Holy Danish massacre

Aethelred the Unready Today is the anniversary of the St. Brice’s Day Massacre. And almost nothing with “Massacre” in its name is good even if it’s also named for a saint. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, for instance, is not a romantic event.

In case the details have faded, and they have, the massacre happened on November 13, 1002 (St. Brice’s, I mean, not St. Valentine’s) at the behest of the dreaded Aethelred the Unready. And it proves that a person can be both weak and vicious and also that the two in combination are even worse than either by itself.

Aethelred was, you may recall, about the worst monarch from the House of Wessex, who seems to have acceded to the throne due to his mother arranging the murder of his half-brother, Edward the Martyr, and once there was unreliable or even treacherous with his courtiers and ineffective in fighting the Danes, vacillating between paying them the Danegeld and battling them.

In 1002 he decided he’d had enough and ordered a massacre of we’re not quite sure who. Certainly not all the Danes in the British Isles; his oily writ did not extend to the Danelaw. Possibly some rather nasty mercenaries. They may have deserved to die, and the Danes had been raiding and pillaging in a most obnoxious manner for centuries.

So I don’t mind trying to get rid of them. I do rather mind sudden massacres although it may be, as Aethelred later claimed, that they’d been planning similar treachery themselves. But what I really mind is a cruel but feeble stroke that ends up, as this one did, provoking Sveyn Forkbeard to invade the next year, some say partly because his own sister was a victim of the massacre.

Sveyn came back repeatedly and not in a good way, invoking the massacre regularly although given the Danes’ general approach it may simply have been an excuse. But in the end he actually became king of England in 1013, only to die the next year, after which Aethelred was briefly restored, died in 1016 and after the tragic death of his son Edmund Ironside Canute (properly Knut, I suppose) became king.

The long and the short of it is that Aethelred was a sniveling, impulsive, cruel man, not even Machiavellian in the common sense of that word. He struck repeatedly but ineffectually, getting the worst of both worlds and earning opprobrium without being feared. So he’s an inspiring role model, but only for his superb illustration of antistatesmanship and his compelling example of what not to do.

By the way Brice himself was a 5th-century bishop of Tours who is no more responsible for it happening on his feast day than St. Valentine is for gangsters opening up on one another with machine guns.

It happened todayJohn Robson
Wish I'd said that - November 13, 2016`

“‘Religion’ has been credited with fearsome pharmaceutical power. Communism calls it ‘the opiate of the people’ – brands it an addictive and debilitating drug. But our cheerfully consumerist society sometimes – and in the oddest places – welcomes ‘religion’ as a possible minor remedy, akin to a tummy mint. For instance, a recent book on women’s health has among its 400 pages a half-page on religion: In a chapter on ‘Stress,’ religion is offered as a stress reliever. It’s well down the list, coming after ‘Flexibility’ and ‘Decreasing Perfectionism’ and ‘Sense of Humor’ and ‘Education’ and ‘Expand Your Leisure and Creative Activities.’ If these don’t work, there is ‘The Importance of Religious Beliefs and Commitment.’ And what sort of belief and commitment are recommended for stress-busting? Two case histories are given: One lady volunteered to work at her synagogue and felt more involved; another wrote some goddess poetry and felt more empowered. As the old hymn has it, ‘Amazing goddess poetry, how sweet the sound, that saves a wretch like me.’ And when Jesus promised that the truth would make us free, did He mean wrinkle-free? The women’s magazines and girls’ magazines (Self and Seventeen, for instance) occasionally recommend meditation and prayer, much to the casual reader’s surprise. The purpose, it turns out, is the preservation of epidermal smoothness: You meditate and pray, you relax, you don’t scrunch up your face, hence you get fewer wrinkles.” New Oxford Review, Vol. LXVI #10 (November 1999)

Famous quotesJohn Robson
$125 a point

November 12 marks the rather shabby beginnings of paid football in the United States when Walter “Pudge” Heffelfinger got a secret $500 “Game performance bonus” to take the field for the Alleghany Athletic Association. Roughly $13,200 in today’s money, it wouldn’t buy you a single play from today’s incredibly overpaid athletes.

Yes, overpaid. Remember the Hank Williams Jr. complaint from the 1970s that "the pitcher got a million dollars and the quarterback he got two”? Well, Colin Kaepernick, the guy who won’t kneel for the national anthem because America treats people like him so badly, signed a 6-year, $114 million dollar contract with the San Francisco 49ers. The details are complicated but essentially it’s $19 million a year or over $1 million per game.

