Aethelstan: The First King of England King Alfred and the Anglo Saxons

In around the year 980,

a member of the English royal family wrote a history of England

for his cousin in Germany...

looking back on the great events of their times...

"My Dearest Matilda", he wrote,

"here you will find the story of our family.

"A tale of so many wars, and the killings of men,

"the shipwreck of navies on the waves of the ocean."

"Now, your uncle was King Athelstan.

"In his time, the barbarian forces were overcome on all sides

"and England emerged as the victor."

"The fields of Britain became one,

"there was peace everywhere and abundance of all things.

"He was a mighty king, worthy of high honour."

Among all the great rulers of British history,

Athelstan today is the forgotten man,

but in his time, a continental poet thought him an English Charlemagne.

His nicknames in Scandinavia

were the "faith strong" and the "victorious".

To the Irish, he was the "pillar of the West".

To the Welsh, the "King of Kings".

To the Scots, simply the "bastard".

But Athelstan will turn the dream of Alfred the Great into reality -

a kingdom of all the English.

DRAMATIC MEDIEVAL MUSIC

SOLDIERS SHOUTING

BELL TOLLS

This is the tale of how the kingdom of England was created

in the Viking Age

by the most remarkable family in British history.

And the third great figure in this story is Athelstan.

But the most surprising thing about him

is that when we look for contemporary accounts,

there's almost nothing.

We've come back to the source we've followed through this tale -

the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

The Chronicle tells how King Alfred resisted the Vikings

and created a single kingdom of the old rivals Wessex and Mercia -

a Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.

It tells how his son and daughter expanded the kingdom

and conquered the Viking Midlands and East Anglia.

But when it comes to Athelstan, there's a surprise...

Athelstan is the most powerful ruler that Britain has seen

since the Romans, and you would have expected

the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to wax lyrical

about these great deeds of the dynasty -

the grandson, after all, of Alfred the Great.

But something very strange happens in this manuscript -

no account is written of the reign of Athelstan.

Only 16 years after Athelstan's death was a new booklet inserted,

which gives us four facts...

..his accession, his death and his wars.

Somebody in Winchester clearly didn't see Athelstan

as being quite the legitimate successor

to the throne of the West Saxons.

To find out why, we need to go back to Winchester,

the capital of Wessex in the last days of Alfred's life.

CHOIR SINGS

At that time, Athelstan was Alfred's only grandson,

and just before he died,

Alfred knighted him with the symbols of kingship.

Seeing the boy's graceful manners and handsome looks,

Alfred affectionately embraced him and gave him a Saxon sword,

a jewelled scabbard, belt and cloak, in omen of a kingdom.

A poem was presented to the little boy punning on his name -

"Prince, you're called Athelstan - noble stone.

"Take this as a happy omen for your life.

"You will be a royal rock, fighting fearsome demons."

"But take the holy path of learning too.

"And if peace comes, I pray that you may seek,

"and God may grant the promise of your noble name."

MEDIEVAL CHANTING

But in the Middle Ages, a year was a long time in politics.

After Alfred's death, Athelstan's father King Edward married

and had other sons by his queen and Athelstan was sent to be brought up

by his aunt Aethelflaed in Mercia.

Athelstan was brought up at that Mercian court

and HIS formative years

must have been passed in her orbit.

She would be telling him the stories about her father

and about HER education at HIS court.

I think it is impossible to describe Athelstan's personality

without looking at Aethelflaed's input into it.

WOMAN SINGS FOLK SONG

So Athelstan grew up in Mercia.

He was educated in Latin letters, he trained to fight and to hunt

with the Mercian thegns in the rolling hills of the Forest of Dean.

As a young man, he must have fought

in his aunt's campaigns in the Danelaw,

where he earned a name for courage and nerve.

But as he grew up in Mercia, did Athelstan still think -

despite his father's remarriage -

that HE was the true heir to the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons?

Now, remember the care with which Alfred the Great had tried to ensure

that the succession would pass down peacefully, through his descendants.

But look at this, there's Alfred's son Edward.

And Edward had at least 14 children by three different wives,

two of whom were anointed queens.

Here's the sons...

His heir as King of Wessex - Aelfweard, who is in his 20s.

The next heir Eadwin, his brother, also in his 20s.

And here in the middle...Athelstan.

He's the oldest, he's the son of a lesser consort.

It says here in French, aside

that Athelstan was "Warlike and courageous and greatly feared

"and the most handsome man that ever lived."

