… like a mass grave. Maybe it helps if said grave is 1,000 years old.
To find out that the young men executed were Vikings is a thrilling development. Any mass grave is a relatively rare find, but to find one on this scale, from this period of history, is extremely unusual.
That sounds like the St. Brice’s Day Massacre, in 1002. According to chronicles, King Ethelred ordered the execuation of all Danes in England, including Christians. That clearly cannot have covered the Danelaw, in parts of which people of Danish origin were the majority, but it is debated how many people were actually executed outside the Danelaw.
Growing up in the heart of the old Danelaw, where some dialect words and traditions are still of Scandinavian origin, I always thought that the unification of England in the 10th century must have seemed here much more like a conquest.
Yes, I found the tone of the articles about this rather chilling. I was going to write about it on Pagans for Archaeology, but found the gung-ho attitude (or the reported gung-ho attitude) somewhat sickening.
I hope that what has happened is that the archaeologist concerned said something like “it is thrilling to find so many Vikings; we will learn lots about Vikings” and that this thrill was transferred by the journalist onto the story of mass slaughter.
Rombald: I admit that my knowledge of English history between, say, Alfred the Great and Harold (II) Godwinson is lacking, so I had not heard of the St. Brice’s Day massacre.
Do you suppose that “kill all the Danes” really meant exactly that, or did it just mean to kill the fighting men? The skeletons found suggest warriors: I had wondered if they were captured raiders of some sort.
I see that the Wikipedia entry for the massacre says that it meant all ages and sexes.
Chas: I don’t really know. Most things from that era are just known from one or two records, and my guess is that no-one knows any more than Wikipedia.
Clearly, women and children were included, as Sweyn Forkbeard’s sister and niece were killed. Equally clearly, it cannot have included the Danelaw (under English rule at that time), as whole areas would have been depopulated. It must have applied only to the south, and it may have applied only to the elite. I don’t know.
It was a strange crime, as well as a cruel one, as neither the English nor Danes at that time drew a sharp ethnic distinction between the two nations (the languages were still just about mutually comprehensible), and English chroniclers had usually seen the Vikings as distinguished by religion rather than ethnicity.