Original subtitles

This is a story of conquest,

betrayal and courage.

The story of the 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.

No longer mere invaders...

...they are now conquerors.

After a lightning-fast campaign, Knut and Sweyn have subdued England.

The nobility has sworn allegiance to them...

...and King Aethelred has been driven into exile in Normandy.

From this moment on, the land is theirs.

But conquering a kingdom is one thing.

Becoming its rightful rulers is another.

Knut and Sweyn did not come to fundamentally change

everything about English society.

They came to take over its head, the head of the snake,

as it were, and control that.

Once Sweyn has affected military conquest of England,

he then must achieve legitimacy and authority,

and that cannot be asserted purely at the end of a sword or a spear.

And so that starts with convening the so-called witan, that is,

leading magnates of England who represent the realm,

and having them elect a monarch.

Knut and Sweyn must now secure the loyalty

of all the members of the Witan.

One of its most influential members resides in York.

Archbishop Wulfstan.

A pious and austere man,

and one of the fiercest opponents of the Vikings.

We know that Wulfstan was deeply concerned

by the Viking threat.

He seems genuinely fearful of the return of unchecked paganism

in early eleventh-century England.

And you see there a man who is railing and screaming about

"This is the end of the world. This is the apocalypse.

This is the end of everything."

So he sees the Vikings as sent by God to punish the English

for their sins. And I think for Wulfstan,

the Vikings become a symbol of the Antichrist.

Winning such a man over may seem impossible.

But Knut is about to present a powerful argument.

Though many Danes still cling to pagan traditions...

...Knut himself was raised in the Christian faith.

All of Knut actions suggest that he was indeed Christian,

and his dynasty was riding on the coattails of Christianity.

It's his grandfather, Harald Bluetooth,

who'd also made the Danes Christian.

Because one of the crucial teachings that the Church has

is that there are monarchs put in place by the grace of God,

that God has created the social order.

So if tapped into correctly,

Christianisation and the Christian faith can become a powerful force.

The piety displayed by Sweyn and Knut

appears to reassure Wulfstan.

Yet no one can truly guess their real intentions.

For Sweyn, the time has come to summon the Witan.

Back in Gainsborough, he sends his messengers across the kingdom.

The assembly will meet in three weeks in York, not London.

For it is from the North that he intends to rule England,

abandoning Wessex, the traditional heart of English royal power.

After he's conquered England,

there's a Witan being called in York.

Well, clearly it's to crown him King,

and it's to give Knut some sort of office or title in that region.

And that is crucial,

because we can see then how close Sweyn is to the north,

how much he focused his energies on it,

and also what a dreadful mistake he made,

because you can't run a kingdom

from its least organised part.

The powerhouse of England is in the South.

That's where the bureaucracy is. That's where the towns are.

That's where the markets are primarily.

That's where the moneymaking machine is.

And if you want to be in England and you want to control it,

you got to do it from the South.

England is about to open a new chapter in its history.

Nothing seems capable of halting the advance of the two Danes.

And yet, fate will decide otherwise.

Knut rushes back to Gainsborough.

He has been summoned to the royal palace.

At dawn, his father's lifeless body is discovered.

The conqueror of the North has died suddenly at the age of fifty...

...at the height of his power.

His reaction, of course, to his father's death

has to be enormous shock. Enormous shock.

This is not what they had planned.

They're about to become legitimate rulers.

They're about to be accepted by the nobles,

ecclesiastical and secular, of the whole country,

and suddenly his father's dropped down dead.

They would have been a part of him at least,

that is pleased that his father,

who was one of the main obstacles other than his brother

to his own ambitions, was gone

because he can't be king fully until Sweyn's gone.

Standing before the man to whom he owed everything,

Knut finds himself utterly alone.

For he knows that now, everything rests upon him.

Sweyn's conquered England, but has not managed to establish

that kind of authority that will allow him to pass the throne

without opposition to a son,

because he's only been in England a matter of months,

not even a full year. So for Knut, that's come too fast.

Does he want to claim to be king of England

following his father's death?

Or does he have to go back to Scandinavia?

That sort of uncertainty, I think, would have been a tremendous

pressure for Knut at this time.

Returning to Denmark is impossible.

His brother Harald has almost certainly claimed the crown.

Without hesitation, Knut asserts his right to the throne of England.

