Athelstan
Historian and broadcaster Michael Wood reveals how Alfred the Great’s forgotten grandson became the first king of all England and won a hugely significant war to secure his fledgling realm
Historian Michael Wood explains how England’s first king forged his realm
When King Aethelstan died in 939, an Irish chronicler hailed his legacy in mighty tones: “Aethelstan, king of the English died, the roof tree of the honour of the western world.” This acclamation was remarkable for several reasons. First, many Irishmen had actually attempted – and failed – to topple the king in a devastating campaign in 937. Second, Aethelstan was recognised as ‘king of the English’ by his enemies, when only two generations previously the Anglo-saxon people had faced complete annihilation. Third, the chronicler’s praise was well founded: Aethelstan was indeed revered throughout Western Europe.
Aethelstan (popularly known to history as ‘Athelstan’) was the grandson of Alfred the Great, and from 924 to his death in 939 he unified the disparate Anglosaxons to create a truly unified kingdom of England for the first time. He was the eldest son of King Edward the Elder, but his mother was a concubine, and his accession to ‘king of the Anglo-saxons’ was by no means guaranteed. Nevertheless, once he gained power he fought relentless campaigns against his Viking and Celtic enemies within Britain and forced them all to submit to his overlordship in 927. He became ‘Emperor of the world of Britain’, and his rapid conquests bred great resentment among his enemies that culminated in a ‘Great War’ in 937.
Led by Anlaf Guthfrithson, the Viking king of Dublin and Constantine II, king of Scots, an unprecedented alliance of Vikings and Celtic peoples from across the British Isles invaded northern England and captured York. Although the details are uncertain, Aethelstan eventually raised an army and comprehensively defeated the invaders in what was described as an “immense, lamentable and horrible” battle at ‘Brunanburh’. Although the location of this mysterious battlefield remains unknown, it was nevertheless decisive. The Anglo-saxon Chronicle described how Aethelstan’s warriors, “eager for glory, overcame the Britons and won a country.” In other words, the new kingdom of England was secured.
Despite his importance to English and British history Aethelstan is a largely forgotten king in the popular imagination. Now, 1,080 years after the warrior-king’s great victory at Brunanburh, the historian, broadcaster and Anglo-saxon expert Michael Wood reveals an England that was ravaged by decades of savage conflict and a monarch whose military achievements made him “renowned through the wide world.”
“A SOCIETY GEARED TO WAR”
To what extent does Aethelstan bear comparison to his grandfather Alfred the Great and his other forebears in creating the kingdom of England?
I view it as a family project over three generations. The kingdom [of Wessex] was nearly overrun in 878 before the Battle of Edington and Alfred, from a very small base, created a ‘kingdom of the Anglo-saxons’, which was a union of the Mercians and West Saxons.
Alfred’s son Edward and daughter Aethelflaed then worked together in one of the greatest combined operations in the whole of Dark Ages warfare when they reduced the Danelaw up to the River Humber. Aethelstan must have fought in those wars from the age of 15 onwards, but we just don’t know.
We know from the surviving fragments that he was trained as a warrior. One source says he was “invincible like a thunderbolt” so he probably had a lot of experience of war in all those battles in the East and West Midlands fighting the Vikings.
A very reliable source says that Aethelstan was brought up by Aethelflaed in Mercia. He knew the Mercian aristocracy, and that alliance was crucial to his ability to carry the Mercian aristocracy with him when he became king of the English.
In 927 Aethelstan invaded and conquered Northumbria and forced all the kings of Britain to submit to him. He became not only the king of all the English but also the king of all Britain. It’s an extraordinary idea.
How devastating were the Viking raids and campaigns in Anglo-saxon England during the early 10th century?
If you want to know what is in Aethelstan’s head, it would be the knowledge of what had happened in his grandfathers’ and parents’ generation. Wessex had nearly fallen, and there was this great royal family story of Alfred fighting in the marshes of Athelney. They really saw it as the salvation of England.
