rolled into Figure 20.1 Viborg on May 12, 1945. Photograph: Jesper Hjermind 335 Figure 20.2 Martyrdom of St. Clement by Bernardino Fungai (ca. 1500). © York Figure 20.3 Museums Trust (York Art Gallery) 433 View of St. Clement’s from Roskilde Harbour, and North Doorway Altar panel from Skjærvøy, Troms, Norway (after 1500), showing St. Clement with his papal tiara, holding papal cross and anchor (Oslo Universitets Oldsaksamling) 455



List of Maps Map 1.1 The topography of London and the Roman city, showing Cripplegate fort, the amphitheater, forum basilica, the principal roads of the Roman Map 1.2 period, and the location of the late/sub-Roman martyrium at St. Martin- Map 1.3 in-the-Fields 26 Map 1.4 Distribution of select artefacts of fifth- to seventh-century date found in the walled city and the location of St. Paul’s 28 Map 1.5 The relationship between Lundenwic and Lundenburg 30 Distribution of select seventh- to ninth-century artefacts, haga, burh, Map 1.6 and other potentially middle Anglo-Saxon place-names and features 33 Map 1.7 Gustav Milne’s reconstruction of London’s street grid in the tenth Map 1.8 century (after Milne with Cohen Excavations at Medieval Cripplegate, Map 1.9 London, fig. 140) 42 (a) Streets dated to the late ninth to tenth centuries. (b) Streets dated to Map 1.10 the eleventh century (after Horsman et al., Aspects of Saxo-Norman London I, figs 109 and 110) 44 Map 1.11 The chronology of waterfront development along the north bank of the Map 2.1 River Thames (after Milne, The Port of Medieval London, fig. 7) 45 The location of Number 1 Poultry, Guildhall, and Bull Wharf 46 Map 3.1 The Guildhall amphitheater in the tenth and eleventh centuries; note the Map 3.2 ward and parish boundaries (after Bowsher et al., The London Guildhall, Map 4.1 fig. 13) 50 Map 4.2a Churches with fabric characteristic of the earlier eleventh century (open Map 4.2b circles) and dedications indicative of Scandinavian foundations (after Map 4.2c Milne with Cohen, Excavations at Medieval Cripplegate, London, fig. 144, Map 4.3 with additions) 53 Map 4.4a The position of London Bridge in relation to the city and to the burh at Map 4.4b Southwark (after Watson et al., London Bridge, fig. 27) 59 Hoards and single coins from Lundenburh. Open circles denote finds listed by Stott 1991, closed circles represent finds made subsequent to 1991. Uncertain “London” or “Thames” and foreshore finds are omitted. Adapted from Ayre & Wroe-Brown “The Eleventh- and Twelfth-century Waterfront and Settlement at Queenhithe.” 67 Finds of early Anglo-Saxon spearheads from the Thames in the Museum of London collection 83 Finds of late Anglo-Saxon/Viking-Age weapons from the Thames in the Museum of London collection 84 Viking raids in the 980s 98 The Viking army in England 991–994 99 The Viking army in England 997–1000 100 The Viking army in England 1001–1005 101 The Viking raid of 1006–1007 103 Thorkell’s army in England 1009–1010 104 Thorkell’s army in England 1010 105 https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513336-205

XVI List of Maps Map 4.4c Thorkell’s army in England 1011–1012 106 Map 4.5 Swein Forkbeard’s invasion 1013–1014 108 Map 4.6 England 1014–1015: Intermission 109 Map 4.7 Cnut’s invasion 1015–1016 110 Map 4.8 Edmund Ironside and Cnut 1016 111 Map 8.1 The estate at Drayton (Hants) granted to New Minster, Winchester, in 1019, with places named in the text. The boundaries of the Domesday hundreds and other eleventh-century vills are marked with regard to information in the Alecto Historical Editions Domesday Book maps. (The uncertainties of boundaries and the placement of vills have not been represented in this map, and this should only be taken as an approximate guide.) 184 Map 10.1 Plan of Late Saxon Winchester (north at the top). © Martin Biddle 214 Map A The empire of Cnut the Great (1016–1035) 303 Map 14.1a The great North–South route running down through the Jutland peninsula – the Military Road or Ox Road begins in Viborg. After Matthiessen, Hærvejen, 1930 307 Map 14.1b All roads lead to Viborg, meeting in a fan-shape north and south of the town. After Matthiessen, Viborg-Veje, 1933. Drawing Svend Kaae 2004 308 Map 14.2 On the flat foreland below the slopes leading up to the plateau lies the Søndersø area, and close by stands a pronounced 12 m high earthen bank, Borgvold, which rises up from an island in the tunnel valley. Drawing Lars Agersnap Larsen 2016 308 Map 14.3 Overview of all areas excavated at Viborg Søndersø 1981, 1984–1985 and 2001. Drawing Svend Kaae and Louise Hilmar 329 Map 14.4a–c The probable extent of the Søndersø settlement around a: 1020; b: 1050; c: 1100, superimposed onto a contour map, where modern earthworks have disturbed the historical landscape – the dam and roadway running down through the center of the illustration and back- fill under the Golf Hotel´s south-eastern corner. A: Brænderigården; B: Golf Hotel, Viborg; C: Borgvold. Drawing Sara Heil Jensen 332 Map 14.5 Venetian portolan chart from 1339 with the Latin text, “vuiberge hic coronatur rex dacie” – Viborg here the Danish king is crowned 334 Map B Denmark, Norway, Sweden in Cnut’s reign (1016–1035) 353 Map 18.1 Western Slavonic territories in Cnut’s reign (1016–1035) 402 Map 20.1 Clement dedications in Northern Europe 432 Map 20.2 Route to Kyiv from Scandinavia via the Baltic 435 Map 20.3 Map of Kyiv (Kiev) in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries 437 Map 20.4 Map of Trondheim, Norway, showing the location of St. Clement’s Church (KLEMENS KIRKE) close by the royal residence and warf (Kongs Gaard og Brygge) at the time of Olafr Haraldsson (1016–28). Based on Blom (1956), 228 439 Map 20.5 Site of St. Clements in Gamlebyen, Oslo, ca. 1300 440 Map 20.6 Early urban centres in Denmark with Clement churches 442 Map 20.7 Map of Roskilde Showing Site of St. Clement’s Church 445 Map 20.8 Urban churches dedicated to St. Clement in England 447

List of Tables Table 3.1 Categories of River Thames finds by period 80 Table 3.2 Medieval weaponry from the River Thames by zone 82 Table 10.1 Genealogy showing the relationships of Edmund Ironside, the family of Cnut and the early Norman kings (with those buried in Old Minster, Winchester underlined) 227 Table 11.1: The twelfth-century connection between Cnut and Sigmundr 248 Table 18.1 Dynasties of the Piast, Jelling, and Nakonid kindreds 403 https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513336-206



Acknowledgments This book came out of “Æthelred II and Cnut the Great: The Siege of London in 1016,” a conference held to commemorate the millennial anniversary of Cnut’s ac- cession to the throne of England. The conference was held July 6–9, 2016, at Uni- versity College London and the University of Winchester, as part of a two-year research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, which was called “The Siege of London, 1016: Immigration, Government, and Europe in the Age of Æthelred and Cnut.” The aim of the project was to mark England’s transition from King Æthelred II to Cnut the Great, exploring the consequences of that change of regime for the history and culture of early medieval Europe. In re- lation to Cnut’s Danes, the theme of “Englishness and Europe” a thousand years ago was also discussed in tandem with the national debate, or lack of it, on con- temporary notions of this in the months that led up to the Brexit referendum of June 23. Taking place just a fortnight later, the conference bore the blow of depar- ture in the hope that this might not be final. After all, England had been joined to Denmark before. As the Ambassador said, quoting a song: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” The present volume, while it speaks to the same themes of immigration, government and Europe that led us to the research project, also raises a few questions about the nature and implications of the Anglo-Danish empire which lasted from 1016 to 1042. In the preparation of this book we have been fortunate in our collaborators, whom we would like to thank for their hard work and patience in ensuring that it could appear on the millennial anniversary of one of the years of Cnut’s reign. These and other thanks are especially due in the context of Covid, unrelenting since March 2020. We would like to thank Carolin Esser-Miles and Eric Lacey in Winchester for their cheerful enterprise, as well as Haki Antonsson in the organiz- ing committee for his quiet efficiency, and Calum Cockburn, Emily Klimova, and Arendse Lund who helped with the organization of the Cnut Conference in Lon- don and Winchester with such attentiveness that the conference became a suc- cess. We gratefully acknowledge UCL and the University of Winchester as well as the Embassies of Denmark and Iceland for their financial support. For the where- withal and space for a reception at the British Library during the conference, we thank Claire Breay, Head of its Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts, as well as His Excellency Mr Claus Grube and Mrs Susanne Fournais Grube of the Danish Embassy at that time. We owe a debt to the keynote speakers, Roberta Frank, Simon Keynes, Andy Orchard, Andrew Reynolds, Elaine Traherne, and Bar- bara Yorke, of whom two gave us their papers and one an eagerly awaited com- mentary. For their great practical help in developing this Companion mostly from the conference papers, we would like to thank Shannon Cunningham and Theresa https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513336-207

