The Rest Is History - 122. Æthelstan: OFFICIALLY England's greatest monarch

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

After an intense tournament featuring sixteen of the finest Kings and Queens this island has to offer, the people have decided the greatest king of England also happens to be the first. The 10th century grandson of Alfred the Great united the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and saw off the Vikings, so Tom explains why we should all be Æthel-STANS. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Welcome to The Rest Is History. The world is reeling from probably, Tom Holland, the greatest shock in sporting history, certainly in the history of monarchical sport, in which we have been specialising on The Rest Is History in the last week or so because this week King Athelstan defeated Elizabeth I to become the greatest monarch in England's history. A shot heard around the world Tom. Absolutely and for those who haven't been keeping abreast of the

sports news we should explain that the past week we've been running a World Cup of the Kings and Queens of England. Now, some people have pointed out that if it's the Kings and Queens of England, how can it be a World Cup? That is ludicrous pedantry, isn't it? Yeah, it's like the World Series. Absolutely.

We've got Anglo-Saxons in there. We've had a Dane. We've had Normans. I mean, it's a genuinely cosmopolitan, inclusive and diverse tournament. We had an Empress of India. We did. We did. Yeah. And an Emperor of India.

I mean, we had it all. Yeah. So a properly World Cup. And we had a Super 16 round. Then we had quarterfinals. Then we had semifinals. And then we had a final. But normally what we do in these World Cups, and we've done Prime Ministers before, we've done Gods, is that we go through the various rounds and then we had a final but but normally what we do in these world cups and we've done prime ministers before we've done gods is that we we go through

the various rounds and then we come to the winner at the end but this time as you have said the winner is so unexpected a king that many people certainly read as a daily mail judging by their comments on the the report on this that appeared in the daily mail, have never even heard of. And Darren Jalland on Twitter. So Athelstan is the Emma Raducanu of Monarchs, because the winner was Athelstan. Extraordinary. So 84,000 votes were cast in this tournament. Athelstan defied the odds to get to the final,

and then he was up against the prohibitive favourite, Elizabeth I. Now, if you're interested in Elizabeth I, we did a podcast with the brilliant Tracy Borman, didn't we? Yes. Some months ago, back in the mists of time, when this podcast was but a stripling. So you should go to that to find out about Elizabeth I. But we thought we absolutely had to go in

with a special Athelstan-themed edition. Partly, actually, Tom, because the – how shall I put this? We're not used on the rest is history to being in the glare of the international spotlight. But the world's reaction to the final rather took us by surprise, didn't it? It's featured in Breakfast TV. Two Breakfast TV channels, apparently. Yeah, apparently. What used to be the broadsheets, a big feature in the Times,

the tabloids, the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail website, which is, I think, the world's most read English language news website, had a feature on this. And as is their want, the readers of Mail Online decided to have their say, didn't they? So I've got a digest here. I've printed out some of the best comments.

So the one that caught my eye initially was what rubbish never heard of him uh he sounds like a country in south asia yeah that's very daily mail and then uh then it started to get going woke nonsense again lefty historians trying to erase the history and undermine the authority of queen elizabeth in favor of some bloke no one's heard of just to appease the anti-monarchist rabble well they've they've nailed you haven't they they have indeed dangerous marxist lefty just shows how out of touch these academics are never heard of him what woke tosh so yeah so i won't be discreet a couple more tom because i think that they reach a climax so there's this one i think it's probably from your brother athelstan was a total lad. Kind to his mother, nice to animals. Respectful, if a little socially awkward around the ladies.

Always up for some jocular banter down the pub. Total lad. That's pretty accurate, actually. And then the two, my three favourites, a man called Mally, or a woman called Mally, said, Historians, nice job if you can get it. Which I believe is a reference to the presenters of this podcast. And finally, It's Grim Up North said, what's a podcast?

That's a great question. I would have asked the same question a year and a half ago. So as you can see, this is a result that got the nation talking. Now, Athelstan, let's get into the, put aside the media, the media furore. We're never ones for the media bubble, are we? No. Let's talk about the man himself and his times. So we are talking, what, 9th, 10th century, Tom?

We're talking 10th century, early 10th century. And I think that it would be appropriate at this stage to quote something that a man who I think ranks as Athelstan's coach, the man who's played a crucial role in getting him to this startling position at the very pinnacle of monarchical sport. And that is the great Michael Wood. Yep, the great chronicler. The great Michael Wood, who's come on the podcast to talk about the history of China,

but who I first came across years and years ago when I was very, very young. And he did a brilliant series on the BBC called In Search of the Dark Ages. That is a brilliant series. It did a brilliant series on on the bbc called uh in search of the dark ages that is a brilliant series it's a fabulous series and one of the uh one of the the figures from the dark ages inverted commas that michael did an episode on was affelstan um and since then he's also done a wonderful three-part series on affelstan on affelstan's father, Edward, and mother and aunt, Athelflad, and his grandfather, Alfred the Great. Michael summed up Athelstan's achievements. Thus, Athelstan is unseated today, he always was, but let's not forget that he is the great early innovator. His vision laid down the template for English law, coinage, culture, assembly politics and sacred

