The Danish conquest of England in the 9th-11th centuries
I have signed up for a number of short courses this autumn and next spring in an effort to keep my brain active and dementia at bay. I always learn new things and enjoy sharing some of my learnings on the web.
So this weekend I was back at the City Lit in Central London to attend a one-day course on the Danish invasion of England given by a very knowledgeable lecturer called Vanessa King. I found it quite heavy with lots of complicated names and confusing relationships, but I took away some learnings, including the following:
- It really was a Danish invasion of England between 875-1042. The Danes hardly touched Scotland, Wales or Cornwall. To this day, those parts of the UK are still different and there are nationalist movements in each of them
- The Danish conquest of England means that for a time we were part of a a mini empire embracing all England, Denmark and Norway and a bit of Sweden and most of the ‘English’ originate from the Danish peninsular.
- The one thing most British people know about the Danish/English King Cnut, who reigned from 1017-1035, is that he was so egotistical that he thought he could command the waves. But the true message of this (possibly apocryphal) anecdote is the exact opposite: Cnut was modestly demonstrating the limits of his earthy power compared to that of divine power.
- Cnut’s second wife was Emma of Normandy who had been previously marred to King AEthelred II (better known as the Ethelred the Unready) and she seems to have been a rermararkable woman. Two of her sons, one by each husband, and two stepsons, also by each husband, became kings of England, as did her great-nephew, William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy who used his kinship with Emma as the basis of his claim to the English throne in 1066.