Atherton Mark - The Making of England

MARK ATHERTON is Senior College Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Regent's Park College, Oxford. At present he is also Visiting Professor in English Medieval Literature at the Heinrich-Heine-Universitt Dsseldorf. He is the author of There and Back Again: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit (I.B.Tauris, 2012, paperback 2014). His other publications include (Teach Yourself) Complete Old English (Anglo-Saxon) (2010) and Hildegard of Bingen: Selected Writings (2001).

This pithily written book elegantly combines the literary, historical and archaeological evidence for that most energetic and energising period of the Anglo-Saxon past, as King Alfred and his successors struggled to create a coherent England. Mark Atherton offers a fresh and refreshing perspective, full of insight, on these teetering times where success was far from certain and disaster ever close.

Andy Orchard, Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford

The language of the Anglo-Saxons, long beloved by a succession of notable poets, has for the rest of us too often been afforded the status of a vulgar tongue. In Mark Atherton it has found a new and exciting champion. Atherton provides a rich geographical context that gives not only a sense of how the Anglo-Saxons thought of their local, closely observed, landscapes but also of how they conceived their place within a largely uncharted and perilous world. Over the whole book looms, rightly, the figure of King Alfred and his court to whom, even when all the legends have been dispelled, is undoubtedly owed the remarkable efflorescence of vernacular writings in later Anglo-Saxon England. Interspersed between chapters, the author has provided what he calls Interludes, texts in Anglo-Saxon, with a translation in English and a short commentary. The selections are deeply illuminating, providing as they do an introduction both to the language and the thought-world of the Anglo-Saxon age, from the time of the migration until the reign of King Edgar and his second coronation at Bath in 973 an occasion which, in Atherton's words, marks the theological and political highpoint of the tenth century. Vulnerable though Edgar's kingdom was yet to prove, when faced with the returning Vikings of the eleventh century, its legacy nonetheless endured. The great corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature compiled during the reign provides an unrivalled testimony to the vitality of vernacular culture before the Conquest. Mark Athertons illumination of this culture and its roots is both arresting and enlightening. It deserves to attract a wide readership.

Henrietta Leyser, Emeritus Fellow and former Lecturer in Medieval History, St Peter's College, Oxford; author of Beda: A Journey Through the Seven Kingdoms in the Age of Bede and A Short History of the Anglo-Saxons (I.B.Tauris, 2017)

Mark Atherton tells the story of the making of the kingdom of the English in an original, often diverting and always instructive way. He covers the period from the accession of King Alfred the Great in 871 to the death of King Edgar in 975, and in the process has to traverse some difficult ground. The leading characters play their usual parts; but they are supported here by a cast of lesser-known figures, who appear out of dark corners and then disappear again into the shadows. It is all very skilfully done, and one emerges after reading Atherton's fine book with a good impression of the reasons why knowledge of the Old English and Latin literature of the period is so central to historical understanding.

Simon Keynes, Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Cambridge

THE MAKING OF
ENGLAND

A New History of the Anglo-Saxon World

MARK ATHERTON

Published in 2017 by

I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

London New York

www.ibtauris.com

Copyright 2017 Mark Atherton

The right of Mark Atherton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

Library of Medieval Studies 2

ISBN: 978 1 78453 005 1

eISBN: 978 1 78672 154 9

ePDF: 978 1 78673 154 8

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

King Edgar, crowned, sitting between Bishop thelwold and Archbishop Dunstan (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.iii)

Map of Anglo-Saxon England

The Via Appia Antica, Roman road (Shutterstock/AlexZaitsev)

Glastonbury Tor in the present day (Ed Webster)

Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.v)

Monastery of Santa Giulia, Brescia, Italy (Andrew Nash)

Homily XXI: Folio 112r from the Vercelli Book (Blusea2001)

The present-day Cathedral of St Eusebius in Vercelli (Shutterstock/PHB.cz/Richard Semik)

Roman road in English countryside (Paul Arps)

Harold Godwineson on a journey (Bayeux Tapestry)

Roman road in mountain region (Shutterstock/Brian Maudsley)

The opening page of Beowulf (London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv)

Labours of the Months: the ploughman, in Cotton, Tiberius B.v (Robana/REX/Shutterstock/British Library)

St Luke, from the Augustine Gospels (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 286)

St Matthew, the Stockholm Codex Aureus, folios 9v and 10r (Stockholm, National Library of Sweden)

The Caelian Hill, Rome (Roundtheworld)

A very deep pool is dammed up in the mind of a wise man; the City Mill, present-day Winchester (Shutterstock/Peter Sterling)

The water, when it is blocked, increases and rises and struggles back towards where it came from; the City Mill, Winchester (Andrea Veil)

St Augustine's Canterbury (Shutterstock/Claudio Divizia)

Eclipse of the moon (NASA)

Brixworth church (Liz Simpson)

City wall, Winchester (Neil Howard)

Fonthill, Wiltshire (Shutterstock/Pitamaha)

Artist's impression of Alaric, king of the Goths (d. 410) (Wikimedia Commons)

Wayland's Smithy, Berkshire (Msemmett)

The spacious ocean beats on the shore (blue_quartz)

Eamont Bridge, Cumbria (Northernhenge)

King thelstan and St Cuthbert (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 183)

Lindisfarne, monastic ruins (Alan Cleaver)

Chi-Rho page, Lindisfarne Gospels, with Aldred's Old English gloss (London, British Library, Cotton Nero D.iv)

Viking sword, modern reconstruction (Shutterstock/Ershova Veronika)

The Lady Chapel, Glastonbury, c.1900; site of the Old Church (Washington DC, Library of Congress)

Illustration to Psalm 41 in the Harley Psalter (London, British Library, Harley 603)

Cheddar Gorge (kelveden)

Glastonbury Tor (Rodw)

Portrait of Dunstan at the feet of Christ in St Dunstan's Classbook (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Auct. F.4.32)