Welcome to the British History Podcast. My name is Jamie and this is episode 331.

Athelred. Thoughts and prayers. This show is ad-free due to member support.

And as a way of thanking members, I offer members on the content, including extra episodes and rough transcripts.

And this week on the members feed, we have a shop talk where we discuss the jokes that describes left in the chronicle.

We chase clues about what was going on behind the scenes at Mercya and we finally explain what's been happening with the outro music lately.

And you can get instant access to that episode and all the previous members episodes by signing up for membership at the British History Podcast.com for about the price of latte per month.

And thank you very much to Gregory, Dean and Sophie for signing up already.

King Athelred, for the first time and quite a long time, had a chance for a breather.

And that's because King Swain Forkbeard, having been paid a King's ransom, had withdrawn his forces and made a promise to never return.

Furthermore, the wolf dynasty, which had been a powerhouse in courtly politics ever since the 1990s, was now all but wiped out.

There were a few stragglers here and there, but that Mercy-empower block, which had wielded so much influence over the King for more than a decade, was now gone.

And in their place was the King's new best friend, Edrick Strayona.

The man who had played a critical role in the removal of the wolf dynasty. And so it was a new day for King Athelred.

And it was a whole new world for Edrick Strayona. Or rather, should I say, it was a whole new world for elder men, Edrick Strayona of Mercy-empower.

He'd had a promotion.

And so in many ways, things were back to normal, but even though Athelred and his court were back to business as usual, you know, stabbing rivals in the back, grabbing lands wherever possible, and that sort of thing,

well, they still couldn't ignore the last few decades of abject military failure, because those decades had hit them right where it mattered most.

In their pocketbooks.

Over the years, they've been having to pay to keep the army in the field. They've lost multiple harvest to the raiders.

They've lost God knows how much gold and silver from the looting. And don't even get me started on how expensive it was going to be to rebuild all the infrastructure that was lost from the burning and the pillaging.

And then, to top it off, they had to pay a huge dain-gill to get them to leave.

And that was just Forkbeard's last campaign. This has been happening again and again. But Forkbeard's last campaign had been extremely expensive for the nobility of England.

...