Tom Holland - Athelstan (Penguin Monarchs): The Making of England

Tom Holland

---

ATHELSTAN

The Making of England

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

India | New Zealand | South Africa

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published 2016

Copyright Tom Holland, 2016

Cover design by Pentagram

Cover art by Olaf Hajek

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-18782-1

To Ned and Daisy, children of Wessex

THE HOUSES OF WESSEX AND DENMARK

THE HOUSES OF NORMANDY, BLOIS AND ANJOU

THE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET

THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK

THE HOUSE OF TUDOR

THE HOUSE OF STUART

THE HOUSE OF HANOVER

THE HOUSES OF SAXE-COBURG & GOTHA AND WINDSOR

It

elstan cyning ldde fyrde to Brunanbyrig: Athelstan the king led the levy to Brunanburh. Then, in 927, Athelstan had ridden past the River Humber and entered York. Princes in the lands beyond the city, intimidated by the scope of his power, had scrabbled to acknowledge his authority. Never before had the grasp of a southern king reached so far. Wessex, Mercia and now Northumbria: all the peoples who spoke the conquerors own language, the whole way to the Firth of Forth, acknowledged Athelstan as their lord. In mark of this, he adopted a splendid and fateful new title, that of Rex Anglorum: King of the English. Athelstans horizons, though, were wider still. His ambitions were not content with the rule of the English alone. He aspired to be acknowledged as lord of the entire island: by the inhabitants of the various kingdoms of the Welsh, and by the Welsh-speaking Cumbrians of Strathclyde, whose kings held sway from the Clyde down to the Roman Wall, and by the Scots, who lived beyond the Forth in the highland realm of Alba. All had duly been obliged to bow their necks to him. In May 934, when Constantin, the King of the Scots, briefly attempted defiance, Athelstan led an army deep into Alba and put its heartlands to the torch. Constantin was quickly brought to heel. Humbly he acknowledged the invader as his overlord. When poets and chroniclers hailed Athelstan as rex totius Britanniae the king of the whole of Britain they were not indulging in idle flattery, but simply stating fact.

Britain, though, was not the world. The seas that washed the island were a menace as well as a moat. For a hundred years and more, they had borne on their tides war-fleets bristling with pirates from pagan lands. Scandinavia, a land so lost to cold and darkness that there was reportedly Its young men, hungry for land and contemptuous of the Christian faith, had found in the monasteries and kingdoms of Britain irresistibly rich pickings. Wicingas, their victims called them: robbers. Altars had been stripped bare of all their fittings, and kings bled of their treasure. Then, when there was nothing else left to take, the Wicingas the Vikings had moved in for the kill. In succession, the proud and venerable kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia had been hewn to pieces. Only the resolution of Athelstans grandfather, a shrewd and indomitable warrior-king named Alfred, had prevented Wessex from succumbing to an identical fate. Gradually, inexorably, bloodily, the fight had been taken to the Vikings. Strongholds lost decades previously to native rule had been won back. Athelstans conquest of York, as well as securing him the sway of Northumbria, had also terminated its rule by a lengthy sequence of Viking potentates. Britain seemed buttressed at last against the predations of the heathen.