The Lady of the Mercians King Alfred and the Anglo Saxons

In the mid winter of 877,

the existence of England hung on a thread.

The Vikings had triumphed everywhere.

The last surviving Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred, fought a desperate

guerrilla war in swamps of Somerset.

But here, in his darkest hour, he had a dream -

St Cuthbert made a prophecy to him that from this place,

his descendants would become kings of all England and lords of Britain.

Alfred took the dream as a mark of destiny.

Alfred beat back the Vikings.

But at the end of his life,

his people still lived in a land torn by war.

At this point in the story it is by no means certain that

Alfred's kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons will survive.

Let alone that one England will emerge.

Now Alfred's children continue the family plan, and one of them is

described by a medieval chronicler as "a person of extraordinary

"ability and mental toughness", the planner of one of the most

brilliant military campaigns in the whole of the Dark Ages.

And she's a woman.

It's one of the great, untold stories of British history -

Aethelflaed, the Lady of the Mercians.

This is a family story.

Three generations of the most remarkable,

the most gifted family in our history.

And to pick up the tale,

we need to go back to the last months of Alfred's life.

Here in British Library is a crucial clue to how Alfred hoped to

shape events after his death.

We have been digitizing a lot of our medieval manuscripts in full

and putting them up online.

It's a fantastic idea, isn't it,

that wherever we are in the world, we can click on this.

'We're looking for Alfred's last will.'

Here it is, the Liber Vitae from the New Minster in Winchester.

In this book, we've got a copy the will of King Alfred.

-The will starts on 29 verso.

-That's right.

-Yes, here we go.

And we can zoom in.

Tremendous!

And here's Alfred's name at the beginning of the will, and

you can really see the individual pen strokes of the scribe.

Alfred Wesseaxona cyng, mid godes gif.

That's absolutely amazing, isn't it, you can see every crinkle!

Every stroke of the pen almost!

'And clues here to a bitter family rift.'

-And he speaks like we do in wills today.

-Yeah, absolutely.

So he's disposing the royal property to his chief children -

the sons, Edward and Athelweard get most,

Edward, the future king.

His daughter Aethelflaed who is already married and gone,

so her dowry's been paid, if you like, if we can put it that way.

And "Aethelwold mines brothor suna."

This is his brother's son,

whose dad of course had been king before Alfred.

-So he gets Godalming.

-Yep.

I think this is the first mention of the name of the town Godalming.

And Guildford, and Staining!

-That's all he gets, Edward gets about 18 estates.

-Yeah.

So he might have come out of this meeting where the will was read out

-feeling a little aggrieved.

-Yes.

-Brilliant.

'So Alfred had cut his nephew from the line of succession

'in favour of his children by his wife Ealhswith.'

And here's Ealhswith, this is his wife, isn't it?

The farm, the estate at Lambourne,

and Wantage, which is where Alfred was born, isn't it?

-And Edington where he won his greatest battle.

-Yep.

It's really quite an interesting psychological document.

He gives these properties that are very important to him and associated

with key events in his life to his wife, which is a very nice touch.

Sentimental? Do you think?

Don't know, you could read it like that, I think.

Well, there's a little touch of that in his character.

He's really trying to nail down the succession, isn't he?

He absolutely is, and particularly for his own family, his own sons.

He wants to make very, very clear what's going to happen,

because there were rival claimants to the throne.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

With early medieval royal families genealogy conferred legitimacy,

and the West Saxon royal dynasty had a pedigree second to none.

Just look at this.

The wheel of fortune.

This is a later medieval royal genealogical roll,

20 feet of it and more. And in a brilliant piece of graphic design,

it shows you the family tree of the Anglo-Saxon kings.

Here's Aethelwulf, Alfred's father and underneath him,

the four brothers who successively became kings of the West Saxons.

Alfred's the youngest, the last of those kings.

But if you follow the green line down, you can see

how Alfred outflanked the descendants of his older brothers,

and established his own branch of the dynasty,

from which, incidentally, our own queen today is distantly descended.

But the son of King Ethelred, the atheling, Prince Aethelwold, the

man who got Godalming in Alfred's will, is cut out completely.

And in the early middle ages, in the Viking Age,

hell had no fury like an atheling scorned.

And a renegade prince could always find an army to back his cause.

Half of England was under the Danelaw -

ruled by Vikings settled in Alfred's day.

