Æthelstan and a United England (with David Woodman)

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0:31Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Listener discretion advised. Hi, I am so thrilled to be joining you with a fantastic interview with professor of history at Cambridge University, David Woodman, whose new book, The First King of England, talks about, I would say, the very uncelebrated, really mostly unknown history of the world. the early medieval king, Aethelstan, in England, who united the kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia, Northumberland, East Anglia. Am I missing anything? No, that's exactly what he did.

1:14And you're absolutely right, Dane. He's very little known. And I hope that he gets better known in the years that come. So just to dive right in, you call the year 927 the birth of England. Can you talk a little bit about why you think that is? Yeah, of course. So Athelstan first became king in the year 924, and he had a bit of a struggle to cement his position on the throne. There was various opposition to him, a bit of hostility from Winchester, which was the sort of heart of West Saxon politics in Wessex. And only a few years later, in 927, he becomes the first king of the West Saxon line ever to have brought together all of the formerly independent kingdoms that you mentioned into one and creates the kingdom of the English for the first time.

1:59Now, what specifically happens in 97 is that there had been a Viking king, a man called Citrich, who had been ruling in York in the southern part of Northumbria in the years that preceded this moment, but he dies in 97. And this gives Athelstan an opportunity to march northwards, take York and Northumbria under his control, and cement his rule there. It's an extraordinary moment. And for me, the year 97 should be one of the most memorable dates in English history. And so after he sort of takes this opportunity in York, he'll go further north, get the submission of kings from Welsh territories, the King of the Scots, a few other kingdoms.

2:38Is he contemporaneously calling himself the King of England? You're absolutely right. So after he takes York, he marches further north. He goes to a place called Eamont Bridge, which is just south of modern Penrith. Here we're in the northwest of modern England. And an amazing ceremony takes place where various kings from Wales, a king from Scotland, and a ruler from Northumbria, they all agree to recognise the superiority of Athelstan that day. And we think it's a very carefully choreographed occasion. It takes place in this area, Eamont Bridge, which is topographically significant. There are ancient sites there.

3:12There's a Roman fort called Bracarvum. There's various ancient henges there. So it's a landscape of authority that Athelstan is drawing from. And yes, almost immediately after this moment in 97, he very quickly calls himself the King of the English, the Rex Anglorum in Latin. Amazingly, he has a poet who travels with him in his retinue to Amont Bridge, and he assigns the poet this job of writing this wonderful poem back to celebrate what was happening in 97. And we get these wonderful verses saying that Athelstan lives glorious through his deeds because he's made Saxonia for the first time. And by Saxonia, the poet means England.

3:48And what's really interesting, Dana, is we don't actually have the word for England at this moment. It's only first used in the early 11th century, so a bit later. Basically, we're getting to grips with very new political concepts, new ideas of one people. So it's really the beginning of all of this stuff. And we're celebrating the 1100th anniversary. I mean, we just celebrated it in September, right, in 925? So as I mentioned, he first became king in 924. He wasn't actually formally crowned king until the 4th of September 925. And that sort of delay speaks to the difficulty he had in establishing himself in the first place.

4:25And you're absolutely right. Just the other week, it was the 1100th anniversary of his coronation. There were wonderful celebrations in Kingston, hundreds of people gathered. There was even the naming of a train in Athelstan's honour. So it's fantastic to think of a train going up and down the national rail network. Something for poets to write about now. Exactly, something for poets to write about now. So it was a fantastic occasion. They even brewed a special Athelstan beer for the day as well. And we're gearing up now for, in two years' time, the 1100th anniversary of England's birth in 2027.

4:56So that should be a momentous anniversary for us to prepare for. I want to ask you, I feel like from an outsider's perspective, the year that gets all the credit is 1066. And even in terms of early medieval kings, rather, Alfred the Great and Æthelred the Unready seem to be more names that laypeople might know. Why do you think that Æthelstan isn't really in the public consciousness very much? Yeah, it's a really good question. I think poor old Æthelstan didn't have very good PR, basically, at his court. His grandfather, Alfred the Great, just as you say, Dana, was much more famous. And Alfred was fortunate in that he had a contemporary biographer, a Welsh cleric named Asser, who was writing a biographical account of his life.

5:38He was employed by Alfred to paint a good picture of Alfred, and that survived, and that cemented the good reputation that Alfred had. Now, if Athelstan ever had such a person, we don't have the text that survived. The poet wasn't good enough? The poet wasn't good enough. It was a relatively short poem when compared to the text of Asser. So I think Athelstan has suffered in that sense, definitely, in historiographical terms. And the phenomenon of 1066 that you mentioned is really interesting to me. I mean, I did wonder a bit when writing the book, you know, does it say something about the sort of self-deprecating attitude of the Brits that we sort of think about our history as beginning with a big defeat, rather than this formation of the English kingdom in the first place?

