 He asked Ælfthryth to make herself as unattractive as possible for the king's visit, but she did the opposite.Edgar, quite besotted with her, killed Æthelwald during a hunt.Edward Augustus Freeman debunks the Æthelwald murder story as a "tissue of romance" in his "Historic essays", but his arguments were in turn refuted by the naturalist William Henry Hudson in his 1920 book "Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn".