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Atypical Deaths of these Historical Figures

Khalid Elhassan July 14, 2020 34 min

Gouverneur Morris - Founding Father of the United States

2. A Glorious King’s Inglorious Death

Edmund II, AKA Edmund Ironside (circa 993 – 1016) was England’s king from April 23^rd to November 30^th, 1016. The son of one of England’s worst kings, the weak and vacillating Ethelred the Unready, Edmund was a vast improvement over his father, and proved himself made of sterner stuff than his predecessor. He earned the surname “Ironside” for his staunch resistance to a massive invasion led by the Danish king Canute.

Starting in 991, Edmund’s father, Ethelred the Unready unwisely sought to buy off the Danes then occupy northern England. He attempted to stop their incessant raids into his kingdom by paying them tribute known as the Danegeld, or “Danish gold”. Unsurprisingly, that emboldened the Danes. They upped their demands for more and more gold, and fearing little from Ethelred, kept on raiding his domain. Finally, after bankrupting his kingdom and beggaring its people with the high taxes necessary to pay the Danegeld, Ethelred ordered a massacre of Danish settlers in 1002.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.