England's Massacre Of The Immigrants

By Sue Cameron
Published: October 30 2007 19:36
Last updated: October 30 2007 19:36
FT

The Sky News TV presenter Julie Etchingham did not realise her mike was still on when she suggested this week that the Tories’ policy on immigration was “extermination”. Her gallows humour hit the headlines and was promptly labelled a “gaffe”.

Yet, horrible as it may seem, the extermination of immigrants was once official policy in England, with horrendous results.

It is not just in Bosnia or Rwanda that “ethnic cleansing” happens.

True, it was over 1,000 years ago in November 1002, on St Brice’s day, that orders were given for the immigrant community to be massacred. Yet the accounts of what happened then are as fresh as reports of atrocities in places such as Darfur today.

It was Ethelred II who was the perpetrator. He has become something of a figure of fun because of being nicknamed “the Unready”.

In reality he was capable of utter ruthlessness, notably towards Danish settlers living peacefully in England.

We can read in his own words from one of his royal charters what he did and why.

“It will be well known that a decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like weeds among the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination,” he says.

He explains that he had had intelligence that the Danes were planning to kill him and his counsellors and take over the kingdom.

Ethelred’s justification comes in a charter of restitution granted to St Frideswide’s church at Oxford, scene of one of the most pitiful episodes of all, with men, women and children being burned alive.

Treacherous Plot

When news of the king’s orders reached Oxford, the local Danes, peaceful descendants of Viking raiders, had broken into the church seeking sanctuary from the English mob.

Many of them would have been second or third-generation immigrants, born and bred in England, which would have made Ethelred’s decree all the more shocking. Again, we know from the king’s own words what happened.

He describes how:

“The Danes at Oxford, striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ, having broken by force the doors and bolts, and resolved to make a refuge and defence for themselves. But when all the town strove to drive them out and could not, they set fire to the planks and burnt this church with its ornaments and books.”

Nor was it just at Oxford that the Danes were murdered.

Henry of Huntingdon, writing just within living memory of the massacre, says Ethelred’s edict was a “treacherous plot” and that the Danes who died had been living “peacefully” in England.

“Concerning this crime, in my childhood I heard very old men say that the king had sent letters to every city according to which the English either maimed all the unsuspecting Danes on the same day and hour with their swords or destroyed them by fire.”

Another chronicler notes that the English “spared neither age nor sex destroying those women of their own nation who had consented to intermix with the Danes and the children who had sprung from that foul adultery. Some women had their breasts cut off; others were buried alive in the ground while the children were dashed to pieces against posts and stones.”

Danegeld

Why did Ethelred do it?

Maybe it was panic. Longstanding Danish settlers may have been peaceable but during his reign there was a fresh wave of Viking raiders from Denmark who slaughtered, burned and plundered their way across the land. Only months before the 1002 massacre, Ethelred had been forced to buy them off, raising the sum, then astronomical, of £24,000 from tax.

It was only 15 years later, under the Danish King Canute, with his policy of reconciliation, that English society started to become more truly integrated.

Since then, with the exception of the expulsion of the Jews in the 12th century, England over the years has shown itself to be a remarkably tolerant country.

Sir Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi, says that in Britain the “default option” is tolerance.

The rate of immigration today has produced new tensions, greater perhaps than for centuries.

It would be ridiculous to be po-faced about a television presenter’s political joke.

All the same, we should not forget what can happen and what did happen here.