Æthelred the Unready

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Hello and welcome to today's episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarman and today we're going to talk about one of the many rulers who left a pretty significant mark on the history of England but whose epithet is not very complimentary. The kings of the early medieval world often have nicknames that give us an insight into their achievements and their rulership. We have Alfred the Great, Edward the Confessor, Edmund the Martyr and of course William the Conqueror.

Some are best known by a feature of their appearance like Charles the Bold or Pepin the Short or Swain Forkbeard. Others were stuck with nicknames that are less fortunate and that colour are modern judgement of their success and accomplishments. One of those is the 10th to 11th century king Æthelred the Unready, who is considered, and I quote, notorious for his unsuccessful military leadership, his blind trust in disloyal associates and his overly harsh treatment of political opponents.

In today's episode, we're going to be discussing exactly why Ethelred is described in this way, and whether that is really a fair reflection of his achievements. That quote is from the back of an award-winning book on Ethelred. which is a reassessment of his life and rule, aiming to give a better understanding of the challenges this particular king was facing.

I'm delighted to be joined today by the author of the book, Levi Roach, who is an Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Exeter, specialising in the religious and political history of Europe in the Middle Ages. So first of all... Ethelred's reputation is not all that great really and he's also been described as one of the few

medieval English kings responsible for a form of ethnic cleansing, which is something we're going to get back to a bit later on. So why did you decide to focus and write a book about Æthelred? Well, I think Æthelred poses one of those perennial problems and challenges for historians, where there are these strong inherited attitudes towards him, these strong ideas of him as a failure. But alongside that, we have a very rich... source base that complicates the picture that allows us to see and

We'll probably get into this, some genuine failures, but inevitably shows something much more complex than just one useless individual, because this is actually one of the periods for Anglo-Saxon England where we have one of the richest source bases, most varied, ranging from different types of...

of written sources, from very good archaeological sources, good manuscript sources. And so it's a real opportunity to connect the dots between a lot of very disparate things. Whereas in most previous periods, we have just one or the others of those kinds of things. We can actually see a lot more of Ethelred, which is partly what...

He probably looks worse. So we're in part at least seeing more closely what previously might be hidden. It also, I think, allows us an interesting opportunity, though, to study. a reign that at the very least wasn't a success. Whether or not he was a complete failure, we can discuss. But when you're dealing with regimes struggling, they're in many respects more interesting, because you have to explain.

You have to explain invasion and conquest as happens later in Aethelred's reign, whereas success kind of gets taken for granted. We're going to get back to this a bit later on, but can you say something just to start us out? but this nickname of his, the Unready, which is usually taken to mean that he was very badly prepared for the Viking attacks. Is that really what that nickname meant?

Not at all in the Middle Ages. So there's two problems with Æthelred the Unready as a nickname. The first is that it comes from the Old English Unraid, which doesn't mean unready in the least. It means ill-counseled. And this is a clever play on Æthelred's name, which is, in Old English, avolred, meaning noble council or good council.

And unred is the reverse of that. So it's kind of saying, you know, noble council, you know, my arse or something like that is the play on that. So that's the first point is that it didn't really mean unready at all. And it was only in the early modern period. that people start misinterpreting this earlier term as meaning not being prepared, as being ill-prepared, and they then associate this with perceived failings of Ethelred. The second problem, though, is even that...

old English nickname, that mocking moniker of ill-counseled, is first detested in the 12th century, in the later 12th century. And so we have no particular evidence that it was actually contemporary with his reign, and good reason to suspect that it might not be. because one of the first texts it appears in, in fact, the first one in its full form, it's an addition. This is a text that's copying and expanding in earlier work, and the earlier work doesn't use.

term at all it just calls him ethyl red and then in this um the leges anglorum in the early 13th century they then add to it Unred. So it actually seems to be a nickname that's probably coined in the post-conquest period when Æthelred becomes kind of synonymous with the failures of Anglo-Saxon England in the light of William the Conqueror and later Norman successes.

He was born in the 960s. Can you tell us a little bit about 10th century England? What was the sort of world that Esther Red was born into? What was that like? So Æthelred is born into a highly successful dynasty that had been expanding their power from a base in Wessex in the south of England, steadily over the rest of what we now know to be England. And his father...

