Thank you for listening to The Rest is History.
For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series and membership of our much loved chat community, go to therestishistory .com and join the club.
That is therestishistory .com.
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock.
It's tax season, and we're all a bit tired of numbers.
But here's one you need to hear.
$16 .5 billion. That's how much the IRS flagged for possible identity fraud last year.
Now here's a good number.
100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second.
If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed.
Save up to 40 % your first year at lifelock .com slash podcast. Terms apply.
Strange tales were told of Olaf Trigvassen's return to Norway.
One day it was claimed the new king was in a fit mood to be entertained.
At his side there suddenly appeared an old man, clocked, and white -haired with only a single eye.
Entering into conversation with the stranger, Trigveson found that there was nothing the old man did not seem to know, nor any question to which he could not give an answer.
All evening the two of them talked.
And even though the king was eventually persuaded to retire to bed by a twitchy English Bishop who had grown suspicious of the eye'd stranger.
Trigveson could still not bear to end the conversation, but continued it, even as he lay on his firs late into the night.
At last, the old man left him, and the king fell asleep.
But his dreams were strange and feverish.
And waking up abruptly, he cried out for the stranger again.
Even though his servant searched high and low, however, the old man could not be found and Trigveson, brought to his senses by daylight, shuddered at his close escape.
When it was reported to him that two sides of beef, a gift from the stranger, had been used in a stew, he ordered the entire cooking pot flung out.
A godly and responsible act.
For clearly, it was out of the question for him, as a follower of Christ, to feast on meat supplied by Odin.
Well that riveting passage finally wrought prose.
That was produced by none other than our very own Hollywood Zone Tom Holland in his book Millennium.
It's about the end of the world and the forging of Christendom.
Is that what the subtitle of the book is?
That kind of stuff.
Yeah, that kind of stuff.
Exactly. I thought a nice compliment to the reading from your own book on this subject with which we ended the previous episode, so a nice segue.
They're a perfect match. We ended last time with a reading from Führer of the Vikings.
Listners may remember that Danish refugees, in the wake of a terrible massacre in the towns and villages of England, have fled across the North Sea to Scandinavia to bring the news to the Danish king and revenge is coming.
So today in this mighty series about the events of 1066, we turn from England to Scandinavia, to the Northlands, we look north to the world of the Change.
And that opening reading about Olaf Trigvetsen rejecting Odin's beef is a reminder of the throes of cultural and social change that are transforming Scandinavia.
So Tom, you talked last time about this guy Olaf Trigvetsen.
He is a terrifying, slightly sinister viking leader who had beaten an English army in 991 at the Battle of Maldon who had led all these pillaging raids across southern England and has extorted a huge amount of silver from England's king, Ethelred the Unready.
But Olav Trigvetsson is an embodiment of change in himself because he's converted to Christianity and he's been paid off by Ethelred and he has gone back to Norway.
So tell us a little bit about him and why he matters.
Yes, so he's returned to Norway, the North way, the great road that kind of winds up the coast of Norway, and he is setting about transforming himself from a pagan Viking chieftain into the intimidating figure of a Christian king.
He does this with the same buccaneering enthusiasm that he had shown in extorting cash from the English, so he goes up and down the Northway, and he smashes idols, and he menaces local pagan leaders, and he forces conversions of his sword, and he throws out Odin's beef.
And I think as that story suggests, his conversion is up to a point pretty genuine.
But the question then is, why?
Why would he, having imposed himself so familiarly on a Christian kingdom?
Why would he then convert to the God of the seeming losers?
Yeah. And I think the answer is that everything he does is very finely calculated to make him look good, to kind of redound to his glory, to add to his potency and power.
And the truth is that even though he had extorted money from the English, he can do that because England is rich. And I think he has seen enough of, you know, this great Christian kingdom ruled by Aethelred to think, well, I would quite like a bit of what Aethelred has.
He may we may think of him as a loser, but Aethelred is heir to Alfred the Great, he's a figure of dignity, of splendor, of wealth and Olaf wants it.
To worship Odin is basically to be parochial, to be poor, to be someone who has to be a predator and to worship Christ is to be powerful and rich and possessed of enough silver.
If you have do to kind of give it out.
Yeah, I think it's important for people to get them to their heads, isn't it?
That the Christianization of Scandinavia is the moment that really marks the end of the Viking age.
But it's not because these warlords think kindness is brilliant and you know, they love turning the other cheek and all that kind of thing.
It's because they think Christianity is a winner's religion.
People who are Christians are rich. They're powerful.
And also, if you're a king, to have one religion, one God, that sounds great.
Get everyone to believe the same thing and And therefore believe in you.
And I think it's more than just about belief.
It's also about the apparatus of power that Christianity provides because it's very much a literate civilization.
You have bishops who can serve you as ministers that could then enable you to kind of construct the kind of kingdom that you find in England.
It enables you to have more sophisticated ways, essentially, of raising troops.
And therefore the offer is that you can be even more bloodthirsty and extort even more money.
ultimately is the kind of the base practical reason for it.
And the degree to which this is something that is very much in the air in the early 11th century is the fact that Olaf Trigvetsen is not the first Viking warlord to have clocked this.
So South of the Northway you go across these icy reef strewn waters that separate Norway from Denmark and there you come to the flatlands of Jutland and there stands the seat of the kings of Denmark and we talked in the first episode about how England is very precocious but it's not entirely unique because in Denmark at the same time as the Curta Kingas the great dynasty of Alfred the Great are establishing their rule over a United Kingdom of England a dynasty of kings in Denmark are doing much the same thing and they set up a great kind of showcase of their dynasty's power at a place called Yelling
which is in that the heart of Jutland and it is you know we've already alluded to Tolkien, it is like something out of Lord of the Rings.
It's a place of ancient graves and you've got gold ringed warriors with their swords and their spears standing on guard outside kind of great halls great feasting halls and you also have two huge amounts of Earth that had been raised by Gorm, it's a great legend, Gorm the Old, who is the founder of this dynasty and had been a pagan.