geography. He is the forgotten presiding genius of England, but this can be rectified. Well, forgotten no more. He posted that before this stunning result came through and he's absolutely right. So huge credit, obviously, to Athelstan, the lad done good, but huge credit as well, I think, to Michael Wood, who has always been a stalwart champion of him and certainly influenced me in my great interest in this astonishing figure. So I mean you've written a book on Athelstan haven't you? You've written the book in the Penguin Monarch series. I did and this goes back to something that we were talking about in the preview to this World Cup where we were talking about what the qualification requirements were

and there was a lot of discussion about why Alfred the Great wasn't in this, and you were quite keen to have him. But I stand by the argument that really, if you're talking about kings and queens of England, you have to begin with Athelstan, because Athelstan is the first king who rules a political entity that we can recognise as being something called England. Yeah. So in that case tom give us some context so athelstan is born in what 894 um around the very end of the ninth century a.d so the romans are long gone um uh what we now think of as england has been a series of fragmented kingdoms that have since come under anglo-Saxon kingdoms that have since come under Danish attack or,

I mean, is attack the right word or is it migration? I don't know what word historians would choose. I think it's attack. So essentially the context is there are four major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Three of these are inhabited by people who define themselves as Angli, as Anglians, And this will become the base word for English. And I think this is one of the reasons why this period is so confusing, and perhaps why Athelstan is relatively forgotten, is that this is a period where the meaning of

words are in the process of migration. But in the 9th century, we can call them, let's call them Anglians. And these are the kingdoms of Northumbria in the north from the Firth of Forth kind of down to the Humber, as the name implies. Mercia, which is basically the Midlands. East Anglia. East Anglia. And then a Saxon kingdom, the kingdom of the West Saxons, which by this point spans Cornwall to Kent. Yeah. So basically the whole of the south of England.

What we would now think of. And the Vikings come crashing into this and they overturn northumbria they overturn east anglia they conquer mercia and then they're moving in to dismember wessex the last anglo-saxon kingdom that is is independent and of course the man who defies them who throws them back who sets wessex up on incredibly firm foundations, is Alfred. And that's why he's called the Great. Alfred dies in 899, and he leaves behind, as rulers of this kind of kingdom that he's forged,

his son, Edward, but also his eldest child, his daughter, Athelflad. Who you've also written about. Who I've also written about, who is also a key figure in this. So if we think of Alfred and Edward and Athelstan as the founding fathers of England, we should think of Athelflad as the founding mother. Because she plays the key role in effectively joining Mercia and Wessex in a kind of Anglo-Saxon united kingdom. Because by the terms of the peace treaty that Alfred signed with the Danes, with Guthrum, the king that he defeated, the kingdom of Mercia was essentially divided in two.

And if you imagine a line running from the Mersey down to the Thames estuary, down to London, the Danes Estuary, down to London. The Danes take the eastern half of that. So that's the Dane law. It becomes the Dane law, as it's later known. And the western half comes under the authority of Alfred as king of Wessex. But Alfred is playing a very careful game because he wants to keep the Mercians on board. He doesn want to humiliate them he doesn't want to imply that they've been subordinated to West Saxon power so he enshrines as a sub-regulus a kind of junior king the most eminent of the um of the

Mercian nobleman a man called Ethelred he's a weasel in the last kingdom. Yes, he is. But there's absolutely no evidence at all for that in the sources. He's a kind of a loyal and a potent ally of Edward in fighting the Danes. And he marries Athelflad. And Athelred has this kind of ambiguous status. So he a king is he a lord what is he so he gets this title mick nafafod lord of the mercians and he's quite elderly by the time he marries athelflad he dies athelflad takes over and she is hailed as mick nafiga, the Lady of the Mercians. And she plays this kind of key role in reconciling the Mercians to the overlordship of her brother, Edward, who is King of Wessex. And this is the context into which Athelstan as a child is growing up.

So they are moving together, Mercian and Wessex, basically. Potentially, but there's also equally always the potential that they might split asunder. Exactly. So Edward, this is Edward the Elder, is it? Alfred the Great's son? Yeah, well, he comes to be known as Edward the Elder because you later have Edward the Martyr and Edward the Confessor. Right. So he's the first, he's not Edward I, but he is the first person called Edward.

He's the first king to be called Edward. Yeah. And he dies, does he, in 894? No, in 9... What? 924. But before that, let's look at the the childhood of athelstan okay very good yes you're quite right another reason i think why um this period is so complicated

is that the names are very very difficult they're great names though we should bring back these names so edward edward is one of the few names that, because Edward I is given it in honour of Edward the Confessor, that has kind of survived into the modern period. But there are lots that haven't. So Edward is a very married king. He's up there with Henry VIII. He's always marrying women, dumping them, marrying other ones. Not, I think, because he's incredibly promiscuous or anything, but he's kind of maneuvering to kind of build up his power the first woman that he marries is a woman called eggwin which which doesn't mean that you won an egg it's it means sword joy that's a great

name sword and and athelstan is their elder son and what then happens is that Egwene either dies or she gets pushed to one side because Edward needs to marry a kind of someone who will knit the family of Alfred together because there are kind of fissures, there are ruptures developing. So he marries this woman called Alflad, who is kind of distantly related to Edward. And they then have uh two children elf weird elf weird that's a great name and edwin okay and the problem for athelstan is that they are now kind of like the superior heirs yeah because they're in situ kind of thing absolutely so athelstan although the elder has now become supernumerary and is a slight embarrassment. So he must be fearing for his life, presumably. Well, Alfred, his grandfather, is clearly very, very fond of him, clearly admires him. Alfred is a great warrior, but he's also a great patron of learning.

