Reassessing the Reign of King Æthelred the Unready: (The Allen Brown Memorial Lecture)

Summary

The reign of Æthelred the Unready is one of exceptional interest: it boasts a dramatic narrative, from Æthelred's ascent to the throne following the assassination of his brother, King Edward, to the invasion and the conquest of his country by the Danish rulers Swein Forkbeard and Cnut and the king's demise in 1016. The reign is distinguished too by its relatively plentiful textual sources in a variety of genres, such as the unusually informative but opinionated account of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the wealth of the diplomatic record, with many charters surviving from the reign, as well as lawcodes, homilies and political tracts. These various sources not only provide different windows onto the period but are also remarkable for the inclusion, in some, of criticism of the king, a very rare occurrence among Anglo- Saxon sources. It is not surprising therefore that Æthelred has been well served by scholars of Anglo-Saxon England, with the publication of three full-length biographies in the past decade and a half by Ryan Lavelle, Ann Williams and Levi Roach, building in important ways upon the seminal work of Simon Keynes published in 1980, whose analysis of the charter evidence transformed scholarship on the reign.

Hayden White famously argued that historians shape their accounts of historical events according to certain narrative forms embedded in our own social consciousness.

In the process of studying a given complex of events, [the historian] begins to perceive the possible story form that such events may figure. In his narrative account of how this set of events took on the shape which he perceives to inhere within it, he emplots his account as a story of a particular kind. The reader, in the process of following the historian's account of those events, gradually comes to realize that the story he is reading is of one kind rather than another: romance, tragedy, comedy, satire, epic, or what have you … The original strangeness, mystery, or exoticism of the events is dispelled, and they take on a familiar aspect, not in their details, but in their functions as elements of a familiar kind of configuration.

From an eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon perspective, it is hard to write Æthelred's reign as anything other than a tragedy.