Gone Medieval - Becoming an Anglo-Saxon King

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

Throughout April, Gone Medieval is your perfect companion for the forthcoming coronation of King Charles III. In this episode, Dr. Cat Jarman asks what did kingship really mean in the first half of the medieval period? How and when did we start to have kings in what later was to become England? And what was the actual significance of a coronation? All these questions and more are explored with Dr. Levi Roach, a specialist in Early Medieval kingship.This episode was edited by Pete Dennis and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. This month we are talking about kings and coronations here on the podcast. But when we go back to the first half of the medieval period, what did kingship really mean? How and when did we start to have kings in what later was to become England? and how did the numerous smaller kingdoms begin to merge?

What was the actual significance of a coronation? Today, my guest is Levi Roach, who is Associate Professor in History at the University of Exeter. Leva, thank you so much for joining me today, and welcome to Gone Medieval. Good to be here. So I'm really delighted that I could talk to you about this because I know that you very much specialised in kingship, really,

early kingship in the early medieval period. So I'm hoping that today we can really sort of pick your brains a little bit about some of this. And this sort of concept of being a king, becoming a king, how we get to coronation events and all of that. Because we don't really have that much from the very early period in terms of the written records of things like coronations. Is that right? Yes, that's very much true. And indeed, kingship as a whole, in a sense, comes into our sources almost partially formed. and then we can start seeing it as it evolves and develops throughout the early Middle Ages.

So as our written sources get richer with the Christianization of England, we're seeing an institution that already exists but is changing in certain respects quite rapidly and continues to change and evolve until we get to that point you're alluding to where we have these quite formalized markers like coronation, these rites of passage that inaugurate the start of one reign, the end of another, and kingship as an office, if you will, something that can be quite well defined. So to sort of really get to the basics, first of all, when do we first start to talk about a king of something we recognise as England, just to get to that sort of starting point?

So if we're talking about all or most of modern England, we're talking about the early 10th century, the reign of King Athelstan, and we're talking about developments in the 920s. If you're talking about kings within what is now modern England, then we're going back further yet. We're going back to the 6th, 7th, 8th centuries, the very earliest period of Anglo-Saxon settlement and then state building in what would become England. So they are sort of then regional kingdoms, I suppose,

but I mean, how does it develop from something, that is called a king from something more sort of chieftainly local? What sort of that process? Do we know much about that? Well, one of the things that of course inhibits us is vocabulary here. So the very term king to us and we envisage something as you know, they're kind of distinct from perhaps a chieftain, a leading man or something like that. But the old English term, Kunig, comes from and is cognate with the modern English term kin. It comes from the kind of leading figure within potentially a kin group. And so when we're talking about this term that we now have as king and we think of as being very distinct from anyone else, in the earliest period we start seeing kings behaving, it doesn't

really have that kind of meaning. It means something much more like what we would consider chieftain leading man. And that's what we see basically as the Anglo-Saxons come over and settle in England, they start setting up political structures inevitably. And the ones we initially see are really very localized. And in the earliest years, we really can't see them historically. Most of the evidence is archaeological or indirect from other sources, but we do know that once we start seeing them, there's lots of them. These are highly localized and there's good evidence that the kingdoms we start seeing. So, for example, Wessex in the south, and particularly bits of the south and southwest, or Mercia in the Midlands, are made up of what had previously been

other kinds of kingdoms. So we're thinking of the average early Anglo-Saxon kingdom being smaller than the modern county, potentially. So there being lots of these. lots of different kinds of kings, and the kinds of rules that they're taking on, therefore, are very much kind of ad hoc ones in a very localized society, a society where political structures are relatively small and where social structure is relatively uncomplexed and fairly flat, so where there isn't a major distinction between aristocrats and commoners and so on, there's not no hierarchy. There absolutely is, and kings are the leading figures, but we're thinking of their being, potentially at various points, you know, 20, 3,000,

