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Martyrdom Most Foul

Æthelred II’s reign begins with an unsolved murder mystery. On 18 March 978, the teenaged King Edward was killed while riding to visit his stepmother Queen Ælfthryth and her young son, the king’s half-brother, Æthelred, at her estate in Corfe (Dorset). The murdered king’s body was first buried without ceremony at Wareham; a year later the body was disinterred and brought to the royal nunnery of Shaftesbury, where it was reburied with appropriate honours. By the early 990s, reports had begun to circulate about miracles occurring at Edward’s grave; shortly afterwards, an abbey dedicated to Edward ‘the Martyr’ was established at Cholsey (then in Berkshire, now in Oxfordshire) on a royal estate that had formerly belonged to the dowager queen Ælfthryth. In 1001, after viking raiding had become more intense, King Æthelred ordered that his brother’s remains be moved to a more prominent location within Shaftesbury Abbey for reburial as a ‘blessed martyr’.1 Those who had martyred Edward, however, were never brought to justice.

The Anglo-Saxon clergy taught that lordship was the foundation of God’s divine order, and that the highest species of earthly lordship was kingship. The murder of an anointed king was an affront to God and, in the years that followed, the surly King Edward was popularly reconceived as an innocent Christian martyr. The northern version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (preserved in manuscripts D and E) laments that ‘no worse deed for the English race was done than this was, since they first sought out the land of Britain. Men murdered him but God exalted him.’2 Although contemporaries never directly blamed Æthelred for the death of his brother, and the king was among the chief sponsors of the cult honouring the martyred Edward, the murder cast a pall over his reign. In an age in which divine explanations were sought for both natural and man-made disasters, it is unsurprising that some traced the tribulations wrought by the vikings to the unpunished murder of an anointed king. Archbishop Wulfstan of York expressed this most eloquently in his ‘Sermon of the Wolf to the English’ of 1014. The viking invasions were God’s just punishment upon the English people for their multiple sins, the greatest of which were the betrayals of two royal lords, King Edward to his death and King Æthelred into exile.³ For Archbishop Wulfstan the guilt for King Edward’s betrayal belonged to the entire English nation. Post-Conquest Anglo-Norman ecclesiastical writers, who similarly sought moral explanations for the conquests of the English by the Danes and Normans, developed further Wulfstan’s denunciation of the moral degeneracy of the English nation. They, however, extended the blame to the moral deficiencies of King Æthelred and, in the case of Edward’s murder, to the ruthless ambition of Æthelred’s mother, Queen Ælfthryth. The martyrdom became the original sin of Æthelred’s reign.

The historical context for the murder takes us back to the disputed royal election that had followed the death of King Edgar, Edward and Æthelred’s father, in 975. Edgar’s marital relations are murky and complicated.4 Twelfth-century Anglo-Norman historians state that he was first married to a daughter of Ealdorman Ordmær named Æthelflæd, whose nickname was either candida (white) or enada (duck). They thought her to be the mother of Edward.⁵ The problem is that no contemporary source names either her or her father. Edgar’s second wife, Wulfthryth, is better attested, because she, her daughter Edith and her cousin Abbess Wulfhild of Barking all became saints. Much of what we ‘know’ about her life, however, comes from late eleventh-century hagiographies. What we can say with some certainty is that Wulfthryth was a noblewoman, that she bore Edgar a daughter, Edith, in 963 or 964, and soon after became Abbess of Wilton.

Edgar’s third wife, Æthelred’s mother Ælfthryth, whom Edgar married in 964, is another matter entirely. She was the widow of Ealdorman Æthelwold of East Anglia, the son and successor of Æthelstan, nicknamed ‘Half King’ because of his extensive authority, and the daughter of a thegn (noble landowner) from the south-west named Ordgar, whom Edgar appointed Ealdorman of Devon soon after the marriage. Like Edgar’s grandmother Queen Eadgifu, and unlike Edgar’s first two consorts, Ælfthryth attested royal charters and played an active role in religious and political events as Edgar’s queen, and even more so as queen mother during Æthelred’s minority from 978 to 984. She is the first tenth-century English ‘king’s wife’ to be styled queen (regina), a title which she seems to have enjoyed from the beginning of her marriage.6 In 973 she was anointed and crowned alongside her husband at Bath. There may have been opposition to Ælfthryth’s anointing from some members of the witan (literally, ‘the wise men’), the king’s great council of bishops, abbots, ealdormen (royal officials who would later be known as ‘earls’) and magnates. A preface attached to the rite used for the ceremony implies that Edgar ordered that she be consecrated alongside him. The author of the preface, however, made it clear that Ælfthryth was not being consecrated to mete out justice, as was her husband, but ‘to the consortship of the royal bed with honour fitting to high royal status’.⁷