King Edgar plays a crucial part in this process in the 950s and 960s of consolidating these gains. His father inherits pretty much all of what we now know as England, but oversees a series of important administrative... overhauls that see the kingdom start to become ruled in much more unified manners, and also ties this in with a very strong policy of supporting the church and of monastic reform.

is born into a highly successful political regime, a centralising one, and one with very close relationships with the institutional church. How did he succeed to the throne of England? So, Æthelred comes to the throne somewhat under a cloud, under difficult circumstances. He's not unique in this. In fact, every time in the 10th century in England, where the throne passes between generations, there's a succession dispute.

So the norm is actually fraternal succession, brother to brother. And when that happens, it all goes pretty well, or half brother to half brother. But whenever we skip a generation, there seem to be contestations and uncertainty as to who should be king next, because there are...

almost always competing sons of the previous monarchs, often from different marriages as well. So often half-siblings jostling. And that's precisely what we see in Æthelred's case, because his father dies relatively young in his early 30s. probably unexpectedly, and leaves two sons, Æthelred and an elder half-brother, Edward, later known as Edward the Martyr. And there's an initial succession dispute when different factions back.

each of these individuals. Edward succeeds in the shorter term. That's not surprising. He's the older of the two. But within a few years of coming to the throne, Edward himself is killed, is martyred by erstwhile supporters of Æthelred. by some of these discontents. So it's a very factionalised world, and there's no doubt that when he comes to the throne, therefore, there would have been a significant portion of the kingdom very uncertain about the prospects.

And how does he do in these early days? Is he quite successful early on? So it's hard to be very... get much of a sense of Ethelred himself in his early years, because the other key point here, one of the reasons why Edward almost certainly is favoured for the succession, is that he is notably older. He's in his mid-teens. Ethelred is still a boy at the time.

So when Æthelred becomes king, he is at the most about 12 years old, is perhaps as young as about nine. So he's not actually doing any of the running of the realm, that's quite clear. It seems that an informal regency is calling the shots, led by his mother. Queen Alfthrith by Bishop Avelwald of Winchester, one of these leading churchmen who'd been a close ally of his fathers, and a alderman.

equivalent of the later Earl, Alphara of Mercia. So there are these three major figures who are all prominent under Aethelred's father and they seem to oversee basically a continuity in terms of policy from Edgar's reign. The approach seems to be not to rock the boat. And at least in that respect, they seem to be successful. It seems to be quite a quiet and peaceful period during his sort of early reign in the late 970s and early 980s.

So moving on a little bit to later in his life, obviously one of the vital tasks for any medieval royal was to produce an heir to ensure his succession. And Æthelbed was married twice, so we're going to go on to his second marriage later on. But can you tell me more about his... first wife and his children. A key moment for Etheride, particularly as a boy king then starting to establish himself, would have been marriage, establishing his own dynasty.

And there are signs that there were tensions over this. And again, this is actually not uncommon. We see this with other boy kings, because what ends up happening is it's in the interest of the regents to maintain as much power for themselves as possible, as long as possible.

And it's in the interest of the young king to do as much as possible independently as soon as possible. So quite often groups that would naturally otherwise be allies, mothers and sons, things like this, end up at least partly at odds. And we certainly seem to see this with Æthelred.

because in 984, Bishop Athelwald dies. And we know that pretty much instantaneously thereafter, within a few months of Athelwald's death, his mother disappears from court. She stops attesting the charters he's issuing.

And this seems to be the period when he gets married and soon starts having children. So this seems to be part of a significant reorientation in the 980s. And it's in these years that he marries a woman who we believe is called Alfieff, who we know very little about his first wife. That itself is a somewhat interesting matter, probably partly because she's overshadowed by Æthelred's mother, the Queen Mother, Althrith. But in any case, the 980s are seeing him starting to assert himself.