And as soon as Alfred's son Edward took the throne,

his embittered cousin made his move.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

For the new king, Edward, it was a deadly threat -

Wessex couldn't have two kings.

And to see what happened we have to go back to Cambridge

to the source we have followed through this tale -

the original manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

It's a contemporary narrative now.

It's being written as these events are going on.

Alfred the Great has died in October 899, aged about 50.

Edward is crowned Pentecost, Whitsunday 900.

And no sooner was Alfred dead and Edward crowned

than hungry athelings began to prowl.

Chief among them, Aethelwold.

Here he is in the Chronicle.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

These were shattering events for the royal family, the redoubtable

Queen Mother, Eadgifu, 60 years later looked back on this time

when she was a little girl, and her father, Sieghelm, the Earl of Kent,

had gone to the war in East Anglia, paying off his debts before he went.

The denouement of the campaign took place on December 13th, 902,

between the Northern Fens and the Devil's Dyke.

With his Viking allies, Prince Aethelwold had struck down all the

way into Wiltshire, plundering and burning.

Then Edward retaliated by attacking Danish territory in East Anglia,

ravaging the countryside.

Between the River Ouse at Huntington and all the way to the fens

in the north around Peterborough, they just burned the land.

Vastatio, depopulatio, they called it.

As far as these massive dykes here in Cambridgeshire,

built in the 7th century to defend the kingdom of the East Angles,

and still a huge obstacle.

Imagine columns of smoke across the horizon,

and somewhere beyond, the Viking army and Danish army

led by Prince Aethelwold and the Danish King Eohric.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

The Chronicle says the place was called the Holme.

In Anglo-Saxon times, this was the end of the dry land -

from this point, the deep fens stretched across to

Whittlesea Mere and all the way to the Wash.

And somewhere close to where we are standing,

the battle was fought in December 902.

The Bloodbath at the Holme was remembered for generations.

According the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, King Edward had issued

an order for a general withdrawal for all the units of his army.

But the Kentish detachment who were the vanguard

and the furthest north, refused to obey orders and stayed where

they were, even though the king sent them seven messengers.

They were caught by the Danish army under Prince Aethelwold.

The Kentish nobility were wiped out in the battle.

All their senior men were killed.

But even though the Danes won the battle,

it was their losses that were the most significant.

Their king, Eohric, was killed, several of his big leaders,

a Mercian prince who was fighting on their side,

and most important of all for King Edward, Prince Aethelwold

himself died in the fighting.

The key threat to King Edward as king in Wessex had been removed.

So King Edward had won, but at great cost.

He was still forced to make peace.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle doesn't admit that,

but battered by his losses,

the king was "compelled by necessity."

He met the leaders of the Danes, not up in the Midlands or the North,

but in the heart of rural Buckinghamshire.

The place was on the ancient route from Mercia into Danelaw -

called Ytingaforda.

Here at the ford where the old track crossed the River Ouzel,

they parleyed and Edward gave them silver

and treasure to buy peace.

And above all, to buy time.

"We are living through an age of iron," wrote one churchman.

A succession of savage winters with thick snow and extreme cold

brought famine and misery.

To pay for his army, Edward had to squeeze every last penny

from his starving people.

From Surrey, one tenant wrote to the king...

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

But sometimes in history, ages of iron can be more important

for the future than ages of gold

Now a new character enters the story -

the daughter of Alfred the Great, King Edward's older sister.

The wife of the Lord of Mercia, she was in her 30s.

Her name in Anglo-Saxon, Aethelflaed - noble beauty.

Here she is. And what's interesting about this is, she's still

remembered as a woman of power and of high education and intelligence.

Just listen to this, this is the caption underneath.

"Aethelflaed, la plus sage de toutes femmes seculers."

Was the most wise of all laywomen.

And she ruled the kingdom alongside her brother

with great wisdom and great intelligence.

The eldest child of a king, very conscious of her position in

the dynasty, a daughter very aware of her relationship with her father.

And through marriage to the Mercian Prince,

one might call him, she took what she had learnt

at the court of her father to another court, to the Mercian court.

And she attempted to instil a similar political culture there.

The ancient kingdom of Mercia stretched from Severn to Trent.

It had long been a rival of Wessex,

but they had found common cause against the Vikings.

They fought together, their royals intermarried.

And Aethelflaed had roots here -

her mother was Mercian, and so was her husband,

whom she'd married when she was 16 and by whom she had daughter.