The stage was set for a typical medieval succession crisis.

And that's exactly what happened.

After Aethelflaed's death, King Edward marched into Mercia.

But in 924, the Mercians revolted against him

and on the campaign, Edward died near Chester.

And then, only days later,

so did his chosen heir - Athelstan's half brother Aelfweard...

..and now the Mercians chose Athelstan as their king.

Here in Winchester, it must have seemed

it was one piece of bad news after another.

The Mercians are in revolt in the northwest.

The King has died, suppressing the rebellion.

His heir apparent in Wessex, King Aelfweard,

doesn't even get back home - he dies mysteriously 16 days later.

Rumours swirling of plots and intrigue, murder maybe.

And then to cap it all, the Mercians have elected Athelstan,

not as their Lord but as their King.

At that point in the story, it must have seemed

that the joint kingdom of Wessex and Mercia created by Alfred the Great,

was about to be torn apart.

But to save the family project, Athelstan now offered a deal -

he wouldn't marry or have heirs, he'd be a kind of caretaker king.

He's not known ever to have married.

There was a certain way of avoiding...

tensions in royal dynasties...

in some adult men renouncing family

and heirs in order to make way for younger brothers or nephews.

The Franks occasionally tried this,

kings in Spain in this period also tried this - it was an option.

But it still took a year of in-fighting

before he was accepted in Wessex...

..and even then, there was a plot to blind him before he was crowned.

No wonder then that he was strategic in his choice of coronation place...

He was crowned, not in Wessex or in Mercia,

but on the border between the two at Kingston on Thames.

Kingston had the only bridge across the Thames,

other than London Bridge up until about 1750, I think.

And so presumably the King of Wessex comes to the edges of his kingdom

so that he can then bring his lords over from Mercia

and begin joining together all that national story.

Yeah, if you're bidding to be king of all the English,

then a place on the boundary between the two key kingdoms -

-the West Saxons and the Mercians - would be ideal.

-Yeah.

He was crowned here on the 4th September, 925.

It was the first English coronation,

tradition said, on a great wooden platform set up in the market place

in front of Kingston church.

And if you'd been here that day, what you would have seen

was a series of carefully orchestrated ritual tableaus,

of dramatic scenes, in which the archbishop and bishops

anointed him, gave him the Sword of Justice,

the ring and the rod and the sceptre.

And then, on his head, they put the crown,

and Athelstan's the first British monarch in our history

to be portrayed wearing a crown.

And he was crowned in the name of the two peoples -

the West Saxons and the Mercians.

For if one kingdom of England was ever to emerge,

it couldn't happen without the two of them.

When the ceremonies were over here at Kingston,

there was a great coronation banquet for all the court,

overflowing with fine food and wine.

But before the king left the church,

he performed one last intimate ritual.

In front of the altar, he freed a slave.

This is a book which Athelstan seems to have had with him

at the time of his coronation...

It's obviously a book of great importance to him.

And he's used it to record this act of his.

It's a good act for a King

to perform at the time of his coronation.

The highest and the lowest in the land

-associated in the same inscription.

-That's a nice way to put it, yes.

He's keen to get his credit for this,

and it's obviously an act which will benefit Athelstan

as much as it will benefit the person he is freeing.

So he'd won the crown.

He was 30 years old, and as he believed, "called by God".

But he's also a politician, a man with nerve...

BELL TOLLS

But he still faced many threats.

Beyond the Humber, Northumbria was ruled by a powerful Viking dynasty

whose empire stretched across the Irish Sea

to Dublin and the Western Isles.

Wary of Athelstan's war-like reputation,

they immediately sent ambassadors

and in new year 926,

he met them at the old Mercian royal centre of Tamworth.

Here, in a great ceremony, he married his sister

to Sihtric the pagan Viking King of Northumbria.

Sihtric accepted baptism as part of the deal,

with Athelstan as his sponsor, his godparent.

Lots of later legends here in Tamworth about this tale...

Those beautiful windows up there by William Morris give you the story.

There's Athelstan on the left, giving away his sister.

There she is - Edith - in white,

receiving a ring from her rather handsome Viking husband-to-be.

Not the grizzled one-eyed veteran of history!

And next to them, the Bishop of Lichfield, Ella -

a central figure in Athelstan's regime.

