[In the following essay, Wilcox concentrates on Wulfstan's relationship to the English massacre of Danish settlers in 1002 in order to discern the Archbishop's views on reconciliation and peaceful coexistence in a Christian polity.]

As a preacher and legislator in late Anglo-Saxon England, Archbishop Wulfstan was in a position to play a significant role as peacemaker in violent and divisive times. The archbishop's attitude to those times has been preserved in a significant body of writing that makes him one of the most articulate voices from the reigns of Æthelred II and Cnut. In this essay, I will examine how Wulfstan handled the role of peacemaker by focusing first on a spectacular breakdown of peaceful co-existence in Æthelred's England—the St. Brice's Day massacre of 1002—and then by careful attention to the archbishop's articulation of peaceful co-existence in the light of that event. Wulfstan's relation to the massacre has never been considered at length before, perhaps because there is no record of his precise role in the event, yet I will show that juxtaposing the preacher and the slaughter provides insight both into the activity of 1002 and, more broadly, into the the moral world of late Anglo-Saxon England.

THE ST. BRICE'S DAY MASSACRE

At the end of the annal for 1002, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports an added detail for the year: “7 on ðam geare se cyng het ofslean ealle ða Deniscan men þe on Angelcynne wæron on Bricius messedæg. forþon þam cynge wæs gecydd þæt hi woldon hine besyrewian æt his life. 7 syððan ealle his witan. 7 habban syþðan his rice” (And in that year the king ordered to be slain all the Danish men who were in England—on St. Brice's day—because the king had been informed that they would treacherously deprive him, and then all his councillors, of life, and possess his kingdom afterwards).¹ In a single, unamplified sentence, the chronicler reports probably the most horrendous act of Æthelred's long and oft-maligned reign. The cryptic account of the Chronicle makes imaginative reconstruction of the event of 13 November 1002 difficult, but what is described here is clearly a pogrom—the slaughter of a settled population on the basis of their ethnic identification.

The chance survival of a charter for the monastery of St. Frideswide, Oxford, is crucial to a fuller understanding of the event. In this charter, dated 1004, Æthelred renews the privilege of the monastery after the burning of its church. The circumstances of the conflagration are explained in the preamble:

Omnibus enim in hac patria degentibus satis constat fore notissimum quoniam dum a me decretum cum consilio optimatum satrapumque meorum exiuit vt cuncti Dani, qui in hac insula velut lollium inter triticum pululando emerserant, iustissima exinanitione necarentur, hocque decretum morte tenus ad effectum perduceretur, ipsi qui in prefata vrbe morabantur Dani, mortem euadere nitentes, hoc Xpi sacrarium, fractis per vim valuis ac pessulis, intrantes asilum sibi repugnaculumque contra vrbanos suburbanosque inibi fieri decreuerunt, set cum populus omnis insequens, necessitate compulsus, eos eiicere niteretur nec valeret, igne tabulis iniecto, hanc Ecclesiam, vt liquet, cum ornamentis ac libris combusserunt.²

(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, like cockle amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination, and this decree was to be put into effect even as far as death, those Danes who dwelt in the afore-mentioned town [Oxford], striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ, having broken by force the doors and bolts, and resolved to make a refuge and defence for themselves therein against the people of the town and 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.)³

In other words, the slaughter was carried out with such zeal that the townsfolk were forced—justifiably, in the rhetoric of this document—to burn down the church, whose privileges now need renewing.

To make any sense of this horrific occurrence, it is first necessary to consider its context. Viking attacks had been the broad shaping force of English history since they began in the late eighth century. Attacks by Vikings, labeled by English sources as Danes (even though modern historians identify both Danish and Norwegian forces, along with Vikings settled elsewhere), culminated in the reign of King Alfred in the division of England with the establishment of the Danelaw to the north and east and of English law to the south and west, as codified in a treaty between Alfred and Guthrum in c. 878.⁴ The next century saw the expansion of English political power into the Danelaw, but the reign of Æthelred (978-1016) was preoccupied with the Viking problem. In 991, Æthelred's ranking ealdorman was defeated by a Viking army in a battle near Maldon, an unsuccessful engagement that was finessed into a story of noble resistance in the famous Old English poem.⁵ Thereafter, Æthelred began trying to buy off Viking attacks with the payment of vast tributes known as danegeld. Both the military and the pecuniary strategies were derided by the near-contemporary Anglo-Saxon chronicler, who regarded Æthelred's whole reign as repeated failure in response to the Danish threat. By 1011 the chronicler was rudely riffing on Æthelred's name (æþel-ræd, “noble-council”), reflecting on the disasters that came about “þurh unrædas”:

