It is always a pleasure to welcome Annie Whitehead to this blog. Annie is an acclaimed historical fiction author and Anglo Saxon historian. I have learned so much about Anglo Saxon times from first reading her historical fiction novels and then diving into her non-fiction.
Murder in Anglo Saxon England: Justice, Wergild, Revenge is Annie’s latest non-fiction release, and she’s graciously agreed to share one of the stories that are featured in the book. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.
Welcome Annie!
An Eye for an Eye, by Annie Whitehead
Imagine you are a young noblewoman in Anglo-Saxon Mercia at the turn of the eleventh century. Your father, an extremely wealthy landowner, has just been appointed ealdorman of neighbouring Northumbria. You and your brothers live a comfortable life and it looks as though the family generally is on the rise.
This was the situation for Ælfgifu, daughter of Ælfhelm, now ealdorman of Northumbria. But in 1006, her life was changed forever. We are not sure precisely why, but in that year her father was killed, another man was deprived of his property, and her two brothers were blinded. No, this was not a robbery gone wrong; this was all done on the king’s orders. We can only speculate what the family might have done to displease the king so, but King Æthelred the ‘Unready’ was definitely in no mood for forgiveness.
That speculation is that the family was loyal not to the king, but to the Danes who had their eyes on the prize of what became known as England. Certainly we know that, probably around the time of Swein Forkbeard’s invasion, Ælfgifu was married to Swein’s son, Cnut, who eventually became king of England.
Royal relations become a bit tangled in this period, for King Æthelred had been married to Emma of Normandy and when he died and Cnut became king, he married Emma himself. He did not, however, put Ælfgifu aside, and for a time she ruled Norway on his behalf, as regent for their son, also called Swein.
This story takes up a lot of the latter portion of my new book, and it is a complicated tale. For simplicity, I will only say here that after Cnut died, a war (of words, mainly) was waged while both Ælfgifu and Emma battled to secure the throne of England for their sons by Cnut.
The succession passed to Ælfgifu’s son, Harold, and then to Emma’s, Harthacnut. But in the midst of all this wrangling, things took a very dark turn indeed. Harold’s bid was successful due in no small part to the fact that he was able to be in England, whereas Harthacnut was stuck in Denmark. Emma, losing the support of Cnut’s man, Earl Godwine, seems to have remembered that she also had sons by her first husband, King Æthelred, both living in Normandy. Might one of them be able to take the throne? Emma pinned her hopes now on Edward, later the Confessor, and Alfred, his younger brother.
Reports vary as to whether they came to England separately or together, whether or not Emma wrote to them or whether the letter was a forgery, and reports also vary as to how much Godwine – now firmly in Ælfgifu’s camp – was directly involved in what happened next. But to give a flavour of those reports, Alfred and his entourage were captured, and once prisoners, were brutally executed, ‘almost’ in the manner of the Roman idea of decimation, except instead of one in every ten men being killed, in this instance it was nine in every ten.
Alfred also later died, but not before being savagely blinded on the orders, one report said, of Earl Godwine and ‘others’ there present.
And I do wonder… was one of those ‘others’ Ælfgifu? Her son Harold was king, but it was said that she was really in charge, and Godwine was therefore ostensibly working for her. Let’s remind ourselves of the family connections here:
King Æthelred had killed Ælfgifu’s father, and ordered her brothers blinded. Now she, as mother of the present king, had in her custody King Æthelred’s son. Did she take the opportunity to take revenge, and do to Alfred what had been done to her own brothers?
She fought like a lioness for her son, so maybe she was ruthless too. And in the book, you’ll discover that this was not the only murder that she might have had a hand in…
This is just one of many stories of murder in Anglo-Saxon England and I decided it would be ‘fun’ to investigate all these stories, to see whether they are based on fact, and why later chroniclers might have embellished them. I also looked at the justice system, the notion of ‘blood feud’, and I thought about a number of recorded deaths which were so timely that I wondered if those who stood most to benefit from them were actually culpable.
The result of all this curiosity and research is my new book, Murder in Anglo-Saxon England: Justice, Wergild, Revenge, published by Amberley books on Feb 15th in the UK.
Murder in Anglo Saxon England is available through Amazon or direct through Amberley Books.
About the author
Annie Whitehead is a prize-winning writer, historian, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and has written four award-winning novels set in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Mercia. She has contributed to fiction and nonfiction anthologies and written for various magazines. She has twice been a prize winner in the Mail on Sunday Novel Writing Competition, and won First Prize in the 2012 New Writer Magazine’s Prose and Poetry Competition. She has been a finalist in the Tom Howard Prize for nonfiction and was shortlisted for the Exeter Story Prize and Trisha Ashley Award 2021. She was the winner of the inaugural Historical Writers’ Association (HWA)/Dorothy Dunnett Prize 2017 and was subsequently a judge for that same competition. She has also been a judge for the HNS (Historical Novel Society) Short Story Competition, and was a 2024 judge for the HWA Crown Nonfiction Award. Her nonfiction books are Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom (a #1 Amazon Best-seller, published by Amberley books) and Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon England (Pen & Sword Books). In 2023 she contributed to a new history of English monarchs, published by Hodder & Stoughton, and in February 2025 Murder in Anglo-Saxon England: Justice, Wergild, Revenge was published by Amberley Books.
For more information about her work, visit her Website, her Blog or visit her Amazon Author Page. Connect with Annie through Twitter/X (@AnnieWHistory), Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky (anniehistory.bsky.social).
Cryssa Bazos 