When you come into Aethelstan’s youth and teens there are major battles and devastation right down the country so it was a very, very unstable time. There are odd sources, such as a letter from the bishop of Winchester to King Edward saying, “We cannot possibly pay any more taxes. The estate here has only got 90 animals left. The Viking raids and the weather have destroyed us. The raids have depopulated the villages and the landscape: we beg you for no more exactions.” They’re talking about an estate within a few hours of Winchester, which was the so-called capital [of Wessex] so these little hints tell you that nowhere was safe. That’s why I would argue that the result was a society geared to war.
What was the condition of England when Aethelstan came to power as ‘king of the Anglo-saxons’ in 924?
The condition of England was that north of the Humber there was a Viking-ruled kingdom of York that joined the kingdom of Dublin. The same kings from the same clan ruled both, and it is possible that the kingdom of Lindsey in what is now the bulk of Lincolnshire was also under their power.
In 924 Edward died on a campaign to suppress a Mercian revolt, and his heir was not Aethelstan but Aelfweard. He was slightly younger than Aethelstan but was the son of Edward’s first queen, whereas Aethelstan was the son of a concubine. Aelfweard had been proclaimed as king not long before his father died so they must have known that his father was slipping. He was invested with the regalia of his office, but he died 16 days after his father. At that point the Mercians proclaimed Æthelstan as king and that’s the great conundrum, because the Mercians proclaim him as king of Mercia, not Wessex. It takes a year for that to be resolved with Wessex, so there is clearly a succession crisis.
It wasn’t guaranteed that Mercia and Wessex would stick together but because Aethelstan was favoured by the Mercians and was a West Saxon prince he trod both paths.
“WHEN YOU COME INTO AETHELSTAN’S YOUTH AND TEENS THERE ARE MAJOR BATTLES AND DEVASTATION RIGHT DOWN THE COUNTRY SO IT WAS A VERY, VERY UNSTABLE TIME”
How significant were Æhelstan’s military conquests and campaigns during the years 927-28 and 934?
The first campaign that he fought as king was after the death of his sister’s husband, the Viking king of York. Aethelstan seized
York, demolished the fortifications, and there may well have been fighting. Aethelstan then marched on to Cumbria, and at Eamont Bridge the kings of the Scots, Strathclyde Welsh, Cumbrians and the other northern kingdoms have to submit to him. The Welsh kings probably submitted at Hereford, and there’s even a suggestion that the kings in Cornwall –
the ‘West Welsh’ – also submit. All of the kings in Britain submitted to Æthelstan.
That first campaign of 927 was a kind of blitzkrieg, and Æthelstan probably moved down to the Welsh borders near Hereford and further down to the south west, so you can reconstruct this incredible tour around Britain where he enforces an ‘Empire of Britain’ with an army. Æthelstan became the most powerful ruler since the Romans, and that uneasy overlordship survived until 933 when the Scots renounced their allegiance.
In 934 Æthelstan assembled a great army at Winchester and they then invaded Scotland. A Durham source said that they went along the east coast past Aberdeen and as far as the Moray Firth. The naval expedition that went alongside it went as far as Caithness and devastated it, including perhaps the Viking settlements there. It’s a sudden revelation of a military force that you never could have expected ten to 30 years earlier. It’s an incredible operation and extremely ambitious. They hit the most northern point of Britain, which hadn’t been done perhaps since Agricola.
Æthelstan re-established the overlordship, but it’s probably the event that led the Scots to put out feelers and say, “We’ve got to do something about this.” It ultimately led to the great coalition of 937.
ANGLO-SAXON ARMIES
What were Æthelstan’s traditional military duties as king?
The Anglo-saxons expected a king to be a leader in war. The epithets of kingship that you see in the poems, such as the famous one about the Battle of Brunanburh, refer to the “giver of rings”, the “lord of warriors”, and the “plunder lord”. You were expected to lead the army, and the king’s presence with the army was vital for its leadership.
The royal army, which went on the expeditionary campaign all the way up to Scotland in 934, was a mounted army. The core was the leadership, and there were about 140 major thegns [landowning warriors] in Æthelstan’s time, and all of them had retinues. They would each have had several estates, and they could probably take quite large retinues with them. We have no idea about the size of an Anglo-saxon royal army in the 10th century, but it was several thousand men.
