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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.
00:23My dearest Matilda, he wrote, here you'll find the story of our family.
00:30A tale of so many wars and the killings of men.
00:34The shipwreck of navies on the waves of the ocean.
00:40Now your uncle was King Athelstan.
00:43In his time the barbarian forces were overcome on all sides.
00:49England emerged as the victor.
00:54The fields of Britain became one.
00:56There was peace everywhere and abundance of all things.
01:02He was a mighty king, worthy of high honour.
01:06Among 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.
01:34To the Welsh, the King of Kings.
01:36To the Scots, simply the Bastard.
01:39But Athelstan will turn the dream of Alfred the Great into reality.
01:44A kingdom of all the English.
02:04THE KING ATHELSTAN
02:34This is the tale of how the Kingdom of England was created in the Viking Age
02:39by the most remarkable family in British history.
02:45And the third great figure in this story is Athelstan.
02:49But the most surprising thing about him is that when we look for contemporary accounts,
02:54there's almost nothing.
02:57We've come back to the source we followed through this tale,
03:01the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
03:04The Chronicle tells how King Alfred resisted the Vikings
03:08and created a single kingdom of the old rivals Wessex and Mercia,
03:13a kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.
03:17It tells how his son and daughter expanded the kingdom
03:21and conquered the Viking Midlands and 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,
03:34and you would have expected the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to wax lyrical
03:38about these great deeds of the dynasty.
03:40The grandson, after all, of Alfred the Great.
03:43But something very strange happens in this manuscript.
03:47No account is written of the reign of Athelstan.
03:51Only 16 years after Athelstan's death was a new booklet inserted,
03:57which gives us four facts.
04:01His accession, his death and his wars.
04:05Somebody in Winchester clearly didn't see Athelstan
04:09as being quite the legitimate successor to the throne of the West Saxons.
04:22To find out why, we need to go back to Winchester,
04:26the capital of Wessex, in the last days of Alfred's life.
04:35At that time, Athelstan was Alfred's only grandson,
04:39and just before he died, Alfred knighted him with the symbols of kingship.
04:46Seeing the boy's graceful manners and handsome looks,
04:50Alfred affectionately embraced him and gave him a Saxon sword,
04:55a 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.
05:27And if peace comes, I pray that you may seek
05:30and God may grant the promise of your noble name.
05:47But in the Middle Ages, a year was a long time in politics.
05:51After Alfred's death, Athelstan's father, King Edward,
05:54married and had other sons by his queen,
05:57and Athelstan was sent to be brought up by his aunt,
06:01Æthelflid, in Mercia.
06:07Athelstan was brought up at that Mercian court,
06:11and his formative years must have been passed in her orbit.
06:18She would be telling him the stories about her father
06:22and about her education at his court.
06:27I think it's impossible to describe Athelstan's personality
06:31without looking at Æthelflid's input into it.
06:36So Athelstan grew up in Mercia.
06:40He was educated in Latin letters.
06:42He trained to fight and hunt with the Mercian thanes
06:47in the rolling hills of the Forest of Dean.
06:52As a young man, he must have fought in his aunt's campaigns in the Danelaw,
06:56where he earned a name for courage and nerve.
07:01But as he grew up in Mercia, did Athelstan still think,
07:05despite his father's remarriage,
07:07that he was the true heir to the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons?
07:13Now, remember the care with which Alfred the Great
07:16had tried to ensure that the succession of his sons
07:20was a success.
07:22He was a man of great ambition.
07:25But look at this.
07:26There's Alfred's son, Edward.
07:28And Edward had at least 14 children,
07:32by three different wives,
07:34two of whom were anointed queens.
07:37Here's the sons.
07:39His heir as king of Wessex,
07:41Ælfwyrd, who was in his twenties.
07:44The next heir,
07:45his son,
07:46his son,
07:47his son,
07:48his son,
07:49his son,
07:50his son,
07:51his son,
07:52his son,
07:53his son,
07:54the next heir,
07:55Eadwyn, his brother, also in his twenties.
07:59And here in the middle,
08:01Athelstan.
08:04He's the oldest.
08:05He's the son of a lesser consort.
08:09It says here in French at the side
08:12that Athelstan was warlike and courageous
08:16and greatly feared
08:18and the most handsome man that ever lived.
08:22The stage was set
08:23for a typical medieval succession crisis.
