Long Serpent, Trygvasson’s flagship, ended up riven, boarded and cleared of her men. Trygvasson himself, adorned in golden armour and a bright-red cloak, leapt from the clawing fingers of his enemies into the sea; and when they made an attempt to rescue him, “he threw his shield over his head, and vanished beneath the waves.”63 His triumph was to have died as he had lived, the very model of a Viking hero; but Forkbeard’s was to have secured for himself power beyond the dreams of all his forebears.And this was the man whom Ethelred, by giving orders for the massacre of St. Brice’s Day, had thought to intimidate. Perhaps, against a foe of a different order, his murderous calculation might have paid off; but the Danish king was not just any foe. Among the victims of the pogrom, it was said, had been one of Forkbeard’s own sisters, the Lady Gunnhild, but the murder of even the least of his subjects would have been sufficient to sanction a blood feud. The onslaught unleashed against Ethelred the following year duly aimed to pile humiliation upon humiliation. Symbols of the authority of the House of Wessex were ruthlessly targeted. At Exeter, where King Athelstan had enshrined his dynasty’s spear of power, only the courage of a quick-thinking monk enabled the priceless relic to be rescued from the Danish firestorm. At Wilton, site of the richest and most splendid nunnery in Wessex, where numerous members of the royal family lay buried – pre-eminent among them Ethelred’s own half-sister, Edith, recently proclaimed a saint – all the lands around the holy enclosure were systematically torched.For the Danish captains, no doubt, it must have been a gloriously satisfying experience to burn and loot, and menace an enemy’s women, just as their ancestors had always done: a reassurance that the old ways still endured. Forkbeard, however, even as he dispatched his war bands to plunder England, had his eyes fixed on a more novel order of things. No less than his father and Trygvasson had been, he was keenly alert to the many advantages that might be reaped by a Christian king. Concerned to show that he took the role seriously, he had duly founded the odd town, installed the odd bishop, even struck the odd coin. When it came to more gruelling responsibilities, however, such as forging a state capable of fleecing his subjects efficiently and of providing him with regular taxes, his enthusiasm had tended to flag. As well it might have done. It was easier by far to menace England, and outsource the whole tedious business to Ethelred. Which is precisely what Forkbeard did.And with such merciless and brutal efficiency that the English king found his own strategy, that of using his wealth to sow discord among his foes, turned back fatally against him. As year followed year, and still the Danes returned, each time with forces bigger, better equipped and more devastating than before, so the bonds of loyalty to Ethelred within England began at last to fray. All the formidable powers of the West Saxon monarchy, built up by generations of the Cerdicingas before him, appeared increasingly to the English to be serving, not their own interests, but those of their oppressors. It was as though Ethelred himself – the heir of Alfred, of Athelstan, of Edgar – had become merely a thrall-like servant of the interests of the Danish king. As royal agents continued with remorseless efficiency their business of levying taxes to fund their master’s strategy, and the mints continued to churn, so it struck many among the English that what they were being obliged to pay for was nothing less than their own ruin.Then at last, in 1012, there was a seeming success. Just as Olaf Trygvasson, almost twenty years before, had been won over to Ethelred’s side, so now was another celebrated Viking captain, Thorkell, together with forty-five of his ships, persuaded to enter the service of the English king: a hint, perhaps, of dawn. Yet this brief moment of hope was in truth to prove a portent of the very opposite, an onset of the blackest night – for the news, when it was brought to Forkbeard in Denmark, stirred him into preparing something more than merely another raid. As with Trygvasson, so with Ethelred: the Danish king had been playing a lengthy game. England, drained as she was of her lifeblood, now appeared ripe for decapitation. In 1013, Forkbeard landed south of York, where Danish settlement had always been at its densest, and received the immediate submission of the region’s immigrant communities. Nor did it take long for the exhausted and battle-scarred English aristocracy to bow to the inevitable as well. Across England, terms duly began to be arranged; hostages handed over; homage offered up to Forkbeard. By the end of the year, even Ethelred was buckling. Boxed up in London, his last stronghold, he ordered the Lady Emma and their children to board a ship and embark across the wintry seas for exile, while he himself set sail to spend a miserable Christmas skulking off the