encomiast

Emma's encomiast attributes to her even more seriously dishonest methods.

While this may be "absurd", there are other hints that the position was more complex than the Encomiast either knew or wanted to admit.

With this extravagant behaviour, as the Encomiast says, went lavish gifts of precious objects.

Indeed, the Encomiast claims to have witnessed his lavish gifts to the churches of St Omer on his way to Rome.

ENCOMIAST, n. A special (but not particular) kind of liar.

Other churchmen, too, had ideas about the duties of Christian rulers, and may have been less convinced than the Encomiast that Cnut lived up to them.

The Encomiast was a competent latinist, familiar with works by Lucan, Sallust, Virgil and possibly other classical authors, and well able to meet Emma's wishes.

Weapons were often embellished with precious metal, and the Encomiast describes the magnificence of Cnut's invasion fleet, and the gold and silver decoration of its ships.

The Encomiast has him beheaded by Earl Eric personally, while Florence says that he was killed in London at Christmas 1017 and that Cnut ordered the corpse to be left unburied.

The irregularity of Cnut's relationship with Harold's mother possibly influenced some: the Encomiast claims that Archbishop Æthelnoth refused to crown him, although he does not connect this with Harold's birth.

The anonymous author, often simply referred to as "the Encomiast", was probably a Flemish monk, as he identifies himself in the text as a monk of St Bertin's or St Omer's.

For often he says to me in an indignant tone: "What a strange thing it is, Eryximachus, that, whereas other gods have poems and hymns made in their honour, the great and glorious god, Love, has no encomiast among all the poets who are so many.

"Newton was a skilled writer of Latin verse, in which, Ritson states, he excited the admiration of his contemporaries; while Warton describes him as the elegant Latin encomiast and the first Englishman who wrote Latin elegiacs with classical clearness and terseness.

The skald Thorleif Rauthfeldarson has him bloodying swords in England with God's help, and he was eventually buried, perhaps first in York Minster, but later in a church at Roskilde, according to the Encomiast in a tomb which he had prepared himself.

The Encomiast has Emma stipulating that a son of hers, rather than any of his other progeny, should be given the succession, and in the circumstances this seems a plausible feature of the deal, especially as she had evidently earlier required the English to guarantee that her son Edward would succeed Æthelred.

It would require some ingenuity to shew why women were to be under such an obligation to him for thus admitting love; when it is clear that he admits it only for the relaxation of men, and to perpetuate the species; but he talked with passion, and that powerful spell worked on the sensibility of a young encomiast.