1. Alan Kennedy, ‘Byrhtnoth’s Obits and Twelfth-Century Accounts of the Battle of Maldon’, in Maldon, AD 991, pp. 59–62.
2. ASC CDE 991, trans. Swanton, p. 127.
3. See Janet Bately, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, in Maldon, AD 991, pp. 46–7.
4. Swein’s participation in the Maldon campaign may be inferred from a charter dated between 995 and 999 (S 939). The Chronicler (991) and the Maldon poet (line 129) both identify the vikings at Maldon as Danes, which, if accurate, would support the presence of Swein but not Olaf.
5. Niels Lund, ‘The Armies of Swein Forkbeard and Cnut: leding or lith?’, ASE, 15 (1986), pp. 105–18; Niels Lund, ‘Danish Military Organisation’, in The Battle of Maldon: Fiction and Fact, ed. Janet Cooper (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), pp. 109–26.
6. Twenty-eight runestones in Sweden refer to vikings who campaigned in England. For texts and translations, see ‘England runestones’ Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_runestones).
7. Judith Jesch, Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age: The Vocabulary of Runic Inscriptions and Skaldic Verse (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2001), pp. 44–67; Kim Hjardar and Vegard Vike, Vikings at War (Oxford and Philadelphia: Casemate, 2016), p. 17.
8. Byrhtnoth and wife are named as beneficiaries in the will of his father-in-law Ealdorman Ælfgar (S 1483), which was drawn up at least forty years before the battle.
9. See R. Abels, ‘English Tactics, Strategy and Military Organization in the Late Tenth Century’, in Maldon, AD 991, p. 148.
10. W. A. Samouce, ‘General Byrhtnoth’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 62 (1963), p. 131. See also I. J. Kirby, ‘In Defence of Byrhtnoth’, Florilegium, 11 (1992), pp. 53–60.
11. M. Lapidge, ‘Life of St Oswald’, in Maldon, AD 991, p. 55.
12. ASC 948 CDE, when a force from York fell upon the rearguard of King Eadred’s army as they were marching south, after having ravaged Northumbria.
13. ASC 992 CDE: ahwaer utene means literally ‘somewhere outside/abroad’, which Swanton reasonably interprets as taking place in the estuary. See Swanton, p. 127, n. 8.
14. ASC 992 CDE, trans. Swanton, p. 127.
15. ASC 993 CDE. He is probably the royal thegn Ælfgar who appears prominently in the witness lists to Æthelred’s charters between 982 and 990, and who was a royal reeve. See Diplomas, pp. 184–5.
16. Discussed in Stephen Baxter, The Lords of Mercia: Lordship and Power in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 81–4.
17. Rory Naismith, European Medieval Coinage, vol. 8: Britain and Ireland c.400–1066 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 231–2 and 265–6.
18. The text is edited and discussed by W. Braekman, ‘Wyrdwriteras: An Unpublished Ælfrician Text in Hatton 115’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 44 (1966), pp. 959–70.
19. V Atr. 28, 28.1; VI Atr. 35.
20. V Atr. 35.
21. The Battle of Maldon, ed. and trans. Donald Scragg, in Maldon, AD 991, pp. 18–31.
22. III Edm. 1.
23. JW, pp. 482–3.
24. ‘Eall here bið hwæt þonne lateow byþ hwæt’, quoted in Thomas Hill, ‘ “When the Leader is Brave …”: An Old English Proverb and its Vernacular Context’, Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie, 119 (2001), p. 232.
25. ASC 1003 CDE.
26. EHD, p. 796.
27. ASC 993 CDE; JW, pp. 442–3.
28. Encomium Emmae, ed. and trans. Alistair Campbell with a supplementary introduction by Simon Keynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 32–3. The Encomiast, a Flemish monk writing around 1041–2, describes Eadric (pp. 24–5) as ‘a man skilful in counsel but treacherous in guile’. Eadric’s nickname, meaning ‘the acquisitor’, first appears in Hemming’s Cartulary, a late eleventh-century collection of the charters and deeds of the cathedral chapter of Worcester placed into historical context by the monk Hemming to defend that church’s legal right to its estates. See Hemingi Chartularium Ecclesiae Wigorniensis, ed. Thomas Hearne (Oxford: 1723), pp. 280–81.
29. See R. Abels, ‘Cowardice and Duty in Anglo-Saxon England’, Journal of Medieval Military History, 6 (2006), pp. 29–48.
30. C. R. Hart, The Early Charters of Northern England and the North Midlands (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1975), pp. 335 and 336–7; Williams, p. 181, n. 14; Attestations, Table LXIII.
31. Niels Lund, ‘The Danish Perspective’, in Maldon, AD 991, pp. 133–49.
32. ASC 994 CDE. The Chronicler has the attack begin on the feast of the Nativity of Saint Mary, i.e. 8 September. Events in this annal are reported under 993 in the A manuscript. The discrepancy may have been due to the use of different commencement days for the year, CDE employing 1 September, and A either Christmas or 1 January. All three were at that time possible New Year’s days. See Ian Howard, Swein Forkbeard’s Invasions and the Danish Conquest of England, 991–1017 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2003), pp. 42–3.
33. ASC 994 CDE, trans. Swanton, p. 129; II Atr. 1.
34. Niels Lund, ‘Peace and Non-Peace in the Viking Age Ottar in Biarmaland, the Rus in Byzantium, and Danes and Norwegians in England’, in Proceedings of the Tenth Viking Congress, ed. J. E. Knirk (Oslo: Universitetets Oldsaksamling, 1987), pp. 265–6.