Mary have children. And the interesting thing is that this coincides, as I say, not only with his mother's disappearance from court and Athelwald's death, but also then a series of attacks on church landholding. And it's quite clearly a reversal of the policies of his father and of his regency. And did they go on to have any children? So they go on to have a large number of children. So we know of at least six sons and three daughters.

the minimum, it's quite possible that there were even more, particularly amongst the daughters. So the daughters are not as well attested. So his sons first appear in 993. And by that point, he has six of them. So what are the crucial issues that... Ethelred had to deal with in his career really was the threat from Scandinavian raids. Was that something that was quite constant throughout his rule or did it increase and become more prominent over time?

So this is something that seems to be a relatively new phenomenon, starting really in the late 980s, but probably in earnest in the early 990s. But then thereafter is a constant element of his reign. one can imagine as being something of a crescendo. Things tend to get worse and worse and worse with this. And this is important because the Vikings had previously attacked England.

particularly in the late 9th into the early 10th century. But there'd now been a period of about 50 years or so of relative peace. One needs to be wary of this. There probably were some attacks in those years that go unrecorded, but certainly nothing on the scale that we suddenly see, starting in the 990s. So this is something that Ethelred and indeed England at large seems to be ill-prepared for. It's not something that anybody's expected and it's coming pretty hard and fast.

So we're going to go on to this a little bit more later on. Obviously, he was involved in a lot of different conflicts and battles, but one that especially stands out is the Battle of Malden in 991. Can you tell us a little bit about that, what happened? what the implications of this particular battle were.

Yes, absolutely. So Malden is the key event of these early raids, really, that we have some that are recorded in Watchit in 988, in the late 980s. But those seem to be pretty small scale affairs and not really anything that would trouble him. By 9-1, we see a large Scandinavian fleet suddenly arrive off the southeastern coast, and it sails up towards Essex and engages the local alderman. That is equivalent.

of later Earl, as I've said, Birtnoth there, in a major battle at Malden. And in this, the Scandinavians are victorious. And this is the first time in living memory that the English have been defeated in a major battle. Birtnoth is the king's most senior. secular advisor. So this really sends shockwaves throughout the kingdom. This is not something anybody's expecting. And that Viking force stays in England for the next three years until 994.

raising tribute, sacking further centres. So this is a problem that just doesn't go away. It's a major shock. It doesn't go away. And it's interesting to note that royal charters disappear for 9-9.

and 992. It seems that almost the business of government is put on hold as people are trying to take stock on what to do next. And in 993, while the Vikings are still attacking England, when the charter record resumes, we see a... big impressive grant issued by the king the largest document he or any English king has ever issued to date and in this he's

busy saying he's sorry for his actions in the 980s. And what's clear is that he and his advisors, having taken stock, have associated failure at Malden with... his own moral failings of his regime and his attacks against the church in the 980s so this couldn't come in some respects at a worse moment for him in terms of that he's been trying to do things his own way trying to reverse policies of his father and his mother and at precisely that moment

large Scandinavian force arrives. So it's really a bit of a perfect storm for him really of both internal and external events that are sort of shaping. his sort of career, I suppose, at this point. Yes, absolutely. And in terms of that, it bears emphasising, as I said, that not only is this a large fleet, but also that we know something of its composition. And this includes amongst its leaders, certainly... Olaf Tryggvason, the later Norwegian king

probably also Swain Forkbeard, who is already the King of Denmark. So this isn't just, you know, a few Viking freebooters out for a little bit of cash. This is a major army capable of taking on the best forces. anywhere in Western Europe. Absolutely. And that's quite crucial, isn't it? That there are reasons back in Scandinavia for these attacks taking place as well, which then have a big impact. So how did he deal with these threats over time? Was it always a case of...

bringing people into battle, or were there other ways of dealing with impending doom that was a Viking force? So one of the intriguing things about Æthelred's reign is actually that battle is often avoided, and this is where the ideas of his unreadiness come from. That is sometimes exaggerated. There are plenty of battles in Æthelred's reign, but it is true that the major conflicts he or his forces almost always lose in.

And it is also true that he seems thereafter to, wherever possible, avoid battle. And the reason for this, I think, is twofold. And it comes from these experiences at Malden, which comes in a really key formative moment when he himself is still in his 20s and learning.

you know, how to be a ruler. The first, I think, is that at Malden, his army had failed utterly, and they ended up having to pay off the Viking forces with very, very large sums. The lesson from this, that he seems to have taken, which is not... that which modern historians have sometimes wanted to take from it, is in fact that it'd be better simply to pay up rather than fight and lose, and then still have to pay up.