XX Acknowledgments Whitaker from MIP and Robert Forke, Christine Henschel, Elisabeth Kempf, and and Julia Sjöberg from Walter de Gruyter, as well as Ulla Schmidt and her team from Datagroup Deutschland and Victoria Blud and some anonymous readers all of whom contributed many fine and useful observations. For the maps and draw- ings, we gratefully acknowledge Barney Harris, Miles Irving, and the late Reginald Piggott. All proprietary rights for figures are acknowledged where they appear. For their help in guiding the work in all chapters, we thank Anthony Bache, Rob- erta Baranowski, Jan Brendalsmo, Margaret Cormack, Øystein Ekroll, Haki Antons- son, Astrid Forland, Clas Gejrot, Ildar Garipzanov, Michael H. Gelting, Trine Haaland, Eyvind Fjeld Halvorsen, Anne-Marit Hamre, Lars Ivar Hansen, Hallvard Haug, Alf Tore Hommedal, Steinar Imsen, Torstein Jørgensen, Espen Karlsen, Kevin Kiernan, Halvor Kjellberg, Lars Løberg, Fraser McNair, Gustav Milne, Anne- Hilde Nagel, Janet L. Nelson, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Levi Roach, Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, Paula Utigard Sandvik, Daniel Sheerin, and Steinunn J. Kristjánsdóttir. A Note on Verses, and Names Skaldic verses, which are numbered by the half-line, are presented in two ways: one of these is the long-line format which is consistent with Gustav Neck- el’s edition of Eddic verse; the other is the half-line format which Neckel re- placed. Although the latter has been superseded in most editions of Eddic verse, it was used in Finnur Jónsson’s 1912–1915 edition of skaldic poetry, was preserved in Íslenzk Fornrit (1933–), and is presently getting a renewed lease of life in Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages (2009–), the definitive se- ries from Brepols. Some skaldic verses are so significant as to be quoted more than once, by different contributors, in either of these line formats and with dif- fering translations, but in the end the text will (mostly) be the same. Names in this volume are worth noting in two ways. Formally, personal names from the Anglo-Saxon period have been modernized or changed in recent centuries according to the conventions of each discourse. In one way, Cnut is still known as “Canute,” Æthelred as “Ethelred” and so on, in newspapers and other media in which æ and other outdated letters are unknown. In another way, the forms “Knútr,” “Æðelræd,” “Þorkell,” and “Hǫrðaknútr” represent the schol- arly ideal but are too intricate for cross-disciplinary appeal. The solution here will be to find a middle ground, writing “Cnut,” “Æthelred,” “Thorkell,” and “Harthacnut.” This book standardizes these and other known names from the pe- riod within a system which makes them recognizable. Important figures with names from other languages, such as Polish or Russian, appear, if they are well known, with spelling a little closer to English. Variant forms for people-names,

Acknowledgments XXI such as “Abodrites” or “Obodrites,” will also appear. Scandinavian names are here subject to a compromise of their own in which most are spelt according to the conventions of Old Icelandic (also known as Old Norse). This is because the non-runic Old Scandinavian literary sources of the tenth and eleventh centuries are skaldic poems, which were nearly all made by Icelanders, whose descendants started writing down their language at the start, and the poems towards the end, of the twelfth century. Because the Danes did not write longer Danish texts in Roman characters until the thirteenth century, most Old Scandinavian names which are not familiar in the English discourse (in contrast to “Thorkell the Tall,” for example, which is), are spelt in the normalization of thirteenth-century Ice- landic that has become common over a century of editing these texts. The fact that the sagas – the later narrative sources for Cnut from Scandinavia which pre- serve skaldic verses – were written mostly in this century in Iceland often gives their stories an illusion of historicity. As stories, the sagas have so defined our understanding of the period that their spelling is often accepted even for Old Danish names. To take King Sveinn Haraldsson, Cnut’s father, as an example: the English called him “Swegen” before the Norman Conquest and “Sweyn” after, while today there is also “Swegn,” “Swein” or even “Swen.” This book calls him “Sveinn,” mainly because that is how the skalds, speaking to us through their modern editions, refer to him. The same usage, with less justice, will be adopted for his grandson King Sveinn II Ástríðarson (ca. 1047–1076), whom English-speaking scholars call “Sweyn,” “Swein,” or “Sven Estrith(s)son,” and Danish ones “Svend Estridsen.” That is because this Sveinn, son of Earl Úlfr by Cnut’s sister Ástríðr or Estrith, was also commemorated by Icelanders, as well as by Adam of Bremen, who called him “Suein.” There again, the names of some of Cnut’s associates, such as “Urk,” are so unusual as to preclude change to the forms in which they appear. Who could have seen that Urk (founder of Abbots- bury abbey in Dorset) would have been an “Órækja” had he gone to Iceland in- stead? (Bolton, is the answer.) Consistency may never be achieved. Ideologically, one people-name is worth noting in an area of nomenclature where scholarship now seeks to set a moral example. Recently the term “Anglo- Saxon,” normal for some scholars, has been dropped by others in favour of “early medieval English” or “early British” in response to a common problem, the wrongful appropriation of this and other historical terms by racist political agita- tors. Our response to the problem is not to surrender this term to extremists, but to keep “Anglo-Saxon” alongside “English,” the substitute which causes less of- fence. While “English” is more accurate than “British” for the language and soci- ety of eastern Britain in the tenth and eleventh centuries, this book acknowledges that “Anglo-Saxon,” used by the people for themselves, remains the only fitting name for the history, literature, archaeology, sculpture, craftwork, architecture,

XXII Acknowledgments iconography, and palaeography of a Latin-based culture embodying elements not only from Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but also from France, Flanders, Germany, Poland, Italy, Tunisia, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Syria, to name some other sources of influence. Of course, Anglo-Saxon England had elements also from Denmark and Norway: after a while, the people of “the Danelaw,” that is, most of England to the east of Watling Street and some to the west of it, considered them- selves English most of the time, using whatever local name obtained; at other times and to other people they would have said they were Danish, after their older language; at the same time many speakers of dǫnsk tunga (the Danish tongue) were Norwegian Gaels in the north-west, as well as Icelanders visiting England some of whom were of Irish descent. For ease of reference, “Danish” and even “Anglo-Danish,” as in our title, will be used here for Scandinavians in England in the early eleventh century. Richard North Erin Goeres Alison Finlay

Erin Goeres and Richard North Prologue “King of Danes, Irish, English and Island- Dwellers”: An Audience with Knútr inn Ríki In the year 1027, or thereabouts, the Icelandic poet Óttarr svarti (“the dark-haired”) composed a verse in honor of Knútr inn ríki (“the mighty”) Sveinsson, whom we call King Cnut the Great: Svá skal kveðja konung Dana, Íra ok Engla ok Eybúa, at hans fari með himinkrǫptum lǫndum ǫllum lof víðara.1 [So shall I greet the king of the Danes, Of the Irish, and of English and Island-Dwellers, That his praise may travel, with heavenly support, More widely through all lands.] Poets who flocked to the royal courts of Scandinavia are well known for the bombas- tic – some would say propagandistic – nature of their works, but the claim in Ót- tarr’s verse is broadly true: by the time of his death in 1035, Cnut’s influence did stretch across much of the northern world over the seas from Dublin and the West- ern and Northern Isles to Norway, western and southern Sweden and the kingdom of Denmark, with friends in Normandy and vassals in Flanders, Pomerania, and Po- land, and with subject territories as far east as Skåne, Bornholm, Öland, perhaps even Estonia.2 Who was the man at the helm of this thalassocracy? 1 “Óttarr svarti: Lausavísur,” ed. Townend, 786 (v. 2). Translated by Erin Goeres. “Island- dwellers” here probably refers to the inhabitants of the Orkneys, but the term may also encom- pass those of Shetland and the Hebrides: see Forte, Oram, and Pedersen, Viking Empires, 227. Óttarr’s epithet echoes Cnut’s styles in charters: “Anglorum cęterarumque adiacentium insula- rum basileus” (king of the English and the other islands lying nearby: S 959, from 1023), trans- lated later in the century as “Ænglelandes kining ⁊ ealre ðare Eglande þe ðærto licgeð” (king of England and of all the islands that pertain to it: S 959); and “rex totius Albionis cęterarum- que gentium triuiatim persistentium basileus” (king of all Albion and emperor of nation rising upon nation: S 963, from c. 1030). See Charters of Christ Church, Part 2, ed. Brooks and Kelly, 1080 (no. 151), 1094 (no. 151A), 1127 (no. 158). 2 Forte, Oram, and Pedersen, Viking Empires, 193–202. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513336-001

