Original subtitles

This is a story of conquest, betrayal and courage.

The story of a son of a Viking sovereign

forged in the shadow of battle.

A man destined for nothing, yet fated to build an empire.

He was larger than life in his lifetime,

and as somebody who had wide-ranging achievements that surprised

even many of his contemporaries.

The story of a man who became ruler of three kingdoms.

A Viking who became an emperor.

He's one of the great medieval success stories.

What he does, we have no word for. It's completely new.

This is the legend of Knut,

Emperor of the North Sea.

As his men raise their cups in celebration...

...Knut has every reason to rejoice.

In just a few weeks, he has subdued Wessex,

the political and economic heart of the kingdom.

He has won over Eadric Streona,

once the chief adviser of King Aethelred.

And in the north, he has laid a trap for Earl Uhtred

before entrusting his lands to his loyal ally,

the Norwegian Erik of Lade.

Now a large part of the kingdom lies under his control.

And yet the young Dane does not savour his victory.

One man, still resists him.

A man who has rallied the English army to his cause...

Edmund Ironside, son of King Aethelred.

Edmund's sudden success as a military leader,

throws a real spanner in the works for Knut.

Nobody knew quite what to expect of him,

but his nickname Ironside is very much contemporary,

and he proves himself very quickly

to be a highly capable military commander

and willing to take the kind of risks his father was very wary of.

And so this makes what looks like a fait accompli, perhaps,

an almost inevitable conquest by Knut,

suddenly come in to question.

Knut must put an end to this swiftly

before Edmund grows too powerful.

So he gives the order:

Tomorrow, they break camp.

Their destination, London.

King Aethelred is now little more than a shadow of his former self.

At his side stand his son Edmund, hastily returned from campaign,

and his second wife, Emma of Normandy,

accompanied by her two younger sons, Edward and Alfred.

Queen Emma stands beside the dying King Aethelred.

She is determined to see her own faction prevail

and to promote the cause of Edward.

But as he is only ten years old, the chances of success are slim.

I think we can only imagine the difficulties of the situation

for Emma at this time.

Her position and her prestige is reliant on being

the widow of King Aethelred,

but her sons by King Aethelred, or the younger son of the king,

and obviously Edward Ironside's seniority within the family

is putting him at a greatly advantageous situation.

After 37 years of an inglorious reign,

King Aethelred is no more.

His body is carried to the Old St Paul's Cathedral,

where he is granted all due honours.

And yet, even in his final moments,

he had fled from battle, leaving his people alone to face their fate.

London has been very loyal to Aethelred.

Aethelred is buried there as the first English monarch to be buried

in London at Old St Paul's.

But there's no doubt then, that once Aethelred is gone,

that Edmund is their king.

They've probably had enough of inaction that enough of them

are willing to roll the dice for one last time

in support of a ruler who looks like they're ready to save the kingdom.

Before the assembled nobles,

Edmund seizes the crown and claims the throne.

The nobility immediately bows,

recognising in this 25-year-old warrior

the qualities needed to succeed King Aethelred.

Emma understands then that her future, and that of her children,

has grown darker.

She's now in a very difficult scenario,

because her sons have definitively lost out

in terms of the succession to Edmund and her worst fears,

in a sense, risk being materialised.

Edmund's on the throne. He's now married.

He doubtless will soon be having children who he'll want to line up

for the succession.

But for Edmund,

the recognition of the London nobility is only the first step.

To be crowned, he must first reconquer the entire kingdom.

In the south of England, Knut has dropped anchor.

A few days earlier, his informants had brought him news:

Aethelred is dead,

and his son has claimed the throne.

Without hesitation, Knut summons all the abbots, earls and nobles

of the regions under his control -

the very same men who, two years earlier, had denied him the crown.

If you're a leading magnate,

you also don't want to back the wrong horse.

The results of that can be catastrophic.

So you are also having to make a calculation

as to who do I think is going to win.

And if I think Knut's chances are notably better,

even if I might prefer Edmund, I do better to support Knut.

And so it's very likely that some of the support is highly pragmatic

and it's people who simply want to survive.

Now Knut, in his turn,

is recognised as the legitimate king of the realm.

England, more divided than ever, has two monarchs.

