Ælfheah's deadly food fight
[953-1012]
After he was kidnapped, Archbishop Ælfheah’s Viking captors were unable to bear his attempts to convert them. They got wasted on wine and flew into a rage, using him as target practice as they pelted him with bones and other projectiles, including blocks of wood and the decapitated heads of oxen. Apparently, this wasn’t an unusual practice: wrote Edward Augustus Freeman in the 19th century History of the Norman Conquest: “pelting people with bones at dinner seems to have been an established Danish custom.”