In September 1015, the Danish prince Cnut led a Scandinavian fleet of 200 longships, carrying an army of some 10,000 men, into Sandwich before sailing around Kent and westward to Wessex. Arriving at the mouth of the River Frome, Cnut's forces moved inland and began ravaging Dorset alongside Wiltshire and Somerset, opening a campaign of a ferocity that contemporaries compared to the worst depredations of the Viking age of Alfred the Great. The invasion came at a moment of profound English weakness: King Æthelred was gravely ill and residing at Cosham, entirely unable to lead a defence, while the English nobility was fractured by treachery and internal conflict following the murders of the thegns Sigeferth and Morcar at the Oxford council earlier that year.
The Peterborough Chronicle manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Cnut came into Sandwich early in September 1015 and straightway sailed around Kent to Wessex, reaching the mouth of the Frome before the harrying of Dorset, Wiltshire, and Somerset began. Although Eadric Streona, Ealdorman of Mercia, and the prince Edmund each raised separate armies to oppose the invaders, the two forces never acted in concert. Eadric's attempt to assassinate Edmund caused the armies to separate, and Eadric subsequently betrayed the English cause entirely, persuading 40 ships of the royal fleet to defect to Cnut. The Scandinavian army meanwhile continued to gather hostages and win over members of the English nobility, steadily consolidating its grip on the south.
By late December 1015 Wessex was considered subdued, and Cnut's army crossed the Thames at Cricklade to carry the war north into Mercia, pillaging and burning Warwickshire. The ravaging of Dorset thus formed the opening blow of a sustained campaign that would culminate in Cnut winning the throne of all England in 1016. Edmund's repeated attempts to raise and hold together an English army failed in part because the Mercians under his command refused to engage the Danes without King Æthelred and the Londoners present, leaving the southern shires exposed and the strategic initiative firmly in Cnut's hands.
Queen Emma's Encomium, composed in praise of Cnut, preserves a vivid portrait of the fleet that descended on Dorset: shields of every kind crowded the ships, gold gleamed on the prows, silver flashed on the variously shaped hulls, and carved lions and bulls with gilded horns threatened death from the bows. The encomiast boasted that no slave, no freed man, no low-born or aged man sailed with that host, but only nobles of mature strength fit for any kind of fighting, so fleet on their feet that they scorned the speed of horsemen. Whatever allowance must be made for courtly flattery, this is the force whose arrival at the mouth of the Frome inaugurated the harrying of Dorset in the autumn of 1015.
not recorded
Cnut's Scandinavian army: approximately 10,000 men in 200 longships. English forces: not recorded in detail; Æthelred was unable to lead and armies raised by Edmund and Eadric Streona failed to combine effectively.
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