But the amazing thing is, is that between these two great barrows, these two great pagan piles of earth, there stands a church and beside the church there is a great block of granite that has been carved It's because so into the stone with an image of a crucified Christ who is entangled with serpents.
And it's inscribed with runes.
And these runes read, and I quote, King Harold had this memorial made for Gorm his father and Fiery his mother that same Harold who joined together all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes to be Christian.
Yeah, it's an amazing sight, actually.
I'll tell you what, it's accessible within half a day from Legoland.
I know. I remember it well.
It's an excellent trip.
The Danish tourist board, if they want to sponsor us, they really ought to.
Because I recommend it to the distance.
As a long weekend, you can knock off Leggogland and the yelling stones in the same trip.
And of course this matters, because these stones the inspiration, the guy who set them up, King Harold, you mentioned, his nickname is Bluetooth, and these stones showing the integration of pagan and Christian, and of course, all Denmark and Norway being joined together are the inspiration for Bluetooth technology, would you believe?
Yes. And the symbol for Bluetooth is kind of fusion of the runes for H and B, so the two initials of Harold Bluetooth.
And the idea behind naming that technology Bluetooth was this idea that Harold had joined together Denmark and Norway, in fact, it was just the Southern reaches of Norway like this is teaching all the world a thing, Kombreya, wonderful.
Of course, I mean, there was nothing touchy -feely about it at all.
It was a very brutal process of conquest. And you can see in this kind of great rock, this great stone with the symbol of Christ and carved on it that the process of conquest is being elided with the process of becoming Christian.
And as you said, to be the servant of a kind of single omnipotent god rather than a whole host of gods, this is to be a Caesar.
This is potentially to have power that is far more prestigious than anything that the pagan world could offer.
And of course, as we said, also, it brings bureaucracy and bureaucracy in turn enables the organisation of a treasury and a treasury enables the commissioning of infrastructure and the building of ships and the arming of ever larger armies.
And the Danish king who best demonstrates this is not Harald himself but his son, Sveine Fortbeird, who at the end of the last episode, you reminded us, had cold, blue eyes.
In his cold, blue eyes, Tom, there was only death because Sveine Fortbeird has just heard the news of the massacre of Danes in England and he has also, according to some sources, heard that one of the victims is his own sister Gunhilda.
Right. And this is a man with whom you do not want to mess.
So Tietmar, the bishop of Mercerburg, said that he was and I quote, not a ruler, but a destroyer.
And Svehen fought beard. He may be, you know, a new kind of dane in that he is a king in a Christianizing world, and he has more bureaucracy behind him and all of this kind of thing.
So he's not a Viking raider or a Viking warlord, but he's just as frightening and formidable as the most sinister and blood drenched of Alfred the Great's adversaries or whatever.
Yeah. I think he's a much more frightening figure, much more kind of chill and calculating than any of the pagan Vikings actually, the knives and the boneless.
Yes. Precisely because he is starting to kind of institutionalise his menace, but you still have the slight vein of brutal comedy that you often get in Viking epics.
So the story of how he comes to power, he actually topples his father, Harold Bluetooth.
So in 986, he leads a rebellion against Harold and there are various stories sort of told of Harold's ends and the most comical and therefore the one that we will go with.
Yeah. The one that you tell in your book, not necessarily the truest, but the one that you enjoyed the most, Tom, I think it's fair to say.
Yeah. So father and son have a kind of parley on an island.
They're just about, you know, they've got all their fleets behind them.
And then Harold Bluetooth goes off to go to the toilet to have a dump and as he sits down to start the process, an arrow is fired and it goes straight up his anus.
And this will not be the last toilet themed death that we will be touching on in the course of this series.
So, Sven had been a comrade of Olaf Trigvesen, the guy who rejected Odin's beef, but they are rivals within the world of the North Sea, aren't they?
One of them is Norway the other is Denmark basically.
Yes. areas. And Swain had fought with Olaf Trigfassen at Moulden, so was fully aware of his potential and his formidable qualities.
And so therefore, decides that he's going to have to eliminate him.
And one of the many ways that I think in which Swain fought Beard is a frightening figure is that he's a great man for delayed gratification.
So he takes his time.
And he slowly builds up an ever more intimidating force with which to take on the Norwegian King and in the year 1000 this great fleet set sail to destroy Olav Trigvason.
Trigvason himself is kind of ready for it, he's got an absolutely enormous kind of dragon ship called the Long Serpent, the largest dragon ship ever fashioned, he's got 60 ships that are kind of similarly impressive and intimidating so these two great armadas sailing out to meet one another but But Fortbeard's force is ultimately far more intimidating.
Olaf Trigvehrsen's fleet is rapidly wiped out and it ends with Trigvehrsen himself, who has got golden armour, bright red cloak, so kind of very on -brand.
His enemies have cornered him, they're about to grab him and Olaf Trigvehrsen leaps into the sea and when Swain Fortbeard's men tried to rescue him from the waters he threw his over his head, it is said, and vanished beneath the waves." So he dies as he had lived as a great Viking hero, a man whose name will be celebrated in song.
But Living with Swain fought Beard has secured for himself power beyond the dreams of any previous Scandinavian king.
Right. So this is a thing, Swain fought Beard at this point, who is this very formidable character.
Of course, famous for his beard, we should stress this, he has this forked beard, which I think in itself is quite intimidating.
So, he is the man that Ethelred the unready has basically chosen to provoke.
It's mad. But I guess Ethelred thought he had no choice.
He thought the Danes were a fifth column and he just had to get rid of it.
I mean, you've said in your notes that if he'd been facing somebody else, it might have been a reasonable calculation but as it is because word is bound to reach Sveinfort beard it's and I quote, the worst policy decision in the whole of English history.
I mean, Brigitte Phillips might have something to say about that, Tom.
I say there's a case for saying.
Yeah, it's in the top two.
