BBC King Alfred and the Anglo Saxons_3of3_Aethelstan The First King of England
Transcript
00:00In around the year 980, a member of the English royal family wrote a history of England for
00:15his cousin in Germany, looking back on the great events of their times.
00:24My dearest Matilda, he wrote, here you'll find the story of our family, a tale of so
00:31many wars and the killings of men, the shipwreck of navies on the waves of the ocean.
00:40Now your uncle was King Athelstan.
00:44In his time the barbarian forces were overcome on all sides and England emerged as the victor.
00:54The fields of Britain became one, there was peace everywhere and abundance of all things.
01:02He was a mighty king, worthy of high honour.
01:16Among all the great rulers of British history, Athelstan today is the forgotten man.
01:21But in his time a continental poet thought him an English Charlemagne.
01:26His nicknames in Scandinavia were the Faithstrong and the Victorious.
01:31To the Irish he was the Pillar of the West, to the Welsh the King of Kings, to the Scots
01:37simply the Bastard.
01:40But Athelstan will turn the dream of Alfred the Great into reality, a kingdom of all the
02:16world.
02:35This is the tale of how the Kingdom of England was created in the Viking Age by the most
02:40remarkable family in British history.
02:46And the third great figure in this story is Athelstan.
02:50But the most surprising thing about him is that when we look for contemporary accounts
02:54there's almost nothing.
02:59We've come back to the source we followed through this tale, the Anglo-Saxon chronicle.
03:05The chronicle tells how King Alfred resisted the Vikings and created a single kingdom of
03:10the old rivals Wessex and Mercia, a kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.
03:18It tells how his son and daughter expanded the kingdom and conquered the Viking Midlands
03:23and East Anglia.
03:26But when it comes to Athelstan, there's a surprise.
03:30Athelstan's the most powerful ruler that Britain has seen since the Romans, and you would have
03:35expected the Anglo-Saxon chronicle to wax lyrical about these great deeds of the dynasty.
03:40The grandson, after all, of Alfred the Great.
03:43But something very strange happens in this manuscript.
03:48No account is written of the reign of Athelstan.
03:51Only 16 years after Athelstan's death was a new booklet inserted which gives us four
03:59facts.
04:01His accession, his death, and his wars.
04:06Somebody in Winchester clearly didn't see Athelstan as being quite the legitimate successor
04:12to the throne of the West Saxons.
04:22To find out why, we need to go back to Winchester, the capital of Wessex, in the last days of
04:29Alfred's life.
04:36At that time, Athelstan was Alfred's only grandson, and just before he died, Alfred
04:41knighted him with the symbols of kingship.
04:47Seeing the boy's graceful manners and handsome looks, Alfred affectionately embraced him
04:53and gave him a Saxon sword, a jewelled scabbard, belt and cloak, in omen of a kingdom.
05:02A poem was presented to the little boy, punning on his name.
05:07Prince, you're called Athelstan, noble stone.
05:12Take this as a happy omen for your life.
05:16You will be a royal rock, fighting fearsome demons.
05:24But take the holy path of learning too, and if peace comes, I pray that you may seek and
05:31God may grant the promise of your noble name.
05:48But in the Middle Ages, a year was a long time in politics.
05:52After Alfred's death, Athelstan's father, King Edward, married and had other sons by
05:57his queen.
05:59Athelstan was sent to be brought up by his aunt, Aethelflaed, in Mercia.
06:08Athelstan was brought up at that Mercian court, and his formative years must have been passed
06:16in her orbit.
06:19She would be telling him the stories about her father and about her education at his
06:25court.
06:27I think it's impossible to describe Athelstan's personality without looking at Aethelflaed's
06:34input into it.
06:41So Athelstan grew up in Mercia.
06:44He was educated in Latin letters.
06:46He trained to fight and hunt with the Mercian thanes in the rolling hills of the Forest
06:52of Dene.
06:56As a young man, he must have fought in his aunt's campaigns in the Danelaw, where he
07:00earned a name for courage and nerve.
07:12But as he grew up in Mercia, did Athelstan still think, despite his father's remarriage,
07:19that he was the true heir to the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons?
07:22Now, remember the care with which Alfred the Great had tried to ensure that the succession
07:30would pass down peacefully through his descendants.
07:35But look at this.
07:37There's Alfred's son, Edward.