The young Dane understands what it means.

From this moment on, between Edmund and him,

it will be a fight to the death.

The fleet glides slowly over the grey waters of the Thames.

In the distance, Knut sees the thick walls of London take shape.

He has come to confront his rival on his own ground.

But taking the city will be no easy task.

For in a century of Viking raids, London has never been taken.

At the time, London was defended by Roman walls

that had been regularly maintained,

and the problem was that the means available to attack fortified cities

were extremely limited.

London was as hard a nut to crack.

It is not a place that Knut is able to very easily take,

even with a substantial military force.

From the ramparts,

Edmund watches the hundreds of ships gathering at the city's gates.

Yet the young king remains confident.

Across the river stands an obstacle long considered impassable:

London Bridge.

A massive fortified structure linking the city to the stronghold

of Southwark on the opposite bank.

And this means that Danes going up the Thames past London

are having things thrown or poured on them as they go past.

I mean, one imagines rocks, one imagines boiling oil,

whatever there is that could possibly upset the Danes

going past underneath to damage their ships or kill the men.

To surround the city, Knut has no choice.

He must take the bridge at any cost.

But forcing a passage would mean devastating losses.

So the young Dane comes up with a stroke of genius.

If his ships cannot pass under the bridge,

they will go round it.

So here is the city, here is the river,

and here is the bridge.

And they dig on their side, the southern side.

They dig a trench down here around the bridgehead where

the bridge meets the land.

And they dig another trench here, and they dig another trench here.

And as far as an arrow can fly.

And that's where they then dig the trenches outside.

Because the idea is then what can the English do

apart from watch this trench go around them and rejoin the Thames?

And these trenches don't have to be very deep because

they've got flat bottom boats,

and they've got hundreds of men sitting around.

Day and night, the Danes dig relentlessly.

From Southwark, English sentries can only look on

as the enemy advances inexorably.

And then, in the course of what, a couple of days,

200 boats go upstream.

And the English can't stop them at all.

All they can do is watch from the other bank and be cross.

It's absolutely pure Knut.

There is minimum effort, maximum damage to the other guy.

Knut sets up his camp on a strip of sand,

safely beyond the reach of English archers.

And they sit staring at the city, making lots of noise,

sharpening weapons, feasting.

But they're sitting there just reminding the English inhabitants

who are locked inside their walled city

that this is the army just outside.

The idea is terror.

Terror for this heartland of Aethelred and Edmund's support,

rather than sort of shimmying up ladders and waving swords.

Inside the besieged city,

bread now sells for its weight in gold,

while the clergy call for prayer.

But no one is under any illusions.

In this duel between Edmund and Knut, time is working against them.

If Knut has indeed managed to cut off supplies to the south of London,

and if he holds part of the walls to the north and west that still leaves

only very limited opportunities to enter or leave the city,

inevitably, sending messengers becomes more difficult,

and food shortages are likely to arise sooner or later.

At a place like London would probably not have more than enough

food stores available to last more than a few weeks really, at most.

Because London has a population by this period of more than 10,000.

Plus, there are the defenders of London, potentially another army,

actually a real army itself, in addition to the local population.

So it certainly would have threatened considerable hardship.

Edmund senses the trap closing in around him.

If he stays, he risks losing the initiative.

So, under cover of night, accompanied by his most loyal men,

he flees the city.

The young king knows he still has one card left to play:

his reputation as a war leader.

For Knut, Edmond's military resistance ends up

being a real thorn in the side,

because Edmonds is willing to offer battle.

What he's showing is that actually Knut is not undefeatable,

and that actually there's potentially a military solution

to these problems.

With Edmund, a new wave of hope spreads across England.

From all corners of Wessex, thousands of men take up arms

and rally under his banner.

After decades of humiliation and defeat,

England finally begins to rise again.

In the Danish camp, bad news keeps piling up.

For weeks, Knut has been besieging London in vain,

while boredom spreads like poison among his army.

There is a real risk with sieges that your army becomes stationary,

it loses momentum. It loses focus.

Things like epidemic can break out much more easily

when you're stationary as a military force.

So there's all sorts of reasons

why it's actually potentially quite risky to embark on a lengthy siege

when you have alternative means of achieving what you wished to get.