How were armies structured and raised by Anglo-saxon kings in the early 10th century?
We know so little about 10th-century warfare, but law codes talk about the obligation of landowners who receive land from the king to provide military service, including at least one mounted man for every plough, so that’s a massive military obligation.
When you think of an Anglo-saxon royal army you can of course also have a local army, and that might be led by a local earl. If a shire was attacked the local thegn or ealdorman would
“HE ENFORCES AN ‘EMPIRE OF BRITAIN’ WITH AN ARMY. AETHELSTAN BECAME THE MOST POWERFUL RULER SINCE THE ROMANS, AND THAT UNEASY OVERLORDSHIP SURVIVED UNTIL 933 WHEN THE SCOTS RENOUNCED THEIR ALLEGIANCE”
send his leaders out to the ‘hundreds’ [regional divisions] of the shire, and the people who owed military service would be brought in with their equipment. They had some rough kind of training, but they were good enough to be directed by the few professional warriors [the thegns] of the shire to fight Viking attacks.
What weaponry and equipment would have been used at battles such as Brunanburh?
The word ‘knight’ is Anglo-saxon, and we think of it as late medieval, but it’s Anglo-saxon, and a thegn would have had his own equipment, including spears, a shield, sword, helmet, probably mail body armour and a horse and spare mounts. They formed a really strong and well-armoured nucleus of the army.
The thegns had really ace equipment, and the weaponry in their wills describe the value of their blades and hilts. You’ve only got to look at the Staffordshire Hoard, where you’ve got dozens of aristocratic hilt decorations from an earlier period, to see that it was portable wealth. These are really valuable possessions that could have included inlaid armour and ornamental helmets.
We haven’t got any surviving examples from the 10th century, but you can imagine that you’re dealing with an aristocratic elite who are trained for war. They’ve gone through military training, and the army leaders have probably read tactical books by Vegetius or other Latin texts that exist from Anglo-saxon England. It’s quite likely that they actually read classical texts on how to conduct feigned retreats, for example.
It’s also hard to imagine that the army going up to invade Northumbria in 927 didn’t have a large baggage train with possibly mobile siege towers and portable bridges. We don’t know, but they must have had these kinds of things, and they are described in the Siege of Paris with Viking armies. You can’t conduct campaigns like that to besiege York and destroy the Viking fortifications [without them]. They must have had the equipment to do this because these are active stormings rather than a siege where you sit and starve them out.
What is known about the common soldiers who fought below the rank of thegn?
We just don’t know, but I’m sure we underestimate the Anglo-saxons’ tactical ability: coordination, messaging separate units to join together on a particular day in a specific place, and coordinating night or surprise attacks was very common.
The Battle of Cynwit in 878 in north Devon is really interesting because Alfred was in deep trouble in Athelney, and the main Viking army was in north Wiltshire. Instead, the ealdorman of Devon, Odda, raised a force from the shire. It was not a royal army, but the Vikings suffered 800 dead, so it was a sizeable force. Odda was able to marshal a shire army that included enough people who in their normal lives were farmers but who had military training and would take orders from the leadership. You’ve got to have discipline and order in an army: they were not just a load of peasants who sat down and drank beer. They were able to outmanoeuvre the Viking army, storm their defences and take them by surprise. All these things suggest trained leaders.
THE ‘GREAT WAR’
What were the causes of the ‘Great War’ of 937, and where does the term come from?
A chronicler called Aethelweard, who was an ealdorman in Somerset, was writing in about 980, and it’s quite likely that his ancestors fought at Brunanburh. He said that right up to his day men in the street would refer to the ‘Magnum Bellum’, which can be safely translated as the ‘Great Battle’, but it is also conceivable that it can actually mean the ‘Great War’.
The only reason I raise that translation is that we simply don’t know the scale of the war. It may not just be a battle. It may be that the whole of the north was in chaos, that the devastation went right down into the Midlands, that losses were absolutely gigantic or that the war continued into the next year. There are later traditions of Aethelstan that say the Scots and Picts submitted, and a Scottish source says that he sent an army north in 938. The scale of the fighting is something we just don’t know, although I think ‘Great Battle’ is more likely.