30, maybe even 40, 50 of these in what was modern England in the very earliest periods. So are they then, I mean, we might not know this, but are they consistent in what it means in the different kingdoms for someone to be a king? Is there sort of a coherence there? There are certain features that we seem to see between different kingdoms, sufficiently so that we can probably use some generalisation. But you're quite right that precisely because these are such localized figures, we need to reckon with significant regional variation and probably quite a bit of which isn't captured in our sources. So we do get hints of this, though, for example, in terms of succession practices, for example, is where you start seeing

this classically. And almost all of the early kingdoms of England have much more ad hoc succession practices than those we later come to kind of know in success where we're thinking of, you know, formal rules and things like that. We're much more dealing with the world of convention and practice. But we do get hints of variation in terms of those kinds of things, in terms of stability as well and other things like that. So there almost certainly would have been significant variation. We can see some hints of this. So, for example, the question of whether or not kingship is passed on within a single family.

Most kings try to make that be the case. But Mercia is the famous example in the Midlands, this great, powerful kingdom that evolves to be one of the really leading ones in England in the 7th and in particular into the 8th centuries. But Mercia, succession seems to be a free-for-all. Monarchs try to regularize it. They try desperately. particularly famously the great Mercy and King Offa tries desperately to set up his son. Edgefith is his successor.

He kills off rivals. He kills off lots of family members because clearly any member of the extended family in Mercia could have a claim to the kingship. But even that doesn't really end up working. And it's quite clear, for example, that Offa's own relationship to previous Mercy and Monarchs was quite distant and probably largely fabricated. So the fact that he claimed to be related to earlier Mercy and Kings is probably largely invention, and we see then later mercy and monarchs, where again, there's no real grounds to

believe that they're actually related to, for example, offer. So here we have a nice example of a really powerful kingdom, once monarchs get established, but where every time a monarch dies, there's chaos for a little while. And eventually that ends up being something of the Achilles heel for the kingdom. By contrast, the kingdom that sort of takes over and eclipses mercy as we move into the 9th century is this kingdom of Wessex in the south that ends up basically giving us the dynasty for all of England. The monarchs of later Anglo-Saxon England were the descendants of the West Saxon dynasty, they seem to have earlier than in Mercia moved to a more settled system where you might get rival claimants, but they tended to be brothers, where the basic principle

that to be king, you kind of had to be the son of a king at least, rather than being a nephew, a cousin, anybody who's met him down the pub, is really established. And obviously that does end up giving something of a competitive edge, if you will, in terms of this competition in the longer term, because it means that kingship is able to pass relatively peacefully from monarch to monarch and indeed, in the best case scenario, is even from generation to generation. So when we are in this scenario, though, in this sort of period that you're talking about now, who essentially sort of makes that decision or how is that sort of established really, obviously? So you've got this period potentially with lots of conflict with sort of uncertainty

if a monarch has died. What is the decision-making process? How does that then go about? How do you sort of go, okay, fine, you win. You're the next king. What's that sort of process? Say, 9th century Wessex, for example. So by the 9th century in Wessex, we see good evidence of trying to line up the succession with some real success. So the classic thing you try to do as a monarch, and people tried this even earlier and failed, like offer, but is one of your big jobs as a medieval monarch, but particularly in the early Middle Ages, before these things are settled, is to try to ensure that your own relatives, ideally your sons or your brothers, are lined up as your successors. And so we start seeing these efforts. We see them reflected, for example, Asa writes about this, about how King Atholwulf, the father

of Alfred the Great, who goes down, of course, is one of the most famous foundational figures in England's history, how his father sets up arrangements for the succession and clearly is setting up that his kingdom will be divided between two of his sons, but also that all of the sons, because Alfred's the youngest, will actually succeed in order. And this is something that is quite distinctive of the West Saxon dynasty, is that they seem to have this strong preference. You need to be a king's son, really to be a king, but then normally you run through the brothers. And this might seem odd to us, because we now tend to expect a swap of generations, the so-called system of primogenitor being the first-born son, or indeed what's now been changed in the modern

system, to being simply the first-born child of any monarch, then being the presumptive heir. the way that they did it in Wessex seems to have been much more preference for if you've got a younger brother, they come first and only once you run down that line do you swap generations. Now the advantage of this, of course, is that if you are in a highly competitive atmosphere,