07:39And Edward had at least 14 children by three different wives, two of whom were anointed
07:45queens.
07:48Here's the sons.
07:49His heir as king of Wessex, Alfweard, who's in his twenties.
07:54The next heir, Eadwin, his brother, also in his twenties.
08:00And here in the middle, Athelstan.
08:04He's the oldest.
08:06He's the son of a lesser consort.
08:10It says here in French at the side that Athelstan was warlike and courageous and greatly feared.
08:18And the most handsome man that ever lived.
08:22The stage was set for a typical medieval succession crisis.
08:30And that's exactly what happened.
08:35After Athelflead's death, King Edward marched into Mercia, but in 924, the Mercians revolted
08:41against him.
08:42And on the campaign, Edward died near Chester.
08:48Then only days later, so did his chosen heir, Athelstan's half-brother, Alfweard.
08:54And now the Mercians chose Athelstan as their king.
09:04Here in Winchester, it must have seemed it was one piece of bad news after another.
09:10The Mercians are in revolt in the northwest.
09:13The king has died suppressing the rebellion.
09:16His heir apparent in Wessex, King Alfweard, doesn't even get back home.
09:20He dies mysteriously 16 days later.
09:24Rumours swirling of plots and intrigue, murder maybe.
09:32And then to cap it all, the Mercians have elected Athelstan not as their lord, but as
09:37their king.
09:40At that point in the story, it must have seemed that the joint kingdom of Wessex and Mercia
09:46created by Alfred the Great, was about to be torn apart.
09:55But to save the family project, Athelstan now offered a deal.
09:59He wouldn't marry or have heirs.
10:01He'd be a kind of caretaker king.
10:05He's not known ever to have married.
10:07There was a certain way of avoiding tensions in royal dynasties in some adult men renouncing
10:19family and heirs in order to make way for younger brothers or nephews.
10:26The Franks occasionally tried this, kings in Spain in this period also tried this.
10:32It was an option.
10:35But it still took a year of infighting before he was accepted in Wessex.
10:41And even then, there was a plot to blind him before he was crowned.
10:52No wonder then that he was strategic in his choice of coronation place.
10:59He was crowned not in Wessex or in Mercia, but on the border between the two at Kingston
11:06on Thames.
11:12Kingston had the only bridge across the Thames other than the London Bridge up until about
11:161750, I think.
11:18And so presumably, the king of Wessex comes to the edges of his kingdom so that he can
11:24then bring his lords over from Mercia and begin joining together all that national story.
11:30Yeah, if you're bidding to be king of all the English, then a place on the boundary
11:35between the two key kingdoms, the West Saxons and the Mercians, would be ideal.
11:43He was crowned here on the 4th of September, 925.
11:48It was the first English coronation.
11:51Kingston said, on a great wooden platform set up in the marketplace in front of Kingston
11:56Church.
12:00And if you'd been here that day, what you would have seen was a series of carefully
12:04orchestrated ritual tableaus of dramatic scenes in which the archbishop and the bishops anointed
12:12him, gave him the sword, the sword of justice, the ring and the rod and the sceptre.
12:18And then, on his head, they put the crown, and Athelstan's the first British monarch
12:23in our history to be portrayed wearing a crown.
12:36And he was crowned in the name of the two peoples, the West Saxons and the Mercians.
12:45For if one kingdom of England was ever to emerge, it couldn't happen without the two
12:50of them.
12:56When the ceremonies were over here at Kingston, there was a great coronation banquet for all
13:00the court, overflowing with fine food and wine.
13:04But before the king left the church, he performed one last intimate ritual.
13:10In front of the altar, he freed a slave.
13:34This is a book which Athelstan seems to have had with him at the time of his coronation.
13:40It's obviously a book of great importance to him.
13:44And he's used it to record this act of his.
13:49It's a good act for a king to perform at the time of his coronation.
13:54The highest and the lowest in the land associated in the same inscription.
13:58That's a nice way to put it, yes.
14:00He's keen to get his credit for this, and it's obviously an act which will benefit Athelstan
14:07as much as it will benefit the person he is freeing.
14:13So he'd won the crown.
14:15He was 30 years old, and, as he believed, called by God.
14:21But he's also a politician, a man with nerve.
14:38But he still faced many threats.
