Athelstan: The Making of England

by Tom Holland

937, the alliance was out in the open. That autumn, Constantin marched south. With him rode Owain, the King of Strathclyde. Meanwhile, at the head of an immense war-fleet, Olaf made the crossing from Ireland to join them. The combined armies of the three leaders, two of them the most powerful kings in Britain after Athelstan himself, and the third a notorious warlord, represented a potentially mortal threat to the nascent English realm.

The Picts, who had lurked unconquered beyond the great wall built by Severus, now flooded southwards and inflicted terrible slaughter. When the Romans, beset by invasions of their own, refused to come to the rescue, the Britons in their despair and misery turned for assistance to mercenaries from across the North Sea. Entire tribes began to migrate. One of these was named the Angles, another the Saxons, and a third the Jutes.

The earliest history of the English-speaking peoples, written by a monk named Bede a century and a half before the time of Alfred, made no mention of Cerdic. No small flotilla of ships, no landing on the south coast. The kingdom of Wessex, it seemed, had not always been Wessex. The West Saxons, Bede implied, had originally been known as the Gewisse. Scholars

Asser, as a Welshman himself, and one who had ended up a bishop in Wessex, might equally have pointed out that Cerdic, the founder of the West Saxon royal line, had a name that, far from being English, was actually Welsh.

Some, such as Cuthbert, a monk as loved for the quality of his miracles and his generosity to the poor as he was admired for the formidable calibre of his austerities, had yearned for the life of a hermit, and steadily retreated to ever lonelier and more inaccessible spots; but others had been kings.

The house of Cerdic now ranked as securely Christian. Athelstan was born into a dynasty that could boast of a devotion to Christ reaching back more than two centuries. Yet still there lingered a certain nagging anxiety: that Wessex, compared to Kent or Northumbria, ranked as a parvenu among Christian powers, and that the lineage of its ruling house lacked the glory bestowed upon those of other kingdoms by kings of the holiness of Oswald.

Alfred had no illusions, though, as to the true basis of his power. Ultimately, it was not the praise of chroniclers or the rituals of the Church that made someone a king of Wessex, but his acceptance by the great men of the kingdom, the ‘ealdormen’, as their lord.

Alfred, more than any of his predecessors, had made a point of condemning the sexual assault of women, and nuns especially; but Æthelwold, breaking into an abbey, flaunted his scorn for the dead king’s law code by abducting one of the sisters and making her his wife.

He could recognize Æthelwold’s move for what it was: a potentially lethal emulation of his kingdom’s deadliest foes. The seizure and fortification of a royal estate, the ravaging of the neighbourhood, the calculated attempt to demonstrate that a king was impotent to defend his lands and his people: all were favourite tactics of the Vikings.

It was back in 874 that the last independent king of Mercia had fled Britain. The Vikings, treating his abandoned kingdom as they had sought to treat Wessex, had appointed a puppet in his place, and then pointedly made winter camp at Repton, where the mausoleum of the Mercian royal family lay: a brutal desecration.

902, the year of Æthelwold’s death in the Fens, a sixty-year-old Viking stronghold beside the mouth of the River Liffey had been overwhelmed and its inhabitants expelled. The King of Dublin, as the settlement was called, had headed northwards for Alba, the realm ruled by Constantin, King of the Scots, and there, a couple of years later, been killed in battle. Others

The transformation of Chester into Mercia’s northernmost burh was completed just in time. When the Viking settlers on the Wirral, tiring of the lands they had been given, and looking around for fresh pickings, sought to seize the city, their attack was rebuffed.

Escorted in triumph from the depths of Viking-held territory, the relics were laid to rest in Gloucester: a favourite place of Æthelflæd and her husband. Like Chester, it had originally been a wasteland of weeds and Roman ruins, the haunt of heathen warbands, before its redemption by their workmen.

Now, with the lowering onto Athelstan’s head of a crown, a touch of Rome had been brought to the banks of the Thames. Consecration had been rendered a coronation.

York, an ancient foundation that could boast a mighty circuit of Roman walls, the seat of an archbishop, and teeming markets piled with everything from Swedish amber to Byzantine silks, had for half a century been a formidable stronghold of the heathen.

True, none of these initiatives had been sufficient to prevent Ragnald, the year after Æthelflæd’s death, from capturing the city; but they had provided Edward with an invaluable basis from which to respond to the crisis. In an aggressive statement of intent, he had advanced into Viking-held territory, and for the first time occupied and refortified an abandoned Roman fortress directly in Northumbria: Manchester.

934, Athelstan celebrated Pentecost at Winchester. A glittering occasion, at which the attendance of kings from Wales and jarls from the Danelaw was more than usually impressive, it was also an intimidating statement of intent.

Fit theatre, then, for a celebration of their dynasty’s remarkable achievement: the fashioning, over the course of only three generations, of a united kingdom that had come to span the whole of Britain. As witnesses to it, attendant in the royal council, were Constantin, and Owain, the King of Strathclyde, and the three most powerful princes of Wales.

Athelstan’s determination that no one living on his own lands be permitted to starve saw him issue a particularly prescriptive ordinance. The officials responsible for his estates were warned by their master that fines would be levied on those who failed in their duty to the needy, and the proceeds donated to charity. ‘My wish it is that you should always provide the destitute with food.’

Endowed from his childhood ‘with the holy eminence of learning’, Athelstan had consecrated his entire reign to demonstrating the lesson taught him by Alfred’s example: that the kingship of a Christian people required victories won in the scriptorium no less than on the battlefield.

Although the last descendant of Charlemagne to claim the title of emperor had been deposed and blinded back in 905, and although the empire itself had split into eastern and western halves, its rulers remained the cynosures of Christian kingship.

Further proofs of the high regard with which the house of Cerdic had come to be regarded by the elite of Francia were quick to follow.

Back in Wessex from the Brunanburh campaign, he continued to shoulder all the manifold responsibilities of kingship: touring his realm, issuing charters and administering justice, engaging in foreign affairs. The strain of it, though, was very great. On 27 October 939, while still only in his mid-forties, Athelstan died in Gloucester.

The sheer antiquity of the English state, far from being despised by its conquerors, tended instead to be both prized and respected by them, for it added lustre to their rule. A Norman anointed as rex Anglorum, no matter that his native tongue was French, ruled as the heir of those same kings who had first, long before the slaughter at Hastings, fashioned England and brought it into being.

The paradox, though, was already evident: that the more solidly the foundations of an English state were cemented together, so the harder did it become to present the island as a single realm.

Seen in this light, Athelstan’s conquest of York, the feat which had first served to project the power of the West Saxon monarchy deep into the north of Britain, can be seen as the decisive event in the making of Scotland as well as of England.

Had Athelstan neglected to seize his chance in 927, then the political contours of Britain might easily have ended up very different. It is not far-fetched to imagine an Anglo-Viking ki...

The inhabitants of Lothian, for all that they might still regard themselves as English, were no longer subject to an English king. Instead, they had been brought to acknowledge the lordship of another man: the ruler of a kingdom that they would call, in their own language, ‘Scotland’.

In a country that has been a unitary state for longer than any other in Europe, the sheer feat of statecraft that was required to bring it into existence risks being signally underestimated. The king who founded England has largely been forgotten even by the English.

As the bonds weaken that for the past three hundred years have joined England and Scotland in a united kingdom, so inevitably have the English as well as the Scots begun to ponder what defines them as a nation.