It's a fascinating moment in the story of Viking Age England -

the granddaughter of the most Christian King, Alfred the Great,

is marrying the grandson of Ivor the Boneless,

the bloodthirsty Viking who died on campaign in Repton 50 years before

and was buried with human sacrifice at the graveside.

But Athelstan's accepting the facts on the ground -

Scandinavian England is here to stay,

and on this spot Sihtric is honoured

as a descendent of the royal line of the race of the Danes.

So Athelstan had begun his long-term plan -

after 60 years of war,

to bring peace to the isles of Britain.

Back in Winchester, like a new president,

he surrounds himself with his own men

and a think tank from all over Europe.

And it's the people around Athelstan at this moment

that are really interesting - Waerulf the priest,

a famous Mercian scholar

who was part of Alfred the Great's translation team.

Walter, Gundlaf and Hildewin are German names.

Dubliter is an Irish abbot and scholar.

Petrus, a Frankish, learned man and poet.

This is Athelstan's courtly circle, his intellectual bodyguard

around him in the potentially hostile atmosphere of Winchester.

But looking over his shoulder at that moment

is his father's next chosen heir...

Prince Edwin.

"Eadwin Cliton" -

Prince or Atheling Edwin, his half brother.

If Athelstan HAD agreed not to marry,

and not to beget heirs in becoming king,

then this is the heir apparent.

And Edwin will play a very dramatic role in the story that follows.

For the moment, Athelstan's rule was secure.

But the next year, 927,

the politics of Britain changed with dramatic speed.

Athelstan now armed for war across the whole of Britain,

wrote his court poet, Petrus,

spear-headed by his armour bearing thegns...

Sihtric of Northumbria had rejected

the king's sister and renounced Christianity, but then died.

And when his kinsmen came over from Dublin to claim their kingdom,

Athelstan invaded Northumbria and drove them out.

And now he sends ambassadors to the kings of the Scots

and the Strathclyde Welsh,

calling them to a peace conference in Cumbria.

This is Eamont Bridge.

This is where Athelstan met Constantine, the King of the Scots,

Owain, the King of the Strathclyde Welsh and the Cumbrians.

And Ealdred and Uhtred, the Lords of Bamburgh -

the Anglo-Saxon rulers of northern Northumbria.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions kings of Wales too,

the Kings of Gwent and Hywel Dda of Dyfed, the future law-giver.

Maybe they came here too.

Here the Northern kings acknowledged Athelstan

as the supreme king of Britain.

It was a turning point in British history.

Guided by God-given dreams, as well as by realpolitik,

Athelstan was determined that this would be a Christian empire.

Before the kings parted, they went to a little village called Dacre.

So why did Athelstan bring the kings of Britain

out to this lonely valley above Ullswater?

Well, the answer is that!

RELIGIOUS CHANTING

Dacre was an Anglo-Saxon monastery from the 7th century.

It's mentioned by Bede, Saint Cuthbert was supposed

to have performed one of his miracles here.

So they came here because it was a sacred place.

And it was on this spot

that they would have performed their solemn oaths against idolatry,

deofolgeld, and made their pact of peace.

Writing back to the royal family in Winchester,

his court poet was jubilant -

"Letter, wing your way back to the palace,

"King Athelstan lives, glorious through his deeds.

"This England is now complete."

ITALIAN SAT NAV VOICE SPEAKS

So Athelstan had power, but what he still wanted was legitimacy.

That summer, 927, he sends an embassy to Rome

with his Archbishop Wuflhem and the famous Welsh king Hywel Dda.

The new Archbishop was to receive his spiritual authority

from the Pope himself.

And the Pope would give his blessing to Athelstan's Christian empire.

The king is fired up now by his own sense of history,

his awareness that he is guiding great events.

The ancient Roman historians had spoken of a "tripartite world" -

Europe, Africa and Asia, with Britain beyond the edge.

Now, Athelstan would claim to rule the world of Britain -

a Christian empire with the authority of St Peter.

THUNDER CRACKS

Athelstan's pan-British embassy to Rome

will have spent two or three months here

and then begun the return journey in the new year of 928.

And, over the next six years, a revolution will take place

in English government, as far reaching - if not more so -

than the Angevins and the Tudors.

This is the moment

for Athelstan's visionary "kingdom of all the English".

When the embassy returned,

Athelstan held a Great Easter council in Exeter.

"The sacred flame" he said,

"has blown across the tripartite world

"in this third year of my reign,

"which there is now no doubt is gifted by God."

