Special Guest Post by Annie Whitehead, Author of Murder in Anglo-Saxon England: Justice, Wergild, Revenge

Available from Amazon UK and Amazon US

We all love a good murder story. Historian and author Annie Whitehead has collated around 100 cases in Anglo-Saxon England, from regicides to robberies gone wrong, and from personal feuds to state-sanctioned slaughter, examining their veracity and asking what, if anything, they can tell us about the motives of those who recorded them and about Anglo-Saxon governance and society.

Getting Away with Murder

You’d think that a society’s attitude to murder and the punishment of the perpetrators would tell you a great deal about that society. And if I were to tell you that the Anglo-Saxons didn’t execute murderers, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was a murderous, lawless place indeed.

And yet, it was in fact not lawless at all. We have surviving written law codes from this period, dating back to the seventh century, when most of the newly established Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were converting to Christianity.

Those law codes contained punishment for murder, but hardly ever capital punishment. Instead, the murderer – or his kin, or indeed lord – was expected to pay a sum of money to the victim’s family. And this was not just true of murder cases, but also injuries. The wergild (man-price) was set according to one’s social status, and the severity of the crime. This compensation system was not unique to Anglo-Saxon England and on the whole, it appears to have been successful in preventing arguments from escalating.

Perhaps the least surprising element of my research for my new book, Murder in Anglo-Saxon England, was that although there were laws in place, they don’t seem to have applied to those with wealth, status and influence. Not only did killers act with impunity, they were often acting on the king’s orders.

The book takes us on a journey through the history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The early chapters catalogue the regicides and murders of rivals and rivals’ sons, which punctuated the struggle – usually unsuccessful – to establish royal dynasties in the burgeoning kingdoms.


The middle part of the period is a strange mixture of high-profile murders not only of kings and noblemen but also royal children with, bizarrely, the later (Anglo-Norman) chroniclers blaming royal women for the deaths. The reasons for this intrigued me, and I set to work examining the sources and their motives, to see if I could exonerate these women.

 With a couple of notable exceptions, I think I’ve secured a verdict of ‘not guilty’. (I’m afraid the jury is still out, considering the case of the first wife of King Cnut, who might well have ordered the son of Æthelred the Unready to be blinded and killed, in revenge for that king’s order to have her father killed and her brothers blinded.)

Æthelred the Unready

The later centuries though, present a different story again, with over-mighty noblemen killing rivals, either on the orders of, or with the tacit approval of the king. A huge ‘blood-feud’ also played out, spanning five generations and involving the slaughter of an entire family while they sat feasting.

Æthelred the Unready benefited inordinately from a number of murders: as mentioned above, he sanctioned the killing of one of his leading noblemen and the blinding of his sons, and he also ordered all the Danes in England to be killed. 

This order was taken seriously by the citizens of Oxford who hounded the Danes who lived there into a church, which was then set on fire. Æthelred had come to the throne as a boy when his half-brother was murdered, supposedly on the orders of Æthelred’s mother. According to the law, his killers should have been punished but they never were. As I said, one rule for the rich…

There are also a number of cases where kings died at incredibly convenient times for their rivals, and earlier stories of savagery. In the book I’ve examined the likely truth behind the legend of the ‘blood eagle’, and investigated how difficult it really is to sever a human head. Archaeology gives us lots of answers regarding execution cemeteries, and we also have written evidence showing when the law began to prohibit the burial of criminals in consecrated ground. 

Blood Eagle

The truth is that in Anglo-Saxon England you were much more likely to be hung for theft than for murder, and I’ve looked into the reasons for that, whilst also pointing out that, barbaric as it might seem that the Anglo-Saxons were employing such punishments, as late as Victorian times children were still being hanged for theft.

The intent is not to titillate, but to get to the truth of the stories, explain why some of them became legendary, and to show how ‘English’ society and its attitudes and politics changed over the course of the five centuries covered by the book. But yes, it does prove that even back in the early medieval period, murder stories were popular!

 Annie Whitehead

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About the Author:

Annie is an author and historian and an elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has written four novels based on real Mercian characters, and three nonfiction books, also about the Anglo-Saxon era. She has been the winner of several fiction and nonfiction prizes and the judge of three prestigious writing awards. Find out more from Annie's website https://anniewhiteheadauthor.co.uk/ and find her om Facebook, Twitter @AnnieWHistory and BlueSky @anniehistory.bsky.social