Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion advised.

In the year 955, there was a new monarch on the throne of Wessex. Edwig, the 14-year-old son of the

previous king, was the new king.

After young Edwig went through his official anointing and installation as king of the Anglo-Saxons,

the Wessex nobility celebrated their new ruler with a feast.

But as the guests gathered around the table, they noticed

an important person missing, the teenage King Edwig himself. With the guest of honor nowhere

to be found, the Archbishop sent two high-up clergy members, Abbott Dunstan and Bishop Kinesier, to the

King's Royal Apartments, to see if he might be there. The two men barged in to find a shocking

sight. The royal crown tossed to the side on the floor and the young king himself in the middle of a

threesome. As one account put it, quote, he was disbording himself between two women as though

they were wallowing in some revolting pigsty. End quote.

Horrified, Abbott Dunstan, quote, told off the two women and tried to convince Edwig to come to his feast, but the king refused. Dunstan had to, quote, put out his hand and physically, quote, remove him from the couch where he had been

laying, quote, parted from his women only by force. One of the women was the young king's fiance,

Alfivu, but scandalously the other woman was Alphavu's mother.

The discovery of the threesome would be humiliating for Edwig.

He had been caught and exposed for abandoning his royal duties for an incestuous affair.

But did it actually happen? Given the outrageousness of the tale,

many historians suggest that it might have been an attempt to slander Edwigs' reputation.

After all, accounts of Edwigs' threesome only appear in narratives of the life of Abbott Dunstan, the man who heroically

stepped in to stop the debauchery and returned the king to his officially sanctioned activities.

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