He knows he can rely on the loyalty of his army, and above all,

on the hostages handed over by the English nobility

the previous year as pledges of allegiance.

The Witan should be nothing more than a mere formality.

Yet behind the scenes of power,

a very different reality is beginning to emerge.

He is elected king by the Danish army, but the English,

unsurprisingly, stop and say, wait a second.

Sweyn was a known entity, highly experienced campaigner.

We were submitting to him, not to his son.

That wasn't the deal. It was Sweyn as King.

He's just a young boy to the English nobility.

He's not even the king of the Danes.

And they would be conversations in dark corners

about the possibilities here. What do we do?

In York...

...Wulfstan has chosen his side.

Before a nobility consumed by doubt,

he delivers a sermon heavy with warning:

the sermon of the Wolf.

A radical text calling on the English to rise up

and save their kingdom.

Sermo Lupi ad Anglos is perhaps the most famous

of the many apocalyptic sermons of Wulfstan of York,

and in this he is adumbrating all of the terrible things

the English have done and all of the signs of God's wrath upon them,

including the fact that they have exiled their king,

that they've sent their king into exile,

their rightful king, Aethelred.

As guardian of moral order within the kingdom,

he calls on every man to stand ready to defend his king.

In the utmost secrecy...

...the English nobility sends envoys across the channel, to Normandy.

There, Aethelred has taken refuge...

...under the protection of his brother-in-law,

Duke Richard II.

For the old king,

this sudden turn of events may offer one final chance

to reclaim his throne.

And so they open negotiations,

and part of the deal struck with Aethelred is

that he agrees to rule them more justly than he had before.

That is the condition of their return.

Aethelred appears to acknowledge his past failures.

He accepts the negotiated terms of his return,

promising to rule more wisely,

to show greater respect to his subjects,

and to forgive those who had betrayed him

during the previous year.

So in a sense, they preferred to bring in Aethelred 2.0,

rather than risking it with a relatively unknown Knut

from a completely different kingdom.

Aethelred now plays what may be his last card.

He calls upon all those who reject Danish rule.

Among them stands a feared Viking war leader:

Olaf Haraldsson.

The story is told

when Aethelred comes back from Normandy to England,

he has the support of Olaf Haraldsson.

This Viking warlord who has his own fleet.

Olaf Haraldsson has been someone who's been involved in raiding

and attacking on England and probably elsewhere in Europe,

has made a name for himself free booting,

like many of these Viking adventurers do.

But crucially, he's also converted to the Christian faith.

And he seems to be someone who Aethelred and his court

are trying to use and set up in opposition to Knut.

For Aethelred, the time has come to reclaim his kingdom.

At the head of a fleet, he sets sail for England...

...and marches toward London.

London represents a potential stronghold.

It is a logistical hub, rich beyond measure.

Controlling it, even without fully conquering it,

was likely one of Aethelred's primary objectives

upon his return to England.

Aethelred approaches the capital...

...the only city that has remained loyal to him.

He knows, however, that the confrontation will be fierce.

London is held by Danish forces loyal to Knut.

There were points of resistance,

as if Sweyn had deliberately garrisoned the main fortifications

that had been captured.

It makes sense: a newly conquered kingdom cannot be left undefended.

They're no way to control the territory.

Danish troops were plausibly stationed across the land,

guarding key towns and fortresses.

The garrison entrenched itself in the fortress

on the southern bank of the Thames, blocking access to the city.

At the heart of this defensive network stands the London Bridge...

...a fortified obstacle that controls the river and connects both shores.

Against such a stronghold, a siege borders on the impossible.

So Olaf volunteers for one of the most

perilous missions imaginable:

to destroy the London Bridge.

He is said to have assembled a small flotilla,

choosing the most skilled and courageous men.

With a few boats, they positioned themselves beneath the bridge,

secured it with reeds and ropes, and tore away its supports.

The collapse forced the surrender of both Southwark and London.

Whether that story is quite true or not, I think is debatable,

but it is such a good story that it's very much embedded

in the history of Viking Age London.

Even if the story of the bridge's destruction

may be legend...

...Aethelred enters the city as a victor.

Yet he does not linger.

Giving Knut time to regroup would be a grave mistake.

Tomorrow he will gather his forces and march north.

In Gainsborough...

...Knut does not yet grasp the approaching danger.

