[2] The name (Danish: Danemordet, Massakren på Sankt Brictiusdag) refers to St. Brice, fifth-century Bishop of Tours, whose feast day is 13 November.
There are historical records which state that Gunhilde, the sister of Sweyn Forkbeard, the King of Denmark, was a victim along with her husband Pallig Tokesen, the Danish Ealdorman of Devonshire.
He goes on to proclaim it was with God's aid he rebuilt St Frideswide's Church (now Christ Church Cathedral): For it is fully agreed that to all dwelling in this country it will be well known that, since a decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination, and thus this decree was to be put into effect even as far as death, those Danes who dwelt in the afore-mentioned town, striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ, having broken by force the doors and bolts, and resolved to make refuge and defence for themselves therein against the people of the town and the suburbs; but when all the people in pursuit strove, forced by necessity, to drive them out, and could not, they set fire to the planks and burnt, as it seems, this church with its ornaments and its books.
[17] The Ridgeway Hill Viking burial pit near Weymouth, Dorset, a site dated as being between 970 and 1038 AD discovered when building a new relief road, contained 54 Scandinavian males all beheaded, suggesting a mass execution that may be linked to Oxford and the decree by Æthelred.
[13] Levi Roach states, "These purges bred suspicion and division at a critical moment, and in the end [Æthelred's] death was soon followed by the conquest of England by the Danish ruler Cnut.
Simon Keynes in his Oxford Online DNB article on Æthelred described it as the reaction of a people who had suffered under repeated Danish attacks through mercenaries who had turned on their employers.
[21] Ian Howard believes the massacre was committed in response to the treachery of Æthelred's mercenary army,[10] and Barbara Yorke describes it as "the type of hard-hitting reply that was necessary in a world inhabited by Vikings.
[9] Historian Levi Roach also notes that it is impossible to conclusively link the mass grave in Oxford and those elsewhere to St. Brice's day, as there was regular sectarian violence across England during this period.
"[11] Only a few years after the massacre, Æthelred granted land to a Dane named Toti outside Oxford, and many Scandinavian figures remained at his court, demonstrating that the St Brice's Day decree was not an order for a general extermination.