Cnut the Great

Cnut, also spelled Canute, was a Danish prince who conquered England in 1016 and went on to become king of Denmark in 1018 and of Norway in 1028. His lands around the North Sea, often called the North Sea Empire, made him one of the most powerful rulers in Europe in the early eleventh century. A Viking conqueror who became a lawgiving Christian king, he ruled England in peace for nearly twenty years, but his empire fell apart within a few years of his death.

Cnut was born around 995, a son of Swein Forkbeard, king of Denmark, and grandson of Harald Bluetooth. Neither the date nor the place of his birth is recorded, and even his mother's identity is uncertain: a Norse tradition calls her Gunhild, daughter of a Slavic ruler, while an eleventh-century English source describes her as a daughter of the Polish ruler Mieszko I.

In the early eleventh century England, ruled by King Æthelred, a great-great-grandson of Alfred the Great, was under repeated Danish attack and had paid enormous sums in tribute, the so-called Danegeld, to buy peace. In 1013 Swein led a full invasion, with the teenage Cnut in his fleet. Æthelred fled to Normandy and Swein was accepted as king, but he died in February 1014. The Danish army chose Cnut as its king, but the English recalled Æthelred, and Cnut sailed home. Before leaving he put ashore at Sandwich the hostages his father had taken, with their hands, ears and noses cut off.

Cnut returned in 1015 with a large fleet, perhaps around 200 ships, and with the help of the Danish commander Thorkell the Tall and the English ealdorman Eadric Streona, who switched sides, he overran Wessex. Æthelred died in April 1016 and his son Edmund Ironside took up the fight. After a series of battles and a siege of London, Cnut won a decisive victory at Assandun in Essex on 18 October 1016, helped by Eadric's desertion of Edmund's army. The two kings agreed to divide the kingdom, Edmund keeping Wessex, but Edmund died on 30 November, possibly murdered, and Cnut became king of all England.

He secured his position with ruthless efficiency. Several leading Englishmen were executed, including the treacherous Eadric, and Æthelred's surviving sons were driven into exile. In 1017 he married Æthelred's widow, Emma of Normandy, though he already had a partner, Ælfgifu of Northampton, with whom he had two sons, Swein and Harold. In 1018 he raised a vast tax, recorded as 72,000 pounds of silver plus 10,500 from London, to pay off most of his fleet, keeping only a small standing force.

Cnut ruled England through great earls, at first mostly Scandinavians, but increasingly Englishmen, above all Godwin, whom he made earl of Wessex and whose son Harold would later become king. He kept the existing system of shires, courts and coinage, and his law codes, drafted by Archbishop Wulfstan of York, presented him as the heir of the English kings before him and promised to uphold the laws of King Edgar. His reign in England was peaceful after the first years, a sharp contrast with the decades of war that preceded it.

He was a generous patron of the church, rebuilding churches and monasteries that Vikings had damaged, and gave rich gifts to religious houses in England and abroad. Historians debate how far his piety was sincere and how far it was a way of making a conqueror acceptable, but the two motives were not exclusive. He had been baptised at some unknown date, taking the Christian name Lambert, and his reign helped draw Scandinavia more fully into the world of Latin Christianity.

When his brother Harald, king of Denmark, died around 1018, Cnut took the Danish crown. He left his brother-in-law Ulf as regent, with his young son Harthacnut as nominal king. In about 1026 he fought a combined Norwegian and Swedish force at the Holy River, the Helgeå, an inconclusive battle whose location is disputed. Ulf, whose loyalty had wavered, was killed at Roskilde on Cnut's orders soon afterwards.

At Easter 1027 Cnut was in Rome for the coronation of the emperor Conrad II of the Holy Roman Empire. He used the visit to win lower tolls for English and Danish pilgrims and merchants and lower fees for English archbishops, and Conrad later ceded him territory on the Danish border. In a letter to the English written on his return, he styled himself king of all England, Denmark, the Norwegians and some of the Swedes.

In 1028 he sailed to Norway, where many nobles, bribed or discontented, had turned against King Olaf Haraldsson. Olaf fled and Cnut was acclaimed king. When Olaf returned in 1030 he was killed at the battle of Stiklestad by a Norwegian army; he was soon venerated as a saint. Cnut's attempt to rule Norway through Ælfgifu and their son Swein was deeply unpopular, and they were driven out shortly before his death. In 1031 the king of Scots, Malcolm II, and two other northern rulers submitted to him, and his influence reached the Norse kingdom of Dublin.

Cnut died at Shaftesbury in Dorset on 12 November 1035, aged about 40, and was buried in the Old Minster at Winchester. His bones were later placed in mortuary chests in Winchester Cathedral and mixed with those of other kings during the English Civil War.

His empire did not survive him. Harthacnut held Denmark but was tied down by war with Norway, where Olaf's son Magnus had become king. In England, Harold, known as Harefoot, took power and was recognised as king in 1037. Harthacnut succeeded him in 1040 but died in 1042, and the English crown returned to Æthelred's line in the person of Edward the Confessor. The Danish claim to England was one of the strands that led to the crisis of 1066 and the conquest by William the Conqueror.

Cnut is best remembered for a story first recorded by the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon in the twelfth century, about a hundred years after his death. In it, the king has his throne placed on the shore and orders the rising tide to stop; when the water wets his feet, he tells his flattering courtiers that the power of kings is empty compared with that of God. There is no contemporary evidence for the scene. The original point of the tale was Cnut's humility, though it is now often retold as a picture of a ruler foolish enough to think he could command the sea.

Historians regard him as one of the most effective kings to rule England before the Norman Conquest. Within a single generation he moved from the leader of a Viking army of the Viking Age to a Christian monarch accepted in Rome and at the imperial court, and for a time he made the North Sea the centre of a single political world.