which they were, with competition from other kingdoms or in the later 9th century from Vikings, by preferring the succession of a brother, you're normally getting an adult man. You're much reducing the chances of a young, potentially untried boy. So you're getting somebody who has real political experience,

who's led armies and so on. And that's perhaps no same as in the case with Alfred the Great. He's had a great apprenticeship. He's already fought very successfully. He knows the ropes. So that's the kind of successful model, if you will, we end up getting that ends up then being the model taken forward by the English royal dynasty, because that is what the dynasty of Wessex ends up becoming. But that is, as I say, very much a kind of perhaps a winning solution to what was before then a really fraught problem, where more often than not, these things were decided by the sword, or failing that, certainly by Realpolitik, that you would get multiple claimants attempting violently or otherwise to establish themselves, and the political community would settle on one when it became clear

that somebody was going to win anyway. And at that point, then, you may as well not resist them, but work with the flow, even if you'd rather someone else. But we start saying, under the West Sax industry, an attempt to preempt that. It's never completely successful, particularly it's open to rivalry between brothers when you swap jails, generations, but we do see a clear attempt to kind of set up, these are the rules of play,

this is how it ought to operate. So do they then also use the sort of longer ancestry and genealogy and things like that to really legitimise their families' place in history as well? Do we see that's happening a lot? Yes, absolutely. So the biggest thing that is raised, the biggest question, kingship kind of raises as a system and still does in our modern political environment, of course, is the question of, you know, why does one person get to be king and not others, potentially within the same family, but also more widely politically, particularly as an institution's getting going. And as we're starting to get polities that can really exert some influence over the lives of commoners, the question is, why, what legitimacy does this individual

have? And of course, it ideally needs to be something that not everybody has. So that's where you get famously a focus on ancestors and exalted ancestry, often going back to these mythical founders of the kingdoms. So in Wessex, they claim to be the descendants of Cheritich, but in different kingdoms it's different. So in East Anglia, for example, it's the woofings or the woofing gases that's one is called in scholarship. And so that's one way of emphasizing how qualitatively different you are from anyone else. It's, of course, not perfect because people can claim that ancestry, sometimes potentially under dubious circumstance. And that's what we see in Mercia, for example. Anybody will claim to be a distant ancestor, potentially have a rival branch of that one. So it can be

faked, but it is an attempt to kind of remove this family from the bulk of people. And the other, of course, famous way to do this that ends up then becoming another essential piece of this puzzle, particularly as we're moving through the 9th century. It's something that's cultivated very actively by the West Saxon dynasty then is what we call coronation, or what might be better called consecration, because if we're being very pedantic here, coronation refers to a ritual act of putting a crown on someone's head, whereas consecration is the overall act, including crucially the anointing with holy oil. So this being brought within the church and bringing on religious legitimacy. And of course, the great thing with consecration, when potentially added to being a member

of this dynasty and emphasis on descent from a common ancestor, is that is how you then distinguish yourself from nephews, cousins, or indeed brothers. You're the one who has been anointed with holy oil. This is ideally meant to be a kind of a one-time ritual and what anthropologists call a rite of passage, i.e. a ritual that changes something. So it's like a wedding ceremony. You go into it not married, you come out married. You go into a coronation. not king, you come out king, at least in the ecclesiastical understanding of these things in practice, particularly in the early years, it's probably understood by many people in England as simply being confirmation of an existing state of affairs. But it is certainly another powerful way of projecting this

kind of authority and giving you a kind of a divinely ordained authority in a sense. And that's what some of the early dynastic pedigrees were actually attempting to do, because many of the names in the dynasties actually go back to things like Wodom, a pagan god, who's then understood in a Christian context who have just been a potentially a great chieftain or something. But there's hints of this already as perhaps being something that was played with in a slightly different context in the pre-Christian era, again, of kings claiming to kind of be of the descent of the gods. But in a very tangible way, consecration makes a king the Lord's anointed, the Christos domine, in medieval kind of religious political understanding. And therefore, someone who cannot

be stripped of these rights crucially by fellow family members or indeed by the wider public, that God has made them king, and that is, in a sense, in terms of the most extreme version of these views, it's then up to God to take that away. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on my podcast, not just the Tudors from History Hit, I try to make sense of everything that baffled our early modern ancestors. Like, what do you do with your waist? If you put your dung hill up against your neighbor's wall, you're going to cause rising dump. Would Henry the 8th ever consider executing his wife, the Queen of England, and Berlin? I'm not even sure if the Berlin's took it seriously because why would they have any reason to suspect Henry the 8th would really get rid of his queen?