And Athelstan, in due course as well, will come to be a great warrior and a great patron of learning. So I think, although it's always dangerous to extrapolate, I think it's not extreme to say that Athelstan probably was a favourite of Alfred. But hold on, how old is he at this point? He's a young boy. He's a young boy. So he's like five or six. Six or seven, something like that. So Arthur the Great is delighted that Athelstan can read or something.

That kind of thing. Yeah, he can count. And there's a story that's told by William of Malmesbury, who's a great fan of Athelstan, an Anglo-English monk writing at Malmesbury in Wiltshire, which will play a key role in the story of Athelstan. And he tells the story of Athelstan that when he was a boy, Alfred gives him a sword belt and a cloak. And this echoes something that had happened to Alfred when he was a boy and he had gone on pilgrimage to Rome where he'd met the Pope. And the Pope had given him a cingulum, which is a kind of sword belt that high military officials in the Roman Empire

had worn. And the Pope had given him the raiment of a consul, the cloak of a consul. So very good. So Alfred, as a young boy, had been given this as a token of his kind of future status as perhaps a figure of roman imperial power and so it again i think it's not too extreme to see that this story perhaps preserves a sense in which alfred is casting attlestan as a figure of did he give him the same ones that's we don't know we don't know let's say let's say that he did let's say it's very kind of andreal the flame of the west from the rings isn't it yes it absolutely is and this of course tolkien is knows all this stuff so it's it's all the kind of material that is feeding into lord of the rings so affelstan is basically aragorn isn't he you could say that

perhaps except very good yeah very good um although there is actually another fantasy parallel that we'll come to at the end of this one that i think is even more interesting it's not tony blair again is it it's not tony blair no it's not tony blair um so so alfred dies edward becomes king athelstan is a problem so what to do with him so again according to william of malmesbury this is a late you know this is late testimony but all the evidence supports it. Athelstan is sent to his aunt. To Athelflad.

To Athelflad. In Mercia. He's hanging around in Wolverhampton or something. He's hanging out in Wolverhampton. Exactly. Because they have a battle there, don't they, of course, in Tenthall? Well, they do. So Athelflad, although a woman, is very much a chip off the Alfredian block.

She's very like her father. Again, she is a great warrior, amazingly, for a woman in this period. She's very, very devout. And she is a great patron of learning. is the fact that the key to establishing the future of English rule, of Anglo-Saxon rule, is to plant what are called burrs, kind of great fortified market towns. Yes. And the way to protect these towns is to obtain the relics of saints because they then exert a kind of a protective screen over these towns

rather than the way that Reagan wanted Star Wars to protect America. And so the key relics of a saint that she gets is the king of an Ulthumbrian saint called Oswald. He was kind of warrior saint, which was buried in a monastery in Lincolnshire called Bardney, which had been destroyed by the Vikings. She sends a kind of raiding party to get these relics, brings them back. She puts them in Gloucester so that Gloucester will then become the kind of the great capital for her power. And the Vikings are incredibly cross about this.

And they send a kind of vast raiding party sweeping into Mercia. They go deep into the bowels of Mercia, are then returning and it's at Wolverhampton, or probably Teton Hall, that they get ambushed by the forces of Wessex and Mercia and they get slaughtered. The men of the black country. Three kings get sent down.

Noddy Holden. Yeah. Three kings get sent down to the infernal regions and they perish under a rain of spears and swords. And this is Athelflaed's great victory. Yeah. So Athelstan is clearly learning at the feet I think not just of Athelflaed but also of of Æthelred as well and that's why

another reason I think for for thinking that Berner Call's portray of him as a weasel is unfair because um Athelstan makes a vow to Æthelred and that he will kind of show him respect when and if he becomes king and when he does almost the first thing he does is is to go and and kind of show his respect at the the tomb of Athelred in the the shrine of Saint Oswald uh that they've built in in Gloucester so at that point Tom he's he's in Mercia um yeah is he in his teens so he's in his teens and so he's watching his aunt um slowly prepare for a war of conquest reconquest so going across this line of birds that they've built from the from the from the mersey down to the down to down to london um and 917 is the key year edward from wessex launches a war of conquest against east anglia and And basically, by the end of the year, he's conquered the whole of East Anglia.

He's annexed that to his kingdom. Atherflad, meanwhile, is leading campaigns against the various kind of boroughs of the eastern Midlands. So Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, and so on. And basically by 918, everywhere south of the Mersey and the Humber has become a part of this kind of West Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, whatever you want to call it, kingdom. Yeah. So to just interrupt you there, Tom. So there is an element, therefore.

I mean, obviously to do a World Cup of Kings, it's very kind of great man history, isn't it? It's very Victorian kind of wiggery. Yeah. So there is an element clearly that, irive of athelstan's merits he is standing on the foundations that have already been built by his aunt his father and his grandfather absolutely um so this isn't something that he's that his later achievements are not purely self-generated no they are no he is he yeah he's inconceivable they'd be inconceivable without the achievements of his father his aunt and his his grandfather and he would never have denied that right i mean

that's that's the significance of the respect that he pays um and one quick other question just about the context so why is it that the anglo-saxons having been on the receiving end of the vikings for a reasonably long time what how is it they've suddenly been able to basically launch this fight back and to start pushing the Vikings back? Is it that they were previously divided and are now united? Do they have some kind of, you know, what is giving them, what has turned the tide? Or is it just a series of contingencies? Well, I think the two principal answers to that question. The first is that because the Anglian kingdoms have essentially been destroyed, Wessex becomes the focus not just for West Saxon hopes, but for Anglian hopes as well.