2 Erin Goeres and Richard North Rise of a Younger Son The story of Knútr begins with a long war in England in which victory shifted from one side to the other for more than twenty years.3 Viking hosts who had raided the kingdom of Æthelred II (978–1016) in the 980s took vast sums of Danegeld from the country after the battle of Maldon in 991 and continued to raid between pay- ments for the rest of the decade.4 Early in this period, possibly in ca. 995 in Jelling in Jutland, Knútr was born to King Sveinn Forkbeard Haraldsson of Denmark (ca. 986–1014) and a Polish princess whose name does not survive. Sveinn raided less, enlarging his power in Scandinavia, until St Brice’s Day, November 13, 1002, when King Æthelred ordered the death of as many Danes as could be found in his kingdom outside the Danelaw. Eying up perhaps this as well as the main chance for conquest, King Sveinn brought his fleet to East Anglia in the following spring. Although his invasion there was checked militarily and by famine, so that in 1005 he was forced to sail home, a new fleet arrived in 1009, led by an earl from Skåne, Thorkell the Tall, soon followed by another led by Hemming, Thorkell’s brother.5 While these armies laid waste to the east of England, closing in on Canterbury, Sveinn was busy recruiting in Scandinavia, preparing for an even bigger cam- paign. In July 1013 he left his elder son Haraldr to hold Denmark and took Knútr with him on the long-awaited expedition to England. The royal Danish fleet first sighted Sandwich, from where Sveinn steered north along the coast into the river Humber and then south for some 25 miles up the Trent to Gainsborough in West Lindsey, the inmost inland port in the Danelaw.6 Almost at once, Ealdorman Uh- tred of Northumbria and the rulers of Yorkshire and Midland Anglo-Danish territo- ries yielded to Sveinn and gave him hostages. These he left with young Knútr, who stayed in the northern Midlands and contracted a marriage there with Ælfgifu, a lady from Northampton.7 Ælfgifu’s highborn family could call on support right through the north of England up to the borders of Scotland.8 Sveinn, 3 For a breezy summary from the Old Danish point of view, see Lund, “Why did Cnut conquer England?,” 26–38. 4 £10,000 after Maldon in 991, £16,000 in 994, £24,000 in 1002, £30,000 in 1007, £3,000 in- terim geld to Thorkell’s host in 1009, £48,000 after the sack of Canterbury in 1012, £72,000 plus £10,500 from London to Cnut in 1018. See ASC (E), ed. Irvine, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 74–75. 5 Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. Darlington and McGurk, 462–463 (s.a. 1009). On the earlier Viking campaigns and Æthelred’s response to them, see Keynes later in this volume, pp. 97–107. 6 Bolton, Cnut the Great, 55–56; Forte, Oram, and Pedersen, Viking Empires, 190–92. 7 Bolton, Cnut the Great, 67; see also Lavelle, p. 176, Yorke, pp. 230–31, and Spejlborg, pp. 341–42, in this volume. 8 Bolton, Cnut the Great, 70–71, and “Ælfgifu of Northampton.” Forte, Oram, and Pedersen, Viking Empires, 190–92.

Prologue 3 meanwhile, led his companies south to Watling Street and the border with non- Danish England, where they “worhton þæt mæste yfel þæt ænig her don mihte” (wrought the greatest evil that any raiding-army could do).9 He took Oxford and then Winchester before meeting resistance at London, in a failed assault in which many of his Vikings drowned in the Thames. From there Sveinn withdrew to Wall- ingford and took the submission of the west and then the rest of England. None- theless, his acts of devastation continued until Æthelred left London for safety in Normandy, parting company with Earl Thorkell, who had helped him repulse Sveinn’s attack on London. Thorkell, following his murder of Archbishop Ælfheah of Canterbury, had hired himself and his forty-five ships out to Æthelred in 1012. With the king’s departure, the fate of the southern English was sealed. Only then did London, the great trading capital of southern England, yield to King Sveinn. Sveinn’s victory was short-lived, however. Just over a month into the following year, on February 2 or 3, 1014, the new king of Denmark and England died where he had first disembarked, in Gainsborough. It has been argued that he had been planning to have himself crowned in York, to the dismay of the English “witan” (council of wise men).10 These southern magnates responded to their king’s death not by accepting Knútr, his son, as the fleet had done, but by asking Æthelred home from exile, “gif he hi rihtlicor healdan wolde þonne he ær dyde” (if he would rule them more justly than he did before).11 Ealdorman Uhtred rejoined King Æthelred when he came home. Having made the outlawry of Danish kings a prerequisite, Æthelred attacked Lincolnshire “mid fulre fyrde” (in full force) before Knútr could muster, “⁊ mann þær hergode ⁊ bærnde ⁊ sloh eall þet mancynn þet man aræcan mihte” (and there was plundering and burning and slaying of any human being they could find).12 Leaving his people to face these reprisals without him, Knútr steered his fleet home to Denmark.13 Before crossing the North Sea at Sandwich, however, he left the witan a message about agreements: “læt man þær up þa gislas þe his fæder gesealde wæron, ⁊ cearf of heora handa ⁊ earan ⁊ nosa” (there he put ashore the hostages which were granted to his father, and carved off their hands and ears and noses).14 9 ASC (D), ed. Cubbins, 58 (s.a. 1013); (E), ed. Irvine, 70 (s.a. 1013); (E), trans. Swanton, 143 (s.a. 1013). Translations of the Chronicle are here and elsewhere based on Swanton’s. 10 Wilcox, “Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos,” 390; Bolton, Cnut the Great, 66–67. 11 ASC (D), ed. Cubbins, 59 (s.a. 1014); ASC (E), ed. Irvine, 71 (s.a. 1014). 12 ASC (D), ed. Cubbins, 59 (s.a. 1014); ASC (E), ed. Irvine, 71 (s.a. 1014). 13 Bolton, Cnut the Great, 71–73. 14 ASC (D), ed. Cubbins, 59 (s.a. 1014); (E), ed. Irvine, 71 (s.a. 1014); (E), trans. Swanton, 145 (s.a. 1014).

4 Erin Goeres and Richard North Knútr was back a year later, making land at Sandwich in September 1015. Unlike his father before him, he turned his fleet south, rounded Kent and sailed to the coast of Wessex, where his new soldiers from all over Scandinavia and Frisia disembarked, laying waste to Æthelred’s heartland with fire and sword. Knútr had chosen a rift between the king and his surviving son Edmund as the moment to strike.15 Sailing north and raiding the eastern coast, Knútr went further inland and devastated Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, and Nottinghamshire. He marched his army into Uhtred’s territory around Bamburgh, while this northern earl was busy ravaging in the south, near Chester, helping Ed- mund to punish the people of Staffordshire, Shropshire, and Leicestershire for not joining the war effort against Knútr. To save his patrimony, Uhtred was forced to retire north and submit to Knútr, who promptly had him killed.16 In the south, Æthelred suffered an even worse defection, that of his rapacious enforcer Eadric “Streona” (Acquisitor). Knútr was also joined by Thorkell the Tall, who had of- fered to help him after reappearing in Denmark.17 As their skalds bear witness, Knútr’s hardbitten brother-in-law from the Trøndelag, Earl Eiríkr Hákonarson, was already helping him in the devastation of England.18 This man had fled to the Humber from Norway when Óláfr Haraldsson defeated him in the battle of Nesjar in 1015. Now, early in 1016, Knútr appointed Eiríkr earl over some of Uhtred’s terri- tory in the north of Northumbria.19 Later these men would run his kingdom effec- tively as viceroys: Earl Thorkell in 1017–1021, Earl Eiríkr in 1021–1023, finally Earl Godwine in 1023–1035.20 Edmund Ironside had all these experienced commanders and armies ranged against him. By good generalship, nonetheless, he began to turn the tide against the Danes in battle. When Æthelred died on April 23 (St. George’s Day), probably in London, the Londoners chose Edmund as their king. Meanwhile, since the rest of southern England had elected “Cnut” as Æthelred’s successor, London became the key to the young Dane’s wealth and power. Perhaps he saw his father’s choice of York as a mistake. After Easter, not long after May, Cnut laid siege to London, in which Æthelred’s body rested within St. Paul’s.21 When his mercenaries, 15 Bolton, Cnut the Great, 78–79. Insley, “Politics, Conflict and Kinship,” 32–35. 16 Bolton, Empire of Cnut, 118. 17 If we trust the relatively reliable Supplement (or Appendix) to Jómsvíkinga saga, Thorkell had fostered Knútr as a child. See Encomium Emmae, ed. Campbell, rev. Keynes, 92 (text); but see Campbell on p. 89: “perhaps a confused memory of Thorkell’s guardianship of Knútr’s son.” 18 Bolton, Cnut the Great, 80 (Þórðr Kolbeinsson and Óttarr svarti). 19 Bolton, Cnut the Great, 75. 20 Keynes, “Cnut’s Earls,” 43–88. 21 See McDermott later in this volume, pp. 148–51.

Prologue 5 descending on London from Greenwich, failed to make headway because of the city’s old Roman walls, Cnut and Thorkell made them dig a channel in South- wark for their ships to pass around by the southern end of London Bridge; this would also stop movement in and out of the town. Meanwhile Cnut and possi- bly (according to the Encomium Emmae) also Thorkell moved west from London into Wiltshire, drawing Edmund into a battle at Sherston that lasted two days, apparently the first in which Cnut had English troops on his side. This battle was inconclusive and chiefly notable for seeing Ealdorman Eadric, who had served Sveinn but had reconciled with Edmund after Æthelred’s death, change sides again.22 By offering money or favour, Cnut was drawing ever more allies of King Edmund into his orbit.23 Edmund fell back to Wessex for reinforcements, allowing Cnut to rejoin the siege of London. Edmund relieved the siege of London at the Battle of Brentford, in which he defeated the Danes, then returned to Wes- sex. Having reengaged successfully in Kent, he saw his army destroyed by Cnut in Assandun (Ashingdon or Ashdon) in Essex and withdrew again westwards. This time Edmund was again defeated and this time seriously wounded near the Forest of Dean, whereupon he sued for peace. In this way, his war with Cnut came to an end near the end of the summer of 1016. The Chronicle says that they met on “Ola- nige” (Olney or Alney), an island on the Severn in Gloucestershire, swore brotherly love and “þæt gyld setton wið þone here” (set the payment for the raiding-army).24 Edmund was thus left with Wessex, while Cnut took Mercia, the East and the North. The city of London, whose garrison had almost thwarted Cnut’s cam- paigns, was obliged to make a separate peace: ⁊ Lundenwaru griðode wið þone here ⁊ him frið gebohton, ⁊ se here gebrohton hyra scipu on Lundene ⁊ him wintersetl ðærinne namon.25 [And the people of London made peace with the raiders and bought their security, and the army brought their ships to London, and therein provided themselves with winter-quarters.] When Edmund died, probably of an infection from his wounds, on November 30, the whole kingdom fell into Cnut’s hands.26 The Londoners, besides contrib- uting to the national English payment of £72,000, are said to have paid him an 22 Bolton, Cnut the Great, 81–82. 23 Bolton, Cnut the Great, 82–87. 24 ASC (D), ed. Cubbins, 62 (s.a. 1016); (E), ed. Irvine, 74 (s.a. 1016); (E), trans. Swanton, 153 (s.a. 1016). 25 ASC (D), ed. Cubbins, 62 (s.a. 1016); (E), ed. Irvine, 74 (s.a. 1016); (E), trans. Swanton, 153 (s.a. 1016). 26 Bolton, Cnut the Great, 90.

