It is, today, the 87th anniversary of the Crystal Palace burning down, but you can look to proper historians for that sort of thing…
…because, far more importantly, it’s also the 1,007th anniversary of Edmund II getting done in by being stabbed up the bum while on the privy. Possibly.
Edmund ‘Ironside’ had become king on St George’s Day 1016 when his dad Æthelred processed off this mortal coil, and had been kinging himself for a mere seven months when he breathed his last on St Andrew’s Day, possibly looking like this as he went.
Obviously, at this distance of time, we don’t know that this is even remotely true, although we can be fairly sure that he spent most of his short reign fighting Cnut and his Danish army, who by then had already been marauding about the place for some time.
In October 1016, Edmund and Cnut agreed a peace treaty which made Eddie king of Wessex, and Cnut ruler of norðdæle (aka “pretty much everything else”). Cnut would then be ruler of the whole caboodle when Ironside… met his end.
Historian Eleanor Parker says
We don’t know the cause of his death, and … he died at the end of a year of almost continuous warfare, just six weeks after a heroic performance at the Battle of Assandun, so it’s very possible he succumbed to an existing wound.
But where’s the fun in that? Obviously, we should go by the account of 12th-century historian Henry of Huntingdon, author of Historia Anglorum, instead, in which he tells us that Edmund was “treasonably slain”.
Well, unless Edric saved his son the faff of climbing into a privy and waiting for the king’s arse to arrive above him by providing a weapon he could set up in the pit which would automatically fire a crossbow bolt into the royal orifice. Accounts vary.
Either way, according to Henry of Huntingdon, Edric — who had fought on Edmund’s side, but could see which way the wind was blowing — went off to Cnut and
Because — as one should expect of the man who (well, supposedly) proved he couldn’t turn back the tide — there was not much insect life on Cnut. Why trust someone who had
hesitated between the two sides with fraudulent tergiversation
…in the words of the Encomium Emmae Reginae (whose anonymous author’s sources were the court of Harthacnut, son of Cnut)? The Encomium says Cnut told one of his men:
Pay this man what we owe him; that is to say, kill him, lest he play us false.
Because, if the manuscript which claims to show how Edmund died is anything to go by, he and Cnut had, quite literally, kissed and made up after their war. It’s from the 13th Century Life of St Edward the Confessor, now in the Cambridge University Library.
And, to go back to Eleanor Parker, Edmund still begat kings, even if he wasn’t one himself for very long.
At the time of his death, he had two infant sons by his wife Ealdgyth. They were taken out of the country, and grew up in exile. One of them married a Hungarian princess and by her became the father of three children, including Margaret of Scotland; and her daughter, in 1100, married Henry I, thus grafting the line of the Anglo-Saxon kings back into the royal family tree.
So…
the English monarchy can today claim descent from the kings of Wessex
but whether you’ll break the ice with Charles III, should you meet him, by opening with “have you heard the one about the 11th century king with the dagger up his bum?” remains a moot point.
