The death of King Edgar

It was on July 8th 975 that there occurred the death of King Edgar. Allowing for the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752 the exact anniversary can therefore be held to fall today. 

A contemporary portrayal of King Edgar in the Winchester New Minster Charter of 966

Image: Wikipedia

The death of King Edgar 1040 years ago is important for two reasons.

His reign is important for his consolidation of what may well be described as an imperial kingship - something his uncle King Athelstan had developed in his reign between 924 and 939 as he expanded his realm - and most notably by his coronation in 973 at the abbey in Bath. This was fourteen years after his accession - though he may have had a coronation at that time - and took place when he had reached the age of ordination and took place on Whit Sunday. This was sacral kingship, celebrated in a Roman spa town, analogous to Charlemagne's Aachen. The Rite used in 973 remains the basis of the English Coronation ceremony, used most recently for the present Queen in 1953, 980 years later.

The King's subsequent visit to Chester where he was ceremonially rowed along the river Dee from the city to St John's church by several tributary kings became celebrated as an assertion and exemplification of English hegemony over Britain,

Described in the early twelfth century as having been "extremely small both in stature and bulk" by that, careful historian William of Malmesbury he was anything but slight in importance as a monarch and as a key figure in the development of the institution of the monarchy and of monasticism, exemplified in the Regularis Concordia of 973, to which there is an introduction here.

King Edgar seated between St Æthelwold and St Dunstan. From an eleventh-century manuscript of the Regularis Concordia 

British Library, Cottonian MS Tiberius A III, f2v

Image: Wikipedia

There is an online account of his reign at  Edgar the Peaceful, which has a bibliography of recent studies of the reign. The Oxford DNB life by Ann Williams can be accessed here and provides a more detailed and academic account.

The sacrality of King Edgar's monarchy is recalled in this thirteenth century illumination in an anonymous Life of King Edward the Confessor
Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.3.59: fol. 3v

Image: Wikipedia

The second reason for the significance of the death of King Edgar was that it brought about the accession of his elder son as King Edward, who was to go down in history as the Martyr, he appears to have been illegitimate or of doubtful legitimacy, and only a boy or teenager at the time. His murder three years later and replacement by his younger, legitimate half-brother King Æthelred II, seemingly with the involvement of the new king's mother, set in motion those elements of instability and lack of political legitimacy that were to haunt King Æthelred the Unready [Unraed signifying No Counsel, a pun on his name which means Good Counsel] and his reign.

There is an online account at of King Edward the Martyr at Edward the Martyr, and the Oxford DNB life, by Cyril Hart can be seen at Edward [St Edward; called Edward the Martyr] (c.962–978); this again provides a more detailed account of his life and reign.

King Edgar died at Winchester, but he was not buried there with so many of his family, but at the abbey at Glastonbury. The abbot was St Dunstan, who as Archbishop of Canterbury was a major player in the King's reign, and the compiler and celebrant of the 973 coronation. By choosing to be buried at Glastonbury - and it seems right to assume that the King did that - he maintained his identification with the Dunstanian monastic reform and confirmed its alliance with the monarchy.

There appears to have developed something of a cult around King Edgar at Glastonbury, and on the eve of the dissolution of the abbey Under the last two abbots the Edgar Chapel was built on to the east end of the monastic church to contain his remains.

 

Reconstruction model of Glastonbury Abbey on the eve of the dissolution.

The Edgar Chapel is on the extreme left.

Image:skyscrapernews.com/All rights reserved. Copyright Holder - GNU License 

Buckinghamshire Coin Hoard

Just before Christmas, on December 21st, a metal-detector found a hoard of more than 5000 pristine silver pennies from the reigns of King Aethelred II, 978-1016, and King Cnut, 1016-1035, which had been carefully concealed at Lenborough in Buckinghamshire.

This is clearly a major discovery and is covered widely online. The latest BBC report can be read at Buckinghamshire ancient coin hoard find 'unprecedented'

The Daily Telegraph account can be read at Amateur treasure hunter's £1m find of Anglo Saxon coins and the Daily Mail repoert which is well-illustrated in their style can be seen at Amateur treasure hunter finds £1m hoard of Anglo Saxon coins

The discovery is already written up on Wikipedia, and that can be read at Lenborough Hoard

As with so many other recent discoveries from the Anglo-Saxon period our knowledge continues to expand with new finds and re-shape our understanding of this crucial period in the development of the country.

Dead Vikings on display

I see from a piece on the BBC News website that some of the human remains from Ridgeway Hill near Weymouth, and which were discovered during the construction of a road scheme in 2009, are going on display in an exhibition at the British Museum, before travelling on to one in Berlin and then going to their new, permanent, home in the excellent County Museum in Dorchester.

The bones are those of the victims of a massacre of Vikings in the period 970-1025. The 47-52 victims were all from Scandinavia or the Baltic region and probably died in the troubled period under King Ethelred II or the dispute over the succession after his death in 1016.

The illustrated report can be viewed at Viking skeletons, and it has links to other, related, online pieces about the discovery. I have posted before about the Ridgeway deaths in Decapitating Vikings in Dorset.