So one of the things we see him starting to do thereafter and through the 990s is very actively pay off Viking groups with tribute to get them to go away. This he also combines with often recruiting. Scandinavians into his own service. So when in 994 he finally makes peace with that army that had arrived at Malden, elements of it go back to Scandinavia. In fact, Olaf Tryggvason heads back with the money and fame he'd received and then is able to set himself up as king of Norway.

But he also hires a number of them into his own forces. So the kind of use a thief to catch a thief there approach. And these become two pillars of his response thereafter is where he needs to, he pays them off with tribute, but also where possible recruiting bits of them into his own armies. The thought being, what better to defend against the Vikings than a fellow Viking? The other part of his response, though, comes from that belief that that attack had been divine punishment.

And so I think one of the other reasons why he's keen and happy to use tribute, things like that, that we might think of as temporary stopgaps, is to him, the Vikings are only ever a symptom of a deeper problem. And the problem lies within England.

So they're not primarily an external enemy just to be defeated in battle. Long-term victory without piety is, to his mind and to those of his advisors, and probably would have been to his father as well, a deeply pious man, would have simply been inconceivable. So this is a sign of divine punishment. Till we've figured out where the sin lies and we've solved that, any success in battle will only ever be fleeting.

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So let's move forwards a little bit to some other events that take place around the turn of the millennium. So there's a couple of things I wanted to talk about there. First of all... Around about that time, Ethelred gets married for a second time, this time to Emma of Normandy, who is the daughter of a Norman ruler, and related goes on to be hugely influential, really. But that's a story for another podcast, I think.

What was the significance of that marriage with Emma? So the marriage to Emma is a really important one that requires explanation because a king of Æthelred's kind of West Saxon and later English royal line has not married. a foreign princess since the mid-9th century. 150 years out of living memory. It's just not something they do. They marry the daughters, wives, sisters of local aristocrats. That's the way it's traditionally done in England. So this is the first big dynastic marriage of...

his dynasty in living memory. And this suggests that something is up and that it requires some kind of explanation here. And the obvious explanation is that those kinds of more temporary measures he's used against the Vikings have, perhaps not surprisingly, not solved the problem. The Vikings have continued coming, and one of the ways they're getting to England and attacking, particularly the southern coast of England, is by stopping off in Normandy, where Emma comes from.

because Normandy had been founded by Normans, i.e. Vikings, hence the name. And indeed, parts of Normandy are clearly still Old Norse-speaking, at least into the late 10th, early 11th century, so they're using Norman ports often to attack England. An obvious response for Ethelred dealing with a naval enemy, a naval foe like the Vikings, therefore, is to try to close the ports. And so by marrying Emma, the daughter of the Duke of Normandy, he can hope...

to secure a Norman alliance. And indeed that seems to hold. In fact, it does hold and Normandy later becomes a place they can go into exile into. So this is a way of trying to cut the Vikings off from one of their key ports and secure the northern French coastline as much as possible as well against Vikings.

So that marriage took place in 2002 and later that year there was another event that really marked Ethared's career, the so-called St Bryce's Day Massacre. Can you tell us what happened there? The St Brice Day Massacre is one of the most difficult events from Æthelred's reign to interpret because we only have very fragmentary evidence, particularly in terms of the written record. We have the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is our continuous narrative of his reign, but is written...

after his reign in hindsight with a very negative perspective on events. And it simply says that the king ordered all the Danish men who were in England to be killed because he'd heard a rumour that they were trying to topple him. We also have a contemporary charter, probably slightly closer to the events, that refers to, again, how a royal order had been issued to kill all the Danish men in his kingdom, and how this was then put into effect in Oxford, is what that's then describing.