In the early middle ages it was hard for any woman

to take a leading role in events.

But without her, England may never have happened.

And in part, that was because in Mercia

royal women had long had special status.

Women were terribly important transmitters and legitimizers

of male power throughout this period.

Not so much in politics in the formal sense,

because I don't think royal women were invited to devise agendas

for assemblies - that was pretty much a male field -

still less to ride into battle.

But women played a terribly important role in culture,

in the culture of the court.

In fact, you could say that the queen was at the heart of

that culture, alongside the king.

Being educated at Alfred's court must have meant that she

imbibed a kind of training for rulership.

As far as her intellectual training was concerned,

Alfred's biographer was rather keen to stress that it was

the same as her brother's, as Edward's.

Aethelflaed's lost biography is only now being be pieced

together from clues, which are still being uncovered.

Rescued from the accidents of time and war.

But of course,

the history of women as a whole has been erased everywhere.

And perhaps Aethelflaed herself understood that.

For someone in her circle recorded the story of her deeds

for future generations.

The main version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle written in Winchester,

tells the story from the point of view of King Edward -

it completely cuts out the story of Aethelflaed, his sister.

What you would really love to have

would be the story from Aethelflaed's point of view,

but astonishingly, embedded in this later manuscript,

is a chronicle written in the Midlands, maybe originally in Latin,

whose central character, whose hero, if you like

is Aethelflaed, the woman.

So following the Annals of Aethelflaed,

we can tell the story of the next 20 years, not only from the point

of view of the Mercians, but from the point of view of the woman.

A short copy of the lost original,

it's a mix of the public and the private.

It starts right on the middle of the page,

with the death of Aethelflaed's mother. "Her Ealhswith forferde."

But then it moves on to her deeds -

starting in 907 with the re-founding of the Roman city of Chester.

907, the city of Chester was restored.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

With Vikings from the Irish Sea on one side

and the Welsh on the other, if you went from Chester,

you could follow the Roman road network straight to York.

Once you have Vikings who are ruling in York and in Dublin,

Chester would be a natural meeting point for shipping,

and I think that makes it really strategic.

Chester soon became rich on the Irish Sea trade

and to protect it, an Irish source says that Aethelflaed settled

a Viking army as a colony in the North of the Wirral.

Aethelflaed, at that period,

donates land to them so that they might settle.

Whilst one might be tempted to think that could be a little bit fanciful,

it could actually be a good strategic move.

If we remember that the foundations of Viking Normandy was Vikings being

given land on the Seine estuary to defend against other Vikings,

maybe Aethelflaed had a similar idea in mind when she gave Vikings

strategic land at the entrance of the River Dee and Mersey.

The River Dee is over there and over that way is the Mersey.

In the 10th century, people's connections would have

been from here in the Wirral,

across the Mersey to their kin in what was south west Lancashire

and the other side of Merseyside, but much more so with Ireland.

That's where they had come from in 902,

this is where they'd settled from, so their family connections

must have clearly been across the water in Ireland.

This is very characteristic of the Viking period - a disc headed pin.

Probably 9th or 10th century in date, and still sharp!

-Cor, I can't believe that.

-After 1,100 years!

The Vikings, having settled on the Wirral, get a bit impatient

and they get greedy for power. They can see that Chester is

developing into quite an important port.

And they then besiege the town.

We've got accounts of how the people in the town

defended their settlement very vigorously, throwing beer

and beehives over the wall at the attacking Vikings.

And eventually Chester is preserved

and the Vikings are put back into their settlement on the Wirral.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

And then in 909 she sends an expedition across Viking territory

to rescue the bones of the great Northumbrian saint, Oswald.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

Bringing his heavenly power to her newly restored city of Gloucester.

We're in the centre of Anglo-Saxon Gloucester here, this is the

meeting place of the streets as you can see - south, east, north, west.

That's the Roman pattern, these main streets go down to the Roman gates.

But what Aethelflaed does, once she has restored the walls,

is create the pattern of streets that go off,

settling burgesses who will provide the garrison,

but also civic life, markets and all that sort of stuff.

And little churches all along.

Michael, Martin, Mary, Cuneburg - good old Anglo-Saxon female saint

down by that gate - and that way, St John's.

It's a political act.

They are re-founding Gloucester, restoring this,

what was in fact a ruined Roman town, with tumbledown walls

and very little inside it except ruined buildings.