I think it's a moral disaster obviously because actually murdering people who are your guests in your kingdom is a terrible look.
no matter whether you have apocalyptic justifications or not.
But I think it's an insane misreading of not just paying for it himself, but the capabilities of the Danish Kingdom.
And I guess the reason that Arthur Read misreads it is that he is thinking that Denmark is still the country that it was back in the pagan days.
He hasn't clocked the fact that it is starting to become a kingdom very much like his own.
and the consequences are utterly disastrous.
And I think anyone in England listening to this who is currently depressed about the state of the country should sit back and reflect on the fact that it was actually a lot worse in the latter years of Ethelred's reign.
So let's get into Sveine Forkbeard's revenge.
So he clearly spends the next few months mustering his forces, assembling his fleet, you know, sharpening their swords.
And then a few months after the St. Brices Day Massacre in 1003, he lands in Wessex in the heartland of the English kingdom at the head of this gigantic fleet and a massive expeditionary force.
And, Tom, he wants to bleeding and dry as so many raiders have done, but also he's after Ethel Redd's authority, the symbols of his authority, and he heads for where else?
For Wiltshire and the Salisbury area.
He does, yeah he does.
So he first of all lands in Devon, but he storms and burns Exeter, and then he marches on my own native county of Wiltshire, and it's county town of Wilton.
And Wilton is one of the great symbols of the authority of the Kurda Kingas, the Dynasty of Alfred the Great and particularly of its women.
So Wilton is the site of an abbey that lies under the particular protection of the royal women of the royal dynasty.
And so to attack it in a way is to insult Atharid's masculinity, his inability to defend the property of his women, and it has a kind of great spiritual potency.
So two sisters of Athelstan, the first King of United England, had been nuns there and Um, and in nine 55, this is very interesting for me, one of the brothers of Athelstan who had ruled in succession to him as king had granted to the nuns of Wilton two villages in the nearby chalk Valley.
One of them was a village called basachuk.
And the other was a village called broad chalk.
And that's where I grew up.
So this is very much my neck of the woods.
Yeah. And it means that I have a particular devotion to the memory of this great Abbe.
and one of the great saints of the Kurda Kinga had also been there.
So this is Edgar's daughter, Edith, and therefore the half sister of Athelred.
She'd been very devout, very holy, much loved by the locals for her kind of kindness and generosity, but she'd also been celebrated for her tremendous dress sense by far the most stylishly dressed nun in England, and she had been criticized for this, but God demonstrated his approval of her her kind of sassy dress sense by making a burning torch drop into the great chest where she kept her clothes and the chest got kind of you know blackened by her clothes completely survived so it was a spectacular miracle yeah that must have definitely happened well you may scoff Dominik but when she dies she's
only kind of in her late 20s the memory of this extraordinary miracle is such that she is enshrined as a saint Golly, miles.
So what do you say?
What do you make of that?
I think it's bonkers.
God, honestly, mercy and skepticism.
I have no time for Wessexist saints, to be honest with you, I just...
I look down on them.
Well, I think that reflects poorly on you, and maybe you would have been at one with Svein.
I would. Oh, god, I'd have thrown my lot in with Svein straight away.
Svein is marching on Wilton.
He's marching on Wiltshire in the Salisbury area, at the head of a marauding, hairy band of Vikings.
And, of course, it's the duty of the tyres of Wiltshire, guy called Alfred to stop them, to preserve this great symbol of Wesaxon royal power.
And he arrives on the crest of the hill.
Looking down at Wilton, he sees the Viking horde.
All his men are lined up waiting for him to sound the battle Trump.
Yeah. And instead he's so terrified that he voids his bowel and vomits all over the soil.
That is that that's why I associate with people from that neck of the woods, Tom, that's the behavior that I've come to recognise.
He runs away, and Svein tortures Wilton, loots the Abbey of its gold.
And of course, you know, this is devastating to Ethel Redd in every way.
Right. He's lost the money and he's been humiliated.
This great symbol of his power has been devastated, and Svein makes sure to extort everything that he can.
And ultimately, you know, he only leaves in 1004 after Ethel Redd has given him yet more dang gold.
So now we really are into the routine of Dane Gild, aren't we, because the issue now is that Svein knows he can just come back again and again, hit England, get more Dane Gild and use that Dane Gild.
I mean this is your Kipling lines, you know, if you pay Dane Gild you will never get rid of the Dane because Svein uses that to beef up his army, beef up his fleet and then come back the next year or two years later for more money.
Yeah it's like going to kind of endless going to a cash point with somebody else's card. Right.
Because every time the Danes Return, 1006, 1009, they are better equipped, more formidable and more terrifying.
I have to say there's an absolutely brilliant book on this that I read a few years ago by a Norwegian historian called Tora Sker called the Wolf Age, and it does this basically kind of week by week narrative.
And it just goes on and on and on.
Of all of these conquests.
And he, he's very tall but he's called Thorkell.
We've established that.
So he's really brutal and effective.
Isn't he? I mean, he keeps looting and pillaging all these towns.
And so in 1011 they go for a place that's even more significant than Wiltshire in the Salisbury area, which is Canterbury.
Their seat of Christianity in England.
And they capture the archbishop, they lock him up in a cage and they keep him there for six months.
and then they hold a great celebratory feast at Greenwich, kind of down river from London, at Easter.
Yeah, on Easter Saturday.
And they get absolutely wasted.
And they've been hiding mighty haunches of beef.
And there are great skulls of oxen and bones and stuff.
And they all start pelting the archbishop with these bones.
And the poor guy dies.
Do you know the name of the man who, this is so Tolkien, the name of the man who finished the archbishop off, he was called Thrum.
Yeah. Thawchul and Thrub.
And this is again to emphasize, just abject humiliation for Atherid.
I mean, it's bad enough to see the great abbey patronized by the women of your dynasty wiped out.
But to have the Archbishop of your kingdom pelted to death with ox bones, I mean, doesn't get worse than that, really.