And because the West Saxon kings are very diplomatic, they tread very, very carefully. They do not try and imply that the Angles of East Anglia or of Mercia are being absorbed into a West Saxon empire. They're able to construct this identity that Alfred and his heirs describe as his Rex Anglosaxonum, the king of the Anglo-Saxons. So they basically invent Anglo-Saxondom as a political means of uniting these previously disparate kingdoms. And it's really telling that we live in a country that's called England rather than, say, Saxon land. You know, there are people who call this kind of... The Welsh, the Scots call it Sassanacs. But there are scribes at the West Saxon court who do call this kind of proto-kingdom Saxonia.

But in the long run, it comes to be called Anglia, Anglolond, England, because the West Saxons are not chauvinist about being Saxon. Does that mean, though, Tom, that there is an idea of England and of commonality before the reconquest happens? Right. There is. There is. reconquest happens right there is there is which is so this the principal spokesman for this is bead yeah writing you know set a couple of centuries earlier um and he of course is writing the history of the church and he casts the angles and by extension the saxons as a kind of not exactly a chosen people but he models their history on the history of the israelites and he casts them as a kind of holy people.

Yeah. There's an idea of them as a people apart kind of thing. Yes, absolutely. And, and that is something that Alfred in particular is very keen on. He, he translates beads,

Latin history into English. He sponsors this idea that there is an Anglo-Saxon church. And, and that's another key reason why England becomes England rather than Saxon land. Okay. We've lost control, Tom. No, we haven't. We haven't. We haven't. No, we firm foundations. And constructing the idea of the English as the Anglo-Saxons as Christian people is one of them.

But the other key one is that they construct an economic base. And that's what the birds are for. So the birds are fortresses, but they're also markets. And these markets generate silver. And silver enables them to fund armies and basically you know i've got i've got a coin which was minted in east anglia and taken by a viking pilgrim to rome that is a fake it's it's um pretending to be uh minted by edward and so what's that what that is showing is that even before edward conquers east anglia the vikings

of east anglia are becoming kind of subordinate both to the spiritual and the economic power of the west saxon monarchy um and and that that that the effort required to build these burrs is is enormous i mean you know it's it's kind of, we're talking kind of building pyramid scale level of effort. It's vast percentages of the population are engaged in building these fortresses. And it means that when the war is launched in 917, the Vikings are totally crushed. Yeah. Now, on the dynastic level, what happens in 918 on the 12th of June is Athelflaed dies.

And Edward basically moves in immediately. So Athelflaed has left a daughter, Alflaed, who is packed off to a nunnery. Edward essentially becomes king of Mercia. The Mercians seem to swallow this and one of the reasons that the mercians swallow this probably is that edward moves up from winchester the capital of wessex up to uh chester which is this great fortress roman fortress that athelflad has re has kind of revived yeah um and athelstan is with him and athelstan seems to be seen by the mercians as a kind of

mercian prince so they basically think we'll accept edward because athelstan is coming next and he's kind of one of us because he's been here for so long is that right that's certainly part of it the other part of it is that the vikings are still a threat in the north because they there's a kind of dynasty that occupies both Dublin and York. And so, you know, the Mersey is a kind of key transit zone for them. And that makes it dangerous for people on the Merseyan frontier. So Edward's power, therefore, is something very welcome. And Athelstan's role as well. And in the last years of his life, Edward is kind of pushing, you know, he's looking towards northumbria he plants um uh the first um anglo-saxon fort

north of the line of the mersey humber uh in an old roman fort do you know what that roman fort was uh an old roman fort north of the humber yeah north of the mersey and humber just north of it um wigan manchester man Manchester very good I thought Manchester would be too obvious that's why I didn't get it it's in Manchester so 94 Edward dies just south of Chester seemingly involved maybe fighting the Welsh maybe fighting Vikings not sure okay and so then the question is who succeeds because you'll remember the brilliantly named alfweird athelstan's younger half brother who has been growing up in winchester as the crown prince of wessex athelstan is in the is in mercia the mercian lords immediately hail him as king of mercia

the wessex and lord seem to hail alfweird as king of wessex so lords seem to hail Elfwyrd as king of Wessex. So things are not looking good. And Elfwyrd leads an army northwards to Oxford where he dies. That's convenient. Very convenient. And so you might think too convenient. I mean, it has to be said that there is no, there's no mention in any source of any foul play at all. But is that not because the sources are incredibly partisan and pro-Athelstan so they wouldn't mention it they're not they're not pro-Athelstan

because um people in Wessex are are very hostile to him and the monks and scribes in Winchester are very very hostile to Athelstan they see him as a kind of Mercian intruder yeah and this is why it actually takes Athelstan over a year before he's crowned. So he's clearly kind of dealing with the fact that there are sizable factions in Wessex who are hostile to him taking over. But in due course, he wins acceptance from the West Saxons as well as from the Mercians. And he is crowned not in Winchester, the capital of Wessex, and not in Tamworth, the ancient capital of Mercia, which Aethelflaed had recaptured from the Vikings. He's crowned Kingston-on-Thames, which the whole point of that

is that it's directly on the border between Mercia and Wessex. And when the Archbishop of Canterbury crowns him, he crowns him as King Parata in Latin, equally of the Mercians and the West Saxons. And when I say crowned, I mean crowned. Because Athelstan is the first king, Anglo-Saxon king to be crowned with what we recognise as a crown.

