After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Bloodiest Anglo Saxon Royal Murders

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

When the Romans left Britain in the 5th century, what happened next?The following centuries saw a messy and bloody struggle for power that left us with some gruesome royal murders.Taking us through the bloody details is medieval expert and co-host of our sister podcast, Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis.This episode was edited by Anna Brant. Produced by Stuart Beckwith and McKenna Fernandez. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Looking for more shady and sinister stories, sign up to History Hit. You can join us to explore the tragic life of the Bronties or discover the chilling story of Burke and Hair. Plus, with your History Hit subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe to start exploring the past. The year is 946 and King Edmund I first of England has been murdered at the dinner table. Blood gushes from his wounds, men grapple across the mead hole as blades are drawn, cups crash to the floor and a royal feast descends into slaughter. But King Edmund's shocking murder at the age of only 25 is one killing in a world of bitter feuds, massacres and murdered monarchs. In an era of warring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, no one is safe, least of all, the king.

In today's episode, we're going to be investigating some of the most gruesome and impactful murders of this period. These deaths ended dynasties, whole royal bloodlines, started and ended wars and forever changed the course of history. From the chaos of Anglo-Saxon England, welcome to After Dark. Hello everyone and welcome to After Dark, I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. In today's episode, we're going to be exploring some of... the most significant murders of the Anglo-Saxon period, and there were many. So buckle up.

England as the Kingdom began roughly in the 10th century, and it's fair to say that it was an extremely volatile and violent place. Joining us to take us through some of these murders is the co-host of our sister podcast Gone Medieval. Drum roll, please. It's Matt Lewis. Hello. That went a bit game show vibes there.

Medieval game show. We will be playing medieval murders. And the prize you'll win is to survive. Medieval murders, no, I would definitely lose. Come here to me, this is one of the things where we were talking earlier about the medieval period. And when you're an expert in medieval time period, it's a big old span. And, you know, we talk about the long 18th century and stuff, but it's still only 120 odd years, whereas you guys go across centuries. You've got to know a lot of stuff in this time period, Mark.

So where does the Anglo-Saxon fit into the medieval? We try and claim at least a millennium. I'll give it to you. I try and fight Tristan. It makes my job easier. The Anglo-Saxon period sits after the evacuation of Britain by the Roman Empire, so they kind of leave, culminating kind of 4-10. They begin to withdraw military protection for Roman citizens in Britain.

And that creates a huge vacuum of power. And from around about 450, we think, onwards, we get the arrival of tribes who are called the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. The poor Jutes never get a look in, do they? They completely get lost in all of this, but there's very definitely significant numbers of Angles, Saxons and Jutes coming over.

And they're coming from what today is Northern Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, places like that. What we're not clear about is precisely why they come. Do they see somewhere that is vulnerable because the Roman Empire has left and think, looks like a great place to attack, let's give it a go?

There is also some hint that they're coming over as paid mercenaries. Are these mercenaries that we're paid for by the Britons, the Romani British that are left behind? I think there's a sense that the Britons are feeling like they need some kind of protection, that things are getting a little bit chaotic, and we need some muscle to come in and help look after us, help to defend territories, because what does it mean when Rome no longer rules the whole of Britain? It's fragmenting, it's breaking up everywhere. You've got to try and cling on to something.

And there's some sense that they're talking to the Angles, Saxons and the Duke saying, you know, if we pay you, can you come over? And they're like, yeah, absolutely fine. Once they get here, they're like, oh, this might be a little bit more interesting than we thought it was. The weather is tropical. Everything is wonderful. And I always think that's a really interesting moment. And I'm sure historians of this specific time would probably say that is, you know,

that's like calling the medieval period the Dark Ages or something. But just in terms of how sort of strange and ghostly that landscape must have been when the Romans removed themselves. And we know that, for example, like the Anglo-Saxons built their, towns often next to Roman ruined cities or towns not inside and they didn't make use of the Roman buildings and they just sort of were allowed to crumble away and I just think there's something kind of quite uncanny about that time. I mean I'm sure that's maybe a little bit of a sort of 18th centuryist kind of romantic view of it. It is interesting because the part of the problem is no one but the Romans really knows how to build in stone. So stone buildings are of limited

use to if you don't know how to maintain them and keep them together. But think of like the mosaics and the underfloor heating, wouldn't you be like, I want to live here? That's part of the reason they get preserved so well in Britain is that people don't use them so much anymore. But also you will then see later on, so the Anglo-Saxon period ends 1066 with the arrival of the Normans. And the Normans, you see very much trying to plug themselves into that Roman heritage to plant themselves in those old stone buildings wherever they go and associate themselves with an older world than the Anglo-Saxons. Do you know, I didn't know. That's so fascinating that their whole.

harking back to that. I'm always interested in this across history when people at various points in history heart back to earlier periods. I mean, Yorkminster is a great example that I'm going to talk about because I was there fairly recently. But Yorkminster, the crypt at York Minster is above ground. And the reason it's above ground is because there is a Roman fortification underneath it and the Normans didn't want to destroy that and break that up. So they completely redesigned York Minster and made it higher so that they could have an above ground crypt, build it on that Roman footprint and maintain it and keep it

and that's them saying we are the heirs to the Romans. So that's a long way of saying that Anglo-Saxon England is about 450 till 1066. Sorry, I made that much longer than it needs to be. You mentioned that under the Romans

Britannia is this unified in averted commas I mean, it's debatable but it's in terms of on the map and in terms of the Roman imagination it's a unified space obviously with the Anglo-Saxons that utterly disintegrates and then you get these different kingdoms building up. So we've got Wessex, we've got Mercia, we've got Northumbria.

