Remembering the St Brice's Day Massacre of AD1002

On Sunday and Monday just gone, I attended a series of events in Oxford marking the anniversary of the St Brice's massacre in the year AD 1002. The events were organised by St John's College, where in 2008 a mass grave of the remains of thirty five young males and two children were discovered, and which were subsequently tied to a decree that was issued by King Aethelred the Unready (ruled 978-1013 and 1014-1016) that instructed his English subjects to kill all the Danes in England.

It seems that the men and children who were killed that day were settled in Oxford, and probably lived on the fringes of the main town, in an area now known as St Clement's. But even though they were part of Oxford society, clearly they were also still seen as foreign, that is, as Danish outsiders, and thus were associated with Viking raids on England that the King was struggling to repel. They became the scapegoats for the wider problem of Norse incursions and the violence these brought.

The evidence suggests that the Danes were not in a position to defend themselves, and were fleeing their attackers as they were killed. They fled to St Frideswide’s church that was located where Christ Church College of Oxford University now sits. They hoped to find sanctuary in a building committed to God. But when their pursuers couldn't force the Danes out, these pursuers set fire to the church. 

The horror of that day feels like an inversion of much of what we think of the Vikings who raided Britain and the Danes who occupied large parts of the country from the ninth to eleventh centuries. For, this is a story of partial integration, vulnerability, and defencelessness. It reminds us that the broad sweep of historical narratives is always incomplete.

The events to commemorate the St Brice's Day massacre were varied. They included a walking tour of the evidence of Anglo-Saxon Oxford, lectures by Professors Carolyne Larrington, David Griffiths, and Caroline Wilkinson, and a panel discussion hosted by forensic anthropologist Professor Dame Sue Black that also featured author Amy Jeffs, who has written on English folk tales, and Angie Bolton, who is Curator of Archaeology at Oxfordshire Museum Services and oversees the preservation of the Viking remains that were found at St John's College. It was very touching to hear Angie Bolton say that she says hello to these remains whenever she goes into the area of the museum where they're kept; she feels it's important to talk to them.

A DNA test was performed on one of the skeletons, SK1756, a young man who had been struck with a sword and stabbed many times. In a remarkable piece of matching, the young man's remains were identified as a near relative of a man whose skeleton had been found in Denmark. In 2021, SK1756 was taken back to Denmark for a visit, and for a time was reunited with his relative in a special exhibition at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. 

At the commemoration this week, a reconstruction of his face, undertaken by FaceLab of Liverpool John Moore's University, was also revealed.

The reconstructed face of one of the victims of the AD 1002 St Brice's Day Massacre

(Source: https://www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/discover/news/remembering-st-brices-day-at-st-johns/)

A walking tour of Anglo-Saxon Oxford arrives at what is now Christ Church College

The grounds of St John's College, Oxford