Ealle þas ungesælða us gelumpon þurh unrædes. þæt mann nolde him to timan gafol bedan [oþþe wið gefeohtan (C)]. ac þonne hi mæst to yfele gedon hæfdon. þonne nam man grið. 7 frið wið hi. 7 naðelæs for eallum þisum griðe 7 friðe 7 gafole. hi ferdon æghwider flocmælum. 7 heregodon ure earme folc. 7 hi ræpton 7 slogon.⁶

(All those disasters befell us through bad policy, in that they [the Danes] were never offered tribute in time nor fought against; but when they had done most to our injury, peace and truce were made with them; and for all this truce and tribute they journeyed none the less in bands everywhere, and harried our wretched people, and plundered and killed them.)⁷

“Peace negotiations and peace buying” (eallum þisum griðe 7 friðe 7 gafole) are worthy of derision in the eyes of this chronicler writing in the context of warfare and strife.⁸

The political sources, then, emphasize this as a period of confrontation and war, and yet a glance at the longue durée suggests that something different was also going on, which, while unremarked in contemporary chronicles, would have an enduring effect on the political, social, and linguistic scene. Even as Viking bands harried the country, ex-Vikings were settling down, intermarrying, trading and farming, and becoming upstanding burghers in their communities. Such settlement was common in the Danelaw, presumably accelerating after the Danish Conquest of 1016, but also occurred in “English” England before that date. In the Danelaw, place-name evidence attests abundantly to settlements by Norse speakers, and the development of the English language attests to the heavy influence of Norse, both in lexical borrowings and, no doubt, in the leveling of grammatical endings which allowed the rapid change to Middle English after the Norman Conquest.⁹ Danish settlement within non-Danelaw English communities before 1016 is harder to pinpoint, but there is some evidence for it. At a high political level, the Norseman Pallig, brother-in-law of Swein Forkbeard, king of Denmark, had somehow become one of Æthelred's military leaders, who deserted to the Viking army in Devon with what ships he could collect in 1001, even though the king “him wel gegifod hæfde ón hamon, 7 on golde 7 seolfre” (had made great gifts to him, in estates and gold and silver).¹⁰

At a more humble level, in a charter datable to 1006-11, a man identified as a Dane, one Toti, is granted estates in Oxfordshire by Æthelred in exchange for a pound of pure gold for tribute.¹¹ A man with the Norse name Clofig received land in Warwickshire in 1001.¹² In the case of Oxford itself, archaeological evidence from the late tenth century suggests the survival on the town's edges of a group who identified with the Danelaw in that Danelaw-produced pottery predominates there over locally produced pottery.¹³ In general, Susan Reynolds has argued for a considerable contribution by Danish settlers and traders to the formation of English towns both in and beyond the Danelaw.¹⁴ The precise extent of Viking settlement is unknowable, although the pattern in Oxford attested by the archaeological evidence and the charter under consideration here was probably typical of many towns outside the Danelaw.¹⁵

Æthelred's action in 1002 was surely motivated in part by his repeated encounters with the Danes as aggressing Vikings, even though the danger is construed as a threat to his person and counsellors—in what sounds like an eleventh-century Gunpowder Plot—which allows him to turn upon the settled population in lieu of the harder-to-get-at marauding armies. Later chroniclers speculate on additional reasons for the purge. A thirteenth-century chronicle attributed to John of Wallingford, in particular, elaborates on what motivated the slaughter: “The Danes made themselves too acceptable to the English women by their elegant manners and their care of their persons. They combed their hair daily, and took a bath every Saturday. So they were all killed on their bathing-day.”¹⁶ In distinctly colorful terms from his significantly later perspective, John sees the slaughter as an explosion of deep-rooted cultural animosity.

