page_title: Dead Man's Plack
section_title: Historical basis
hierarchical_section_title: Dead Man's Plack / Historical basis
caption_attribution_description: English: Deadmans Plack Monument, Harewood Forest. This monument is described by Hampshire Treasures as an obelisk surmounted by a stone cross and dated 1835; erected to the memory of Earl Athelwold who was killed here by King Edgar AD963. Shown for comparison with this summertime geograph 18224.
context_page_description: Dead Man's Plack is a Grade-II listed 19th-century monument to Æthelwald, Ealdorman of East Anglia, who, according to legend, was killed in 963 near the site where it stands by his rival in love, King Edgar I. The name is more probably derived from a corruption of "Dudman's Platt", from Dudman — who is recorded as a resident in 1735 — and platt, meaning a plot of land. The monument was erected in 1825 at Harewood Forest, between the villages of Picket Twenty and Longparish, Hampshire, by Lt. Col. William Iremonger.
context_section_description: The story of Æthelwald's murder was first described by William of Malmesbury, a 12th-century historian, in his Gesta regum Anglorum ("Deeds of the kings of the English"; 1125). William's account was later repeated by David Hume (1711–1776), a Scottish historian, philosopher, economist, diplomat and essayist, in his 6-volume work The History of England, published between 1754–1761. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), in his preface to Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), says the story has "a most suspicious air of romance" and "greatly resembles" some of the legends of early Rome. Macaulay writes: "when we turn to William of Malmesbury, we find that Hume, in his eagerness to relate these pleasant fables, has overlooked one very important circumstance. William does indeed tell both the stories; but he gives us distinct notice that he does not warrant their truth, and that they rest on no better authority than that of ballads."
  Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–1892) debunks the story as a "tissue of romance" in his 1875 Historic Essays and writes: "The process by which legend gets transmuted into apparent history could not have been better described than it is by Lord Macaulay." Freeman also refers to another contemporary chronicler, Geoffrey Gaimar, whose L'Estoire des Engleis ("History of the English People"; 1136–1140) describes Æthelwald's death at the hands of unidentified armed men in Wherwell Forest (Harewood Forest).
  Elizabeth Norton, a historian specialising in the queens of England, concludes that "the evidence certainly does not suggest that [Æthelwald] was murdered" and that the story related by William of Malmesbury is "a later elaboration" of the reason behind Ælfthryth's foundation of nearby Wherwell Abbey, "which was popularly considered to have been carried out as an act of atonement."
caption: Dead Man's Plack in 2006
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