Today we celebrate our unification day

England’s first king remains sadly neglected

A few years back, I visited Malmesbury Abbey with my young children in tow for a fascinating tour of yet another old church. It was here, I explained, that the eccentric Eilmer had tested human flight back in the 11th century (with admittedly limited success). It is here, I announced with gleeful excitement, where you will see the tomb of the very first king of England.

In we went, to be greeted by the sound of loud hip-hop being played from speakers, and the clatter of skateboards, the abbey having been turned over to some yoof event. There he lay in the corner, obscured behind scaffolding, the tomb of our great founder, King Athelstan, or at least an effigy explaining he was buried somewhere under the building. With the soundtrack it felt like a moment of pure decline, the founder of our nation lying underneath, above him someone rapping about God knows what.

Such is Athelstan’s obscurity that few would know that today is in fact England’s unification day. It was on this date, in the year 927, that the kings of Alba, Strathclyde and various other realms in northern Britain met near Penrith to acknowledge the rule of King Athelstan over all the lands of the Angles and Saxons. 

The story begins with the arrival of the Viking great army in 865; within six years the Danes had conquered all of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except for Wessex, which came close to collapse until its young king Alfred heroically turned back the tide. 

Alfred had saved Wessex during its darkest hour, and under his peace with the Norsemen neighbouring Mercia was partitioned between the two sides; but after his death in 899 his son Edward and daughter Æthelflæd took the war to the enemy. 

Æthelflæd had been married to a leading Mercian nobleman, Ethelred, and then as a widow ruled the middle kingdom as ‘Lady of the Mercians’. In 907 Æthelflæd had driven the Vikings away from Chester, a Roman town she had refounded as a burh, the English pouring boiling beer on the besieging force. Three years later a large Viking army attacked western Mercia but was repulsed, with three Danish kings ‘hastening to the hall of the Infernal One’ as the scribes put it. Pushing back, in 917 Æthelflæd conquered Derby, a former Viking stronghold, then Colchester. By Christmas all the Vikings of East Anglia had pledged their loyalty. 

Æthelflæd died in 918, and after her death the Mercian nobles wanted her daughter as their monarch, but instead her brother Edward took over, putting his niece in a convent. Such ruthlessness was typical. Before the old king died Edward had had a liaison with a woman called Egwinna, and while the details are unclear, soon a son was born, named Athelstan, who came to be doted on by his grandfather before the old man’s death. 

However, Edward took a new wife, Elflaed, for dynastic reasons, and Egwinna was packed off to a convent (or died — we don’t know) and their young son was sent to live with his aunt. Wife number two was also later sent off to a convent — very convenient places! — when Edward needed a new marriage alliance.

And so Athelstan was raised by his aunt Æthelflæd in Mercia, and when Edward died in 924 his supporters in the midlands were able to ensure he took the throne of the two kingdoms, against competition from various half-brothers, a couple of whom providentially died. Yet the young man would outshine even his grandfather.

The Vikings still ruled most of the north from their capital in York, but in 927 their king Sitric died and Athelstan rode in and declared himself ruler. No southern king had ever claimed the north but after Athelstan defeated a Viking army raised from Dublin, soon afterwards the various kings of northern Britain recognised his rule. This new kingdom included not just York but also the northern half of Northumbria, modern-day Co. Durham and Northumberland, a part of the northern Anglian kingdom that had largely resisted Viking rule. And so July 12, 927 was the date of English unification.

Athelstan’s coins, including those minted in York, now proclaimed him by the title Rex Anglorum, King of the English. 

Athelstan then asserted his authority by heading as far as northern Scotland, but the new kingdom would only be confirmed ten years later when a reckoning came. The Scots king Constantine had gone into alliance with the ‘idol-worshippers’ of York and Dublin, the Vikings, along with the Brythonic-speaking kingdom of Strathclyde, and headed south.

An army of West Saxons, Mercians and Northumbrians met them and gained a bloody victory at Brunanburh, a battle known at the time as ‘the great war’ and which was almost certainly much larger than Hastings a century later. 

An Anglo-Saxon poem written afterwards stated that: ‘Never in this island before now, so far as the books of our ancient historians tells us, has an army been put to greater slaughter at the edge of the sword, since the time when the Angles and Saxons made their way hither from the east over the wide seas, invading Britain, when warriors eager for glory, proud forgers of battle, overcame the Britons and won for themselves a country.’