14:41Beyond the Humber, Northumbria was ruled by a powerful Viking dynasty, whose empire stretched
14:46across the Irish Sea to Dublin and the Western Isles.
14:56Wary of Athelstan's warlike reputation, they immediately sent ambassadors.
15:02And in New Year 926, he met them at the old Mercian royal centre of Tamworth.
15:11Here in a great ceremony, he married his sister to Citrich, the pagan Viking king of Northumbria.
15:22Citrich accepted baptism as part of the deal with Athelstan as his sponsor, his godparent.
15:29Lots of later legends here in Tamworth about this tale.
15:32And those beautiful windows up there by William Morris give you the story.
15:37There's Athelstan on the left, giving away his sister.
15:40There she is, Edith, in white, receiving a ring from her rather handsome Viking husband-to-be.
15:48Not the grizzled, one-eyed veteran of history.
15:51And next to them, the Bishop of Lichfield, Elder, a central figure in Athelstan's regime.
15:58It's a fascinating moment in the story of Viking Age England.
16:02The granddaughter of the most Christian king, Alfred the Great, is marrying the grandson
16:08of Ivar the Boneless, the bloodthirsty Viking who died on campaign in Repton 50 years before
16:15and was buried with human sacrifice at the graveside.
16:20But Athelstan's accepting the facts on the ground.
16:24Scandinavian England is here to stay.
16:27And on this spot, Citrich is honoured as a descendant of the royal line of the race
16:33of the Danes.
16:40So Athelstan had begun his long-term plan, after 60 years of war, to bring peace to the
16:47Isles of Britain.
16:52Back in Winchester, like a new president, he surrounds himself with his own men and
16:57a think tank from all over Europe.
17:01And it's the people around Athelstan at this moment that are really interesting.
17:05Werolf the Priest, famous Mercian scholar who was part of Alfred the Great's translation
17:11team.
17:12Walter, Gundloff and Hildwin are German names.
17:17Dubleter is an Irish abbot and scholar.
17:21Petrus, a Frankish learned man and poet.
17:26This is Athelstan's courtly circle, his intellectual bodyguard around him in the potentially hostile
17:33atmosphere of Winchester.
17:37But looking over his shoulder at that moment is his father's next chosen heir, Prince Edwin.
17:45Edwin Cliton, Prince Atheling Edwin, his half-brother.
17:52If Athelstan had agreed not to marry and not to beget heirs in becoming king, then this
17:59is the heir apparent, and Edwin will play a very dramatic role in the story that follows.
18:12For the moment, Athelstan's rule was secure.
18:16But the next year, 927, the politics of Britain changed with dramatic speed.
18:42Athelstan, now armed for war across the whole of Britain, wrote his court poet Petrus, spearheaded
18:59by his armour-bearing thanes.
19:05Bitteridge of Northumbria had rejected the king's sister and renounced Christianity,
19:10but then died.
19:17And when his kinsmen came over from Dublin to claim their kingdom, Athelstan invaded
19:22Northumbria and drove them out.
19:30And now he sends ambassadors to the kings of the Scots and the Strathclyde Welsh, calling
19:35them to a peace conference in Cumbria.
19:40This is Eamon Bridge.
19:42This is where Athelstan met Constantine, the king of the Scots, Owain, the king of the
19:47Strathclyde Welsh and the Cumbrians, and Ealdred and Uchtred, the lords of Bamburgh, the Anglo-Saxon
19:54rulers of northern Northumbria.
19:56The Anglo-Saxon chronicle mentions kings of Wales, too, the king of Gwent and Hywel Dda
20:01of Dyfod, the future lawgiver.
20:04Maybe they came here, too.
20:16Here the northern kings acknowledged Athelstan as the supreme king of Britain.
20:23It was a turning point in British history.
20:37Guided by God-given dreams, as well as by realpolitik, Athelstan was determined that
20:43this would be a Christian empire, and before the kings parted, they went to a little village
20:50called Dacre.
20:54So why did Athelstan bring the kings of Britain out to this lonely valley above Ullswater?
20:59Well, the answer is that.
21:07Dacre was an Anglo-Saxon monastery from the 7th century.
21:11It's mentioned by Bede that St Cuthbert was supposed to have performed one of his miracles
21:16here.