And it's kind of radiant. So, you know know those things going up looking like the sun um and and that and that is mod that is modeled on the crown of roman emperors so again it's this idea that this is a an imperial you know this is this is an imperial status that athelstan is laying claim to the inheritance of the romans as rulers of all of britain and are they copying um the franks at this point, do you think? Do you think like Charlemagne and co? I mean, the Franks have obviously been the dominant,

the most resplendent power in Western Europe. Are the Anglo-Saxons copying them? Absolutely. So that's a huge influence. But the Franks themselves are copying the Romans. So that's kind of the pedigree. And, of course, the other thing that the Anglo-Saxons have copied from the Franks is the idea of anointing.

So the king of what will become England right the way up to the present day with Elizabeth II is anointed. And that's an echo of an Israelite ritual. So David is anointed. Saul is anointed. Solomon is anointed. Dare I say that that is the sacral. It's a sacral monarchy. It is.

Right. Now that we've got the sacral in, I think we should take a break. So Tom is performing heroically, because obviously he's bearing the brunt of today's podcast, because he's an Athelstan ophile, and he's defying his cold, which is tremendous and very

Anglo-Saxon behaviour. So we will return after the break with more Athelstan. Don't go away. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip.

And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestis rest is entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com welcome back to the rest is history we are talking about athelstan officially officially

the top king of england um the producer jack was just giving me a hard time because he said i missed the best pun ever i should have said that tom was an athel stan tom you know what that means it's not really it's an internet expression isn't it it's some internet stan stan yeah for the youngsters say we don't have any truck with that kind of youthful talk on applecast right the old fashion um so tom he's just been crowned. He is the king equally of the Mercians and of Wessex, the people of Wessex. What does he do? What does he do that makes him so great?

So Athelstan's priority is what his relation is going to be with the Vikings in York. And the Vikings in York are ruled by a guy called Citric. Citric. I remember him from, well, there's lots of people called Citric in the last kingdom. They're all called Citric, actually. So Citric has, he's been a kind of a thorn in Anglo-Saxon side for a while, but he decides with Athelstan he's going to try and cosy up to him. So a treaty is signed.

It's agreed that Citric will marry Athelstan's sister. And in 926, Citricric comes south comes to tamworth um marries athelstan's sister goes back to york and then the following year citric dies oh that's very convenient yet again it is and this is a key moment because you could imagine that that if you could imagine a kind of scenario where Britain ends up divided between an Anglo-Saxon kingdom south of the Humber, an Anglo-Scandinavian kingdom between the Humber and the Firth of Forth,

and a kind of Gaelic-speaking kingdom in the Highlands. So to put it another way, Boris Johnson, Andy Burnham, Nicola Sturgeon. Exactly. But this doesn't happen because Athelstan decides that this is his opportunity to grab York. And he moves with incredible speed, much faster than the obvious Viking candidate to succeed Citric, who's a guy called Guthrith, who's over in Dublin. He's crippled by his ridiculous name.

He is. He is. So Athelstan moves in and he annexes York. And he basically then absorbs all the Anglian kingdoms that stretch right the way up to the Firth of Forth. So including the Uhtred, you know, the Uht-speaking peoples of Britain are acknowledging the rule of one king. And how long does that take, Tom? I mean, how quick is that? You made that seem like it was a matter of months, is it?

It is months, yes. It's a lightning strike. I mean, it's kind of rickety. It's precarious. Wulstan, the Archbishop of York, who had a very, very cosy time of it with the Vikings, doesn't really like having this Mercian, West Saxon kind of upstart. So he's always, he's a slightly kind of foxy character in the background,

kind of negotiating with the Vikings. But Athelstan is, you know, I mean, he's right up there. So a couple of quick questions. Do the people in northumbria who are as it were english speaking do they believe they have a commonality with the west saxons and the mercians so do they feel part of one family um and actually that's the second question was part of that do they even speak the same language they do speak they kind of speak

the same language but presumably very different dialects yeah very strong kind of dialects but yes essentially they do do they well the evidence that there are clearly northumbrians who resent athelstan's power his his authority is precarious but equally um he's a very very intimidating figure and the measure of that is that it's not just the Anglian lords of Northumbria who answer a summons from Athelstan to come to basically Penrith, the River Aemond in Cumbria in the Lake District. But the kings of what will become Scotland as well. So Owain, the king of Strathclyde, which is the Welsh-speaking kingdom that means basically kind of Glasgow stretching south into the Lake District. And Constantine, who is the king of Alba, which will become Scotland.

