517 



ETHELRED I. 



ETHELRED I. 



813 



but no events of his short reign are distinctly recorded. It appears 

 however that the Northmen continued to make occasional descents 

 both ou the coasts of Wessex, and on tho.se of other parts of the 

 island. All that we are told of Ethslbert is, that he died in 865 or 

 866. He appears to have left a son, Ethelwald, and other children ; 

 but he was succeeded on the throne of Wessex by his younger brother 

 Ethelred. 



ETHELRED I. (called also Edelred and Ethered), King of Wessex 

 and head of the Heptarchy, was the third surviving son of King 

 Ethelwulf, who in his will (ratified by the Witan) appointed Ethelred 

 to succeed to the throne immediately after his eldest brother Ethel- 

 bald; he did not however succeed till after the death of his elder 

 brother Ethelbert in 866. [ETHELWULF and ETHELBERT of Wessex.] 

 The reign of Ethelred was eminently disastrous both for Wessex and 

 for the other states of England. In the last year of the preceding 

 king, the great Danish chief, Ragnar Lodbrog, had been taken prisoner 

 while making an attack on Northumbria, and put to death with cruel 

 tortures. It appears to have been with the purpose of avenging this 

 luss that the various Scandinavian nations immediately united their 

 strength in that great expedition against England, which terminated 

 iu the conquest of half the country. The invaders, to the number of 

 several thousands, under the command of Inguar (or Ivar) and Ubbo 

 (or Hubba) landed on the coast of East Auglia, immediately after the 

 accession of Ethelred to the throne of Wessex. Having encamped 

 and paused the winter on shore, they marched into Yorkshire in the 

 spring of 867, took possession (1st of March) of the city of York, and 

 having there (12th of April) repulsed with great slaughter an attack 

 of the Northumbrians under Osbert and Ella, made themselves masters 

 of all the kingdom of Northumbria to the south of the Tyne, and 

 placed Inguar over it as kinir. They, then marched into the kingdom 

 of Mercia, and passed the winter of 867-8 in the town of Nottingham. 

 Beorhed, the Mercian king, now solicited the aid of Ethelred ; and 

 the King of Wessex, accompanied by his younger brother Alfred, 

 whom ha appears to have admitted to a share of the royal power, 

 advanced with an army against the foreigners. The Danes however 

 did not venture to engage the allied forces of Wessex and Mercia ; 

 and a treaty was made by which they agreed to evacuate Nottingham 

 and to retire to York. In that city they remained quiet for the 

 remainder of this year, and all the next, during which England was 

 afflicted by a severe famine, followed by a terrible mortality both of 

 human beings and cattle. But, in the spring of 870, disregarding the 

 Lite pucitication, the Danes resumed hostilities, carrying their arms 

 across the Humber into Lincolnshire, which was included in the 

 dominions of Mercia, Notwithstanding some attempts to check their 

 progress, which were made by Earl Algar, the governor of the district, 

 they speedily overran all Lincoln, and pushed their way into the 

 adjoining territory of East Anglia, sacking and destroying in their 

 course tne abbeys of Croyland and Medehamstead (or Peterborough), 

 the town of Huntingdon, and the nunnery of Ely, and massacreing and 

 laying waste wherever they appeared with unheard-of ferocity. At 

 u village called Hoxton, iu Norfolk, they seized Edmund, the East 

 Anglian king, and put him to death : he sustained the torments they 

 indicted upon him with such constancy that he was afterwards 

 revered as a martyr, and the 20th of November, the day on which he 

 met his fate, was assigned to him in the calendar. His death made 

 the Danes masters of East Anglia, over which they placed Qodrun, 

 one of their chiefs, as king. They now resolved to invade Wessex, 

 the only state which they had not either conquered or rendered 

 powerless. They entered Berkshire, under the command of Halfden 

 and Bacseg, and took the town of Reading without encountering any 

 resistance ; but they were soon after attacked by Earl Ethelwulf at 

 the neighbouring village of Inglefield, and driven from their ground 

 with the loss of Sidnor, one of their most renowned captains. Four 

 days after they were fallen upon at Reading by King Ethelred and 

 his brother Alfred ; but on this occasion the Saxons were repulsed 

 with great loss, the brave Earl Ethelwulf being among the slain. The 

 battle of Reading however was followed in four daya more by 

 another more important encounter at a place which the old writers 

 call Aescesdun, or the Ash-tree Hill, and which has been supposed 

 by some to be Ashhampstead in the west, by others Ashton iu the 

 cast, of Berkshire. The Danes were here attacked with great impetu- 

 osity and valour by Alfred, and, notwithstanding their advantageous 

 position, were, after a struggle of some length, completely defeated 

 and put to flight. It is said that the English chased them for the 

 whole of the night and next day over the country till they reached 

 the town of Reading, in which they again shut themselves up. But 

 a fortnight after the battle of Ash-tree Hill they again met the two 

 kings of Wessex at Basing, in the north of Hampshire, and this time 

 the English were worsted. A similar result attended the next battle, 

 fought, about two months after, at a place called Merton, which has 

 been variously conjectured to be places named Morton in Surrey, 

 Oxfordshire, Wilts, and Berkshire. In this engagement, which must 

 have taken place early iu 871, Ethelred received a wound, of which 

 ho died soon after Easter, leaving the now almost shadowy inheritance 

 of the crown of Wessex, and what would at a later period have been 

 called the suzerainty of England, to his younger brother Alfred. 



