Æthelred the Unready, by Richard Abels Hugo Gye

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Æthelred the Unlucky

HUGO GYE Æthelred the Unready By Richard Abels Penguin £6.99

A temperamental leader, written off by many when he came to power in controversial circumstances. A man with complex family relations and a constantly changing cast of allies. A high-energy politician hamstrung by a true national crisis.

Sound familiar? Boris Johnson could profitably leave his classical comfort zone and pick up Richard Abels’s new minibiography of Æthelred the Unready if he needs a cautionary tale of just how badly it could all go wrong.

The book – part of the Penguin Monarchs series – is subtitled The Failed King and there can be little doubt that Æthelred, who was forced to hand England over to the Danes in 1013, was ultimately a failure. COVID is no picnic, but at least it is unlikely to ravage the country for 25 years, as the Vikings did.

Like our current Prime Minister, who is always ideologically flexible, Æthelred was seen as something of a ‘blank slate’ when he became king in 978 – primarily, in his case, because he was 12 at the time.

This meant that royal advisers, led by the Queen Mother Ælfthryth, were able to set the political weather; at least until the king came of age and overhauled the court, banishing his mum in the process, a gambit he would later reverse.

The U-turns and regime changes of Æthelred’s reign leave the reader thinking that Johnson’s ‘trolley’ nickname could be applied to him.

Nonetheless, Richard Abels is clearly sympathetic to his subject, whom he describes as ‘an energetic ruler committed to the defence of his kingdom’. He points out that Æthelred was a prolific legislator and that England around the turn of the millennium experienced a cultural flourishing, with clergymen such as Wulfstan and Ælfric producing remarkable theological texts; three of the four surviving manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon poetry date to this time.

Æthelred was let down by his predecessors, who failed to maintain the military machine created by his greatgreat-grandfather King Alfred.

He was also unlucky, in that, this time around, the Danes were not just roving warriors out for plunder, rape and pillage: Swein Forkbeard (father of Cnut) was serious about expanding his empire and settling down for the long term.

To the average reader, 1,000 years on, Anglo-Saxon England can sometimes seem nothing more than a string of brutal wars, occasionally brightened up by artistic treasures such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Abels explains that, in fact, by Æthelred’s time England had quietly become the most sophisticated state in western Europe, with the king holding unmatched control over the economy, the law and the church.

Given his long-standing position as a professor at the United States Naval Academy (the mind boggles at the thought of Kentuckian cadets receiving lectures on figures such as Bishop Æthelwold and Olaf Tryggvason), Abels is unsurprisingly strong in his handling of the military evidence.

He also deftly draws on archaeological surveys and builds on the seminal work of Cambridge historian Simon Keynes in using land-grant charters to build a narrative of Æthelred’s rise and fall.

At just over 100 pages, this biography is inevitably incomplete, but it is a compelling introduction to the study of this complex king which will leave the reader – whether living in 10 Downing Street or not – questioning their preconceptions. If there is one figure they may wish to hear more about, it is

Unready cash: Æthelred the Unready hands money to the Danes to appease them – the subject of the poem Dane-geld by Rudyard Kipling