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Streets Ahead.
Story time.
History time.
History time big time today.
Eleven hundred years ago, there was no England.
Not as we know it.
There was Wessex.
Mercia.
Northumbria.
There were Danish rulers in York.
Welsh kings in the west.
A Scottish king in the north.
And then came Æthelstan.
Warrior.
Lawmaker.
Book collector.
Relic hunter.
European power broker.
Grandson of Alfred the Great.
And, arguably, the first king of England.
Which raises a question.
Why have most of us barely heard of him?
I was thinking about Æthelstan because of a house on one of my London Walks.
My Kensington walk.
It is one of the great houses of Kensington.
Magnificent.
Grand.
Unmistakable.
The house belonged to Athelstan Riley.
Riley was a prominent Anglican layman, a hymnologist and an authority on church music.
And he was named after the king.
So there we are.
Standing in a Kensington street.
Looking at the home of a Victorian gentleman.
And his unusual Christian name opens a door onto a king who lived and ruled eleven hundred years ago.
A king who did not simply inherit England.
Rather, the king who made England.
That house, once seen never forgotten. Not least for the string courses. Four of them. Four different levels. String courses running all the way around the house. And you look closely, there they are, Aethelstan Riley’s initials, A R, repeated over and over on those string courses. All the way around the house. Arguably the most extraordinary house in London is embossed, repeatedly, with the name of the first King of England.
Æthelstan was born in 893 or 894.
His father was Edward the Elder.
His grandfather was Alfred the Great.
Even as a small boy, he appears to have been marked out for something exceptional.
According to William of Malmesbury, Alfred presented his grandson with a scarlet cloak, a jewelled belt and a Saxon sword in a gilded scabbard.
Æthelstan won’t have been no more than five or six years old.
It is a wonderful image.
The old king.
The young prince.
The scarlet cloak.
The sword.
A child being dressed for destiny.
William also tells us that Æthelstan was brought up at the court of his aunt Æthelflæd, the formidable Lady of the Mercians.
If so, this was no sheltered childhood.
Mercia was fighting for its life against the Danes.
Æthelstan may have learned kingship in the saddle.
He may have gained military experience in the campaigns that pushed back the Danelaw.
He would certainly have grown up understanding that kingdoms were not permanent things.
They had to be defended.
Extended.
Held together.
His father, Edward the Elder, died in July 924.
And Æthelstan’s accession was anything but straightforward.
Edward’s realm may at first have been divided.
Æthelstan was chosen king by the Mercians.
His half-brother Ælfweard appears to have inherited Wessex.
But Ælfweard died only sixteen days after their father.
Æthelstan then succeeded to the combined kingdom.
Not everybody was pleased.
There was opposition at Winchester.
There were whispers about Æthelstan’s birth.
William of Malmesbury says that a man named Alfred plotted to have him blinded.
Another half-brother, Eadwine, later drowned at sea in mysterious circumstances.
The sources are murky.
The stories were written down long afterwards.
But one thing is clear.
Æthelstan did not begin his reign as the universally welcomed heir to a settled kingdom.
He began as something of an outsider.
A man who had to establish his authority.
And establish it he did.
In 926, Æthelstan met Sihtric, the Danish king of York, at Tamworth.
The two men made an alliance.
Sihtric married one of Æthelstan’s sisters.
A year later Sihtric died.
Æthelstan moved north.
He took control of York.
And with that, something unprecedented happened.
For the first time, one king ruled all the English kingdoms.
Wessex.
Mercia.
East Anglia.
Northumbria.
This was not merely a larger Wessex.
It was a new political reality.
England.
In July 927, Æthelstan gathered the other rulers of Britain at Eamont, near Penrith.
The king of the Scots was there.
The ruler of Strathclyde was there.
Welsh rulers were there.
The lord of Bamburgh was there.
They made peace.
They gave pledges.
They swore oaths.
And a contemporary poem celebrated what Æthelstan had achieved.
“This England now made whole.”
There it is.
A whole England.
Not an idea.
Not an aspiration.
A kingdom.
But new kingdoms are fragile things.
Æthelstan’s neighbours were not going to accept his dominance quietly.
In 934, he marched into Scotland with both an army and a fleet.
He ravaged the country as far north as Dunnottar.
His ships reached Caithness.
Three years later came the great test of his reign.
Brunanburh.
The year was 937.
A vast alliance formed against Æthelstan.
Constantine, king of the Scots.
Olaf Guthfrithson, Norse king of Dublin.
Owain of Strathclyde.
Scots.
Norsemen.
Britons.
Together they invaded Æthelstan’s kingdom.
The site of the battle is still disputed.
Historians have been arguing about it for centuries.
But wherever Brunanburh was, the battle fought there was immense.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that Æthelstan and his brother Edmund won undying glory by the sword’s edge.
Five kings were said to have died.
Seven earls from Ireland.
The son of the Scottish king.
Thousands of fighting men.
The Chronicle exults that there had never been a greater slaughter in the island since the Angles and Saxons first crossed the sea to Britain.
Brunanburh was not just another battle.
It was a battle for the survival of England.
Had Æthelstan lost, his new kingdom might have been broken apart.
Northumbria might have returned to Norse rule.