The main street plan is Roman,

but the pattern of streets is just like Winchester, I think.

It's an exact match, or at least the eastern half of the street pattern

is an exact match for Winchester and other towns

which Alfred, of course, restored and relayed and created.

And it's partly military and partly commercial.

Here, she built a church where the bones of St Oswald

were placed in a gilded shrine,

where she planned she and her husband would be buried.

These fragments of sculpture, once brightly painted,

came to light in Carolyn's excavations.

Well, we would've seen a great wall there with an arch in the middle,

and a vivid wall painting above it,

with we don't know, certainly with an angle included.

You would go through the archway, up to a high altar

where the relics of St Oswald might have been.

Further still, there was another building,

which was sunk into the ground - it's a crypt.

We can be certain there were pillars holding it up in the middle.

It's very like the Royal Mausoleum at Repton.

It's interesting, isn't it, that it's so small compared with

the great Carolingian churches, which were contemporaries.

It could have been enormous, it could have been very ostentatious.

And they built it small.

Maybe this is...maybe it was the shrine that was important,

and the relics that were important.

And the size and the ostentation were not important.

Humility was a very important virtue to her.

-Well, perhaps!

-I like that, I like that.

But the constant in her life was war.

In 910, Mercia suffered a massive and devastating attack by a huge

Viking army from Northumbria and the Danelaw.

Over midsummer they cut a swathe through the heart of Mercia,

ravaging all the way to the Bristol Avon.

And then they turned up the Severn Valley to make their way home.

Our key source for what followed is a 10th century chronicle

by one of the royal family.

But the only manuscript was destroyed by fire in 1731.

Every so often, you find a little word, a little piece of text.

This is just one small fragment of one medieval manuscript

which was damaged by the fire in 1731.

Someday somebody will come along and actually find which place

and which text it is.

-So we've not given up?

-Never give up hope, Michael!

As so often in Anglo-Saxon history, a key source has been lost.

But now with the benefit of new scientific techniques,

the experts are restoring the fragments.

And among them, now just a handful of blackened folios,

is the Chronicle of Ealdorman Aethelweard.

There is a microfilm but of course it's a microfilm of a black

manuscript and therefore in itself the microfilm is also illegible.

We're therefore indebted to an Elizabethan antiquarian,

Henry Seville, who in 1596 did this wonderful printed edition.

It's an absolutely fabulous book, isn't it? Gorgeous.

And the Great War of 910 is described with wonderful

circumstantial detail.

"They went across the river Severn into the western

"district along the Welsh border.

"They devastated and took huge plunder.

"And on their way home, rejoicing in their enormous spoils,

"they were still in the process of crossing the river Severn

"at Quatbridge," he says here.

"Then they were intercepted at this place called Wednesfield."

"In Vuodnesfelda campo."

Which today is right in the middle of the most industrialised district

of the West Midlands, next to Wolverhampton.

The Vikings were caught in line of march.

Aethelweard says the Mercians intercepted them at Wednesfield,

where the Viking vanguard hastily formed a battle line,

waiting for the rest of their army to catch up.

And there, says Aethelweard, the Mercians,

with their West Saxon allies, launched their attack,

and they overwhelmed them in a storm of spears.

Hard to imagine, I know, but the road here,

running along the canal between Wolverhampton and Wednesfield,

is what the Anglo-Saxons called the "ealde street" -

the old highway - which went from the Severn Valley

at Bridgnorth into Danish territory in the East Midlands.

That's why the battle was fought here, in the field of Woden -

a fitting place for a Viking apocalypse.

The fighting ended at Tettenhall near Wolverhampton,

which gave its name to the battle.

Thousands of them were killed, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Among the dead, two kings and ten major leaders including the seer,

or the soothsayer,

one imagines the Viking equivalent of the army chaplain.

"All of them hastened to the hall of hell,"

says Athelweard in his Chronicle.

And the date is interesting. It was the 5th August,

the feast day of St Oswald whose bones Aethelflaed had brought

out of the Danelaw only the previous year.

So she and her generals had tracked the invaders,

and then intercepted them,

and attacked them on the ground and the date of their own choosing.

For Aethelflaed herself the glow of victory was tempered -

her husband of 25 years was dying - suffering from long term illness,

or perhaps from wounds,

Earl Ethelred has been short changed by history.