6 Erin Goeres and Richard North extra massive sum, £10,500. Moreover, when some of the Scandinavian army returned to Denmark, “xl. scypa belaf mid þam cynige Cnute” (forty ships were left with King Cnut).27 Like a rich prisoner, in this way, London was forced to pay fees to her jailers. Cnut established one garrison in Southwark and later another to the west of London’s walls, on the Strand near St. Clement Danes.28 London had seen Norse- men before, on decks and siege-ladders, but the poem Liðsmannaflokkr (Soldiers’ Song), composed apparently by Danish officers in ca. 1017–1019, a year or two after the peace of 1016, portrays them more constructively.29 After attributing much presence of mind to Knútr in a stanza in which he is said to order his troops to pause, not to attack, one of the officers composing this poem diverts from the failure of this action with an implication that some of them are planning to stay on, now that the siege has been lifted.30 As he says to his putative lady, in what appears to be the end of this sequence of skaldic verses: Dag vas hvern, þats Hǫgna hurð rjóðask nam blóði ár, þars úti várum, Ilmr, í fǫr með hilmi. Kneigum vér, síz vígum varð nýlokit hǫrðum, fyllar dags, í fǫgrum, fit, Lundúnum sitja.31 [Early it was each day that Hǫgni’s door went red With blood, when we marched out, Lady, with the Protector; O meadow of the ocean’s sun, now that the harsh battles Have concluded, we may settle down in fair London. His shield-kenning “Hǫgna hurð” (Hǫgni’s door) refers to the tale of Hildr, a prin- cess over whom Hǫgni and Heðinn, respectively father and abducting lover, are doomed to fight till the end of time. Whether or not his gold-adorned companion is English, like Ælfgifu, Cnut’s wife from Northampton, the unnamed, probably Danish, officer makes clear that the present war is over and the capital a promis- ing place to live in.32 It was a different story with Cnut, however. It seems that Cnut never warmed to London. The old Roman city, which had never surrendered, 27 ASC (D), ed. Cubbins, 62 (s.a. 1016); (E), ed. Irvine, 74 (s.a. 1016); (E), trans. Swanton, 153 (s.a. 1016). 28 See Clark, p. 95 and Crawford, pp. 450–52, later in this volume. 29 Poole, “Skaldic Verse and Anglo-Saxon History,” 284–86. 30 For a shrewd commentary, see Goeres, “Being Numerous,” 75–82. 31 Text based on “Liðsmannaflokkr,” ed. Poole, 1028 (v. 10). Translation by Richard North. 32 For other suggestions as to who this lady is, see Morawiec, “Liðsmannaflokkr,” 93–115 and in the present volume, p. 421 (Cnut’s mother), and Poole, Viking Poems, 113 (Cnut’s queen Emma).

Prologue 7 holding out against both him and his father before him, was his only by treaty. Small wonder that Cnut kept a watchful eye, even while he made London the cen- ter of his government to the west of the North Sea. On the eastern side lay Jutland and Viborg, where, as we shall see later in this volume, Cnut began to succeed his brother Haraldr formally as king of Den- mark in 1019.33 From here and later from England his foreign ventures contin- ued within a wider frame. There was an expedition to the Baltic in 1022–23, then a campaign in north-eastern Skåne which succeeded in halting a com- bined Norwegian-Swedish army at the Battle of Holy River in 1026, from which time Cnut was overlord over southern and southwestern Sweden. In 1028 this was followed by a successful campaign in Norway that saw his leading rival, King Óláfr Haraldsson, driven into Ukrainian exile and then two years later, in 1030, put down at Stiklestad in the Trøndelag. The historical record also hints at Cnut’s conflicts with Welsh and Irish forces around the same time, and at a series of military engagements with the Scottish kings, from which Cnut emerged victorious in the early 1030s.34 War, however, was not the only form of interaction that took place between Cnut and his neighbours. The king actively pursued dip- lomatic relations with the dukes of Normandy, in 1017 marrying Emma, sister of Duke Richard II and widow of his defeated rival, King Æthelred, and later, proba- bly in the eary 1020s, arranging the marriage of his own sister Ástríðr or Estrith to Richard’s son Count Robert I.35 In February or March 1027, Cnut went on pilgrim- age to Rome, where he attended the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor, Con- rad II (1027–1039). Cnut became a major player in European politics. Praise of him must indeed have traveled widely throughout Europe the more he drew Eng- land into this empire of his making, which lasted until 1042. Having visited Den- mark and the Baltic thus in 1019–1020 and 1022–1023, Skåne, Germany, and Rome in 1026 and 1027, Norway in 1028, and perhaps even Scotland in 1031, Cnut spent more time in England, where he died in Shaftesbury, Dorset, on November 12, 1035. He was interred in the Old Minster, Winchester, possibly near the tomb of St. Swithun.36 33 See Hjermind later in this volume, pp. 321–31. 34 Bolton, Empire of Cnut, 138–150. 35 Bolton, Cnut the Great, 33, n. 17. 36 Crook, “‘A Worthy Antiquity,’” 173–176. For more on Cnut and St. Swithun, see Haug later in this volume, pp. 380–83.

8 Erin Goeres and Richard North Overview of the Companion This book is interdisciplinary, but without its chapters being grouped by discipline or theme. Unlike the other great millennial tribute, a Plutarchian one to Cnut and William,37 it is set out with an overarching narrative that follows Cnut to the En- glish throne and from there to the rise of his great domain through conquest, king- dom, and empire. The first of these titular sections, “Cnut’s Conquest,” traces the end of Anglo-Saxon rule in England and the beginning of a new Danish regime. Focusing for three chapters on London, as the lingering hold-out to Cnut and his least willing English prize, this section lays out a background to the final Danish victory. Both the decline of the Anglo-Saxon kings and Cnut’s winning strategy are studied in archaeological, historical, and literary records. To start with the ar- chaeology: Andrew Reynolds (chap. 1) lays foundations for this section by assess- ing how early and with what boundaries the city of London took shape and what roles therein were played by Kings Æthelred and Cnut. Two more contributions on London’s material culture offer their own perspectives on the conflict. Julian Bowsher (chap. 2), in a study that gathers the results of many excavations at vari- ous riverside locations over the past thirty years, discusses a small but notable corpus of coins produced for both kings. Bowsher evaluates these new discoveries and argues that, despite the upheaval London suffered during the numerous sieges of the Anglo-Danish conflict, some stability may be seen in the smooth tran- sition from the use of coins minted for Æthelred to those minted for Cnut. John Clark (chap. 3) discusses a group of weapons, apparently of Scandinavian origin, found in the old bed of the River Thames. Setting these weapons in the context of other early medieval river finds, he argues for their possible role in the Scandina- vian attacks on the London area during the early eleventh century. The war is dis- cussed in more detail in four more chapters. A commentary on the conflict as portrayed in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is provided by Simon Keynes (chap. 4), with the aid of twelve detailed maps of the war which Sveinn initiated and his son inherited in the last years of King Æthelred II. Going into the form as well as the content of the sources, Zoya Metlitskaya (chap. 5) evaluates the style and ideology of the author of the so-called Æthelredian Fragment of the Chronicle. In her study of the formulae of this and related texts, Metlitskaya argues that the author seems to have been influenced more by the heroic values of the Anglo-Saxon past than by such overtly Christian ideals as penance and divine punishment. She makes the case that this author was affiliated with the supporters of Æthelred’s sons and began to compose this part of the Chronicle just after the accession of Edmund II. 37 Conquests in Eleventh-Century England, 1016, 1066, ed. Ashe and Ward.

Prologue 9 The poignant portrayal of Æthelred’s death in the same account is also discussed by Michael Treschow (chap. 6), who suggests that the king’s death in London, as Cnut’s ships approach, is emblematic of a personal inability, demonstrated throughout his reign, to deal with the problem of the Danish invasions and of the costly tribute which these entailed. Treschow reveals the tone of futility sur- rounding Æthelred and his death to be established in imitation of biblical chroni- cle, while the story of political catastrophe takes on a cathartic role. Hereby the traumatized reader is prepared for Cnut’s triumph through a subtle acquiescence to the hidden workings of providence. Lastly, David McDermott (chap. 7) gives pride of place to Æthelred’s son and successor, Edmund II Ironside. Acknowledg- ing that the Second Viking Age in England is usually portrayed as a struggle be- tween Æthelred and Cnut, McDermott observes that the campaign against Cnut in 1015–1016 was led by Edmund, Cnut’s last English antagonist. Focusing on the increasing political significance of London during the period, McDermott notes that the Londoners, besieged so many times during the Anglo-Danish conflict, spurred Edmund on to resist the invaders and regarded him as a liberator, for- ever hating Cnut for defeating him. The Companion’s second and third sections focus on Cnut’s reigns in Eng- land and abroad and on the changing relationship between England, Scandina- via, and the European continent. The second section, “Cnut’s Kingdom,” reflects first the political skill with which Cnut continued to cultivate allies and amass power in his new English kingdom, then the effects of his rule on the awakening political and literary culture of a new “Anglo-Danish” environment. Ryan Lavelle (chap. 8) looks at the early years of Cnut’s reign and at the mechanisms em- ployed by the young king as he sought to assert his legitimacy as the new ruler. Lavelle describes how Cnut was able to adapt himself to Anglo-Saxon forms of kingship and argues that this was particularly necessary during the early years of his reign, when, before the birth of his son Harthacnut, the king’s long-term control over England remained vulnerable to the survival of Æthelred’s sons and other pretenders from the previous dynasty. Eleanor Parker (chap. 9) examines one of the most widespread stories about Cnut in post-Conquest historical writ- ing, namely, his disposal of Eadric Streona, reportedly executed by Cnut himself as his reward for betraying Edmund Ironside. Tracing the development of this tale from its likely origins at the Anglo-Danish court, Parker notes ways in which the narrative deflects any notion of duplicity in Cnut, its protagonist, before con- sidering ways in which it shaped the later accounts of his conquest and reign. Barbara Yorke (chap. 10) reconsiders and revises the belief that Cnut had much to do with Winchester in his reign. For all that Cnut assimilated into the family of King Æthelred II, Yorke argues that he concentrated his patronage of the city in two distinct phases, at the start and end of his reign. She finds, on the one hand,

