Levi Roach

So much better than the last book that I read on the subject (
The Normans: Power, Conquest and Culture in 11th Century Europe). There is no attempt to reduce the impact of what the Normans achieved. Instead, the book lays out the good and the not-so-good with a clear analysis of the why. The Normans were never going to emulate the Romans coming from a relatively small dutchy but nonetheless, they made their mark even though much of what they achieved it not so well known. That the author doesn't just focus on the 1066 invasion is a plus point.… (more)

This is, overall a good biography of the unfortunate Aethelred, who, as Levi Roach points out, was never a truly bad king, just a not very good one. A not very good king in a time when the English needed someone remarkable, beset as they were by marauding Vikings and Danes and riven by internal tensions. Aethelred was dealt a fairly bad hand, but seemed to make many mistakes of his own accord. Firstly, by constantly paying tribute to the pillaging bands (and where he was able to get hold of thousands of pounds of gold on multiple occasions is something Roach does not really explore) which just encouraged them to come back for more and secondly by playing palace politics with various barons which led to their death and their subjects willingness to accept the rule of the Danes. At the time of his death Aethelred had control over only a small corner of his land

Roach does well with limited sources to construct a pacy and even handed narrative. But ... sadly for the lay reader, there are just too many characters with the same or similar names. There are 2 Aelfgar's, 3 Aelfgifu's, 5 Aelfric's and, well you get the picture. The index for characters who's names start with Ae goes for two pages. There is of course nothing the author can do about this, but it makes it hard to keep track. And as a significant part of Aethelred's rule, when not fighting the Danes or Vikings is spent on monastic reform, with the best will in the world, the eyelids start too droop.… (more)

Excuses, excuses!

A good biographer needs to have some sympathy with his subject in order to portray him properly. But that does not justify glossing over failures.

Æthelred Unraed -- Ethelred un-rede, Ethelred the redeless, Ethelred no-counsel, Ethelred the ill-advised, wittily but unfairly labelled in modern English "Ethelred the Unready" -- came to the throne in dreadful circumstances: he inherited the crown as a child after his older half-brother Edward the Martyr was murdered before he could have children. By the time Ethelred died nearly forty years later, he had bankrupted his kingdom to pay off Viking raiders, had been overthrown once, had seen most of his children die, had gone into exile, had returned, and was on the verse of being overthrown again. It was a terrible time in England.

The big question is, how much was Ethelred's fault, and what could he have done about it? He certainly wasn't to blame for his brother's murder. He wasn't to blame for the existence of the Vikings. But for the response... that was largely under his control. And he had two basic answers to the raiders. The first was the paying of "Danegeld," that is, tribute to go away. But, as Kipling wrote, "once you have paid him the Dane-geld, You never get rid of the Dane." They just kept coming back, in more and more force. Arguably paying Danegeld was sensible the first time or two, since it would let England fortify and prepare for the next incursion. Except... Ethelred didn't. He made some minor defensive preparations, which were ruined because he couldn't keep his squabbling subordinates in line -- but if author Roach is to be believed (and I have no reason to doubt it), his main "defense" and his second response to the raiders consisted of trying to get his people to conform to a certain reformist view of the church. I dunno about you, but if I'm being invaded, I'd rather hire soldiers than argue about how to pray for help!

Of course, if Ethelred couldn't control his barons, and so couldn't hold an army together, then maybe church reform was all he had left. But if Ethelred couldn't control his barons, whose fault was that?

The constant tendency of this book is to defend Ethelred, which I don't think is reasonable; the basic fact is, Ethelred was a lousy king. That's why they called him unread, the ill-advised: no one had any good suggestions to deal with the situation. To cover up the absurdity of trying to defend Ethelred Roach is forced into endless analysis of charter evidence, often pushing his logic through three or four levels of inference. Most of his individual inferences are reasonable, but when he is forced to make that many logical leaps, it becomes a certainty that some of the leaps are leaps too far.

And those endless chains of inference really weigh down the book. There are endless pages of detailed analysis that push Roach into creating paragraphs that are a page, or even two pages, long. It is very tedious, especially when you just want him to get to the point! The book really needs more structure, just to help the reader know when to set it down for the night and go to sleep. I ended up skimming a lot of those pamphlet-sized paragraphs just because I couldn't take another twenty-sentence exposition of why it's significant that Bishop X witnessed a charter above Ealdorman Y, or why it's important that this word was used instead of that.

This book is, I think, important for historians, in that it offers a lot of original ideas and provocative suggestions. I suspect that at least two-thirds of those original ideas are wrong, but some are probably right, which gives it value. Future historians can weigh the ideas, keep the good, and toss the rest. But as a book for a casual reader trying to understand England in the period before the Danish and Norman conquests, this is too nitpicky, too tedious, and, flatly, too ready to excuse an incompetent king.… (more)