Back to the Mainly The Vikings calendar
At this stage Ethelred had two ideas, both
of them pretty stupid. Firstly, he decided to pay the Danes to go away. He brought in a new tax for his people called Danegeld and handed this money over to the
Danes. The first payment was made in 991 AD and, in today's money, was about £20,000. Some of the Danes went away.
Those that didn’t leave, Ethelred hunted down and killed. Unfortunately this included Gunhild, the sister of the Danish King, Sweyn, who was also
known as Sweyn Forkbeard. The king not his sister who didn’t have a beard at all, I guess. Anyhow Sweyn, not unnaturally, was a bit cross.
Over the next 20 years the Danes also had two ideas. One was to keep attacking and so Ethelred kept giving them money to go away and never come back
but they only heard the first part. The second idea was mainly from Sweyn and concerned his desire to avenge his sister’s death.
As the money the Danes asked for went up each year so Ethelred had to find it and he did this by taxing the ordinary people more. This did not make
him popular, even if by now he was tying his own laces.
Another thing that worried people was that they thought that in the year 1000AD, 1000 years after the birth of Jesus, terrible things would happen
and the world would end and everyone would die. Most people were wrong except Ethelred’s mummy, remember her, Eifthryth, how could you forget a name like that,
who did actually die that year, once she knew Ethelred could tie his laces even if he wasn’t really ready to do so.
One lasting thing Ethelred did do was to say that the law in the land should be administered by a sheriff and 12 good men, which is why we have a
jury of 12 people in our courts even today. In 1002AD, a new idea came to him and he ordered that all Danes in England should be killed but this time,
reversing earlier patterns, no one was ready to do it so it never really happened much.
