Aethelred: why was the Anglo-Saxon king called ‘the Unready’?

But the real story of how Aethelred came to be known as ‘the Unready’ is more complex, and more recent. Centuries after his death, his legacy would be rewritten as he became victim to a piece of medieval wordplay.

How did Aethelred become known as ‘the Unready’?

“Aethelred is probably the most infamous Anglo-Saxon monarch, who's gone down as almost a by-name for uselessness and incompetence,” says medieval historian Levi Roach, who was speaking about Aethelred on HistoryExtra’s Life of the Week podcast series. “But the ‘Unready’ moniker is not even near contemporary, and as far as we’re aware was never used during his lifetime.”

• On the podcast | Levi Roach considers the life of the ill-favoured Anglo-Saxon king Aethelred

Instead, it derives from a 12th-century pun on his name. ‘Aethelred’ would have been pronounced Av-el-raid, literally meaning ‘noble council’ or ‘good council’. By tweaking it with an Old and Middle English term 'unræd', which means the opposite – ‘ill-counselled’ or ‘ill council’ – the nickname became a way for people to mock Aethelred.

As Roach puts it, one reading of the pun could be, “Good counsel, my arse!”

At the time, people were looking for an explanation for the upheavals suffered by the English. “Immediately after the Norman Conquest, Norman and English writers alike felt that they needed to explain why it had happened to the English,” says Roach. “They settled on a solution that it had been punishment for their sins, and quickly singled out Aethelred’s reign as where the rot had started.”

Then as the centuries passed, the unræd part of the moniker was increasingly misunderstood and translated into ‘unready’. This stuck simply because it fitted his established reputation as a king who was never ready for the Vikings.

How did Aethelred come to power?

Born between 966 and 968 AD, Aethelred would have been aged 12, at most, when he became king in AD 978. This is important in understanding his reign, according to Roach, along with the context of the competition that he faced to get to the throne.

“One of the things that complicated matters from the start was that Aethelred’s father, Edgar, had three consorts,” says Roach. “Indeed, he had married his third when still in his early 20s. So, he’d had a busy youth by any measure!”

When it came to his offspring, Edgar had a son with his first wife, a daughter with his second and two sons with his third, including Aethelred. With half-siblings in the picture, this led to different factions at court, and Edgar’s death in AD 975 AD brought about a succession dispute.

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While Aethelred had some support – his mother, Aelfthryth, was the latest queen – many backed Edgar’s eldest son, Edward. He eventually won out, but the dispute cast a pall over his reign. Just three years later, he was killed in Corfe Castle, Dorset, by supporters of Aethelred.

“There isn’t any real suggestion that Aethelred was the driving force behind the murder, but what we do get is a string of sources implicating his mother – the classic ‘evil stepmother’ trope,” says Roach. “All those sources were produced after the Norman Conquest, though, beyond living memory. So there’s a danger of going a bit too Game of Thrones with this, and portraying Aelfthryth as a scheming mastermind.”

Since no guilty party could be identified for the assassination, however, suspicion swirled around the new monarch.

What were the key events of Aethelred’s reign?

Given his age, Aethelred’s early years on the throne were a de facto regency in which his mother Aelfthryth and her supporters – including Aethelwold, Bishop of Winchester – played prominent, influential roles.

By the close of AD 984, several key figures had died, Aethelwold among them, which led to a shift in the power dynamic.

“Aelfthryth disappeared from the witness list of Aethelred’s charters overnight,” says Roach. “She’d been so present up to that point, and we know that she was likely still alive until approximately AD 1000. This suggests a change in climate at court: she was either expelled or didn’t like what she was seeing and removed herself.”

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With Aethelred now ruling alone, he faced a major challenge in the shape of Danish warriors landing on English shores. Viking attacks had stopped during his father’s reign, so the threat was, in terms of recent memory, unprecedented, according to Roach. “When the Vikings did start reappearing in force, it was a shock to the system.”

Beginning with small-scale raids, the Danish threat became more serious until the English suffered a decisive defeat at the battle of Maldon in AD 991. This, Roach argues, sparked a crisis at the heart of Aethelred’s regime and plenty of soul-searching on the part of the king himself.