For as the Mercian Chronicle says,

he was a man of great virtue who had performed many noble deeds.

The Chronicle records the death of her husband,

the Lord of the Mercians, in 911.

Aethelred there the "Myrcna hlaford," the Lord of the Mercians.

And almost immediately afterwards the Chronicle calls her

the Lady of the Mercians - Aethelflaed, "Myrcna hlaefdige."

I think her position is analogous to some Carolingian queens,

when the king was absent, at war or on pilgrimage.

She ran the comitatus, the following, the court.

And when Aethelflaed's husband died, all this was amplified,

and the political relationship that held the Mercian Kingdom together

was between her as a lord, a female lord -

they had to invent, in a way, a new word for this. Lady.

'Myrcna hlaefdige.'

That relationship between her and the leading men of the kingdom

was what enabled the Mercian kingdom to continue and succeed.

So backed by her earls and thegns -

her friends as she liked to call them - she was now partner

in the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons with her younger brother Edward.

Edward the Elder is a good medieval ruler, a good early medieval ruler.

He's an effective early medieval ruler,

he adapts to circumstances and is ruthless where it counts.

Edward experienced a gritty childhood, a gritty youth.

He's experienced the difficulties of his father's reign against

the Vikings, we can imagine him as being dragged along on campaigns.

He's given experience of leadership in the 890s.

Edward brooks no nonsense, and when his cousin Aethelwold,

who had a very, very good claim to the throne after

the death of Alfred, rebelled, Edward responded quickly -

he basically hunts him down.

That's not to say that Edward wasn't a pious ruler in conventional terms.

I mean, he founds the New Minster in Winchester.

This enormous church was a sort of grand statement of

a new dynastic chapter opening up in English kingship.

Edward was a far more complex man than history gives him credit for.

He made law, corresponded with foreign churches,

and he kept up his father's contact with Rome.

Our sources describe large numbers of English crossing the Alps,

risking attacks by brigands and by Saracens,

for the sake of prayer at the shrine of St Peter in Rome.

Some of them, indeed, to end their days here.

The hostels of the Saxon quarter,

still remembered on Roman street signs, can seldom have been busier.

The oldest part of the complex comes from the time of Pope Gregory II

when the king of Wessex, Ina, founded the Schola Saxonum.

Destroyed by fire and restored by Pope Leo IV, who is the Pope

who received Alfred as a little boy. How about that!

Edward sent an Embassy here, headed by his Mercian archbishop,

Plegmund, who had helped King Alfred in his translation programme.

They took gifts and perhaps brought back manuscripts like this

book of psalms later owned by Edward's son Aethelstan.

THUNDER CRACKS

The embassy sent by Edward the Elder in 908 came, we're told, bearing

large sums of money, elemosina, as a gift from the people of England.

So even in the most difficult times of Edward's

and Aethelflaed's fledgling kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons,

the English tenaciously and loyally hung on to that link with Rome,

which they felt to an extent defined them.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

Together, brother and sister now began a joint

offensive against the Vikings of the Danelaw.

One of the bequests, if you like, of Aethelflaed

is her really very active campaigning founding one borough after another.

And if you plot these out on a map,

you can see how her and Edward really cooperated, if you like, to defend

the interests of Mercia and Wessex, and also to strengthen border zones,

to bring areas of strategic significance under their sway.

And so they made a really powerful alliance.

You can really see them working together.

Taking a leaf out of Alfred's book,

the key to her warfare was fortress building.

Some were restored Roman towns, some reused Iron Age hill forts.

And others were built on new sites.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

And it was Tamworth, the old residence of King Offa,

that meant most to the Mercians.

It was a great rectangle of ditches and earthen ramparts

with a wooden palisade, centring on the church

and with the royal palace, the royal hall, next door to it.

In fact, the main Mercian street is still the high street today.

We're just on the very edge of Mercian territory.

You go across those hills there and you enter the Danelaw.

Aethelflaed, when she came here with her army the summer of 913,

was bringing the war right up into Danish territory.

But even more than that,

it was a great symbolic moment for the Mercians.

As the Chronicle says, she came here with all the Mercians,

meaning all the earls and thegns of the Mercian kingdom.

And she did it with God's help, God's blessing.

We are forgotten, we're seen as a bit of a small market town.

But we know it was an important place

as a political administrative centre right in the heart of Mercia,

so we know it was really an important place.

