Danegeld was an English land tax. Originally, the term Danegeld described the tax raised to pay Danish warriors, or Vikings, not to invade England. The Danegeld sometimes also meant a tax raised to maintain armies to oppose the Danes. The English King Ethelred II (978-1016) paid extraordinary amounts of silver in Danegeld in an effort to save his kingdom from attack. Ethelred also used money from this tax for other purposes. The English people disliked the tax, and King Edward the Confessor abolished it in 1051. After the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the Danegeld was revived and collected as a land tax until 1162. The Norman King William I recorded the collection of Danegeld in the Domesday Book, a survey of the land and principal landholders of his realm.
Prior to the reign of Ethelred, similar taxes had been raised in England, Ireland, and France to ward off the Danes. “The Dane-Geld” (1911) is a famous poem by the British author Rudyard Kipling. Today, danegeld may refer to any type of blackmail payment as the result of a threat. See also Domesday Book; Ethelred II; Extortion; Kipling, Rudyard; Vikings.
