Hi my name is Kevin Hicks, welcome to my YouTube channel The History Squad.
Now today's video, by request from my Patreon members is about the 9th century East Anglian
king or saint, Edmund.
There is so much about this guy, so much legend.
The pictures from the medieval times of him tied to a tree and shot through with arrows,
some say he died in combat, so we're gonna have a little look into the legend that is
Saint Edmund, who became the first patron saint of England.
Just doing the research for this subject of Saint Edmund, King Edmund, was very difficult
because on one hand there is very little known about him, on the other hand there is an awful
lot written about him, so my sources are from Assa, the late 9th century Welsh monk and
bishop.
The Saxon Chronicles.
The Winchester, the Winchester Chronicles which are apparently written before then,
and then there's a book by the Reverend McKinley, so I've used all of those as resources as
well as you know surfing the net as you do.
But before you, you know, begin this subject you've got to look at England, 9th century.
Then go back before then, imagine you're a Briton and the Romans are your masters.
Things have been going quite well the Roman Empire has settled and then all of a sudden
they've got to go.
Well you don't have a Briton Army, it's gone, long in history it's gone.
The Romans go you are so vulnerable and that's when Vortigern who was a king, down in what
we now know as Kent.
Invited over Hingis and I think his brother to bring some of their Saxon army over to
help protect them from marauding Picts.
Now that's actually wrong, when I said the Saxon army it's wrong, they were the Jutes
and they're from a part of the world called Jutland which is in modern day Denmark and
when they come over yeah, they're going to do a bit of fighting for us.
But let's face it England, especially down in what they call The Garden of England, Kent
in the South there, it's beautiful farmland, it really is.
So if you see who actually did invade, because the Saxons, Angles and the Jutes who made
up the Anglo-Saxons and the English, were Invaders and they were ruthless and they settle.
Uh the poor old Britons were pushed off to the west because the Saxons pushed them away,
settled the land and they made a success of it, and that's the problem because then you
have other invaders coming don't you, the Vikings.
You can look at the first raid on Lindisfarne, where they struck down monks, just, just killed
them as they were tending their fields.
Took away only the young, murdered everybody else, they didn't care and they tore the covers
off Bibles, holy books, because they got jewels on them.
This is what they were they were after, treasure, they're after slaves.
But this is recorded how they slit the throats of children and just threw them by the side
of the path, how they struck down men of all ages and captured women to take away as slaves
and sell them on the slave markets in northern Europe.
These Vikings, they were barbarians.
They were barbaric vicious killers to the point that they eventually depopulated parts
of England, East Anglia particularly.
So we're going to put up a map to show you the different parts because it's interesting
some of the parts of England, East Anglia that's the Eastern Angles, Wessex the West
Saxons, Sussex the southern Saxons yeah?
So you have this whole carved up parts of England which still bear the name for the
Saxons.
So it's quite a complicated picture and right in the middle of it 9th century we end up
with a new King right over on the east there in East Anglia and he is the very, very young
King Edmund.
We have a description of King Edmund, he was tall, well proportioned, deep blue eyes, handsome
but he had a great big nose.
I love these little touches do you?
He was not English but he was born in the old homeland of the Saxons, Northern Germany,
just north of Hamburg. 841 A.D that's when he was born.
He wasn't the natural heir to the little kingdom of East Anglia.
Aethelweard had died, he hadn't an heir, so the elders look around.
They go back to the old country looking for an heir and they have a distant cousin Edmund.
So he becomes king Edmund.
He was very young and it wasn't a straightforward transition, it was a little bit rocky at first
but what they noticed about this young man is how honorable he was, how fair.
Also a devout Christian.
So you have this guy now, on this eastern part of England, he's quite a guy.
Everybody likes him and if there's an encroachment onto his land he will fight them, he is not
a coward, he's not faint-hearted but he is fair and this is the thing that flows through
the whole story of King Edmund who became Saint Edmund.
And don't forget he was that patron saint of England.
So, way back in the 9th century there they had a problem Viking Raiders, Danes, Vikings
call them what you will.
It was these long ships, I've got a model here, this is incomplete, it's all part of
something I'm working on in the future, but these long ships with their oars and their
sails, they could yes get across what they called the German Sea, we call it the North
Sea now, but they could even row up rivers and as the Eastern side of England was peppered
with these great big rivers that went all the way inland, these men could raid deep
into your kingdoms, and this is what's going to be such a major problem for East Anglia,
and indeed the rest of England.
You see our story of Edmund continues with a lone boat, a fishing smack really, washed
up on the shores of East Anglia and on board there was Lothparck a Danish chieftain he’d
been out hunting he’d been out on his boat and he got washed out to sea.
He turned up cold and hungry on the shores of East Anglia.
He was taken to see King Edmund.
King Edmund straight away treats him nice, treats him fairly.
He stays on, he doesn't go straight home, he stays on.
He likes hunting, he likes sport and eventually he is given to hunting with Edmund, King Edmund’s
own hunt master, Bjorn I think was his name, and off they go together.
But uh Bjorn gets very jealous of the prowess of Lothparck, how he can hunt, and he murders
him, stabs him in the back.
