Cnut the Great
Cnut ruled England, Denmark and Norway at once, and is remembered in English for a story about a chair on a beach that means the opposite of what people think. He was a son of Sweyn Forkbeard and a great-grandson of Harald Bluetooth, and he came to England in 1013 with his father's invasion. Sweyn died within weeks of being accepted as king, the English recalled Aethelred, and Cnut was driven out. He came back in 1015 and fought a long campaign against Edmund Ironside that ended at Assandun in 1016 with a partition; Edmund died within weeks and Cnut took everything. He began as a conqueror and governed as an English king. He paid off and dismissed most of his fleet, married Aethelred's widow Emma of Normandy, issued law codes in the English tradition rather than a Danish one, endowed the churches his own army had plundered, and had the remains of Archbishop Alphege - killed by drunken Danes in 1012 - moved to Canterbury with public honour. He also killed or exiled the English nobles he did not trust in the first years, which is the part the church chroniclers were less eager to record. He inherited Denmark in 1018 and took Norway in 1028, holding an empire around the North Sea that depended entirely on him. He went to Rome in 1027 for the imperial coronation and negotiated lower tolls for English and Danish travellers, which is a stranger and more practical achievement than most of his battles. The tide story comes from Huntingdon a century later, and in it he has the chair carried to the water to prove to flattering courtiers that his power is nothing. His sons lost the empire within seven years.
- Lived: 990 CE – 1035 CE
- Nationality: Danish
- Roles: head_of_state, military