How important are these individual and shifting boundaries in terms of defining this period, how people see their own identities, how they're motivated to murder potentially other people? It's vital because everybody is grasping at power. So we quite often think about Anglo-Saxon England in terms of the heptarchy, so those seven kind of big kingdoms. But that's after a long period of distillation. Each one of those kingdoms begins as like 20 smaller places where warlords are emerging and whatever lands you can take is yours.

And you fall out with neighbours, you fight with neighbours, you make alliances with neighbours to build and grow that kingdom. So Wessex starts off as a huge collection of fragmentary kingdom. and is eventually smashed together until you get one king who is strong enough to control that whole area and begin to call it Wessex.

Northumbria up in the northeast is a really great example of this. So for most of this period, Northumbria is two kingdoms that are quite often conquered by each other, sometimes ruled by the same king, but also very, very happy to separate again and go back to being ruled by two different kings.

So no boundaries are settled during this whole period. And a nightmare period, if you're just a peasant in a field who just wants to plow his field and just get on with life and not get hacked to death by a sword and you've got to keep remembering who's in power and what's going on. Obviously you've got as well the – I mean, we have the introduction of Christianity with the Romans,

but this is the Anglosian period. Obviously is bringing people, as you say, from northern Germany, from Denmark. But Christianity does quite quickly establish itself? It does. So we do see a moment when Rome evacuates, they essentially take the official religion of Christianity with them. The difficult thing for us is always to see what everyday ordinary people's

religious worship looked like. The Romans told them they were Christian. Does that mean they've abandoned everything they've ever believed before? But even the Romans would be Christian, but then also have like household gods and little shrines and stuff right. Like even they honour, as you say,

on the ground, boots on the ground level. Yeah. We can't exactly know. It's quite often Christian light. It's not necessarily as monotheistic as we always want to think of it. It's a sort of pick-a-mix situation. Yeah. And the.

Angles Saxon and Dukes come from that area of northern Europe that is still pagan. So they are worshipping that much broader pantheon of gods that will include people like Woden and Thor and all of those kinds of figures. And so, again, it's hard to say whether the whole of Britain reverts to some pagan religion because there's a new elite arriving who are imposing themselves. But we do then begin to see, so if the Anglo-Saxons, Angles, Saxons and Dutes are arriving, say, right 4.50, We do begin to see Christianity arriving by the end of the 6th century. So 597, you've got St Augustine's mission to England. He's sent by Pope Gregory the Great to preach Christianity to England. Very quickly gets a convert in the form of Ethelbert, the King of Kent,

who marries a Frankish wife, Bertha, and the Franks are Christian by this point. So she is influencing her husband towards Christianity. St. Augustine plays along with it as well. And we also have the force coming from the west and the north of Celtic Christianity, which has never kind of abandoned Ireland in the northwest of Scotland. And they're largely based at Iona and they begin to send missions into the north of Scotland and the north of England too. So in 635, those are beginning and you get Edwin, who is a king of Northumbria in the northeast, adopting Celtic Christianity because of the influence of Iona up there.

Later on you'll get a Northumbrian king, Oswald, who adopts Roman Christianity because of the influence of his wife, who comes from a Roman Christian kingdom in the sacred of England. What I'm hearing is women are really important in the society in terms of the belief systems and bringing their own sort of cultures with them. Yeah, hugely, hugely. It seems to be an awful lot of these alliances are made between kingdoms that involve a marriage. And it's a Christian queen coming who is influencing her husband to adopt that religion. And that, I guess, is the big difference and perhaps part of the success of Christian. from paganism. Similar to in Roman times, you've got this pantheon of gods. Well, you can accept one more God into that pantheon.

But once Christianity is in there as a monotheistic religion, it's trying to push everybody else out. So you can agree to accept Christianity, even if you're a pagan, feeling like it won't mean anything. But once it's in there, it can begin to push everything else away. So we're starting to build up this picture of the ruling forces that are coming into place that are shaping this. society and we've looked at the people that are in charge, we've looked at now the moral

compasses. We have an idea that this period of time is a specifically or an especially violent time. Do you think that's warranted or are we imposing something on the medieval past there? It's really hard to be certain. I feel like we tend to overach the amount of violence that's got, the sense that you couldn't walk down the street without getting beaten up. This time period on screen, for example, is bloody. Yeah, absolutely. Undoubtedly, on a large scale, there is this fight to expand kingdoms. There are war bands marching around fighting each other. Does that necessarily mean that your normal peasants in the field who are just trying to grow their crops are stabbing each other as well?