And so he began his project with laws on charity

and a ferocious clamp down on crime.

And he's already moving fast...

..it's as if he thought he didn't have much time

and was desperate to turn his ideas into reality.

No biography has survived for him as it has for Alfred,

so his story has to be pieced together from fragments -

inscriptions, burnt manuscripts.

And one key aspect of his revolution in government

is revealed in an unlikely source - the King's Land Grants.

Although it's only a land document - I say only -

but it gives us a vision of his kingdom at that moment, doesn't it?

Yes, I think the point about these royal diplomas

is that any one of these on its own is interesting up to a point.

From a historian's point of view, the interest of these documents

is completely transformed when you put them all together.

Because these charters are dated, because they are localised,

you can begin to see how the king moves

from one part of the country to another.

So yes, these are the documents that represent

the first flush of enthusiasm for this new kingdom of the English.

And in this new kingdom,

the King demanded control and wanted feedback.

So he travelled constantly, holding regular gatherings

of local and national leaders.

One of these was held in November 931 at Lifton, in Devon.

There must be 100 or so people named in this charter.

One imagines, certainly, that there would have been

two, three, four hundred people present at the meeting.

-Maybe thousands?

-Even more, yes, yes.

The bishops are certainly not going to be travelling on their own.

So many hundreds of people needed to be fed and temporarily housed,

from support staff to the King himself.

You can begin here with "Ego Athelstanus" so you have...

"I, Athelstan, King of Britain", he's called there.

Then you have "Ego Wulfhelm" - he's the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Here, in the far west of Devon, were Viking earls from the Danelaw,

feasting with the kings of Wales.

And then, most interestingly,

you have "Ego Hywel subregulus" -

Welsh sub-king.

So, the Welsh kings have come down to Lifton in Devon in November

and are acknowledging Athelstan as the supreme king of Britain,

-are they, Simon?

-That is certainly the impression

that this Charter of Athelstan is creating, yes.

-As I say, whether...

-Whether they saw it that way...?!

Whether they see it that way is quite another matter.

The world had changed.

A whole new agenda was on offer,

which was this notion of consensus, of collaboration

of assemblies as the place

where you shape policy together.

It had to be happening in assemblies beyond the court in the shires,

in the hundreds.

And, in these places, landowners and royal agents...

communed with each other and came to share an ideology

which bound the king and his people together as divinely approved.

So in the mundane record of the King's journeys,

you can glimpse the growth of English government

and even the origins of Parliament.

Law-making is one of the most important aspects of assembly functions.

Athelstan makes laws on a large scale.

There's clearly also a good deal of give-and-take,

of general discussion between the King and his great men.

There's one instance in one of Athelstan's law codes

where he says... There are complaints about disorder, and he says,

"My councillors have said that I have suffered this too long" -

and there's clearly a sense there of give-and-take...

The councillors putting up a point,

making a complaint, and the King responding.

He apologies for the state of the nation -

"My councillors say I have borne it too long."

But then he sends a messenger,

following on the latest law-making session.

We all grew up with the idea that Simon de Montfort

is the founder of the English Parliament,

but you're suggesting we should look much further back in time.

Legislation...

political discussion, consensual politics,

the sort of thing that goes on in 13th century politics,

And you can trace, I think,

a clear line through, in terms of the history of large assemblies,

straight through from Athelstan to the 13th century Parliament.

Of course, a lot changes, but there is a clear line of continuity.

And to see how this all worked at grassroots,

we've come to a borough built by Alfred the Great

and especially favoured by Athelstan.

We're just outside the little town of Malmesbury in Wiltshire,

on the northern edge of the West Saxon kingdom in Anglo-Saxon times.

Just over the Avon into Gloucestershire, that's Mercia.

And from at least as far back as the 14th century,

the townsfolk here have believed

that these fields were given to the town by King Athelstan.

And believe it or not, even today, these fields,

known as "the King's Heath",

are administered by King Athelstan's court.

To help enforce his laws,

all freemen had to swear a solemn oath of loyalty to him.

GAVEL BANGS

Oh, yea, oh, yea, oh, yea.

All persons come forward to do your business in a peaceful manner.

-WOMAN:

-Warden and freemen of Malmesbury,

King Athelstan's feast day court was held in the old courthouse

on Tuesday the 12th June 2012

before M Westmecott - warden -

O Pike, NOJ Pike...

To break your oath was treason to the king.

The Warden's Oath -

"You shall swear that you will well and truly

"execute the office of warden of this corporation.