And why do men grow beards? During puberty, the male body heats up and a smoke rises in the body pushes out the hair in the face. So the beard is actually a form of excrement. In other words, words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Twice a week every week. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so if we think about then, this idea that we are moving eventually towards an England and the gathered country, how do we get these sort of kingdoms, because obviously we moved from, as you said, lots and lots of different smaller kings to the bigger kingdoms with the sort of one sort of character in charge of them. What sort of takes place for that to happen?

Well, this is one of these processes that I've kind of alluded to that we are experiencing and starting to see partway through, if you will, that we're starting to see these things. We really start being able to trace developments with the introduction of Christianity and the written word, where we then start getting written in narratives, most famously, beads for the early period that allow us to really say something about how kingdoms are operating. And what's clear from the early sections of bead and what he has to report about the early Christian kings is already at that moment we're seeing a trajectory towards a lot. larger kingdoms. And there's every reason to believe that existed prior to him and prior to the introduction of Christianity, but it's almost certainly spurred on by Christianity. Because crucially with Christianity comes the written word, which in the long term ends up becoming crucial for things like administration, though it's probably not the reason why kings initially convert. They're not, you know, thinking like modern bureaucrats. But it also involves this element

of ideological justification for the powers that be, or at least this potential to offer this, that Crucially, Christianity has had this kind of historically ambiguous relationship with secular authority, but it's traditionally shied away from challenging it. There was a famous lines of Christ's about render into Caesar what are Caesar's, but also particularly when the political order is an avowedly Christian one, and doubly so in a context, potentially of conversion, where kings are sometimes driving this on, there is a real potential for Christianity to act as an ideological underpinning for the social order. For kings being good Christian monarchs who are appointed by God and these kinds of conceptions that then reach their logical conclusion, if you will, in what we start then seeing

as royal coronation and consecration rights where we start getting special ceremonies for these. But long before we have the ceremonies, there's the idea of monarchs being monarchs by the grace of God and God working hand in hand with them and they often are individuals who are working very closely with local bishops and the like. So we start seeing this close pairing in these early years of Christianity, Christianization, and powerful monarchs. Though by no means all powerful monarchs are Christians, but it ends up being the kind of model as we move forward. And we start seeing these larger kingdoms emerge. Often sometimes there's kind of loose confederacies or kingdoms created by overlordship. So some of the

classic examples of these are kingdoms like the East Angles and East Anglia, where they are building on the blocks of what may well have been distinct polities of things like Norfolk and Suffolk in the north and south. We see kingdoms like Mercia, as the classic example in the Midlands, where beneath what we kind of see is the Mercy and polity, it's very clear there were lots of different regions, many of which had had their own kings, and indeed, in some cases, we can even trace this. So famously, the kingdoms of the Huiche and the Magun Satan are ones in the sort of southwest midlands, so the witches around kind of modern Worcester. We actually see these polities initially as being sub-kings to the Mercyan kings, and then eventually the sub-kings disappear altogether.

So what we can see is a process whereby Mercia initially is an overlord. So we have a leading king and then sub-kings or petty kings. And then the sub-kings have got rid of and or start being called instead a alderman. So that is a royal officer. So whereby we're getting step for step, slow but steady further integration of these kinds of regions under the overlordship of a single monarch. Other ones we get there, it seems to have been a kingdom of the middle angles, for example, in the kind of East Midlands that's then, by the time we, again, can actually really see what's going on is under Mercy and oversight.

