Aethelred the Unready (c.968—1016) has not, as Levi Roach acknowledges, enjoyed a good press. In recent times there may have been some attempt in academic circles to take a more measured view of his calamitous reign, but the fact remains that if most us would have trouble saying quite what he did or did not do, or even what ‘unraed’ actually means, we all know how it ended. ‘And that is called paying the Dane-geld;’ wrote Kipling,
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
On the face of it the revisionists have an uphill battle, too, because when Aethelred came to the throne as a child the kingdom was looking in pretty good shape. Less than a century before his birth his great-great-grandfather Alfred had defeated the Danes and unified the Saxon kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, and over the succeeding reigns, his son and grandson had extended their power across the east and north so that for the first time a Saxon king could legitimately style himself rex anglorum and we can reasonably begin to speak of a coherent ‘English nation’.
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