21:17So they came here because it was a sacred place, and it was on this spot that they would
21:22have performed their solemn oaths against idolatry, death or guilt, and made their pact
21:30of peace.
21:37Writing back to the royal family in Winchester, his court poet was jubilant.
21:42Let her wing your way back to the palace.
21:46King Athelstan lives, glorious through his deeds.
21:50This England is now complete.
22:04So Athelstan had power, but what he still wanted was legitimacy.
22:14That summer, 927, he sends an embassy to Rome with his archbishop, Wulfhelm, and the famous
22:20Welsh king, Hywel Dda.
22:26The new archbishop was to receive his spiritual authority from the pope himself.
22:37And the pope would give his blessing to Athelstan's Christian empire.
22:45The king is fired up now by his own sense of history, his awareness that he is guiding
22:50great events.
22:53The ancient Roman historians had spoken of a tripartite world, Europe, Africa and Asia,
22:59with Britain beyond the edge.
23:06Now Athelstan would claim to rule the world of Britain, a Christian empire with the authority
23:13of St Peter.
23:22Athelstan's pan-British embassy to Rome will have spent two or three months here, and then
23:27begun the return journey in the new year of 928, and over the next six years, a revolution
23:34will take place in English government as far-reaching, if not more so, than the Angevins and the
23:41Tudors.
23:42This is the moment for Athelstan's visionary kingdom of all the English.
23:55When the embassy returned, Athelstan held a great Easter council in Exeter.
24:01The sacred flame, he said, has blown across the tripartite world.
24:07In this third year of my reign, which there is now no doubt is gifted by God.
24:17And so he began his project with laws on charity and a ferocious clampdown on crime.
24:27And he's already moving fast.
24:31It's as if he thought he didn't have much time, and was desperate to turn his ideas
24:36into reality.
24:41No biography has survived for him as it has for Alfred, so his story has to be pieced
24:46together from fragments, inscriptions, burned manuscripts.
24:53And one key aspect of his revolution in government is revealed in an unlikely source, the king's
24:58land grants.
24:59Although it's only a land document, I say only, but it gives us a vision of his kingdom
25:05in that moment, doesn't it?
25:06Yes, I think the point about these royal diplomas is that any one of these on its own is interesting
25:13up to a point.
25:15From a historian's point of view, the interest of these documents is completely transformed
25:20when you put them all together.
25:24Because these charters are dated, because they're localised, you can begin to see how
25:29the king moves from one part of the country to another.
25:34So yes, these are the documents that represent the first flush of enthusiasm for this new
25:39kingdom of the English.
25:44And in this new kingdom, the king demanded control and wanted feedback.
25:49So he travelled constantly, holding regular gatherings of local and national leaders.
25:59One of these was held in November 931 at Lifton in Devon.
26:29There must be a hundred or so people named in this charter.
26:43One imagines certainly that there would have been two, three, four hundred people present
26:48at the meeting.
26:49Maybe thousands.
26:50Even more, yes.
26:51And certainly the bishops are certainly not going to be travelling on their own.
26:58So many hundreds of people needed to be fed and temporarily housed, from support staff
27:04to the king himself.
27:06We can begin here with Ego Athelstanus.
27:09So you have I Athelstan, King of Britain, he's called there.
27:13Then you have Ego Wulfhelm, he's the Archbishop of Canterbury.
27:20Here in the far west of Devon were Viking earls from the Danelaw, feasting with the
27:25kings of Wales.
27:28And then, most interestingly, you have Ego Haul Subregulus, Welsh sub-king.
27:36So the Welsh kings have come down to Lifton in Devon in November and are acknowledging
27:40Athelstan as the supreme king of Britain then, Simon?
27:43That is certainly the impression that this charter of Athelstan is creating, yes.
27:49As I say, whether the Welsh would have seen it quite that way is another matter.
28:01The world had changed.
28:04A whole new agenda was on offer, which was this notion of consensus, of collaboration,
28:10of assemblies as the place where you shape policy together.
28:16It had to be happening in assemblies beyond the court, in the shires, in the hundreds.
28:23And in these places, landowners and royal agents communed with each other and came to
28:30share an ideology which bound the king and his people together as divinely approved.
28:44So in the mundane record of the king's journeys, you can glimpse the growth of English government
28:50and even the origins of parliament.
28:57Lawmaking is one of the most important aspects of assembly functions.
