These skeletons are part of a massive burial discovered in 2008, a find that put some metaphorical meat on the bones of our knowledge about a notorious state-sponsored killing known as the “St Brice’s Day Massacre”.
Corroborated by two written sources that date from the time of the deaths, the St Brice Massacre happened on November 13, 1002 in England. The long-ruling King Aethelred the Unready (the Old English moniker in fact better translates “ill-counciled”) issued a decree for all the Danes in England “to be destroyed by a most just extermination,” since they had “sprung up in this land, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat”. In the Bible’s Gospel of Matthew, there is a directive to separate the invasive cockle weeds and burn them, and the king was referencing this.
Historians have debated the true cause and the extent of the killing of the Vikings. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions a Danish plot to destroy Aethelred — indeed, Viking raids had grown so pernicious that the king was paying them annual tribute to leave the island alone. However, in many parts of England (“the Danelaw”) there had been Danish settlers for a century, and these people had likely been assimilated.
So when archaeologists found no evidence of mass Viking graves in places where Danish settlement was the greatest, the extent of the massacre was called into question. The burial in 2008 found in Oxford suggests these victims were part of the killings. The skeletons were all male, and all but two over age 16. Many had previous scars, perhaps from battles, and their diet (detected from isotope analysis of their teeth) was that of a people who ate a lot of seafood and came from cold climates. Another mass Viking grave found on Ridgeway Hill in Dorset showed similar profiles.
Most experts now think the order to kill all Danes was meant to target the marauders of the moment. Regardless, the St Brice Massacre likely inspired the Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard to amplify his attacks. England was conquered by the Danes in 1013.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine,David Keys, “A Viking mystery,” 2010. Photo Oxford Archaeology. Richard Abels, “Tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages”, “The St Brice’s Day Massacre: a case of ethnic cleansing?” podcast July 5, 2022