08:29And that's exactly what happened.
08:33After Athelflead's death,
08:35King Edward marched into Mercia,
08:38but in 924,
08:39the Mercians revolted against him
08:42and on the campaign,
08:43Edward died near Chester.
08:46And then only days later,
08:48so did his chosen heir,
08:50Athelstan's half-brother, Elfweird.
08:55And now the Mercians
08:57chose Athelstan as their king.
09:03Here in Winchester,
09:04it must have seemed
09:05it was one piece of bad news after another.
09:09The Mercians are in revolt in the northwest.
09:12The king has died suppressing the rebellion.
09:16His heir apparent in Wessex, King Elfweird,
09:18doesn't even get back home.
09:20He dies mysteriously 16 days later.
09:24Rumours swirling of plots and intrigue,
09:28murder maybe.
09:31And then to cap it all,
09:32the Mercians have elected Athelstan
09:35not as their lord, but as their king.
09:40At that point in the story,
09:42it must have seemed
09:43that the joint kingdom of Wessex and Mercia
09:45created by Alfred the Great
09:47was about to be torn apart.
09:54But to save the family project,
09:56Athelstan now offered a deal.
09:59He wouldn't marry or have heirs.
10:01He'd be a kind of caretaker king.
10:04He's not known ever to have married.
10:06There was a certain way
10:09of avoiding tensions in royal dynasties
10:14in some adult men
10:17renouncing family and heirs
10:21in order to make way for younger brothers or nephews.
10:25The Franks occasionally tried this.
10:28Kings in Spain in this period also tried this.
10:31It was an option.
10:35But it still took a year of infighting
10:37before he was accepted in Wessex.
10:42And even then, there was a plot to blind him
10:45before he was crowned.
10:51No wonder then that he was strategic
10:54in his choice of coronation place.
10:59He was crowned not in Wessex or in Mercia,
11:02but on the border between the two
11:05at Kingston-on-Thames.
11:12Kingston had the only bridge across the Thames
11:15other than London Bridge up until about 1750, I think.
11:18And so, presumably, the King of Wessex
11:20comes to the edges of his kingdom
11:23so that he can then bring his lords over from Mercia
11:26and begin joining together all that national story.
11:30Yeah, yeah, if you're bidding to be king of all the English,
11:33then a place on the boundary between the two key kingdoms,
11:36the West Saxons and the Mercians, would be ideal.
11:42He was crowned here on the 4th of September, 925.
11:47It was the first English coronation.
11:50Tradition said, on a great wooden platform
11:53set up in the marketplace in front of Kingston Church.
11:59And if you'd been here that day,
12:01what you would have seen was a series of carefully orchestrated
12:05ritual tableaus of dramatic scenes
12:09in which the archbishop and the bishops anointed him,
12:12gave him the sword, the sword of justice,
12:15the ring and the rod and the sceptre.
12:18And then, on his head, they put the crown.
12:20And Athelstan's the first British monarch in our history
12:23to be portrayed wearing a crown.
12:32And he was crowned in the name of the two peoples,
12:37the West Saxons and the Mercians.
12:42For if one kingdom of England was ever to emerge,
12:46it couldn't happen without the two of them.
12:53When the ceremonies were over here at Kingston,
12:55there was a great coronation banquet for all the court,
12:58overflowing with fine food and wine.
13:01But before the king left the church,
13:03he performed one last intimate ritual.
13:07In front of the altar, he freed a slave.
13:29This is a book which Athelstan seems to have had with him
13:33at the time of his coronation.
13:36It's obviously a book of great importance to him.
13:40And he's used it to record this act of his.
13:45It's a good act for a king to perform at the time of his coronation.
13:50The highest and the lowest in the land
13:53associated with the same inscription
13:55It's a nice way to put it, yes.
13:57He's keen to get his credit for this,
14:00and it's obviously an act which will benefit Athelstan
14:04as much as it will benefit the person he is freeing.
14:09So he'd won the crown.
14:12He was 30 years old and, as he believed, called by God.
14:17But he's also a politician, a man with nerve.
14:23MUSIC PLAYS
14:34But he still faced many threats.
14:37Beyond the Humber, Northumbria was ruled by a powerful Viking dynasty
14:42whose empire stretched across the Irish Sea
14:45to Dublin and the Western Isles.
14:49Wary of Athelstan's warlike reputation,
14:52they immediately sent ambassadors.
