Tom Lambert is Osborn Fellow and College Associate Professor in Early Medieval History at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His early work was on law—his book, Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England was published in 2017—but he has since diversified into social, economic and (very recently) political history. Across all these fields, he is interested the way contemporaries conceptualised their own power structures, and in probing how and why modern historians have sometimes misconstrued them.
The politics of Scandinavian hegemony in England, 1042–1050
An unbroken historiographical consensus holds that, after the death of Harthacnut and accession of Edward in 1042, the English kingdom definitively ceased to be part of the wider Scandinavian hegemony established by Cnut. The claims to England maintained by northern rulers were, it is generally assumed, rejected by the political elite of the newly independent kingdom. Yet Swein Estrithsson’s version of events, committed to writing by Adam of Bremen in the 1070s, was that England continued to recognise Danish suzerainty until a rebellion orchestrated by Earl Godwine’s sons.
On close inspection, this story is less fantastical than has been assumed. The English evidence is consistent with Edward first having been installed as a client ruler by Harthacnut in 1041, and subsequently maintaining diplomatic relations with Swein which would have been hard to distinguish from those of a loyal sub-king. By the mid-1040s this pro-Swein posture had become controversial in England, with Godwine, Swein’s uncle, twice unsuccessful in advocating for sending ships to his nephew’s aid. But it is plausible that, as the Danish king would later maintain, it was the 1049–50 political crisis provoked by the violence of Godwine’s eldest son that led to England’s definitive rejection of Swein’s suzerainty.
The paper argues that, at minimum, a policy of studied ambiguity about the extent to which England accepted Danish overlordship was maintained in the opening years of Edward’s reign. It suggests English elites may have regarded relatively light-touch political subordination as a small price to pay for the peace and security that an unchallenged Scandinavian hegemon could provide.
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