Was Ethelred really Unready?

The recent royal wedding suddenly conjured in my mind the name "Ethelred the Unready".  He was a king, I knew, and I never knew anything about him, other than the somewhat humorous name.  When I thought about it, I figured he must have been a young man who got on the throne when he was still a bit youthful, i.e. boy king, and thus he would not have been considered ready for the big chair.

Well, I was wrong.

It isn't difficult in this Internet era to find information on topics, and so I did.  Here's the Wikipedia link:

Æthelred the Unready

But here's a quick summary from the Britroyals Web site:

"King of England from 978, following the murder of his half-brother, Edward the Martyr. He was son of King Edgar. Aethelred tried to buy off the Danish raiders by paying Danegeld. In 1002 he ordered the massacre of the Danish settlers, provoking an invasion by Sweyn I of Denmark.In 1013 King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark landed in England and was proclaimed king. Aethelred II the Unready fled to Normandy but was recalled in 1014 on the death of Sweyn. War with Sweyn's son, Canute, occupied the rest of Aethelred's reign. His nickname is a corruption of the Old English 'unreed', meaning badly counselled or poorly advised."

So he wasn't unready.  He just didn't have anyone to tell him the right thing to do.  Killing a lot of Danish settlers was really not a good move.

Actually, the attached moniker is a pun.  Æthelred means "well advised".  unræd, or "unreed" as shown above, looks like "unready".  So his full name and title means "The Well-Advised Who Is Badly Advised".  Ha ha ha.

Oh yeah, he had 9 children and reigned for 38 years, except for that little break when Sweyn Forkbeard took over.  That was an incredibly long time back then. He became king when he was 10 years old (I was right about that!).   Also, he's given credit for the concept of a grand jury.

He was buried in Old St. Paul's Cathedral in London, which was destroyed in the WWII bombing campaign of Germany, and his grave was lost. 

But his name lives on.