14:55And in New Year 926,
14:57he met them at the old Mercian royal centre of Tamworth.
15:04Here, in a great ceremony, he married his sister to Citric,
15:08the pagan Viking king of Northumbria.
15:13Citric accepted baptism as part of the deal
15:17with Athelstan as his sponsor, his godparent.
15:20Lots of later legends here in Tamworth about this tale,
15:23and those beautiful windows up there by William Morris
15:26give you the story.
15:29There's Athelstan on the left, giving away his sister.
15:32There she is, Edith, in white.
15:34And, of course, there's his wife,
15:36who he's married to, and he's given away his sister.
15:40There she is, Edith, in white,
15:42receiving 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, Ella,
15:54a central figure in Athelstan's regime.
15:57It's a fascinating moment in the story of Viking Age England.
16:02The granddaughter of the most Christian king, Alfred the Great,
16:07is marrying the grandson of Ivar the Boneless,
16:10the bloodthirsty Viking who died on campaign
16:13in Repton 50 years before,
16:15and was buried with human sacrifice at the graveside.
16:19But Athelstan's accepting the facts on the ground.
16:23Scandinavian England is here to stay.
16:26And on this spot, Citric is honoured
16:29as a descendant of the royal line of the race of the Danes.
16:38So Athelstan had begun his long-term plan,
16:42after 60 years of war, to bring peace to the Isles of Britain.
16:51Back in Winchester, like a new president,
16:54he surrounds himself with his own men,
16:56and a think tank from all over Europe.
16:59And it's the people around Athelstan at this moment
17:02that are really interesting.
17:04Werolf the Priest, famous Mercian scholar
17:08who was part of Alfred the Great's translation team.
17:12Walter Gundloff and Hildwyn are German names.
17:16Dubleter is an Irish abbot and scholar.
17:20Petrus, a Frankish learned man and poet.
17:25This is Athelstan's courtly circle, his intellectual bodyguard
17:30around him in the potentially hostile atmosphere of Winchester.
17:36But looking over his shoulder at that moment
17:39is his father's next chosen heir, Prince Edwin.
17:44Edwin Cliton.
17:47Prince Atheling Edwin, his half-brother.
17:51If Athelstan had agreed not to marry
17:54and not to beget heirs in becoming king,
17:58then this is the heir apparent.
18:01And Edwin will play a very dramatic role in the story that follows.
18:11For the moment, Athelstan's rule was secure.
18:15But the next year, 927,
18:17the politics of Britain changed with dramatic speed.
18:21DRAMATIC MUSIC
18:46DRAMATIC MUSIC
18:51Athelstan, now armed for war across the whole of Britain,
18:55wrote his court poet Petrus,
18:58spearheaded by his armour-bearing thanes.
19:05Citrich of Northumbria had rejected the king's sister
19:09and renounced Christianity, but then died.
19:12DRAMATIC MUSIC
19:17And when his kinsmen came over from Dublin to claim their kingdom,
19:21Athelstan invaded Northumbria and drove them out.
19:30And now he sends ambassadors to the kings of the Scots
19:33and the Strathclyde Welsh,
19:35calling them to a peace conference in Cumbria.
19:40This is Eamon Bridge.
19:42This is where Athelstan met Constantine, the king of the Scots,
19:46Owain, the king of the Strathclyde Welsh and the Cumbrians,
19:50and Ealdred and Uchtred, the lords of Bamburgh,
19:53the Anglo-Saxon rulers of northern Northumbria.
19:56The Anglo-Saxon chronicle mentions kings of Wales too,
19:59the king of Gwent and Howaldar of Differd, the future lawgiver.
20:04Maybe they came here too.
20:10DRAMATIC MUSIC
20:15Here, the northern kings acknowledged Athelstan
20:18as the supreme king of Britain.
20:23It was a turning point in British history.
20:27DRAMATIC MUSIC
20:37Guided by God-given dreams, as well as by realpolitik,
20:42Athelstan was determined that this would be a Christian empire.
20:47And before the kings parted,
20:49they went to a little village called Dacre.
20:53So why did Athelstan bring the kings of Britain out
20:56to this lonely valley above Ullswater?
20:59Well, the answer is that.
21:06Dacre was an Anglo-Saxon monastery from the 7th century.
21:10It's mentioned by Bede.
21:12St Cuthbert was supposed to have performed one of his miracles here.
