Was Aethelred Really That Unready?

Aethelred only partly-deserves his bad rap in the history books.  His military actions are generally condemned, but even at that, he had a harder road than most other kings.  The Danish invaders were more formidable in the late 900s than even the Great Heathen Army of 865.  Aethelred bought them off for much of his reign, but did choose to fight them in ineffective ways intermittently. Buying them off was probably the best strategy most of the time - history teaches that wars are always more expensive than we pretend when we go in - but in retrospect historians thought this only encouraged the Danes to look at England as a renewable resource for raiding.  Better, they thought, to have defended fiercely at some earlier times. Yet he turned the tide a bit by hiring some Danes to protect England against other Vikings. While this is always a risky strategy, it can work for a long time.

So easy to say in retrospect. The disastrous Battle of Maldon was under Aethelred and considered partly his fault, but as the poem commemorates, the decisions of others were the problem.  It is one thing to say later if we were going to fight so arrogantly and stupidly it would have been better to buy them off this time as well, had the English fought and won then the subsequent raiding would probably have been different.  In that context, the execution of many already-settled Danes was a second disaster, because it gave the invaders reasons for revenge in addition to loot. None of it worked out, and it is agreed that he was not a good judge of character and chose terrible advisors.  This was ironic given that his name Aethel-red means "nobly-advised." 

Yet that is the real meaning of "Unready" at the time. It meant poorly-advised.  (Those who took German or know a bit of its history will recognise Rathaus as "advice-house" or town hall.) When he wasn't supporting the various nobles who were out for themselves rather than for him or for England, he did reasonably well. Despite the attacks and hemorrhaging money the institutions of government, not created by him but still new and potentially insecure, continued to function so that trade, law, the Church, and agriculture held up through it all.  More recent scholarship has tried to describe how exactly Aethelred accomplished this, but it is first noted that the whole thing might have collapsed but it didn't.  He must have done more than a few things right. Then, as now, people take for granted that life goes on and has some day-to-day predictability. But survival and success are never guaranteed. The take wisdom and effort to remain in place.