The Scots and the kingdom of Strathclyde might have pushed south.
The map of Britain might have developed very differently.
Instead, Æthelstan won.
His enemies fled.
And England endured.
That victory is the great set piece of his reign.
But Æthelstan was much more than a warlord.
He was also a state-builder.
He issued law codes.
He tightened control over the coinage.
He ordered that one royal currency should circulate throughout his dominions.
He controlled where money could be minted.
He summoned great councils attended by bishops, abbots, nobles, Englishmen, Welsh rulers and Scandinavian lords from the old Danelaw.
These were not little gatherings of local magnates.
They were national assemblies.
Men from across the kingdom came together in the presence of the king.
They witnessed charters.
They heard laws.
They took part in the machinery of government.
That mattered.
A kingdom is not unified merely because one army has conquered it.
It becomes unified when people begin to be governed together.
When they use the same coinage.
Attend the same royal court.
Recognise the same laws.
Answer to the same king.
Æthelstan’s charters tell the story of his growing ambition.
At first he called himself King of the Anglo-Saxons.
Then King of the English.
Then King of the Whole of Britain.
His coins showed him wearing a crown.
Not a helmet.
A crown.
This was deliberate.
Æthelstan and his court were searching for a language, an image and a ceremony large enough to express what had happened.
A new kind of king had appeared.
A king not merely of Wessex.
A king of England.
And a king who expected to be taken seriously far beyond England.
Æthelstan was the first Anglo-Saxon ruler who can genuinely be said to have conducted a foreign policy.
His sisters were married into the great ruling houses of Europe.
One, Eadgyth, married Otto of Saxony, the future Otto the Great.
Another married Hugh, duke of the Franks.
Æthelstan helped his nephew Louis return to France and reclaim his throne.
He gave refuge to exiled princes.
A future ruler of Brittany was fostered at his court.
So, according to later Scandinavian tradition, was Hákon, son of the king of Norway.
Hákon would be remembered as Æthelstan’s fosterling.
William of Malmesbury put it magnificently.
“The whole of Europe sang his praises.”
And Europe came to him.
Envoys arrived.
Scholars arrived.
Princes arrived.
Gifts arrived.
Some of those gifts were astonishing.
A sword said to have belonged to Constantine the Great.
A lance associated with Charlemagne.
Fragments of the True Cross.
A piece of the Crown of Thorns.
Relics enclosed in crystal.
How much of this can be taken literally is another matter.
The medieval world was not overburdened by modern standards of authentication.
But the stories tell us something important.
Æthelstan’s court was not provincial.
It was connected.
Cultivated.
Cosmopolitan.
And the king himself was passionately interested in books, learning and religion.
He gave manuscripts to churches and monasteries.
He collected relics.
He commissioned luxury books.
He drew scholars from England and abroad into his orbit.
One surviving manuscript contains a magnificent image of Æthelstan presenting a book to St Cuthbert.
The king stands crowned.
He holds the book in both hands.
The saint raises one hand in blessing.
It may be the earliest surviving portrait of an English king.
Think about that.
The first king of England.
In one of the earliest pictures of an English king.
Not swinging a sword.
Not trampling an enemy.
Giving a book.
That seems to me to catch something essential about Æthelstan.
He was a warrior.
He had to be.
But he understood that kingdoms were built not only by force.
They were built by law.
Religion.
Learning.
Symbols.
Memory.
He never married.
We do not know why.
Perhaps he wished to avoid creating another branch of the royal family and another contested succession.
Perhaps he felt a religious calling to chastity.
Perhaps it was simply personal choice.
He had younger brothers who could inherit.
And so when Æthelstan died at Gloucester on October 27th, 939, the throne passed to his brother Edmund.
He was buried at Malmesbury Abbey.
Not at Winchester with his father.
That may be significant.
Winchester had been the heart of the old West Saxon royal establishment.
Æthelstan had always been something of an outsider there.
Malmesbury remembered him differently.
As a benefactor.
A hero.
A great king.
William of Malmesbury, writing two centuries later, saw what were said to be the king’s remains.
He described Æthelstan as of average height.
Slim.
Fair-haired.
His hair, William said, was beautifully intertwined with threads of gold.
A final glimpse.
The warrior king at rest.
Gold still in his hair.
Æthelstan’s achievement did not prove permanent.
After his death, York quickly slipped from English control.
The north had to be conquered again.
England would fracture.
It would be rebuilt.
It would face new Viking invasions.
New kings.
New crises.
But something fundamental had changed.
For the first time, England had existed.
One ruler.
One kingdom.
One coinage.
One political community stretching from the Channel to the north.
Alfred the Great is the famous name.
Alfred defended Wessex.
Alfred preserved the possibility of England.
But it was his grandson who turned that possibility into reality.
Alfred dreamed of it.
Æthelstan made it.
And that brings us back to Kensington.
Back to that magnificent house.
Back to Athelstan Riley.
A Victorian gentleman carrying the name of a king who ruled eleven centuries ago.
A king half-forgotten now.
But not forgotten entirely.
His name survives.
His books survive.
His coins survive.
His laws survive.
And his greatest creation survives.
England.
Æthelstan.
First king of England.
Glory of his native land.
You’ve been listening to London Calling.
The London Walks podcast.
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