Unfit and Unready
An idiot king in the Middle Ages, and his passel of venal advisors shat history's bed. Can we please not let this happen again?
If you absolutely insist on being a Medieval English king, try being Alfred the Great, not Ethelred the Unready. Any monarch, whom historians saddle with an embarrassing nickname wears a '“kick me” sign for the rest of recorded history. Most often history’s nickname is just a dumb joke on your physical appearance:, as was true Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the Fat. Charles the Fat’s predecessor, Charles the Bald, came in for less body shaming, and was in fact famously hairy, so his nickname was like calling me “shorty” because I’m tall, something only about eleven quintillion people have ever done.
But…unready?
But what’s up with the nickname,“unready?” And why pin it on somebody already saddled with “Ethelred?” Did he keep the Medieval Über driver waiting just once too often? Did he always file for an extension on tax day? Did dinner guests know to drive around the block several times before ringing the bell? What made Aethelred so darn unready?
Well, turns out Ethelred wasn’t slow getting out the door, or bad with deadlines. He just followed bad advice. In Old English, “rede” meant “speech” or “advice,” as it still does in German. The speech and advice young Ethelred heard and followed, was almost uniformly crappy. As Wikipedia informs us,
His epithet comes from the Old English word unræd meaning "poorly advised"; it is a pun on his name, which means "well advised".
A tasting menu of bad counsel
If you want just a sample of the kind of advice young Ethelred got from his advisers, it contained gems of political wisdom like,“pay the Vikings protection money so they won’t raid England quite so often,” and later, when the Vikings reneged on that deal, “pay them some more and hope for the best.” When Ethelred’s advisers realized that the Danish Vikings were using the English Treasury like an ATM machine in between raids, they knew just how to fix things. And by ‘fix things,” I mean “turn this bad investment into a monstrous fuckup for the ages.”
Mass murder: is it ever not a good idea?
Their idea was simplicity itself. Forget about the bloodthirsty and avaricious Viking raiders. Instead, target the Anglicized Danes minding their own business in England’s “Danelaw” settlements. When Ethelred’s brain trust was formulating this cunning plan, the fact that its intended victims were well-assimilated and highly innocent Danes who had been living in England for generations, probably seemed like an upside. After all, It’s always easier to slander and persecute harmless fellow citizens than actual baddies, because the imaginary ‘enemies within’ haven’t done anything to deserve it, so they won’t see it coming. Thus the local, harmless Danes, whose only offense was having menfolk with better hygiene, nicer grooming and altogether more sex appeal than Anglo Saxon incels, got murdered in their thousands.
History’s verdict: “um…you did what?”
Today’s better class of historians don’t like to use prejudicial language, but even they call the resulting slaughter, “The St. Brice’s Day Massacre.” And the Dane raiders from actual Denmark? How did they take this cold blooded murder of their expat cousins? If you guessed, “not at all well,” congratulations. You’ve got much more political savvy than Ethelred or his clown car of advisers.
So yes, the upshot of all this bad advice and stupidity was exactly as shitshow-adjacent as you might expect: more Viking raids, costly wars and ultimately, exile for Bad King Ethelred. That’s the price of having a dumb leader who takes bad advice from awful people. It’s hard enough to avoid terrible outcomes when you are a fairly decent human being-type leader doing fairly decent human things with the best knowledge available. But evil dipshits take the wheel, with other evil dipshits to advise them, watch out. That’s why it’s soooo much better to elect a leader who, for all their human imperfection, is not an actual evil dipshit surrounded and counseled by others of their kind. Thus, history’s moral is obvious:
Vote for Kamala!
Again: Vote for Kamala, because Donald Trump is an evil dipshit who takes crappy advice from people as bad as he is. And that never, ever ends well.
This is great! Thanks for including the real background on the word so that it translates to "ill-advised."
Your post made me think of the Kipling poem about Dane-geld and the famous lines:
"And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane."
He also murdered his brother ( well, brother died in suspicious circumstances) suspicious enough that the king felt compelled to make a large grant of land to the church,which became Barton Abbey in Wiltshire. Original granary still standing , with much larger one built several centuries later. Since I knew about Aethelred and his chronic un-redeness, I was thrilled to visit. Didn’t know abut Danelaw fiasco tho.
Some things never change