The cause of it was obviously the English empire and Aethelstan’s aggressive policies towards Britain. This included his determination to wipe out an independent kingdom of Northumbria run by Vikings from a Dublin clan. It was also immediately incited by his aggression in 934 with the army and the fleet going all the way up Scotland. At that point his enemies decided to combine.
What is known about the alliance led by Anlaf Guthfrithson and Constantine II of Scotland against Aethelstan in 937?
Two sources say that Constantine was the instigator, and he had married a daughter to the Viking king of Dublin, Anlaf Guthfrithson. There’s a very interesting source, the most famous of all Welsh prophetic poems, the Armes Prydein (the Great Prophecy of Britain) that calls for an alliance of all the Vikings, Irish, Norse Irish, Dublin Vikings, the Cumbrian Strathclyde, Welsh, Cornish and everybody else to join together to defeat “the Great King”.
The specificity of the reference in the poem is key and suggests that by the summer of 934 a Welsh poet in Dyfed knew that people were calling for this alliance against Aethelstan to get the whole manpower of the Celtic fringe to join together to defeat him, and of course that is what happened in 937.
Their intention was probably not to march down to Winchester – that’s not the agenda. But what they would do either by treaty or battle was to restore the kingdom of York and to say, “Northumbria is our land, and your kingdom stops there.” Whether they wanted to say it stopped at Watling Street rather than the Humber is another matter, but the restoration of the kingdom of York was ultimately what they were after. That would have also ensured that the Scots wouldn’t have to endure English armies attacking them again.
We are still trying to piece together the evidence, but in Viking terms their force was massive. When it’s said that “many thousands” were killed that’s from a very realistic source. A Northumbrian source says that 615 ships was the size of the fleet that went into the Humber. That’s not the Scottish and the North British armies coming overland, that’s just the combined Viking fleet. 615 ships is the biggest Viking fleet ever in the British Isles.
How did the invasion of Aethelstan’s territories unfold in 937?
The answer is we don’t know, and I’m the first person to attempt a tentative construction that is really based on the available sources. One is this source by William of Malmesbury, who gives an extended quotation from a lost poem that was dismissed as just being made up in the 12th century. When you look at it closely it’s not, and there’s no doubt that what he says is a verbatim quote from a lost source.
It’s incredibly informative and clearly comes from a time not long after Aethelstan’s death. It simply says that the Northumbrians submitted to the invaders under Anlaf Guthfrithson, so that tells you that it’s in York or in the region of York. That then enables you to see how the rest unfolded, because other sources say they eventually gave battle with the help of Danes who were settled in England. That can only be in Northumbria or the East Midlands.
William’s source says that the invaders devastated widely with terrible destruction. The fields were burned, the ravaging and the looting was terrible – it was horrendous. At some point York submitted, and the invading army must have gathered somewhere on the Northumbrian border, because the fleet had landed in the Humber. From there the invaders mounted expeditions into the Midlands, but is it just plundering expeditions or an actual invasion? That’s what we don’t know.
The really interesting thing that then comes from the same quotation (which proves how contemporary it is) is that Aethelstan had previously been swift to act during danger.
“THEY WERE ABLE TO OUTMANOEUVRE THE VIKING ARMY, STORM THEIR DEFENCES AND TAKE THEM BY SURPRISE”
He was brilliant – invincible – and never let his enemies rest, but now he seems to have almost wasted time. It was as if he deemed his service done while they ravaged everywhere and caused such destruction. That has to be contemporary and contrasts with rather homiletic sources where the king’s job was to be “seated on a high watchtower ever vigilant.”
There’s no doubt that that’s a real source telling you that Aethelstan, for all his great reputation, at this moment was strongly criticised for not immediately responding to the invasion. What you guess, and what the source actually says, is that he bided his time, presumably to gather more forces. Harold II did the wrong thing in 1066 by charging down from Stamford Bridge and immediately attacking
[at Hastings], but Aethelstan wasn’t going to let that happen. He risked the devastation of stretches of his territory to make sure that he’d got enough forces to combat this. So that is how I would tentatively reconstruct it, but it is of course pure speculation.