In Aethelflaed's day,

they'd not forgotten the glorious past of Mercia.

Absolutely no, not at all.

And here in Mercia, royal women had played that role before.

King Offa's queen, Cynethryth,

is the only Anglo-Saxon queen shown on coins.

Do you ever imagine what Aethelflaed might have been like?

I do, actually.

I have this vision of her as being this really strong, warrior woman.

And we know obviously that women in Anglo-Saxon society were

peace-weavers, and I think that she had kind of earned her role.

-She knew how to negotiate.

-It's interesting, isn't it,

that quite a lot of her achievements were by negotiation rather

than by war, although she was still prepared to lead the army.

Absolutely. And she obviously could command the army,

and they were happy for her to lead them.

So I think that's a very unique position for a woman to be in.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

Leadership in this period really had to be personal

because they were going to spend a lot of face-time with their people.

There wasn't a massive administration that was running things.

A figurehead who would walk in and shake hands at the right time,

you know, she really had to be very active in making negotiations,

planning campaigns,

and being there at the site where things were happening.

Year by year, Aethelflaed's Chronicle faithfully records the

dozen boroughs she rebuilt or founded.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

Step by step, consolidating Mercian power along the Mersey,

on borders of Wales and the Danelaw.

To some of her older subjects it must have felt like not

so much a building programme, but the rebirth of a kingdom.

It's amazing how the patterns can

have been imposed so long ago, isn't it?

Oh, yes indeed. I mean, we're entering Oxford now through pretty

much exactly the same route that the Anglo-Saxons would have entered it.

How this extraordinary tower, which is both a church tower

and also part of the defensive structure,

and it might even have served as a sort of watchtower -

looking to the north, which is the most vulnerable part of the city.

It's just fabulous, isn't it?

So the main northern ditch of the town running on this side?

Yup, it would originally just have been an earthen rampart,

laced with timbers. And then to reinforce that,

because inevitably as the timbers rot it would have started to

push out, they faced it with stone.

So for the first time really since the Roman period

you would have had a stone walled city.

These were such huge infrastructure projects, and you can't imagine

one person being there all the time in each of these.

But on the other hand, there must be a degree of personal oversight.

In a situation where there are no means of mass media or

communication otherwise, she must have, to some extent,

exerted personal control, personal involvement

and it's really just an extraordinary achievement

to be almost everywhere at once.

Like her father, Alfred, she was also a patron of learning.

Educated in his court, she was literate and cultured.

And Mercia was a centre of scholarship - the key figures

in Alfred's translation programme had been Mercians.

And one Mercian manuscript perhaps even offers us a way into her mind.

It gives us an entrance to a characteristic aspect of their

psychology, which is the tension between worldliness and piety.

Written by the West Saxon saint, Aldhelm, 7th century saint,

very famous writer, and it's about virginity and chastity.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

'She is to be praised who rejects worldly pleasures

'and represses the carnal desires, for they are worthless.'

In the best of all possible worlds, Aldhelm says,

chastity is the best armour against the wiles of the devil.

Maybe there's a thread here.

Aethelflaed's father, Alfred, according to his biographer,

had given himself up to the pleasures of the flesh when

he was a young man and then felt very guilty about it afterwards.

And thought that the terrible affliction he had,

the bodily affliction that he suffered from all his life,

was punishment, and in the end, renounced sex altogether.

Now Aethelflaed's his eldest child, his beloved first daughter

and after the birth of her first child, her daughter Aelfwyn,

such a difficult birth according to a later story,

that she too renounced sex as a religious vow.

Could there be a thread there?

For all their great achievements as leaders in war and peace,

both of them were battle winners, maybe this intense inwardness

and self-reflection, and anxiety about the body, was an ever present.

But the other ever present was still war.

In 917, brother and sister continued their campaign against the Danelaw.

And Aethelflaed attacked the Danish base at Derby.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

The Mercian army's broken into the town

and there's fierce fighting going on.

And then the Chronicle says, there right inside the gates,

four of the thegns who were most dear to her were killed.

In the oldest Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry, one of the big themes is

the bond between the lord and his warriors - it's a reciprocal bond.

The lord is generous with land and treasure and hospitality

and affection, friendship, as they said.

And in return, the thegns give their service, their unswerving loyalty,

even laying down their lives for their lord.

And here in the battle for Derby, Aethelflaed's thegns

lay down their lives for their Lady.

