Cnut the Great

This MA Medieval History dissertation examines 11th century original sources to support the thesis that Godwin of Wessex was a sea-lord in command of ships, that he aligned with the Danish sea warriors of Cnut the Great before the conquest of England in 1016, and that his power as earl of Wessex was largely derived from his control of military and mercantile fleets and strategic maritime and trade landholdings.

The article addresses the possibilities for a methodological reassessment of the phenomenon of the thegns in England and Scandinavia in the late Viking Age (ca. 900–1066). The historiographical overview reveals that the thegns have never been examined for their own sake, and that the recent developments in source studies open new methodological prospects in anthropological research. The case study of the thegns hopes to outline some of them.

Emma (°985-1052) was de dochter van de Normandische hertog Richard I en zijn Deense minnares Gunnor. In 1002 trouwde ze met Æthelred II en de komende vijftien jaar zou ze koningin van Engeland zijn. Toen Æthelred stierf, volgde Vikingleider Cnut hem echter op en was Emma, afhankelijk van de bronnen net wel of niet, overgeleverd aan diens genade.
Enerzijds beval Cnut Emma te ontvoeren zodat hij haar in 1017 kon huwen, anderzijds vaardigde hij amper een paar maanden later een wet uit die verhinderde dat weduwes gedwongen moesten hertrouwen. Opvallend is echter dat historici zich hier nooit eerder vragen bij stelden en Emma, in tegenstelling tot de EER, altijd heel passief voorstelden. Mijn hypothese is echter dat ze zich vrijwillig, maar wel met een aantal eisen, schikte in haar aanvankelijk passieve rol en dat ze die later kon ombuigen in een zeer actieve rol. De onderzoeksvraag van deze paper luidt dan ook: Wat was de verhouding van Emma van Normandiës huwelijk met Cnut (1017) ten opzichte van chapter 72-74 uit diens wetten (1018) en wat was Emma’s eigen visie op dit huwelijk?

In 1016 the young Danish prince who was to become Cnut the Great, King of England, Denmark, and Norway, laid siege to the city of London as part of a program of conquest that would see him crowned as King of England by 1017. This millennial year is an appropriate time to reflect on the consequences of London's defiance as a city that was rapidly evolving into the economic capital of a united English polity. As the siege did not end in Danish victory, the resistance of the independent minded Londoners had implications upon how Cnut would conduct juridical, financial and religious policy in relation to the city. Cnut could not allow the city to exert such oppositional autonomy unchecked. Yet the Danish king had ambitions of establishing an Anglo-Scandinavian Empire and London was a strategically important city in that vision, valued for both its continental connections and its wealth. Cnut could not afford to stunt London's economic life through punitive repression. The Danish king's early years were then characterised by a series of carefully balanced retributive policies that were designed to remove London's agency for rebellion, while not crippling it as an established economic and commercial centre.

Anyone interested in first millennium history is of course familiar with Cnut II the Great as king of England, Denmark and Norway. The second millennium had just begun when he and his father invaded England in 1013. The purpose of this paper is to explore where Cnut actually came from and who his family was. In this article, I want to refer to Cnut as a wiking from the swamps of the Scheldt Basin who worked his way up as a christian leader and created enough power in England and the north to become king there.

This article interrogates certain historiographical trends of constructing self-sufficient models of explanation for essentially unrelated data in the primary sources. For a case study the essay spotlights the protracted examination of the early medieval social group of thegns (OE/ON þegn). Attention is drawn to the influential articles by Svend Aakjær, Rachel R. Reid, and David Roffe. Aakjær’s main thesis was that Viking-Age thegns and drengs (ON drengr) known from the Scandinavian runic inscriptions used to be members of royal retinue(s), just like they were strata of landed nobility in England. Rachel Reid drew an institutional parallel between the Anglo-Saxon king’s thegns and medieval barons, and David Roffe augmented this later view by suggesting a continuity in 11th-century landholding patterns. The author hypothesises that the inherent flaw of such models lies in an unconscious confirmation bias when dealing with the source material. By addressing the primary sources directly, the author seeks to demonstrate that some of these views suffered from a lack of empirical data already at the inception. Though contextualising his polemics in modern historiography, in his criticism the author relies on the ad fontes method rather than the wisdom of hindsight. The article also aims to tackle the circulation of the self-sufficient models of this sort in subsequent historiography, as well as to identify plausible origins of prominence and consequences. The author hopes to relate this individual case study to a broader context of medieval research, thereby offering a feasible model of its application to further topics.