So, in the long run, Atherid's solution is yet again financial he can't fight England it's interesting isn't it that England despite being so wealthy just doesn't have the martial traditional martial culture has it does and this is where I think the revisionism on Etheret gets it wrong okay he has shown that he can fight I mean he invaded Scotland he launched an attack on Normandy spoiler alert his elder son will show that it's perfectly possible to raise troops and to fight so why Doesn't he do it in a convincing and effective way?
I suspect that the humiliations heaped on him has broken his prestige.
And the resentment of him as a man who just keeps extorting money and handing it over is kind of corroding the willingness of people to kind of go the extra length for him.
People basically think he's a loser, and they don't want to back him off.
And people do think he's a loser.
and where I think it is it is reasonable to say that Etherred is unlucky is just to emphasize the fact that he is up against something new with this.
The fact that Denmark is a state rather than a kind of consortium of raiders.
I think this is something that he hasn't properly clocked, but he really should have done by this point.
He should have fought and in 1012, I think Etherred decides the policy is not working.
What I need to do is to try and specifically buy off some of these raiders and employ them as my mercenaries.
And he targets Thorkall the Tall, this guy who had captured the Archbishop of Canterbury, gives them another massive bribe and wins Thorkall over together with 45 ships.
But the problem is that this policy which maybe 10 or 20 years before would have worked is a failure because it just makes Swain alarmed.
You know, he doesn't want to think of Athored teaming up with someone as formidable as Thorkall.
And so he decides that the time has come for me to invade.
And as he had done with Olaf Trigvetsen, so with Athel Red, he's been playing a very long game.
And his policy with Athel Red has been to bleed him dry of the lifeblood of Silva, and then to close in for decapitation.
And so in 1013 that is what he does.
He sails up the Humber Estuary with a huge invasion force.
and the Humber Estuary effectively if you're facing Vikings from across the North Sea it's like a dagger point sticking into the heart of England because it leads to York, the great second city of England and which for so long had been a Viking capital.
There's loads of Danes in this area, I mean there are people with Danish surnames, there are Danish place names, there are all these people who perhaps for whom it is perhaps not such a stretch to imagine having a Danish overlord rather than an English one.
And it seems pretty clear at this point, doesn't it?
Do you agree that, um, spain, he's, this isn't another raid.
He's like, right, let's finish this now.
I'm actually just going to take this over.
And this is going to become part of my empire.
Yeah, he's been planning it.
And now the moment has come and he combines menace with overtures to the local aristocracy in Mercia. And they are so battle scarred and weary that they start accepting Spain's terms and handing over hostages, offering homage to Spain.
And by the end of that year, 1013, Atherid is effectively staring down the barrel, he no longer has the run of his country, he's, he's bottled himself up with, with Thawkel in London.
But he knows that he can't hold out for long, that the whole country now effectively is submitting to the Danish King.
So he orders his Queen, the Lady Emma, who is of course the sister of the Duke of Normandy, go on board a ship and to take with her their three children.
So those are two boys, Edward and Alfred, and a girl, God Gifu.
And once they're on the ship, to set sail for Normandy.
And this will be really important later on, the fact that these children, one of whom is called Edward, so listeners should remember him, are disappearing into exile in Normandy to her homeland.
Exactly. Ethelred still can't quite bring himself to endure the humiliation of seeking sanctuary with the Duke of Normandy.
So instead he leaves London and he kind of hangs out on the Isle of white spends Christmas there.
And it's miserable because effectively he is now the Viking.
His court has shrunk to his fleet and in the new year he kind of gives up and in the dying days of of 1013.
So in the days immediately after Christmas he decides this is hopeless and he too sets sail for the Norman court.
So now the dynasty that has ruled England for so long, the dynasty of Alfred and of Edward the Elder and of Athelstan has gone off into exile.
the Danes are the masters of England.
And a Danish King, horse specific.
Yeah in Svein Fortbeard and then an unbelievable George RR Martin style twist, the 3rd of February 2014.
Tell us what happens to Svein Fortbeard Tom.
Well he dies and there are conflicting accounts about what exactly happens to him.
So some say that he died in his sleep others others that he fell off his horse and smashed his head.
And others say that he was killed by Saint Edmund, the King of East Anglia, who back in the time of King Alfred had been shot to death by pagan Vikings and had since been enshrined as the great patron saint of the East Angles.
That Saint Edmund had appeared to Saint Fortbeard in a dream and struck him with a pole and that had finished him off.
So listeners, make up your own minds.
Was he killed by Saint Edmund in a dream with poll or did he, as I read in another book, have a stroke near a scumthorpe?
Basically, you can divide the human race into people who think that go with a stroke and scumthorpe or the poll people.
What I will also say is again over the course of the story, people dying unexpectedly.
And often it's mentioned at feasts.
Again, this is an enduring theme and people might want to ponder whether perhaps foul play was in operation.
But I mean we don't know anyway, so Spain Fortide is now off the scene And so the Witan this great assembly of the elder men the men who lead the various counties in England They get together and they decide actually maybe we should get Ethelred back and the anglo -saxon Chronicle Gives the details of the invitation they sent to Ethelred they said no sovereign was dearer to them than their natural Lord if only he would govern them better than previously done which...
yeah, that's not really an endorsement, is it?
But Atherrhed does obviously come back.
He does. So Thorkil switched sides by this point.
So Thorkil is now back, back with the Danes.
Yes, but there's a Norwegian on the scene, a guy called Olaf Haraldsson and Dominic, we'll be hearing about him again soon.
He's a very stout man.
Very stout yes, and very saintly in the long run.
It's like being very murderous.
So, Olav Haraldsson helps capture London for Atheredd from the Danes.
He sails up the Thames and he pulls down London Bridge.
I'm never entirely sure how pulling down London Bridge helps, but he does and there's a kind of, there is a thesis that this is the origins of the nursery rhyme London Bridge is falling down.
The other great champion of the English resistance to the Danes is Atheredd's eldest son.
