Re: Today in Christ -
11-13-2008, 12:45 PM
Today, is the anniversary of The St Brice’s Day Massacre. In 1002, the Christian King Æþelræd Unræd (Ethelred the Unready), fed up with Danes raiding England’s south coast and having to pay them Danegeld (money to go away) ordered the massacre of every Dane, man woman and child, in England. In Oxford, the Danes took refuge in a church. This was burned by the mob as means of sending them to heaven quickly.
The true awfulness of the situation that King Ethelred had to face and solve can be seen from the Chronicles of John of Wallingford, Abbot of St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire, England who described the Danes thus,
“the Danes, thanks to their habit of combing their hair every day, of bathing every Saturday and regularly changing their clothes, were able to undermine the virtue of married women and even seduce the daughters of nobles to be their mistresses."
It does not take a genius to realize that the English, who even today have no regard for personal hygiene, saw this habit as “cheating.”
Perhaps Pastor Prune could issue an apology on behalf of all Danes for causing themselves to be slaughtered?
|