And there is kind of a legend within the story, because he doesn't come back, but his hunting
hound does.
It's hungry, then it runs away and everybody's a bit confused with this then the dog doesn't
come back.
So after a few days they go looking for the dog who is howling near the dead body of his
master who has been stabbed in the back.
Well Bjorn was the last person to see him alive, he's the likely candidate.
He's put on trial, they reckon he's guilty but they're going to leave it to God's judgment.
They're going to cast him adrift in Lothparck’s boat.
Bjorn the hunter and the gamekeeper is set adrift in Lothparck’s boat and he's going
to drift on the same line, but back to Denmark.
Now when Bjorn gets washed up he's taken by the Danes and they go to see the sons of Lothparck,
but Bjorn doesn't tell them the truth.
Well they want to know ‘what are you doing in our dad's boat?’
basically, and he says ‘well what happened was this, this Danish Prince, Lothparck, he
gets washed up and he is taken to the King Edmund who tricks him, brings him in and then
has him tortured as a spy and they eventually execute him.
It was terrible what they did.’
Straight away the sons of Lothparck are absolutely furious, they are going to get some revenge.
They are going to invade.
So the sons of Lothparck, they're going to invade.
They're going to get revenge.
Now there are different accounts of this, I'm going with the one I like the most.
They invade but they bring the hunter Bjorn with them.
He knows East Anglia, he can come in down through the rivers, he can spy for them, he
knows the best ways in.
But they're beaten back several times by King Edmund.
This guy, he doesn't stand idly, he will fight and they meet finally 869 at Thetford and
there is a heck of a battle.
The battle going on for hours upon hours and then stopping at the evening time, the Vikings
retreat into their camp and King Edmund stands there amongst the dead and the dying and he's
horrified.
He can see what's happening, his country, East Anglia is being ravaged.
He doesn't like it so he withdraws, then an offer he sent to him by the sons of Lothparck.
‘If you pay homage to us you can keep your kingdom,’ and he had to consider this because
he was vastly outnumbered by the Danes and the Viking army now, but the one thing that
sticks is he's got to give up Christianity, go back to the old gods and he's unwilling
to do that and it's a problem.
But he puts his people first, he will surrender.
But he doesn't surrender alone, he has a holy man with him Bishop Humbert, so together they
hand themselves over to the brothers and uh negotiations begin but the sticking point
is this, King Edmund will not recant, he will not give up his Christian faith, and that's
the big sticking point.
So straight away they kill the bishop with a sword, single stroke, he's dead and King
Edmund is tortured.
He's tied to a pillar, in the church and he is whipped and flayed, but he will not recant.
In the end the brothers, they get fed up of, of this guy.
‘Give him to the archers.
Use him for target practice.
Help yourselves.’
And they shoot him, but being bowmen, they know where to shoot.
Shoot him in the legs, shoot him in the arms, don't shoot him through the heart or through
the stomach and they keep him alive for quite some time and in the end the brothers they
simply behead him.
The head is hacked off, the body is thrown to one side in a pit and the head, under the
advice of Bjorn the hunter, is thrown in a thicket so nobody can find it.
Eventually the Danes withdraw and local Christians they find the body of their King but they
can't find the head.
It's about a year they try to find the head of their King and they do a search of the
area looking in the thickets for the head and they're calling to each other.
‘No I'm over here’.
‘Yeah I'm over here, I still can't find it’ and then they realize that there's an
extra voice calling out ‘I'm here’ and they're all looking at each other.
You can imagine the scene can’t you?
‘Was that you Bert?’
‘No it wasn't me’.
‘Was that you Jim?’
‘No it wasn't me and they go towards the voice.
‘I'm here, I'm here.”
And eventually they find the head, which hasn't decomposed of King Edmund.
‘I'm here’ it called out.
So the legend is born.
He was simply known as King Edmund, he wasn't anything special uh brave guy, good guy and
all that but it was the Danes in 890 A.D they minted some commemorative coins and on it,
it talks about or it marks the Saint Edmund.
So it was his enemy who actually promoted Edmund as a saint.
There are miracles that happen and are attributed to uh Saint Edmund, he becomes the patron
saint of England, until Edward III who dismisses him as our Saint and we have Saint George,
Saint George.
And it doesn't finish there.
In recent history, I think in 2006, the newspaper and the BBC over in Suffolk, they petition
the government to have Saint Edmund reinstated as the true patron saint of England because
Edmund was Englishman.
Well actually he wasn't was he, because he's from Germany yeah?
So they fail and so he is instated as the patron saint of Suffolk and I love that because
that was his home, it was the place East Anglia that he actually fought for, and just a little
note there…
You might see I have a badge on my cap.
I have been a member of a little guild of archers for a few decades now and we are known
as The Guild of Saint Edmund, he is our patron saint.
Well I hope you enjoyed that little video there and we've opened up the legend of our
original patron saint a little bit more.
If you did enjoy the video then like, share and subscribe and don't forget to turn on
the all notification button to see, you know, what's coming on down the line.
And a quick shout out to some of my PATREON members, Dave Dempsey, Patrick Brown and Nick
Hooper, hey guys thanks a million and notice this didn't come off.