The events of late 1002 are shocking precisely because the aggression was aimed not at the attacking Viking armies but at the settled population (“all the Danish people who were in England,” according to the Chronicle). As Edward A. Freeman, the great nineteenth-century Liberal historian, put it, “Æthelred and his counsellors contrived to do what otherwise might have seemed impossible, to put the heathen invaders in the right.”¹⁷ It is unclear whether Æthelred's writ here could have applied to the Danelaw. Rather, “the Danes who had sprung up in this island, like cockle amongst the wheat,” were presumably those most clearly settled in precisely the same territory as the identifiably English wheat among whom they were scattered. Only that somewhat assimilated group, presumably, might have been physically close enough to deprive the king and all his counsellors of life. Oxford, in any case, was firmly situated on the English side of the Danelaw divide.¹⁸

The image of the “cockle amongst the wheat” (lollium inter triticum), by which the charter writer portrays the Danes disparagingly as a grain-field weed, draws its force less from Anglo-Saxon farming practice than from Christ's parable in Matt. 13.24-30, where a man's field of good seed is oversown at night by his enemy with cockle among the wheat (“oferseow hit mid coccele onmiddan þam hwæte,” in the Old English version of Matt. 13.25).¹⁹ In this parable, the farmer instructs his servants to “Gather up first the cockle, and bind it into bundles to burn, but the wheat gather ye into my barn” (Matt. 13.30).²⁰ The parable goes on: “And the field is the world. And the good seed are the children of the kingdom. And the cockle, are the children of the wicked one. And the enemy that sowed them, is the devil. But the harvest is the end of the world. And the reapers are the angels. Even as cockle therefore is gathered up, and burnt with fire: so shall it be at the end of the world” (Matt. 13.38-40). The evangelist here firmly places the image in an apocalyptic context. The apocalyptic time frame is retained by the homilist Ælfric both times he uses this passage (in Catholic Homilies 1.35 and in Pope 5).²¹ Æthelred, however, has moved the action from the end of the world to the present and has given a very particular interpretation to the cockles.

Through this image from Matthew, the charter writer imagines the Danes as pagan, since they are the unsaved sown by the devil. The faith of the Danes, though, is an open question. The target of the group's flight at Oxford might provide a clue to their religion. Their running to a church suggests either a faith in Christianity (although it is true that the church was closed to them, since they had to force the doors and bolts) or a faith in English law, which regarded churches as sites of sanctuary.²² The charter writer implies that they sought both moral sanctuary and a defensible protective position (they “resolved to make a refuge and defence for themselves therein” [asilum sibi repugnaculumque]). The Danes' choice for sanctuary in Oxford may or may not suggest that they were christianized members of the community; in all events, they were somehow sufficiently distinctive to be under attack.

The tone of the charter is clear. Æthelred and his charter writer are unapologetic about the killing of the Danes, albeit slightly ambivalent about the destruction of the church building. The general killing of Danes is presented as “a most just extermination” (iustissima exinanitione); the people of Oxford and its suburbs were in pursuit, “forced by necessity” (necessitate compulsus). When they couldn't drive the Danes out of the church, they followed the reasonable course of burning the building. There is a hint of distancing—the citizens “as it seems” (vt liquet) set the fire—along with a hint of regret in the listing of what got burned, “this church with its ornaments and books” (hanc Ecclesiam … cum ornamentis ac libris). The act of renewing the church's privileges was perhaps an attempt to reestablish normalcy after a regrettable incident, while, nevertheless, justifying what the citizens did.