6:17It's quite interesting that that's what we think about. And that's where history kind of begins for us. I think he's a bit of a victim of historiography in various ways. But after Athelstan dies, England doesn't stay united, right? Yes. And this is a big aspect of Athelstan's reign. So 1970 brings it all together for the first time. And we can only imagine the challenges that would have confronted him after he'd done this for the first time. Lots of people who would have tried to overthrow him, they would have been resentful of the authority and the power that he achieved. We know this because in 937, for example, there was the famous Battle of Brunanbur, where a Viking coalition came together and tried to overthrow him.

6:56And there's been all sorts of debates about where that battle took place, but a major encounter in his reign. And then, yes, only a couple of years later, he dies in 939. We don't know anything about the circumstances in which he died. And then the kingdom of the English that he had built, it sort of fragments. A Viking named Olaf Guthrithson comes over from Dublin, and he's able to take control in York once more. So York is ceded to Viking authority once again in 939. So yes, it breaks down. And I think it speaks to, I guess, just how successful he had been as an individual. It just shows that so much rested on his shoulders.

7:31He must have been, I think, a very ruthless person, a very able politician to do all these things, and certainly, in martial terms, very, very powerful. But, you know, what makes a good king is being a good king for the moment. We had a conversation with our friend, the brilliant historian Dan Jones, about Henry V, and he made the point that what made Henry V such an excellent king is he was the right king for the time during which he lived. And I think we can probably say the same thing about Aethelstan. Yeah, it's another really good point. I mean, I think that if we think about his lineage, the way in which he'd been brought up, he would have seen the example of his grandfather, Alfred the Great, whose reign was beset by Viking raids.

8:12It was actually Alfred who recognised that in the face of these external attacks of Vikings, it was really important that the English kingdoms, as much as possible, were internally joined together, if you like. So under Alfred, we get something called the Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons, which is a joining together of Wessex and Mercia, broadly speaking. And also under Alfred, we get the idea of the English coming through in various texts. Alfred begins to talk about what the English people are, and he uses the old English word Angolcun to describe this. So I think Athelstan, sorry, is really taking these ideas that have been formed and were nascent in Alfred's court and drives them forward.

8:48So he's absolutely a man of the moment. He probably saw the merits in that, in warding off future Viking attacks. I hope I'm not mixing up his early medieval figures with similar names, but was it Alfred the Great who was able to marry his daughter, Aethelfla, diplomatically and sort of unite kingdoms? Exactly right, yes. Do we know if Aethelstan was able to conquer territory diplomatically, or do we assume it was more through military force. I think it's probably a mix is the answer. So going back to your point about Ethelflaid, I mean, she is a fascinating character in her own right. It's very unusual in the early medieval period that the women are given prominence in our sources, and she does.

9:29We have a whole set of annals. She's a personal favourite. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, she's such an interesting character. She's deserving of a biography in her own right, Tom Holland has written a biography of Aethelfla. She's a fascinating, fascinating person, daughter of Alfred and sent to Mercia and is able to join Wessex and Mercia together or help in that process. And we think that actually Athelstan was sent to her court as a child to be brought up there. So she would have been a very important example for Athelstan of what it was to be a successful and strong leader. And I think Athelstan, he definitely would have succeeded or been successful by combining both negotiation and political alliances that he was making in negotiated terms, but also with martial skill.

10:13I think it would have been both of those things that would have enabled his success. Do we know if he had any sort of legacy on the continent in Europe at the time, or was he more of a domestic ruler? Yeah, I mean, this is another extraordinary aspect of his reign. So as I mentioned, he becomes king in the first place in quite difficult circumstances, creates England very quickly in 1927. And connections between English kingdoms, rather, and Europe have been longstanding by these points. But we've never before had a monarch who has a kind of concerted foreign policy. And it becomes very clear that Athelstan does.

10:46His father, who was a man called Edward the Elder, actually married three times in total. And that meant that Athelstan had quite a large number of half-brothers and half-sisters. Dangerous when you're trying to consolidate power. Very dangerous. Yeah, it was dangerous to Athelstan. And there are indications that some of his half-brothers posed a threat to his rule. And in fact, at the beginning, we think he shared rule with a half-brother called Elfroyard. But one of the things he does strategically is he seems to arrange a number of key marriage alliances between some of his half-sisters and contemporary rulers in Europe.

11:19So places like West Francia, East Francia and Bergen, he marries these sisters into these royal houses. And he sets himself up as being a key player on the European stage as well. You mentioned before that in contrast to Alfred the Great, there was no surviving contemporary biography of Athelstan. As a historian, how do you approach your research? Yeah, it's one of the, I guess, frustrations, but also the joys in a way of doing this kind of work, that there are so many gaps in our records that you sort of have to be quite imaginative in trying to overcome those gaps, you know, and trying to understand how you can piece together the life of an early medieval monarch like Athelstan.