29:04Athelstan makes laws on a large scale.
29:07That looks fantastic.
29:11There's clearly also a good deal of give-and-take, general discussion between the king and his
29:17great men.
29:19There's one instance in one of Athelstan's scorecodes where he says there are complaints
29:23about disorder, and he says, my counsellors have said that I have suffered this too long.
29:30And there's clearly a sense there of give-and-take, the counsellors putting up a point, making
29:34a complaint, and the king responding.
29:43He apologises for the state of the nation.
29:47My counsellors say I've borne it too long.
29:49But then he sends a messenger following on the latest lawmaking session.
29:56We all grew up with the idea that Simon de Montfort is the founder of the English parliament.
30:23But you're suggesting we should look much further back in time.
30:26Legislation, political discussion, consensual politics, the sort of thing that goes on in
30:3413th century politics.
30:36And you can trace, I think, a clear line through in terms of the history of large assemblies
30:41straight through from Athelstan to the 13th century parliament.
30:44Of course, a lot changes, but there is a clear line of continuity.
30:55And to see how it all worked at grassroots, we've come to a borough built by Alfred the
31:00Great, and especially favoured by Athelstan.
31:05We're just outside the little town of Malmsbury in Wiltshire, on the northern edge of the
31:10West Saxon kingdom in Anglo-Saxon times.
31:14Just over the Avon into Gloucestershire, that's Mercia.
31:17And from at least as far back as the 14th century, the townsfolk here have believed
31:23that these fields were given to the town by King Athelstan.
31:30And believe it or not, even today, these fields, known as the King's Heath, are administered
31:37by King Athelstan's court.
31:45To help enforce his laws, all free men had to swear a solemn oath of loyalty to him.
31:53Oyez, oyez, oyez.
31:56All persons come forward and do your business in a peaceful manner.
32:03Warden and Freeman of Malmsbury, King Athelstan's feast day court was held in the old courthouse
32:09on Tuesday the 12th of June 2012 before M. Westmacott, Warden, O. Pike, N. O. J. Pike.
32:17To break your oath was treason to the King.
32:23To break the warden's oath, you shall swear that you will well and truly execute the office
32:28of warden of this corporation.
32:30You shall maintain, support and uphold all the rights, liberties, immunities, privileges
32:37and franchises of the corporation.
32:44So Athelstan's subjects were bound by the sworn oath in village tithings and the courts
32:50of Hundred and Shire.
32:52So it's wonderful seeing these ancient English traditions still in action, isn't it Oliver?
32:57The warden and free burgesses of Malmsbury have a direct link to Athelstan via the 500
33:03acres that he gave us in recognition of our assistance in his fight with the Danes.
33:10So there's the direct link, you can't get away from that.
33:14The King, in a nutshell, was creating an allegiance to his person, but most of all to his law.
33:23A key idea in English history.
33:39Athelstan also fixed England's physical frontiers.
33:43Across the Tamar, the Cornish too now became part of England for the first time.
33:49Forty years on from Alfred's Viking Wars, Athelstan overhauls his defensive network
33:55of boroughs.
33:56He closes some down and turns others into centres of trade and civic life.
34:04In Exeter, he restored the Roman walls, laid out streets and housing plots, encouraging
34:10merchants to settle.
34:13But markets need outlets.
34:25Athelstan granted to Exeter the old Roman port on the River Exe, a place, as he put
34:32it, known to the locals as Toppersham.
34:37Morning.
34:40Morning.
34:42Salmon fishermen.
34:44Those boats are for salmon fishery.
34:46Grant of Topsham to Exeter in the 10th century mentions these fisheries.
34:52Still doing it.
34:56Topsham would grow rich on Exeter's trade.
35:00Wool from Devon, tin and silver from Cornwall.
35:04So trade came with the revival of the English town.
35:12In Athelstan's time, it was said, the standard of living started to rise.
35:16There was plenty in the shops.
35:21But markets must have money.
35:34The only authority for the currency now was the king, who took a cut of the profits of
35:50each mint.
35:53By the end of the 10th century, nowhere in southern England was more than 15 miles from
35:57a mint.
35:59The English people were getting used to living in a money economy.
36:12We have here a very nice example from Chester.
36:16In this particular case, we have the name of the king surrounding a cross on one face,
36:24and we have him being called Athelstan Rex Tober, Athelstan, the king of all Britain.