Whether others saw her only as ‘consecrated to the consortship of the royal bed’, Ælfthryth clearly interpreted her role as queen more broadly.⁸ Unlike earlier royal consorts, she acted as an advocate in a number of lawsuits. That all of these disputes involved female landowners and most were resolved through the queen’s mediation rather than by her advocacy in court suggests that she exercised power within the constraints of the accepted gender roles of the period.⁹ Her most significant public and political actions were in support of the Benedictine Reform movement sponsored by her husband. She appears to have been particularly close to Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, to whom she lent the services of one of her household officers to oversee the expulsion of the secular canons from the New Minster.¹⁰ Edgar saw Ælfthryth as his female counterpart in reform. Just as he himself was to be the advocate of male monastic houses, she was to be the protector of nunneries. As reported in the preface to the Regularis Concordia, the Benedictine monastic customary approved by the Council of Winchester (c.973), Edgar ‘wisely ordained that his wife Ælfthryth should be protectress and fearless guardian of the communities of nuns; so that he himself helping the men and his consort helping the women there should be no cause for any breath of scandal’.11 The reformer bishops and abbots were fervent supporters of a strong theocratic monarchy and undoubtedly appreciated the value of having an anointed queen as protector of Benedictine nunneries.

Ælfthryth soon bore Edgar two sons, Edmund probably in 965 and Æthelred between 966 and 968, which immediately raised questions about succession. Edward, born to Edgar by his first union, was the eldest son, but some questioned whether he was the product of a legitimate marriage. That Ælfthryth, unlike Æthelflæd candida, was a consecrated queen argued in favour of the succession of her son. Ælfthryth’s patronage of the Benedictine Reform movement and her role as legal advocate for all nunneries may thus be seen in the light of the queen’s political manoeuvring on behalf of her son Edmund. Bishop Æthelwold became her strong ally.¹² Æthelwold’s support can be seen in the characterizations of the queen and Edmund and Edward in the witness list to the refoundation charter for the New Minster, Winchester, issued in 966. This magnificent gold-leaf Latin charter is thought to have been drafted by Bishop Æthelwold himself. Edmund’s attestation appears below Edgar’s and Archbishop Dunstan’s but above that of his older half-brother Edward. He is described as ‘prince, lawful son of the aforesaid king’, and Ælfthryth as ‘the lawful wife of the aforesaid king’. Edward, who appears between them, is simply ‘prince, born to the same king’.13 (Æthelred either had not yet been born or was deemed too young to attest.) Bishop Æthelwold acknowledged Edward’s status as an ‘ætheling’, a king’s son, but clearly doubted that he was the product of a legitimate Christian marriage.

With Edmund’s death in 971 or 972, Æthelred became his mother’s candidate for the throne. Edward’s claim to the throne was that he was Edgar’s eldest son; Æthelred’s, that he had the same father and that his mother was an anointed queen. Royal elections in the tenth century, however, had less to do with ‘legitimacy’ and principles of succession than with practical considerations, in particular the ability of the candidates to marshal support. The great men of the realm, lay and ecclesiastic, who constituted the late king’s witan, chose the new king from among those deemed ‘throne-worthy’. In eighth-century Wessex, this had meant any man who could claim descent from the sixth-century founder of the royal line, Cerdic. By the tenth century, the field had been narrowed to members of King Alfred’s lineage. For the most part, consensus had not been difficult to achieve in the royal elections of the tenth century. This was not the case in 975, however, when Edgar suddenly died at the age of thirty-two, apparently without having named either of his two sons as heir apparent. The election divided the ecclesiastical and lay magnates. Despite Ælfthryth’s support for monastic reform and her status as an anointed queen, the two archbishops, Dunstan of Canterbury and Oswald of York, favoured Edward’s claim to the throne.¹⁴ Bishop Æthelwold, on the other hand, was in Æthelred’s camp. Æthelred also had the support of the leading ealdorman in Edgar’s court, Ælfhere.15 Æthelwine, Ealdorman of East Anglia, and his brothers supported Edward, even though (or perhaps because) the queen had once been their sister-in-law. Through her patronage and legal advocacy, Ælfthryth had built up a clientele of influential abbesses and laywomen who also would have promoted Æthelred’s candidacy.¹⁶

