Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 55.djvu/209

 king’ (A.-S. Chron. sub. an.). He marched north and returned to his ships. There the Londoners submitted to him and gave him hostages, and Æthelred took shelter in Thorkel's ships which lay at Greenwich. Sweyn ordered that a heavy tribute should be exacted from the people, and that his fleet should be provided for abundantly. He died at Gainsborough on 3 Feb. 1014. By a writer in the Danish interest he is represented as calling his son Canute to him when he felt the approach of death, and, exhorting him to rule well and promote Christianity, to have declared him his successor (Encomium Emmæ, i. c. 5). The English believed that his end was far different; he is said to have specially hated the memory of the martyred king, St. Edmund (841–870) [q. v.], and to have scoffed at his reputation for sanctity. He ordered the clerks of Edmundsbury to pay him a heavy tribute, often threatening that he would destroy their church and put them to death with torments. These threats he repeated at a general assembly that he held at Gainsborough. In the evening of that day, as he was on horseback, surrounded by his army, he beheld St. Edmund advancing towards him in full armour. He shouted for help, saying that the saint was coming to slay him. The saint pierced him with his spear; he fell from his horse, and died that night in torment ( sub an.) He was buried in England; but a proposal having been made to cast his body out, an English lady, who heard of it, embalmed the body and sent it to Denmark, where it was buried in a tomb that he had prepared for himself in the minster of Roskild that he had built (Encomium Emmæ, ii. c. 3;, vii. c. 28).

It is said that the troubles of Sweyn's early life brought him to repentance, and that after his restoration he was active in promoting the spread of Christianity in Denmark and Norway, and that he was assisted by Gotibald from England (whom he made bishop in Scania), by Poppo, Odinkar, and other bishops. In England, however, his Christianity did not keep him from cruelty and treachery. By his wife, the daughter of Miecislav of Poland, he had two sons, Harold being the elder, and Canute (, vii. c. 28), and as Canute is described as the son of Eric's widow, the mother of Olaf (, ii. c. 37, and, p. 25), the German authorities make Eric's widow identical with Miecislav's daughter. She was in Slavonia at the time of Sweyn's death, having, it seems, been discarded by her husband, and she was fetched back to Denmark by her two sons (Encomium Emmæ, i. c. 2). German commentators (see notes to, Encomium Emmæ, and , ed. Pertz) call her Sigrid Storrada, or the Haughty. The sagas, however, say that Sweyn married first Gunhild, the daughter [sister] of Burislaf or Boleslav the Wend, and had by her Harold and Canute, and that on her death he married Sigrid the Haughty, the widow of Eric and mother of Olaf the Swede, and that Sigrid was a Swede by birth, and had been courted by Olaf Tryggvisson and insulted by him (Heimskringla, i. 212–13, 271, 348, transl. Morris; so too the editors of Scriptores Rerum Dan. ii. 205 n., stating that Canute was the son of Gunhild, and not, as Peter Olaus says of Syritha, the mother of Olaf). Amid these conflicting statements it will be well to remember that Thietmar of Merseberg, Adam of Bremen, and the writer of the ‘Encomium Emmæ’ are, so far as they go, the best authorities on the matter. It is unlikely that Sigrid was the daughter or sister of Burislav the Wend, or that she was the mother of Harold and Canute, and it seems certain that she was the mother of Olaf the Swede. Sweyn's daughters were Gytha, wife of Eric, son of Hakon, who became earl of the Northumbrians, and Estrith, wife first of the Danish earl Ulf, by whom she had Sweyn, called Estrithson, king of Denmark, and afterwards wife of Robert, duke of Normandy (Norman Conquest, i. 521–2). To Sweyn and Olaf Tryggvisson is ascribed the beginning of a native Scandinavian coinage, as opposed to Scandinavian coins minted in England. Two silver coins of Sweyn minted in Scandinavia are in existence, the obverse on each clearly being copied from a crux model of Æthelred II; one of them, in common with a coin of Olaf Tryggvisson, bears the name of Godwine as moneyer; this Godwine was no doubt an Englishman, and may have been taken to Scandinavia after the invasion of 994 (, Norges Myntu in Middelalderen, tab. 1; ap. Numismatic Chronicle, 3rd ser. vii. 223 sqq.)

[Adam Brem., Thietmar, Enc. Emmæ (all SS. Rerum Germ. ed. Pertz); Sveno Agg.; Chron. Erici Regis; Chron. Roskild. (all SS. Rerum Danic. ed Langebek); Saxo Gramm, ed. 1644; Will. of Jumièges, ed. Duchesne; Heimskringla (Saga Library); Corpus Poet. Bor. ed. Vigfusson and Powell; Dahlmann's Gesch. von Dännemark, ed. Heeren; Stenstrup's Normannerni; Mallet's Hist. de Dannemarc (3rd edit.); A.-S. Chron. (ed. Plummer); Flor. Wig. (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Will. of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum, Hen. Hunt. (both Rolls Ser.); Freeman's Norm. Conq.] 

SWEYN or SWEGEN (d. 1052), earl, the eldest son of Earl Godwin or Godwine [q. v.] and his wife Gytha, was early in 1043,