Annie and I had a zoom chat the other day, and she absolutely lit up when she told me her newest book was about to be released. I immediately invited her on my website, because, well, I’ve read and loved every one of Annie’s books, both fiction and non-fiction. So, welcome, Annie, and please share whatever possessed you to write a book about murder in Anglo-Saxon England!
Thanks Liz! As I go about my daily life as a writer and historian, I’m frequently reminded of murder stories from the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ period, and some of them are truly sensational. There’s a tale of a royal abbess who, envious that her little brother became king, arranged to have him murdered. When her wicked crime was discovered, her eyeballs spontaneously fell out. Then we have the gruesome story of the Northumbrian king who, in a revenge killing, was executed via the appallingly savage ‘blood eagle’. We have a murdered king whose severed head told his followers where to find his body, and we have a royal stepmother arranging the stabbing of an abbot, and of her own stepson so that her son could rule instead. That son then went on to order a mass killing of Danes who had settled in England, and recently the charred remains of those victims have been unearthed.
I decided it would be ‘fun’ to investigate all these stories, to see whether they are based on fact, and why later chroniclers might have embellished them. I also looked at the justice system, the notion of ‘blood feud’, and I thought about a number of recorded deaths which were so timely that I wondered if those who stood most to benefit from them were actually culpable.
The result of all this curiosity and research is my new book, Murder in Anglo-Saxon England: Justice, Wergild, Revenge, published by Amberley books on Feb 15th in the UK.
I have presented the stories chronologically, and explained the political circumstances surrounding them, to help add context to the tales. I hope though that I’ve managed to dispel the myth that this was a lawless society, and I found plenty of examples of equally scandalous and brutal murders on the Continent. We all, it seems, love a good murder story, and it turns out that this was just as true in the last millennium!
Universal Link: https://mybook.to/MIASE
Amberley Books: https://www.amberley-books.com/murder-in-anglosaxon-england.html
Annie Whitehead is a prize-winning writer, historian, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and has written four award-winning novels set in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Mercia. She has contributed to fiction and nonfiction anthologies and written for various magazines. She has twice been a prize winner in the Mail on Sunday Novel Writing Competition, and won First Prize in the 2012 New Writer Magazine’s Prose and Poetry Competition. She has been a finalist in the Tom Howard Prize for nonfiction and was shortlisted for the Exeter Story Prize and Trisha Ashley Award 2021. She was the winner of the inaugural Historical Writers’ Association (HWA)/Dorothy Dunnett Prize 2017 and was subsequently a judge for that same competition.
Annie has also been a judge for the HNS (Historical Novel Society) Short Story Competition, and was a 2024 judge for the HWA Crown Nonfiction Award. Her nonfiction books are Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom (a #1 Amazon Best-seller, published by Amberley books) and Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon England (Pen & Sword Books). In 2023 she contributed to a new history of English monarchs, published by Hodder & Stoughton, and in February 2025 Murder in Anglo-Saxon England: Justice, Wergild, Revenge was published by Amberley Books.
Learn more about Annie and her non-fiction and fiction books on her website at https://anniewhiteheadauthor.co.uk/