Even worse,

part of Wessex has fallen back into Edmund's hands.

If he does not want to see his alliances unravel one by one,

Knut has no choice.

He must lift the siege and face Edmund once and for all.

Edmund has won his gamble.

He has gathered the loyal forces of the south beneath his banner.

He believes this army can carry him back to victory,

especially now that his scouts report Knut's army is getting close.

So he deploys his men along the hillside,

an ideal position to repel an attack.

Penselwood is a symbolically, crucially important, political place

within the West Saxon kingdom.

This was the place where Alfred the Great had gathered his armies

against the Danes during his victory in 878,

and perhaps Edward Ironside

had hoped to draw on a little bit of that magic

when he gathered his forces to fight against Knut in 1016.

At the head of an army numbered in the thousands,

Knut advances toward the English lines.

For the first time, the two kings face each other on the battlefield.

Each aware that the fate of the kingdom may be decided here.

For Edmund and Knut, England represents everything.

Neither have any other prospects.

Knut's only kingdom and kingship

is going to be in England at that moment.

No other prospects immediately in Denmark, as he has discovered.

For Edmund, his entire dynastic line hinges upon this.

He's seen his father fail to prevent external conquest.

He's determined to prevent that repeating itself.

Edmund rallies his men.

No grand speeches, only a call to defend their homes,

their families and their land.

The majority of those fighting are not professional soldiers.

They'll be members of the lower aristocracy, probably the majority,

and maybe some wealthy peasants.

These are individuals who are not highly trained.

The English defensive line braces itself,

ready to absorb the shock of the assault.

Though Edmund has the advantage of ground,

Knut knows his men are far more battle-hardened.

So he gives the order to attack.

With a roar, the two armies crash together.

It's a straightforward land army style of fighting

without apparently cavalry support.

It's far more likely to be two giant blobs hitting each other at speed.

The Vikings slam into the English shield wall with full force.

Shield against shield, axe against sword.

Combat between Saxons and Vikings at this time

is very much about the press of the shield wall.

The idea of large infantry formations with overlapping shields,

with, one man protecting his neighbour.

Knut watches the battle.

Inspired by Edmund's leadership, the English fight with a ferocity

he has never seen before.

What was meant to be an easy victory turns into a disaster.

The Viking line breaks and flees,

leaving their dead behind.

Edmund, despite all predictions, wins.

This isn't meant to happen.

The Danish invading forces are vast.

I think his father died.

He was elevated by that act.

Finally, he can start ordering people around in a way he couldn't

when his father was alive.

And he's maybe just very good at PR.

Edmund crosses the battlefield as a hero.

For the first time in a long while, England dares to hope again.

So a comparative victory at Penselwood in 1016

shows that he is not seen as the loser.

And military victory at this time is about being seen as successful.

As long as you'll see as successful, people are willing to support you,

and evidently Edmund has enough people supporting him at this time.

Knut fully grasps the scale of the disaster.

Many of his men have fallen,

while countless others tend to their wounds.

He knows that another defeat could be fatal.

There must be people around him, Englishmen around Knut,

who are suddenly thinking,

"Oh, whoops, have I gone to the wrong side?

What's happening?"

This is a situation in which people are sort of making their mind up

almost by the day.

And Knut stands a very serious risk of his forces

draining away from him.

But Knut refuses to admit defeat.

Instead, he changes strategy.

From now on, he will wage a war of attrition -

a slow and calculated war of pressure and raids.

He is a true strategist.

He takes no unnecessary risks.

He is, in many ways, representative of what a Viking truly was.

Not the operatic caricature, but a man who knows he is outnumbered,

far from home, and must be extremely cautious before attacking.

Otherwise, he risks losing both his life

and everything he's come to achieve.

Edmund has gathered the finest

of the southern English nobility around him.

His recent victory has restored confidence

and brought the wavering lords back into line.

Milord.

Chief among them is Eadric Streona,

who, after betraying Edmund for Knut, has once again switched sides.

Why Edmund would have trusted him is a very good question.

I suspect, frankly, that he didn't. But Edmund needed support.

This is one of those moments

where people are lining up behind different backers.

Eadric is one of the most powerful men in the kingdom.

Edmund cannot say no to him.

