Welcome to the British History Podcast. My name is Jamie and this is Episode 202, the

Fall of FH. This show is free and independent due to member support and as thanks for helping

keep the community going I offer members only content including extra episodes and rough

transcripts. And right now the members are listening to an episode about how the class

structure of the Northman was arranged and how that structure has ties to not one, not

two, but three separate monagé twas between the God-hymedal and some local Scandinavian couples.

Now if that's peaked your interest you can get instant access to that episode and all the

previous members episodes by signing up for membership at the British History Podcast.com.

And thank you very much to Shay, Chris and Debra for signing up already. When we left off last

time King Edmund of East Anglia had paid a ding-gale to the great heathen army, but rather than leaving

the army set up camp in his kingdom. It was a situation that would have caused all manner of

havoc for virtually everyone who lived in the small eastern kingdom. The suffering would have

been widespread and in an era where religion provided the lens through which to view current events

in history, the pagan domination of a good Christian king, the famine that almost certainly followed,

and the way that the heathens would have been able to operate with impunity within Christendom,

it must have seemed like judgment day or at least a sign of the end times.

Interpreting a political or military matter as the arrival of biblical prophecy or at the very

least a temporal chess disment for a spiritual failure might seem strange to us. If I was out

getting coffee and I saw an army on the horizon, my first conclusion probably wouldn't be,

oh man, I must have really f***ed off God. But I would suspect that viewing their world as one of

spiritual cause and effect would at least make the chaos of the era appear to have some sort of

order to it. By looking at it as part of divine retribution or at least as a divine warning,

...