Special Guest Blogger: Ethelred The Unready

In Anglo-Saxon times, a king had to be strong to fight and keep his land so its a shame that after my brother Edward was killed, the English got me.
Being a peace loving chap, rather than fight with the invading Vikings i tried to stop them from invading by giving them gold and land but it didn’t work out so well as the Vikings took the land and gold and still attacked anyway.
I would pray to God for victory over my enemies while my brother Alfred did all the fighting, must have worked because we won most of our battles.
I did try and act tough when it came to criminals though and invented a test that others would later use which included ordeals.
We could have gathered evidence, look for witnesses and then make a balanced and informed decision but instead we tied the defendants big toe to their wrists and chucked them in a river and if they floated they were guilty and we cut off their hands and feet.
Another was ordeal by burning, that's where you grip a white-hot iron bar and walk three paces then we bandaged the wounds and after three days, if the wounds aren't healed, you are deemed guilty and it's off with the hands and feet.
One other ordeal was trial by cake where you eat a cake if you choke you're guilty and off come the hands and feet but if you manage to eat the cake without choking you're innocent. Pretty popular that one.
My soldiers killed many Viking families in our battles which made King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark angry, so angry in fact that he invaded England and if i know one thing it is not to hang around when a man with an axe and a horned helmet is looking for me so i ran off to France with my wife Emma where i stayed until i died three years later.
My Emma, obviously having developed a taste for wearing a crown and Scandinavian men with beards and big choppers, then married old Forkbeard's son Canute who defeated her own nephew before ruling England as Queen alongside Canute and leaving behind a very confusing family tree for future Royal genealogists.