So we start getting these bigger blocks, these bigger building blocks that have all been built up from multiple smaller building blocks. And this is where the archaeologist Steve Bassett famously spoke in one context of the FAA Cup model of Anglo-Saxon kingship. And that is the idea that kingship kind of emerges through this competition, with neighbours, in which the winning force then goes on, if you will, to the next round. And so you start getting bigger and bigger kingdoms as they hoover up those around them. And so we end up in this world by the 9th century, where we really only have four big players. We have the Mercians and the Midlands. We have Wessex, south of the Thames. We have the East Anglians and modern East Anglia, and then we have the Northumbrians north of the Humber. So we kind of end up with the big four, if you will.

Now, whether or not, left on their own, those big four would have continued that kind of F-A-Cup model till one was crowned as were champion and ruler of all England is a bit less clear, because there's actually some signs, at least, of greater stability kind of emerging with those four big chunks. But it's at that very moment where we're seeing that greater stability that then the Vikings come in and wipe out three of the four. And so kind of create a fait accompli where we definitely do move to a single surviving dynasty, that of Wessex, which then, as their monarchs, managed to, successfully reconquer, as someone's described in earlier historical works, but more accurately

simply conquer the Midlands, East Anglia and the North, then kind of create this kingdom of England with roughly the borders of modern England. So what we're getting is, on the one hand, a process of whittling away that's going on anyway, and then this really decisive bolt from the blue with the Viking Great Army wiping out three of the four, which, as I say, for my money, is certainly not something that would be predictable, and at the very least accelerates this process, massively, but it's by no means certain that we would have ended up with a single kingdom and certainly not with the kind of borders we now know, except for this additional kind of crucial factor in the late 9th century. That's so interesting. If we then move into beyond the 9th century

into the 10th century when we have this England finally sort of taken shape, the kingship then, how similar is that to what was before in these sort of separate kingdom? Is it a very different form of rulership, or is it still on that same model? It probably depends where you're living within England and when we're talking within the 10th century. So the initial moments after conquest, we're not seeing massive change. So we are seeing a West Saxon dynasty who have kind of firmer rules of succession and probably slightly more invasive rule and kingship, at least in their homelands, than in some of these other areas. The Mercians are more overlords, perhaps, in the West Saxon monarchs

classically they are seen often as more micromanagers. So there are probably a few slight differences. But the moment you conquer a new area, you cannot, even if you want to, impose your willfully upon it, you have to work with the grain of local society. And so in the early years of the Kingdom of England, so when famously the son and grandson of Alfred the Great really see this form, so Edward the Elder and then crucially Athelstan, who is the one who finally conquers Northumbry and brings it within the fold. Under Athelstan, we're probably not seeing things being much different from the way they've historically been. And indeed is really the second half of the 10th century where we start seeing consolidation. So it's a kind of classic example of

massive expansion and then consolidation, which is exactly as we'd expected, exactly as we see in the modern period. Suddenly you get the headaches and the problems. Wait, how do we actually run this? How do we try to make sure there's at least some vaguely unified procedures and otherwise? And so it's almost a counter-reaction to now having a model of kingship, which was meant for a much smaller kingdom being applied to a much larger one and the growing pains that then starts leading to more formalisation. So the creation of kind of formal shires, as we now know them. These were traditional on Wessex, but probably not across all of the kingdom. So the shiring of England, creating counties across the entire kingdom, not always of equal size, but at least an idea there's these building blocks.

Then the next step being having someone to run the counties. Crucially, this then becoming this figure of the shireeve or the sheriff, as we later on know them. And then above them is operating the more traditional office holders, the so-called A. Alderman, the ancestors to the later earls. So you've always had that kind of kings with a few people beneath them, but then they're having to create additional layers of administration and of oversight. And the degree to which they're able to do this, and the degree to which it actually translates into real power will have varied massively geographically. So if you live in Northumbria, right up until 1066, what you're seeing is a loose overlordship from the south, often very hands-off, particularly in the north of