So, that's not by Emma, but by a previous Queen.
And this is a guy called Edmund.
He had scorned to flee England when Ethelred and his sons by Emma had gone.
He'd stayed in England.
He's very charismatic.
He's very brave. And he's so formidable in battle that he wins the nickname of Ironside.
He's a tremendous man, isn't he?
And actually, you could say he is the last English King in the sense that he is the last English descent.
When we make this as a TV drama he should be played by an AI de -aged Sean Bean.
That will give people a clue as to what happens.
Yes, more toilet based deaths are approaching.
But for now he's done very well.
In fact he's so cross with with Atherwood that he's basically kind of been him and is saying I will I should be King and between them, Edmund Ironside and Olaf Haraldson succeed in reestablishing the rule of the kurda King.
Gass the prospects for Edmund Ironside as a future king are all the brighter for the fact that his father by now is a dying man.
In 1016, he duly shuffles off this mortal coil, but his passing actually is barely noted because by now everyone's eyes is on Edmund Ironside.
You know, he's tremendous.
He's dashing. his sides are made of iron and he claims the throne.
There is however a problem, because he is not the only claimant to this throne.
There is a rival and who that is and how the contest of this rival with Edmund Ironside develops, we will discover after the break.
I'm David Orlishoger, historian and broadcaster.
And I'm Sarah Churchwell, author, journalist, and academic.
And together we are hosts of GoalHanger's latest podcast, Journey Through Time.
We're going to be looking at hidden social histories behind famous chapters from the past. Asking what it was like to have lived through prohibition or to have been there on the ground during the Great Fire of London.
We'll be uncovering all of that.
And we'll have characters and stories that have been totally forgotten but shouldn't have been.
This week, we're looking at a terror attack that shocked New York, that cost American lives, caused millions of dollars of damage to buildings across Manhattan, that led to the establishment of new security agencies, and that helped push the United States towards war.
But it's not 9 -11. even.
This is the Black Tom explosion of 1916, the story of a massive sabotage campaign as Germany made a desperate effort to keep America from helping the allies during the First World War.
And the cast of characters for this story involves Playboy diplomats, there's a stranded sailor, an opera singer who's managing a brothel in New York and there's a hapless spy who leaves secret documents on a train.
So join us on journey through time and hear a clip from the Black Tom story at the end of this episode.
Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.
I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying.
It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did, and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.
I'm told it's super easy to do at MintMobile .com -slash -switch. Up -front payment of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required.
Intro rate, first three months only.
Then full price plan options available.
Taxes and fees extra.
See full terms at MintMobile .com Only a boy, you ship batterer.
When you launched your boat, No King was younger than you.
So those were lines, lovely lines, it's written by a praise singer about the very young, very impressive, very frightening son of Svein Forkbeard. And this is a man familiar to anybody who enjoys anecdotes about waves.
Because he is a young man called Knute.
And Knute came with his father, Svein, to England in 1013.
He's probably battle hardened even at that point.
He'd probably been on previous raids.
His father has been struck in a dream by Stedman with a poll and has died.
And so Cnut is now the leader of, well, he's the leader of what?
Is he the leader merely of a warband or does he want to be the claimant to a grand North Sea Empire that includes England as well as Denmark and Norway?
He's got a dilemma, hasn't he Tom?
Does he give up and basically go back to Denmark or even at this young age, does he go for it as his father was going to do?
Well, I think he actually does both.
So, he does withdraw from England in the wake of his father's death.
But as a sign that he will be back, remember that the English noblemen, particularly around Mercia, had given him hostages.
So, Knut takes these hostages and he maims them, cuts off their hands, blinds them and dumps them all on the beach at Sandwich. so that's that's not fun and he then goes back to Denmark and he you know he's a chip off the old block he does what his father would have done which is to use his rank and his power as King of Denmark to marshal another great invasion fleet and he also sends agents to England to secure pledges of loyalty from all the various Danish communities there, particularly in East Anglia and particularly around the Humber because that's where the settlement is the deepest. And he
also recruits large numbers of mercenaries.
And it's said in a biography of him by a guy who's very keen on him.
There were so many kinds of shield, it was easy to believe that troops drawn from all the nations of the world were with him.
And among them is Thorkill, who has now abandoned Atherhed for good.
So he's got these terrifying massive lads behind him.
They're sailing for England.
And they arrive in the summer of 1015.
Ethelred is dying but not quite dead.
So the question in everybody's mind is this.
Is it going to be Edmund Ironside who succeeds, his heir, or is Knut going to finish what Sveyn Fortbeard started and basically assimilate England into the world of the Scandinavian empire?
And Knutian and Edmund go hammer and tongs, And by the time that Aethereid finally dies on the 23rd of April 10 16, the country has is effectively divided in two.
So Knuth has North Ambria in East Anglia.
And Edmond has Wessex and neither side can really defeat the other.
And I think that the fact that Edmund has been able to secure Wessex indicates that Aethereid actually had been a failure as a king.
You know, he could have fought as his son did, and he didn't.
And now the country is divided.
So there is one key territory which remains up for grabs.
And that is Mercia. Yeah, the Midlands.
Basically the Midlands.
And this is under the rule of an elderman called Edric.
And he is a very slippery treacherous opportunist, as is conveyed by his nickname, which is Strayona, or The Grabber.
So he's very much the little finger of this story, isn't he?
Because he's always changing sides and betraying people and basically you never can be entirely sure.
Well he's only on his own side and he is constantly swapping from Edmund to Knut and back again.
Yes he is. So actually the description you get in the Angus Jackson Chronicle it does sound quite like kind of a little finger.
A man of humble origins but his smooth tongue won him wealth and high standing.
Endowed as he was with a subtle genius and incredible powers of eloquence he surpassed all his peers in malice and treachery as well as in pride and cruelty.
He's the captain benteen of the story so I mean he's so treacherous but in a way he overdoes it.
