The sordid deaths of Edmund Ironside, Edward II

The sordid deaths of Edmund Ironside, Edward II,

Edward sat on the latrine, just going about his business, when an assassin stabbed him through the anus with a sword

Edward II was reportedly murdered at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire in 1327, where he was held captive after relinquishing his crown. There, he was killed by having a red hot poker inserted into his anus. ‘His screams could be heard for miles around,’ wrote one chronicler.

It makes for a great gruesome story, but several historians have since debunked it as mere myth, and a likely smearing of Edward II because of his homosexuality.

King Edmund II (nicknamed Edmund Ironside) was king of England for just seven months in 1016. He raised an army to fend off invasions by the Danish invader Canute (aka Cnut the Great). However, after a siege in London, Edmund was finally defeated. At the Treaty of Alney, Canute allowed Edmund to retain lands in Wessex in return for a peace agreement.

Not long after that, Edmund passed away. Some say he died of natural causes. However, Henry of Huntingdon’s account of Edmund’s death states that when Edmund answered the call of nature, he was stabbed twice from below by an assassin concealed in the pit beneath the toilet seat. The assassin left the knife, which had ruptured Edmund’s bowel, protruding from the king’s rear end while he made his escape

Edmund still represented a threat to the Danes, and he and Cnut agreed to divide the kingdom between them, with Edmund retaining the Saxon heartland of Wessex and Cnut taking the north and east of England. This arrangement, known as the Treaty of Alney, can hardly have been agreed much earlier than the end of October, and it lasted less than a month. On 30 November (says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; a 12th century Ely calendar gives the date as the 29th) Edmund died, and the speedy and indubitably convenient nature of his demise soon generated some gruesome accounts of a sticky end at the hands of Cnut. Many histories pass hazily over the precise method employed, but Henry of Huntingdon, writing in the 1120s, was not so coy. His version of events concludes:

King Edmund was treacherously slain a few days afterwards. Thus it happened: one night, this great and powerful king having occasion to retire to the house for receiving the calls of nature, the son of the ealdorman Eadric, by his father’s contrivance, concealed himself in the pit, and stabbed the king twice from beneath with a sharp dagger, and, leaving the weapon fixed in his bowels, made his escape

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