West Aisle of the North Transept, Ely.
The Danes carried off Brithnoth's head; but his body was rescued; and, according to his wish, the monks came and brought it back to Ely, where the Abbot buried it, replacing the missing head by one of wax. During the eighteenth century the skeleton was met with in the course of some excavations and recognised as Brithnoth's by the absence of the skull. It now lies in Bishop West's beautiful chapel, along with the bones of other Anglo-Saxon worthies.
The Lady Elfleda, Brithnoth's widow, added largely to the benefactions he had bestowed on Ely; she gave the Abbey valuable lands within easy reach of the monastery, and she moreover presented to the church a golden chain, and a curtain worked with the most notable deeds of her husband's life. Those who have seen the Bayeux tapestry, representing the events of the life of William the Conqueror, can picture to themselves what Lady Elfleda's curtain may have been a century earlier.
In the next generation (1016) a body of the monks of Ely accompanied another hero to battle against the Danes. The hero of this generation was Ethelred's son, King Edmund Ironside; the battle was the great fight of Assandun, a place impossible to locate with certainty, but not improbably situated on the south-east border of Cambridgeshire. During the last twenty-five years the Danes had become more and more daring, and now, under their great king, Canute, the mightiest of all Scandinavian monarchs, they were attempting nothing less than the organised conquest of England. Thus Canute and Edmund were face to face in a desperate struggle, and, after five indecisive battles in a single year, Edmund was defeated, on St. Luke's Day, at Assandun, and his defeat was shortly followed by his death. Canute then assumed the crown, by right of conquest, a right which he proclaimed by calling himself not, like his predecessors, "King of the English," but "King of England."
He proved, however, not at all a bad king. He had been brought up a Christian, and he took the Church under his protection. He bore no malice against the monks of Ely for their support of Edmund Ironside, but, on the contrary, treated the Abbey with marked favour, and gave her rich endowments. More than once he visited Ely, and we all know the lines of the cheery old ballad which relates how Canute in his barge was rowing near the island. It runs thus:
"Merrily sang they, the monks at Ely,
When Cnut the King he rowed thereby;
Row to the shore, men, said the King,
And let us hear these monks to sing."
This was in the summer-time,[209] when the waters were open; but not seldom Canute made his visits in the depth of winter, when, on the Feast of the Purification, the Abbot of Ely each year entered on his Chancellorship of the realm, an office which he shared in turn with the Abbots of Canterbury and Glastonbury, each holding this office for four months at a time. The legend may well be true, which tells how, on one of these mid-winter visits, Canute reached Ely (from Soham)[210] in a sledge, preceded by the heaviest man that could be found (characteristically nick-named "Pudding"), who skated ahead of the King to ensure the ice would bear. On another occasion Canute was accompanied by his wife Queen Emma, and she, in token of her regard for the Abbey, left behind, as her gift, splendid hangings for the church, and for the shrine of the foundress. An altar frontal of green and red and gold, and a shrine cover of purple cloth, bedecked with gold and jewels, are described as being of exceptional beauty and value, "such as there was none like to them in richness throughout all the realm."
This was not Emma's first connection with Ely. While she was yet the second wife of Ethelred the Unready (after whose death she married the victorious Canute), her younger son, Edward, afterwards King Edward the Confessor, had here been presented in infancy at the altar, and had been in childhood a pupil of the choir school, where his special proficiency in learning psalms and hymns gave promise of his future saintliness. The Ely choir school was, at this time, probably the most noted educational institution in England, and was under the direction of the Precentor, who had general charge over all the literary work of the house, such as the reproducing of books, etc. That this precocious scholar, who left Ely at nine years old, ultimately came to the throne, while Alfred, his elder brother, did not, is due to one of the most ghastly tragedies of English history.