Cnut the Great

Biography

Cnut conquered England at about twenty years old and spent the rest of his life governing it with a sophistication that surprised everyone who expected a Viking chieftain to behave like one. He issued law codes, built churches, restored monasteries that his own predecessors had raided, made pilgrimage to Rome and distributed silver to the churches and poor he met along the route, and wrote letters home in the voice of a Christian king concerned about the spiritual welfare of his subjects. His reign was by most accounts one of the more stable periods in late Anglo-Saxon history. The story of Cnut commanding the tide to turn back — generally told as a story of royal arrogance — was recorded by a 12th-century source as precisely the opposite: Cnut had the throne carried to the shore to prove to his flattering courtiers that only God commands the tides, and that a king's power is correspondingly limited. Whether the story is true or not, it captures something real about how he chose to present himself. He was King of England, Denmark, Norway, and parts of Sweden simultaneously — the most powerful ruler in northern Europe since Charlemagne — and managed all of it through deputies and periodic personal visits while spending most of his time in England. He died at 40, and his empire dissolved immediately: his sons were incompetent, his English and Danish territories separated, and within seven years the Anglo-Saxon dynasty returned in the person of Edward the Confessor. Cnut had conquered England; England had conquered him.

Key Battles