6 - Imagining Justice in the Anglo-Saxon Past: Eadric Streona, Kingship, and the Search for Community

Summary

Initially depicted as a traitor and a villain during Cnut’s conquest of England in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Eadric Streona has inspired those who have recorded his role in history to enumerate his many crimes, if not to attribute new ones to him, and to provide great detail to the scene of his execution. After the Chronicle, there are seven eleventh- and twelfth-century accounts of Eadric’s story: the Encomium Emmae Reginae, Hemming’s Cartulary, John of Worcester’s Chronicle, William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, Aelred of Rievaulx’s Genealogia Regum Anglorum, and Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis. In these narratives, Eadric is variously killed, killed and thrown over the walls of London, strangled in private and dumped from a window into the Thames, beheaded, publicly beheaded and dumped in the Thames, beheaded with his head displayed on the highest tower in London, and beheaded with his head displayed on the highest gate in London. While the variation suggests that the sources have limited value as witnesses to what actually happened historically, the presence of a common narrative core that is repeatedly developed invites attention. It has been noted that twelfth-century sources in England show a trend toward greater detail in the development of stories and so ‘can yield useful insights into the times in which they were written through close analysis of nuances of detail and shifts of emphasis in their representations of the distant past.’ I suggest that the details of Eadric’s crimes under Æthelred and Edmund ‘Ironside’, and his judgment and execution under Cnut, are intended as focal points for the ideological elaboration of kingship and community. Such elaboration takes place within the context of a flourishing twelfth-century historiography that was interested not only in maintaining English traditions and a sense of community, as Richard Southern has suggested, but was also continuing an English tradition of using history writing as a means of constructing community identity in the face of social disruption.

The Anglo-Norman accounts of Eadric fall into two narrative strands.