Absolutely, probably not. That's not happening. So violence is prevalent, but it isn't necessarily endemic. It doesn't affect everybody on an everyday level. And part of the reason that we can be fairly certain that that's true is because there are very strict law codes around at this time that regulate the behaviour of people. This isn't some kind of chaotic, lawless, anarchic society. There is very clear structures and the Anglo-Saxon legal codes, I find them absolutely fascinating. They tend to rely on a sense of collective responsibility that the community is responsible for the behaviour of its members and the community is responsible for punitive. breaches of the rules. And if they don't, the community can be punished as a whole for that too.

That's so interesting. I suppose as well in a society that's kind of building itself up in terms of, you know, that formation of where does the boundary lie in this kingdom, what kind of people are we going to be, what's going to distinguish us from our neighbours down the road or in the neighbouring kingdom, that there's a sense of kind of collective investment, even though there's obviously hierarchy in this world, there are kings and there are noblemen and all the rest of it. But there's a kind of a sense that everyone, is responsible? I think that's really fascinating. Everyone is grouped into, so in Anglo-Saxon, England, your parcel of land is called a hide. And that's not a fixed measure of land. It's however much land it takes to feed a family. What if you have a really hungry family? Like me.

In areas of good land, it's smaller. In areas of not such good farmland, you might have a larger parcel. These hides are gathered together into hundreds, so hundred members, 100 hides make a hundred. You can still see lots of hundred houses around places today. well, that's where the community used to meet to govern itself. And ultimately the Shire Reve, which is the forerun of the sheriff, which is responsible for royal authority in the Shires. So if, for example, you and I, Maddie were to get together and kill Anthony.

Which is highly likely. For some reason. He's given up. You've just capitulated instantly. I have no fight left. But if something like that were to happen, the sheriff would come and say, who did it? And the community would be tasked with inquiring. They would lead the investigation and they would present the sheriff with the person who had committed that murder.

In this case, we are on camera, so it would be quite easy to see who did it. But it does also mean that you could choose as a community to protect the person that committed that murder. Because if you don't find who it was and give them over to the sheriff, the whole community pays a fine, and then the matter is done. So you could decide. If there's a wrong and around, and I'm not saying Anthony's a wrong one. if there's a wrong and around and the community wanted rid of them. Okay, so it's a kind of admirable system until it's not because it's open to all kinds of community-based interpretation of what is moral

and if someone needs to go from that community, they can be gone. But to the medieval mind, justice was often about your social status. So lots of medieval punishments aren't physically cruel. They tend to be about embarrassing you. So put you in the stocks or the pillory or something like that or make you do penance. in the street is about embarrassing you in front of all your neighbours. Yeah. Because that was deemed worse than getting whipped a little bit or something like that.

The lowering of your social status, the lowering of everyone's opinion of you was far more serious than that. Yeah, the loss of your position in that hierarchy. How militarised was this society? Are we obviously, you know, you talk about sort of war bands and there is fighting going on even if that, you know, our version of this kind of hyper-violent world isn't really sustainable, practical in reality. Were people, were their sort of local militia training to protect themselves in this period? Could most people handle a weapon, or is that a sort of Hollywood version? I think everyone carries a knife during the medieval period because that's what you eat with. So everyone has a knife on their belt at all times.

Oh, so it's kind of like having a knife and fork hanging from your clothes today. Yeah. Okay. everybody carries a knife in medieval times. Not everyone has a sword. Sword is a weapon of status. They cost an awful lot of money. So if we look at a lot of Anglo-Saxon horde,

Staffordshire Horde, for example, has a whole load of sword hilts in it that have been collected by somebody else because they're valuable and important. And the suggestion is that the swords that they've come off are being stripped of what makes them valuable and makes them stand out and perhaps recycled amongst the men.

So the leader of an army is issuing swords to his men because not everybody can afford to have a valuable sword lying around all of the time. The idea that medieval households have them above the fire, so when you attack you can just go and get the sword. Not a thing. If a warlord wants to go to war, part of his demonstration

of his status is how many people can I give a sword to? The Staffordshire Horde has something like 120-something sword hilts in it. So this is plunder that someone has taken from all over the place, and for context, you know, Sutton Hu has one sword hilt in it. So this is someone who was probably a fairly successful war leader. I mean, that's very interesting, isn't it?

Because the other thing that the Anglo-Saxons do to garner loyalty in support is to give rings out, right? And so there's an inherent, but also potentially sort of spiritual power in metal work and the sort of the bond that it creates between you. And I like that idea of taking a sword help because it is valuable and it makes the sword important, but also maybe there's a sort of inherent power in it in terms of collecting it. I didn't know that about the stuff at your heart.

That's so interesting. Okay, so not everyone has a sword. What about boz and arrows, spears, axes? Are those normal household items? They are, to some extent. Bosen arrows are used for hunting and axes used for chopping all of your wood and things like that. And throughout the medieval period, you quite often see battlefield weapons that bear a remarkable resemblance to farm tools and everyday items. So in the Anglo-Saxon period, people fight a lot with axes.

The Vikings are particularly famous for fighting with axes, but the Anglo-Saxons do as well. because it's an everyday item that you know the weight of in your hand. You don't need special training in how to use it. You're using that seven days a week to chop wood. Yeah. It feels comfortable. Therefore, if you've got to do this thing that's really scary and uncomfortable, you might be able to make it a little bit easier by knowing the weight of that thing in your hand.

