When King Æthelred II came to the English throne in 978 CE as a child of around ten, England had enjoyed decades without major Viking attacks.

That respite was short-lived.

News of England’s changed political fortunes swiftly made its way to Scandinavia and within two years the Vikings had returned.

By 991 CE, repeated failures to repel the raiders had convinced the king to adopt a new policy: buying peace, via a payment to the Vikings that came to be known as the Danegeld.

Put simply, Æthelred was trying to pay the Vikings off.

What was the Danegeld and how did it work?

The Danegeld was a kingdom-wide tax imposed on the people of England to raise vast quantities of silver.

It was initially levied on an as-needs basis to purchase peace with the Vikings. In 991 CE, the sum was ₤10,000, which Æthelred paid

for the great terror they occasioned by the sea-coast.

for the great terror they occasioned by the sea-coast.

In 1012 CE, the amount had risen to ₤48,000. Over the course of his reign, Æthelred would pay a staggering sum of ₤240,000 in tribute to Viking raiders and mercenaries – all in the hope this would make them go away.

It was such a lot of money

It is difficult to conceptualise this sum in modern terms. In total, this would have equated to around 84 tonnes of silver, equivalent to roughly 58 million pennies.

No other kingdom in contemporary western Europe possessed the fiscal machinery to raise such sums on a repeated basis.

The cumulative Danegeld extracted during Æthelred’s reign exceeds even the highest scholarly estimates for the entire........

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