Why worry?

Has Aethelred not repeatedly proven powerless against the Vikings?

Knut's reaction after his father's death is puzzling.

Remarkably, Aethelred moves swiftly,

while Knut appears almost inactive,

as if two months passed without any action.

Knut? He's only a young man. He's not his father.

Can he control his own forces? He can control some of them.

Can he control all of the alliances his fathers made with Scandinavians?

I doubt it.

I think initially he must have seen certain Scandinavians

turn against him,

and then the Danelaw and the other areas of England

that he could count on started to show no support.

And this must be his age. This must be his inexperience.

Too young, overconfident men.

Knut does not yet see the ground slipping beneath him.

On April 25th, Easter Day,

a message reaches him from his scouts.

Aethelred has entered Lindsey with a massive army.

Despite having promised to not repeat past abuses,

the first thing he does is he charges in to the north.

This leads to a massacre Lindsey. The last unit that supported Knut.

We know Knut had secured the support

of Lincolnshire's inhabitants,

promising provisions for his defence,

particularly in anticipation of a campaign.

It is therefore entirely logical that Aethelred, as Sweyn once did,

raids and plunders areas that show disloyalty

or pose potential opposition.

In Gainsborough, Knut finally gathers his forces.

He urges them to defend their king.

But despite his warrior's determination,

it is already too late.

This time the English army holds the upper hand.

Knut, at this point, is on his back foot.

He's in a very difficult position.

And so when the lights all go out, one after another,

Knut is a good tactician.

And just like Aethelred, when he's left with only one region left,

he left quickly,

because at that point he's trying to save

whatever he's got for the next assault.

Knut has no choice: leave England or die.

He gathers his last loyal men...

...and takes to the sea at the head of his fleet.

Behind him lies a land ravaged by the vengeful fury

of the Anglo-Saxons.

It's an enormous, chaotic,

swinging backwards and forwards situation.

Aethelred has been driven from the country.

Sweyn's come to power. Sweyn's died.

There's panic running around of all the various forces.

Some stay with Knut. Most don't.

Knut flees, the English open negotiations with Aethelred

and Aethelred comes back. It's an immensely chaotic time.

On his ship,

Knut watches the English coast recede.

Defeated by a man he considers weak...

...he must flee...

...trapped by his own pride.

He must have been furious.

There must have been quite a lot of people,

who said they would support him and then turned against him.

And so he did exactly what he said he was going to do in that scenario.

After several days at sea, his fleet lands at Sandwich.

The hostages,

given by the English nobility during his father's conquests,

are cast ashore.

What should be done with these men?

For Knut, mere execution would be far too gentle a revenge.

He wants to make an example.

What if there's a time machine?

Would you like to have dinner with Knut? Absolutely not.

I think he was a ruthless, scary individual.

And I don't think- I think we would all, all of us in the modern world,

would run screaming from him.

I think if you survive in this environment,

if you thrive in this environment,

you're a pretty scary, ruthless creature in yourself

and Knut is good at it.

Without the slightest remorse,

he orders them to be mercilessly mutilated.

Knut employed a range of corporal punishments,

standard under the law of the time:

cutting off hands, parts of the face, ears, or nose.

These practices appear in contemporary legal codes,

including those issued by Wulfstan.

And so I think for him, this is a parting shot.

This is saying I may be leaving now,

but I'll be back and don't underestimate me.

Do not cross me.

This is what happens to people who cross me.

They don't get killed.

They get injured in ways that will maim them for life

and make them and everyone else who meets them

remember what I'm capable of.

Harald watches with concern

as his brother's ships near the coast.

Crowned King of Denmark upon their father's death,

he cannot know Knut's true intentions.

At the back of Harold's mind and at the back of Knut's mind,

there's this sort of notion that this Danish kingdom isn't big enough

for the two of us here.

This is a situation where these two brothers are at some points

going to have to face off, potentially against one another.

One might imagine that Harald would feel a little bit nervous

about the presence of his more experienced brother

back in the Kingdom.

Though always close, Knut and Harald's brotherly bond

cannot mask the tension that day.

Knut initially seems intent on reclaiming

part of the Danish kingdom.

From Harold's perspective, Knut is a threat

because Knut's interests lie in becoming king.

Harald's interests lie in keeping the kingship.

