The English paid off the Vikings for almost a century. But was the Danegeld such a bad idea?

When King Æthelred II came to the English throne in 978 CE as a child of around ten, England had enjoyed decades without major Viking attacks.

That respite was short-lived.

News of England’s changed political fortunes swiftly made its way to Scandinavia and within two years the Vikings had returned.

By 991 CE, repeated failures to repel the raiders had convinced the king to adopt a new policy: buying peace, via a payment to the Vikings that came to be known as the Danegeld.

Put simply, Æthelred was trying to pay the Vikings off.

What was the Danegeld and how did it work?

The Danegeld was a kingdom-wide tax imposed on the people of England to raise vast quantities of silver.

It was initially levied on an as-needs basis to purchase peace with the Vikings. In 991 CE, the sum was ₤10,000, which Æthelred paid

for the great terror they occasioned by the sea-coast.

In 1012 CE, the amount had risen to ₤48,000. Over the course of his reign, Æthelred would pay a staggering sum of ₤240,000 in tribute to Viking raiders and mercenaries – all in the hope this would make them go away.

It was such a lot of money

It is difficult to conceptualise this sum in modern terms. In total, this would have equated to around 84 tonnes of silver, equivalent to roughly 58 million pennies.

No other kingdom in contemporary western Europe possessed the fiscal machinery to raise such sums on a repeated basis.

The cumulative Danegeld extracted during Æthelred’s reign exceeds even the highest scholarly estimates for the entire quantity of coins circulating within England at any one time.

These payments have left an enduring archaeological trace. Tens of thousands of Æthelredian coins have been found in Scandinavian hoards, by far the largest volume of extant coins from his reign.

But was it such a bad idea?

The decision of Æthelred and his advisers to pay tribute to the Vikings for peace has often been derided. The writer and poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) famously quipped

that if once you have paid him the Danegeld

you never get rid of the Dane.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a medieval historical record written in Old English) also reflects that

for all this truce and tribute, [the Vikings] journeyed nonetheless in bands everywhere, and harried our wretched people, and plundered and killed them.

Although writing centuries earlier than Kipling, the chronicler still wrote with the benefit of hindsight and in full awareness that the policy of paying tribute had failed to arrest the Viking incursions in Æthelred’s reign.

It’s easy to say now that paying the Vikings to go away “didn’t work”. But this obscures the fact the raiders were not a united force. Paying off one Viking band did not ensure another would stop coming.

And Æthelred was not the first king to pay for peace with the Vikings.

This was a common method by which Frankish kings dealt with the raiders who established themselves along the rivers of France.

In England, King Alfred the Great (King Æthelred II’s great-great-grandfather) had previously paid for peace with the Vikings in the 870s CE.

Alfred, however, benefited from a sympathetic narrative tradition that cast even his defeats in positive terms. And in the end, as one historian put it:

no amount of special pleading can alter the fact that Alfred survived his Viking onslaught whereas Æthelred did not.

Æthelred really did try very hard

Æthelred was not an inactive leader. From 992 CE, there is greater evidence of English resistance through fleets and armies locally and kingdom-wide.

The Danegeld was just one part of wider royal policy responding to the Vikings. In fact, Æthelred invested heavily in England’s defensive capacity but was thwarted in large part by internal political division.

Remarkably, his defensive efforts, especially around ship building, required the levying of yet further taxes. Most notable among these was called the heregeld. It was an annual land levy that is often conflated with the Danegeld.

It was first used to pay Æthelred’s Scandinavian mercenaries before becoming an ongoing means of maintaining the kingdom’s armies and fleets.

The legacy of the Danegeld

King Æthelred II died in 1016 CE in London, besieged by the forces of the Danish prince Cnut, who would succeed him as king of England.

But this was not the end of the Danegeld. Far from abandoning the system, one of Cnut’s first acts as king was to impose a massive Danegeld of ₤82,500, ₤10,500 of which was extracted from London alone. The ongoing maintenance of Cnut’s forces required around an additional ₤14,000 in heregeld each year.

Cnut, it seems, had immediately seen the potential of the administrative structures that had developed to collect the Danegeld and heregeld and decided to exploit them.

Although the Danegeld was raised several more times in the reigns of Cnut and his sons, it was the heregeld model of taxation which had the longest legacy.

Like Cnut, England’s next conqueror, William, also, as one historian puts it:

had straightaway grasped the potential of the economic and organisational resources of the English kingdom.

He immediately brought back a land-based geld, the heregeld having been briefly abolished in 1051 by former King Edward the Confessor (one of King Æthelred II’s sons). William the Conqueror levied this tax every year of his reign.

Although William’s tax resembled that of the heregeld, it came to be known as the Danegeld.

Detached from its original purpose of buying peace from Viking armies, the Danegeld became a regular source of royal revenue inherited and repeatedly exploited by the Norman kings.

Thus, while perhaps a sign of military weakness in its inception, the Danegeld ultimately became one of the foundational elements of an increasingly sophisticated fiscal and military system that survived both Æthelred and the end of the Viking Age.