The exercise of brutish state power was quite normal for late Anglo-Saxon kings, although it receives less comment from the chronicler than does defeat at the hands of the Vikings. In 986, for example, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to a royal ravaging of Rochester but leaves the episode unexplained and unmotivated.²³ A few decades later, in the reign of King Harthacnut, a royal ravaging of Worcester was a bloody and destructive affair that resulted from the death of two of the king's tax collectors at the hands of the citizens.²⁴ Such turning against a single city, though alarmingly violent, must have been relatively straightforward to coordinate, since the king could use his standing army. The precise mechanism of the St. Brice's Day massacre, on the other hand, is harder to envisage, just as its precise scope is unknowable. Again, though, there are some clues.

In the charter of 1004, the decree for the slaughter was well known—no sneaky business here—and was arrived at “cum consilio optimatum satrapumque meorum” (with the counsel of my leading men and magnates). Usually such a phrase would suggest the witan, the collection of men of rank, civil and ecclesiastical, who met with the king perhaps three or four times a year at a movable location, where they conducted the business of the state, including the drafting of laws, the election of high ecclesiastics, the settlement of disputes, and the transfer of land.²⁵ Surviving charters attest to two such meetings in the second half of 1002. One was held on 11 July at Canterbury (where the charter S. 905 was written), surely too early to have resulted in the sudden action in November; the other was at an unknown place and date after the July meeting (where the charter S. 902 was drawn up).²⁶ The special circumstances of a perceived threat against the king might mean that the “leading men and magnates” were whoever was at hand, not a full meeting of the witan. If, however, the massacre followed a meeting of the witan, this later meeting was it.

If the slaughter was agreed to by the witan, the ealdormen and thanes in attendance along with their retinues would have carried the news to their districts. If the policy was a special action, news of it must have been carried to local leaders. The perceived threat to the king suggests that the action would have been undertaken quickly, yet the coordination to a single day suggests some time must have passed while local leaders were informed and local arrangements were made. Plans must have remained secret lest the Danish population run for sanctuary sooner. The Danes at Oxford were pursued by “vrbanos suburbanosque” (the people of the town and the suburbs), apparently an undifferentiated mob following, presumably, the orders and leadership of the reeve or the local thegn, rather like the prosecution of a hue and cry against any thief caught in the act.²⁷

The witness list of the charter drawn up in late 1002 (S. 902), like all such witness lists, itemizes who was present when the meeting was held. If the massacre did follow a meeting of the witan, this gives us a list of those involved in the decision. In any event, the charter of 1004 (S. 909) includes a roll call of those condoning its violent rhetoric. In the 1004 charter, after King Æthelred's attestation come those of two archbishops, Ælfric of Canterbury and Wulfstan of York, then the queen, Ælfgifu, then the king's first son, Athelstan, followed by seven bishops, two ealdormen, four abbots, and twelve thegns. Such a witness list implicates the powerful ecclesiastics of the land in the rhetoric of acceptance of the massacre. One of those two archbishops, Wulfstan, was a highly articulate voice in late Anglo-Saxon England who has left us a substantial enough body of work to speculate about his attitude to the slaughter. The charter of late 1002 (S. 902) is the first in which he attests as archbishop of York. I will now turn to his attitude toward peace and reconciliation as viewed through the extreme test case of this breakdown of both. Wulfstan will provide a focus for understanding a Christian commitment to peaceful co-existence and reconciliation in late Anglo-Saxon England.

ARCHBISHOP WULFSTAN AND THE MASSACRE

Wulfstan was Bishop of London in 996-1002, archbishop of York in 1002-23, and concurrently, bishop of Worcester in 1002-16. He was both a significant actor on the political stage of his day and a major Old English author, who wrote some forty surviving Old English homilies and a treatise of political theory, the Institutes of Polity, along with drafting six of the lawcodes for King Æthelred and the major pair of lawcodes of King Cnut.²⁸

Wulfstan's movements in November 1002 are impossible to reconstruct. His predecessor at York, Archbishop Ealdwulf, died in summer 1002 according to the Chronicle. Wulfstan witnessed the charter of 11 July 1002 (S. 905) as bishop of London and that of later 1002 (S. 902) as archbishop of York. No record survives of when he was consecrated, presumably by Ælfric, archbishop of Canterbury, nor of when he traveled to York.