And so Knut back in Denmark is one prince too many

for a kingdom that has just lost Sweyn.

In the throne hall now under his control,

Harald invites Knut to speak.

Yet his younger brother's claims could ignite

a dangerous war of succession.

If Harald refuses, Knut must choose:

submit or fight.

If Knut was the astute politician I believe,

it made sense for him to adapt.

"Very well, if you are unwilling to grant me anything,

I will demonstrate loyalty and friendship instead."

This may have been the surest way to achieve his aims,

avoiding direct confrontation and certain defeat.

Barely twenty years old, Knut has already lost everything :

his throne, his kingdom,

and perhaps even his future.

Unwilling to live in his brother's shadow,

he sees one path:

reclaim by force what he believes is rightfully his.

This is not a man who is accepting his role in Denmark

as the second son.

This is instead a man who is waiting for his opportunity

to re-invade England.

He's waiting, and he's watching

for some key mistake in the English regime to be made

that gives him a new way in.

After thirty years of a chaotic reign...

...Aethelred finally recovers his throne.

Yet he now faces a nobility steeped in mistrust and betrayal.

A nest of scorpions,

at whose heart he believes he has found a loyal ally.

Eadric Streona.

Eadric Streona is the bad man of the first half of 11th century

in English politics.

His nickname, Streona, it means the Grasper, the Inquisitor,

in addition to which he doesn't seem to have very much

of what we would say moral fibre.

Or he's a brilliant survivor, which one, we can't to say.

And he flip flops between supporting whoever looks like they might win.

And we don't quite know why, but for whatever reasons,

Aethelred gives Eadric more and more power and authority,

and it's clear that many of those at court resent this,

that this is a new guard coming in,

that Aethelred places absolute trust in.

Eadric never leaves the king side,

feeding his paranoia day after day.

At forty-seven, weakened by illness,

Aethelred faces yet another threat:

the struggle for his own succession.

So all the sons of the king are considered to be aethelings.

So you actually have a number of contenders to the throne.

It's a bit of a political brawl.

But it also means that the son who's the best leader

and who has a strong faction behind him among the noblemen,

will come to the top rather than necessarily the firstborn,

who may not be the best.

Two lines now vie for power.

First, from his union with Elgifu of York, six sons.

At that point, the elder son,

Edmund Ironside, appears to have the upper hand.

He's a young man in his early twenties,

perhaps a little younger or older,

already highly respected and clearly eager to go to war.

Opposing him, the second line:

Edward and Alfred...

...born of Aethelred's second wife,

a noblewoman from across the channel.

Emma of Normandy.

Emma of Normandy is the daughter of the Duke of Normandy,

Richard I,

who is a descendant of Rollo,

so the Viking who established Normandy as a county

in the ninth century.

And she seems to be a very aggressive political figure

that she's influenced there, as we know by Norman politics,

where women took a much greater role.

They really didn't do this in English politics.

She is extraordinarily powerful,

and not shy about exerting that power.

So Emma dedicated her life, really, to making sure

that one of her sons was on the throne.

Emma has no intention of letting the throne

slip from her grasp in favour of a son from a previous marriage.

At court, the treacherous Eadric may prove a valuable ally

against Edmund's ambition.

By Aethelred's later years, Emma his queen,

quite possibly Aethelred himself,

and certainly others at court, aligned with Eadric

or creating a faction.

And that faction may well be working to try to line up eventually

the succession of Edward and Alfred,

Aethelred's sons with his second wife Emma,

over his sons with his first wife.

And so what we start seeing is a fracturing of the dynasty

between rival line.

The king summons a great assembly.

Nobles from across the realm gather.

Among them stand Sigeferth and Morcar...

...two leading figures of the Danelaw.

Both known for supporting Edmund's claim to the throne.

As the feast reaches its height...

...Eadric Streona approaches the king.

With a simple gesture, Aethelred gives the order to strike.

He has Sigeferth and Morcar invited by Eadric Streona

to a meeting, and then they are murdered.

They are just murdered.

The king seizes their lands and he has Sigeferth widow

placed in Malmesbury Abbey.

What happens there is that Aethelred has created a scenario

whereby his son, his trusted friends and allies

are now being attacked by his own father.

For Edmund, it is a crushing blow.

His closest allies are dead.

Worse, Aethelred now openly favours Edward, Emma's son.