Right. So first of all he sides with Knut and tries to have Edmund assassinated then he goes over to Edmund then he goes back to Knut and then he comes back to Edmund.
He's a weatherfane.
He is tracking the the shift in fortunes between Knut and Edmund as they fight each other over England and the climactic clash takes place in the autumn of 1016 on the 18th of October at a site in Essex called Asendon.
It's a very very hard fought battle but then treachery in the English lines.
Edric Strowena, the grabber, has swapped sides yet again.
In Celebrate his great victory at Ashington.
You worked well in the shield war warrior King brown was the flesh of bodies Served to the carrion birds gray line but Edmund, you know, his sides are not fashioned out of iron for nothing No, he's not going to surrender and in the end the two men agreed that they will defied England Edmund keeps Wessex, but canoe gets mercy on therefore effectively everything north of the River Thames and And we've promised toilet based misadventure.
Edmund does not long outlive the agreement, so on the 30th of November, 10, 16 he dies, possibly of wounds suffered in battle.
But another account says that he was murdered while sitting on the toilet.
It's sort of true, isn't it?
That basically everybody who dies in this period, there's always an account that claims that it was while they were relieving themselves in some way.
Not everyone, but it certainly it's a feature theme.
It's a feature. Isn't it?
Yes. So we're in 1016, exactly half a century before the very famous conquest of 1066.
But this is a conquest, just as complete, and just as remarkable in some ways as the Norman conquest. This is a Danish conquest, the dynasty of Alfred the Great has been, it appears, definitively driven off the throne.
And the Danes, I mean, they really are the masters of England now under Canute.
And Cnut is obviously very keen on killing as many of the curd of King Gass, the dynasty of Alfred the Great as he can.
So Edmund's younger brother, he is murdered on Cnut's orders.
This still leaves some of them on the scene.
So we've mentioned the two sons of Ethelred and Emma who have fled to Normandy so they are Edmund's half -brothers, Edward and Alfred, so they are in Normandy and Knut can't get his hands on them.
Edmund Underworld, inside himself, has left two sons.
Knut sends them to Sweden in the expectation that they will be murdered.
Yeah. That's his plan.
So it's a bit like Claudius sending Hamlet to England to be murdered.
His same kind of idea.
The king of Sweden doesn't murder them, but sends them on to Kiev.
And from there, they end up in Hungary.
Right. And the eldest of them, a guy called Edward, grew up to be known as Edward, the exile.
So there are still curd of king, as out there, but there are none now in England.
You know, since we raised the comparison of the Norman Conquest, here's the crucial question.
What happens in England?
So, my sense is that actually Knute, the top jobs, obviously he gives to his own supporters, to Danes.
Yeah. So, he keeps the heartland of Wessex, but Thorkil, the very tall guy who's swapped sides a few times but has now ended up on the winning side.
He gets East Anglia.
And another Dane, a guy called Eric, gets Northumbria.
So they're parsling out the kingdom rather as William will go on to do after 1066.
And these guys aren't Elderman, like the Anglo -Saxons, they're something new, aren't they?
Yeah, which becomes Anglicised to Earls.
Right. So there's the same route.
You can see Elderman an earl.
I mean, it's the same kind of route, but to be an earl is to live in a country that has been conquered by the Danes.
There is one surviving ultimate earl we want to call him and that is Edric Strayona, the grabber.
But again, as with William, who does try to keep some English lords in situ, but they're always rebelling against him.
And so ultimately, he just gets rid of them all.
Edric is too slippery, too treacherous, he starts the scheme again, it's not having that.
And so he has Edrick murdered in London on Christmas day, 1017, and his head is put on a spike on the battlements of London and his body is thrown over the city battlements to serve as food for the dogs.
That's exactly the kind of thing that you look for in a series like this, isn't it?
Yes, exactly. So that's about the jobs.
What about the crucial thing?
Which is about the money.
The attraction of England is that it's so rich. All of these men, these mercenaries who have flocked to Knut's banners, they have done so because they thought they were going to get the money.
What happens to the wealth of England is it basically just parceled out and looted.
Can I quote for Millennium?
Do you gonna quote for yourself?
I'm gonna quote myself.
In Canute, the last in its instincts which had long propelled generations of Northmen across the seas were set to attain their apotheosis for he had his sword at the throat of an entire kingdom.
So think of all that gold that Danes over the course of Ethelred's reign had been been extorting.
There's millions of coins.
Well, as far as ability to do that, had depended upon the apparatus of English governance.
This is what enables him to raise the money.
And now that apparatus of English governance is canoots to command so he can do with it what he wants.
And. In the tax year of 1018, he sets the tax rate at 100%.
And it takes his agents months and months to extort this.
But by the end of the year, essentially the entire income of the kingdom for that year has vanished into Knut's treasure chests.
So Rachel Reeves can only dream of such rich pickings.
Regular listeners will be disappointed if I don't mention Dennis Healy at this point and his 83 % top rate of tax in the early 1970s.
So Dennis Healy exceeded only by Knute.
But so here's the question.
Top jobs? Given to Daines.
The money parceled out and basically the entire income of England for a year taken and put into Danish coffers.
Why is it therefore that nobody remembers the conquest of 1016?
Well, it must have been psychologically pretty devastating, particularly for the English elite, many of whom must have lost not just their money, but their power, their status, their prestige, their self -worth, all of those kinds of things.
I think it's partly because the English are actually very familiar with the Danes and you could talk of a kind of Anglo Danish world reaching back decades maybe centuries.
These people, their language is and now that the Danes have become Christian, their religion, there is scope there for them to merge.
So culturally it's not a shock.
I mean it is a shock but it's not as big a shock as it will be to be conquered by people speaking French. That would be a shock.
But I think also Canute may have conquered England, but he displays something akin to a kind of cultural cringe.
So in 1018, which is the year that he's extorting his hundred percent tax rate, he allows himself to be persuaded by the Archbishop of York, who's a very distinguished scholar, a very holy man into upholding the the laws of the Kurdish Kinger.