And you will quite often find simple farm tools that are used for getting apples down for trees are just stuck on a longer pole. Because you know what that feels like in your hand. You mentioned the Vikings there. And I think it's interesting to put these two things side by side, the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings, and see how that interaction is going. What is that coexistence, if you can call it, coexistence like? It doesn't begin as coexistence at all.

So the first encounter that the English appear to have with the Vikings comes in 789 at Portland in Devon. So ship is sighted on the sea. The royal officials come down to welcome them. Story words makes me cringe. Would you like me to take you to the king so that you can see him and the Vikings jump off the ship and kill them all? And that's the first introduction of the English. It's so unfortunate to be the first people to come into contact with the Vikings in that way and be like, hello, friends. Oh, oh no.

Very much we don't come in peace. Yeah, friend shaped, but no. And then of course we have the attack on the under spahn. Yeah, so the most famous interaction that quite often is viewed as kickstarting the Viking Age in Britain is. 8th of June 793 on Lindisfarne, which is a monastic island and the Vikings land there. There has been lots of portents before in the weather people are seeing lightning in the sky and the shapes of dragons in the clouds and things like that. Never a good sign.

No. Which then turns out to maybe be the prows of the Viking ships, these dragons emerging from the fog and the mist to attack them. And the Vikings are very clearly identifying places like Lindersfarn because the English as Christians now have a sense that monasteries are sacred. So who would attack a monastery? You'd have to be an absolute lunatic or a pagan. Or not a Christian.

To attack a monastery. So all along the coast, you've got these incredibly wealthy places full of gold and silver. And I mean, Vikings aren't interested in books, but books are covered in gold and silver as well. And nobody's guarding it. There's a bunch of guys with weird haircuts. in long brown dresses.

Stop building them on the coasts. Stop doing that. This is one of the parts of history that I really like to use as an example of sometimes phrases and catch phrases don't quite do history justice, which is history is written by the victors. In this case,

it's absolutely not. History is written by the victims and in their victimhood, they shape that idea of Viking violence and therefore wider violence in Anglo-Sax and society in a really specific way. And I think that's why it's important that we put those two groups of people beside each other,

even though I know they didn't know themselves as Vikings. But I want to join all of that together now before we go on and talk about the actual, some of the murders that we're going to talk about. When we talk about bringing these kings back in and the rule that's operating over all of this, right? So let's go back to what we started talking about. How vulnerable are the kings that are overseeing Mercia, say, or wherever it might be? is this a rain in the way we would understand it in, say, the early modern Tudor post-Bosworth world? Or is this something that's far more volatile? It's much more volatile.

We do see chopping and changing, I mean, literally sometimes, all of the time. We get the unification of England, so that heptarchy finally merging into one kingdom, is a really slow process. The first person we have recorded is using the title of the king of the English, who controlled the whole place is Athelstan in 927 so the 1100th anniversary of that next year and that is the moment

when England appears to be born but even then after Atholstan's death there are moments when it fractures Eric Bloodax takes control of York as king of York Is that nominative determinism? Maybe, maybe it's a good Viking name born as that

A good Viking name So England is by no means set once it's established It can break again It is still fragile. There is pushing and pulling. We famously had prior to Athelstan, Alfred has made that deal with Guthrum

where they've essentially divided England in two and created the Dane law in the north-east and the east of England. And that's the reason you still see an awful lot of influence of the old Norse language and place names around cities like York. It's because of that long-standing connection to the Danish communities that settled.

Any place name in Yorkshire with B.Y. On the end is a Viking place, right? Yeah. Yeah, gate comes from Gata, the Old Norse word for street. The reason all the gates into York are called bars is because it's a Viking word for a gate. So there is still so much of that influence there. So we do see a period when the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes are beginning to live closer together, that they are becoming integrated, they are becoming a more settled society

as England is emerging into this one single kingdom. Right. we're going to get into some of the vulnerabilities, some of the violence of this fractured world in just a moment. Join us after the break. Okay, Matt, we're on to the murders now. We've done a long run up and set the scene, I think, beautifully in terms of what this world looked like and the sort of complexities of it. First up on our list of horrible deaths is Edward the Martyr. And this is, I don't want to trivialize this, but it's kind of a bit of a medieval medieval.

murder mystery. Is that fair to say? It is. It's a real who done it. And people have been trying to work this out for centuries now. And we've got the right man for the job because you do love a medieval mystery. I do. Do you have, do have a, don't tell me right now, but do you have an idea of who might, do you have a theory of who might have done this? Yes. Okay, tell me at the end, but okay, go. Okay, go. So we're on, we're on the 18th of March in the year 978 and we've got Edward the Martyr, who at this point is king of England, a unified kingdom, and he goes to Corfe Castle in Dorset. There isn't the big castle there at this point, but it's still an important royal seat.