36:31The king of all Britain.
36:33Yes.
36:33And then on this other coin, which is from Winchester, we see again the same title, Athelstan
36:40Rex Tober, king of Totius Britanniae, all Britain.
36:45Completely the other side of the kingdom, but yet using the exact same title, and of
36:49course the same title that is used in his charters and in certain other documents.
36:53The fact that we see it coming through in both types of source really does indicate
36:58that someone at the top of the food chain is issuing a command that it's got to change,
37:03that we've all got to start singing from the same hymn sheet in terms of what we're calling
37:07the king.
37:15So Athelstan was a man in a hurry.
37:17His first six years saw great practical achievements, but culture and learning would also play a
37:23key role in nation building.
37:27His grandfather Alfred had begun the revival of education, and Athelstan took it to the
37:33next level.
37:37You can't put together a collection like this for any other Anglo-Saxon king.
37:43He obviously liked books, and he saw books as a useful tool for him to make his connections
37:52and to establish his networks and so on.
37:57And in his books, you can see too how learning was to be a tool of kingship.
38:04So here you have an extraordinary inscription indicating that this gospel book was given
38:12by King Athelstan to the Church of Canterbury.
38:16Very fancy titles here.
38:18Athelstan, Anglorum, Basileus et Coragulus.
38:22This is all fancy words used in order to express kingship.
38:28Athelstan, king of the English and ruler of the whole of Britain.
38:35He's king not only of the English, but also of the whole of Britain, which is an extraordinary
38:39claim.
38:45When Athelstan was a boy, his grandfather had urged him to follow the path of learning.
38:52And his own book of psalms hints at his personal interests, with its added paintings, its religious
39:00calendar, and its private prayers.
39:04The end, perhaps most surprisingly, series of texts in Greek, the Apostles' Creed, the
39:12and so on.
39:14You can get a real sense of the king as an intellectual, dare one say.
39:22One writer he especially admired was the 7th-century saint, Aldhelm.
39:28To whom, it was said, Athelstan devoted himself body and soul.
39:35And this manuscript of Aldhelm was written by one of the king's scribes.
39:41What you're looking at is 10th-century scholarship.
39:47Almost every word, every phrase is being glossed, i.e. explained and commented on.
39:56And through this manuscript, there are thousands of these.
40:01Perhaps the choice of text also tells us about the unmarried king himself.
40:08Its message that self-control, purity of mind, chastity, is a victory for a man, as great
40:17as victory in battle.
40:21That even a warrior hero must fight his inner demons.
40:30The king spent Christmas 932 at Amesbury in Wiltshire.
40:36And then, out of the blue, comes this.
40:46In this year, 933, King Athelstan ordered his brother Edwin to be drowned at sea.
40:59Many later legends grew up about the drowning of Prince Edwin.
41:04It was said that Athelstan had been turned against his brother by a wicked cup-bearer.
41:11That the councillors of England had tried Edwin in London and drowned him off London
41:15Bridge.
41:16And even better, that Athelstan had deliberately and cruelly had Edwin set afloat in the middle
41:23of the sea in a rotten boat with no oars.
41:31What we know is that Edwin was buried at Saint-Bertin in Flanders.
41:35And there, a chronicler told how King Edwin had drowned at sea, fleeing across the Channel
41:43after upheavals in his kingdom.
41:52Later legends said that Edwin had been unjustly accused of rebellion, that afterwards, weighed
41:59down by guilt, Athelstan did public penance.
42:02Oh, that's magnificent, isn't it?
42:06This is beautiful.
42:09And that he founded a church where prayers would be offered for his brother's soul and
42:14his own sins.
42:16And the foundation of all of this, obviously, was the original church that burnt down, founded
42:21by Athelstan here.
42:23So King Athelstan, in 934, founded the church here, which was then called Middleton, as
42:28a penance for the death of his brother, who he believed was plotting against him.
42:34And he felt so guilty about it, the legend is that he actually built the church here
42:39on this site.
42:41And as we can see in the paintings, very much that he is offering the church to the abbot.
42:48Obviously, Athelstan had behaved in ways, perhaps, which he then regretted.
42:52Strangely enough, in the Irish law codes, there is a punishment of being set to sea
43:01in a boat with no oars, is actually a legal punishment for homicide of brothers, amazingly.