10 Erin Goeres and Richard North that such acts on Cnut’s part as the issue of an Anglo-Saxon-style law code at a council in Winchester served to demonstrate the king’s desire for reconciliation with his conquered subjects; on the other, that the king’s later interaction with Winchester was more limited, until he prepared a mausoleum for himself and his queen in the Old Minster. Observing that Winchester was thus the Dane’s ideolog- ical capital, Simon Thomson (chap. 11) discusses the fragment of a relief carving in stone from the same minster, in the first of three chapters on the Anglo-Danish character of the literature associated with Cnut. On the basis of this and of the detailed archaeology of Martin Biddle, Thomson argues that the stone depicts Sig- mundr, later known as a hero of Vǫlsunga saga (Saga of the Volsungs), in a story which both features in the saga and predates it by a long way. Insofar as he sug- gests that Sigmundr at this time, as with Sigemund in Beowulf, was celebrated as a dragon-slayer, Thomson argues that the stone reveals a lively interest in Ger- manic myth and legend at Cnut’s court, whether in Winchester or elsewhere in England. The theme of a new Anglo-Danish hybridity continues with Russell Poole (chap. 12), who draws attention to a striking quantity of non-Scandinavian-derived vocabulary and expressions in the work of the most prolific and widely traveled Icelandic poet, Sigvatr Þórðarson. Poole links the language of Sigvatr’s poetry to his journeys through France, England, and Italy. Focusing, in particular, on the in- fluence of English literary discourse on the poet’s work, he argues that Sigvatr may have become a vernacular spokesman for members of the English-influenced Scan- dinavian elite. Finally in this section, Richard North (chap. 13) posits the existence of at least two copies of Beowulf in Cnut’s reign. Proposing that one of them, the one in the Nowell Codex that we have now, was made just after Cnut’s conquest, North sees an attempt in the copying to insinuate a kinship between Beowulf and the ancient kings of Denmark. Referring to the work of four skaldic poets, he sug- gests that Cnut created a Skjǫldung ideology on the basis of the opening folio of another copy of Beowulf, one perhaps in Winchester. North ends with a speculation that in 1019–1020 Cnut took this folio, like a charter with the names of his ancestors, to Zealand and Skåne as the proof of his right to rule Denmark. “Cnut’s Empire,” the third and final section, offers a broader perspective in its consideration of how Cnut’s reign affected England’s relationship with main- land Scandinavia as far north as Norway and with Continental Europe as far east as Ukraine. The first two chapters draw firstly on archaeological evidence to ex- amine Cnut’s Danish heritage and the uses to which this was put in the consolida- tion of his royal power in Denmark. Turning to Viborg, near to an important assembly site where it seems Cnut was first crowned king of Denmark in 1019, Jesper Hjermind (chap. 14) discusses recent excavations from the northern banks of Viborg’s Lake Søndersø. Detailing a number of the most impressive finds, in- cluding a fragment of painted Middle Eastern glass, a turned boxwood bowl,

Prologue 11 English-style pottery, and gaming pieces, he argues that such objects, associated as they are with royal and aristocratic courts, provide a material witness to Cnut’s journey to Viborg in this year. Marie Bønløkke Spejlborg (chap. 15) reviews the evidence for further Danish arrivals, mostly returning Danish settlers, from Eng- land over the sea. Observing that that the material record of eleventh-century con- nections between the two countries has improved significantly in the last thirty years, Spejlborg shows that modern archaeology reveals many types of contact between all levels of English and Danish society, and that the period surrounding the conquest of England by Cnut was one of the most intense for such interac- tions, usually through the English church. Caitlin Ellis (chap. 16) examines Cnut’s ecclesiastical policy in Scandinavia during his years of expansion, taking the fa- mous image of Cnut in the Winchester Liber Vitae as a starting-point. Regarding King Cnut’s imports of English and English-trained clergy in the context of rivalry between the York-Canterbury axis and the ambitious diocese of Hamburg-Bremen, Ellis studies his use of ecclesiastical patronage for political ends. Taking this be- yond England and Denmark, Eldbjørg Haug (chap. 17) discusses Cnut’s connec- tions with the cult of St. Swithun in Norway, as well as the claim, made in a vita of the saint, that the king was responsible for translating one of the saint’s relics to Scandinavia. Within this context Haug sets the cult of St. Swithun in Stavanger, associating the translation with Norway rather than Denmark and particularly with respect to the untimely death of the local magnate Erlingr Skjálgsson. Turning to lands further east, the next two chapters consider a highly complicated but rela- tively under-studied aspect of Cnut’s life: his and his family’s relationship with the Western Slavs and Poles. Laura Amalasunta Gazzoli (chap. 18) traces a connection between Cnut’s dynasty and the Slavs of what is now the North German coast, re- vealing an association that began with his grandfather, Haraldr blátǫnn (“Blue- tooth”) Gormsson. Gazzoli demonstrates that this connection played an important role in the conquests of England, first by Sveinn and later by Cnut, and that it con- tinued to play a role in the formation of Danish royal identity in the generations that followed. Jakub Morawiec (chap. 19) concentrates on Cnut’s Polish connec- tions in a renewed discussion of his and his brother Haraldr’s mother, who was an anonymous daughter of Duke Mieszko I. Morawiec finds instances in which these connections influenced Danish policy with European neighbours, even while he shows that Cnut’s kinship with such Polish royals as his cousin, Mieszko II, did not make him side with the latter in his conflict with Conrad II, the Holy Roman Emperor. From here we move further east, to the Ukrainian principality of the Rus’ in search of St. Clement, whom Barbara Crawford (chap. 20) shows to have been patron of Cnut’s dynasty. Crawford concludes this third section on “Cnut’s Em- pire” with a survey of the evidence for the proliferation of St. Clement in the many churches dedicated to this maritime saint. As she shows, these extend from Kyiv

12 Erin Goeres and Richard North to Norway and from Denmark to London and Oxford and elsewhere in England, from east to west in a movement which follows the fleets of Cnut’s thalassocracy and may indicate the presence of the garrisons that maintained it. In the course of these chapters, the reader may notice that their authors sometimes disagree on matters of historical fact, and indeed that there is little in the field that may be called secure. Consequently, this book is equipped with an Epilogue in which Timothy Bolton reflects on the utility of the sources, particu- larly on kings’ sagas from thirteenth-century Iceland. He gives an overview of King Cnut’s reception, not only in these and other medieval Scandinavian histo- ries that narrate his life and times and those of his foes and friends, but also in the modern historical trends which have caused the information within these sources to be accepted, rejected, or even ignored, by historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In effect, Bolton, who is Cnut’s leading biographer, re- stores old pathways to the subject of this Companion by showing how narratives in later Old Norse (or Old Icelandic) literature, particularly skaldic verse, may be trusted to deliver a credible account of actual historical events. Central to each chapter is the young man who rose without trace to become England’s first royal player on the international stage. As a younger son of the Danish royal family, Knútr had no choice but to succeed in England, which he did by campaigning with such sure strategy and instinct that he won the war and made himself an empire. This Prologue will end with an attempt to glimpse the workings of Cnut’s mind some seven years later, on a June evening in 1023, when he “translated” Archbishop Ælfheah’s body from St. Paul’s back to his old dio- cese in Canterbury. Knútr inn ríki, Tomb-Raider The story is told by the Kentish monk Osbern in his Translatio sancti Ælfegi (translation of St. Elphege) of ca. 1080.38 Archbishop Ælfheah of Canterbury (1006–1012) achieved sanctity when he was killed by Earl Thorkell’s men on April 19, 1012 in an assembly in Greenwich, more than half a year after they took him prisoner upon breaking into Canterbury on September 29, 1011.39 One day after his murder, the Danes sold Ælfheah’s corpse to the men of St. 38 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris. The present text is theirs, the translation based on theirs. 39 ASC (D), ed. Cubbins, 56–57 (s.a. 1011–12); (E), ed. Irvine, 68–69 (s.a. 1011–12); (E), trans. Swanton, 141–43 (s.a. 1011–12).

