As I wrap up my WWI obsession, I am already two books underway with my new medieval Europe obsession. Matt made me read Pillars of the Earth, which in turn inspired me to finally begin my medieval project by taking out half a dozen library books. (It’s for work but a perfect excuse to learn about something to which I didn’t pay enough attention when I was in school.)

The first nonfiction medieval book was Queen Emma and the Vikings by Harriet O’Brien. A supposedly cunning and mean English Norman queen living in the early 1000s, Emma was renamed Aelgifu by her first husband Aethelred the Unready to match the 90% of Anglo-Saxon women who were called that. Her cool husband was the Viking king, Cnut, a teenager who conquered England and won a place in my heart.

Queen Emma makes the best of shreds of evidence. The author manages to overcome the meagre information on the queen by describing the fascinating times of Anglo-Saxon England. For example, did you know that England at the time had hares but not rabbits? The Normans – Emma’s people – brought over rabbits only after 1066 “as a useful source of protein.”

Then there are the carrots. O’Brien explains that the English had white and purple carrots, not orange carrots, which were a seventeenth-century development. The internet begs to differ: carrots made it to England only in the fifteenth century, far after O’Brien’s book suggests (see the Carrot Museum and others, all repeating the same information as the internet is wont to do).

But the crowning element of this book is poor king Edmund Ironside’s death on November 30, 1016. Cnut’s worthy opponent may have died on the toilet.

The devious nobleman Eadric Streona is rumoured by later chroniclers to have coerced his son or bribed some of Edmund’s men to ambush the king in the latrine. The twelfth-century historian Henry of Huntingdon says that the attacker(s) were even hidden in the depths of the toilet itself. Edmund Ironside was stabbed in the butt or the bowels; Geoffrey Gaimar in the 1100s wrote that Eadric used a crossbow operated remotely to shoot an arrow that “went as far up as the lungs.”

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