43:08And it's obviously a way in which you don't want to have the blood on your hands of actually
43:14executing somebody.
43:17So you set them to sea, and if God allows them to come back to land, then fine, if not,
43:24it's done with.
43:25So there's an eerie shadow behind the tale, isn't there, really, isn't there?
43:33Absolutely, yeah.
43:34So the succession crisis after his father's death had come back to haunt him.
43:42Athelstan's hard-won authority had been shaken.
43:52The next spring, Constantine, King of the Scots, renounced his allegiance.
44:01And Athelstan now raised a great army to punish Constantine and bring him back into the fold.
44:08934, here for Athelstan Cunning, in on Scotland.
44:16From Winchester on the 28th of May, they rode to Nottingham, and then up into Northumbria.
44:24I'm a land herrer with a land army, a ship herrer with a navy.
44:38On the 1st of July, as the English fleet moved up the east coast, the land army stopped at
44:44Chester-le-Street on the River Weir, the shrine of St. Cuthbert.
44:51Athelstan came here with his grand army from all over Britain.
44:56He came into the little church on this spot, and the priests opened St. Cuthbert's coffin
45:02so the king could actually touch the preserved body and wrap it in the beautiful embroideries
45:09that he'd brought with him.
45:14Athelstan's grandfather, Alfred, had had a vision of St. Cuthbert in his moment of direst
45:19danger in the marshes of Somerset.
45:22Cuthbert had prophesied that Alfred's descendants would become kings of all England and rulers
45:27of Britain.
45:28That had now happened, and Athelstan had come to this place to say thank you and to ask
45:34the saint for his help in the wars that lay ahead.
45:42And then he invaded Scotland, plundering the lands of the Scots and the Picts.
45:48The Northumbrian chronicle says they attacked Dun Fodder,
45:54Dunottar Castle on the coast south of Aberdeen.
46:00In early August, they reached the shores of the Moray Firth, and the fleet went on to
46:05Caithness, the northernmost point of the British mainland.
46:12There had been nothing like it since the expedition of the Roman general Agricola.
46:25Faced by such a show of force, Constantine submitted to Athelstan and came back with
46:31him into England.
46:41But across the British Isles, voices of opposition were growing.
46:46In Wales, a poet now called for the King of Kings to be overthrown, and for the English
46:53to be driven out of Britain, where they had come as landless wanderers 400 years before.
47:01It is a prophetic poem in which it is hoped that there would be an alliance between the
47:08peoples of what I suppose we would term the fringes of the Isles of Britain, to push the
47:15Almyn, the English, out of England.
47:18The idea is that this alliance of Britons, Vikings and the Irish will push them out again
47:25and make them once more the Roamers of the High Seas.
47:54The muse foretells the men of Wessex will see England burn.
48:03When the great battle comes, their dead will be packed too tight to fall.
48:13And in summer 937, the moment came.
48:19That August, a huge Viking fleet left Dublin under King Anlaf Guthrisson, whose kinsmen
48:25Athelstan had driven from York 10 years before.
48:30The Scots and Strathclyde Welsh came overland under King Constantine.
48:37Northumbrian sources say the Viking fleet of 615 ships landed in the Humber.
48:45There, in their chief city of York, the Northumbrians joined the invaders.
48:51Suddenly, Athelstan's northern empire had collapsed.
49:02The axis of the war was probably the Great North Road.
49:10The Allies now began to devastate the lands to the south, to draw Athelstan to them.
49:18That autumn, you have to imagine columns of refugees fleeing away from the smoke as the
49:24Allies, the Scots and the Norse-Irish devastated the lands south of the Humber.
49:35They ravaged everything with incessant plundering raids.
49:40Cutting out the peasants and setting fire to their fields.
49:45Such was the barbarians' mounted strength.
49:52As autumn turned towards winter, Athelstan still didn't move, and now the moneyers in
49:57Nottingham and York stopped putting the king's name on their coins, uncertain how events
50:03would turn out.
50:07And in England, voices were raised against the king.
50:12In his youth, he was fearless and bold, it was said, but he now let precious time slip
50:17by in inaction, while they destroyed everything.
50:34Still, Athelstan refused to be drawn.
50:40A later legend says that he came back to the little chapel of St. Catherine at Milton
50:46to pray for God's help.