21:16So they came here because it was a sacred place.
21:20And it was on this spot that they would have performed
21:23their solemn oath against idolatry,
21:26death or guilt, and made their pact of peace.
21:36Writing back to the royal family in Winchester,
21:39his court poet was jubilant.
21:41Let her wing your way back to the palace.
21:45King 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,
22:16he sends an embassy to Rome with his archbishop, Wolfhelm,
22:19and the famous Welsh king, Hauldar.
22:26The new archbishop was to receive his spiritual authority
22:30from the pope himself.
22:37And the pope would give his blessing to Athelstan's Christian empire.
22:43The king is fired up now by his own sense of history,
22:47his awareness that he is guiding great events.
22:52The ancient Roman historians had spoken of a tripartite world,
22:56Europe, Africa and Asia, with Britain beyond the edge.
23:05Now Athelstan would claim to rule the world of Britain,
23:10a Christian empire with the authority of St Peter.
23:21Athelstan's pan-British embassy to Rome
23:24will have spent two or three months here
23:26and then begun the return journey in the new year of 928.
23:31And over the next six years,
23:33a revolution will take place in English government
23:36as far-reaching, if not more so, than the Angevins and the Tudors.
23:41This is the moment for Athelstan's visionary kingdom of all the English.
23:54When the embassy returned,
23:56Athelstan held a great Easter council in Exeter.
24:00The sacred flame, he said, has blown across the tripartite world
24:05in this third year of my reign,
24:08which there is now no doubt is gifted by God.
24:15And so he began his project with laws on charity
24:19and a ferocious clampdown on crime.
24:22And he's already moving fast.
24:25It's as if he thought he didn't have much time
24:29and was desperate to turn his ideas into reality.
24:36No biography has survived for him as it has for Alfred,
24:40so his story has to be pieced together from fragments,
24:43inscriptions, burned manuscripts.
24:46And one key aspect of his revolution in government
24:49is revealed in an unlikely source, the king's land grants.
24:53Although it's only a land document, I say only,
24:56but it gives us a vision of his kingdom in that moment, doesn't it?
25:00Yes, I think the point about these royal diplomas
25:03is that any one of these on its own is interesting up to a point.
25:09From a historian's point of view,
25:11the interest of these documents is completely transformed
25:14when you put them all together.
25:18Because these charters are dated, because they're localised,
25:21you can begin to see how the king moves
25:24from one part of the country to another.
25:27So, yes, these are the documents
25:29that represent the first flush of enthusiasm
25:32for this new kingdom of the English.
25:35And in this new kingdom,
25:37the king demanded control and wanted feedback,
25:41so he travelled constantly,
25:43holding regular gatherings of local and national leaders.
25:50One of these was held in November 931 at Lifton in Devon.
25:55One of these was held in November 931 at Lifton in Devon.
26:26There must be hundreds or so people named in this charter.
26:30One imagines certainly that there would have been
26:33two, three, four hundred people present at the meeting.
26:36Maybe thousands.
26:38Even more, yes, yes.
26:40And certainly the bishops are not going to be travelling on their own.
26:44They're not going to be travelling on their own.
26:47They're not going to be travelling on their own.
26:50They're not going to be travelling on their own.
26:53They're certainly not going to be travelling on their own.
26:58So many hundreds of people needed to be fed and temporarily housed,
27:03from support staff to the king himself.
27:07We can begin here with Ego Athelstanus,
27:10so you have I Athelstan, King of Britain, he's called there.
27:14Then you have Ego Wolfhelm, he's the Archbishop of Canterbury.
27:19Here in the far west of Devon were Viking earls from the Danelaw,
27:23feasting with the kings of Wales.
27:28And then, most interestingly, you have Ego Howell Subregulus,
27:33Welsh sub-king.
27:35So the Welsh kings have come down to Lifton in Devon in November
27:38and are acknowledging Athelstan as the supreme king of Britain then, Simon?
27:43That is certainly the impression that this charter of Athelstan is creating, yes.
27:48As I say, whether the Welsh would have seen it quite the way is another matter.
28:00The world had changed.
28:03A whole new agenda was on offer,
28:06which was this notion of consensus, of collaboration,
28:09of assemblies as the place where you shape policy together.
28:14It had to be happening in assemblies beyond the court,
28:18in the shires, in the hundreds.
