BUT he charged right on to King Cnut’s bodyguard, when a fearful outcry and horrible shrieks were heard, and the ealdorman* Edric, seeing that the rout of the Danes was imminent, shouted to the English: “Flee English, flee English, Edmund is dead.” Thus shouting, he fled with his own troops, followed by the whole English army.* A dreadful slaughter of the English was made in this battle; there fell in it the ealdormen Ednoth,* Elfric, and Godwin,* and Ulfkytel of East Anglia,* and Ailward, son of Ethelsy the ealdorman, and the flower of the English nobility.
King Cnut after this victory took London, and obtained possession of the regalia of England.*
* Edric’s betrayal of King Edmund is strikingly reminiscent of the treachery of Jafar Ali Khan, counsellor to Siraj ud-Daulah, Nawab of Bengal, in 1757. Like Edmund, Siraj had inherited this ‘senior man’ from his predecessor; like Edmund, he made the mistake of overlooking his record of corruption and poor judgment; and like Edmund, he was double-crossed by him in the heat of a crucial battle for his crown. See The Battle of Plassey.
* Ednoth was Abbot of Ramsey and later Bishop of Dorchester.
* Godwin of Lindsey, not to be confused with Cnut’s ally Godwin, later Earl of Wessex.
* Ulfkytel was ealdorman of East Anglia from 1004 to his death here at the Battle of Assandun in 1016. He appears in Scandinavian histories too, where he is named Ulfkell Snillingr, ‘the bold’.
* An ealdorman is literally a senior man, in those days a noble rank which soon afterwards came to be called an earl. The word has continued to this day in the form alderman.
* Edmund was of course not dead at all. According to Henry, the two mighty kings met again in battle shortly afterwards: see The Duel of the Kings.