A Bloody Footnote in English History: Remembering the St. Brice’s Day Massacre
By Gus Latcham, Third Year History
Content Warning: Genocide.
The thirteenth of November 1002 AD marked another bloody day in English history.
Distinguishing this one, however, from the countless other bloody days in English history, is the genocidal hysteria which precipitated it. Following the dubious discovery of a Danish-backed attempt on his life, King Æthelred II called for the mass execution of all Danes in England, an ethnic category then used to describe anyone of general Scandinavian descent.
“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”, read Æthelred’s account of the massacre two years after. It is not known exactly how many were killed following this mandate, nor how widely enacted it was, but at least two contemporary accounts offer records of the atrocities that did occur in direct response.
For context, Æthelred’s reign came at a time of turbulent North European relations; seafaring raiders from Scandinavia, loosely termed Vikings, had been marauding English coastlines since 793. In search of loot and riches, Viking groups launched sporadic incursions into English towns and villages, leaving trails of destruction and desecration in their wake. But by 865, the Scandinavian pirates had grown bored of ‘going Viking’; they chose instead to settle - farming and wintering in the lands they once sought to seasonally pillage. Soon thereafter the ‘Danelaw’ was established, a territory conceded by Alfred the Great across the North-East of England for the inhabitation of the Danish settlers.
Crucial to understanding this episode, though, is that, by the time of Aethelred’s reign (and long before that), the Danes and the English were by no means mutually exclusive ethnic groups. The most conspicuous example of this is Æthelred’s marriage to Emma of Normandy, the Norman-born aristocrat, who through her maternal lineage was of Scandinavian descent. Through centuries of cohabitation in England, albeit sometimes a tempestuous arrangement, there was a strong degree of social and cultural interchange between the two groups on a popular level. English towns and villages that suddenly fell under the Danelaw were not met with exodus; rather cultures collided and people assimilated, evident in the Scandinavian influence in our language and genetic composition today.
Such then, was the dismay of many, when the highest power of the realm decreed the execution of all Danish inhabitants of England, with no apparent scruples for age or sex. According to the monk William of Jumièges, writing around sixty years after the massacre, Æthelred ordered specifically for Danish women to be buried alive up to their waists, and dogs set upon their naked torsos, whilst the requisite punishment for small children was to be crushed to death (Deeds of the Norman Dukes, William of Jumièges).
Two burial sites in Oxford and Dorset, containing ninety-one skeletons in total, are the best archaeological evidence for the massacre. Discovered in 2008 and 2009 respectively, the skeletons are invariably Scandinavian, and all date to around 1000 AD. The fifty-four Danes found atop a hill in Dorset displayed signs of shoddy, but methodical execution, having been beheaded one-by-one. Similarly, the charred remains of those found in St John’s College, Oxford, are consistent with the St. Frideswide Charter of 1004 AD, which describes how a group of defenceless Danes were burned alive in the church in which they sought refuge.
An archaeologist excavates the remains of fifty-four skeletons with Scandinavian DNA in Dorset in 2009 (Oxford Archaeology).
But perhaps the most striking aspect of this episode is not the sheer scale of violence actioned by mobs across England, but rather the rhetoric employed by Æthelred to justify his decision. The specific phrase used by Æthelred to describe the Danes - ‘cockle amongst the wheat’ - is an egregious euphemism intended to dehumanise a particular group of people. Cockle, also known as ‘false wheat’, is a pervasive, poisonous weed that closely resembles actual wheat, and grows in the exact same conditions. It falls on the farmer at harvest to separate and discard the cockle, only at that point distinguishable by its dark grey appearance.
The comparison, then, between Danes and the undesirable, deadly cockle plants was a deplorable one; it was intended to reduce them to a lesser existence – undeserving of empathy or humane treatment. Such rhetoric is by no means confined to our medieval past, either, and those attuned to the history of Nazi Germany and other periods of racial persecution more broadly will recognise it in full. Hitler, most notably, garnered much popular support through his comparisons between the Jewish people and tuberculosis, along with a range of other pejorative, inanimate, or ‘sub-human’ entities.
The perennial ‘othering’ of racial minorities echoes even into the present day, where recent race riots across the UK were fuelled partly by dehumanising language, much of which was also endorsed by figures of authority.
A final point of intrigue, as raised by Dr Alice Roberts in her recent book Crypt, is the question of Æthelred’s perception of his own wife, Emma of Normandy. Herself being Scandinavian by descent, how could he justify the hateful persecution of a demographic he presumably saw her a part of? It may be that Æthelred was able to view her only as a Norman – in which case highlighting a greater irony due to the direct relation of the Normans and Danes. But more likely is that Æthelred and his people were inclined to draw arbitrary and expedient distinctions between migrants of ‘greater’ perceived value, and those of ‘lesser’ perceived value to society. Ethnicity may well have been decided on the basis of utility – a hardly unfamiliar approach - and the many Danes that did not reach the required threshold for an English identity surely suffered on St Brice’s Day.