People who've listened to our Macbeth episode will remember the complexities of all this. Let's not go there again, Tom. I can't deal with all those Malcolms again. So Athelstan holds this great kind of council council uh at penrith where he summons that the nobles of northumbria he summons um constantine he summons uh owen and they all come and there's a there's a kind of significance in this because um penrith has a roman fort and it has standing stones and the roman fort is a reminder of the Romans who had laid

claim to the whole of Britain and the standing stones in the opinion of the peoples of the time are had been raised by the giants who were the first people to rule all of Britain so Athelstan is implicitly saying that he's king not just of an Anglo-Saxon realm the king of of England but he's king of Britain Rex Totius Britanniae king of the whole ofain rex totius britannia king of the whole of britain and rex totius britannia where's that from is that a coin is that an inscription it's an inscription on the coins that he starts to mint yeah wow yeah and the fact that constantine the king of alba and owain the king of strathclyde go there that that's implicit you know they're implicitly accepting this status but as what overlord emperor yeah

basically basically basically as overlord yeah yeah um so the whole thing is is rickety but clearly impressive and i guess that there are two kind of great themes that that follow through athelstan's reign and that justify his position as the greatest, as the winner of our World Cup of Monarchs. One of them is that he's a great king of, I mean, he's a great peacetime king. He lays down the foundations for what will become the kingdom of England, its law, its education system, as Michael was saying, his law, coinage, culture, assembly, politics, sacred geography, all that kind of stuff. But he is also a great warrior. He's a great king, you know, great, a great fighter.

And he couldn't have been a great peacetime king if he'd not also been a great warrior king. So so on that theme, obviously, the Welsh princes, the king of Strathclyde, the king of Albert, massively resentful um and in 934 constantine has become so kind of um resentful that athelstan launches a massive invasion of the highlands and it's really the first time that a kind of a power in britain based in the lowlands has invaded the highlands since the time of the romans yeah so athelstan leads this great expedition. Constantine kind of, you know, gets beaten up, comes crawling back. And in 935, there is this massive kind of derbar that Athelstan holds, the old Roman city of Cirencester,

in the amphitheater. And Constantine is there. Owen is there. All the Welsh princes are there aflstan is enthroned as a as a kind of massively roman figure he's chosen this place for very obvious reasons and he's hailed not just as rex but as basileus the the greek for emperor the way that the emperor in constantinople is hailed and he's described by contemporary as the greatest that the emperor in Constantinople is hailed. And he's described by contemporary as the greatest and the most illustrious of the kings who in our own day rule here on earth.

Because the kingdom that he is forging has a kind of integrity, has a kind of centralism that is unprecedented anywhere outside really the caliphiphate in in southern spain or the byzantine empire so it's it's an astounding achievement so at this point this is the premier kingdom in western europe is that basically what you're saying absolutely yes um i mean you've got you so you've got you've got the the um you've got the kingdoms of the franks which they've all fallen out with each other well they're kind of they're devolving into becoming what will become France and Germany. And the measure of Athelstan status is that his sisters marry them. So they marry Duke Hugh,

who's the greatest Lord in, in what will become France and Athelstan sister, Edith marries Otto the great, who the hairy chested hero of the charge against the Hungarians at Augsburg, who we've already talked about. Play Howard Shaw. This is what underpinned your last monologue. And also he's bringing up Viking princes in his court.

So he brings up a Norwegian prince called Haken, who will go back and become the first Christian king of Norway. So he's a figure absolutely of of kind of european status and and when we were doing the tournament some people on twitter um you know sort of as is so often the way people used the the sort of slightly spurious device of our of our tournament to sort of air their own cultural preoccupations and stuff so there were Catholics saying, you should vote for Athelstan

because he's a believer in the true faith and like the heretic Elizabeth and so on. But there were a few people who were sort of saying, oh, Athelstan would be the Remainer-ish vote because he's plugged into Europe and he believes himself to be a good European and all this stuff. I mean, is that completely ridiculous and spurious?

Yeah, of course it is. I mean, there's no point. But he sees himself as part of a European family. Absolutely. As Alfred had done, which is why he'd gone to Rome. Yeah, exactly. Yes, Athelstan sees himself as part of a Christian. I mean, he wouldn't call it European.

He'd call it Christian. No, Christendom. He's a part of Christendom. And Athelstan's Christianity is incredibly important to him. Well, come on. I mean, this is a gift to you. Yeah, but I mean, you know, so Athelstan feels that he is king by grace of God. He's an anointed king. And just as Alfred clearly did as well, he feels this incredible pressure that he will

be answerable for the people of England before the day of judgment, that he will have to answer to God for how he's ruled. And so there's this constant sense of anxiety that he has to do right. And you see this in almost all his kind of peacetime legislation. So he's a great lawgiver. And there's this kind of wonderful example of this, that he inherits this law code, which says that children should be put to death at 10. That's harsh. It's also very bad for the future of the species.

Well, so Athelstan says, you know, this is a bit harsh, isn't it? You don't mean all children should be put to death? No, sorry. Yes, criminals. Yes, criminals. Yes, yes, yes, yes. That wouldn't be good. That's positively Herodian. No, that wouldn't be a good policy. No, so children can be put to death if they're convicted of a crime at the age of 10 and so Athelstan says this is you know this is a bit harsh and so he consults with his his bishops and he's always doing this he's always you know he wants to make sure he's doing the right thing and so they they raise the age to 13 oh that's very kind of them but

