This hasty defence is easy to understand, for it was the resounding victory of King Edmund Ironside over the Viking usurper, Cnut, which made England into the predominant power of medieval Europe. What isn't remembered today is how close this came to not happening. Following his defeat at the Battle of Assandun and the subsequent partition treaty with Cnut in 1016, Edmund narrowly avoided assassination, as well as being afflicted with a mysterious illness. Luckily, neither managed to finish him off, and in 1017 he led a resurgent Wessex into the Second Danelaw. Despite Cnut's desperate scorched earth stratery, the infamous 'harrying of the North,' Edmund finally caught him up and smashed his army at the Battle of Lincoln. Cnut was amongst the thousands of Viking dead.
The effects of this great victory were far reaching. In Scandinavia, the fledgling Viking kingdom created by Cnut's father Swein collapsed back into a series of warring sub-kingdoms. No more would Viking raiders threaten Northern Europe. Nowhere was this respite better felt than in England. Edmund used the relative peace to rebuild the strong state of his grandfather Edgar. By the time of his death in 1033, the power of the English crown was once again the envy of Europe's rulers. Under Edmund's son, Edward III, the Welsh and Scottish kingdoms were once again brought under English control, and by the 1050s were represented on the Witenagemot as part of a 'Kingdom of the Britons.'
Following the subjection of the Viking remnants in Ireland during the late eleventh century, the British kingdom began to expand both politically and economically into the rest of the old Viking world. By 1350 an enormous area, from Scandinavia in the east to the nascent settlements on the shore of the new western continent, from Iceland in the north to Cornwall in the south, English was the language of business, the English penny the currency of choice and the great Anglo-Saxon navy the keeper of the peace. This political and economic expansion was matched by a cultural boom. The tradition which had already produced Bede, Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle flourished with the injection of British, Irish and Scandinavian elements.
In contrast, continental Europe was all but locked out of this emerging northern Confederation. The weak monarchies of France and the Holy Roman Empire prevented them from marshalling their resources in the way that the Anglo-Saxon kings could. Occasionally the two worlds would collide; the attempt by William, the Bastard Duke of Normandy, to seize control of the Confederation, due to the advice of his personal confessor, an English exile called Edward, was a warning to all future invaders. The crushing defeat of the French royal army at the battle of Ayelsford in 1415 ended the Continental threat to the Confederation for good.
For so much to have hinged on one small illness, as any historian will tell you, is absurd. But it could have all been very different.