28:21And in these places, landowners and royal agents
28:25communed with each other and came to share an ideology
28:31which bound the king and his people together as divinely approved.
28:44So in the mundane record of the king's journeys,
28:47you can glimpse the growth of English government
28:50and even the origins of Parliament.
28:56Law-making is one of the most important aspects of assembly functions.
29:03Athelstan makes laws on a large scale.
29:07That's fantastic.
29:11There's clearly also a good deal of give and take,
29:14general discussion between the king and his great men.
29:19There's one instance in one of Athelstan's scorecodes
29:22where he says there are complaints about disorder
29:25and 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,
29:33the counsellors putting up a point, making a complaint and the king responding.
29:43He apologises for the state of the nation.
29:47My counsellors say I've borne it too long.
29:50Then he sends a messenger following on the latest law-making session.
29:56What does the king want?
29:58Does he want to see a young man speaking
30:02or does he want to see a young man speaking?
30:07What does he want?
30:09Does he want to see a young man speaking or does he want to see a 15-year-old man speaking?
30:26Legislation, political discussion, consensual politics,
30:32the sort of thing that goes on in 13th century politics.
30:35And you can trace, I think, a clear line through,
30:38in terms of the history of large assemblies,
30:40straight through from Athelstan to the 13th century.
30:43But, of course, a lot changes.
30:45But there is a clear line of continuity.
30:55And to see how it all worked at grassroots,
30:58we've come to a borough built by Alfred the Great
31:01and especially favoured by Athelstan.
31:05We're just outside the little town of Malmesbury in Wiltshire,
31:09on the northern edge of the West 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,
31:21Athelstan's folk here have believed that these fields
31:24were given to the town by King Athelstan.
31:30And, believe it or not, even today,
31:33these fields, known as the King's Heath,
31:36are administered by King Athelstan's court.
31:45To help enforce his laws,
31:47all free men had to swear a solemn oath of loyalty to him.
31:53Oh, yea! Oh, yea! Oh, yea!
31:56All persons come forward and do your business in a peaceful manner.
32:02Warden and Freeman of Malmesbury, King Athelstan's feast day court,
32:06was held in the old courthouse on Tuesday 12th June 2012,
32:12before M Westmacott, Warden, O Pike, N O J Pike...
32:17To break your oath was treason to the King.
32:22The Warden's oath.
32:24You shall swear that you will well and truly execute
32:27the office of Warden of this corporation.
32:30You shall maintain, support and uphold all the rights,
32:34liberties, immunities, privileges and franchises of the corporation.
32:40APPLAUSE
32:43So, Athelstan's subjects were bound by the sworn oath
32:47in village tithings and the courts of Hundred and Shire.
32:51So, it's wonderful seeing these ancient English traditions
32:55still in action, isn't it, Oliver?
32:57The Warden and Free Burgesses of Malmesbury
32:59have a direct link to Athelstan via the 500 acres that he gave us
33:05in 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
33:18to his person, but most of all, to his law.
33:22A key idea in English history.
33:36Athelstan also fixed England's physical frontiers.
33:41Across the Tamar, the Cornish too now became part of England
33:46for the first time.
33:48And 40 years on from Alfred's Viking Wars,
33:51Athelstan overhauls his defensive network of boroughs.
33:55He closes some down and turns others into centres of trade and civic life.
34:01In Exeter, he restored the Roman walls,
34:04laid out streets and housing plots, encouraging merchants to settle.
34:15But markets need outlets.
34:19Athelstan granted to Exeter the old Roman port on the River Aix,
34:24a place, as he put it, known to the locals as Toppisham.
34:31Morning!
34:33Salmon fishermen.
34:35Those boats are for salmon fishery.
34:38Granted.
34:40Salmon fishermen.
34:43Salmon fishermen.
34:45Those boats are for salmon fishery.
34:47Grant of Toppisham to Exeter in the 10th century
34:50mentions these fisheries.
34:52Still doing it.
34:56Toppisham would grow rich on Exeter's trade.
35:00Wool from Devon, tin and silver from Cornwall.
35:06So trade came with the revival of the English town.
35:13In Athelstan's time, it was said, the standard of living started to rise.
35:18There was plenty in the shops.
35:22But markets must have money.
35:43The only authority for the currency now was the king,
35:47who took a cut of the profits of each mint.
35:52By the end of the 10th century,
35:54nowhere in southern England was more than 15 miles from a mint.