On August 15th, 1015, Edmund acts:

he travels to the monastery of Malmesbury...

...abducts Ealdgyth, widow of Sigerferth,

and marries her on the spot,

claiming her late husband's inheritance.

It's a crucial and enormous act,

he's aligning himself against Aethelred

and what we have here is shock and horror,

because suddenly the king and the obvious heir

are at loggerheads and at war with each other.

By attacking the northern nobility,

Aethelred fractures his kingdom once again,

pushing England to the brink of civil war.

The news spreads like wildfire.

A few days earlier, Knut had issued the call to arms.

Now, from one end of the country to the other...

...thousands march towards the capital.

Knut has waited months for this moment.

The fracture tearing England apart offers him the perfect opportunity

for revenge.

The tree has a trunk and you see one trunk above the ground,

as it were.

But if you were to grab that and pull it out of the ground,

you see all these roots,

and each root leads to another unit, into another unit,

and they spread out in a myriad of ways.

So Knut doesn't have direct contact with people, even a few stages down.

When a king calls, as opposed to a local nobleman,

you get an enormous amount of uptake of this.

To launch his reconquest, Knut relies on a man from Norway.

Erik of Lade,...

...an old ally of his father,

destined to be the cornerstone of his great army.

Eric's family has been slowly consolidating power

over northern Norway,

and pretty much then all of Norway down to the south.

They are probably the most powerful dynasty

ruling any part of Scandinavia at that point.

Erik, moreover, has married one of Knut's half-sisters.

He was therefore a family ally, a recognised war leader,

a man of great power and considerable charisma,

widely respected,

and very likely someone who played the role of a mentor to Knut.

As the army gathers, an alarm sounds.

A fleet approaches off the coast...

...filled with men and weapons.

At its head is Thorkell the Tall, fearsome Viking leader,

Aethelred's ally for more than three years.

Of all his followers, Thorkell was likely the most loyal.

Yet, in 1015, he seems to vanish from England,

returning discreetly to Denmark with only a few ships.

And he stays a little bit offshore.

This is a man who's not quite sure if the Danish royal family

are going to try and kill him or not, but also he doesn't want

to give them the opportunity.

Knut is intrigued

and agrees to hear out this formidable adversary.

Thorkell knows England extremely well:

its balance of power, its terrain.

Such knowledge could be of great value.

Knut studies the man, thirty years his senior,

once among his father's greatest enemies.

A single gesture could have ended him,

but instead Knut offered his hand.

Knut accepts the allegiance very quickly,

without reserve.

Securing the support of such an experienced, influential,

and knowledgeable leader is sufficient.

Erik then stands as Knut's positive guiding force,

Thorkell his darker, more ambivalent counterpart.

Together, they form the two paternal figures

around whom Knut builds himself and his army.

They are the very best allies he could find,

both among the Norwegians and the Danes.

His ability to surround himself with talent is extraordinary.

At first light, Knut gives the order to set sail.

At the head of a fleet of 200 ships,

he heads toward England.

The encomium of Queen Emma records the fleet as being

dazzling to behold.

It used the sort of grandiose, Latin terms

emphasizing sight of this terrible war fleet of Knut

that is brought to England in 1015.

So for an observer standing on the English coast,

there must have been a view of this kind of forest of masts and sails.

And it must be a terrible sight to behold.

But as the fleet nears the English coast, Knut turns south.

Unlike his father two years earlier, he does not aim for the north.

His target is the heart of power: Wessex.

He's now had a taste of England. He's been around it a bit.

He spent a bit of time there, and he can see that what he needs more

than any else, he doesn't need to go to the part that looks like

Scandinavia because it's most convenient for him.

He needs to go to the part that's least convenient for him

to understand and interact with,

because that's where you rule England from,

and that's the wealthy South.

The ships skirt coast of Kent, pushing into Dorset.

On board, carried by the dark waters of the river...

...Knut recalls the day a year earlier when he first set foot

on English soil beside his father.

Today he fights for his own name,

for the oath whispered over Sweyn's lifeless body.

By the time he comes back to England,

he's still young, but already has considerable experience.

He's had those early moments in England,

working first with his father successfully,

those difficult moments where it all went wrong.

He's had a few year's experience.

He's had experience now back at his brothers court in Denmark

and some of the difficulties he's encountered there.