So the laws of Edgar and of Ethelred.
Essentially, you know, he promises he will rule as though he belonged to the dynasty of of Nordic and of Alfred the Great.
And the reason that he's happy to do this is because he does not want to rule as a Viking Warlord. He wants to rule England as a Christian King.
He's grown up surrounded by English bishops bishops in Denmark, Harold Bluetooth and Swain Fort Beard had not allowed bishops from Germany to serve there.
Because the Germans are a far more present threat, the Saxon monarchy.
So all the bishops in Denmark basically are English.
And the archbishop of York Wolfstein, he can serve Knut as a kind of Gandalf.
Or as a Merlin. Or a Merlin.
Yeah. He's at his side.
And this sense of intimacy that Knut has with his new Kingdom is evident in his very bed, because although he is a Christian, he remains sufficiently a Northman that he thinks nothing of having two wives, both of them kind of English in his bed.
And the question of what exactly these two women, what exactly their status are, is highly contested.
Okay. So are they both wives?
Is one of them a concubine?
So Pauline Stafford, who's kind of the great expert on the role of Queens in the 11th century England, she says, concubine wife is too stark a distinction to capture this shifting situation.
And the reason for that will be evident when I describe who these two women, these two wives, concubines, Queens, whatever, who they are.
So the first one she's from Northhampton, isn't she?
And she's an elder one's daughter and she has the brilliant name of Elf Gifu.
Which confusingly, is the same name that Emma, Arthur Ed's wife from Normandy had been given when she came to England, which is why we need to not call her that.
Yeah. So, so Elph Gifu had married Knut in the early days of Swain's invasion.
And almost certainly this was a kind of dynastic marriage.
So as we will see, she is probably related to the leading mercy and family.
She's a kind of pledge of their, of their alliance with the Danes and Knut and Elph Gifu seem to have got on tremendously well.
So Elph Gifu gets pregnant very, very quickly gives birth to a boy who is named Sveyn after his adorable grandfather.
And in 1015 Knut sends her back to Denmark with the baby.
Knut returns to Denmark as well, gets her pregnant again and she gives birth to another boy, Harald who in due course in the 12th century will come to be called Harefoot.
So, he's not called Harefoot in this period but we'll call him that because it distinguishes her from the other Haralds.
So, Knut clearly respects al -Gifu very highly, not just as a woman who can give him sons, but also as a political operator.
And when he returns to England to fight Edmund Ironside he leaves al -Gifu to administer part of Denmark for him.
And in 1030, so that's kind of the decade and more on, there's an even more striking example of his faith in her because by this point his elder son Svein is a teenager and Knut thinks I quite like him to be king of Norway, So he sends out gift food Spain Anna and a big warband off to Norway to conquer it and install Spain as king And it's true that it doesn't go brilliantly Alf -gifu does conquer Norway, but she rules very very harshly The Norwegians rebel and in 1035 She and Spain are kicked out and Spain die soon after of wounds sustained in battle I love gift food is back in Denmark.
But she's still very much a kind of potent presence on the scene Yeah, and still has cards to play as as we will see in due course Well, let's so let's just park her to one side says elf get food and her son who is hair foot Harold Heyford. Yep.
Now you said that there were two wives of Knut and this really is a twist Yeah, it's great twist because he has married the widow of his father's former Adversary, Aethelred.
He is married, Emma of Normandy.
He has in 1017. So she must be a fair bit older than him.
Right? She's still very nu -bile.
Okay, that's good to know.
As we will see. And so you could say this is kind of classic Viking behavior, taking to bed the woman of your defeated enemy.
Right. But I'm sure that that's a kind of part of the dynamic.
But essentially, Knut is marrying her because she had been married to Ethel Red and anointed as his queen and so she is a living link to that tradition of West Saxon monarchy, going back centuries and centuries.
Emma's mother had actually been a Dane, so she's half Danish and probably speaks Danish.
But her value to Knut is essentially that she is, even though she's half Danish, half Norman, she is an English queen, she's the embodiment of England.
And by marrying her, he is in a sense marrying England.
And so his marriage to her is blessed by the church. And this is the big point of difference between her and Al've Gifu, Al've Gifu's marriage had not been blessed by the church doesn't need to be.
Now, this isn't an age where it's a given that the church will bless every wedding.
But the fact that Emma's has been enables her to say, I am Cnut's legitimate wife and any children that I give him, they are entitled to the throne of England.
So this speaks to Cnut's political sensitivity and sophistication, doesn't it?
He's not just a Viking warlord. He has, you know, as you put in your notes, he's waded through blood.
He has ruled by the sword and by terror.
He's won his crown and yet once he's done that He is sufficiently skillful to recognize that there are continuities he wants to preserve.
He wants to work with the existing traditions.
He clearly wants to...
Consiliate is the wrong word, but ultimately he knows he will have to work with the English.
England is his prize and he wants it to thrive under his overlordship.
And I guess, you know, he's also Christian, which means he's got a lot in common with people of England.
The figure he reminds me of is Augustus.
He's not a man of similar achievement, but the willingness to be unspeakably brutal where necessary.
And then when it's no longer necessary to park that side, and to kind of promote himself as a figure of peace, very, very formidable.
That's just good politics isn't it Tom?
Right. So this guy who as you said, had waded through blood.
He allows Wolfstan the archbishop of York, to write laws in his name, that proclaim the Christian virtues of humility and self -restraint.
So as Wolfstand writes, and Canute puts his name to this, for the mightier or of higher rank a man is, so the deeper must he atone for wrongdoing both to God and to men.
Canute has disinherited the oldest royal line in Christendom, but he becomes, I'm delighted to say, a regular visitor to the restored and rebuilt nunnery at Wilton and he rides there with Emma and he dis mounts respectfully outside the holy precincts.
And he walks in and he prays among the tombs of the women of the House of Wessex. And he is a Viking, a Northman from the frozen limits of the world.
