Tom Holland - Æthelflæd: A Ladybird Expert Book: Englands Forgotten Founder (The Ladybird Expert)

Series 117

This is a Ladybird Expert book, one of a series of titles for an adult readership. Written by some of the leading lights and outstanding communicators in their fields and published by one of the most trusted and well-loved names in books, the Ladybird Expert series provides clear, accessible and authoritative introductions, informed by expert opinion, to key subjects drawn from science, history and culture.

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MICHAEL JOSEPH

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First published 2019

Text copyright Tom Holland, 2019

All images copyright Ladybird Books Ltd, 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover illustration by Colin Shearing

ISBN: 978-1-405-93343-8

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On 12 June 918, the most celebrated woman of her age died. Today, few remember thelfld. No one in English history, though, has been more unjustly forgotten. The daughter, sister and aunt of great kings, she was a ruler as remarkable as any of them. She founded cities, she sponsored learning, and she defeated the enemies of her people. Her achievements would prove enduring. It was on the foundations laid by thelfld that a new kingdom, in the decades following her death, would come to be built a kingdom that lasts to this day. England owes much to her founding mother.

Why has thelfld faded into oblivion? In part, no doubt, it is because she is a shadowy figure. We do not know nearly as much about her as we would like. But there is another reason as well. England is the oldest nation state in Europe. The country seems such a fixture that it is tempting to think that it was always bound to come into existence. But things might have been very different. The fashioning of a united kingdom of Englalonde was not inevitable. The challenges that confronted thelfld and her father the king we commemorate as Alfred the Great were formidable. Fearsome enemies had to be defeated, and the fragments of ancient realms soldered together. Peoples with distinct and proud traditions had to be brought to share a common identity. A nation had to be forged.

It was an astonishing feat of state-building the most decisive in British history. The story of thelfld is the story of how it came to be achieved.

thelfld was born in 870, to a father of royal stock. Alfred was the younger brother and presumptive heir of the King of Wessex, a realm centred in the south of Britain. The line was an ancient one. The kings of Wessex claimed descent from a Saxon adventurer named Cerdic, who was said to have landed in Britain some eighty years after the collapse of Roman rule. Other, more distant ancestors included Woden, the king of the gods. thelflds pedigree was one that linked her to the very beginnings of her people.

The Saxons, though, were not alone in having crossed the North Sea and founded kingdoms in what had once been Roman Britain. A people called the Angles had done the same. Some had settled in the east of the island, in the land that became known as East Anglia. Another Anglian kingdom, Mercia, lay directly north of Wessex, and a third, Northumbria, stretched from the Humber all the way to the Firth of Forth. For centuries, these various kingdoms had maintained an uneasy coexistence, sometimes fighting one another, sometimes patching up alliances. Borders were rarely stable, and smaller kingdoms, over the course of the centuries, had increasingly been absorbed into the territory of larger ones. This was how Kent and Sussex, both of them originally independent, had ended up ruled by the kings of Wessex. By the time of thelflds birth, West Saxon power had come to embrace the whole of the south of Britain.

Kingship was a tough business. Only rulers proficient in battle could hope to survive. The ancestors cherished by Anglo-Saxon kings were those who had fought and won great victories. This was why although thelfld was Alfreds eldest child she had no prospect of succeeding him. War was seen as mens work.

The ultimate basis of power was always military might. The supreme duty of any king was the defence of his people from incursions by rival warlords. Ravaging was a constant threat. Invaders would aim to seize all they could. If crops were devastated as they often were then starvation would invariably threaten. As peasants died of hunger, magnates would suffer from the impoverishment of their holdings, and a king might find his prestige mortally threatened. Only by leading his warriors on a reprisal raid, by seizing enough gold to become a byword for generosity, a ring-giver, could he hope to repair the damage.

Victory was best assured by fighting with the ferocity and cunning of a natural predator. Warriors would don helmets crested with boars, and wear their swords in scabbards decorated with serpents or hawks. Marching to war, an army would invariably be tracked by flocks of ravens. Deep within the forbidding darkness of the forests, wolves might well be heard, howling with anticipation at the feast to come. After the slaughter, the corpses of the defeated would be left as food for the beasts of battle. Later, once the campaign had been brought to a close, poets would salute them. But now start war, the carrion-birds shall sing. The grey-cloaked wolf shall yell, the spear resound.

thelfld might not have been raised to the practice of arms but no daughter of a king could have failed to learn from song, of the glory and the horror of war.

There was more to ruling Wessex, though, than winning battles. Its kings also had a duty to Christ. The days of worshipping Woden were long gone. Although he continued to feature in their kings lineage, he did so now as a mortal hero, not as a god. thelfld was born into a dynasty that had been Christian for two centuries. Her father, for all his renown as a warrior, was also famously devout. Naturally, then, Alfred did not hesitate to have his first child baptised.