How to Bankrupt a Kingdom: Ethelred the Ill-Advised Pays Vikings to Please Go Away (They Didn't)

On April 23, 1016, the English King Ethelred the Unready—who earned his unfortunate epithet not because he was unprepared, but because his name meant "ill-advised" or "without counsel"—finally died after a catastrophically incompetent reign. The timing was spectacularly inconvenient, as England was in the middle of being conquered by the Danish King Cnut (Canute). What makes this particularly delicious is that Ethelred had spent decades paying enormous amounts of silver—the infamous Danegeld—to Vikings in the hopes they'd simply go away. Spoiler: they didn't. Instead, they took note of what a pushover he was and came back with friends. By the time of his death, Ethelred had paid out approximately 240,000 pounds of silver, which was roughly equivalent to England's entire monetary supply at the time. His son Edmund Ironside inherited what was left of the kingdom, which by this point was approximately half of England, the other half already firmly in Cnut's grip. Edmund, whose nickname suggests he was considerably more competent than his father, would spend the next seven months fighting Cnut to a standstill before they agreed to split the kingdom. Then Edmund conveniently died in November—possibly murdered—and Cnut got the whole thing anyway. The moral of the story: if you're going to be named "Ill-Advised," try not to live up to it quite so enthusiastically. This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI.