Silver penny from the reign of King Æthelred
Credit: Fitzwilliam Museum Aethelred II, Helmet type, Cambridge, Cnit CM.33-1935
From the 6th century onwards, England had converted to Christianity while the Danes continued to worship Norse deities. Æthelred believed that this placed God on his side – but prayer proved useless. So did reprisals on Danish settlers. Fruitless attempts to bribe or defeat the Vikings sealed Æthelred’s reputation as a disastrous king who deserved to fail. Sellar and Yeatman’s 1930s classic 1066 and All That echoes this sentiment: the “Wave of Danes” who overran the country were “undoubtedly a Good Thing”.
“Throughout history, Æthelred’s payment of Dane-geld has been used as a short hand for drastic mismanagement and poor decision making,” says Keynes. “But there is another, more complex, picture to be painted of Æthelred’s reign, and the ways that he and his councillors tackled the considerable challenges that they faced as they sought to administer a kingdom and protect their respective interests.”
Much of what we know about Æthelred’s reign comes from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - an account by an anonymous chronicler of each year’s notable events. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is far from impartial: its verses were composed by court poets, or skalds, who celebrated the deeds of the leaders of the Viking armies. “The story told in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and retold many times thereafter, is very superficial. But there is plenty of other evidence for the period, and the deeper one looks, the more complex and interesting it all becomes,” says Keynes.
Keynes says that no single body of evidence is richer than the 130 charters that survive Æthelred’s reign. More properly called ‘royal diplomas’, these charters are documents that record agreements made at assemblies held four or five times a year. Such meetings, which took place at major festivals, such as Easter and Pentecost, were an opportunity for both ceremony and business. The charters, written in Latin, were witnessed by prominent members of the church and key land-owners.
“In comparison to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, which is a wonderfully vivid narrative in the vernacular, the diplomas are dry and seemingly impenetrable documents – and
it’s true that individually they appear to yield little. But considered collectively, they offer an opportunity to reach below the surface of recorded events,” says Keynes. - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/aethelred-the-unready-king-of-the-english-1000-years-of-bad-press#sthash.UiM9qhmH.dpuf