It was a formative event, the battle significant enough that it appeared not just in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle but in various Norse, Celtic and Latin chronicles, and even in the Icelandic sagas. Yet today most of the details have been lost and so little is remembered of the great Battle of Brunanburh that we have little idea of where it was fought, with 40 possible locations identified between Dumfriesshire, Northumberland and Cheshire.

Now, one man ruled England. As a contemporary poet wrote: ‘Whom he now rules with this England made whole’, perfecta Saxonia, ‘King Athelstan lives glorious through his deeds.’

Large swathes of the country remained heavily Danish, still reflected in Scandinavian place names, but Athelstan did not replace the Viking aristocracy, and the records of those swearing loyalty to him include various second and third generation Danish settlers.

Athelstan, after all, was an enlightened and merciful Christian ruler, and his rule was aimed at ‘ensuring that the Christian ideals promoted and discussed at his court found expression in his legislative programme and that he governed his united realm as a truly Christian monarch’, in Sarah Foot’s words. 

He was a great lawmaker who built on his grandfather’s work. He abolished the death penalty for children under the age of 15 for minor offences, which made him something of a wacky liberal for the 10th century. He instigated a system of poor relief. He collected books and such was his reputation for learning that poets and scholars came to his court from all over western Christendom, including Irish bishops, an Icelandic poet, and the greatest continental scholar of his day, Israel the Grammarian.

Athelstan was also the first king to have a royal portrait, in which he appears wearing an imperial crown, his hair in ringlets entwined with threads of gold. Indeed when Athelstan was consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, he became the first king to wear a crown, earlier rulers having worn a helmet, and he’s probably the oldest ruler whom a time traveller would look at and obviously recognise as a medieval king, as viewed in the popular imagination. 

Tom Holland, who has also written an excellent short biography of our first king, has suggested on his podcast that Athelstan may be a sort of real inspiration for King Arthur, the closest thing to the real historical figure. The Arthurian myth was germinating at the time, before it would be written down and formalised and filled with later anachronisms, and it recalled a benevolent Christians monarch who united the lands and repelled foreign invaders. 

Indeed Athelstan came close to a sort of early medieval idealised kingship, also addressed as Rex pius Athelstan in a poem of that name which called him ‘Holy King Athelstan, renowned through the wide world’.  He was a ‘king who ruled England alone which, before him, many kings had held among themselves’, as an 11th century scribe from Exeter recalled. When he died in 939 the Annals of Ulster noted: ‘Athelstan king of the English died, the roof tree of the honour of the western world.’ 

Without Athelstan the north may well have evolved into a separate Norse-speaking nation. Holland wrote in his book how ‘Perhaps we can see now, in a way that we could not even a few decades ago, just how astonishing the creation of “Englalonde” actually was. The story of how, over the course of three generations, the royal dynasty of Wessex went from near-oblivion to fashioning a kingdom that still endures today is the most remarkable and momentous in British history.’ The north-south divide has come to define English history in many ways, but no one has ever come close to breaking it.

England wasn’t destined to come into existence, its birth owes much to this great king, who has since fallen into obscurity. This ‘roof tree of honour of the western world’ was famous in the medieval period and was even mentioned in Shakespeare, and it was only from the 16th century that Athelstan became increasingly forgotten; just as his grandfather became ever more celebrated, helped by the interest of churchman Matthew Parker. The crucial difference is that Alfred had a biographer in the form of Asser, while if Athelstan had a biography — and many believe there was such a thing — it has been lost. 

Æthelflæd, meanwhile, remains even more unrecognised and uncelebrated, while strangely the far-more obscure and dubious, and certainly less effective, antics of ancient warrior-queen Boudicca have been etched into the historical memory. It’s perverse, but maybe we just prefer losers, and killing yourself rather than being captured by the Romans is more glamorous than grinding out victories in the east midlands.

We’re only five years away from celebrating the 1100th anniversary of our country’s unification, under this great and compassionate king. I hope that, when the time comes, it will be properly recognised by the whole nation, not, as I suspect, by me and five or six other cranks standing around his tomb while a bunch of teenagers listen to rap music.