50:51And as for what Athelstan might have spoken on this spot at that moment, well, a prayer
50:57survives attributed to him, a prayer before battle in which he asked God to let him fight
51:03well and act manfully, and he begs that his enemies will be destroyed like Pharaoh's
51:11army before the people of Israel.
51:14And at the end of the prayer were a series of dreadful maledictions against the hostile
51:20king and his kingdom.
51:22Tear them apart, O Lord, smash them into dust.
51:27Aggression, anger, sense of betrayal, whoever composed that prayer sounds as if he was contemplating
51:36a fight to the death.
51:43Alone in his private chapel, he prayed on his most sacred relic, a fragment of the true
51:49cross set in a rock crystal.
51:56Meditating on his past sins and the sins which would inevitably come with the slaughter of
52:02thousands in war.
52:07Such were the tensions between being an Anglo-Saxon warrior king and a pious Christian man.
52:16There's a later tradition that Athelstan wore his cross relic around his neck in his
52:20battles, literally arming his soul and protecting his body with one of the most potent relics
52:30in the whole of Christendom.
52:38Then with the armies of Wessex and Mercia, Athelstan attacked.
52:44Athelstan king, Earl of Drichten, Bernard of Berchtesgade and his brother, Erk,
52:51held a long, notorious slogan at such a sword-fighting event in Brunnenburg.
53:01There was a sea of blood on that island.
53:04Hundreds of people fell before that sword-fighting event.
53:13But where Brunnenburg was is still a mystery.
53:36We'll never know for sure what happened in 937.
53:41But my guess is that it was on this stretch of this road that the great war of the 10th
53:48century came to its climax.
54:06The news spread across the northern world.
54:11The battle was immense, lamentable and horrible, they said in Ulster.
54:17It was a black day for the Scots, they said, more savage than anything on record.
54:24He smashed those fierce kings, wrote a Frankish poet.
54:28And by God's will, trod on their proud necks.
54:35There were those who'd criticised his war leadership, but as one of his courtiers wrote
54:40long afterwards, he was experienced and farsighted and very hard to overcome in any conflict.
54:49And so it had proved.
54:55And even 50 years on, the English still called it the Great War.
55:07Athelstan had saved his crown, but in his books are perhaps hints of the troubling
55:12aftermath for him as a Christian.
55:17They contained inscriptions in which Athelstan, A, records that he's the donor of the book,
55:24but B then, yes, asks anybody looking at the inscription to bear him in mind in their prayers.
55:35You who come after me, I ask you for a moment to pray for my soul.
55:41In future times, remember me and forgive me my sins.
56:01The war had united the West Saxons and Mercians in a great national achievement, though it
56:07would be a while yet before the Northumbrians felt part of a new England.
56:12As for the Scots and the Welsh, they are still negotiating their relationship with Athelstan's
56:17successors.
56:22He'd started as a compromise candidate, a caretaker king, but he had carried through
56:27the family plan of his grandfather, Alfred, the creation of an English kingdom with governance
56:34and justice, law and learning, shires, towns and workable institutions.
56:47He had done as his grandfather asked him.
56:51He'd followed the path of wisdom and yet, like the old pagan heroes, fought with all
56:56his might against the demons.
57:03As a man, it was said, he was affable and courteous and beloved by his people who admired
57:08his courage and humility.
57:12But he was like a thunderbolt to his enemies, by his invincible steadfastness.
57:27Athelstan died in 939, in his mid-forties, maybe worn out by the job.
57:33An Irish writer called him, the roof tree of the honour of the Western world.
57:41Athelstan's funeral took place very end of October or early November 939 and he was buried
57:47here in Malmesbury, close to his personal saint, Aldhelm.
57:55He'd reigned for 14 years only, but he'd set a path for the future, building on what his
58:01grandfather and his father and aunt had done.
58:05He'd made real the England that Alfred had dreamed.
58:10And for all the ups and downs of our history ever since, Athelstan's visionary kingdom
58:15of the English would endure, and of course it still does.
58:35Our England's Tudor queens battled to win the hearts of their nation in times of great
58:40upheaval.
58:41Meet the last of our she-wolves tomorrow at 8 here on BBC4.
58:45Next tonight they were off to Vietnam with Peter and Dan Snow to explore another 20th
58:50century battlefield.