The King Burned Alive Inside His Own Church

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]On the 13th of November, 1002, King Ethelred II issued an order, "Kill every Dane in England."

[00:00:09]Before the night was out, Oxford was burning.

[00:00:12]Ethelred's own charter, written 2 years later and still held at Christ Church, Oxford, describes what happened in his words, "Danes, who had sprung up like cockle amongst the wheat, subjected to what he called a most just extermination." A king documenting his own massacre.

[00:00:31]In Oxford, a group of Danes ran for the only protection they knew, the sanctuary of St. Frideswide's Church.

[00:00:38]The mob locked the doors and set the building alight. For over a thousand years, that was where the story ended.

[00:00:44]In 2008, during building works at St. John's College, constructed on the same site, archaeologists uncovered a mass grave.

[00:00:53]37 individuals, young men mostly, aged between 16 and 45, burned, hacked, several with slash wounds to the hands, the injuries of people trying to shield themselves from blows.

[00:01:07]One skull carried stab wounds from behind.

[00:01:10]The find was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2010.

[00:01:14]The bones are real. The charter is real.

[00:01:16]The king wrote it down himself.

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