Prologue 13 Paul’s Church in London, where it was swiftly interred. His tomb became a site of pilgrimage and brought the church significant income. The Worcester Chroni- cle, which gives the longest contemporary account, opens by saying that in 1023 “Cnut kyning binnan Lundene on Sancte Paules mynstre sealde fulle leafe Æðelnoðe arcebiscope” (King Cnut, within St. Paul’s Minster in London, gave full leave to Archbishop Æthelnoth) to have St. Ælfheah translated to Canter- bury.40 Thus the initiative came from Æthelnoth, who had arrived in London on June 1. The location of the first scene in St. Paul’s is common to both accounts. Osbern’s Translatio matches or follows the Chronicle in which Ælfheah’s body is shipped from there “ofer Temese to Suðgeweorke, ⁊ þær þone halgan martyr þan arcebiscope ⁊ his geferum betæhton” (over the Thames to Southwark, and there they committed the holy martyr to the archbishop and his companions). On the evidence of this annal, it seems likely that Æthelnoth had presented his claim to Cnut, whose relations with Canterbury were always good, within a few years of the king’s taking power. Nonetheless, to save Canterbury’s blushes about the manner of removal, Osbern tells the story as if the idea for the saint’s translation were Cnut’s. Lavelle calls it “an early medieval ‘special operation’”; Bolton, a “heist”; Sarah Foot, “an opportunity to use major public spectacle to demonstrate visually and symbolically his repentance for the violence of the Danish army dur- ing his father’s lifetime, and his willingness to do reparation for their sins.”41 Thus the space which Osbern opens up for Cnut in his story causes disagreement even today. To us, however, it may afford a glimpse of the man as he was remem- bered by witnesses. In this respect, Osbern’s story, which he based on the witness of Godric, a man who was there, is so far from relating an orderly translation that it resem- bles stories, written in thirteenth-century Iceland, but mostly set elsewhere in Scandinavia, in which an aristocratic haugbrjóti (mound-breaker) breaks into a haugr (grave-mound) to steal a precious object such as a sword from a relatively benign haugbúi (barrow-dweller) inside.42 Although it is the body of the dead that is stolen in his account, Osbern’s image of Cnut, in a role that translates as “tomb-raider” for our days, is rather similar. It is this story that gives the most vivid picture of Cnut’s involvement with a city that had no love for him. Osbern wrote the Translatio as a sequel to his Passio sancti Ælfegi (Passion of St. Elphege) of ca. 1075, in which he says that the people of London brought the archbishop to St. Paul’s, having bought his body from the Danes after his 40 ASC (D), ed. Cubbins, 64 (s.a. 1023); (D), see also ASC (D), trans. Swanton, 156 (s.a. 1023). 41 Lavelle, Alfred’s Wars, 194–98 (p. 194). Bolton, Cnut the Great, 112. Foot, “Kings, Saints and Conquests,” 159. 42 On this tradition, see Guerrero, “Stranded in Miðgarðr,” 40–59.

14 Erin Goeres and Richard North martyrdom in Greenwich in 1012. The mention of money makes that part of the Passio credible. Less credibly there, however, Osbern goes on to say that some twelve thousand Danes and Englishmen, having wept floods of tears in repen- tance for the archbishop’s demise, now danced with joy in the streets while his body “ad ęcclesiam Doctoris Gentium aduectus, in eadem conclamatus honora- tus collacatus est” (was conveyed to the Church of the Teacher of the Gentiles, acclaimed therein, and honorably laid in state).43 Eleven years later, according to the Translatio, Cnut summons Archbishop Æthelnoth and tells him the plan for retranslation. Osbern says that Cnut first sum- mons Æthelnoth to see him in London on Saturday, the eve of Pentecost 1023 (i.e. on June 1), letting him know that he wishes to make good on a promise he had made to the English in 1016, to translate Ælfheah “ad sedem patriarchatus sui ser- uato more antiquorum” (to the see of his patriarchate in the traditional way of the ancients).44 Archbishop Æthelnoth, arriving in London, goes straight to the church. Osbern says that he “mandauit \\regi/ in balneas descendenti se adesse. & quid ipse uelit statuere. in ęcclesia Beati Pauli apostoli expectare” (commanded the king, who, as it happened, was getting into the bath, to come to him in the church of the blessed apostle Paul and declare what he wished to have done).45 There is a distinct possibility that Cnut was bathing in the former Roman public bathhouses at Huggin Hill, between St. Paul’s and the river, on the site of a tenement which, in the late ninth century, belonged to the bishop of Worcester;46 perhaps it is not co- incidental that the Worcester text gives the fullest Chronicle account. Cnut falls in with the archbishop’s command as if this were the most natural thing in the world: Quo ille accepto sine mora de lauacro surgit, clamide solummodo nudum corpus obtegit simplices pedibus subtalares inducit sicque ad presulem impigro gradu tendit.47 [When he heard this, he rose up from his ablutions without delay and, wrapping merely a cloak around his naked body, placed his feet in plain sandals and thus quickly made his way to the archbishop.] To us the Dane’s towel and sandals might lend him a careless air, belying the gravity of a situation in which Æthelnoth will have dressed for an audience in archiepiscopal robes. In the story that follows, nonetheless, Cnut puts a plan 43 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 283 (lines 11–12). 44 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 300 (lines 72–73). 45 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 302 (lines 83–85). 46 Pers. comm. Andrew Reynolds; see also Reynolds in this volume, pp. 24, 35 and Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 302, n. 20. 47 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 302 (lines 86–88).

Prologue 15 into action, ordering “omnibus familię suę militibus quos lingua Danorum hus- carles uocant” (all the soldiers of his household, who are called “housecarls” in the Danish tongue) to divide into groups: one to perform a diversion, the other a raid. Cnut orders “ut eorum alij per extremas ciuitatis portas seditiones conci- tent” (that some of them should incite rebellions at the outer gates of the city: these would have been from the garrison by St. Clement Danes on the Strand); and that others “pontem & ripas fluminis armati obsidant, ne exeuntes eos cum corpore sancti Lundanus populus prępedire ualeat” (arm themselves and occupy the bridge and the banks of the river, so that the people of London would not be able to stand in the way of those leaving with the saint’s body).48 These words of Osbern’s presuppose an English citizenry then in control of the Roman city of Lon- don, north of the river, whom the Danes of Southwark were watching from the southern end of London Bridge. Cnut’s plan for a diversion by some or all the gates of the City of London may indicate that he expected capture from any Lon- doners he ran into on the way to the foreshore. Once Cnut arrives in the church, according to Osbern, he announces his plan to the archbishop “lętabunda simul ac tremebunda uoce” (in a voice which was shaking with joy).49 In contrast, the archbishop bewails his hearing of this only now, the prospect of capture by the Londoners outside, and above all the small number of Danes in their party: for who will move the stone at the entrance of Ælfheah’s tomb? These cares the king brushes aside with words which entrust the outcome to the dead man himself: In hoc pater sancte maxime apparebit quia nobiscum beatus ille uolet transire. si quod impossibile hominibus est. ipse sua uirtute fecerit esse possibile. semper enim difficultas miraculum gignere consueuit.50 [This, Holy Father, is just how the blessed man will make clear his wish to cross with us. Whatever is impossible for men, he will make possible through his own power. Ever is it the way of difficulty to beget a miracle.] Despite the affective piety of Osbern’s record, it is as if Ælfheah interacts with his rescuers. Is there is a Scandinavian touch to the idea that the corpse, like a Norse haugbúi, has its own role to play?51 At any rate, Cnut stays outside, offers to stand guard, and asks Æthelnoth to pray for help and his monks to move the stone- work. The monks are given as Godric – later dean of Christ Church, Canterbury, 48 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 302 (lines 89–94). 49 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 302 (lines 96–97). 50 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 304 (lines 112–15). 51 Guerrero, “Stranded in Miðgarðr,” 49–51.

16 Erin Goeres and Richard North where he became the younger Osbern’s source52 – and the older Ælfweard the Tall, who, if he truly was a servant of Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury (d. 988), may have been tested some forty years later. With Æthelnoth’s blessing, they tear open the chamber’s plaster wall with an iron candelabrum and push the stone cover of the inner tomb easily aside. St. Ælfheah is discovered lying un- corrupted within. Finding a board providentially the right size, the monks carry the saint’s body through a dark narrow street (possibly Paul’s Wharf Hill) down to the shore, followed by Cnut and the archbishop, whose surprise is left to us to imagine cum ecce regia navis aureis rostrata draconibus, armigeris repleta militibus, uenienti mar- tyri obuia offertur. quam citius dictu rex insiliens, expansis brachiis martyrem suscepit, deinde protensa dextera pontificem induxit.53 [when lo! a royal longship with golden dragon prows, full of armed men, come to meet the martyr, is placed in their way. Quick as a flash, the king jumped in and with arms open picked up the martyr. Then, offering his right hand, he helped the pontiff aboard.] The longship shoots off with King Cnut at the helm, east and downstream to the opposite bank. At this moment, God’s great favor to St. Ælfheah is revealed, “dum hinc pontem & totas fluminis ripas loricatis stratas militibus conspiceres” (as here you would have seen the bridge and the entire banks of the river lined with armed men).54 That the south bank lay outside London is probably why we may take the words “totas fluminis ripas” to exclude the northern side. Albeit in reverse, the scene is painted as vividly as the day St. Ælfheah’s body first entered London: Illinc per extremas urbis portas simulatorias seditiones excitatas audires, attenderes regem nauem regentem, remigem nobilem remos trahentem, orantem archiepiscopum & sanctos monachos obsequium pręstantes.55 [over there you would have heard the pretended rebellions incited at the outer gates of the city; you would have espied the king steering the ship, the noble oarsmen pulling on the oars, the archbishop praying and the holy monks performing obsequies.] Out of sight, the fighting in progress by London’s Roman gates, as the Londoners fall for Cnut’s trick west, north, and east of St. Paul’s, is implied to have a sound of its own. Disembarking on the Southwark foreshore, Cnut has the saint loaded on a wagon, for a troop of monks and housecarls to escort him to Rochester along 52 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 304 (lines 119–20). 53 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 308 (lines 171–74). 54 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 308 (lines 177–78). 55 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 308 (lines 178–81).