35:58The English people were getting used to living in a money economy.
36:04We have here a very nice example from Chester.
36:09In this particular case, we have the name of the king
36:13surrounding a cross on one face.
36:16And we have him being called Athelstan Rex Tober.
36:22Athelstan, the king of all Britain.
36:25The king of all Britain.
36:27Yes.
36:30And then on this other coin, which is from Winchester,
36:33we see again this same title,
36:35Athelstan Rex Tober, king of Totius Britanniae, all Britain.
36:41Completely the other side of the kingdom,
36:43but yet using the exact same title,
36:45and of course the same title that is used in his charters
36:48and in certain other documents.
36:50The fact that we see it coming through in both types of source
36:53really does indicate that someone, Athelstan Rex Tober,
36:57really does indicate that someone at the top of the food chain
37:00is issuing a command that it's got to change,
37:03that we've all got to start singing from the same hymn sheet
37:06in terms of what we're calling the king.
37:14So Athelstan was a man in a hurry.
37:17His first six years saw great practical achievements,
37:20but culture and learning would also play a key role in nation building.
37:27His grandfather Alfred had begun the revival of education,
37:31and Athelstan took it to the next level.
37:36You can't put together a collection like this
37:39for any other Anglo-Saxon king.
37:42He obviously liked books,
37:45and he saw books as a useful tool
37:49for him to make his connections
37:52and to establish his networks and so on.
37:57And in his books, you can see, too,
37:59how learning was to be a tool of kingship.
38:04Well, here you have an extraordinary inscription
38:08indicating that this gospel book
38:11was given by King Athelstan to the Church of Canterbury.
38:16Very fancy titles here.
38:18Athelstan, Anglorum, Basileus et Coraculus.
38:22This is all fancy words used in order to express kingship.
38:27Athelstan, king of the English
38:30and ruler of the whole of Britain.
38:34He's king not only of the English, but also of the whole of Britain,
38:38which is an extraordinary claim.
38:44When Athelstan was a boy,
38:46his grandfather had urged him to follow the path of learning.
38:51And his own book of psalms hints at his personal interests,
38:56with its added paintings,
38:58its religious calendar
39:01and its private prayers.
39:04The end, perhaps most surprisingly, series of texts in Greek,
39:08the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer and so on.
39:15You can get a real sense of the king as an intellectual,
39:18dare one say it.
39:22One writer he especially admired was the 7th-century saint, Aldhelm.
39:28To whom, it was said, Athelstan devoted himself body and soul.
39:34And 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,
39:50i.e. explained and commented on.
39:55And through this manuscript, there are thousands of these.
40:00And perhaps the choice of text also tells us about the unmarried king himself.
40:07Its message that self-control, purity of mind, chastity,
40:13is a victory for a man, as great as 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.
40:40In this year, 933, King Athelstan ordered his brother Edwin to be drowned at sea.
40:55Many later legends grew up about the drowning of Prince Edwin.
41:00It was said that Athelstan had been turned against his brother by a wicked man.
41:06That Athelstan had been turned against his brother by a wicked cup-bearer.
41:11That the councillors of England had tried Edwin in London
41:14and drowned him off London Bridge.
41:17And even better, that Athelstan had deliberately and cruelly
41:21had Edwin set afloat in the middle of 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,
41:40fleeing across the Channel after upheavals in his kingdom.
41:52Later legends said that Edwin had been unjustly accused of rebellion,
41:57that afterwards, weighed down by guilt, Athelstan did public penance.
42:03Oh, that's magnificent, isn't it?
42:06This is beautiful.
42:08And that he founded a church where prayers would be offered
42:11for his brother's soul and his own sins.
42:15And the foundation of all of this, obviously, was the original church
42:19that burnt down, founded by Athelstan here.
42:22So King Athelstan, in 934, founded the church here,
42:26which was then called Middleton, as a penance for the death of his brother,
42:30who he believed was plotting against him.
42:32And he felt so guilty about it.
42:35The legend is that he actually built the church here on this site.
42:39And as we can see in the paintings,
42:42very much that he is offering the church to the abbot.
42:46Possibly Athelstan had behaved in ways perhaps which he then regretted.
42:51Strangely enough, in the Irish law codes,
42:55there is a punishment of being set to sea in a boat with no oars.
43:02It's actually a legal punishment for homicide of brothers, amazingly.
