Too often dismissed as the unready king - unprepared, ill-advised, and incapable of dealing with the military and political crises that faced the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, not least of which were a series of Viking onslaughts - King Aethelred has gone down in history as an incompetent failure. This new biography redresses the indictment, placing Aethelred into his proper historical context. Central to the study is the authoritarian manner in which the...