Prologue 17 what is now the Old Kent Road. The king’s attention to detail emerges further in the way he prepares to cover their escape, “timebat nanque ciuium irruptiones” (for he feared attacks from the citizens). So had Æthelnoth on the crossing; per- haps his prayers were too loud: Deinde surgens. & liberalibus iocis archiepiscopo alludens: “Liberatus es inquit & meoi- munere de periculo mortis, de qua te liberari non posse arbitrabaris. Iam securus ad sanc- tum profiscere, atque ut nostris faueat temporibus humiliter deprecare. Ego uobiscum pariter irem. Si magnis ut nosti regni negotiis occupatus non essem.”56 [Then Cnut rose, and with great good humour, jested with the archbishop, saying: “With my help you are freed from the threat of a death from which you were thinking you could not be delivered. Go now to the saint in safety, and humbly beg him to bless us with more favour- able times. I would go with you too if I were not, as you know, busy with affairs of state.”] Teasing his beneficiary thus, Cnut turns to face a crowd of Londoners advanc- ing from the northern end of the bridge. Perhaps they, too, hope to recover the martyr’s remains. Enjoying the fury of his least favorite city, Cnut promises Æthelnoth that he will ask Queen Emma, now in Kent with their young son Har- thacnut, to join the archbishop and his party in Canterbury “cum tota nobilitate” (with all the nobility).57 Cnut had married Queen Emma in July 1017, a year after the death of her first husband, King Æthelred II. Then the party of archbishop, monks, and others sets off for Canterbury. There is more adventure down the road in Plumstead, where Cnut’s housecarls, supposing that the Londoners have come after them, take up position against them, making ready to die and to give Æthelnoth’s party time to escape. Yet their pursuers turn out to be friendly, not Londoners at all, and soon the archbishops are back home in Canterbury.58 Opening Questions This Companion will open with some questions about Cnut Sveinsson, supplanter of Edmund and Æthelred II and the first non-English ruler of England. How much Cnut changed of Æthelred’s England in the late tenth and early eleventh centu- ries, how much he allowed to remain; how much or little he valued Winchester, 56 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 308 (lines 186–91). 57 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 308 (line 193). Emma arrives in Canterbury three days after Ælfheah, although, according to the Worcester text of the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle (D), s.a. 1023, she joins the party in Rochester. 58 Translatio Sancti Ælfegi, ed. and trans. Rumble and Morris, 308–312 (lines 195–217).

18 Erin Goeres and Richard North even while he made London, the city he disliked, into his political and economic capital; how much planning or improvization there was in his creation and up- keep of a maritime empire that he doubtless wished his children to inherit; what the aftermath of his power was in the later eleventh century in London, England, and Scandinavia: these wide-ranging questions are approached here by 22 schol- ars in order of the events. With recent research in history, archaeology, and litera- ture, let us try for some answers.

Part I: Cnut’s Conquest



Andrew Reynolds Chapter 1 London into the Age of Cnut: An Archaeological Perspective This chapter will review the archaeology of the city of London, beginning with a brief consideration of the city’s archaeological resource, its extent, and recovery, before charting the early history of this city from its Roman origins through to the later tenth century and then the early eleventh when Cnut, having secured the city from Æthelred and Edmund, began to take an increasing interest in Lon- don as his new capital.1 London’s early development is complex, both in terms of its chronological and spatial development, and this background is necessary to place its urban floruit in the reigns of Æthelred and Cnut in perspective. The re- cent publication of a series of large-scale excavations in the heart of the walled city allows for a high-resolution reading of the redevelopment of London, in which the later tenth and early eleventh centuries are shown to have been a pe- riod of substantial and apparently planned urban growth in contrast to much less regular (and comparatively sparse) prior occupations. New findings support the idea that the Roman amphitheater discovered in the 1990s served as an as- sembly place for the city’s aldermen, and here the evidence for the defense of London in the so-called “second Viking Age” will also be reviewed. Overall, a case will be made for the rise of London as England’s principal urban center in an intense and relatively short period in the early eleventh century, in contrast to previous arguments for a later-ninth-century urban foundation by King Alfred. Introduction After a brief overview of the archaeology and history of London, from Roman beginnings to the earlier Anglo-Saxon period and the reemergence of urban life 1 For this chapter, I acknowledge the organisers of the conference upon which this volume is based. I should also like to thank John Clark for his sage advice and Barney Harris for producing the illustrations. I thank my teacher Gustav Milne for encouraging me as an undergraduate, for his insight, and for several enjoyable years in which we worked on the medieval buildings of London; his writing on London is an inspiration. Lastly, I am grateful to the generations of ar- chaeologists whose skill and commitment enabled the material story of London to be told. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513336-002

22 Andrew Reynolds in the form of Lundenwic, this chapter will consider the oft-supposed direct transloca- tion of extramural settlement back inside the walls of the former Roman city in the late ninth century. London’s earlier history provides the background necessary to ap- preciate the full significance of the developments in London’s urban fabric in the later tenth and earlier eleventh century. The focus here will be on the topographical development of the city, rather than on such details of its economic or material cul- ture history as are covered elsewhere in this book. Archaeological inquiries into London’s past have resulted in a series of trans- formative realizations about the nature of human occupation not only in both Roman and medieval cities, but also in Lundenwic, the “transitional” settlement to the west of the walled city. Lundenwic eluded recognition until the 1980s, despite the fact that the place-name Aldwych (Old Wic) gives away its location unambigu- ously.2 The nature and extent of Roman London, Londinium, is relatively well un- derstood. Even though the chronological details continue to be refined, whilst the meaning of the name itself has puzzled scholars of place-names,3 the exceptionally well-preserved deposits of this period in many parts of the city have allowed schol- ars to map out fluctuations in the extent and character of the Roman settlement with relative clarity,4 particularly in comparison with what is known of occupation in and outside the walled city between the fifth and eleventh centuries. This chapter is not the first to review the post-Roman material. In particular, two key book-length treatments of London’s post-Roman history and archaeology have lost none of their relevance despite decades of subsequent archaeological and historical investigation, of which an impressive synthesis has recently ap- peared.5 The first monograph is Brooke and Keir’s beautifully written and percep- tive investigation of the written and topographical evidence, published in 1975; 2 Biddle, “London on the Strand”; Vince, “The Aldwych.” 3 Rivet and Smith, Place-Names of Roman Britain, 396–98, though they draw no conclusion about what Londinium means, emphasize that the name was probably communicated by either Vulgar Latin or British speakers to Germanic speaking people (p. 397). Where they dismiss Ptolemy’s association of Londinium with the Cantii (the people of Kent) in his (ca. 125–150) Ge- ography (p. 398), it may be said that Ptolemy’s view may merely reflect London’s evolving rela- tionship with the surrounding regions. Ekwall, in English Place-Names, 303, more boldly suggests that “The immediate base may be a pers.[onal] n.[ame] Londinos or a tribal name formed from the adjective,” with the first part of the name cognate with Old Irish lond (wild). 4 Perring, Roman London and “Recent advances”; Mattingly, An Imperial Possession, 273–76; Hingley, Londinium. 5 Naismith, Citadel of the Saxons. Although this appeared too late for its detail to be included here, there appears to be broad alignment between his conclusions and mine. Naismith’s vol- ume is an expert sysnthesis, particularly strong on the economic and administrative organiza- tion of the city.

Chapter 1 London into the Age of Cnut: An Archaeological Perspective 23 the second is Alan Vince’s expert overview of archaeological findings, published in 1990.6 My contribution will set the historically informative results of several recently published excavations of the city within the context of revisions in over- all thinking about the urban process in England and neighboring countries. Archaeology in London: The Resource Whereas historians and literary scholars must be ever mindful of the partial na- ture of their evidence, as well as of the factors that led to the initial production and subsequent survival of this evidence, archaeologists confront problems of a different kind, for all the theoretical parallels that can be drawn between writ- ten and physical evidence.7 Unchecked construction work and controlled exca- vation are both destroyers of archaeological strata. Nonetheless, our knowledge has increased enormously over the last seventy years; and particularly dramati- cally since the mid-1970s, when concerted archaeological inquiry witnessed such a marked upturn, both in extent and methodological approach, that Brooke and Keir, in their preface to London 800–1600: The Shaping of a City, acknowledged that “it is the worst time to be writing a book on London in the period most likely to be illuminated by these [archaeological] studies.”8 How perceptive they were. Preservation and recovery are the two most important factors that impact upon the archaeologist’s ability to reconstruct the past. While Londoners started to dig basements and cellars for their houses from the late tenth century on- wards,9 the effects of these structures upon archaeological strata pale in compar- ison to the devastating destruction wrought by the digging of cellars in the exponential expansion of London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In many cases, even the earlier reconstruction of vast expanses of the city, after the Great Fire of London in 1666, sealed rather than erased archaeological deposits. Many of London’s churches, rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren and others, lay di- rectly upon the foundations of their medieval predecessors, thus preserving ear- lier remains below them and medieval ground plans in later fabric.10 The one 6 Brooke and Keir, London 800–1216; Vince, Saxon London. 7 The key notion is that archaeological strata may be “read” as text by an excavator with the “linguistic” skills to decode the many and complex facets of the archaeological record. 8 Brooke and Keir, London 800–1216, xiv. 9 Horsman, Milne, and Milne, Aspects of Saxo-Norman London I, 109. 10 As, for example, at St. Vedast, Foster Lane and St. Brides, Fleet Street: Milne and Reynolds, “St.Vedast”; Milne, St. Bride’s.