43:07Yes, a fantastic connection.
43:09And it's obviously a way in which you don't want to have the blood on your hands
43:13of actually executing somebody.
43:15Yes, once that's washed away.
43:17So you set them to sea, and if God allows them to come back to land,
43:21then fine, if not, it's done with.
43:24So there's an eerie shadow behind the tale, isn't there?
43:27Absolutely.
43:33So the succession crisis after his father's death had come back to haunt him.
43:41Athelstan's hard-won authority had been shaken.
43:51The next spring, Constantine, King of the Scots, renounced his allegiance.
44:00And Athelstan now raised a great army to punish Constantine
44:05and bring him back into the fold.
44:08934, here for Athelstan Cunning, in on Scotland.
44:15From Winchester on the 28th of May, they rode to Nottingham
44:20and then up into Northumbria.
44:37On the 1st of July, as the English fleet moved up the east coast,
44:42the land army stopped at Chester-le-Street on the River Weir,
44:46the 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,
44:59and the priests opened St Cuthbert's coffin
45:02so the king could actually touch the preserved body
45:06and wrap it in the beautiful embroideries that he'd brought with him.
45:13Athelstan's grandfather Alfred had had a vision of St Cuthbert
45:17in his moment of direst danger in the marshes of Somerset.
45:21Cuthbert had prophesied that Alfred's descendants
45:24would become kings of all England and rulers of Britain.
45:27That had now happened, and Athelstan had come to this place to say thank you
45:33and to ask the saint for his help in the wars that lay ahead.
45:38And then he invaded Scotland,
45:41plundering the lands of the Scots and the Picts.
45:45A Northumbrian chronicle says they attacked Dunfodder,
45:50Dunottar Castle on the coast south of Aberdeen.
45:57In early August, they reached the shores of the Moray Firth,
46:01and the fleet went on to Caithness,
46:03the northernmost point of the British mainland.
46:09There'd been nothing like it
46:11since the expedition of the Roman general Agricola.
46:23Faced by such a show of force, Constantine submitted to Athelstan
46:28and came back with him into England.
46:39But across the British Isles, voices of opposition were growing.
46:45In Wales, a poet now called for the King of Kings to be overthrown
46:51and for the English to be driven out of Britain,
46:54where they had come as landless wanderers 400 years before.
47:00It is a prophetic poem
47:03in which it is hoped that there would be an alliance
47:07between the peoples of what I suppose we would term
47:10the fringes of the Isles of Britain
47:13to push the Alfin, the English, out of England.
47:17The idea is that this alliance of Britons, Vikings and the Irish
47:23will push them out again and make them once more
47:26the roamers of the high seas.
47:33EXPLOSIONS
47:55The muse foretells the men of Wessex will see England burn.
48:01When the great battle comes,
48:04their dead will be packed too tight to fall.
48:12And in summer 937, the moment came.
48:18That August, a huge Viking fleet left Dublin under King Anlaff Guthrisson,
48:23whose kinsmen Athelstan had driven from York 10 years before.
48:28The Scots and Strathclyde Welsh came overland under King Constantine.
48:35Northumbrian sources say the Viking fleet of 615 ships landed in the Humber.
48:43There, in their chief city of York, the Northumbrians joined the invaders.
48:49Suddenly, Athelstan's northern empire had collapsed.
48:54EXPLOSIONS
49:01The axis of the war was probably the Great North Road.
49:09The Allies now began to devastate the lands to the south,
49:13to draw Athelstan to them.
49:17That autumn, you have to imagine columns of refugees
49:21fleeing away from the smoke
49:23as the Allies, the Scots and the Norse-Irish
49:27devastated the lands south of the Humber.
49:34They ravaged everything with incessant plundering raids,
49:39driving out the peasants and setting fire to their fields.
49:44Such was the barbarians' mounted strength.
49:51As autumn turned towards winter, Athelstan still didn't move,
49:56and now the moneyers in Nottingham and York
49:58stopped putting the king's name on their coins,
50:01uncertain how events would turn out.
50:06And in England, voices were raised against the king.
50:11In his youth, he was fearless and bold, it was said,
50:14but he now let precious time slip by in inaction,
50:20while they destroyed everything.
50:33But still, Athelstan refused to be drawn.
50:40A later legend says that he came back
50:42to the little chapel of St Catherine at Milton
50:46to pray for God's help.
