This extract from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recounts events of the years 1011 and 1012, when a viking war-band besieged and entered Canterbury, sacked the city and captured many of its inhabitants, including monks and nuns. Among their captives was Ælfheah, archbishop of Canterbury, whom they seem to have expected the Church to ransom. When Ælfheah refused to allow ransom to be paid for him (perhaps because the Church's finances were straitened at the time), the vikings brutally killed him. The present chronicler (probably a monk of St Augustine's, Canterbury) saw the attack on Canterbury as a blow aimed at the very heart of the kingdom. The English responded to the murder by proclaiming the archbishop a martyr and saint; his day (19 April) was widely observed during the eleventh century.

For an edition of the manuscript from which this reading is taken, see Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Vol. 5, MS C (Cambridge, 2001).