Athelstan is still worried and there's this you know this scribe writes about he says the king thinks it cruel to have such young people put to death and for such a minor offenses as he has learned is the common practice and so therefore they raise it to 15 so you could say that affelstan you know i mean is more on the guardian than the daily mail side of this yeah you know he's he's he's uh hence all the cancel the angry comments yes well clearly yes, yes. Yes. Yes. Clearly. And what woke Tosh, they would say. But he's also. And again, one of the one of the things that I again, why Athelstan is, I think, not as well known as he should be, is that his character is opaque. It's difficult to get a sense of him as a person but occasionally you do and so there is a charter that is issued in 932 he comes to um to Amesbury not far from Stonehenge and he sits

in court at Christmas uh and on Christmas Eve he issues a charter to um a charter of land a grant of land and in it he says that the person who gets the grant of land can have it but must always provide food and shelter to those who are wandering and homeless and it's obvious that he's thinking of of the holy family going to bethlehem at that point and this anxiety for those who have no shelter those who have who are homeless um so he issues warnings to his reefs to his kind of um let me know his land managers. My wish is that you should always provide the destitute with food. And when he issues his law codes, he issues this kind of vast law code at Greatly. Anyone who's taken the train from Waterloo to Salisbury, Greatly is one of the next to Overton, the Overton window. You have Greatly just down the line.

It's his hill fort he gets he holds this kind of great meeting on the on the hill fort with his bishops issues this law code um and one of the things that he he decrees there is that um uh only the king should issue coinage so this is the basis of the you know what will become basically the english currency the pound in the long run it will become the pound but i'm going back to his personality, I mean, it's so frustrating, isn't it? When you think, I mean, you obviously are so familiar with Suetonius and Tacitus and all the writers on the Roman emperors, on the first emperors and so on.

And you get such a strong sense of the character of Tiberius or Nero or somebody. I mean, we don't even know, do we, really, what he looked like. So Dominic, just on his characters, I just want to say about the thing at Grady, that he issues his law code and he obviously feels that by issuing laws things will then happen but you then get this incredible flash of of impatience that i think is very actually rather tony blairish say you remember tony blair saying he had scars on his

back from trying to make you know things work and they didn't work um and he says i athelstan the king declare that i have learned how inadequately the public peace has been kept relative both to my wishes and to the provisions laid down at Greatly. And so his solution is to issue more laws. And I think there you do get the sense of a very proactive king,

but a king who is frustrated, by the way, that actually, you know, issuing laws doesn't seem to immediately sort everything out. His attempts at public service reform are being frustrated by the inertia of gordon brown yes exactly exactly so i think you you do get flashes of of his personality of his character there but those are tiny aren't they i mean if you're if you were sort of called in as the author of the book on athelstan to advise some hbo series and they said well what what's athelstan? Is he tall? Is he short? Is he irascible?

Is he, I mean, it's very hard. I think he's earnest. I think he's an earnest man. I think he's an earnest man. I think he is dutiful. I think he's visionary. I think he's hardworking. I mean, I think he pushes himself into an early grave and he's clearly incredibly charismatic. So in a sense, I mean, I think that makes him almost a kind of an ideal king. So he's a bit like me, basically. He's very like, yes, he's very like you. And of course, the episode that absolutely defines him

as a charismatic king is when in 937, Constantine, King of Scotland, Owain, the King of Strathclyde, and the son of Guthrith, Olaf Guthrith's son, join in alliance. So that's the King of Scotland, the King of Strathclyde, and the King of Dublin, and launch what will be remembered for generations after as the Great War.

And Athelstan leads a mighty army and meets this Scottish Strathclyde Viking invasion force at a place called Brunanbur and defeats them. A great battle in English history, right? A great battle in English history. The theme of song in this year, King Athelstan, Lord of Earls, ring giver of warriors and his brother as well, Edmund Atheling achieved everlasting glory in battle with the edges of swords near Brunanbur.

The problem is we don't know where Brunanbur is. Right. No idea at all, Tom? Well, some people say it's Bromborough on the Wirral. Right. Others, Michael Wood argues that it's by the Humber. For what it's worth, I mean, I think we will never know for sure, but I would guess that, I mean, the likeliest place, if you're thinking of Vikings from Dublin and people from Scotland coming,

it's probably somewhere on the Cumbrian coast, I would have thought. Yeah. I mean, it seems the likeliest place, but we'll never know. Athelstan wins, and what is the consequence of that? Is it merely to return to the status quo of an overlordship of Britain? Or does it mean... Yes, essentially. But he dies a couple of years later after that.

I think basically worn out. And everything then falls to pieces. Well, here's the thing, Tom. If he's the greatest king and it all falls to pieces, I mean, that doesn't say much for the other kings. I mean, his legacy is fragmented and flawed. Well, think what it says is is that it speaks volumes about his prestige because the fact that he dies the vikings come back they recapture york um they penetrate so far south actually that they they sack tamworth the capital of this year um but that passage i

read from the great epic poem on um on brunenbergmund Atheling, that is Athelstan's younger half-brother. And he succeeds. And he very rapidly takes back York. He gets up into Strathclyde. He defeats the Strathclydes. He asserts his dominance over the whole of Britain again. The Vikings come back one last time. So that's Eric Bloodaxe.

But basically, they die on the kind of the moors Britain again. The Vikings come back one last time. So that's Eric Bloodaxe. But basically they die on the kind of the moors above York. And that is then it from that point on. So Edgar, who is Athelstan's nephew, gets crowned at Bath, again, a kind of great Roman city. And from that point on, essentially England is established. Its borders are established. Its monarchy is established.