11:58I mean, a big challenge when sitting down to write a biography of Athelstan is that you can't even do it chronologically, because there are just so many gaps in our records. So you have to do it thematically. But actually, one thing that we're very fortunate about with Athelstan is that we have a whole set of contemporary royal documents, so land grants known as royal diplomas that he was making, and a set of law codes, and in fact, a whole set of very interesting coins, thousands of coins in his name, which means that we can recreate quite a lot about his royal ambition, his royal policies. These documents take us right to the centre of the Royal Assembly, you know, all the things that are going on at the centre of politics.

12:33So really, that's the place to go, I think, when we're thinking about Athelstan. We also have an early 12th century text written by one of the greatest Anglo-Norman historians, a man called William of Malmesbury, who includes probably the longest narrative account of Athelstan's life. And the problem is that because of the sort of 200 year gap between when William was writing and when Athelstan lived, we don't always know just how much we can trust what William was saying and where was he getting his information from. So again, you have to be a bit cautious when using those details, but we can make sort of cautious progress when looking at his texts.

13:05And because you're basing it sort of on these sources, these legal documents, these coins, you mentioned that by necessity, you imagine that Athelstan was quite a ruthless person. What else have you been able to glean about his character? Yeah, well, if you're thinking about the basics of what did he look like? What did he like to eat? You know, what kind of person was he? I mean, we simply don't know. We just don't have those details from our surviving contemporary sources. We do have an image of him in a manuscript, an early 10th century manuscript in Cambridge in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College.

13:38It's an extraordinary image of him with his head bowed, looking at a manuscript in front of St. Cuthbert. We don't know whether he's giving it to St. Cuthbert or he's trying to show that someone who's in favour of St. Cuthbert or a learned king, what's the exact message here? And one of the ways in which it's very interesting is that it's the earliest surviving portrait of any English monarch. But does it show the real Athelstan? We just don't know. But another aspect to Athelstan that's really, really important is that he was a keen patron and sponsor of learning too, and of religion. And there's lots of evidence to the fact that he was encouraging scholars from across Europe to come to this court and to exchange ideas and favoured progress and learning in various forms.

14:16What do you think Athelstan's influence today is? Because obviously, the Kingdom of England didn't stay united. It fell apart after his death. It comes back together again. But do you think there's a line we can draw from Athelstan to today? I think it's very hard sometimes. I'm very wary of sort of drawing a line from so far back to directly to today. But for me, I mean, Athelstan is England's founding father. That's really very important. And yes, things broke down when he died, but he was the kind of architect of it all, if you see what I mean. He was the person who had the idea, the blueprint for it, and made it a vague reality in the early 10th century.

14:54And And certainly during his reign, it was a reality to varying degrees. And it's not like he managed to create this one homogenous place overnight. There would have been different amounts of people buying into it depending on where they lived and all sorts of differences of belief and language and all sorts of things. But I think in terms of the blueprint and the architecture of what England could be, Athelstan really should be thought of as our founding figure. When did you first become interested in Athelstan? Actually, as an undergraduate student, 20 odd years ago, I mean, I remember going up to study history and one of the first essays I did was on Athelstan.

15:27I was only dimly aware of his name at that point. And there was no modern biography of him then. You know, I was amazed that when I read about him, all these achievements, all these things that he'd done, and I hadn't known about him, having grown up in the UK through the UK schooling system, I just hadn't found out about him. So that was when I first found out about Athelstan and became fascinated by him ever since.

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17:53What made you decide at this point to write the biography? I've worked on various aspects of Athelstan's reign over the years academically, and I really have a close attachment to his royal documents, his diplomas that we mentioned earlier. They're so difficult in terms of the way that they're written. So they're written in very florid and learned Latin by a royal scribe who's known by the title Athelstan A. And these documents emerge just at the moment that he brings England together for the first time in 927. So in the wake of that political achievement, it's very clear that he's deploying this royal scribe to try and celebrate in literary terms what he's done in political terms.

18:31And it seemed to me that these documents were unlike anything else from the early medieval period. There's nothing like them before and nothing like them that comes afterward. And so I became fascinated by the style of Latin, the rhyme, the alliteration, the chiasmus, the use of new words that he invents. How did this person do it? It seemed to me he was a genius, actually. So for me, the way in was through these royal documents, because they were so taking us right to the heart of the Royal Assembly. And you can imagine Athelstan, at the end of the Royal Diplomas, there is long lists of witnesses, people who were present at the meeting of the Royal Assembly, where these documents would have been read out.