“In a charter of AD 993 AD, Aethelred talks about the present ills of the kingdom – clearly referring to the Viking attacks – and how he believed he had brought them on by virtue of his youthful indiscretions. He specifically blamed himself for taking lands from the church, including selling Abingdon Abbey after Aethelwold's death,” Roach points out.

“This was quite a natural way to interpret things within the medieval mindset in which God directly directed political events. This was God’s vengeance.” Incidentally, this charter also saw the reappearance of Aethelred’s mother on the witness list, where she remained for the rest of his reign.

How did Aethelred fight back against the Vikings?

For Aethelred, fighting the Vikings was as much about religious purity as it was military might.

“As he saw it, the way to solve the problem was to undo the things that had caused it,” explains Roach. “The rest of his reign was centred around the notion that the Vikings were never just a secular, military threat to be dealt with, but a sign of a deeper rot in England.

“The politics of the 990s AD were characterised by Aethelred repeatedly saying sorry to the religious institutions he’d taken land from, beseeching divine favour, and founding new monasteries. He seems to have felt that if only he could emulate what his dad had done so successfully, he would find the lasting path to victory,” Roach continues.

While there was always the possibility of meeting the Viking invaders with renewed military force, Aethelred adopted a different approach: the payment of tribute. By paying off the Danes, he hoped they would be persuaded to end their attacks.

“Initially, this seems to have been a stopgap in order to get divine power on his side and continue reforms,” claims Roach. “But it became Aethelred’s go-to policy. There’s no doubt that, in the long term, it didn’t act as a very effective deterrent.” Raids continued throughout the decade and new communities of Danes began to settle in England.

Another approach that Aethelred hoped would bring peace was the recruitment of Viking warriors into his own armies. Although Roach argues this was a success to some extent, these mercenaries lacked loyalty and were not above going rogue.

The truth was that neither of these measures were enough. “Paying them off had to be combined with defensive tactics – and willingness to fight,” Roach says. “It’s the latter that Aethelred lacked. I suspect that was down to his psychology: after the early defeat at Maldon, I’m not sure he had the confidence to believe he could win outright in battle. When you don’t believe it, it can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

What was the St Brice’s Day Massacre?

When tribute payments had failed to halt Viking attacks, and seemingly hearing that mercenaries were involved in a plot to assassinate or overthrow him, Aethelred ordered the execution of all Danish men in his kingdom. Launched on 13 November 1002, the bloodletting became known as the St Brice’s Day Massacre.

“This is one of the most infamous events of Aethelred's reign, partly because of the way it was recorded,” says Roach. “A couple of sources, including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, describe Aethelred issuing a decree that all the Danes in England were to be slain. This sounds pretty nasty, and it almost certainly was.”

• On the podcast | Benjamin Savill discusses the St Brice’s Day Massacre of 1002

However, Roach stresses that this was not the full context of the order. Aethelred is frequently portrayed as having huge swathes of the populations of the East Midlands, East Anglia and the North killed; any descendants of the Vikings who settled during the time of Alfred the Great were targeted.

“That is manifestly what he was not doing”, says Roach. “You could not have gone to those parts of England and identified Viking from non-Viking, because they had intermarried and were speaking dialects that had combined. It would not just have been hugely detrimental politically, but it would have been impossible to achieve.”

Instead, Aethelred had different aims. “What he seems to have been trying to do is to execute recently arrived groups, particularly mercenaries who recently entered his employ,” Roach explains. “He’d brought in a group in AD 994 AD: some had turned against him in AD 997, while another group did so four years later.

“What he seems to have happened in 1002 was that Aethelred took the protective measure of executing them rather than waiting for them to become turncoats.”

Why was the St Brice’s Day Massacre so significant in Aethelred’s reign?

The St Brice’s Day Massacre reflected a shift in Aethelred’s mindset. “Charter recordings talk about the Danes as ‘sprouting up in the kingdom like cockle [weeds] amongst the wheat’,” Roach points out. “Taken from a biblical parable, in the 11th and 12th centuries this was taken as a sign that kingdoms should be purified of polluting elements – getting rid of the ‘cockle’.”

