Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Scandinavian Britain - II. The Danelaw - 5. Svein and Knút - 6. The Downfall of the Danelaw
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Viking ruler as his father had been the reverse.
Soured by ill-health and the spoilt child of an ambitious
and often disappointed mother, king of Denmark in
his "teens" and king of England also at twenty or
twenty-one, he spent his short reign in exactions,
quarrels and violent revenges, and died suddenly, as
every schoolboy reads, after drinking at a wedding-feast
in Lambeth, 1042. His half-brother Eadward the
Confessor reigned in his stead.
6. The Downfall of the Danelaw.
Eadward’s reign was disturbed throughout by a
struggle between the Anglo-Scandinavians and the
Franco-Scandinavians. The king, half Norman by
birth and wholly Norman by training, failed only by
want of energy to make England as Norman as
himself. On the other side were not merely the
Danish and Norse populations of the Danelaw, but
the family of Godwine, by Knút’s favour ruler of
Southern England and the husband of the Danish
lady Gyda, sister to jarl Ulf. Ulf had married Knút’s
sister Astrid ; their son Svein, nephew by marriage to
Godwine, was heir to the throne of Svein Forkbeard.
It was only by the promise of succession at Eadward’s
death that he was induced to forego his claim upon
England and content himself with the endeavour to
win Denmark, an endeavour in which he succeeded.
His brother Björn became earl of Wessex ; Godwine’s
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