PAST CRIMESWessex, who falsely claimed to support him. But Earl Godwin was actually
backing Harold Harefoot, the new Danish king of England, Cnut’s heir.
Godwin took Alfred and his men to Guildown, a hill from which he pretended
to show Alfred the wonderful views of the kingdom that would be his. Alfred
was said to be making a promise to be a good king when Godwin’s men seized
him and his men and tied them up. Then Godwin decimated Alfred’s
supporters. Decimation was an old Roman punishment for mutinous troops–
one out of every ten men were summarily killed, as noted in the previous
chapter. But Godwin’s form of decimation was to kill nine out of every ten,
according to theAnglo-Saxon Chronicle.The next morning, still thinking that
Alfred had too many supporters, the Earl had the survivors decimated again.
Alfred was taken by sea to the monks of Ely, where his eyes were put out.
Despite care from the monks, the unfortunate Alfred died soon after, probably
in February 1036.
In the 1920s, excavations in a garden at Guildown found the remains of
several hundred soldiers who had been tied up and killed. The site had been
used as a cemetery much earlier, in the sixth century, but the burial of these
soldiers was dated to around 1040. The excavator immediately suspected that
these were the remains of Alfred’s men. There was no church or churchyard
nearby, making this a very unusual form of burial for the eleventh century.
Was it another judicial execution cemetery? But many of the bodies were laid
in triple graves, and showed evidence of dying with their hands tied behind
their backs. Signs of injury and mutilation were noticed on the bones–heads,
arms and legs cut off, one with his spine broken, and others buried face down.
The grave cuts were too small to accommodate the bodies properly–they had
been crammed in together or laid on top of each other.
It seems very likely, therefore, that these remains belong to Alfred’s
decimated mercenaries, mercilessly cut down and carelessly buried by the
ambitious and ruthless Earl Godwin.^4
Vikings in Britain
The Viking age saw quite a number of murders, as might be expected, and
evidence for some of these has come to light. However, in one case, modern
forensic archaeology has proved one story false. At Hadstock in Essex, there
was a local legend concerning a piece of leather found attached to the church
door in 1791. Later, in 1883, a label attached to this scrap claimed that it was
the skin of a pagan Viking who had been caught robbing the church. He had
been flayed and his skin nailed to the church door as a stern warning to other
raiders. Recently, a tiny portion of the leather was sent to Oxford University