There is little doubt among the historians (well…historian) who have studied the life of Aethelbald of Wessex, that he was indeed the most boring man of his era. In fact, it is possible that he was the most boring man that has ever lived.
He lived on a farm in Wessex in what is now Hampshire. The nearby town of Wintanceastre (now called Winchester) was reported to suffer from mass evacuations when rumours circulated that Aethelbald was on his way. This included the Royal Family. People were often heard to remark that Aethelbald really gave them the shits.
He was an earnest and well-meaning man, but he never managed to understand that other people did not share interest in his hobbies. These included collecting ancient coins and collecting plough parts. He also collected fossilised animal dung. According to Aethelbald, the colour of the flame when the dung was burned gave clues about the diet of animals in the past. He also kept extremely meticulous meteorological records for every day of every year that he lived – after he turned sixteen. When his parents discovered how boring he was they seriously considered disowning him. They relented when they realised they could instead move to France without him knowing. He never married.
He had a nerdish charm that drew people into listening to him. However, before they realised the trouble they were in they found themselves hypnotised. He would drone on in his boring monotone describing, for instance, the intricate differences in each of his collection of interestingly shaped oak leaves. Some of his victims were found more than a day later sitting in the same place that they had met him, rocking back and forth with their eyes still glazed over. Others were seen to collapse, fold into the foetal position and start crying, as Aethelbald explained in minute detail over a number of hours, the difference between the Mark III plough harness and the Mark III (B), and how they turned the earth at differing angles leading to changes in the influx of moisture into the root systems.
His one and only audience with King Ceawlin is reported to have lasted for thirty minutes. He was, by all accounts, lucky to escape with his life. The king found him so boring that he became hysterical. His advisors had to restrain him from ordering an immediate execution on the grounds of Aethelbald being a threat to the kingdom’s sanity. For his part, Aethelbald was oblivious to this as he tried to explain his forecast of the likely trends for the next year’s weather and rainfall. He did this one day at a time divided into morning and afternoon probabilities.
In many ways Aethelbald was the forerunner of the modern day train-spotter, stamp collector and people who obsessively record daily rainfall and have a collection of rain gauges with which to bore their friends.
He died in his fifty-second year when, after he had paid for passage to the Isle of Wight, he managed to bore the ship’s master to death. This happened within fifteen minutes of boarding. The ship drifted for a while before it ran aground on The Needles and sank. Poor Aethelbald had never learned to swim, preferring to catalogue seashells instead during the rare times that he had ventured down to the beach.
The townsfolk of Wintanceastre were able to live with a great deal less stress from that time on. When the King heard of this tragedy, he declared a national holiday to celebrate.
