Back to the Mainly The Normans calendar

The Danes had been attacking England for over 20 years and dear old Ethelred was handing out Danegeld like there was no tomorrow and in 1013, there wasn’t. Well not for Ethelred anyway. Sweyn, the Viking King of Denmark and a few other places over there, decided that he had taken enough Danegeld so he might as well invade; so he did. He defeated Ethelred, who probably wasn’t ready, fairly easily and Ethelred fled to Normandy in France.

Sweyn, if you remember he was known as Sweyn Forkbeard, was crowned king, made Gainsborough the capital of England (nothing against Gainsborough but a weird choice) and set out to rule. However, the following year Sweyn ran out of tomorrows too, as he died and confusion reigned, although it was never actually crowned. Sweyn has one of the shortest reigns of any English monarch of just 40 days and presumably 39 tomorrows.

After his death, some Anglo-Saxon nobles invited Ethelred to come back, while some supported Cnut, the son of Sweyn. Ethelred presumably replied, “ready or not, I’m coming” and returned and defeated Cnut, who ran back home to Denmark but not for long.

In 1015 Ethelred’s son Edmund, also called Ironside, rebelled against Ethelred while, in the same year, Cnut, who sometimes spelt his name Canute, the son of Sweyn, always spelt Sweyn, also came back with a new army, which spelt trouble. Ethelred was now ready and died in April 1016. Edmund succeeded him, fought a few battles against Canute which nobody really won and came to an agreement in October 1016 with Canute to split the country and when one dies the other would take over his part. It wasn’t a 50-50 split as Edmund got Wessex and Cnut the rest, which was all of England north of the River Thames. Anyway, very kindly, for Canute, or Cnut, Edmund, or Ironsides, died one month later, spelling the end of arguments for a while. No one quite knows how Edmund died although there are stories that he was shot while on the toilet. Anyhow flushed with this lucky moment, Cnut, or Canute, became King of England.

Forward to 1016AD