The premise of the presentation is the assumption that the hitherto established etymology of the OE/ON word þegn (also OHG and OS thegan) is linguistically improbable and thus needs a revision. The article offers historical evidence in support of Guus Kroonen’s recent claim of that þegn is not connected to the Ancient Greek lexeme for “a child,” τέκνον (< PIE *tek-no), and instead stems from PGmc *þegjan- “to request,” thus ab initio denoting a “retainer.” If Kroonen’s surmise is correct, it might have some implications for historical research, though it is argued throughout this essay not to substitute the latter with sheer linguistics.

This presentation was given at the "Viking World: Diversity and Change" conference in Nottingham on July 2nd, 2016.
This talk addresses the problem of the possible social interraction between the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavians. It is a development of the author's previous pursue of the topic, presented at the Student Symposium on Viking and Medieval Scandinavian Subjects 2016 (Aarhus University) in March of that same year.
Compared to the talk in Aarhus, this presentation puts an emphasis on the historiographical situation and suggests a novel methodological approach. Additionally, it touches on the possibility of the Old English influence upon the Old Norse in the usage of the word "thegn". Finally, following the further research, carried out since March, it proposes the Danelaw as a possible contact zone rather than a region of a confined Scandinavian influence.

During the middle Ages, the role and powers of women as queens suggested not only ambiguity and limitation, but also a permanent flux of transformations. For queens of the eleventh and twelfth-century like Emma of Normandy (Emma Ælgifu), Urraca of Leon-Castile and Teresa of Portugal, the confirmation of their status, both royal and social, relied not only on their identity as consecrated individuals and owners of an office, but it also depended on how that office was carried out beside its masculine counterpart. The current mechanisms were designed ultimately for a share in power, and yet the life paths of Emma, Urraca and Teresa and the actions they took confirmed them as individual authorities, generating a conflict with the intellectual and government understanding of their time, in its majority (if not entirely) masculine.
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Durante a Idade Média, o papel e poder da mulher como rainha não é só ambíguo e limitado mas também em permanente fluxo de transformação. Para rainhas do século XI e XII, como Emma da Normandia (Emma Ælgifu), Urraca de Leão e Castela e Teresa de Portugal, a afirmação do seu status, tanto real como social, dependia, não só da sua identidade como individuo consagrado e detentor de um cargo, mas também do ofício desempenhado ao lado do elemento masculino. Os mecanismos regentes visavam, em última instância, uma partilha de poder e, porém, os percursos de vida de Emma, Urraca e Teresa e as acções tomadas pelas mesmas afirmaram-nas como autoridades individuais, gerando conflito com o entendimento intelectual e governativo na época, de maioria (se não inteiramente) masculina.

In his letter to Æthelheard (archbishop of Canterbury) and Ceolwulf (bishop of Lindsey) about Hringstan, an Anglo-Saxon exile in Francia, written at the close of the 8th century, Charlemagne briefly summarised the motivations for a contemporary noble person to flee: “It is better to live in exile than to perish, to serve in a foreign land than to die in one’s own” (Whitelock 1979. P. 849). Two centuries later, driving political and familial rivals into exile appears to have remained a viable method in the contest for power throughout Northern and Eastern Europe. Among others, two English expatriates in particular have attracted interest from historians: Edward the Exile (d. 1057) and Gytha (d. 1098/1107), daughter of Harold son of Godwine, who found themselves temporarily or permanently at the Russian court.

Iedereen die in geschiedenis van het eerste millennium is geïnteresseerd kent natuurlijk Cnut II de Grote als koning van Engeland, Denemarken en Noorwegen. Het tweede millennium was net begonnen toen hij samen met zijn vader Engeland binnenviel in 1013. De bedoeling van deze tekst is om te onderzoeken waar Cnut eigenlijk vandaan kwam en wie zijn familie was. In dit artikel wil ik Cnut aanduiden als een wiking uit de moerasgebieden van het Scheldebekken die zich als christelijke leider opwerkte en in Engeland en het noorden genoeg macht creëerde om daar koning te worden.