Beautiful village today. It's gorgeous. So he's been, Edward goes hunting in Dorset and decides to visit his young half-brother, Ethelred, who maybe slight spoiler will later become Ethelred the unready. I'm suspicious. I'm quite rightly. just so you know as the king arrives

he's offered a welcoming drink and have a cup of wine your highness and while he's sitting on his horse drinking this cup of wine a whole bunch of servants rush out and stab him while he still sat in the saddle

there are varying accounts of this that either he fell dead from the horse at that point or he slipped in the saddle his foot got caught the horse bolted and he was dragged through and that perhaps this also contributed

to killing him. His body is then hidden in some marshy lands. It's eventually recovered and it's moved to wear him. But it's pretty clear someone has planned his murder and planned to hide the body. The person that falls under huge amounts of suspicion for this is Queen Ethel Thrift, so his stepmother. That's not where my suspicion was going, but okay.

Well, her son Ethelred is still too young to be doing too much on his own account at this. point. But she was quite keen that her son, not her stepson, should be king of England. Jesus, there's twists and turns out of place. Oh, boy moms. I said this as a boy mom. So the suggestion is that she has orchestrated the murder of Edward in order to make her son Ethelred king. And while Etheret is too young, to make her the power behind the throne. So no one is ever officially put on trial or or punished. in any way for this murder.

Edward goes on to be made a saint a few years later in 1008 and is remembered as Edward the martyr because he's killed. Is his sainthood to do with how pious he was or to do specifically with the fact that he's murdered? I think it's to do with the fact that he's murdered and he doesn't necessarily have a reputation

for being particularly pious. I think it's just to do with the fact that he's murdered while he's receiving hospitality he should have been safe in that moment but yeah the suspicion has long fallen on his stepmother and Ethelred does end up on the throne next do you agree with that suspicion? I think it's likely

it seems likely to me Anglo-Saxon kings had a tendency to so succession is not clear in Anglo-Saxon England you have this title of Ethering that is given to people which is something like Prince it means literally throne worthy. So you might have a dozen ethelings around and you pick from that pool of people. It isn't necessarily the king's oldest son who's going to succeed here. So if it's up for grabs

and there's only one guy in the way, what if that guy was nudged off a little bit and my etheling is bumped up the list? Is there a sense in society and by society I mean, I suppose the people living in these kingdoms in this moment when something like that. like this happens and their king is is killed and nobody is held responsible for it. Is there a sense that this is an injustice that should be sorted or is life just so bloody hard in this moment that you know, a frost has killed all your plants and now you can't feed your family so you're just going to focus on that. Is there an attempt to sort this mess out or is it like, oh well he's dead so we'll just move on to the next. The big question is once he's dead, who cares? Right. Okay.

And I don't mean like, oh, who cares? I mean, genuinely, who is out there that cares? because what's the point in defending him? What's the point in prosecuting potentially, you know, the new king's mother for a murder that you can't necessarily prove she did? Okay. What's the benefit in persecuting her? You know, we've talked about Anglo-Saxon, England has this idea of communal responsibility for anything. If you decide it's worth it.

The commune decide they don't want to look into it. I mean, the Anglo-Saxons even have the system of Waregild, which literally means man-money. So everybody's life in Anglo-Saxon England has a value. And they're aiming the point of the wear gild system is to stop blood feud from developing. So normally a person's value would be between two and five years of the money that they would generate. So if you kill the father of a family, they can't feed themselves anymore necessarily. You pay compensation to them to allow them to survive for a period of time.

And the idea of this was it stops long-standing, generational feud setting in that see murders back and forth. So again, when we think about is Anglo-Saxon England violent, they're doing things to try and stop here. It has the potential, but they're trying to stop these things becoming a spiral of violence by putting a financial value on things. And I guess the question in this case is who's championing Edward, who is making the case that someone ought to be punished for his death?

Nobody is. Nobody. Okay. Wow. It's just not worth the time. next one up on our list of deaths is 1002. It's a very pleasing number to look at on the page. St. Bryce's Day Massacre. I don't know who St. Bryce is, and I don't know what the massacre is,

and that's why you are here. Tell me about everything. The St. Bryce's Day part is important because in the medieval world, most things were coordinated by Saints' days. You didn't necessarily know what date this was in a calendar. It's much more likely that people you're talking to know will know when St. Swithon's Day is.

or anything like that. So lots of things tend to be coordinated. St. Bryce's Day falls on the 13th of November in 1002. And this is a moment in which Ethelred the Unready is king. So this is Ethelred whose mother potentially had Edward killed. This is season two of this story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The continuing story.

Ethelred is having endless problems with Danes, with the Vikings still invading. he becomes his cognitive unready comes from the Anglo-Saxon unred which means poorly advised. So Ethelred means well-advised. So I think they're trying to be funny. The well-advised, unadvised, basically. Well-advised, the unadvised, poorly-advised, yeah. I'm not sure it works.