He doesn't like him, almost certainly because he's been part

of different factions in the past.

But Edmund needs every man he can get if he's going to defeat Knut,

who also has Thorkel on his side.

But I suspect in the long term, Edmund's plan is to defeat Knut

with Eadric and then get rid of Eadric.

But the Danes remain elusive.

Their ships move along the coasts of Essex and Kent,

striking wherever they can.

Burning villages.

Slaughtering the inhabitants and seizing everything of value.

Knut is probably nervous at this point.

I mean, he is dancing around a bit. He is raiding.

That will certainly help pay and feed his troops.

So you might suspect that Knut is biding his time and wondering

what's going to happen next.

A deadly game of cat and mouse,

in which Knut always seems one step ahead.

This sort of string of battles is where they focus their attention.

This is the exciting car chase of the film, as it were,

where they're moving around.

And it is, it is nail biting stuff.

A game where every move counts.

A few days before the battle of Sherston,

Knut quietly succeeds in winning over

part of the lesser English nobility

who had, until then, remained loyal to Edmund.

So, at Sherston, some deal has been made.

Some almighty great payment or promise has been made.

It's psychologically devastating

because he's been turned against by these high ranking Englishmen.

And what's more shocking than that is almost all of them

that we can trace of these collaborators, these traitors,

is related to the English royal family.

This is where the power drains away from him.

This is where he gets that sinking sensation

and the sand just runs through his fingers.

But at last, fortune turns in favour of the English king.

His scouts locate Knut's forces inland,

just a few miles from the coast near Ashington.

For Edmund, this is the moment to strike.

As long as the Viking army is cut off from its ships,

it remains vulnerable.

But above all, a few weeks earlier, during the battle of Sherston,

Edmund has seen a number of his soldiers turn against him.

Medieval battles are high-risk affairs.

It's not, you know, for no reason that many commanders

actually avoid open battles.

But if you've got your back to the wall, as Edmund does,

they're often also high risk, high gain.

If he wins outright a major victory against Knut,

that's his best bet for expelling Knut completely from the kingdom.

Knut listens to his commanders.

Among them is the fearsome Thorkel the Tall,

the veteran warrior who has pledged himself

to Knut's cause against Edmund.

But can Knut really trust him?

For behind this display of loyalty,

no one has forgotten his former alliance with Aethelred.

And being seen to be a part of the conquest in England,

engaging in battle against Edmund is very important to him,

because it means that he is showing his loyalty to his new master,

and he's also then lining himself up

for a share of the spoils of victory.

I don't think he's doing it meekly.

He's showing his worth and he's saying, you need me.

Look at me. Look how glorious. What a great war leader I am.

He's out there and he's proud of his role, as one would expect,

of somebody who's possibly pushing 50

and has been a warlord all his life.

And Knut is a boy by comparison.

Knut senses that what is about to unfold

is no ordinary battle.

He knows his future will be decided here, in mud and blood.

His thoughts drift back over the past two years:

his first steps on this land, in the shadow of his father.

Two broken oaths, two humiliations he has never forgotten.

But those trials have forged him.

He is no longer merely the son of the great Sven.

He is Knut the Conqueror.

And for the first time, he knows it:

England will be his.

Here we are at the final battle.

We know that both leaders are present.

There is no doubt about that,

and both appear to be organising their battle formations.

The only certainty our sources provide

is the violence of the fighting.

It is a battle that lasts a considerable time,

with both sides fighting with great determination and courage.

For the King! For the kingdom!

In a surge of bravery,

Edmund charges into the heart of the melee,

cutting through enemy ranks like fire through dry grass.

Across the front line, Knut rallies his men,

urging them to fight to the very last drop of blood.

If the Vikings have an edge at this point,

it could be because these are all crews of warriors,

row together and sail together,

and act as a body with a kind of .

In the heart of the melee, Edmund turns toward his flank.

On the ridge above, Eadric stands motionless,

staring back at him.

In that instant, Edmund understands.

In a final act of betrayal, Eadric withdraws

and abandons the king to his fate.

Edmund is stunned.

He realises that victory is slipping from his grasp.

Some suggest that Eadric was already on Knut's side,

but pretended to support Edmund,

and that when the battle begins to turn in favour of the Anglo-Saxons,

he abandons the field.