THE BATTLE OF BRUNANBURH
What is known about the events of the battle itself?
Not much actually. The Anglo-saxon Chronicle suggests that the West Saxons pursued the North British all through the day after the defeat, but that’s just a poetic phrase and it may not mean anything. It almost suggests that the Mercians and the Viking army fought it out on the field for much longer, but that’s maybe reading too much into the evidence. Certainly the losses in the Irish leadership and the Irish-viking army were huge, and it does suggest that a sizeable part of the army was cut down on the field.
However, everyone agrees that it was a gigantic battle. The Annals of Ulster says it was “immense, lamentable and horrible” and savagely fought. “Many thousands” of the Viking army were killed, and a “multitude” of the English were killed as well, so they have some knowledge of what happened. Anlaf Guthfrithson only escaped with “a few” so it’s an absolutely gigantic defeat and resonated in lots of sources.
What is known about the casualties of the battle on both sides?
There are various accounts of bishops and nobles that were killed on the Anglo-saxon side. One story names two of Aethelstan’s cousins as being killed, and they were buried at Malmesbury in Wiltshire.
There is a strong York tradition that Aethelstan founded Saint Leonard’s Hospital around that time, and one tradition says that it was after the battle. Was this an expiation of his sins for having killed so many people, or doing something nice for the Northumbrians? Who knows, and I haven’t been able to prove it yet.
On the Viking side the casualties included five kings and seven earls. The heir to the king of Scots was killed, and there is an Irish source that lists a lot of the dead. The aristocracy bore the brunt of the fighting in some of these battles, and they led by example. If things went wrong then the losses could be massive. Losses in leaders were often very heavy, and they definitely were at Brunanburh.
How did Aethelstan’s contemporaries receive the victory at Brunanburh?
The Anglo-saxon Chronicle, which was written two years after Aethelstan’s death in 939, says it was the greatest victory since the Angles and the Saxons first came over the wide seas to Britain to win themselves a kingdom. That’s the historical context that they see it under, and there’s quite a few other sources that see it in that light. It goes into folk legend, late medieval sagas, hagiography, miracle stories and right down to Elizabethan drama. It became a great source of legend so it’s a big story.
A POWERFUL LEGACY
Could it be argued that 937 is as important as 1066 in early medieval English history?
I wouldn’t say it was as important as 1066 because that was a catastrophic rupture, but it is one of the great decisive moments in early British history. The historian Frank Stenton said that the victory at Brunanburh wasn’t as decisive for the future as the Battle of Edington [in 878] but of course if Aethelstan had lost, been killed and his leadership wiped out then it would have been a very different story.
“THE LOSSES IN THE IRISH LEADERSHIP AND THE IRISH-VIKING ARMY WERE HUGE, AND IT DOES SUGGEST THAT A SIZEABLE PART OF THE ARMY WAS CUT DOWN ON THE FIELD”
What was the impact of Aethelstan’s reign and his victory at Brunanburh?
Aethelstan died two years later, and his empire in the north immediately collapsed. Although it was fairly rapidly restored they did have to fight another 20 years to make sure that Northumbria became a part of the kingdom of the English.
His reign left a template for a kingdom of all the English, including the regal styles and the titles. He pretty much established that, up to the Humber, Northumbria would be a part of the English kingdom. A lot of his ideas proved useful to the future, including his lawmaking, a coinage for the whole realm and even extending Alfred’s translation program. Aethelstan was really ambitious and saw himself as a late Carolingian king.
It is a premature kingdom of all the English but it is there, and later generations always saw him as the first king even though he possibly overreached himself in many ways. His model was probably [Saint] Bede’s “gens Anglorum”: the English people. These can include Mercians, West Saxons, people of Danish descent, Cornish, Welsh people and speakers on the English side of Offa’s Dyke. It was a nation, as one 10th century source says, of many different languages, customs, costumes and so on. In a sense, it’s a visionary kingdom based on Bede’s blueprint that Alfred then dreamed up and Aethelstan brought into being.