Would have been much funnier in Anglo-Saxon. Yeah. So he's constantly paying the Vikings off. Every time they come, he gives them a bucket-load of treasure to turn around. and go away again. They do turn around and go away again, but as soon as that treasure runs out, they just come back and say,

can we have some more, please? And he keeps giving them money. So he doesn't have a particularly powerful position. He's really struggling. He's becoming increasingly unpopular because he's given all the kingdom's money away to people who just knock on the door and ask for it. And so he comes up with this idea

because of his own fear and his growing paranoia. He coordinates on St. Bryce's day, the legalized murdering of, any Dane in England, any and all Dains in England, anyone of Danish heritage. I mean, that's a wild order to give out. That's, that seems excessive. And also, I suppose maybe it's going to solve the problem if they keep coming back for money, but it's also presumably going to generate a lot more issue. Yeah. I mean, there's no way to say this that isn't genocide. Yeah. Yeah. He essentially tells everybody it's legal to kill Danes

today. And I encourage you to do it. And was it just kind of find it that day? Yes. Yes. The idea was that everybody would move and take the Danish community by surprise on that day. So we have, for example, we know that this took place in Oxford. There are charters that note that the Danes fled out of Oxford to St. Freed's Wide Church in search of safety, but that the locals burn the church down with them in it. Christians burning a church down with the people in it. And ironically, the Danes, who are who were not Christian, finding shelter in a Christian church. Many of them may have been Christianised by this point,

but they're still being viewed as, as you know, othered outsiders and they're taking refuge in a Christian church, which you would think would pull people up in the medieval world. But the king has given you permission to do whatever it takes today. And the mass graves have been found of bodies in Oxford that show signs of severe trauma that date from this period too. So probably mass graves, and DNA analysis shows that those people of Danish heritage too.

So these are probably victims of the St. Bryce's Day massacre. And can we tell how widespread this was? Are there these pockets of violence where people took this order seriously and did carry it out? Or is it, you know, that, I mean, what was every person of Danish descent in this kingdom killed? I don't think they actually managed to kill all of them, but it was very wide. It was nationwide. This was a serious effort to destroy. a unified kingdom.

Oh, so it's literally, okay, wow. Yeah. So there is still a huge integrated, settled Danish community in the northeast of England and the East Midlands and around there. And Ethel Red is essentially scared that they're encouraging the other Danes or the Vikings to keep coming back. And so he just wants rid of them all together. And it's obviously widespread enough that it causes outrage in Denmark.

Yeah. Because Swain Fortbeard, who's the king of Denmark, gets in ships, not on his own, gets in some ships with some men, and brings an army over to England and invades it. Essentially in revenge for the St. Bryce's Day massacre, there is some suggestion that one of his female relatives, perhaps one of his sisters, was killed as part of the St. Bryce's Day massacre

and that he comes over looking for revenge for that. But Swain will end up conquering England and driving Ethelred off the throne and then dying a few days after he becomes King of England. Oh wow. Ethelred should have just followed the Anglo-Saxon rule of just paying the price. Yeah. Should have paid the compensation. And then Swain is Swain Fortbid is Knoot's dad. So Knoot that we end up as Knoit the Great, the Danish king is essentially following on from his dad's conquest of public in outrage. Wow. The other thing I'm supposed to say is, you know, we talk about the Danes by this time in 1002 being integrated into society. presumably there's a lot of Anglo-Saxon Danish marriages and families that are now descendants of Vikings who've settled.

How popular is this order when it's given out? Obviously, people do enact it and the Danes are killed. But if you're an Anglo-Saxon man, you've married a Danish woman and, you know, or whatever, that integration looks like, surely on a sort of on the ground level, there is outrage and frustration, and sorrow at this. Yeah. I mean, it's easy to view it from the outside of saying kill all Danes. But as you say, what does that mean in practical terms?

They're not living in separate communities. No, no. They've been living together for generations by this point. They are integrated. And I say how much Danish heritage makes you Danish and a viable target? If you're a Danish woman married to an English man, what does that mean? Are their children targets of this too? kind of on the ground it's much harder to work out what this might have meant.

But I think it plays into that human problem of mob mentality. If the mob are given permission to go and do this, you become kind of blind to the fact that these are your friends and make. And clearly they do. That happens. We're going to go to a break and then we're going to continue with some more deaths. Cheerful. Okay, Matt, we've got the last one now. This is Alfred Etheling.

Is this etheling as in Prince Throneworthy? Is that that the same word? That is him. So he is one of this pool of people who might be in line for the throne of England at some point. So this is, we're in 1036 now. So we're moving gradually towards the Norman invasion. Who is Alfred? Where's he come from?

How is he going to die? Because it's not great, it's not a great death even by Anglo-Saxon. No, no, it isn't. He is the youngest son of Ethel Red the Unready, so he seems to be our thread that's from India all of this. And Ethel Red's wife, Emma of Normandy, which gives England its connection to Normandy that will ultimately lead to the Norman conquest. And he is about 24 years old in, it's either 1036 or 1037. We're not quite sure entirely of the date when this actually happens. But Canute, as I mentioned, Canute will be the Danish ruler of England for a while, dies in 1035, and Alfred and his brother Edward cross over to England in order to claim the throne of England as members of the House of Wessex. Where have they been? They've been in Normandy.