24 Andrew Reynolds glaring exception to this rule is St. Paul’s Cathedral. Here the scale of the works involved in the construction of the present edifice are likely to have left little in the way of structures or strata relating to the medieval and earlier religious com- plex, at least below the footprint of the current building.11 A pioneering study of the survival of archaeology in London, undertaken in the 1970s by Martin Biddle, Daphne Hudson, and Carolyn Heighway, revealed that no less than 25% of archaeological deposits within the walled area had been erased by later activities, with at least 58% of the urban area at least par- tially effaced.12 This important and innovative study, The Future of London’s Past, was itself produced in an era of activity, when the pressures of redevelop- ment were ramping up again after the immediate reconstruction following World War II. A number of these developments were monitored or excavated via small trenches by dedicated teams of archaeologists funded by public dona- tions, who managed to record only a fraction of the sites being redeveloped in the 1940s to 1960s.13 The challenges facing these pioneers of urban archaeology were immense, especially given the extent of rebuilding necessary after the sus- tained bombing of the city in the early years of the war.14 Although the history of archaeological recovery in London may be found elsewhere,15 it is important to recognize that the figures given for archaeology lost by 1973 only increased in the rest of the 1970s, while the newly formed De- partment of Urban Archaeology, based at the Museum of London, fought to re- cover the material remains of Roman and medieval London, often from the jaws of mechanical excavators. It was not until 1990 that the responsibility for record- ing the archaeology in advance of development, together with the burden of cost, was formally passed to property developers. This was done through plan- ning guidance issued by the government, which, though itself not legally bind- ing, was now at least part of the formal planning process; indeed, it worked remarkably well. In part, the need for new regulations came about due to a series of threats to high-profile archaeological sites in the city, notably the Huggin Hill Roman bath-house and (with greater media coverage) London’s Rose Theatre of 11 McCourt, “An Archaeological Assessment,” 214; Tatton-Brown, “Topography of Anglo- Saxon London,” 23. 12 Biddle, Hudson, and Heighway, Future of London’s Past. 13 Grimes, Roman and Mediaeval London. 14 There were, for example, fifty-seven consecutive nights of aerial bombardment between September 7 and November 2, 1940, while on December 29 that year the City experienced the most extensive fire since the blaze of 1666: Milne with Cohen, Cripplegate, 1. 15 For an excellent short summary, see Milne with Cohen, Cripplegate, 1–3. For a longer con- sideration, see Sheldon and Haynes, “Twenty-five Years,” and Morel, Archaeology in Global Cities.

Chapter 1 London into the Age of Cnut: An Archaeological Perspective 25 Shakespeare’s time.16 Since the 1990s it has become routine for the excavation and recording of archaeological remains to precede development. Nevertheless, one wonders what has been lost. The archaeological record, though partial in its survival and partial in its recovery, is extensive. It has a huge potential to reveal so much more of London’s early history, and moreover in a way that written sources, barring the discovery of long-lost documents, are unlikely to replicate. Roman Beginnings The earliest occupation of the site that became Roman Londinium is dated by some to no earlier than 50 CE. However, London’s role as the administrative center and preeminent settlement in the Roman province of Britannia seems to come slightly later, between 60 and 70, perhaps due to the sack of Colchester, the earlier provincial capital, in Boudicca’s revolt in 60 or 61 (London was also sacked).17 Interestingly, the evidence for early Roman period occupation at Lon- don has been read by some as a sign that it was in origin a commercial settle- ment, an entrepôt, rather as Lundenwic was some six hundred years later to the west of the Roman city; by others, however, this evidence has been taken to indicate a military foundation in the Roman invasion of Britain in 43.18 Besides its location upstream of the Thames Estuary, in itself a major gateway into southern England from Continental Europe, the site of London is relatively un- prepossessing. Topographically uninspiring, with relatively little variation in eleva- tion, the area enclosed by the third-century Roman wall (128ha) incorporates a minor river fed by rivulets (the Walbrook) draining southwards into the Thames, as well as large areas of boggy ground initially unsuitable for settlement and ex- ploitation. The eastern part of the walled area retained this character into the late Anglo-Saxon period and was the latest part of the city to be resettled. The late-first-century Cripplegate Fort, whose north-western part lay for many years unrecognized in the outline of London’s city wall, provided a mili- tary focus which was subsumed, at least partly, with the development in the third century of a walled encient that was to dictate the extent of the city of late 16 Sheldon and Haynes, “Twenty-five Years,” 5; Bowsher and Miller, The Rose and Globe; Bowsher, Shakespeare’s London, 68–80. 17 Mattingly, An Imperial Possession, 265. 18 Mattingly, An Imperial Possession, 273–75; Perring, “Two Studies on Roman London.”

26 Andrew Reynolds Anglo-Saxon, medieval, and later London (Map 1.1).19 The walls of Roman towns and cities now tend to be seen as a symbolic reflection of urbanitas which denotes distinctions between urban and rural identities: the cost and re- sponsibility for erecting walls appears to have been borne by a given town’s population rather than by the state.20 Map 1.1: The topography of London and the Roman city, showing Cripplegate fort, the amphitheater, forum basilica, the principal roads of the Roman period, and the location of the late/sub-Roman martyrium at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The relatively early onset of urban decline in Roman London can be observed in terms of an economic downturn, one which followed a spate of devastating fires and a neglect of public buildings and public space, all beginning in the late second century.21 By the end of the third century, major public edifices such as the forum-basilica and amphitheater had passed out of use.22 By the fourth century, much of the intra-mural area appears to have been turned over to agri- culture. Presumably this was done to provide an immediate source of sustenance for the smaller number of urban dwellers within the city walls, many of whom were living by that time in large villas but in much less demographically dense occupations overall. Evidently the Roman city wall, including the riverside wall, 19 For an important series of essays on the form and function of the city at this time, see Bird, Hassall, and Sheldon, Interpreting Roman London. 20 Mattingly, An Imperial Possession, 331–32. 21 Mattingly, An Imperial Possession, 334, 338; West and Milne, “Owls in the Basilica.” 22 Mattingly, An Imperial Possession, 336–37.

Chapter 1 London into the Age of Cnut: An Archaeological Perspective 27 remained more or less intact into the early Middle Ages, at least in its outline if not in its verticality, on which I shall say more below. By earlier standards the occupants of the late Roman city lived in a strange place, with ruined elements of a bygone age of classical urbanism as well as large tracts of agricultural land within the city walls: this townscape is revealed dramatically by the Number 1 Poultry excavations in the heart of the city, of which more below. In many ways, the late Roman city of London would have been a dangerous and dilapidated place to live in, not a magnet for folk seeking an urban way of life. Nonetheless, immediately to the west of the walled city some exciting new finds have been made which bring a new perspective to the cultural transforma- tion of Roman to Anglo-Saxon London. These are the remarkable discoveries at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, where a late Roman cemetery appears to have continued into the fifth century, possibly as a martyrium and associated shrine, and where two fine blue glass palm cups of seventh-century date were recovered in the eighteenth century.23 These palm cups (probably from a burial, to judge by other graves found nearby and by burials with palm cups from the emporium at Ipswich),24 bear witness to the rejuvenation of London as a center of population, commerce, and production, all within an economic upturn that was enjoyed by much of northern Europe from this period up until the impact of the Vikings in the ninth century; this upturn reconfigured the socioeconomic pattern of the Eu- ropean macro-region. Early post-Roman London within the Walls The fifth century is a particularly difficult period to understand in London’s his- tory. Elsewhere, owing to well-known problems of scientific dating across the later Roman to early Anglo-Saxon transition,25 this century is marked both by a hiatus in the use of coin for monetary transactions and by the disappearance of readily datable commodities of the kind that were commonplace during the period of Roman occupation. In the two centuries following the latest datable Roman occu- pations within the walled area, the evidence for activity of any kind is extremely sparse (Map 1.2). Principally it is limited to a few sherds of early Anglo-Saxon 23 Telfer, “New Evidence.” 24 Malcolm and Bowsher, Middle Saxon London, 21, fig. 13: Scull (2009). 25 The C14 calibration curve presents particular difficulties across the fifth and sixth centu- ries, and the Roman period in general.

28 Andrew Reynolds pottery recovered from later contexts from a scatter of sites,26 with a Germanic- style brooch of fifth-century date from a layer of fallen roof tiles at the Lower Thames Street bath-house and with a sixth- or seventh-century Merovingian-style buckle loop from a twelfth-century context at the Guildhall.27 Three complete pots of northern Frankish origin, dating to the late sixth to early seventh century, which were purportedly found in the western part of the walled area (one from Gresham Street, and one from Christ’s Hospital, Greyfriars, and one from Alder- manbury), may be items from an antiquary’s collection.28 The seeming sparsity of these visits to the former Roman city, evidenced by a few objects here and there, shows that occupation only really began again from around 600 onwards. Map 1.2: Distribution of select artefacts of fifth- to seventh-century date found in the walled city and the location of St. Paul’s. The key documented event for the reoccupation, on any scale, of the walled city is the foundation of the monastic community of St. Paul’s in the western end of the walled area in 604. Hot on the heels of the first party of missionaries 26 Vince, Saxon London, 10–12; Schofield, Blackmore, and Stocker, “St. Paul’s Cathedral,” 82 (Table 1). 27 Marsden, Roman London; Evison, “Early Anglo-Saxon Applied Disc Brooches,” 270–71, fig. 2a; Bowsher, Dyson, Holder and Howell, The London Guildhall, 300–301. 28 Vince, Aspects of Saxo-Norman London II, 20; Vince, Saxon London, 11–12, fig. 5; Schofield, Blackmore, and Stocker, “St. Paul’s Cathedral,” 81.