Welcome to the British History Podcast. My name is Jamie and this is Episode 311, Team

Edward. This show is ad-free due to member support and as a way of thanking members for

keeping the show independent I offer members only content including extra episodes and

rough transcripts. This week Z and I dug into some of the crazy stories that came out

of this period. We also talked about some sociological studies that might help explain

the contradictions and Edgar's reign and we also answered your questions about how

the show gets made. And you can get instant access to that episode and all the other members

extras by signing up for membership at the British History Podcast dot com. For about the price

of a lot of tape per month. And thank you very much to Adam, Constantine and Lissa for

signing up already. King Edgar the Peaceable was buried at Glastonbury in 975. But weirdly,

that's not the end of his story. William of Womsbury tells us that nearly a century later

in 1053 the Abbott-Elward reopened the King's tomb. Now Womsbury doesn't tell us why the

monk decided to reopen the grave. I suppose we can just assume that Elward was going through

a goth phase. But what we're told is that when the Abbott opened the tomb he found Edgar

lying in it perfectly preserved as if he was merely sleeping.

Face with an apparent miracle, or what we would recognize today as an obvious vampire,

Elward decided to press his luck even farther and he cut into the flesh of the long dead

king. As the knife sunk into Edgar's body, blood gushed forth in torrents. That's the

actual description by the way, gushing out in torrents. And this scene out of the shining

freaked out the people who had been gathered around the tomb. Yeah, apparently since this

was long before Netflix, there were bored people just standing around watching Elward's

tomb raiding in dark age autopsies. And this scene, a still bleeding body disturbed in

...