So he's certainly coming back a wilier, more experienced

political operator

and not someone who anybody in England I think would underestimate.

Wessex is among the kingdom's best-defended territories.

But Knut is confident.

His ships give him a decisive edge.

These longships, often miscalled Drakkars,

are the key to Viking striking power.

Britain may see itself today as a navy first in its military.

But it wasn't then and it had nothing in comparison

to these longboats that the Vikings used.

What made Scandinavian ships so effective in this period

was the fact that they managed to be very seaworthy,

could travel significant distances, could carry large numbers of men,

but still have a relatively shallow draft.

And so what that allows them to do is to travel quite far up

navigable rivers to beach quite easily and to land,

and then attack local people.

Knut's army devastates all in its path.

Dorset.

Wiltshire.

Somerset.

The young Dane advances relentlessly.

Between Knut's hesitations in 1013-1014

and his return in 1015-1016, there is a dramatic shift.

He knows exactly what must be done and he executes it coldly,

efficiently and with calculation.

A highly effective approach,

no doubt advised by the two-men at his side,

probably the finest war leaders of the North.

Knut learned from his past mistakes.

He gives the enemy no respite.

At the head of their troops,

Erik and Thorkell descend on English lands

like a swarm of locusts.

Knut rarely goes into battle himself.

Like Octavian during Rome's civil war,

he remains behind, reflecting,

pulling strings, giving orders, relying on powerful men to act.

But his followers clearly trust him

and are willing to go into battle in his stead.

The Scandinavian forces set up camp in Mercia.

One of the kingdom's richest regions

and undoubtedly one of the most difficult to subdue.

At least until a man appears on the outskirts of the camp.

Knut is intrigued and watches the stranger approach.

It is no other than Eadric Streona.

Aethelred's closest advisor.

Instead of defending his king,

he presents himself before his most formidable enemy.

Edric Streona choice to side with Knut

seems to be one of these key moments in many ways,

in the strategies of 1015.

Why Eadric decides to betray Aethelred is really

the million pound question.

He risen on Aethelred's coattails.

But if we look at Eadric's later career,

what it seems to teach us is that he's somebody

who is interested in one thing and one person only.

And that was Eadric Streona.

So what he does is he decides to jump before he is pushed,

and figures that his best bet for maintaining his position of power

and influence is to then be the kingmaker,

to be the one who secures Knut's claim to the throne,

and then hopefully reaps dividends from that.

Like his father two years earlier,

Knut strikes at the very heart of the kingdom.

Once again, Aethelred does nothing to stop the invasion.

Left to fend for themselves,

the nobles have no choice but to submit to the Dane,

one after another.

By securing the allegiance of this aristocracy

through his very presence,

Knut symbolically exposes the King's absence.

The ruler is not there to defend his ancestral lands.

He is a failed king and therefore an illegitimate one.

Politically, it is a masterstroke, and above all, it works.

The campaign seems almost effortless.

Yet Knut does not realise that this time,

a far more formidable opponent awaits him.

Fate intervenes once again.

King Aethelred falls gravely ill.

Setting aside old quarrels,

he entrusts command of the war to his son, Edmund Ironside.

The big change that happens with Edmund Ironside taking over

is that we have a competent and present, English leader.

But he is the Englishman who will fight back against Knut.

Between those two, there's an equality in their fights.

If you read this as a narrative, you're not quite sure which way

it's going to go until the final battle happens,

as it were.

To confront Knut,

Edmund must rally the full strength of the kingdom.

For now, his army is dangerously thin.

Accompanied by his personal guard,

he rides tirelessly across the regions

still loyal to the crown,

calling upon the fyrd, the levy of free men.

Fyrd is the terms for the army,

and it would have been composed typically of a small inner entourage

of potentially professional soldiers or near professional soldiers,

senior aristocrats who saw war as one of their main pastimes,

but then supplemented with a local militia.

So with individuals called up from local counties to serve in the army.

These men were expected to arrive

with their own resources and weapons, which was far from simple.

Such levies often produced armies that were uneven,

poorly equipped, unevenly trained.

To resist Knut, Edmund repeatedly mobilises the kingdom's free men,

raising new forces whenever possible.

To his troops, Edmund strives to embody leadership.

But the conflicts that once opposed him to his father

have left deep scars.