Ultimately, however, Edward was able to marshal more support than his half-brother. I suspect that the factors that proved decisive were Archbishop Dunstan’s support and the relative ages of the princes. As Archbishop of Canterbury and Edgar’s mentor, Dunstan’s opinion carried great weight. Perhaps even more important was their ages. Although both æthelings were young, one was still a child. Edward was probably fourteen or fifteen years, about the same age as Edgar had been when he became king. He was a youth on the verge of manhood.¹⁷ Æthelred, on the other hand, was at the most nine years old. To elect him was to opt for a regency in which the queen mother, Ælfthryth, would take a leading role. This may have swayed some of the clergy. One can well imagine Dunstan or Archbishop Oswald intoning the biblical lamentation: ‘Woe to you, O land, whose king is a child.’¹⁸

Edward proved to be a weak and unlucky king in comparison to his father. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports the appearance of a comet at harvest time soon after Edward’s accession to the throne, which was deemed to have foreshadowed the outbreak of a great famine the following year.¹⁹ The most dramatic event of Edward’s brief reign was the so-called anti-monastic reaction, in which laymen attempted to recover family lands from the reform monasteries.20 King Edgar had lent royal muscle to the Benedictine reformers’ efforts to acquire landed endowments for their monasteries. The methods that Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester and others employed in this pious work were often heavy-handed. Even when the donation or sale was done freely, kinsmen of the donors might well have resented the loss of estates that they saw as family lands. As long as Edgar lived, disgruntled laymen had little hope of succeeding in a suit brought against a monastery, and even less of recovering the contested estates by force. Edgar’s death unleashed the pent-up resentment, as the young new king lacked the stature necessary to maintain the peace. In the absence of royal authority, powerful ealdormen such as Æthelwine and Ælfhere protected the monasteries they favoured and allowed followers to despoil those favoured by their rivals.

So who killed Edward, and why? It is impossible to solve this ‘cold case’. None of the versions of the Chronicle identifies the killers. Byrhtferth, a monk of Ramsey Abbey and one of the most prolific authors of the period, provides clues to their identities in his Life of St Oswald (c.1000) without actually naming anybody. According to Byrhtferth, King Edward was the victim of a ‘wicked and treacherous’ conspiracy concocted by ‘zealous’ thegns of his younger brother, and carried out by some of the great men of the realm. In Byrhtferth’s narrative, King Edward, ‘longing for the consolation of fraternal love’, decided to visit his ‘beloved’ brother and stepmother at the unnamed royal estate where they dwelled. ‘Fearing nothing and trusting in the Lord and the might of His power’, the king took with him only a few of his household warriors. Upon arriving on the estate, Edward was greeted by the conspirators, described as ‘magnates and leading men’. Byrhtferth explicitly tells his readers that Queen Ælfthryth and Æthelred were not present as they had remained behind. The unsuspecting king, still on horseback, was surrounded by mounted armed men, ‘just as the Jews once surrounded our Lord’. While one of the killers, a royal butler, took the king by the right arm and made as if to give him a kiss of peace, another firmly grabbed his left arm and stabbed him. The king cried out and fell from his horse, dead. The conspirators allowed the corpse to be taken to a nearby house belonging to a poor man, ‘where no Gregorian chant and no funeral lament was heard’ and where the body was covered only by a cheap blanket. A year later, Ealdorman Ælfhere came to the makeshift grave accompanied by a large entourage. He ordered the king’s body to be exhumed and moved for a more fitting interment. To the amazement of all, the body was miraculously found to be free of decay.21

There is no reason to doubt Byrhtferth’s tale that Edward was ambushed by thegns of his brother on a visit to Queen Ælfthryth’s estate at Corfe. Æthelred was king when Byrhtferth wrote the Life of St Oswald and it would not have been to his or his community’s advantage even to suggest that the queen mother might have had a hand in Edward’s death. ‘Cui bono?’ (Who benefits?) is a key forensic question asked by investigators of crimes. Those who stood the most to gain from King Edward’s murder were Queen Ælfthryth, her son Æthelred and their supporters, in particular Ealdorman Ælfhere. But the evidence against them is at best circumstantial. No contemporary source charges any of the three with the crime – even those written during Cnut’s reign (1016–35), when it would have been safe to have levied that charge. One might argue that Æthelred’s promotion of the cult of his martyred half-brother and Ealdorman Ælfhere’s contribution in discovering and moving the murdered king’s body are proof of their innocence. But they also could be seen as acts of penitential remorse. On the other hand, Æthelred’s age alone – he was eleven at most when his brother was murdered – should excuse him as a suspect.