Now there are on average around 160 plays per game. (I checked.) Taking out things like kickoffs, there are about 134 that involve a quarterback. But as two teams are playing, all things being equal, each QB will take 67 snaps. So Kaepernick gets paid very nearly $15,000 per snap.

OK, obviously he and all the others are paid for their time in practice and for the scarcity value of their talents if not their attitudes. But the same is true of Heffelfinger, who got a “bonus” for showing up and playing because he practised and was good. (In fact in the game in question, whose final score was 4-0, he scored the only touchdown on a recovered fumble; touchdowns were worth less in those days although dollars were worth more.)

The story is, as I said, a bit shabby. For one thing, Heffelfinger, who’d been an all-American guard at Yale, was paid “double expenses” during his earlier stint with the Chicago Athletic Association. And if you don’t think that’s pay, try telling your boss it’s OK to submit each receipt twice and see what happens. For another, the $500 arrangement was kept secret until it was unearthed in the 1960s so they were ashamed to be seen doing it but not ashamed to be doing it which is a rather characteristically human but not a dignified pose. (Incidentally the AAA paid another guy $250 to play along with Pudge the next week, against Washington & Jefferson College, but the team lost 8-0.)

It’s hard to believe there was a time when people played sports for the love of the game. And I don’t suggest that those who sacrifice time and effort to excel in this or in any other field should not be rewarded. Moreover, as sports careers tend to be short even without sudden serious injury they need to be paid over a decade the sum a normal person would earn over four or five. And yes, sports are popular. But modern sports are also lurid.

There are examples of sportsmanship and humility, to be sure. And not all of them are scripted by the team’s well-paid PR consultants. But frankly I feel that if these athletes were forced to scrape by on a million bucks a year they might actually show more appreciation and more of the old amateur spirit of good clean fun. Minus the bit about cash payments under the table, I mean.

It happened todayJohn Robson
When Henri met Matilda

Henry I Stop me if you’ve heard this one. No, actually, don’t. I may have mentioned it before. But today is the day Henri I of England (not a typo; he was French) married Matilda of Scotland whose name was Edith (also not a typo but I can’t explain it).

Now Edith Matilda is a very interesting person in all kinds of ways, trilingually literate, pious, a patron of arts, and active in government on behalf of her often-absent husband in a marriage that seems to have been marked by genuine mutual devotion. Even though King Horny I also had roughly two dozen known illegitimate children.

Henry is interesting too, not least for having bumped off his miserable brother William II in a “hunting accident” after which he made a beeline for the royal treasury almost as though he had known it was going to happen. But I digress.

The thing that fascinates me about this marriage is that Matilda was the daughter of Saint Margaret of Scotland and Scottish king Macolm III (predictably killed in battle with the English on an ill-advised raid). And Margaret was the sister of Edgar Atheling and daughter of Edward the Exile, son of Edmund Ironside, last king but one in the House of Wessex (both Edmund and Edward the Confessor were sons of the wretched Aethelred the Unready, though by different mothers) that traced back to Alfred the Great and beyond.

It’s not just antiquarianism. It’s amazing that the Canadian monarchy to this day has its origins in the miraculously successful struggles against disorder in the darker part of the Dark Ages. And it’s a tribute to statesmanship that Henry, son of William the Conqueror, should have married into the House of Wessex for sound dynastic and political reasons, and wound up with a love match with a remarkable woman into the bargain.

It’s like something out of the Lord of the Rings. Which isn’t that surprising given Tolkien’s academic background in Anglo-Saxon literature. And it also comes out well despite enormous travails, including the death of Henri I’s only legitimate son and the civil war that erupted over efforts to keep his and Matilda’s daughter, also Matilda and confusingly Maude (stop it with the double names) and a former Holy Roman Empress, on the throne and with her the House of Wessex as well as of Normandy.

In the end Maude Matilda’s son by Geoffrey of Anjou, Matilda of Scotland’s grandson, became Henry II the Almost Great. And if he was succeeded by such wretched sons as Richard and John, well, nobody’s perfect. From them came other bummer kings like Henry III, and also excellent ones like Edward I. And a system that learned to curb the menace of bad rulers.

It’s a long and tangled tale, of course. And it’s hard to say how much it owes to the happy coincidence of statecraft and emotion in the marriage of Henri and Matilda. But it owes something, and it’s a happy something.

It happened todayJohn Robson