Others sources, including Encomium Emma Reginae,

suggest a withdrawal even before the battle begins,

based on a straightforward argument: the Danes are too strong.

If we fight, we'll lose and die for nothing.

Better to withdraw and negotiate.

Rather than risk his life,

Edmund chooses to flee the battlefield,

leaving his great army behind, defeated.

The flower of the English nobility was killed.

You get the feeling this is the battle to end them all.

And this is where Edmund's forces are in retreat.

And they describe it as a massacre.

This is what the Danes are - what we would say -

mopping up the English as they flee.

So there's not only this clash in the sand,

and there's probably also a chasing of the English forces

and killing them on the hoof as they're leaving.

Knut has won the battle, but at what cost?

Facing an enemy who stubbornly refuses to bend the knee,

perhaps it is time to change strategy.

Knut gazes out over the waters of the Severn,

a natural frontier between the lands under his control

and those that still remain loyal to Edmund.

It is here that Eadric Streona, more elusive than ever,

has arranged a meeting.

Edmund has arrived.

On the bank, Edmund is already waiting.

The negotiations take place at Eadric's initiative.

He appears to have pushed both sides toward discussion.

Edmund wanted to continue fighting.

Knut could've done so as well,

but did not necessarily stand to gain from it.

There seems to be more of a sense

that they fought one another to a stand still.

Neither can one overpower the other,

and they've realised it at this point.

The meeting takes place

on a small island lost in the middle of the river.

On both sides, armies stand ready,

poised to surge forward at the slightest signal.

Obviously, an island is the best place

to have any form of negotiation like this,

because both kings are coming with an army.

Even if they strip that army down, they're going to come with enough

forces to really have a very ugly incident, as it were.

For the first time,

Knut and Edmund face one another within sword's reach.

Time itself seems suspended between them.

Knut knows that everything could still tip either way.

As a gesture of good faith, he salutes his adversary.

One of the things about scouting first is respect for the enemy.

If you respect your enemy, and even if you slightly fear your enemy

then the fact you've defeated him glorifies you as well as him.

So one imagines that is also part of Knut's makeup, as it were.

When he meets Edmund, he meets him as a fellow warrior

who he's got an enormous amount of respect for.

Negotiations begin.

Each man seeks compromise, without losing face.

Gradually, mistrust fades

and a strange complicity settles between the two rivals.

Both saw, I think, almost a reflection of themselves:

someone young, ambitious, militarily capable,

and that may well have fed into, in the end,

a willingness to strike an agreement.

The two men divide the kingdom.

Edmund is offered the North.

Knut takes the South, a logical division in light of his ancestry.

The two men thus become co-kings of the England,

effectively bringing the war to an end.

Most of our sources agree that both armies

are extremely satisfied with the outcome,

having been severely tested by a year and a half of campaigning.

For Knut, this victory is not the one he had hoped for.

He sought to conquer an entire kingdom.

Instead, he must settle for half of it.

But fate has one final, cruel twist in store.

A few weeks after signing a peace treaty with Knut,

Edmund - young king and tireless warrior -

dies suddenly at the age of 26.

Whether from a sudden illness or the result of a plot remains uncertain.

There is, however, a villain who perfectly fits the archetype:

the ultimate traitor, Eadric.

He is said to have bribed or persuaded men to kill King Edmund

while he was in the privy -

allegedly striking from below, either with a hook or a dagger.

These are conceivable, if horrible, horrible ways to die,

and also horrible ways to have to kill somebody if you're an assassin,

climbing up a toilet, it's probably not the best way to go.

Edmund's body is laid to rest at Glastonbury Abbey,

beside his grandfather, King Edgar.

For Knut, Edmund's disappearance is a blessing.

It's almost too good to be true.

Edmund's death is one of those suspicious deaths for which

a conspiratorial interpretation offers a convenient explanation.

Who benefits from it? Knut does.

By the end of 1016, he becomes sole king.

Many medieval historians

were inclined to apply this line of reasoning.

In other words, Knut may have arranged Edmund's death.

It's perhaps just most likely that Edmund Ironside had wounds.

I mean, people often overlook that.

But after the division of the kingdom,

a few months later, Edmund is dead.

