Cnut

Our school history jumps from Alfred the Great to 1066 but there is a lot going on in the interim. For a start, Cnut, the Viking, appears as if by magic, defeats Edmund and becomes the first Viking king of the Anglo Saxons. In fact the one who really unites the country.

In my researches I found one gem from the past in the form of a letter written by Cnut himself that makes one wonder, with Brexit boiling, if people have changed all that much.

... I spoke with the (Holy Roman) Emperor himself and the Lord Pope and the princes there about the needs of all people of my entire realm, both English and Danes, that a juster law and securer peace might be granted to them on the road to Rome and that they should not be straitened by so many barriers along the road, and harassed by unjust tolls; and the Emperor agreed and likewise King Robert who governs most of these same toll gates. And all the magnates confirmed by edict that my people, both merchants, and the others who travel to make their devotions, might go to Rome and return without being afflicted by barriers and toll collectors, in firm peace and secure in a just law.

The more I read about the man, the more irritated I became over how he was ignored in my school history.  I learned of him in an art appreciation class talking about a poem about some old woman trying to sweep the Atlantic Ocean out of her front door, yet here is the king whose empire stretched around the North Sea; in other words, the major trading area of the time. Think of it, amber, ivory, fur, iron ore, timber, from Scandinavia, tin, copper, lead, wool, from Britain, all trading with Germany and the empire of the Tzar, possibly even the Far East through the Caspian and Black Seas.

Pie in the sky? If I jump a bit to the days of Braveheart Wallace, when the Scots wrote to the outside world telling them Scotland was free and open for business, they didn’t write to the French or the Venetians, they wrote to Hamburg and Lubeck, their old trading partners across the North Sea.  

Back to Cnut. The Scots paid homage to him, not just Duncan’s father-in-law, Malcolm, but Macbeth, who killed Duncan, not in his bed as Shakespeare made it, but in open battle. For the next seventeen years, not Shakespeare’s weekend, Macbeth was king of Scotland. A settled Scotland that allowed him to visit the Pope in Rome and return, still King of Scotland.

In the meantime Duncan’s sons had run off to England, where they learned how the English court ruled and took those ideas north when they returned to Scotland.

All this, yet a time ignored by the conventional teachers of history in preference to battles and royal marriages.

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