But in 1027, amazingly, he takes time off from ruling this great North Sea empire that he's forged in Norway, Denmark, England—I mean, it's a lot—but he is able to go on pilgrimage to Rome.
And there in the heart of the ancient city to kneel before the tomb Saint Peter and in the words of his biographer, diligently to speak Saint Peter's special favour before God.
And he hasn't just gone there to pray.
He's gone because that Easter of 1027, a new German Emperor is being crowned in Rome and canute at that coronation has the place of honour at the Emperor's side and it is an amazing achievement for the great grandson of a pagan Warlord, so Gorm the Old, you know, with his great mounds and all that stuff, to be received with the utmost honour and respect in Rome by both the Emperor and the Pope.
Oh, in that sense, there's a slight Charlemagne aspect to this, isn't there?
Somebody from ultimately a barbarian pagan lineage, who now is standing there in Rome, in the city of the Pope and the Caesars, being winning respect and recognition from his peers.
Knut is a tremendously, I know this is a violent age and he's behaved very violently.
But as a politician, as a statesman, he's a very impressive figure.
Well, it's often said that Alfred the Great is the only English king, or at least king of England to be called the Great, but he isn't.
Canute is also being given that Super K, as Charlemagne had Charles the Great.
Yeah, I mean, I think his feats of conquest and then of statecraft are very, very formidable.
And justice England had recovered under Alfred, who had beaten the Danes.
So also it recovers under Canute, who is himself a Dane.
And I guess the obvious reason for that, is that it's firstly Knute is not kind of imposing his hundred percent tax rate, you know, that was that was a one -off, but also the Danes are no longer raiding England, because it's being ruled by the Danes.
And so there is scope for the English economy, and the English countryside, and English infrastructure to recover.
And it also seems that Knute's regime is is secure, because he has Harold Herford, his son by Alf Gifu, but he's also fathered a son on Emma who gets given the wonderful name of half a canute.
And so the fact that canoe is so strong, he rules his great empire, he has two sons.
It makes the prospect of any return to the English throne of the Kurdikingas, the line of Alfred the Great seem utterly implausible.
So you've got the sons of Edmund Ironside, including Edward, the exile.
They are often distant Hungary.
They are basically, you know, they're East European aristocrats.
They don't even speak English.
Right. And then you have Ethelred's two sons by Emma.
So that is Edward and Alfred.
They are in Normandy, it's true, only across the channel.
But they have the stamp of absolute losers and the person who really says, Yeah, they're losers is their own mother.
Well, because is in her interest, she's back in England.
Of course it is. Because the son that she's backing is hothkuneet, the one she's had by Knudt.
Right. I mean, he's the one who's kind of ready and lined up to sit on the England throne.
So it's not surprising that Emma's focus now is all on England and all on Denmark and she doesn't really have any interest in her two sons by Alfred, who are in exile in Normandy, or indeed actually in Normandy itself.
She's been to that she's moved on from it.
Because Normandy itself at this point does not look a terribly formidable proposition because it is become bitterly divided, it's succumbed to the French disease.
Yeah, so in 1026, so that's a year before Canute goes on his pilgrimage to Rome.
Emma's brother, Richard the Second.
Richard the Good, he's ruled for a very long time in Normandy, he dies, and he has two sons, and these two sons fight over the inheritance.
And the elder brother wins, he rules for less than a year, one of these kind of dramatic deaths, maybe he's poisoned again, we don't really know.
And he succeeded by his younger brother who is called Robert.
Robert is pretty able, he restores Normandy to a kind of measure of health.
But then, amazingly and bizarrely, he goes on pilgrimage, not to Rome, but to Jerusalem, which is very, very dangerous.
I mean, it's a long way to go and very, very risky.
And what makes this seem even more, I think, irresponsible.
is that although Duke Robert of Normandy does have an heir, this heir is firstly only seven years old and secondly he's not legitimate.
And the name of this boy, Dominic, ladies, gentlemen, is a William.
And then in July 1035 Robert has got to Jerusalem fine he's returning from Jerusalem he is approaching Constantinople, and he dies.
And William is now the Duke of Normandy.
But his inheritance is a terrible one.
He's menaced by enemies all along the frontiers of Normandy, but even more, he is menaced by the great lords of his own.
Dukedom. And England, by contrast, is an absolute model of stability.
So, ladies and gentlemen, will England remain happy and united and forward -looking under the reins of Knute and his successors?
Will Normandy fall apart?
And what will happen to this seven -year -old boy, William?
What prospects for him?
Well, you can, of course, find out.
Right now, if you remember, the Rest Is History Club – because you can listen to our next episode which is all about the rise of William of Normandy but if you're not the Rest is History Club and you want to you can sign up at therestisthistory .com and you know Bob's your uncle but Tom for those people who don't want to do that we will be back on Monday with a next thrilling chapter of this epic story.
Bye bye. Here's that clip we mentioned earlier on.
And gradually what you see in this period is mounting concern over what became called hyphenate Americans, this idea that foreign immigrant communities had divided allegiances.
loses. And so there are increasing demands for effectively loyalty tests.
And Wilson gives a very famous speech in which he uses a famous phrase.
And that's a phrase that you have spent a long time studying Sarah.
And that is to ask whether these Americans who have loyalties to other nations will when it comes down to it, whether they will put America first. And that's the phrase right, America first, it is a phrase that was first popularized as in this context in 1915, a year before Black Tom, in a speech that Wilson gave, addressing these mounting concerns about hyphenate Americans, about whether they were real Americans or not.
And the way that Wilson put it was, he said, he demanded that immigrant communities stand up and state explicitly, whether, he said, is it America first or is it not?
And at that point, America first became an incredibly popular phrase.
It basically dominates American political discourse for the next decade.
Then it kind of subsided and then it has a resurgence around World War II when it was used to talk about whether America should enter the Second World War.
And then it went into advance for a long time, until it made a dramatic reappearance in the 21st century, which listeners will be familiar with.
If you want to hear the full episode, listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.
