Cnut the Great

Cnut, Old Norse Knútr (c. 990 - 12 November 1035), was the son of the Danish prince Swein Forkbeard and a Slavic princess identified by the Encomium Emmae as Świętosława, daughter of Mieszko I of Poland. When Swein conquered England in 1013, the teenage Cnut was left in command of the Danish fleet and supply base at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire while his father consolidated his English throne. Swein's sudden death in early 1014 forced the young commander to withdraw temporarily to Denmark after English nobles recalled the exiled Æthelred the Unready.

In the summer of 1015 Cnut returned at the head of a substantial Viking fleet, landing at Sandwich and then sailing round Kent into Wessex. The Mercian ealdorman Eadric Streona deserted Æthelred with forty ships and joined him, as did Thorkell the Tall. Cnut's principal campaign was fought against Æthelred's eldest son Edmund Ironside. At the Battle of Assandun on 18 October 1016 Eadric withdrew his forces from the line at a critical moment, and Cnut won decisively. When Edmund died soon after under unclear circumstances, Cnut was crowned king of all England.

His first political acts were calculated to combine consolidation with conciliation. He married Æthelred's widow, Emma of Normandy, in 1017, simultaneously linking his rule to the legitimate Anglo-Saxon house and severing Norman interest from any rival claim. Yet the same Christmas of 1017 he ordered the execution of Eadric Streona himself, along with several other English magnates who might constitute a rival faction. Contemporary chroniclers recorded his end with cool approval as the deserved fate of a serial betrayer. Cnut then divided England into four great earldoms — Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, and East Anglia — appointing trusted Danes and Anglo-Saxon collaborators to govern them.

When his elder brother Harald II of Denmark died in 1018, Cnut inherited the Danish throne and became the rare monarch ruling two kingdoms separated by the North Sea. To bind Danes and English together he emphasized what his letter of 1019 called "the ancient law and wealth that bind both peoples," and he issued a major law-code (often called Cnut's Law) that drew on the codes of his Anglo-Saxon predecessors. His pastoral letter of 1027 was written on his return journey from Rome, where he had attended the imperial coronation of Conrad II at Easter. In that letter he styles himself "king of all England and Denmark and the Norwegians and of some of the Swedes," and reports that he negotiated with the pope to reduce the fees his bishops paid for their pallium and the tolls his subjects paid on the pilgrim road to Rome.

In 1028 he drove out King Olaf Haraldsson of Norway, the future saint, and added the Norwegian crown to his collection. In 1031 King Malcolm II of Scotland formally submitted to him. The three kingdoms united under Cnut's rule constitute what modern historians call the North Sea Empire — the most expansive Scandinavian political construction of the early Middle Ages. The medieval historian Norman Cantor judged him "the most effective king in Anglo-Saxon history."

The most enduring single image of Cnut is the legend of the king and the tide, first recorded by Henry of Huntingdon in his Historia Anglorum in the twelfth century. "When he was at the height of his ascendancy," Henry writes, "he ordered his chair to be placed on the sea-shore as the tide was coming in. Then he said to the rising tide, 'You are subject to me, as the land on which I am sitting is mine, and no one has resisted my overlordship with impunity. I command you, therefore, not to rise on to my land.' But the sea came up as usual, and drenched the king's feet. So jumping back, the king cried, 'Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless, and there is no king worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven, earth and the sea obey eternal laws.'" The medieval intent was to praise Cnut's humility, although modern readers have at times misread the story as one of royal arrogance.

His statecraft was matched by harshness. The Danegeld tax levied to pay his housecarls weighed on the English peasantry and persisted in popular memory as a symbol of foreign exploitation. His Christianization of Denmark and his cultivation of bishops were both prestige projects and instruments of central control. He betrothed his daughter Gunhilda to Conrad II's son, the future Emperor Henry III, an arrangement that, had she not died young in Italy in 1038, might have anchored England and the Holy Roman Empire in a single dynastic line. When Cnut died at Shaftesbury on 12 November 1035, the North Sea Empire was divided among his sons Harold Harefoot, Harthacnut, and Sweyn. Within seven years its English component would pass back to Edward the Confessor, Æthelred's son by Emma — and Cnut's institutional consolidation of England, ironically, would set the stage for the Norman Conquest of 1066 by binding the English crown to Norman, Danish, and continental dynastic networks at once.