"You shall maintain, support and uphold all the rights,

"liberties, immunities, privileges, and franchises, of the corporation."

APPLAUSE

So Athelstan's subjects were bound by the sworn oath

in village tithings and the courts of hundred and shire.

So it's wonderful seeing these ancient English traditions

still in action, isn't it?

The warden and free burgesses of Malmesbury

have a direct link to Athelstan...

via the 500 acres that he gave us

in recognition of our assistance in his fight with the Danes.

So there's the direct link, you can't get away from that.

The king, in a nutshell, was creating an allegiance,

to his person but most of all to his law -

a key idea in English history.

Athelstan also fixed England's physical frontiers.

Across the Tamar, the Cornish, too,

now became part of England for the first time.

And 40 years on from Alfred's Viking wars,

Athelstan overhauls his defensive network of boroughs.

He closes some down and turns others into centres

of trade and civic life.

In Exeter, he restored the Roman walls, laid out streets

and housing plots, encouraging merchants to settle.

But markets need outlets.

Athelstan granted to Exeter the old Roman port on the River Exe,

a place as he put it, "known to the locals as Toppesham."

Morning!

Salmon fisherman.

Those boats are for salmon fishing, a grant of Topsham to Exeter

in the 10th century mentions these fisheries.

They're still doing it!

Topsham would grow rich on Exeter's trade -

wool from Devon, tin and silver from Cornwall.

So, trade came with the revival of the English town.

In Athelstan's time,

it was said the standard of living started to rise,

there was plenty in the shops.

But markets must have money.

The only authority for the currency now was the King,

who took a cut of the profits of each mint.

By the end of the 10th century, nowhere in Southern England

was more than 15 miles from a mint.

And the English people were getting used to living in a money economy.

We have here a very nice example from Chester.

In this particular case,

we have the name of the King surrounding a cross on one face...

And we have him being called

"Athelstan Rex To Br" -

"Athelstan, the King of all Britain."

-"The King of all Britain"?

-Yes.

And then on this other coin, which is from Winchester,

we see again this same title - Athelstan Rex To Br.

King of Totius Britanniae -

all Britain.

Completely the other side

of the kingdom

but yet using the exact same title, and of course the same title

that is used in his charters and in certain other documents.

The fact that we see it coming through in both types of source

really does indicate that someone at the top of the food chain

is issuing a command that it's got to change,

that we've all got to start singing from the same hymn sheet

in terms of what we're calling the King.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

So Athelstan was a man in a hurry -

his first six years saw great practical achievements.

But culture and learning would also play a key role in nation building.

His grandfather Alfred had begun the revival of education

and Athelstan took it to the next level.

You can't put together a collection like this

for any other Anglo-Saxon King.

He obviously liked books,

and he saw books as a useful tool

for him to make his connections

and to establish his networks and so on.

And in his books, you can see too

how learning was to be a tool of kingship.

Well, here you have an extraordinary inscription

indicating that this gospel book was given by King Athelstan

to the church of Canterbury.

Very fancy titles here -

Athelstan Anglorum Basileos et Curagulua.

This is all fancy words used in order to express kingship.

"Athelstan, King of the English and Ruler of the whole of Britain."

He's King, not only of the English,

but also of the whole of Britain, which is an extraordinary claim.

When Athelstan was a boy,

his grandfather had urged him to follow the path of learning.

And his own book of psalms hints at his personal interests,

with its added paintings,

its religious calendar, and its private prayers.

At the end, perhaps most surprisingly,

a series of texts in Greek -

The Apostle's Creed, the Lord's Prayer and so on.

You can get a real sense of the King as an intellectual, dare one say it.

One writer he especially admired was the 7th century saint Aldhelm,

to whom it was said Athelstan "devoted himself body and soul".

And this manuscript of Aldhelm

was written by one of the King's scribes.

What you're looking at is 10th century scholarship.

Almost every word, every phrase, is being glossed,

ie - explained and commented on.

And through this manuscript there are thousands of these.

And perhaps the choice of text

also tells us about the unmarried king himself -

its message that self-control, purity of mind, chastity

is a victory for a man as great as victory in battle.

That even a warrior hero must fight his inner demons.

The king spent Christmas 932 at Amesbury in Wiltshire.

And then, out of the blue...

comes this...

In this year, 933, King Athelstan ordered his brother Edwin

to be drowned at sea.