Wessex coast. Then, disdaining to play the part of a Viking any longer, he too crossed the Channel. His destination: the court of his brother-in-law, the Duke of Normandy. This final humiliation set the seal on all the others.Peace – if of a brutal kind – had been brought to England at last. But it was not to endure. In February 1014, at the very height of his triumph, Forkbeard died. The English earls and bishops, already repenting of their submission to a barbarian, at once invited Ethelred to return; “for they said that no sovereign was dearer to them than their natural lord – if only he would govern them better than he had previously done.”64 Evidently, the line of Cerdic still retained something of its mystique; but it was too late now for Ethelred to burnish it. Prostrated by illness, his only consistent policy upon his return was to haunt his sickbed; in 1016, at last, he slipped into the grave. His subjects barely noticed. Already, the battle for the rule of England had moved on to a younger generation. Even before Ethelred’s death, his eldest surviving son, Edmund, a warrior of such charismatic fortitude that he would come to be hailed as “Ironside,” had laid claim to the throne. But he was not alone in his ambition: for Forkbeard too had left a son.“Only a boy, you ship-batterer, when you launched your boat, no king was younger than you,”65 wrote one praise-singer of the precociously terrifying Canute. Already, even before landing in England to press his right to the kingdom, the young prince had shown himself practised in the grimmer arts of Viking lordship, mutilating the hostages left in his care by Forkbeard and then sending them back to their relatives, the great lords in their high-beamed halls, to serve as a gruesome warning of the folly of resistance. Sure enough, in the stumps where once the hostages’ hands had been, and in their noseless faces, and in the cropped remains of their ears, the English had indeed been granted fair warning of the horrors soon to come. Ironsided Edmund may have been – but Canute was forged of ice. All the summer of 1016, the two men fought each other; until ultimately, with the pair of them brought to a bloody standstill, there seemed no possible resolution to the conflict, save to divide the kingdom in two. A month after the treaty had been signed, however, Edmund died: the last king of purely English stock ever to sit on the country’s throne. Naturally, men suspected murder – as well they might have done.Canute had gambled much on his attempt to win his prize – and now it was payback time. Many warriors had followed him across the northern seas, “men of metal, menacing with golden face”66 – and their captain, just like any other, needed to be a scatterer of treasure, or nothing at all. In Canute, the larcenous instincts that had long propelled generations of Northmen across the seas were set to attain their apotheosis – for he had his sword at the throat of an entire kingdom. Already, over the course of the unfortunate Ethelred’s reign, ton upon ton of silver had been delivered into the hands of the Danes. Now, with all the honed apparatus of English governance directly in his own hands, there was nothing to stop Canute from imposing a truly swingeing tax. Which was what he duly did: at a rate, in effect, of 100 per cent. It took his agents months to screw out; but by the end of 1018, the kingdom’s entire income for that year had vanished into his treasure chests.Perhaps, then, many among the English must have wondered, this was how the world was to end: with a tax demand. Even the man who was now Archbishop of York, the brilliant and devoutly orthodox Wulfstan, openly warned that the Danes might prove the shock troops of Antichrist. Already, summoning the English to prepare themselves for the Day of Judgement, he had advocated barefoot displays of penance, the singing of psalms and public prayer; and in 1014, during the dark days that followed Forkbeard’s conquest of the kingdom, he had flatly declared the end time imminent. “For nothing has prospered now for a long while either at home or abroad, but there has been military devastation and hunger, burning and bloodshed.”67 Even pagans, however, as they observed the state of the world, might on occasion fall to pondering what its fracturing portended. One did not have to be a Christian to be conscious of Christian dates. Was it merely coincidence, for instance, that Thorgeir, summoning the Icelanders to decide whether they should abandon their ancient gods, had chosen to do so in the year 1000? What prospect, if the end were indeed approaching, that any of the heathen gods, even Odin himself, could hope to keep it at bay? Despite the triumph of the Danes in the killing fields of England, many Northmen, suspended between their new faith and their ancient beliefs, were not immune to the anxieties of Wulfstan. “Kin,” wrote one of them, in dread of the end days, “will break the bonds of kin”:A harsh world it will be, whoredom rampant,