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perhaps for political expediency, but perhaps with skulduggery in mind – agreed to a truce. Indeed they swore to be brothers, exchanged garments, weapons, even gifts. Then they agreed to partition the nation, Canute ruling the north, Edmund the south. An Anglo-Saxon church survives at Deerhurst where this pact was made. But within a month Edmund was dead, just 23 years old, and Canute was king.

Canute Demonstrates Limits to Earthly Power
England’s fiery Danish king is a man of contrasts
    C anute is credited with being a great king, of both his Danish territory and England. He did indeed rule for nearly 20 years. But he came to the English throne with a bloody past behind him, for as
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reported at the decisive Battle of Ashingdon,

    ‘Cnut had the victory, though all England fought against him….’
    Canute had to pick up several pieces if he was to win over his new client nation.
    The Danish king is remembered for the many good things he achieved: restoring peace and stability, and upholding Christian principles. But to do so would be to whitewash his character.
    After Edmund Ironside had routed Canute and his army, the Viking king, on his retreat to Denmark, committed one of the most infamous acts of barbarity on record. He disposed of his English hostages by cutting off their hands, ears and noses - hardly acts of a Christian conscience. His ruthless cruelty was also manifest later when back in England seeking absolute power, when he systematically eliminated all potential sources of opposition.
    Once Canute had secured the throne in 1016, he imposed a huge one-off tax on his subjects of £70,000 to pay off his Viking army and fleet, so they could return to their homeland on a good pension. This did at least become the final Danegeld the English had to finance. Nevertheless it was crippling to the treasury.
    THE DANEGELD
    The Danegeld was land tax, agreed by the English king to pay off Viking invaders. The idea was to persuade them to leave for good, but all it did in practice was entice them back for more, like wild animals returning to a known source of food. With each raid, the sums extracted became greater: £10,000 in 991; £16,000 in 994; £24,000 in 1002; and £30,000 in 1007. The poet Rudyard Kipling summed up the issue:
    It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation
    To puff and look important and to say: –
    ‘Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
    We will therefore pay you cash to go away.’
    And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
    But we’ve proved it again and again,
    That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
    You never get rid of the Dane.’
    (Rudyard Kipling, ‘Dane-Geld’, 1911)
    Thereafter the new king seems to have set about transforming his image into a more benevolent, if tough, leader. Very likely the Catholic Church, through the work of Archbishop Wulfstan, had a hand in this process. In what seems to have been a bid to reconcile himself to the English people, Canute married Ethelred’s widow, Emma of Normandy. Together they planned a series of religious ceremonies designed to lay the ghost of the past.
    They underwent a pilgrimage of sorts to Ashingdon where Canute ‘ordered to be built a minster of stone and lime for the souls of the men who were there slain.’ In another act of reconciliation, they humbly translated to Canterbury the relics of St Aelfheah, archbishop of Canterbury, who had been brutally butchered to death by drunken Danish louts during the war years.
    Finally, in an attempt to raise himself to the exalted House of Wessex, the king, with the help of his queen, ceremonially presented a magnificent gold cross to the New Minster at Winchester, traditional capital of Saxon England.
    Canute tried his very hardest to portray himself as a bona fide English king. Yet he made no attempt, when the opportunity was there, to rise above his station. Unlike his Saxon predecessors, he claimed no divine authority.