Cnut (Penguin Monarchs): The North Sea King by Lavelle Ryan

Author:Lavelle, Ryan [Lavelle, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780141979885
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-12-07T06:00:00+00:00

5

Into Realms Beyond

Is Cnut in Hell? In a profound investigation into the motivations of an early tenth-century usurpation, the historian Geoffrey Koziol asked the same question of the Frankish king Robert I, concluding with the answer: ‘I don’t know. But I believe the question mattered to him, and that it mattered to him should matter to us.’1 The fate of his eternal soul mattered to Cnut, too. Like Robert’s, his rule came through usurpation and bloody conquest; but unlike Robert, who can be easily read as a pious prince in the mould of his Frankish contemporaries, narratives about Cnut normally make much of the ‘old Viking’ world of the Danish prince, as if ideas of Christian salvation were something to which a warlord would simply pay lip service before moving on to more interesting matters.

If we think of Cnut in these terms, we do him and those around him a disservice. Indeed, the Bishop of Chartres admitted to this mistake when he wrote to the king, thanking him for a gift while apologizing for having believed him to be pagan.2 By the standards of his day, there is much to suggest that Cnut was a pious king and, if the number of records of his death in English monasteries is anything to go by, he may even be the most likely of Anglo-Saxon kings to have gained salvation. That may seem a jarring, even blasphemous statement. What about his bigamy? What about the claims of Alfred the Great, Edgar or the saintly Edwards? Granted, Norman saint-making after 1066 might be important for at least Edward the Confessor, but Cnut was the only pre-Conquest ruler since Æthelwulf to travel to and from Rome while king. If such achievements and the number of monks and clergy praying for Cnut counted for anything in contemporary theology, the words of his 1027 letter indicate that at least someone in his party understood the importance of travelling to Rome – ‘to pray for the redemption of my sins and the salvation of my kingdoms and of the peoples who are subject to my rule’3 – and presumably someone must have informed him of the redemptive power of making such a pilgrimage.4 In terms of its sheer scale (and there are few other pre-Conquest kings who were publicly concerned with the passage of English pilgrims), Cnut’s record could not be beaten. A range of churches were favoured by his patronage, not just in the royal heartlands of Wessex but also from Essex, the old eastern Danelaw of East Anglia, the west Midlands and Durham, as well as Christ Church, Canterbury. York does not seem to have been on this list after Wulfstan’s death in 1023, but even here, a sensible policy seems to have prevailed: Cnut does not seem to have interfered with the affairs of the see, suggesting he was aware of the important control it had over churches in the North, where royal authority could be perceived as distant.5 There were good reasons for the presentation of Cnut as a Christian monarch.

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