Many later legends grew up about the drowning of Prince Edwin.

It was said that Athelstan had been turned against his brother

by a wicked cup-bearer, that the councillors of England

had tried Edwin in London and drowned him off London Bridge,

and even better, that Athelstan had deliberately and cruelly

had Edwin set afloat in the middle of the sea

in a rotten boat with no oars.

What we know is that Edwin is buried at St Bertin in Flanders.

And there, a chronicler told how

"King Edwin had drowned at sea,

"fleeing across the Channel after upheavals in his kingdom."

Later legends said that Edwin had been unjustly accused of rebellion.

That afterwards, weighed down by guilt, Athelstan did public penance.

-Cor, that's magnificent, isn't it?

-It is beautiful.

And that he founded a church where prayers

would be offered for his brother's soul and his own sins.

And the foundation of all of this, obviously,

was the original church that burnt down, founded by Athelstan here.

So, King Athelstan, in 934, founded the church here,

which was then called Middleton,

as a penance for the death of his brother,

who he believed was plotting against him.

And he felt so guilty about it,

that the legend is that he actually built the church here on this site.

And, as we can see in the paintings,

he is very much offering the church to the abbot.

Possibly Athelstan had behaved in ways which he then regretted.

Strangely enough, in the Irish law codes,

there is a punishment of being...

set to sea in a boat with no oars.

It's actually a legal punishment for homicide of brothers, amazingly.

-Wow.

-And it's obviously a way in which you don't want

-to have the blood on your hands of actually executing somebody.

-Yeah.

So you set them to sea, and if God allows them to come back to land,

-then fine, and if not, it's done with.

-Yes.

So there's an eerie shadow behind the tale, isn't there?

Absolutely, absolutely, yeah.

So the succession crisis after his father's death

had come back to haunt him.

Athelstan's hard-won authority had been shaken.

THUNDER CRACKS

The next spring, Constantine, King of the Scots

renounced his allegiance.

And Athelstan now raised a great army

to punish Constantine and bring him back into the fold.

"934 - here for Athelstan cyning in on Scotland".

From Winchester on the 28th May,

they rode to Nottingham

and then up into Northumbria.

HE READS OLD ENGLISH

"With a land army."

HE READS OLD ENGLISH

"With a navy."

On the 1st of July, as the English fleet moved up the east coast,

the land army stopped at Chester-le-Street on the River Wear,

the shrine of Saint Cuthbert.

Athelstan came here with his grand army from all over Britain.

He came into the little church on this spot

and the priests opened Saint Cuthbert's coffin...

so the King could actually touch the preserved body

and wrap it in beautiful embroideries

that he'd brought with him.

Athelstan's grandfather Alfred had had a vision of Saint Cuthbert

in his moments of direst danger in the marshes of Somerset.

Cuthbert had prophesied that Alfred's descendants

would become kings of all England and rulers of Britain.

That had now happened, and Athelstan had come to this place

to say thank you and to ask the saint for his help

in the wars that lay ahead.

And then he invaded Scotland,

plundering the lands of the Scots and Picts.

A Northumbrian chronicle says, "they attacked Dunfoeder".

Dunnottar Castle on the coast south of Aberdeen.

In early August, they reached the shores of the Moray Firth,

and the fleet went on to Caithness

the northern-most point of the British mainland.

There had been nothing like it

since the expedition of the Roman General Agricola.

Faced by such a show of force,

Constantine submitted to Athelstan and came back with him into England.

But across the British Isles, voices of opposition were growing.

In Wales, a poet now called

for the "King of Kings"

to be overthrown.

And for the English to be driven out of Britain where

they had come as landless wanderers 400 years before.

It is a prophetic poem, in which it is hoped

that there would be an alliance between the peoples of what,

I suppose we would term the fringes of the isles of Britain.

To push the English out of England.

The idea is that this alliance of Britons, Vikings, and the Irish

will push them out again and make them

once more roamers of the high seas.

HE READS IN OLD WELSH

The muse foretells the Men of Wessex will see England burn.

When the great battle comes,

their dead will be packed too tight to fall.

And in summer 937, the moment came.

That August, a huge Viking fleet left Dublin

under King Anlaf Guthfrithson,

whose kinsmen Athelstan had driven from York ten years before.

The Scots and Strathclyde Welsh came overland under King Constantine.

Northumbrian sources say the Viking fleet of 615 ships

landed in the Humber.

