A King Is Burnt to Death: What Caused It?

The entry in question is this one:

King Mul of Kent and twelve companions are burnt to death during a Kentish uprising. His brother, King Caedwalla of Wessex ravages the kingdom in revenge.

When is a king not in charge of his kingdom? When a rebellion is so successful that is kills the target of its outrage.

The security of Kent must have been lean indeed if access to the king was so easy. Where were the king and these 12 companions? Were they in a dining hall, having a big feast, while the peasants starved outside? Were they on the field of battle, trapped inside a raging inferno resulting from flaming pitch ignited by angry battlefield opponents? Were they captured and burned at the stake?

We just don't know. All we really have is this entry. We are left to piece together the puzzle for ourselves.

First of all, it is obvious that the king's subjects were not happy with their monarch. Indeed, they must have been very angry indeed to have made it possible for him to be burned to death, let alone be the instrument of that death.

So, we can conclude that the people were angry with their king. Now, the question is, "Why?"

This was the 7th Century, after all, and the kingdom of Kent probably didn't have an active democratic movement. Still, the people must have been feeling fed up with the contined dominance of Kent by Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, and just about every other Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Kent, after all, was where the Christian conversion started. The great King Ethelbert made it known that he was converting to Christianity; slowly but surely, the other Saxon states followed. Kent was the home of Canterbury, famed place of the Archbishopric. Kent was the place where the legendary Hengist and Horsa had come ashore, ready to do battle to defend their hard-earned settlements in the time of Arthur. And yet, by the 7th Century, Kent was ruled by one overlord after another. So it very well could be that the people of Kent wanted their king to stand up for himself and for them and win back some territory or otherwise make himself a little more threatening to their Germanic brethren.

This theory is all well and good, but killing the king and 12 of his retinue seems hardly an appropriate way to get that king to do something else. However, such an act could have been a message to the king's successor: Do what you're told or you'll get the same.

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