They've grown up in Normandy. So the Edward, who is the brother that crosses over with him, will become Edward the confessor. So his mom is Emma of Normandy. That's the link to Normandy that will ultimately get. give us the Norman. Emma of Normandy does not sound medieval to me. It's like Louise of yeah. Emma of Normandy is an absolutely fascinating figure. She's the only woman ever to have been married to two kings of England. She was married to Ethelred the Unready and Canute. She also commissioned a biography of herself, first English woman to do that. Oh my god. She had her own

story written which doesn't talk very much about Ethelred and talks lots about Canute. But it's very much an effort to justify her own position in the world. It's a really, she's fascinating. Yeah. She's really great. Wow. Okay. So the, the two, the two men come over to England to claim it. What could possibly go wrong. What could possibly go wrong. Yeah, let's let's get into what does go on. So they land on the coast of Sussex with a Norman bodyguard. They've been escorted over. And they're met by Godwin, who is the Earl of Wessex, the father of Harold. Godwinson, who will later go on. Godwinson, literally being the son of Godwin. Son of Godwin. Yeah, okay.

So Earl Godwin, hugely powerful nobleman in Wessex, captures Alfred. He doesn't manage to get hold of Edward, reportedly, but Alfred is picked up on his way to go and see his mom. And Earl Godwin's men kill all of those followers that have come with Alfred. They slaughter all of the Norman bodyguard. And he's then subject, subjected to ritual blinding.

And the point of this is Anglo-Saxon and throughout the medieval period actually, ideals of kingship require you to be physically perfect. You will so often see descriptions of kings and queens describe them as beautiful, handsome, all of this kind of thing. Part of being a king, being appointed by God, requires you to be beautiful, a vision of physical perfection. So any way in which you can remove that perfection from someone eliminates them from the line of succession. So blinding is one. If you're blind, you can't possibly be king. We see castration. If you can't reproduce, you're not going to make a viable king either.

They might amputate a hand or a foot or something like that. If you can't fight anymore, you can't lead armies, you can't be a king. We even see, I mean, there's facial disfigurement. So even, you know, just cutting someone's face so they have scars and they no longer look beautiful is considered enough to potentially remove them from the line of succession. Really? That would be enough to make you not be a king. Yeah. Imperfect. And we even have instances of scalping, which has also been called kind of forcibly tonsuring someone so that you're giving them a monk's tonsure so that they're only fit for a life in the church. Right. Wow. Okay. But you're doing it forcefully, so you're making them bleed.

Yeah, absolutely. So these are all ways to remove them. And Godwin is like, you know, spun the roulette wheel of which one we're going to do to Alfred and we're going to go for blinding. Probably red-hot pokers to the eyeballs. It's not an exact procedure. No. And it doesn't seem to go incredibly well either.

Not that there's a great way for it to go, I guess. No, but I suppose the idea if you, you know, disqual, figure or maim someone who is throneworthy in this period you're not going to be accused of killing them, you're just removing them from the line of succession, right? So it's, you want this to go, you want this to go well because you want him to be blinded, but you don't want the inevitable outcome here to happen. And this is Godwin playing a bit of kingmaker. He clearly doesn't want Alfred around as any kind of claimant or threat to the throne. So he orders this, this blinding of Alfred

but whether it gets infected or whether it's just too much whether it's done wrongly isn't very clear but he dies a few days after this at Ely Abbey and this when Edward the Confessor becomes king

this is often cited as part of the reason why he has a really fractious relationship with Godwin and the Godwin sons they are immensely powerful but ultimately he's blaming Godwin for murdering his brother Yeah Can I ask how does that

Emma feel about this? She, I mean, she's just really keen to point out that she's nothing to do with it. Okay. Definitely wasn't me. Interesting. There does seem, I mean, maybe this is why we should have taken the earlier story with a slight pinch of salt. There is often an effort to blame queens and women working in the background. Aren't they often called she-wolds and things?

There's like a very gendered thing going on her, isn't there, of like these manipulative women who are pulling strings behind the scenes and kind of causing the men to, very lady-a-wells and, Beth-esque behavior. Medieval, it's not so bad during the early medieval period. The medieval Catholic Church will later on develop very strong ideas about what women are and what women should and shouldn't do. All women are the daughters of Eve. They're responsible for sin existing in the world. That will definitely solidify through the period and that affects the view of medieval women.

It's really good that that attitude didn't fix itself to human beings and that we totally rid of that now, isn't it? Anyway. It's good to have a dream. Yeah. Oh, sob. Yeah, so, okay, so this idea, but in this period, is this idea at the height of its power, this idea of these manipulative women, is Emma seen as someone who is, you know,

potentially Machiavellian in her, or that's anachronistic, but, you know. Part of the reason that she writes her biography, or has her biography written, is that she is concerned about perceptions of her. She is concerned that people are viewing her as kind of pulling strings behind the scenes here, and she's keen to kind of say, I'm literally just looking at it. after my sons, you know, I'm just trying to do my best here. So she seems to be conscious that people will have a low opinion of her and be accusing her of things and so she has made her effort to set the record straight,

which, again, we have to take a slight pinch of salt because it's her version of all of these things. But it's definitely later in the medieval period. So from the, say, the mid-12th century onwards that the church is really solidifying its idea that women shouldn't have positions of power and that they are, they, they're so often, and position women is responsible for the things that men do wrong. And we see it time and time again. Louis the 7th of France messed everything up on the crusade, but that's definitely Eleanor of Aquitaine's fault.