Aethelred – no longer thinking that his youthful misdemeanours were to blame for England’s present misfortune – had shifted his view to believe that there were negative elements in his kingdom which could be blamed instead.

“The St Brice’s Day Massacre was the first sign that things were spinning out of control,” claims Roach. “Strikingly, it was followed a few years later, in 1005–6, by an event that [historian and author] Simon Keynes evocatively called the ‘palace revolution’.

“This was the ousting of an entire faction, with multiple magnates exiled or blinded. The justification appears to have been, ‘Well, we tried getting rid of the group we thought were to blame, and that didn’t fix it – so now these are the polluting elements.’ There seems to have been ever-more drastic attempts to ‘purify’ England,” Roach adds.

A consequence of these purges, and the infighting they provoked, was that it became harder for Aethelred to defend his kingdom. This was to prove catastrophic.

In 1009, a large Viking force under Thorkell the Tall landed in England. It took Aethelred paying a massive sum in tribute and instituting an annual taxation to pay for these warriors as a mercenary army before they dispersed three years later. “At that point, England was essentially spent,” says Roach.

Why was Aethelred’s reign split into two periods?

In 1013, the king of Denmark, Sweyn Forkbeard, launched an invasion of his own. He may have had multiple motivations: he reportedly wanted revenge after he lost his sister in the St Brice’s Day Massacre; he did not want Thorkell to take England for himself; and he could see that the land was ripe for the taking.

His forces were met with little resistance and Sweyn looked to have conquered England. Aethelred, meanwhile, fled with his second wife, Emma of Normandy, where her family connections meant he had safe harbour.

Aethelred’s reign looked to be over, having been given up with a whimper. But then the landscape changed. Sweyn died in 1014 before he could be crowned the first Danish monarch of England, and his son Cnut was a young man in his twenties. It was deemed too big a risk to install him on the throne.

The decision was taken by England’s leading magnates, therefore, to request that Aethelred return and take the throne once more. This was done with the condition that he rule more justly than he had previously and satisfied all grievances.

What was the second period of Aethelred’s reign like?

Aethelred’s final years as king were marked by a deeply divided court, intra-family tensions, and the looming threat posed by Cnut. He had fled back to Denmark after Aethelred’s return, but launched an invasion of his own in 1015. His warriors were soon ravaging England and looking set to take London.

There was no clear defensive strategy to deal with Cnut’s army. Aethelred’s son, Edmund Ironside, had rebelled and taken control of lands in the north. It was his men that Cnut faced, not Aethelred’s. “There seems to be complete turmoil, because initially Aethelred’s forces weren’t willing to join and there was uncertainty as to who the real enemy was,” says Roach.

And that wasn't the only problem facing Aethelred. Having grown increasingly ill in the preceding months, he died in London on 23 April 1016.

How did Aethelred die?

The nature of the illness he was suffering from in the final years of his life is unknown.

Following his father’s death, it fell to Edmund to take on Cnut, but he suffered a defeat at the battle of Assandun later that year. Then when he died himself shortly afterwards, Cnut became king of the whole of England.

Who were Aethelred’s wives and heirs?

In around AD 985, Aethelred had married Aelfgifu of York, the daughter of the earl of Northumbria. The couple had 10 known children, including Edmund Ironside.

Following Aelfgifu’s death around the turn of the century, Aethelred married the noblewoman Emma of Normandy in 1002. Their children included Edward the Confessor, future king of England.

Who succeeded Aethelred?

Not including the brief period where he was ousted by Sweyn Forkbeard in 1013, Aethelred was succeeded by his son, Edmund Ironside. This would be a similarly brief reign, however, as the new king died in 1016 and was replaced by Cnut.

Where was Aethelred buried?

Aethelred was buried in Old St Paul's Cathedral. There he remained until the tomb and monument were destroyed, along with the cathedral, in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

"It seems almost only right and poetic, in a way, that he died in London and was the first English monarch to be buried at St Paul’s,” concludes Roach.

“It’s a nice reflection of the growing importance of London: traditionally, the dynastic centre of Aethelred’s West Saxon dynasty had been at Winchester, but London had been his bastion against the Vikings in later years. The city was never taken by siege, and it was where he found his final rest.”