19:04And you can imagine the effect it would have had to hear this incredible Latin read out by the king or one of his advisors to those assembled. And the witness list, they contain names of people from all over the English kingdom for the first time. So not just people from Wessex and Mercia, but we get these wonderful, you know, these wacky old Norse names from Northumbria, Welsh kings, Scottish kings, they're all there. He's even able to wield a degree of authority over these British kings as well. And they all would have heard this amazing Latin. So that was the way in for me. I love these documents.

19:33It's a very cinematic scene too. What these gatherings would have been like in reality, at the end of these diplomas, we have some 70 to 80 names listed. If you imagine that all of these people had their own retinues traveling with them across Britain, there's probably four or 500 people present at these occasions. I mean, they must have been extraordinary gatherings. They moved around mainly in the Southwest, in Wessex. And yes, how did they work? I mean, just looking at the witnesses, they sort of suggest to you a degree of sort of democracy, obviously not the right word, but that kind of thing, a degree of discussion and politics going on.

20:05But of course, Athelstan had the last word. He was the person in charge of all of this. But yeah, they really bring to life, you know, the way in which these early English kingdoms were governed. Did Athelstan have any direct heirs? So one of the very remarkable features about Athelstan's reign is that he didn't marry. There's no record of him marrying during his lifetime from contemporary sources. and we only have one reference to a potential daughter, but we think it's an erroneous reference from a late text from Ely. They just got it wrong because the person it names has the same name as one of his sisters.

20:37We think the Ely author just mistook a sister for a daughter. So he didn't have any direct heirs. So when he dies in 939, the throne passes to half-brother Edmund. And one theory, which is written by the early 12th century author William of Malmesbury, is that he deliberately didn't marry because it would have caused more complexity in the succession, that if he'd produced his own heirs, there could have been more challenges to who succeeded afterwards. So that's one theory. Was there not sort of an established notion that the child of the current heir would become the next king? So there was no strict rule of primogeniture at this point.

21:11There was a broad understanding that somebody of royal blood would succeed. And the Old English term that sources use for that is someone who is an affling, so someone who was literally throne-worthy. But the reality was that when a king died, everything was up for grabs, and it depended on all sorts of things like military power, status, but also who had the backing of the Royal Assembly at that moment. So it was very much up for grabs. And Athelstan had experienced that himself, as I mentioned at the beginning, when his half-brother Elfriard seems to have ruled alongside him, at least for a small amount of time.

21:43That's fascinating to me, because in a modern sense, I think we have this very modern idea of legacy and wanting to pass on your legacy to a child where Athelstan was so driven to unite these kingdoms under one rule, and yet he didn't really abide by that contemporary notion that he would pass it on to his own dynasty. Yeah, it's a good point. And it stands a little bit in contrast with, if I think about his grandfather, Alfred, a remarkable feature of Alfred's reign is that we have his will surviving. So we actually have what he wrote down and what he wanted to happen after he died. It doesn't say in explicit terms to whom he wanted the throne to pass, but he's very clear in saying that Edward, his son and Athelstan's father, is to receive the majority of estates in Wessex, in the heart of Wessex.

22:26And it looks very clear that he was therefore being designated the official successor to Alfred. And we just don't have that kind of detail from Athelstan's reign. And again, it could be an accident of survival of our sources, but we have no indication that he was, laying the foundations for someone else. One thing to say is that Edmund, his half-brother, does seem to succeed without any real issues. So maybe it had been agreed, it just wasn't written down. And actually, it was quite a smooth transition in power in Wessex, at least. Forgive me if this makes no sense, but because there are so many gaps in the story, I wonder, for you as a historian, is there like a holy grail text that you would be desperate to find that you think would be able to fill in the gaps of Æthelstan's life?

23:07Is there sort of one text that has been talked around. They're like a missing piece. One of the joys of doing early medieval history is actually that new things appear all the time in various ways. In fact, as I was writing the book, a bag of coins, some of which were in Athelstan's name, were found in Rome. And it was terribly exciting to wonder what these might say about Athelstan or those traveling in the early 10th century to Rome. And the same with texts, actually, that sometimes in archival work, people find new copies of diplomas is a very regular thing, or they find new copies of texts in various ways, either texts that were written in the early 10th century or copies of those texts, which people haven't realised in the archives quite what they have in front of them.

23:47So it's really exciting. And actually, one of the reasons I love working in this area is that there's always a chance for new material to be found. I guess one thing I would really wish for with Athelstan specifically is we have the main contemporary narrative text is something called the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, survives in a number of principal manuscript versions. And unfortunately for Athelstan's reign, it falls relatively silent apart from a wonderful poem that it inserts in the year 937 to commemorate the Battle of Brunanbur. If I had a wish, it would be to discover a manuscript that had more detail about Athelstan.