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by the wicked Elfreda. Meanwhile ‘the dagger of an attendant pierced him through’. He clapped spurs to his horse but half fell and, with one foot caught in a stirrup, was dragged through the wood, trailing his blood as he went. Alas, the end of Edward meant the succession of Ethelred.

    The political background to this deed was monastic reform, the hot potato of the time. Edward belonged to St Dunstan’s stable which wished to reform the monasteries along stricter Benedictine lines. But this was opposed by the rival Mercian kingdom who formed an alliance with Elfreda and supported the accession of Ethelred.
    Though the king’s earthly life was short (lasting only about 15 years), soon after his death miracles were reported in his name and he became known as Edward the Martyr. Indeed his fame spread far and wide. Pilgrims came to seek his tomb, but his rather plain burial in Wareham was thought to be unworthy.
    His body was therefore exhumed and translated by archbishop Dunstan to Shaftesbury Abbey, a distance of 25 miles. A solemn procession took place on foot, during which more miracles were said to have occurred. Seven days later the charmed bones arrived at their destination. It was probably the greatest religious procession ever to happen in Dorset.
    Edward the Martyr’s relics might have vanished by the modern era had not the Russian Orthodox Church stepped in to receive them in the 1980s. Believing that the ‘old church’ doctrine espoused by Dunstan of Glastonbury and Edward the Martyr was close in style and content to their own (for this predates the Great Schism of the 11th century when the Christian Church split into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox), the eastern Church set up a shrine dedicated to Edward at a chapel in Brookwood, Surrey, where they continue to celebrate services in his honour.

Was Ethelred Really ‘Unready’?
How come such a sloth reigned for 38 years?
    N o English king has had a worse press than Ethelred the ‘Unready’. Even Richard III and bad King John had their reprieves, but Ethelred has had more disparaging rhymes written about him than any other monarch. Writing a century after his death, William of Malmesbury said of him:
    The king, eager and admirably fitted for sleeping, put off such great matters (that is, opposing the Danes) and yawned, and if ever he recovered his senses enough to raise himself upon his elbow, he immediately relapsed into his wretchedness.
    But what did Ethelred do to earn such a reputation? Can a man who reigned for 38 years have been all that bad? His great calumny was to give up, not even to try to defend, all that his ancestor Alfred the Great had painstakingly secured from the Vikings nearly two centuries before.
    The Anglo-Saxon empire was by the 980s an evidently prosperous state, one of the wealthiest in Europe, with rich pickings to be had if its borders were not well defended.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
tells of a government in disarray, of indecision, treachery, ineptitude, even cruelty, of which Ethelred was the chief culprit.
    Facing wave upon wave of Viking invasion, the king became ever more desperate. For a long time Danes had been settled under the Danelaw in eastern parts of the country. In a pique of paranoia, Ethelred issued a decree in 1002 that all Danes be massacred, on the grounds that they wished to depose him. Furthermore this order of execution was extended to all members of his governing counsel, the Witan. Ethelred’s nickname, the ‘Unready’, is a twelfth century translation of the Anglo-Saxon word ‘Unraed’, meaning ‘ill-advised’, or ‘having no counsel’, and may originate from this event, known as the ‘Massacre of St Brice’s Day’.
    THE WITAN: A PROTO-PARLIAMENT
    Perhaps the earliest form of English parliament existed in royal Wessex. A body of the king’s counsellors, both lay and ecclesiastical, numbering about 100, would meet regularly in what was known as the Witan to debate issues of the day.