vikings – Ingliando

The St Brice’s Day Massacre

13th November 1002

On this day, King Aethelred of England, commonly known as “the Unready” but whose nickname would be more accurately translated as “the ill-advised“, ordered the deaths of all the Danes in his kingdom. After a brief period of relative peace and stability the Vikings had begun to launch raids again, winning a decisive victory at the Battle of Maldon in 991. Aethelred managed to buy a few years of peace at great cost to the treasury, but it was a short-term solution. The full scale of the massacre he ordered is not known, but the victims included Gunhilde, the sister of Sweyn Forkbeard, the formidable King of Denmark, who waged a vindictive ten-year war on England. Eventually, in 1013, Forkbeard defeated Aethelred, marched into London, and claimed the land to be his own. Sweyn’s son Cnut finished the job in 1016 and Aethelred’s kingdom became an extension of Denmark’s growing Empire.

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The Murder of Archbishop Ælfheah

19th April 1012

On this day, Ælfheah, the archbishop of Canterbury, more commonly known today as Alphege, was savagely murdered by Danish Vikings. On 8th September 1011, the Danes laid siege to Canterbury and, helped by the treachery of Ælfmaer, sacked it three weeks later. They then took Ælfheah prisoner and plundered and burned the cathedral. Ælfheah was held captive for seven months until the Danes grew tired of his refusal to allow a ransom to be paid for his release. On 19th April, in a drunken frenzy, the archbishop was pelted with bones and the heads of cattle until he received a fatal blow on the head with the butt of an axe, possibly delivered as an act of kindness by a Christian convert.

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Vikings Sack the City of Paris

29th March 845

On this day, an Easter Sunday, having sailed up the river Seine with a fleet of 120 ships, 5000 Vikings under the leadership of Reginherus (identified by some as the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok) entered the city of Paris and plundered it. The Frankish king Charles the Bald attempted to halt the raid by gathering an army on either side of the river, but the Vikings attacked and defeated one of the divisions, and hanged 111 prisoners on an island in the Seine, inciting terror into the remaining Frankish forces. Charles agreed to pay Reginherus 7,000 livres of silver and gold (about 2570 kg) to leave the city and allowed the Vikings to keep whatever they had plundered in Paris. During the two months that it took Charles to raise the sum, a significant number of Vikings died from dysentery. According to the locals, the disease was sent as divine retribution by Saint Germain of Paris.