The question is, though, who then are all the Danish men in England in Ethelred's reign? An older scholarship, particularly of the 19th, early 20th century, tended to presume this meant anybody of Danish descent, i.e. potentially.

large portions of the population of the north and east of England, the so-called Danelaw, which had been settled in the time of Alfred the Great. Now, it's absolutely clear that can't be the case, because in those regions, nobody could have told... easily who was danish who was english any more than one could go around and kill every irish man or woman in england nowadays you know you just wouldn't be able to it wouldn't be manageable

So historians have long suspected that actually what this is, is that it must be targeted against clear groups and probably more recent arrivals. And the obvious candidates are either the mercenaries, the king had hired in 994, some of whom seemed to have turned coat in 997, and another of whom in 1001, only the year before this event, had betrayed him. So it's quite likely that he still has at least some of these mercenaries in his employ, but a number have.

proven disloyal. One could imagine that's where those rumours of them trying to topple him would have come, and therefore this is a preemptive strike killing off his remaining mercenaries. Not nice, absolutely not nice, but clearly not ethnic cleansing quite in the modern sense. That's probably the most likely interpretation. It's possible, though, that another group that was targeted alongside or instead of that would have been merchants.

as well. So people who were based temporarily in England or who'd come over and settled very recently. But either way, we're thinking of this as groups that must be easily identified as Danes. So it's not pleasant. It's not nice. It does have a whiff. of kind of later ideas about ethnic cleansing in the sense that he is targeting a minority very prominently. But it doesn't seem to be a case of lynching anybody you suspect might be a Dane. It's much more targeted in terms of that.

Obviously I have to bring in some of the archaeology here. We do have some possible evidence or a few discoveries that have been linked specifically to that so i'm talking here about the couple of mass graves one in weymouth and one in oxford can you tell us a little bit about those two yes absolutely so those were two really exciting finds that

had been kind of discovered while I was writing ethyride book and were being written up while I was doing so. And they do, as you say, potentially shed light on this event, because what those are is they're two execution burials.

And the key thing in both cases, there are some notable differences, but in both cases we're dealing with large groups of exclusively men, younger men, who have been clearly executed in some kind of systematic manner. In the case of Ridgway Hill, at Weymouth they seem to have been beheaded.

one by one. In the case of the Oxford Henge excavations from St John's College, Oxford, what seems to have happened is rather they were cut down, many of them from behind. But either, in both cases, they've been put into mass graves, discarded.

not on consecrated grounds, so treated as thieves or non-Christians would have been. So they've been consciously treated badly in terms of the way their bodies have in these kinds of nasty mass graves, and they have been all killed. And the question is then, what...

to do with these ones. And it's possible that both cases or either case is simply, say, a Scandinavian raiding group that's been caught and killed as a result. But it's tempting, given that we have these references to the St. Bryce's Day Massacre. And given that we have reason to believe those must be clearly identifiable groups of recent incomers, potentially.

Scandinavian mercenaries and Ethelreds employed to see these as precisely that. Because if I'd been asked before these finds had been made, what would a St. Bryce's Day Massacre grave look like? I would have said, young, all male.

potentially signs of previous injury which are the case in some of these ones and you know execution burial which is precisely what we see and given that we have good reason to believe that the individuals in these graves are scandinavians from the stable isotope analysis and given that the radiocarbon dates for weymouth are certainly fitting within ethylred's reign and for ox

Oxford possibly can as well. It's very tempting to see these as part of that. And in that respect, in the specific Oxford case, it's nice to know that we have that charter reference to the St. Bryce's Day Massacre happening there. And the reason why that's interesting anyway... is that Oxford's not in the Danelaw. And so that's one of the early hints to us as historians that in fact this isn't a move against the Danelaw per se, it's about groups potentially elsewhere.

And certainly Oxford will be a logical place to have a Scandinavian garrison. We have some evidence of Scandinavian influence there in this period, and it will be helping control the Thames. Likewise, Weymouth overlooking the southern coast would be a very natural place. So that's just overlooking Portland.

where we know there had been previous Viking activities. So it's sites that are overlooking harbours and controlling strategic areas. And what was then the immediate effects that this massacre had? Hey, what's up? It's Mario Lopez. Back to school is an exciting time, but it can also be overwhelming and kids may feel isolated. A vulnerability that human traffickers can exploit. Human trafficking doesn't always look like what you expect.

