Murder, sex and even a menage-a-trois: Today’s royals have nothing on the exploits of their Dark Ages counterparts

The bone coffins

by Cat Jarman (William Collins £25, 272pp)

During the English Civil War, in December 1642, Parliamentary troops storm Winchester Cathedral. An orgy of vandalism follows. The altar and organ are destroyed.

The soldiers then turn their attention to ten wooden chests filled with ‘the sacred remains’ of kings, queens, bishops and saints from Anglo-Saxon times.

The coffins are torn open and the bones inside are thrown at the stained glass windows. After the soldiers get bored and leave, the cathedral clergy collect what they can of the remains of the former kings of Wessex and resettle them.

Six mortuary chests still stand atop the chancel screens of the cathedral in Winchester, four of which are originals that escaped the 1642 destruction, two are replacements from 1661.

Archaeologist Cat Jarman uses these chests as a framework on which to build her fascinating new history of Anglo-Saxon England.

The earliest king in the bone box is Cynegils, who came to the throne of Wessex in 611. It was during his reign that the kingdom converted to Christianity, although Jarman’s story shows how kings often found it difficult to behave in ways that we would recognize as particularly Christian. .

Sex turned out to be a problem. Aethelbald was an early king of Mercia, a rival kingdom to Wessex. According to his indignant Archbishop Saint Boniface, he continually committed fornication in monasteries and defiled nuns and virgins. (Boniface wasn’t the only one who hated Aethelbald. He was murdered by his own followers.)

Eadwig, who was king of a largely united England in the 1950s, could hardly wait for his coronation to be over before jumping into bed with a mother and daughter. He was found ‘wallowing himself evilly between the two of them, as if he were in a filthy stable’.

According to his biographer, the Welsh monk Asser, Alfred the Great is said to have prayed to God for a minor illness that would take his mind off sex. The Almighty sent him a bad case of piles. Alfred later decided that he had had enough of hemorrhoids and prayed that they would be replaced by another condition. According to Asser, the poles have disappeared.

Violence permeated the Anglo-Saxon world and many of its kings met bloody ends. In 946, Alfred’s grandson, Edmund I, was murdered during a brawl in the village of Pucklechurch in Gloucestershire. Thirty years later, the teenage King Edward, later known as ‘the Martyr’, was murdered at Corfe Castle, possibly on the orders of his stepmother Aelfthryth.

More than a century earlier, another martyred king, Edmund, ruler of East Anglia, had been captured by Viking raiders. In one version of his death, he was first used as target practice by archers. He was later beheaded and his head thrown into a forest.

Cat Jarman’s Bone Chests (William Collins £25, 272pp)

A search party was sent to look for it, but had no success until they heard a voice shouting from among the trees, “Here, here!” After this, they found Edmund’s head, miraculously preserved and guarded by a gigantic wolf.

The story of Edmund the Martyr, with all its legendary embellishments, is part of a larger story that informs much of Jarman’s book. That is the relationship – sometimes peaceful, more often violent – ​​between the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians who came to this country.

The first recorded raids took place on the southern shores of Wessex in 789. Four years later the Viking raid on the sacred island of Lindisfarne took place. “A pagan people is growing accustomed to ravage our coasts with piracy,” reported the scholar Alcuin. He decided that the attacks on Northumbria were God’s punishment for the people for being bad Christians.

For the next two centuries and more, war flared up regularly. In a battle against the Vikings in 851, a West Saxon army led by Alfred’s father, Aethelwulf, inflicted ‘the greatest slaughter of a pagan plundering army that we have heard told of to this day’.

Alfred himself is remembered as the king who ‘defeated’ the Vikings. He is known as ‘the Great’, but the irony is that the only other king of England to ever be given that title was the Scandinavian. Canute – more accurately Cnut – was one of the many Danish kings who were also kings of England in the first half of the 11th century.

Jarman pays due attention to the role of women in Anglo-Saxon society. Emma, ​​who “had kings for sons and kings for husbands,” as one medieval poet put it, was married to both Aethelred, an Anglo-Saxon ruler, and Cnut. She is an example of the bonds that developed between the two peoples. (She was originally from Normandy and was the great-aunt of William the Conqueror.)

Recent scientific tests suggest hers is one of the bodies in the Winchester coffins.

The mortuary coffins still kept in Winchester Cathedral contain a jumble of bones. They owe their fame to the fact that the remains are among the great and good from the time when England emerged as a nation. Jarman did well to let those dry bones speak.