The news of her triumphs spread like wildfire.

Early in 918, the Danish army in Leicester submitted

without fighting and chose her as their Lord.

And then from their capital in York, the Northumbrians

sent pledges that they too would bow to the Lady of Mercians.

In north Britain, her reputation now far surpassed her brother.

To the Irish, she was the most renowned queen of the Saxons.

I think that charisma that she had

did cross political boundaries as well.

There's a record of the year 918

that the men of York were willing to submit to her authority.

Which is quite amazing really that so often in the writings,

the Vikings of Northumbria are portrayed as the inveterate

pagans and plunderers, and yet this woman was perhaps able to

offer perhaps a more peaceful solution.

And when new Viking invaders from Ireland occupied the

Tyne valley, she sent ambassadors to the Scots to form

a northern alliance for mutual help and defence.

In 918, the Vikings were defeated at Corbridge on Hadrian's Wall.

And a later Irish source even claims she was there in person.

"Othere, Earl of the Vikings," it says, "fled into a dense wood

"and the queen ordered the wood cut down and all the pagans killed.

"And her fame spread everywhere."

I always get the impression that she felt that she had to do this

lest she be perceived as a weak leader.

She had to make sure she made these shows of strength,

but at the same time, she was a very able communicator,

and used that skill to her advantage too.

But then in June 918, at the height of her power...

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

She was in her late 40s. Of her tomb, nothing survives

save perhaps a broken coffin lid and one tiny fragment of gold.

With Aethelflaed dead,

Edward hurried to Tamworth to bring Mercia under his power, only

to find that the Mercians had chosen a new Lady - her daughter Aelfwyn.

It's the only time in British history that a daughter

succeeded her mother.

The Mercian assembly accepted her daughter in the absence of a son.

I think that may have been because they saw a daughter,

who I also think was likely then to have been married,

but perhaps to another Mercian.

It was a way of maintaining over time Mercian independence.

And it had a chance of succeeding.

Her daughter takes over,

and there is a real sense of independence from Wessex.

This is resolved by Edward marching up to Tamworth and imprisoning her.

Presumably put into a nunnery, but we can't be sure about that,

but judging by the way royal families worked in that period,

that's the most likely outcome.

Yes, they were very ruthless and unsentimental

about royal women and royal daughters, weren't they?

The West Saxons especially.

The elimination of nieces and nephews was not new.

That was another feature of early medieval dynastic politics,

which was played out yet again in 918.

Yet Aelfwyn's fate was rather like that of Charlemagne's nephews -

that's to say, we know nothing about it,

but we have horrible suspicions which may be justified.

Aethelflaed, her chronicle said,

had been a person of extraordinary ability and intelligence who

steered the kingdom strongly justly and calmly.

I think Aethelflaed can indeed be imagined as having the diplomatic

and international role of a king.

Certain people had an interest in editing her out

and this is always in this period true of women, I think.

Their activities and achievements have been underestimated.

Aethelflaed managed to salvage something by commissioning

her own history, as her father had commissioned his,

but also by having such a remarkably high profile.

When Aethelflaed dies,

both she and Edward are at the height of their power.

In the later years of Edward's reign, his power actually

starts to decline and I think that's almost because he doesn't have his

powerful sister, Aethelflaed, still active in Mercia on his behalf.

And that brings us to the last entry in the Chronicle of Aethelflaed.

SPEAKING IN OLD ENGLISH

"For when Edward died, the Mercians chose as his successor

"Aethelflaed's foster son, Athelstan, the son she never had."

And not just as their lord, but their king.

Athelstan was King Edward's first-born, though by a concubine.

And as a boy, he'd been sent to Mercia to be brought up by his aunt.

But when he was five,

his grandfather King Alfred had invested him

with a Saxon sword, belt and cloak,

so it was said, in omen of a kingdom.

These investiture ceremonies are really

the beginnings of medieval knighthood.

They took place round the age of 14, the transition from being a boy

to being a young man, a warrior, a knight -

the word is actually Anglo-Saxon.

Now Alfred the Great couldn't wait that long - he was dying -

so he gives his blessing to his only grandson.

In the world of early medieval royal families,

such a gesture could have meant nothing, but rather like Alfred's

own investiture by Pope Leo, aged five, in Rome,

for Athelstan himself, the ceremony carried the mark of destiny.

Next, how Aethelflaed's foster son

became the first king of all England.

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