Wulfstan's ethical whereabouts, on the other hand, can be reconstructed from his extensive writings. The foundation of his moral code lies in Christ's abbreviated two commandments of the New Testament: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart …” (Matt. 22.37, Mark 12.30) and “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matt. 22.39, Mark 12.31). He particularly appreciated the latter formulation in terms of the Sermon on the Mount, “All things therefore whatsover you would that men should do to you, do you also to them” (Matt. 7.12, cf. Luke 6.31). Such an injunction recurs throughout his writings, as in the context of a homiletic listing of the Ten Commandments: “he georne eac lærde þæt manna gehwilc oðrum beode þæt þæt he wille þæt man him beode” (he also eagerly taught that each person do unto others what he would want that one do unto him).²⁹ The injunction is repeated with a slight variation later in this sermon and is peppered elsewhere throughout Wulfstan's homiletic writings.³⁰

The productive nature of such rhetoric for fostering peace depends, of course, on who is defined as a neighbor, and one of Wulfstan's homiletic formulations makes clear the potential exclusivity of the doctrine:

Ælc cristen man is oðres nyhsta, forðam we synd þurh cristendom ealle gebroðra, 7 we syndon Cristes agene bearn gyf we sylfe willað. And ðy hit is rihtlic dom þæt ænig cristen man oðrum ne beode butan þæt he wille þæt man him beode, 7 se byð swyðe gesælig þe þæne dom rihtlice gehealdeð.

(Each Christian person is the other's neighbor, for we are all brothers through Christianity, and we are Christ's own children if we ourselves want to be. And therefore it is a correct judgment that any Christian person should not do unto others except what he wants that one do unto him, and he is very happy who keeps that judgment rightly.)³¹

In this reading of Christ's injunction, if those Danes fleeing to the church of St. Frideswide's were in fact pagan, Wulfstan's rhetoric of brotherly love and reciprocity would not have applied to them. Instead, Wulfstan provides a predictably harsh voice against pagans. On the one hand, Christ's first injunction to love God suggests that pagans were doctrinally beyond the pale for Wulfstan; on the other, the Viking attacks must have sharpened his sense of the havoc and mayhem pagans could impose on a settled Christian nation. Such, presumably, is the context of the legal code he drafted “ða se micel here com to lande” (when the great army came to the country),³² which organizes a national liturgical response against the pagan aggressors, featuring the daily recital in every religious foundation of a mass “contra paganos” (against the heathen),³³ and including the recital of Psalm 3 (“Why, O Lord, are they multiplied that afflict me? many are they who rise up against me”), a psalm that reflects on God's protection of his chosen people against persecution by nonbelievers.³⁴ In general, when the legislation Wulfstan formulated conjures up peace and concord (“sibb 7 som”), it is significantly among “eallum Cristenum mannum” (all Christian people).³⁵

The legislative attitude toward pagan practice is particularly clear in VI Æthelred, probably drawn up at King's Eanham in 1008, six years after the massacre, in a legal encouragement of peace and goodwill. Here, the counsellors define “rihte laga” (justice) as “þæt man frið 7 freondscipe rihtlice healde innan þysan earde for Gode 7 for worolde” (that peace and goodwill shall be duly maintained within this land in matters both religious and secular).³⁶ Yet this call for peace and goodwill is immediately preceded by two clauses that significantly narrow its scope:

[6] 7 la gyt we willað biddan freonda gehwylcne 7 eal folc eac læran georne, þæt hy inwerdre heortan ænne God lufian 7 ælcne hæþendom georne ascunian.

[7] 7 gif wiccan oððe wigeleras, scincræftcan oððe horcwenan, morðwyrhtan oððe mánsworan ahwar on earde wurðan agytene, fyse hy man georne ut of þysan earde 7 clænsige þas þeode, oþþe on earde forfare hy mid ealle, butan hy geswican 7 þe deoppor gebetan.

([6] And now behold, we will beseech all our friends and likewise earnestly enjoin upon the whole nation, to love one God from their inmost heart, and zealously shun all heathen practices.