There, in their chief city of York,

the Northumbrians joined the invaders.

Suddenly, Athelstan's northern empire had collapsed.

The axis of the war was probably the Great North Road.

The allies now began to devastate the lands to the south,

to draw Athelstan to them.

That autumn, you have to imagine columns of refugees fleeing away

from the smoke as the allies - the Scots and the Norse Irish -

devastated the land south of the Humber.

"They ravaged everything with incessant plundering raids,

"driving out the peasants

"and setting fire to their fields.

"Such was the barbarians' mounted strength."

As autumn turned towards winter, Athelstan still didn't move.

And now the moneyers in Nottingham and York

stopped putting the King's name on their coins,

uncertain how events would turn out.

And in England, voices were raised against the king...

"In his youth he was fearless and bold, it was said,

"but he now let precious time slip by in inaction,

"while they destroyed everything."

But still, Athelstan refused to be drawn.

One later legend says

that he came back to the little chapel of Saint Katherine at Milton

to pray for God's help.

And as for what Athelstan might have spoken

on this spot at that moment...

Well, a prayer survives, attributed to him.

A prayer before battle,

in which he asked God to let him fight well and act manfully,

and he begs that his enemies

will be destroyed like Pharaoh's army before the people of Israel.

At the end of the prayer,

were a series of dreadful maledictions

against a hostile king and his kingdom -

"Tear them apart, oh, Lord, smash them into dust."

Aggression, anger, a sense of betrayal -

whoever composed that prayer,

sounds as if he was contemplating a fight to the death.

RELIGIOUS SINGING

Alone in his private chapel, he prayed on his most sacred relic -

a fragment of the True Cross set in a rock crystal.

Meditating on his past sins and the sins which would inevitably come

with the slaughter of thousands in war.

Such were the tensions between being an Anglo-Saxon warrior king

and a pious Christian man.

There's a later tradition that Athelstan

wore his cross relic around his neck in his battles,

literally arming his soul and protecting his body

with one of the most potent relics in the whole of Christendom.

Then, with the armies of Wessex and Mercia, Athelstan attacked.

But where Brunanburh was is still a mystery.

We'll never know for sure what happened in 937,

but my guess is that it was on this stretch of this road

that the great war of the 10th century came to its climax.

The news spread across the northern world.

"The battle was immense lamentable and horrible",

they said in Ulster.

"It was a black day for the Scots", they said.

"More savage than anything on record."

" He smashed those fierce kings",

wrote a Frankish poet,

"and by God's will trod on their proud necks".

There were those who'd criticised his war leadership,

but as one of his courtiers wrote long afterwards,

"He was experienced and far-sighted,

"and very hard to overcome in any conflict."

And so it had proved.

And even 50 years on,

the English still called it "The Great War".

Athelstan had saved his crown, but in his books

are perhaps hints of the troubling aftermath for him as a Christian.

They contain inscriptions in which Athelstan,

A - records that he is the donor of the book,

but B - then, yes, asks anybody looking at the inscription

to bear him in mind in their prayers.

"You who come after me, I ask you for a moment to pray for my soul.

"In future times, remember me and forgive me my sins."

The war had united the West Saxons and Mercians

in a great national achievement,

though it would be a while yet

before the Northumbrians felt part of the new England.

As for the Scots and Welsh,

they are still negotiating

their relationship with Athelstan's successors.

He'd started as a compromise candidate, a caretaker king,

but he had carried through the family plan

of his grandfather Alfred - the creation of an English kingdom

with governance and justice,

law and learning...

shires, towns and workable institutions.

He had done as his grandfather asked him.

He had followed the path of wisdom and yet like the old pagan heroes,

fought with all his might against the demons.

As a man, it was said, "He was affable and courteous"

"and beloved by his people, who admired his courage and humility.

"But he was like a thunderbolt to his enemies

"by his invincible steadfastness."

BELL TOLLS

Athelstan died in 939 in his mid-40s -

maybe worn out by the job.

An Irish writer called him

"The roof tree of the honour of the Western world."

Athelstan's funeral took place

at the very end of October or early November 939,

and he was buried here in Malmesbury...

..close to his personal saint, Aldhelm.

He'd reigned for 14 years only, but he'd set a path for the future.

Building on what his grandfather and his father and aunt had done,

he'd made real the England that Alfred had dreamed,

and for all the ups and downs of our history ever since,

Athelstan's visionary kingdom of the English would endure

and of course it still does.

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