vised" conduct or speech.
There is a fourteenth century poem which speaks of Richard the Second as
"redeless." And, because there is no such thing as being neutral;
because, if we are not good, we are bad, the word got the meaning of
foolish or worse. Freeman, the great historian says that AEthelred "was
perhaps the only thoroughly bad king among all the Kings of the English
of the West Saxon line; he seems to have been weak, cowardly, cruel, and
bad altogether."

As long as St Dunstan lived, AEthelred was not so bad as he afterwards
became. We must remember what a bad mother AEthelred had in AElfthryth, or
Elfrida, who was an evil wife to her first husband, and most probably
caused the murder of the king her step-son, the son of King Edgar, who
was her second husband. This was the Edward known as St Edward the
Martyr.

The story of AElfeah comes under the year A.D. 1011. "In this year sent
the king and his witan to the (Danish) army, and desired peace, and
promised them tribute and food on condition that they ceased from their
harrying. They had then overrun East Anglia, and Essex, and Middlesex,
and Oxfordshire, and Cambridgeshire, and Hertfordshire; and south of
Thames, all Kent and Sussex, and Hastings, and Surrey, and Berkshire,
and Hampshire, and much of Wiltshire. All these misfortunes befell us
through ill counsel, that they were not in time (either) offered tribute
or fought against, but when they had done the greatest ill, then peace
and truce were made with them. And nevertheless for all the truce and
tribute, they went flockmeal everywhere and harried and robbed and slew
our poor folk. And then, in this year, between the nativity of St Mary
and St Michael's Mass, they sat round Canterbury and came into it
through treachery, because AElfmaer betrayed it, whose life the
Archbishop AElfeah had before saved. And there they took the Archbishop
AElfeah, and AElfweard, the king's reeve, and Abbot AElfmaer, and Bishop
Godwin. And Abbot AElfmaer they let go away. And they took there within
all the clergy, and men and women: it was untellable to any man how much
of the folk there was. And they were afterwards in the town as long as
they would. And when they had thoroughly surveyed the city then went
they to their ships and led the Archbishop with them. Then was he a
captive who erewhile had been the head of the English race and of
Christendom.[I] There might then be seen misery there where oft erewhile
men had seen