This is exactly what you'd expect from some nasty gangrenous cuts.

In St Paul's Church,

the Archbishop of Canterbury crowns Knut King of England.

From this moment on, nothing escapes him.

The Dane is ready to assert his authority and rule without rival.

But conquering a kingdom is one thing, holding it is another.

Aethelred and Edmund are dead,

yet for Knut, one final threat remains.

He must silence those who, one day,

might challenge the legitimacy of his reign,

beginning with Edmund's two young sons.

They are heirs presumptive -

sons of a king, entirely legitimate claimants to power,

provided they come of age.

Any of those English athelings are a potential rallying point

for some of the noblemen.

And there's always a possibility that, you know,

as those young men get older,

that they could become a flashpoint

for a rebellion against Knut.

Faced with the children, Knut hesitates.

Eliminating them would be tempting, but politically dangerous.

It seemed to me too controversial to kill an atheling,

to kill somebody who might inherit the throne one day.

In Scandinavia, I'm certain it would have been done in ten minutes,

but he sends them out to Sweden,

whether they're meant to be murdered there or just forgotten,

they continue to survive.

But the most serious threat does not come from England;

it comes from the Continent.

Edward and Alfred, the sons of Aethelred and Emma,

have found refuge with their uncle Richard II,

the powerful Duke of Normandy.

And Knut has no way of reaching them.

Worse still, Edward, only 14 years old,

could one day lay claim to the throne of England.

The Normans are very power hungry, extremely ambitious,

very power hungry, and they have now got sitting in that court, in exile,

these heirs which give them a method of ruling England.

Knut is worried that the Norman Conquest is going to happen in 1016,

not 1066.

He's worried that they're going to try and sweep in

and take control of some part of England for the wealth,

and they're going to use one of these little boys

as an excuse for doing it.

The Norman threat cannot be ignored.

So Knut devises a plan -

one whose cornerstone is none other than the widow of his former enemy:

Emma of Normandy.

There's a lot of good reasons for him to marry Emma of Normandy.

She's the English queen.

But she also represents an alliance with Normandy.

And that also means that the Duke of Normandy, Richard II,

is much less likely to support his nephews

as a flashpoint for rebellion against Knut.

Once you've married Emma,

she's now not just part of Aethelred's establishment,

she's part of Knut's establishment.

And they will not move against

a powerful member of their own dynasty.

The plan seems perfect, with one complication:

persuading Emma to marry the man responsible for her downfall.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that Knut fetched Emma, to be wed.

Of course, if we read the word fetched, it kind of indicates

that Knut has some kind of power in this situation.

And quite possibly, she does have no choice.

But Emma tells her own story.

She tells that Knut sends men to woo her to persuade her

to become his queen,

so she tells it as kind of a love story.

He has everything, and now he needs the perfect imperial spouse.

For Emma, the temptation is immense.

To accept, would be to regain her status as queen.

But it would also mean abandoning her two sons in exile.

She quickly decides as part of that marriage negotiation,

that's what's most important to her, is not supporting Edward and Alfred,

but having a son with Knut and seeing that son on the throne.

It is a poisoned chalice for her, in a sense,

because up to this point, she's worked so tirelessly

to try to secure the succession of her two sons with Aethelred,

and she has to decide what she loses

and how best to maintain her power and influence,

and she ultimately opts for her own prospects over those of her sons

and her sons never forgive her.

Before marrying Emma,

Knut must settle one final matter:

to inform his first wife, Aelfgifu of Northampton,

married according to Scandinavian custom,

that she will never be queen of England.

He must have just sat down with her and said:

"Look, I'm terribly sorry, darling.

You know, I'll give you X amount a year.

Keep the children, but you and me are done,

because I got to get married again."

And he hasn't broken any religious or social or moral code

by setting aside Aelfgifu,

all that happened is life changed, the world changed.

She became irrelevant.

And that marriage in that union became irrelevant.

And so he can set her off and say:

"Emma, come here. Now we're going to be married".

Knut and Emma pass through the doors of St Paul's.

Ironically, it is here that Aethelred lies buried,

an impotent witness to his widow's remarriage to his greatest enemy.

This is, above all, a political union.

Emma regains her influence while Knut secures a partner

who knows the English court intimately.