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So the immediate effects don't, to my mind, seem to be particularly clear. It definitely doesn't help the king defend his kingdom. Later legend suggests that Swain Forkbeard then returns shortly thereafter because his sister had been killed.

was one of these Danes. But those stories emerge very late. They're quite romantic. They seem to be trying to explain why Swain reappears. And the much more prosaic explanation is probably that Swain's been busy... actually in recent years fighting the norwegian king olaf tryggvason this had been another element of ethelred's strategy was sending olaf back in fact to

create problems for Swain there. And so it may well have been around this time, around 1003, that Swain was first in a position to come back to England. Anyway, we have no external evidence for a sister of his based in England. And again, if those archaeological finds are indeed St. Bryce's Day Massacre.

burials, then those reinforce the case, we're treating this as much more strike against mercenaries, all-male groups. So we wouldn't expect a sister, Swain Forkbeard, to have been waltzing around England, waiting to be executed. So Swain then becomes a fairly important part of the story of what happens later on, because you were talking about him being in England right about this time, but he comes back later on, doesn't he?

Yes. So Swain Forkbeard is a classic example of this phenomenon that we see of Viking success in England leading to further Viking success that, you know, once you've got a bit of cash, you're... tempted to come back once you know that there is easy pickings. So we have reason to believe he was probably present, though not certainly, at the Battle of Maldon.

He certainly is one of the major leaders attacking England in the years after the St. Bryce's Day massacre. And so he leads a series of attacks that are quite successful in the early 1000s. They retreat in 1005 due to famine, but not due to defeat in battle or any problems. And eventually, indeed, he conquers England briefly in 1013.

but then dies in his kind of moment of triumph. So there's a very good chance, if he hadn't done that, that he would have become the first Danish king of England. In the end, his son Knut ends up doing the same. And it's Knut, really, who becomes the key part of the kind of end of Ethered's story, I suppose. And he obviously is the one who becomes the first Danish king of England. So I know this is probably enough to fill an entire episode in itself.

Can you just run us through what happens when Knut arrives in England? Yes, happily, though I think it would be useful to rewind also a little bit because there's one other player that often gets written out here but who's really important, and that is this individual known as Thorkell the Tall. So Swain's force has been the one leading to major English losses in the early 1000s. But absolutely key is in 1009.

a large army led by a different individual, not by Swain, by this chap we know as Thorkell the Tall, arrives in 1009, and that army ravages England continuously to 1012. seems to plunder where it likes, is incredibly successful, even captures and eventually executes the Archbishop of Canterbury. And one senses that after that, England's actually a spent force. Æthelred in the end recruits Thorkell into his own army.

and Thorkell's actually probably his most effective general in his later years, but that's why it's so easy for Swain to conquer England in 1013. it seems to be, into 1014, is that actually, after that point, English resistance has pretty much been broken. And we see that then again, I think, with Canute, in a sense, is that when Swain dies in 1014, Canute's...

being with him. He's part of the army, and the army tries to elect him king, but he's in his mid-teens. It doesn't work, and Æthelred's recalled from exile in Normandy. But Canute goes back to Denmark, licks his wounds, and then comes back the very next year in 1015. and makes very good progress. So he basically picks up where his father left off. The only thing that comes close to stopping him is, in fact, Æthelred's eldest son now, Edmund Ironside.

who seems to be made of rather sterner stuff than his father. Certainly seems to be more... keen and successful general, and he leads a spirited resistance before him, particularly after Æthelred's death. So Æthelred dies on St George's Day 1016. St George isn't the patron saint of England yet, but it's a nice coincidence. He's also the first Anglo-Saxon

King to be buried in London. So there's a number of sort of interesting symbolic moments there. And London certainly is his most reliable source of support in his later years. But it's particularly after Ethelred's death that then his son is elected king by the English. And Edmund Ironside puts up a very staunch resistance against Canute, fighting multiple battles, sometimes winning.

sometimes losing, but never losing decisively is the key thing. And they actually agree late in 1016 to divide the kingdom between the two. But shortly thereafter, Edmund dies, and we suspect that might have been from injuries received in battle. So it is partly, even then, bad luck that England ends up becoming fully...

conquered by Knuth. There's kind of an alternative world scenario where Edmund were successful, where we didn't end up having a Danish dynasty. But in the end, Edmund, as I say, does die, and then Knuth is.

uncontested as king of England. And it's, in a sense, a repeat of what his father has done. By now, England's finished. Probably most people in England aren't necessarily happy at the prospects of Canute's reign, but they want peace above anything else and are more than happy to have a Danish king if it leads to an end to conflict.

