Well, if you believe some of the later commentaries on this, then the Danes
will be the ones that are clean and smell less bad than the English; one
commentator suggested that the Danes needed to be got rid of because they
washed, combed their hair and were getting all the ladies as a result!
Clearly the English men wanted to be allowed to be slobs and still be able
to find wives. :-) I have been entertained by descriptions of this
particular massacre since attending a conference on it in 2002 at Nottingham
University. I was also fascinated by the commentator, who stated that the
English women that had married Danes were punished by being buried up to
their waists and then dogs were set on them to tear their nipples off. How
do you train a dog to take only the nipples, and why would you do that?
Sorry, way OT. Shutting up now.

----- Original Message -----
From: "llama_nom" <600cell@...>
To: <norse_course@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 10:14 PM
Subject: [norse_course] Re: Did the Norse ever refer specifically to the
Anglo-Danes?


>
> Could be, although it's hard to tell how closely the killers' idea of who
> was Danish enough to be massacred would have matched the views on
> ethnicity of people in general, let alone their victims. Massacrers are
> notorious simplifiers and lumpers-together... But then you'd think they'd
> have needed at least some perceived distinction to exploit.
>
> --- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "Ruarigh Dale" <ruarigh@...> wrote:
>>
>> The entry for the St Brice's Day massacre (1002) in the Anglo-Saxon
>> Chronicle refers to the Danes or Danish people in England. This suggests
>> that the English peoples understood there to be a difference, unless you
>> think it only refers to visiting Danes, which is one possible
>> interpretation. A charter of Aethelred from two years later ordering
>> restitution to St Frideswide's minster in Oxford refers to a decree "to
>> the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting
>> like weeds amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just
>> extermination". This charter is the only real evidence of the massacre
>> actually occurring, but the terminology suggests that there were clear
>> divisions of identity between the English and the Danes living in
>> England, so there may not have been an Anglo-Danish identity per se,
>> previous discussion on this forum notwithstanding.
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Michael
>> To: norse_course@yahoogroups.com
>> Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 4:56 PM
>> Subject: Re: [norse_course] Re: Did the Norse ever refer specifically
>> to the Anglo-Danes?
>>
>> True enough, though it likely depended on whether you were an
>> Anglo-Dane from Northumbria, East Anglia or Mercia prior to 1066. The
>> latter folk were probably much more "blended" with their Anglo-Saxon
>> neighbors than someone north of the Humber.
>>
>
>
>
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