Wherever a man does something wrong, they're looking for a woman to blame for that happening. And that's not so much happening during this period, but it definitely becomes a theme later on. And that's why I think we then get a history that looks back and sees she wolves everywhere and tries to position women as being, the driving forces behind things like this.

Yeah. So Matt, we reached the end of the Anglo-Suxan period in 1066, which is, you know, famously a really relaxing non-violent year after all these centuries of bloodshed. How do you see the end of that? I mean, obviously, you know, with the way we define historical periods is quite arbitrary sometimes and it's open to debate and it's very much with hindsight.

But is there a shift in terms of the violence? culture of the Anglo-Saxons in terms of, you know, being able to just kill people off, pay some compensation, etc. With the Norman incursion, does this world just continue a pace and just with Normans now and Anglo-Saxons under them? Is it a change? No, I mean, it's one of those things that, you know, historians are dreadful quite often for saying this was a seismic turning point. It was a huge moment in history. But 1066 and the Norman invasion really is one of those genuine... moments where everything changes in England.

And you've gone from this, the Anglo-Saxon period is quite often viewed through rose-tinted spectacles. And we need to remember that it's violent and it's difficult. And there's just a monetary price for killing people. There are reasons that they did that. But nevertheless, that doesn't make it good.

But it does very quickly become viewed as this period of communal responsibility, of a different form, a gentler form of law in England. because the Normans arrive and enforce their will now with a much harsher steel fist, they're building castles everywhere to suppress the local population. And again, what we had in 450,

I guess with the arrival of the angles of Saxons and the jutes, you've got this minority now, minority elite trying to impose themselves on a majority. And they're very keen to import Norman law, French law and French ways of doing things. And again, as we did with the Vikings, we see the influence of Norman language on English life everywhere. So something as simple as a cow, a cow is an Anglo-Saxon word because, or a Danish-influenced word, because it's the thing, it's the unprocessed thing.

The beef that you get out of it is French. So the finery that you get out of a cow is given a French name. Interesting. Whereas the more functional basic item retains more of an Anglo-Saxon influence. And the Normans do kind of, they're very keen to sweep away the Anglo-Saxon world. You know, William the Conqueror takes the oath of Serum in 1086, which essentially completely restructures society and says that everybody that owns land in England is now directly responsible to the king.

So he's tearing down all of those Shire structures, the hundreds and the hides and the Shire Reeves that have been there for, centuries, he's just removing all of that and saying, right, you do it my way. I suppose, so I mean, you spoke at the beginning of this episode, about the Normans harking back to the Roman period. And I suppose, you know, as often happens with harking back to the classical world, this idea, whether it rightly or wrongly of sort of order, quote unquote, civilization, heavy inverted commas there. But, you know, this, I suppose, sort of rule, order, citizenship. And I suppose partly, would you say partly that's what the Normans are bringing, this idea of sort of, maybe not a rational, nationality, but sort of broad control blanket rules for everyone.

There's no longer this sort of messy, parochial, oh, sort of out amongst yourselves. You know, he's killed her from down the road. Well, maybe she deserved it. So we'll just cover it up and pay a fine or whatever. That is, you know, the idea of that Roman world of sort of huge empire and the bureaucracy of it. Is that coming into play here? I think so. William is trying to go back to a world of centralised power.

because then the power is all his and he needs to be able to control it from the centre. Anglo-Saxon society is much more devolved. Power is spread around the kingdom in a way that William simply can't tolerate because he's got so few of his elites trying to pull the reins of power into the centre that he's taking all of that away.

And I think part of what he's doing by harking back to the Roman world is saying, look, all of that was a mistake. That was a mess. That Anglo-Saxon stuff. we're here to put you right now we're here to put you straight yeah do it are we yeah can I before we go can I ask are you team Anglo-Saxon or team Normans team Anglo-Saxon you're a bit more interesting than the Normans I think the Normans quite boring they just

they come in I'm team Norman I think my family came over with the Normans oh really yeah I think I think my understanding is that that's so maybe that's but you very firmly have an anionniker on your side for that as well she's very team Norman oh is she Okay. Well, she's also, has she told you this, her family are from the same field in Ireland that my family are from. Literally the same village, literally the same parish.

It's bizarre that it would occur. That was fascinating. I think as a Staffordshire lass, who went to see the Staffordia Horde in Staffordia before it went to, is it in the British Museum now? Yeah, it must be part of it at least. Is it in Birmingham? Oh, at least it's vaguely gone back where it belongs.

It's got to be team Anglo-Saxon. Matt, this was absolutely fascinating. And do you know what? It's given me a much clearer sense of that period between the Romans and the Normans, that because it's messy, because it's complicated, because it's king this, king that, you know, mercy, Northumbria, Wessex, there's so much to hold in your mind. And I imagine even as a historian of that period, you know, you mentioned before these major kingdoms came together, you've got all these little kingships and these little areas. There's so much information. There's so much messiness. You've made this come to life and given us, I think, a much more complex society to think about. So thank you. you for that. If you want to hear more Anglo-Saxon history from us, you can get in touch at afterdarkhistoryhit.com. If you've enjoyed this episode, you can comment below if you're watching on YouTube or leave us a five-star review wherever you get your podcasts.