Emma has been married to an English king for a long time.

She knows how it works. She knows what to do.

She knows which way to hold a knife and fork, as it were.

And she understands what it was like to come in as an outsider

into the English political system.

So she has that experience to pass on to Knut,

and they seem to work very closely together.

So they end up becoming this real power couple, if you will,

of the 1020s, 1030s

who dominate English and Northern European politics.

A few months later, Emma gives birth to a son...

...Harthacnut.

The child becomes the first cornerstone of a dynasty

Knut hopes to place at the head of the kingdom for centuries to come.

Knut spends most of his time in Winchester,

the capital of Wessex.

The city houses the royal treasury, the archives,

the mint,

as well as the most powerful monasteries

and religious institutions of the realm:

churchmen whom the young king must win to his cause.

Welcome!

For a Christian England,

no power can endure without the support of the clergy.

And from among them, Knut chooses his eminence Wulfstan,

the austere and formidable Archbishop of York.

For Knut, Wulfstan is the key player, alongside Emma,

in solidifying his control of the regime

and remodelling himself in the traditions,

local traditions of monarchy.

It seems quite clear that Knut follows Wulfstan's advice almost

to the letter in order to become a king of the English,

indeed, a better king than the English themselves.

He integrates himself immediately into the kingdom.

He writes in Old English, he communicates in Old English.

He adopts all the titles and regalia, and appears to have

been more popular than many of the previous English kings,

particularly because of his policies notably his extraordinary generosity

toward the Church and the monasteries.

With Wulfstan at his side,

Knut begins to learn the subtleties of the English court.

And gradually exchanges his Viking garb for that of an English king.

Yet behind appearances,

the young Dane has not forgotten where he comes from,

or to whom he owes his victory.

These allies he must now reward.

East Anglia in the east is granted to Thorkel the Tall.

Northumbria in the north is entrusted to Erik of Lade.

Mercia in the west remains in the hands

of the notorious Eadric Streona.

For himself, Knut keeps Wessex, the historic heart of power.

He cannot rule simply through terror,

so he needs to bring some of the English onside.

At the same time,

he needs to reward some of his Scandinavian men with them.

And with these two imperatives are somewhat at odds,

because if he does too much of one, it threatens the other.

Then Knut is waiting for people to step out of line,

and as they step out of line,

he gets rid of them and then he sprinkles in

Scandinavians who are loyal to him.

That's how you do it. You do it carefully, slowly,

trying to keep as much of the existing machine as possible.

But putting your guys, putting your Scandinavians

into just the right place so that they have control.

Eadric Streona has every reason

to believe himself untouchable.

He survived the deaths of Aethelred and Edmund alike,

shifting loyalties time and again to stand with the stronger side.

And now he wants more from the young Dane

he helped place upon the throne.

England is yours. I have done...

Without him,

perhaps Edmund would still be sitting there.

Eadric is said to have killed Edmund Ironside,

then demanded his reward.

Knut is supposed to have replied:

"Ah, you have taken the head of my sworn brother?

Very well. I shall give you what I owe you, the loss of your own."

And Erik strikes him with an axe, settling the matter.

Here, we are dealing with a Knut

who may appear extremely calculating politically,

but also with a ruler who understands the cost of betrayal.

Betrayal may happen.

But when it happens repeatedly, it proves that a man cannot be trusted.

Knut's reasoning is, in a way, defensible:

if someone was unable to remain loyal to his rightful king,

why should he now be considered reliable?

Eadric's head is mounted on a spike...

Hey! Cease this foolishness at once!

...and displayed for all to see on Tower Hill outside London.

A dishonourable fate reserved for traitors.

Later Anglo-Norman chroniclers tell a story that this was done

very justly by the Tower of London, essentially,

what becomes a later royal execution site.

This is an indication that Knut is willing to act in a ruthless fashion

when the circumstances suits.

In barely two years, Knut has pacified England.

He has ended the Viking raids...

...rewarded his allies...

...and eliminated his enemies.

But in a world where nothing is ever secure,

where power rests upon fragile balances,

the winds are about to change.

And already, across the North Sea,

a new challenger is already rising, still little known,

but destined to become one of the greatest threats to his reign.

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