Its currency is established. Its language, its its its its monarchy is established its currency is established its language its religion it's all unitary and that this kind of precocious nation state has been established now you talked about tolkien there is this fabulous theory mentioned by the clerk of oxford um eleanor park i don't know if you've come across it she has on twitter yeah yeah wonderful wonderful writer about the anglo-saxon ritual year but also generally about anglo-saxon saints and the church and myths more generally. And she suggested that perhaps C.S. Lewis, the Narnia stories, that you remember that Edmund is the kind of the younger brother and Peter becomes the king of Kaer Paravell. Edmund is seduced by Turkish delight. But perhaps Peter is modelled on Athelstan, which I think...

Really? Yeah, I love that theory. Do you think that's true? Who knows? I don't know. But it's a great theory. So Athelstan has created England. He's not created Britain, though, has he? No, he creates England. Yeah. And that idea, even though there's disasters to come, with more Danes much further down the line, and Knut and then the Normans. That idea that Athelstan has created of an – I mean, use the phrase nation state.

I mean, historians, I've heard historians like Patrick Wormald argue about England as a state and all this kind of thing. So arguably, possibly the world's first true nation state. Denmark would be its only rival yes exactly and i think again that's interesting that that denmark and england that their history is so intimately kind of tied up with each other at this point but the the process of fighting each other and learning from each other uh helps to create these yeah i think i think you can call them nation states without too much risk of anachronism. And that's Athelstan's achievement, you think? I do.

A different king, somebody less skilful, less fierce, less pious, would not have been able to achieve that, do you think? I think, you know, we said this before, that Athelstan is the heir of Alfred and Athelflad and Edward. And really, the creation of England is a tribute to all four of those remarkable figures but athelstan plays you know he is the he is the man who forges what we can recognize today as england okay so tom two questions before we go first of all if athelstan

is such a titanic figure why is he not better known, I know he had a lot of fun with the Daily Mail comments, but the truth is most people walking down the street in England probably have barely heard of him. So why do you think he fell out of the public imagination in that way? Well, I think that there's a kind of very broad answer to that, which is that 1066 plays such a key role in the imagination of the English that almost everything before that has been erased. So secondary school, you go to secondary school, you study 1066, you don't study the making of England. I mean, I think the French or the Americans would find that very peculiar. I think also it's the fact that, you know, as we've said, he's a slightly shadowy figure. So one of the reasons why Alfred is remembered is that this bishop called Asser wrote a life of him.

William of Malmesburybury who i've mentioned before athelstan gets buried at malmsbury um in fact you asked what does athelstan look like um according to william malmsbury his grave got opened up and there were kind of long golden braids were still had still survived so and athelstan was it was a slight man of average height so that's the description of him um william of marsbury says that there was a book a life of athelstan that he was drawing on uh it's lost but the book is lost um michael wood again is wonderful on this trying to kind of resurrect what it might have said and what it might have been um but i think i think he's a kind of shadowy figure but i think above all

it's it's his his labors were so great that we have come to take them for granted. I think people in England tend to take the existence of England for granted. People think England's always existed. It could have been Germany, couldn't it? It could have been fragmented for so long. Absolutely. Because England kind of maps onto roughly the Roman province of Britannia, there's a kind of assumption that England exists right back into primordial times. But it's simply not the case. As I said, Great Britain could have been divided up in very, very different ways. fact that England exists that you have this unitary kingdom which contains the Angles and

the Saxons a kingdom that it is entirely appropriate and legitimate to call Anglo-Saxon is entirely down I mean is hugely hugely down to Athelstan and I think it's kind of wonderful that he's won. Well why did he win Tom I mean 84,000 votes, he was the punter's choice, very narrowly beating Elizabeth I, who obviously was the massive favourite, and understandably. Why do you think, is it, what does that say about our listeners,

that you think? Well, I think it's a tribute to the immense historical literacy and good sense of our listeners. I suppose I've been draining on about Athelstan for so long that perhaps some of my followers may have been influenced by that. Perhaps. I don't know. But I think that there has been a kind of process of rediscovery of this particular period.

I think Michael Wood has played a crucial role. Yeah. But I think more generally, you know, you've had The Last Kingdom, the Bernard Cornwall novels adapted into TV series. You've got the Vikings. Yeah. But I think more generally, you know, you've had The Last Kingdom, the Bernard Cornwall novels adapted into TV series. You've got The Vikings. And it may be that the kind of the strains that the United Kingdom is coming under, the kind of the rise of Scottish nationalism perhaps has in England has kind of awoken an interest in, you know, where does England come from? Yeah, I'm sure that's true. I'm sure that's true. I mean, what I would say is that the story of the House of Wessex from Alfred through to Athelstan and his heirs shows how hard it is to forge the United Kingdom

out of different constituent parts and how heroic I think the effort is. Very good. Well, that's great news and much to end. So, Tom, we will be back on Monday with beginning the great tournament roundup by looking at the losers, by looking at people like Oliver Cromwell,

George V, Henry VII, Henry II, a great range of characters. So we'll be back doing that on Monday. We'll have probably another podcast, I should imagine, on then the people who got to the later rounds. And you can go back to that podcast that we did with Tracy Borman if you go to our sort of...

However you access our podcast. I don't know how you do it. But anyway, you can go back and you can find our podcast about Elizabeth I. But this is Athelstan's day, isn't it? It is. So well done to Athelstan.

They're dancing in the meat halls. They are. They're dancing in the streets of Tamworth, of Wolverhampton, of Winchester. And on that note, have a great weekend and we will see you next time. Goodbye. Chwet. Thanks for listening to The Rest is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community,

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