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1. Setting the Scene
 England, at the end of the tenth century, was ruled by King Aethelred II. Now commonly described as the Unready (arising from his description at the time as Æthelred Unræd, meaning "no counsel" or "ill advised"), his reign was punctuated by ever-increasing raids upon his territories by the ravaging and pillaging Vikings. Aethelred had no military or diplomatic answer to their raids, so he simply raised a series of taxes, called Danegeld, to pay them off.
These raiding-parties from Scandinavia had been visiting these shores on and off for over 500 years. After a period of relative calm and stability they re-started just two years after Aethelred's accession to the throne and culminated with his defeat by Swein of Denmark and his son Cnut, who took for himself the throne of England in 1016, Denmark in 1018 and Norway in 1028.
| The earliest raiders of this period descended upon England in small companies, which came ashore without warning, and departed before meeting any but local resistance, and they circumnavigated the entire British Isles in their search for booty, visiting in the 980s amongst other places Hampshire, Kent and Cheshire, Devon and Cornwall, and Dorset (see map, Appendix). No part of the coast was safe, and Essex and the Blackwater estuary towns like Maldon were no exception.
In August 991 yet another body of raiders appeared off the English coast, with Olaf Tryggvasson at their head. It was larger than any of the forces which had lately harried the English, possibly (as suggested by my Norwegian authority, Tom Bjornstad, check out his superb Viking site!) greater than 3,000 men, and to some extent it was much more an organised army than a raiding party. Its ravages are important in English financial history, for they compelled the government to raise a particularly heavy tax (danegeld) in order to buy off the invaders.
But the war of 991 would be no more than a dim episode in a monotonous succession of disasters were it not for the great poem which describes the death of Byrhtnoth, ealdorman (the King's representative) of Essex, in a battle against the raiders.
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