50:50And as for what Athelstan might have spoken on this spot at that moment,
50:55well, a prayer survives, attributed to him,
50:58a prayer before battle in which he asked God
51:01to let him fight well and act manfully,
51:06and he begs that his enemies will be destroyed
51:09like Pharaoh's army before the people of Israel.
51:13And at the end of the prayer were a series of dreadful maledictions
51:18against the hostile king and his kingdom.
51:21Tear them apart, O Lord, smash them into dust.
51:27Aggression, anger, sense of betrayal,
51:30whoever composed that prayer
51:33sounds as if he was contemplating a fight to the death.
51:42Alone in his private chapel, he prayed on his most sacred relic.
51:48A fragment of the true cross set in a rock crystal.
51:55Meditating on his past sins,
51:57and the sins which would inevitably come
52:00with the slaughter of thousands in war.
52:06Such were the tensions between being an Anglo-Saxon warrior king
52:10and a pious Christian man.
52:14There's a later tradition that Athelstan wore his cross relic
52:18around his neck in his battles,
52:20literally arming his soul and protecting his body
52:25with one of the most potent relics in the whole of Christendom.
52:37Then, with the armies of Wessex and Mercia, Athelstan attacked.
52:44King Athelstan, Earl of Drichten,
52:47Bernard of Berchtesgaden and his brother, Erk,
52:51held a long and fierce battle
52:54against the Swedish king in Brunnenburg.
53:01The sea of Valhalla and this land
53:04were covered with the blood of many people
53:07before the death of the Swedish king.
53:13SHOUTING
53:30But 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
53:46that the great war of the 10th century came to its climax.
54:06The news spread across the northern world.
54:11The battle was immense, lamentable and horrible,
54:15they said in Ulster.
54:17It was a black day for the Scots, they said,
54:20more 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,
54:38but as one of his courtiers wrote long afterwards,
54:41he was experienced and farsighted
54:45and very hard to overcome in any conflict.
54:49And so it had proved.
54:54And even 50 years on, the English still called it the Great War.
55:00Athelstan had saved his crown,
55:03but in his books are perhaps hints of the troubling aftermath
55:07for him as a Christian.
55:11They contained inscriptions in which Athelstan,
55:14A, records that he's the donor of the book,
55:17but B, then, yes, asks anybody looking at the inscription
55:22to bear him in mind.
55:24You who come after me, I ask you for a moment to pray for my soul.
55:30In future times, remember me and forgive me my sins.
55:55The war had united the West Saxons and Mercians
55:59in a great national achievement,
56:01though it would be a while yet
56:03before the Northumbrians felt part of a new England.
56:07As for the Scots and the Welsh,
56:09they are still negotiating their relationship
56:12with Athelstan's successors.
56:17He'd started as a compromise candidate,
56:21He'd started as a compromise candidate, a caretaker king,
56:26but he had carried through the family plan of his grandfather, Alfred,
56:30the creation of an English kingdom with governance and justice,
56:35law and learning,
56:38shires, towns and workable institutions.
56:44He had done as his grandfather asked him.
56:48He'd followed the path of wisdom,
56:50and yet, like the old pagan heroes,
56:53fought with all his might against the demons.
57:00As a man, it was said, he was affable and courteous
57:04and beloved by his people who admired his courage and humility.
57:10But he was like a thunderbolt to his enemies
57:13by his invincible steadfastness.
57:25Athelstan died in 939,
57:28in his mid-40s, maybe worn out by the job.
57:32An Irish writer called him
57:35the roof tree of the honour of the Western world.
57:40Athelstan's funeral took place at the very end of October
57:43or early November, 939,
57:45and he was buried here in Malmesbury,
57:48close to his personal saint, Oldhelm.
57:54He'd reigned for 14 years only,
57:57but he'd set a path for the future,
58:00building on what his grandfather and his father and aunt had done.
58:04He'd made real the England that Alfred had dreamed.
58:09And for all the ups and downs of our history ever since,
58:12Athelstan's visionary kingdom of the English would endure.
58:17And, of course, it still does.
58:31Our England's Tudor queens battled to win the hearts of their nation
58:35in times of great upheaval.
58:37Meet the last of our she-wolves tomorrow at 8 here on BBC4.
58:41Next tonight, they were off to Vietnam with Peter and Dan Snow
58:44to explore another 20th-century battlefield.