[7] And if wizards or sorcerers, magicians or prostitutes, those who secretly compass death or perjurers be met with anywhere in the land, they shall be zealously driven from this land and the nation shall be purified; otherwise they shall be utterly destroyed in the land, unless they cease from their wickedness and make amends to the utmost of their ability.)³⁷

Peace and goodwill are defined for those inside the nation in contradistinction to these excluded categories, including those practicing paganism along with those who secretly compass death (“morðwyrhtan”), who are to be driven out or utterly destroyed. The fate of these excluded sounds alarmingly like that of the Danes back at Oxford on St. Brice's Day.

In view of the permeable boundary between homilies and laws, it is unsurprising to find Wulfstan inserting into lawcodes phrasing from his homilies.³⁸ Such overlap includes the re-use of the formulation to “do unto others,” which occurs in three codes in telling contexts. In the lawcode “Grith” (Peace or Sanctuary), probably drawn up by Wulfstan in Cnut's reign, Wulfstan diminishes the importance of worldly rank and insists instead on the importance of Christianity:

[29] 7 eac is mycel nydþearf manna gehwylcum, þæt he oðrum beode þæt riht, þæt he wille þæt man him beode, be þam þe his mæð sy.

[30] Ealle we habbað ænne heofonlicne fæder 7 ane gastlice modor, seo is “ecclesia” genamod, þæt is Godes cyrice; 7 þy we syn gebroðra.

([29] And also there is much necessity for each person that he should, to the best of his ability, show the justice to others that he desires should be shown to him.

(30) We all have one heavenly father and one spiritual mother, who is called “ecclesia,” that is God's church; and therefore we are all brothers.)³⁹

Here the “do unto others” formulation occurs firmly in the context of Christian confraternity: within God's church, we are all brothers. In another formulation from Cnut's reign, I Cnut 18.2, the injunction to “do unto others” is presented as something a Christian should know for his or her own good, as “rihtlic dóm 7 Gode swiðe gecweme” (a just maxim and very pleasing to God). In VI Æthelred, however, the code from 1008, and perhaps reflecting a memory of the massacre, the injunction is in a different context, which gives it a different valence:

[42] Eac we gyt willað myngian georne freonda gehwilcne …

[48] … þæt hy ælþeodige men 7 feorran cumene ne tyrian ne ne tynan.

[49] 7 þæt hy oþrum mannum unriht ne beodan ealles to swyþe; ac manna gehwylc oþrum beode þæt riht, þæt he wille, þæt man him beode, be þam þe hit mæð sy; 7 þæt is swyþe riht lagu.

([42] And likewise we desire earnestly to exhort all our friends …

[48] … that they should not vex or oppress strangers and men come from afar.

[49] And that they should not excel in offering injustice to other men, but that every man should, to the best of his ability, show the justice to others that he desires should be shown to him—which is a very just rule.)⁴⁰

Here the respect for foreigners and those come from afar would seem to hold out the possibility of including the settled Danes among the community who should be treated as we would be treated. While hardly a forceful critique of the massacre, this bit of rhetoric may at least show Wulfstan's later concern that he not encourage the ethnic slaughter in which he had been complicit in 1002.

Throughout his works, Wulfstan's rhetoric promoted peace and reconciliation within the community, often figured in terms of brotherly love or of doing unto others as one would have done unto oneself. Yet his rhetoric also served to define those others within a Christian community with an evangelism that might fuel mistreatment—in the extreme case, even slaughter—of non-Christians. His formulation of Christian morality in VI Æthelred, however, hints that at that stage (in 1008), Wulfstan desired to include any assimilated Danish people into the protective net of an ordered Christian community. Of course, the acceptance of a settled Danish presence became easier after 1016, when a Danish victor, Cnut, ruled as king of both the Danelaw and of English England. At that stage, the challenge became to guide the new king toward the ideal values of Christian polity, a task in which Wulfstan played a particularly prominent part.