ETHELKEU II., surnamed the Unready, King of the Anglo-Saxons, 

 was the youngest son of King Edgar, by his second wife, the infamous 



Elfrida. On the murder by Elfrida of his elder brother, Edward the 

 Martyr, iu 978, he was reluctantly acknowledged as king by the 

 Witan, in the absence of any other individual having pretensions to 

 the crown ; even Dunstan, who had steadily opposed the party of 

 Elfrida throughout the late reign, finding himself now obliged to 

 acquiesce in the accession of her son. He was crowned by Dunstm 

 at Kingston-on-the-Thames on the 14th of April, being at this time 

 only a boy of ten years old ; but the haughty prelate is stated by 

 Malmesbury to have declared as he placed the crown on the boy's 

 head that the sins of his mother and her accomplices should be visited 

 on the head of her son, and that in his reign auch evils should befall 

 the English as they had never yet suffered since they came into 

 Britain. The curse thus solemnly denounced by the chief priest and 

 leading statesman in the kingdom, no doubt did something towards 

 working out its own accomplishment. Certain it is that the reign of 

 Ethelred the Unready is on the whole the most calamitous and dis- 

 graceful in English history. The feeble and distracted government 

 that arose out of his minority, the circumstances of his accession, aud 

 the unpatriotic conduct of Dunstan, immediately drew once more 

 upon England the attention of the northern piratical powers, who had 

 now remitted their attacks for nearly a century. A small body of 

 Danes lauded at Southampton in 980 ; aud scarcely a year passed after- 

 wards in which one part or other of the coast was not in like manner 

 visited and ravaged, usually with impunity. At length, in 991, a much 

 larger force than had before appeared arrived under two leaders named 

 Justin and Gurthmund, and after taking the town of Ipswich, pro- 

 ceeded to Maldon, and there encountering the English army commanded 

 by the lderman Brithnod, obtained a complete victory, Biithnod him- 

 self being slain. On this it was resolved by the English Witan, on the 

 advice, it is said, of Siric, who had succeeded Dunstau as the king's 

 chief counsellor, to buy off the invaders with a sum of money. They 

 agreed to accept 10,000 pounds of silver, which was accordingly paid 

 to them, being raised by an impost on all the landed property in the 

 kingdom, which from this time became a regular tax, under the name 

 of the Danegeld, and was perhaps the first direct tax imposed iu 

 England. It was felt however that this was a very precarious expe- 

 dient to trust to ; and as soon as the Danes were gone, the govern- 

 ment proceeded to fit out a formidable fleet, which might perhaps 

 have been of service if it had been ready to meet them when they 

 arrived. As it was, it was no sooner afloat than it was rendered useless 

 by treachery and mismanagement. A squadron of Danes having again, 

 appeared on the coast iu 992, Alfric, the commander of the English 

 fleet, when sent to surprise them, secretly gave them information of 

 the intended attack, and then went over and joined them. The next 

 year, when the Northmen made a descent upon the coast of Northum- 

 berland and took by storm the castle of Bamborough, the leaders of 

 the force sent against them in like manner deserted to the enemy. In 

 994 a much more powerful armament than had yet appeared sailed up 

 the Thames under the command of Sweyn or Svein, king of Denmark, 

 and Olave king of Norway ; it consisted of ninety-four ships, and 

 directed its first efforts against London, which however defended itself 

 successfully against the assault. The invaders then overran and laid 

 waste a great part of Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire. In the 

 end they were again bought oft' by the payment of a sum of money, 

 their demand this time rising to 16,000 pounds of silver, Olave now 

 consented to embrace Christianity ; aud he faithfully kept his promise 

 of never again molesting England. Not so the king of Denmark ; his 

 forces continued their attacks year after year; and at last, in 1001, 

 Ethelred found himself once more compelled to rid himself of them 

 by his old expedient. He was now obliged to pay them 21,000 pounds 

 of silver. 



For what length of time the relief which he thus purchased might 

 have Lstcd it is impossible to say. Ethelred now resorted to another 

 mode of dealing with the evil, which was of a very different character 

 from that to which he had hitherto adhered, but combined the quali- 

 ties of being at once still more unjustifiable and still less likely to 

 prove efficacious. On the 13th of November (the festival of St. Brice) 

 in the year 1002, the English inhabitants, in obedience, it is said, to 

 secret instructions received in every city from the government the 

 evening before, suddenly rose in all parts of the kingdom upon the 

 Danes who were resident among them, aud put them to death men, 

 women, and children. There has been some dispute as to the precise 

 extent to which the massacre was carried, and it cannot bo supposed 

 to have comprehended all the persons of Danish descent resident in 

 the country, for in many districts it is certain that the majority of the 

 inhabitants were of this description ; but there can be no doubt that 

 a very large number of persons perished. This atrocious and in every 

 way unwise proceeding did not long remain without its fit puuishment. 

 The next year Sweyn, whose sister, married to an English earl, had 

 been among the butchered, again appeared on the south coast ; aud 

 from this time it may be said the kingdom had no rest. After the 

 devastations of the invaders had been continued for four years, they 

 were once more bought off in 1007 by a payment of 36,000 pounds of 

 silver. The next year, by extraordinary efforts a numerous fleet was 

 built, and assembled at Sandwich ; but a dispute arising among the 

 captains, one of them deserted with twenty vessels, and turned pirate, 

 and nearly all the rest were soon after destroyed by a tempest. 

 Meanwhile, all the other forms of public calamity combined to aflliot 