. Para uma rainha do século XI como Emma da Normandia (Emma Ælgifu), a afirmação do seu status, tanto real como social, dependia, não só da sua identidade como individuo consagrado e detentor de um cargo, mas também do ofício desempenhado ao lado do rei, com vista a uma partilha de poder régio.

This is my presentation at the international PhD and post-doctoral training school "Dynamic Middle Ages II" (Düsseldorf, September 2016) https://medieval.hse.ru/dynamicma2
The topic I touched upon deals with the Anglo-Saxon charters (royal diplomas) of the 10th and 11th centuries. I intended to pay special attention to the political and cultural circumstances of their production, as well as to raise some thought-provoking questions, concerning the statistics.
You can also find a simplified visualisation of the royal lineage of the period at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nZiBfwDFXs

It is widely recognized that Cnut's reign in England saw a major increase in cultural, especially Church-centered, patronage, at the same time as it brought Scandinavian culture into the mainstream of southern English life. Winchester seems to have been one of the centres of such cultural activity: patronage and interest flowed into Winchester from multiple sources, if not often from Cnut himself, reflecting competing political and personal interests while simultaneously demonstrating the convergence of different cultural affiliations. Thanks to the archaeological excavations led by Martin Biddle, we can now see two focal points of this cultural activity in the great churches of Old and New Minsters, each of which managed and benefited from this interest in its own way. A large fragment of stone found in Winchester in 1965 epitomizes this flowering, this cultural convergence, and this focus: showing a key moment in the story of Sigmundr Vǫlsungsson, it must have been installed in the Old Minster during or after Cnut's reign, perhaps initiated with his patronage. The sheer unlikeliness of such an ideaa non-Christian warrior with a strange and savage story decorating the inside of one of England's oldest cathedralsmay have contributed to a dearth of discussion concerning this stone and its implications in eleventh-century English culture. But there is, this chapter argues, no reason to be afraid of this carving of a wolf and a man, for the relief merely lends a sharp focus to what we already know from other sources: Cnut's court had a lively interest in mythic and heroic narrative; that is, in what we might call Germanic storytelling at the same time as it invested heavily in the Church, in connections with Rome, and in the recent English past. Most people in early medieval England seem not to have seen the contradictions between the vaguely "pagan" and the broadly "Christian" that often preoccupy us, and it is usually best, I suggest below, to believe in the vibrant, productive, complicated mixture that the evidence shows, rather than to erect barriers against it in defiance of that evidence. The Sigmundr stone has much to tell us about how Cnut wanted to be perceived and indeed about the cultural tone of England in the eleventh century. It also has implications for our understanding of the stories of Sigmundr, of the Vǫlsungar, and of Beowulf. This chapter, then, aspires to wide horizons, some of which will no doubt remain hazy. But it begins with solid stone.

Dit werkstuk betrekt zich op de vraag of de de facto legitimiteit van Knoet de Grote als koning van Angelsaksisch Engeland, te verklaren is aan de hand van de theorieën over legitimiteit zoals gepostuleerd door Maximilian Carl Emil Weber (1864—1920). Bestaande literatuur over Knoet de Grote zijn troonsbestijging, zoals dat van vooraanstaand 19e-eeuws historicus Edward Augustus Freeman, zou een ‘geromantiseerd’ beeld hebben geschetst van de kwestie. Dit werkstuk zal kijken of dit beeld, aan de hand van Webers theorie over waar legitimiteit in gegrond kan zijn, ten eerste terecht te noemen is en, ten tweede, of het Knoets status als legitiem vorst van het ‘Angelsaksische’ volk goed kan verklaren.

The administration of Cnut in England (1016-35) saw a pragmatic use of in situ traditions, institutions, personnel and legislation. The ability to adapt to local structures is thought to be the key for his relative stable rule in England. Within these parameters, Cnut further developed authority and law. Though not very communicated in Norwegian historiography, similar procedures might have been tried in Norway after the king’s gain of supremacy there from 102835. His son Svein was instated as tributary king from 1030, around the time Olaf Haralsson was defeated by Cnut’s support. The reign is regarded as highly unsuccessful and unpopular in later Norwegian sources and modern scholarship. This paper will explore some possible effects and influences from this period on law and administration in the developing Norwegian kingdom.