Northumbria. So if you're in modern county Durham, You don't see the kings of England. They don't bother you. You don't bother them. Everyone's happy that way. In areas like the Midlands and East Anglia, you are probably seeing more transformation. But they're never ruled as intensively as south of the Thames as those old areas of Wessex. So the old heartlands in the south and southwest. Kind of from about Winchester to about Exeter at the very southwest of it, those are the kind of heartlands of the kingdom. And that's where the king's authority really is felt quite actively, even already in the ninth century, but particularly. by the later 10th and 11th centuries. That's where we get by European standards really quite centralized and powerful kingship. But in large other parts of the kingdom, you're probably dealing with somebody who's not that qualitatively different to what we've seen before. So let's just sort of move it back to this idea of consecration and coronation. Can you say a little bit more about when we start to know what really happens in that process? So at what point do we start to really see? You mentioned before that there's a point where

these become more formalised and more sort of standardized. When do we really see evidence for what that means in reality? So the first dynasty for whom we really see regular attempts to have these kinds of events and a kind of a line that can be actively traced is this West Saxon dynasty, quite how far back it goes, is difficult to know. As ever, the evidence tends to come after the developments rather than before. But it certainly seems to be well-established principle by the reign of Alfred the Great, that monarchs will be formally crowned and consecrated in an ecclesiastical ceremony. And this is reflected in the so-called coronation ordinase, these liturgical ordinates, i.e. instructions for an archbishop on how to run a coronation. So once you see these,

of course, there's a reason why you have them. It's because you're doing this regularly. And textually, the earliest English ordo clearly is an evolution of earlier continental ones. And that makes sense because on the continent, the Carolingian dynasty that had become established and was kind of the powerhouse on the continent, starting from the mid-eighth century, has very strongly emphasized its God-given nature, worked very closely with the church, and this finds expression, not least in the fact that the Carolingian monarchs are all consecrated. And that seems to have been a new development for them, and it seems to be a practice that's picked up from there to England. So interestingly enough, King Offer, going back to one of the more successful Mercian monarchs,

whose Charlemagne's contemporary, seems to have had his son consecrated in his own lifetime. We don't have the ordo for it, so we don't know how it was done, but he seems to have already attempted this. That's one of the things he attempts us to do to kind of fix the mercy and succession problem. It doesn't work, not least since his son dies soon after him. And then suddenly the person he's lined up and gone to such effort to exult is no longer candidate for king, and all hell breaks loose and a different dynasty seems to be installed soon thereafter. But we're already seeing some reception of these ideas, therefore, in England, and an awareness of them and an idea that this might be a good way forward. By the second half of the ninth century under the

West Saxon monarchs, we are then seeing this consistently. So the earliest English Ordo is clearly an evolution of these kinds of things we've seen on the continent and that have become the norm, particularly for the West Frankish monarchs, that is the monarchs of the region that's becoming what we now know is the Kingdom of France, who they most naturally face towards geographically and otherwise. So that's the kind of model. We start seeing it in these texts, and then we start seeing these texts evolving. So crucially, we have adjustments being made to the ordnays, and then we have the so-called second English coronation Ordo. That is a development of the first, and emphasizes kind of certain elements more strongly. But this is crucial evidence that

these things are not of academic interest. You don't update your liturgy if you're not using it. And so they're very, very good evidence that there's evolution in these thoughts and that these things are finding very active practice. And alongside these ordinays, then we start seeing just pragmatically in our historical sources, they regularly start mentioning consecration. Not all of our sources all the time, but it's something that is regularly part of how you describe the start of monarch's reign. And indeed, some of these sources show influence from the liturgical ordnays. So probably are influenced either by events that the liturgical ordinates have informed or by reading the ordinates themselves. But either way, these are kind of showing an awareness of coronation, consecration as this kind of

constitutive act and as of this being an important part of what makes a king a king. It's only ever part of it. It must be emphasized. So also crucial is an act of so-called election, which is going back to some of those early periods where it's a bit of a free-for-all elections when you then get the senior magnates of the kingdom to all say they agree to your succession. It's not modern kind of secret ballot election. It's everyone saying, yeah, yeah. And it's something you normally only do once it's already been decided. But there's other kinds of acts as well that are clearly very important alongside it, but it's now very much part of becoming a monarch, because it is very much part of the established package.