35. ASC 994 CDE.
36. II Æthelred, quoted in Simon Keynes, ‘The Historical Context of the Battle of Maldon’, in Maldon, AD 991, p. 106; Laws, p. 57.
37. Lund, ‘Peace and Non-Peace’, pp. 264–8. See also R. Abels, ‘Household Men, Mercenaries and Vikings in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Mercenaries and Paid Men: The Mercenary Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. John Gillingham (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 155–7.
38. II Atr. 6.1. Norse landowners are implied by II Atr. 7, which protects a ‘shipman’ (sceithman) against English cattle-rustlers, and an appendix to the treaty concerned with property disputes and vouching to warranty (team).
39. Keynes suggests that Pallig received his ‘great gifts, in estates and gold and silver’ in connection with this treaty. Keynes, ‘The Vikings in England: c.790–1016’, in Sawyer (ed.), Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, p. 77.
40. ASC 993 A (correctly 991); 994 CDE.
41. Lesley Abrams, ‘The Anglo-Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia’, ASE, 24 (1995), pp. 220–23. Olaf promoted Christianity aggressively in pagan Norway. See also Lund, ‘Danish Perspective’, pp. 138–40; Theodore M. Andersson, ‘The Viking Policy of Ethelred the Unready’, Scandinavian Studies, 99 (1987), pp. 284–95.
42. ASC 994, trans. Swanton, p. 129.
43. ASC 999 CDE, trans. Swanton, p. 133.
44. Simon Keynes, ‘Conspectus of Edgar’s Charters’, in Edgar, King of the English, pp. 60–80. Æthelred is styled rex totius insule, ‘king of the whole island’, in a charter (S 898) issued in the year following the campaign. Andreas Lemke, ‘Voices from the Reign of Æthelred II’, in Von Æthelred zum Mann im Mond: Forschungsarbeiten aus der englischen Mediävistik, ed. Janna Müller and Frauke Reitemeier (Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2010), pp. 21–2.
45. The battle at Dean is reported only in the A manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The battle probably drew the attention of the monks of the Old Minster, Winchester, because one of the casualties was the son of a bishop of Winchester. The contemporary account in A tellingly lacks the pessimism and criticisms that suffuse the entry for 1001 in CDE. Keynes, ‘A Tale of Two Kings’, p. 202.
46. ASC 1001 A, trans. Swanton, p. 132.
47. ASC 1002 CDE.
48. Memorials of St Dunstan, ed. W. Stubbs (London: Longman, 1874), pp. 397–8, trans. EHD, pp. 82–3.
49. S 909, in which she is said to have been ‘consecrated to the royal bed’. See Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, pp. 174–5.
50. Diplomas, p. 210, n. 2003.
51. S 904. Pauline Stafford, ‘Queens, Nunneries and Reforming Churchmen: Gender, Religious Status and Reform in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England’, Past and Present, 163 (1999), pp. 4 and 19.
52. Pauline Stafford suggests that the nuns of Wherwell sought the privilege as protection against the new queen: ‘Queens, Nunneries’, pp. 25–7.
53. Exodus 20:12, in Roach, Æthelred the Unready, pp. 189–90.
54. ASC 1001 A.
55. ASC 1002 CDE, trans. Swanton, p. 135.
56. S 909; EHD, pp. 545–6.
57. Kings Alfred and Æthelstan had both issued legislation assuring church sanctuary (cyricgrið), as would Æthelred himself six years after the burning of St Frideswide’s church, probably at the urging of Wulfstan. See Af. 2.1, 5.4, 42.2; IV As. 6; VI Atr. 14; VIII Atr. 1.1. Wulfstan’s views on the inviolability of church sanctuary are most fully articulated in the texts ‘Grið’ and ‘Nor Grið’, in Political Writings, pp. 76–84.
58. See Roach, Æthelred the Unready, p. 196. The parable of the cockle among the wheat was used to countenance the burning of heretics during the High Middle Ages (Levi Roach, personal communiqué). See also Ann Williams, ‘ “Cockles Amongst the Wheat”: Danes and English in the West Midlands in the First Half of the Eleventh century’, Midland History, 11 (1986), pp. 1–22.
59. Sean Wallis (ed.), The Oxford Henge and Late Saxon Massacre; with Medieval and Late Occupation at St John’s College, Oxford (Reading: Thames Valley Archaeological Services, 2014), pp. 37–158. A second mass grave of slain vikings was discovered in 2009 on Ridgeway Hill between Dorchester and Weymouth in Dorset. This one contained the disarticulated skeletons of fifty-four men (but only fifty-one skulls) who had been violently killed. Chemical analysis and radiocarbon dating determined that they too were Scandinavian males of fighting age killed probably sometime during the reign of Æthelred. Given the location of the burial pit, the dead may have been vikings captured during a raid or a company of mercenaries billeted in either Dorchester or Portland. See Louise Loe, Angela Boyle, Helen Webb, David Score, ‘Given to the Ground’: A Viking Age Mass Grave on Ridgeway Hill, Weymouth (Dorchester: Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, 2014).
60. See Williams, pp. 53–4; Roach, Æthelred the Unready, pp. 192–200. Ryan Lavelle suggests that the victims were Scandinavian merchants. See Lavelle, p. 100.
61. WM, pp. 300–301; Williams, p. 54.
62. The Danes’ praise of the East Anglians’ ‘hand-play’ is in the entry for 1004 in manuscripts C and D but not E. See Swanton, p. 136, n. 1.
63. ASC 1005 CDE, trans. Swanton, p. 136.