Byrhtferth’s Life of St Oswald may not name the killers but it does suggest their motive. Byrhtferth’s portrayal of Edward is inconsistent, to say the least. He is presented as both a Christian martyr and a brat. The account of the murder begins with a very unflattering portrait of the new king. Noting that Edward’s election had been contested, Byrhtferth explains that many of the great men of the realm had preferred Æthelred as king because of Edward’s irascible temperament, which ‘struck not only fear but terror in everyone’. The king, Byrhtferth tells us, was particularly hard on members of his own household, whom he ‘hounded not only with tongue-lashings, but even with beatings’, which might explain the participation of a royal butler in the assassination.22 Byrhtferth is often an unreliable narrator, yet I think that we ought to take seriously his characterization of the young king as an unstable teenager with an uncontrollably violent temper, not least because it clashes so sharply with his far more stylized narrative of the murder, which is clearly modelled on the biblical account of the betrayal of Christ. The magnates of the realm could not have been happy with the chaos of the ‘anti-monastic reaction’, even if they themselves were responsible for much of it. One can imagine that even those who had preferred Edward originally to his younger half-brother might have had buyer’s remorse. The killers undoubtedly intended to place Æthelred on the throne, but they may have been motivated less by support for the child than by fear and dislike of the young king. After experiencing three years of Edward’s outbursts of temper, many of the magnates may have preferred the ‘more gentle’ (and malleable) Æthelred on the throne. The murder was in essence a coup d’état.23

From the silence of the sources, it would appear that indeed no one was ever punished for the crime. This is remarkable on two counts. In Anglo-Saxon law, hlafordswice, betrayal of one’s lord, was a ‘bootless’ crime, one that could not be compensated by the payment of a fine, and the killing of a king was the most shocking form that this crime could take.²⁴ Secondly, Edward’s kinsmen did nothing to avenge his death. The ethos of reciprocity underlay morality and law. Even if Edward had not been a king, Æthelred, as his nearest kin, would still have been obliged to seek vengeance for his brother’s murder. That he failed to use his power and authority as king to track down and punish the killers did not go unnoticed by contemporaries. The northern version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle pointedly states that King Edward’s ‘earthly kinsmen did not wish to avenge him’, but assures the reader that his Heavenly Father revenged the slain youth by forcing those who had killed him to venerate his bones as a martyr.25 Byrhtferth goes further. Comparing the murderers of Edward to the biblical Cain, which is as close as Byrhtferth gets to assigning blame to Æthelred, he describes how the killers ‘flourished, passed out, got drunk, revelled, because they were corrupt and disgusting to God’.²⁶ Like Pharaoh, their foolish hearts were hardened by God so that they would not do penance. God punished them in this life as well. One of them, Byrhtferth relates, was struck blind, a fitting penalty for one who would be deprived of the sight of God in the next life. Byrhtferth assures his readers that the others suffered similar tribulations as divine punishment for their wicked deed. This was not because the identities of the killers were unknown. King Edward, as did all nobles, travelled with a retinue. They, at the very least, must have known who had killed their royal lord. That Æthelred as king never ordered his brother’s murderers to be apprehended and executed suggests again the involvement of either Ælfthryth or Ealdorman Ælfhere, if not as conspirators at least as protectors of the culprits.

Later medieval chroniclers had no doubt that Ælfthryth was guilty. By the early twelfth century a tradition had arisen that she not only planned the killing but executed it.²⁷ The ordinarily reliable Henry of Huntingdon wrote in his Historia Anglorum (History of the English, c.1140) that he had heard tell that Ælfthryth personally stabbed her stepson to death while offering him a cup of wine.28 The late twelfth-century Liber Eliensis (Book of Ely) goes even further, turning the pious Ælfthryth into a harlot and a witch who murdered not only Edward but the first Abbot of Ely as well to prevent him from exposing her dark secrets.²⁹ This is the stuff of folktales. We cannot, however, dismiss the possibility that she was complicit in the murder of King Edward. Certainly, the killers must have had a powerful patron or patrons to evade punishment. For medieval authors who explained the disasters of Æthelred’s reign as divine retribution on the English people for their immorality, it made sense to locate the original sin in Æthelred’s accession to the throne through the murder of his brother.