And at the time, is there a contemporary feeling of... Æthelred not being a successful king? You were talking about this at the beginning. Does that come in much later? Or at that point, is he being blamed for all of this on a sort of personal level, as it were? So one of the interesting and intriguing things is that actually very few sources blame Æthelred. read explicitly. But there is clearly, by later years, implicit criticism.

in contemporary writings and the main narrative we have is chronicle accounts actually quite sympathetic to him it's probably written by a supporter of his but it's also acknowledging that his regime was a failure it blames largely traitors from within but there certainly is an acknowledgement that

Ethelred has failed in that respect, and that colours later perspectives. And one of the key things that I think modern historians need to bear in mind is that Ethelred's reign is 38 years long. It's one of the longest reigns.

in English history and it would be impossible to be failing for 38 years on end and still be king what's clear however and what one shouldn't deny in wanting to kind of revise opinions of him slightly is that probably his last well certainly his last five and probably about his last 10 years on the throne are pretty grim indeed. From about 10.05 to 10.16, the writing is firmly on the wall. And I tend to think that traditional judgments on Æthelred are fair for about those years, but not before.

It's no coincidence that it's those years that have generated most of our sources and therefore coloured our interpretations. By that point, everything is slowly and sometimes quite swiftly falling apart. It would have been very grim indeed to be living in England. That really sets a good...

context really for Æthelred and I think you've made it really clear that he was faced with a lot of both internal and external pressures that really led to it. So if we go back to the beginning and this sort of idea of him being unready or ill-advised Would you feel that is a justified nickname for him? I think ill-advised is a problematic one.

In the end, his regime collapses under the weight of its own expectations, but I don't think that's any explicit fault of his. If anything, he took advice too often and too readily. And I think the... conundrum that lies at the heart of his regime is precisely that he's following on from a very successful father and a very pious father, has interpreted an interpretation whereby success in this world is dependent upon piety.

and that the two are going hand in hand. As a result of this, when things go wrong, the inevitable conclusion is that it's a fault within English society that's been creating this. And this leads Æthelred to constantly be having to fight two enemies. an internal one and an external one the internal one is to his mind the more important one but the result of this is that he ends up regularly particularly in his later years when things get worse culling his courts

removing advisors, chopping and changing in a way that could only have damaged his actual prospects for defending the kingdom. And one of the things that really undermines the final efforts in his later years is that there end up being two factions at court that are absolutely at loggerheads. So he did all of the sensible things that his advisors would have said to him to do. Nothing he did was foolish, yet the result was absolutely catastrophic.

Levi that was an awful lot of ground to cover in a short time but thank you so much for sharing all these insights into Ethelred's rule and of course if you want to know more about this story I'd definitely recommend that you pick up a copy of Levi's book that's called Ethelred

The Unready by Levi Roach and is published by Yale University Press. And you're working on another book at the moment, I think, which is moving across the channel. You're working on The Normans now, is that right, for your next book? Yes, I'm just finishing off a popular history of the Normans, starting from the foundation of Normandy, so the very early years of Viking settlement, right up through the loss of Normandy to the English crown.

Norman escapades in southern Italy and the Holy Lands. So lots to cover, lots of fun. Watch this space. Brilliant. I'm looking forward to that. And I think that you will have Emma making an appearance as well, won't you? So you'll see the other side of that story, I suppose. Absolutely. A chapter on Emma and also one on her son with Æthelred, Edward the Confessor, the last king of Æthelred's line on the English throne.

Fantastic. Well, I'm definitely looking forward to that one. Thank you so much, Levi. That was brilliant. And thank you to everyone for listening today. I'm Dr. Kat Jamman, and this has been an episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you enjoyed hearing about reasonably well-prepared medieval rulers, please do subscribe or leave us a review and I hope that you will join us again next week. Nice. Love the way you look. Warehouse.