Many distrust the young prince,

judging him to be overly ambitious.

There was a real question for those loyal to Aethelred

as to whether or not Edmund was friend or foe,

and this is one of the things that hamstrings Edmund's

initial attempts to resist

is that he's not able to secure that support,

and that the main English army under Aethelred's authority

is not willing to join Edmund's.

This is quite serious.

This is a refusal to do the King's bidding.

Edmund is there on behalf of his father,

and these armies are refusing to come to the meeting places

and join up. This is very, very bad news.

In London, Aethelred receives a message.

His son pleads for aid.

Despite the illness consuming him,

the king orders his guard to assemble and rides west.

A few days later, Edmund welcomes his father.

He studies him closely.

All of England's hopes now rest on this old, weary, aging king.

As a final little sort of bump in this, Aethelred is warned,

maybe it's real, maybe it's just paranoia,

that some part of the army or somebody there is going to kill him.

The king apparently panics and runs into the safety of London,

and the army just disbands.

What you can see- You can see the problems here

and the fragility of the English forces.

And this is the major problem that Edmund has.

But once again, Aethelred withdraws.

Edmund is isolated and has no choice.

He rides north, prepared to risk everything.

At Bamburgh, he meets Uhtred, Earl of Northumbria.

The man supported Sweyn and Knut the previous year,

yet remains tied to Edmund through marriage alliances.

He's experienced as a warrior.

He's got troops, he's got power,

and so Edmund reaches out to Uhtred

and Uhtred actually joins forces with the English forces

against the Danes.

This might seem somewhat anachronistic,

because earlier Uhtred seemed to have some association

with the Danes, but Uhtred,

he's going to be friends with whoever gets Uhtred the most power.

This is then combined with the fact

that he was closely allied with people like Morcar and Sigefurth,

who've just been purged from the court.

And therefore, do not look kindly upon Aethelred and his regime.

And so, for Edmund, Uhtred is a logical ally.

With Uhtred now at his side,

Edmund finally commands forces capable of challenging Knut.

Yet instead of facing his rival...

...he turns south toward Mercia...

...unleashing his strength against those nobles accused of treachery.

Once again, the English fight among themselves

while the Danes devastate the kingdom.

Everybody thought that they would attack the Danish army,

but it's much better from their perspective

to pursue their own interests.

And at this point, I think that their interests are Eadric Streona.

So, Knut is a problem? Yeah, sure.

But Eadric's support for Knut is the big problem.

And I don't think at this point

they necessarily have national interests at heart.

But, you know, in these circumstances,

who could blame them?

Facing the growing alliance between Edmund and Uhtred,

Knut turns to strategy.

A direct confrontation would be too great a risk.

Together with his commanders, he devises a daring plan.

At dawn, they will outmanoeuvre the enemy

and strike deep into the heart of Uhtred's own lands.

Of course, the Uhtred episode,

glorious though it is for the English,

is unfortunately short lived.

What Knut does again, always the brilliant tactician,

he himself and Erik, they go to Uhtred's house

and they threaten him at home

when he's taken most of his forces away with him to the south.

Danish forces descend upon Northumbria,

ravaging territories left dangerously undefended.

In their wake, towns and villages fall one after another.

Uhtred is panicked.

He was not ready for this at all,

and he withdraws from the fight in the south of England,

and he heads home.

Returning to Bamburgh,

Uhtred discovers his stronghold already in Danish hands.

In the great hall of his palace, Knut awaits him...

...seated upon the throne that once belonged to his host.

Facing the young Dane,

Uhtred immediately understands that there is no way out.

Submission is his only hope of survival.

The difference between Knut and Sweyn is clear.

Sweyn relied on hostages and negotiated loyalty.

Knut however had already experienced how fragile aristocratic allegiance

could be.

Shortly after submitting, Uhtred was most likely assassinated.

Uhtred is gone from the picture.

This mighty English warrior

who could have turned the tide for Edmund.

He's a piece that's off the chessboard. Click.

And he's gone.

And it's checkmate to Knut, just for the moment.

Wessex, Mercia and much of northern England

now lie under Knut's control.

Edmund can rely only on his own strength if he hopes to prevail.

As for Aethelred, sick and weakened, he remains confined within London.

For Knut, the conquest of England now seems inevitable.

And yet, once more, fate is about to intervene.

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