St Edward the Martyr

Today is the feast day of St Edward the Martyr, and this year is the 1,035th anniversary of his murder early in the evening of March 18th 978 at Corfe in Dorset. The killing of the teenage King, who had succeeded to the throne in 975, appears to have been so as to place his younger half-brother Ethelred, then a child, and not himself involved in any such conspiracy, on the throne. As King Ethelred II he was the most assiduous proponant of his half-brother's cult, but historians have seen the regicide of 987 as undermining from the very beginning the moral basis of King Ethelred's authority.

St Edward the Martyr

A modern icon of the martyr King

Image:catholic.org

There is an illustrated online account of  St Edward's life and reign here and of his cult here.

The excellent account of his life in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Cyril Hart can be read here.

Following rather ignominious burial at Wareham his body was translated to Shaftesbury and the great abbey of nuns there housed his relics and was a place of pilgrimage until the sixteenth century. There is an online account of the abbey here. Only foundations remain of the church, but the relics themselves were re-discovered during excavations in 1931, and confirmed as being of the right date and character in 1970. I recall seeing them - or possibly  pictures of them - on my visit to the abbey site in 1972.

A plan of the abbey at Shaftesbury

Image:British History online

Following a protracted legal dispute over custody of the relics, during which they were held in a bank vault, they are now with the St Edward the Martyr Orthodox Brotherhood at Brookwood Cemetary in Surrey. I did not manage to accompany friends on past visits at Easter from Ascot Priory when I used to spend the Triduum there.  The website of the Brotherhood has a section about St Edward which can be viewed here. It is good that the relics are once again a focus of devotion, but it is rather sad that after so many centuries at Shaftesbury that they should be removed elsewhere.

St Edward's cult survived in the Church of England in that he remained in the Calendar of the Book of Common Prayer. Here in Oxford the Tractarian Thomas Chamberlain as Vicar of St Thomas' in the nineteenth century founded a number of schools for both boys and girls, the only one of which survives is St Edward's under the patronage of the boy-martyr King. It was the association of St Edward with the monastic reforms of St Dunstan which probably inspired Canon Chamberlain, as well as the Tractarian attempt to recover devotion to English medieval saints. The school incorporates in its arms the heraldic bearings assigned in later centuries to the Kings of the house of Wessex and uses as a badge the dagger and cup symbols of St Edward's martyrdom.

Decapitating Vikings in Dorset

Yesterday's Daily Telegraph had an article about the discovery at Ridgeway Hill near Weymouth in 2009 of the remains of 51 young men who had been beheaded in a massacre dated to the tenth or eleventh century. Analysis of the bones indicated taht they were of Scandinavian origin, and the killing had been an organised event, with the severed heads piled up to one side.

There is an online account about the discovery here, and another report, with photographs, by the BBC from the time of the excavations can be seen here.

The latest suggestion according to the Daily Telegraph report is that they were victims of the 1002 St Brice's Day Massacre ordred by King Ethelred II and were perhaps Viking mercenaries. The fact that they had been decapitated from the front suggests that they may have been Jomsvikings - a group who prided themselves on showing bravery in the face of death. There is a reference from Queen Emma, Ethelred's wife, to a Jomsviking leader of a group in England at this time.

Last November I posted about the St Brice's Day massacre in Oxford and the recent discovery of the remains of some of the victims. The post can be read here.

Massacre in Oxford

Well that headline got your attention, but it is rather stale news. Today is the feast of St Brice and the anniversary of the massacre on that day of the Danes in Oxford, and elsewhere, in 1002 on the orders of King Æthelred II. It was ethnic cleansing eleventh century style.

There is an informative assessment online of King Æthelred II which reflects current historical thinking about his life and reign. An article about the massacre, with an interesting discussion of various historians interpretations of what actually happened can be seen here. As the article shows by quoting himself in a charter to St Frideswide's (now Christ Church cathedral) from 1004 things had been violent in Oxford two years earlier:

For it is fully agreed that to all dwelling in this country it will be well known that, since a decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination, and thus this decree was to be put into effect even as far as death, those Danes who dwelt in the afore-mentioned town, striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ, having broken by force the doors and bolts, and resolved to make refuge and defence for themselves therein against the people of the town and the suburbs; but when all the people in pursuit strove, forced by necessity, to drive them out, and could not, they set fire to the planks and burnt, as it seems, this church with its ornaments and its books. Afterwards, with God's aid, it was renewed by me.

The King does not appear at all penitent, other than for the incidental damage to St Frideswide's church, even though the massacre probably caused the Danish invasions which were to force him into exile in Normandy a few years later and after his restoration and death the establishment of the Danish line of Kings from 1016 until 1042.

A gold mancus of King Æthelred II
1003-06
British Museum

Image:Wikipedia

King Æthelred II
An illumination from the Abingdon Chronicle of c.1220

Image:Wikipedia

In 2008 building work for an extension to St John's college revealed a series of skeletons of young men who had suffered violent deaths and been dumped in mass grave outside the city on the site of a bronzeage temple circle. The dating would indicate that these were victims of the St Brice's day massacre. The choice of this place for the burial suggests that a place associated with demons or suchlike in their minds was where the inhabitants of Oxford thought the Danes belonged. There is a report on the discovery here.