The St. Brice's Day massacre is a revealing flashpoint for examining the values of English society at the turn of the first millennium during the turbulent reign of King Æthelred. Wulfstan provides a valuable lens for viewing that flashpoint both because he wrote enough to allow the re-creation of a Christian intellectual's attitude to an act of slaughter and because his role as archbishop gave him a special responsibility to shape the response of his Christian society toward such political violence. Wulfstan's attitude shows the development of a Christian polity in a time of strife. The ethical outlook of his time is particularly interesting to Anglo-Saxon literary scholars since it provides a possible context for the preservation of most surviving Old English poetry—this was approximately the time when all four major poetic codices were copied out. The Christian polity that Wulfstan developed would go on to serve him well as he applied it most fully during the relatively stable reign of Cnut. While it is hard to know just how complicit Wulfstan was in the St. Brice's Day massacre itself, his activity in shaping the moral direction of the reign of Cnut shows him in the end to be a force for peaceful assimilation.

Notes

1. Charles Plummer (based on the edition of John Earle), Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel with Supplementary Extracts from the Others, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1892-99), s.a. 1002, 1:134-35, from MS E. All citations of the Chronicle are from this edition (cited hereafter as ASC), with word division normalized. A multi-volume collaborative edition is currently in progress and will ultimately supersede Plummer; general editors are David Dumville and Simon Keynes (Cambridge, 1983-). The relevant Chronicle entry is in MSS CDEF. All translations of the Chronicle are taken from Dorothy Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents, c. 500-1042 (Oxford, 1955), no. 1, pp. 135-235, here at p. 217.

2. Spencer Robert Wigram, ed., The Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Frideswide at Oxford, 2 vols., Oxford Historical Society 28, 31 (Oxford, 1895-96), 1:2-3, accepting the reading exinanitione for MS examinacione and with word division normalized.

3. Whitelock, English Historical Documents, no. 127, p. 545.

4. See F. Liebermann, ed., Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols. (Halle, 1903-16), 1:126-28; Whitelock, English Historical Documents, no. 34, pp. 380-81.

5. The poem is edited by D. G. Scragg, The Battle of Maldon (Manchester, 1981), and contextualized in terms of the battle in Donald Scragg, ed., The Battle of Maldon, A.D. 991 (Oxford, 1991).

6. ASC CDE, s.a. 1011.

7. Whitelock, English Historical Documents, no. 1, p. 221.

8. For a reading of the chronicler's interpretation of Æthelred, see Simon Keynes, “The Declining Reputation of King Æthelred the Unready,” in Ethelred the Unready: Papers from the Millenary Conference, ed. David Hill, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 59 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 227-53, who also describes the development of the nickname.

9. See Gillian Fellows Jensen, “The Vikings in England: A Review,” Anglo-Saxon England 4 (1975), 181-206; and Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1993), chap. 4.

10. See ASC A, s.a. 1001. Whitelock, English Historical Documents, no. 1, p. 216. William of Malmesbury claims that Pallig, his wife Gunhild, and their son were victims of the St. Brice's Day massacre and uses the event to motivate subsequent attacks by Gunhild's brother, Swein Forkbeard; see De Gestis Regum Anglorum, ed. William Stubbs, 3 vols. (London, 1887), 1:207.

11. Charter S. 943 in P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1968). Charters are cited hereafter as their number with an S. prefix. For further details on this charter, see Simon Keynes, The Diplomas of King Æthelred “The Unready” 978-1016 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 261-62.

12. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters, S. 898.

13. The findings are described by John Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (Stroud, 1994), p. 167, who draws the inference about culturally Danish settlers and reports the forthcoming findings of Maureen Mellor.

14. Susan Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (Oxford, 1977), pp. 37-42.

15. For Danish settlement patterns post-1016, see Ann Williams, “‘Cockles Amongst the Wheat’: Danes and English in the Western Midlands in the First Half of the Eleventh Century,” Midland History 11 (1986), 1-22.

16. The chronicle is paraphrased by Edward A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1867-79), 1:344 n. 2; for the original, see Richard Vaughan, ed., The Chronicle Attributed to John of Wallingford, Camden Miscellany 21 (London, 1958), p. 60.

17. Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, 1:342.

18. For a convenient map, see David Hill, An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 1981), p. 45, map 68.

19. R. M. Liuzza, ed., The Old English Version of the Gospels, Early English Text Society, o.s. 304 (Oxford, 1994), p. 27.

20. Biblical quotations are from the Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate.

21. Ælfric, Catholic Homilies 1.35, lines 122-25, ed. Peter Clemoes, Ælfric's Catholic Homilies: The First Series, Early English Text Society, s.s., 17 (Oxford, 1997), p. 480; and Pope 5, lines 265-78, in John C. Pope, ed., Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, Early English Text Society, o.s. 259-60 (Oxford, 1967-68), 1:299-300.

22. The guarantee of church sanctity recurs in lawcodes both from before Æthelred's time (e.g., II Edmund 2, II Edgar 5.3) and in those drafted by Wulfstan (i.e., VI Æthelred 14 and 42, VIII Æthelred 1, I Cnut 2, and Grith 2).

23. “Her se cyning fordyde þet biscoprice æt Hrofeceastre” (In this year the king [Æthelred] laid waste the diocese of Rochester; ASC CDE, s.a. 986).

24. The event is recorded in the ASC CD, s.a. 1041, and the details are drawn out from various sources by Emma Mason, St. Wulfstan of Worcester, c. 1008-1095 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 57-58.

25. On the operation of the witan during Æthelred's reign, see Keynes, Diplomas, esp. pp. 126-34.

26. For further details on all the charters of Æthelred's reign, see Keynes, Diplomas, passim.

27. See I Edgar 2, II Cnut 29.1.

28. On Wulfstan's life and works, see the introductions to Dorothy Whitelock, Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, 3rd ed. (London, 1963); and Dorothy Bethurum, The Homilies of Wulfstan (Oxford, 1957); along with Dorothy Bethurum, “Wulfstan,” in Continuations and Beginnings, ed. E. G. Stanley (London, 1966), pp. 210-46. On the homiletic corpus, see Karl Jost, Wulfstanstudien, Swiss Studies in English 23 (Berne, 1950); and Jonathan Wilcox, “The Dissemination of Wulfstan's Homilies: The Wulfstan Tradition in Eleventh-Century Vernacular Preaching,” in England in the Eleventh Century, ed. Carola Hicks, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 2 (Stamford, 1992), pp. 200-201. The political treatise is edited by Karl Jost, Die “Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical,” Swiss Studies in English 47 (Berne, 1959).

29. Bethurum, Homilies of Wulfstan, 10c.32-33. Wulfstan's homilies are all cited from this edition; translations are my own.

30. See Bethurum, Homilies of Wulfstan, 10c. 147-48 and 7.169-71, 8c.112-15, 10a.13-15, 13.55-57, 18.141-45.

31. Bethurum, Homilies of Wulfstan 8c.110-15.

32. “Prologue,” in VIIa Æthelred. VII Æthelred is edited by Liebermann, Die Gesetze, 1.260-62; and translated by A. J. Robertson, The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I (Cambridge, 1925), pp. 109-17. All quotations and translations of the laws are taken from these two works.

33. VII Æthelred 3.

34. VII Æthelred was agreed at Bath, probably in 1009.

35. The phrases recur at V Æthelred 19, VI Æthelred 25.1, I Cnut 17.2.

36. VI Æthelred 8.2.

37. VI Æthelred 6-7.

38. Such crossovers lead Robertson to remark with irritation that the late codes of Æthelred “are thoroughly ecclesiastical in tone and homiletic in style, full of tiresome repetitions and injunctions, but giving small sign of any practical policy with regard to the difficulties of the time” (Laws, p. 49).

39. VI Æthelred 29-30.

40. VI Æthelred 42, 48-49. Wulfstan reuses this formulation later in his career in a homiletic context in Arthur Napier, ed., Wulfstan: Sammlung der ihm zugeschriebenen Homilien (1883; repr. with a bibliographical appendix by Klaus Ostheeren, Dublin, 1967), 59, p. 309, lines 3-8.