And we start seeing it as well in the fact that we get a place of coronation. So we don't know where the West Saxon monarchs traditionally were crowned. We suspect Winchester, because this is thought of as being the kind of home base, their proto-capital, if you will. But the honest answer there is that's a best guess. We don't actually know when they were crowned. We don't know where they were crowned. We don't know where he was crowned.

We have good reason to believe he probably was, but it's kind of guesswork. What we can start seeing, though, from the reign of Athelstan, who conveniently enough is our first monarch of all England, though he's not taken Northumbria at the time of his coronation. Athelstan is the first one where we'd have a place of coronation, Kingston upon Thames. And that then becomes the standard for the dynasty thereafter through the 10th century. And this seems to be itself kind of reflecting the creation of this kingdom out of previous building blocks, because Kingston is not that close to the West Saxon heartlands. It's not especially close at all. But crucially, it's right on the border between Wessex in the south and mercy and the north. It's just on the south side of the Thames.

But it's also nearby the old boundary of the Kingdom of Kent in the southeast, which was another one of those actually quite powerful kingdoms before we got to the final block of four. So it seems to in all sorts of ways give expression to a unified kingdom that is still respecting old power bases. And it's also giving a nod to the rising importance of London, because Kingston in this period is not yet part of London, as we now think of it as being. It's just outside, but it's nearby London. And so it's near this growing metropolis that is going to soon become the beating heart of the kingdom. So that's great to see how these things all seem to come together, I suppose.

So the sort of joining of the kingdoms, but also the ceremonies, it's all becoming part of that same package as England turns into the sort of England that we recognise, I suppose. So this is sort of when that starts to happen, is it? Yes, I would say so. And it's quite important there because whatever importance we accord to coronation, it clearly has some importance because contemporaries are starting to get excited and interested by it. But even though our sources obviously are mostly ecclesiastical, they may well be exaggerating this slightly. But it's notable that it mirrors this in that precise manner you're talking about because it is a symbolic inaction of becoming monarch. So it's important that it reflect the kingdom that the person is ruling over and that it encapsulates in essence what that kingdom and what that kingship is. crucially, the kings receive the regalia at this occasion. And that's not just the crown. So that's one of the other reasons why we speak, strictly speaking, of consecration, not coronation. Coronation is one of the acts, but so is anointing with Holy Oil. You also receive alongside the crown, a sword, for example. So they receive various symbols of their rule. And as they receive them, the liturgical

ordinaries have the archbishops instruct the kings in how they're to use these for the defense of their people and so on. And so it also kind of offers a succinct lesson in good monarchy. one very ecclesiastically influenced, but also influenced by wider ideas of defending your people, defending the poor, being righteous, offering good justice and so on. And one of the things that's introduced over the course of the 10th century, crucially, is a coronation promise that the monarchs themselves swear to uphold certain core values. So this is increasingly becoming this reflection of the nature of the office, the nature of the kingdom, and the nature of the contract between monarch and people. And that becomes quite interesting in terms of then later

developments, because we have good evidence already by the reign of King Ethelred, as we move then into the late 10th, early 11th centuries, of actually this coronation oath being so as always held back up to kings, particularly in Ethelred's case famously, there's a text of his reign, which is a translation of this, so it's the oath in the vernacular, probably as he'd sworn himself, but then with a kind of a gloss on and discussion of it. It seems quite clear in context that this is actually designed as a criticism of Ethelred as monarch, because it's reflecting upon actually how he hasn't been living up to these, or trying to make him reflect upon the very promises he enacted at the start of his reign. And it's these kinds of coronation promises that then kind of lay the long,

long-term foundations for the kinds of constitutional developments we later see with things like Magna Carta, where people start measuring kings back up to their commitments to their people and trying kind of then start discussing checks and balances. Well, I mean, that's super interesting, I think, actually, this sort of idea of what the coronation actually means in terms of that whole kingship. So that's absolutely fascinating. Levi, thank you so much for all of that.

That's been a really interesting discussion. Thank you for having me. And that brings us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. Don't forget that you can subscribe to our newsletter, Medieval Mondays. Just look in the episode notes for how to do that. please do leave us a review wherever you found this podcast, just a rating or a comment. It really helps other people find us. Don't forget, we're going to be back again next week.

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