Throughout history, Æthelred’s payment of Dane-geld has been used as a short hand for drastic mismanagement. But there is another, more complex, picture to be painted of Æthelred’s reign.
- Simon Keynes
A silver penny struck more than ten centuries ago (on display in the Fitzwilliam Museum) shows Æthelred, King of the English. The obverse shows the king in profile and the reverse a Christian cross. Thousands of similar coins have survived. Many are in collections in Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm. This coinage is material evidence of ‘Dane-geld’, money paid to England’s enemies in attempts to forestall Viking invasions of England.
Inevitably remembered as ‘the Unready’, Æthelred died exactly 1,000 years ago on 23 April 1016 – 50 years before the Norman Conquest. The same date in April is recorded as the day of the death of William Shakespeare (in 1616) and also celebrated each year as St George’s Day.
Born around 968, son of King Edgar and Queen Ælfthryth, Æthelred died in London, a place that had recently been established as political and commercial centre of England. He was the first monarch to be buried in the old cathedral of St Paul which much later became one of the most notable casualties of the great fire of London.
Æthelred’s nickname is a pun that may date from as early the 11th century. Æthelred means ‘noble-counsel’ while the noun unræd means ‘an ill-considered or treacherous plan. “The nickname degenerated from ‘Æthelred unræd’ into ‘Æthelred the Unready’, and ‘Æthelred no-counsel’, giving rise to further stories about him,” says Professor Simon Keynes.
Keynes, a historian in Cambridge University's Department of Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic, has worked extensively on the Anglo-Saxon period – especially the charters and coinage that offer new windows into a time of turmoil. He was the organiser and keynote speaker at a conference last week.
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Image: Silver penny from the reign of King Æthelred
Credit: Fitzwilliam Museum Aethelred II, Helmet type, Cambridge, Cnit CM.33-1935
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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