Richard Fletcher pierces through King Canute's slick PR and argues that the Norman Conquest was a Good Thing

Mathilda Lisle
Sunday April 7, 2002
The Observer

Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England
Richard Fletcher
Allen Lane £14.99, pp230

King Canute, remembered today as a wise and good monarch, was a master of PR, projecting an image of himself as a pious and dutiful Christian king, a man properly in tune with human frailty. In reality, he was a violent and ruthless young man who, as Richard Fletcher shows, in this compelling work of forensic historical reconstruction, was responsible in 1016 for a crime so dreadful that it continued to send aftershocks through Anglo-Saxon England until long after the Norman Conquest.

Briefly, when Canute, a Danish arriviste, completed his subjugation of the unruly north of England he commanded the appearance of the greatest of his northern subjects, Earl Uhtred of Northumbria, at a place called Wiheal (now Wighill) near Tadcaster, in Yorkshire. Uhtred had been loyal to Canute's predecessor, Ethelred the Unready (or 'Ill-advised') but, realising that Canute now had the upper hand, came with 40 retainers to Wiheal to make his submission.

In the ambush and slaughter that followed a bloodfeud was initiated that would last for almost 60 years. It's not entirely clear whether this was due to the uniquely violent temper of the times or to the enormity of Canute's crime. Like many academics who yearn to give their special subject popular appeal, Fletcher has been unable to resist giving what is, essentially, a careful general study of pre-Norman culture and society, a sensational subtitle, 'murder and revenge in Anglo-Saxon England', a bid for a larger audience that is at odds with what is in the book.

Much of Fletcher's narrative, a Sellars and Yeatmanesque parade of Ealdhuns, Ecfridas, Eadwulfs, Aethelthryths and Orms, confirms the historical perception of this dark millennial century as a succession of pitched battles from Newquay to Newcastle between villainous gangs hell-bent on plunder. It was, it goes without saying, a man's world of warfare, bloodshed and politics. Only two eleventh-century queens (Emma, wife of Canute, and Edith, wife of Edward the Confessor) emerge from the maelstrom with any clarity.

Fletcher expertly weaves his narrative to culminate in the tragic histories of Tostig and Harold, an English king whose love of military grandstanding was, mercifully, cut short by the arrival of William of Normandy. The appearance of civilising forces from across the Channel put a stop to the hooligan feuding of the upper class. The main conclusion most people will draw from this enthralling volume is that England's best luck was the invasion of the boring, but cultivated, French.