On 4 May 979, at a large assembly held at the royal estate in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, the two archbishops, Dunstan of Canterbury and Oswald of York, and ten diocesan bishops anointed Æthelred king, to the great rejoicing of the assembled magnates.³⁰ More than a year had elapsed since the murder of his half-brother, and three months since Ealdorman Ælfhere ordered Edward’s corpse to be exhumed from its makeshift grave at Wareham and transferred to Shaftesbury Abbey for proper royal burial. Delays between the death of an Anglo-Saxon king and the consecration of his successor were not that unusual in earlier centuries when there were rival candidates for the throne, but an interregnum lasting a full year would have been unusual even then. It was especially striking in 978, in the months following Edward’s death in March, when the only remaining ætheling was the child Æthelred. King Edward himself had tacitly acknowledged Æthelred’s status as heir apparent by endowing him with the estates set aside for the upkeep of king’s sons.31

The murder of King Edward, however, cast a pall over the succession, and the manner in which the killers disposed of the body exacerbated the situation. The sources agree that the killers mistreated Edward’s corpse, although they differ on exactly what happened to the body. Byrhtferth says that the murderers allowed the corpse to be taken to the nearby house of a poor man where it lay covered with a blanket. The northern version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that Edward was buried at Wareham without royal honours. A late eleventh-century hagiographical work attributed to Goscelin of Canterbury, the Passio et Miracula Sancti Eadwardi Regis et Martyris (Passion and Miracles of Saint Edward, King and Martyr), meshed together the earlier accounts and embellished them with miraculous elements. According to the Passio, Queen Ælfthryth, who planned the murder, ordered that the corpse be hidden to prevent exposure of her guilt. Her servants dragged the body to a nearby hut, where it was covered with straw and then disposed of ‘in hidden and marshy places’.³² Nearly a year later, a pillar of fire was seen over the place where the body lay buried. Pious local men raised the body from its marshy grave and brought it to Wareham, where it was buried in the east end of the church. Hearing of the miraculous discovery, Ealdorman Ælfhere, to make amends for his role in Edward’s murder, ordered the body to be transported from Wareham to Shaftesbury Abbey and reburied with full royal honours. To the amazement of all, Edward’s body was found to be completely incorrupt, a certain sign of his sanctity. This was the account that was probably promoted by the nuns of Shaftesbury. Archbishop Wulfstan, however, had heard a different story about the condition of the remains. In his ‘Sermon of the Wolf’, Wulfstan states as if it were common knowledge that Edward’s body had been burnt.33 It is difficult to reconcile these two early sources. All that can be said with confidence is that Ealdorman Ælfhere presided over the removal of a body from Wareham to Shaftesbury Abbey, where those remains were venerated as relics of a martyr. Whether that body was King Edward’s is far from certain.

Miracle stories aside, it is unlikely that the whereabouts of Edward’s corpse were unknown for almost a year. Certainly, the killers knew how they had disposed of the body, as did their patrons at court. It is more likely that Edward’s body remained for a year in Wareham because there was no agreement among the magnates about what should be done with it. Those who had supported the assassination would have wished to delegitimize Edward and, despite his consecration, deny that he had ever been a true king. The dead king’s supporters, on the other hand, would have insisted that he be buried with the honours due a king.³⁴ The latter camp claimed both archbishops. Dunstan, in particular, had been a key supporter of Edward’s succession. He was undoubtedly horrified by the murder of an anointed king and the shameful treatment of the corpse. The prolonged interregnum may have been caused by the archbishop’s refusal to consecrate a new king until the body of his predecessor had been interred with proper honours. If so, the reburial of Edward’s body in Shaftesbury Abbey can be seen as a quid pro quo and a gesture of reconciliation, which might explain why Ælfthryth’s ally Ealdorman Ælfhere played so prominent a role in the affair. The choice of Shaftesbury Abbey for the reburial may be significant.35 Although it was close by, only about twenty miles or so from Wareham, the nunnery was not the obvious site for the burial of a king. Glastonbury or the Old Minster, Winchester, were more obvious places. One suspects that Queen Ælfthryth might have had something to do with choosing a nunnery under her supervision as Edward’s final resting place. By transferring Edward’s corpse to Shaftesbury, Ealdorman Ælfhere and Queen Ælfthryth acknowledged King Edward’s legitimacy. They also appropriated his body.

But three more months after the burial of Edward would pass before Æthelred was crowned. The choice of Kingston-upon-Thames as the site for the coronation emphasized the legitimacy of the succession. Kingston, a royal manor in Surrey on the south bank of the River Thames about twenty miles upriver from London, had been favoured for royal coronations since Æthelstan had chosen it for his crowning in 925.³⁶ The sources do not describe Æthelred’s coronation, but it probably followed the ordo devised by Archbishop Dunstan for his father’s imperial coronation at Bath in 973.³⁷ That ceremony was replete with Christian liturgy and symbolism emphasizing the king’s dual role as guardian of the Church and defender of his people: ‘Saxons, Mercians and Northumbrians’. The three-fold royal oath that Æthelred swore on holy relics embodied the clergy’s view of Christian kingship. A king was to preserve the peace of the Church and of his realm; to forbid theft and ‘all unrighteous things to all orders’; and to ‘command justice and mercy in all judgements’.38