King Æthelstan: England's colossus
The rise of Æthelstan was as important a moment in English history as 1066 and Magna Carta. On the 1,100th anniversary of his coronation, David Woodman salutes a king who forged a nation
It’s there beside the guildhall. A large grey stone surrounded by Victorian railings. Over the years, countless visitors to Kingston-upon-Thames have strolled past it, many barely registering its existence. Yet here, nestled at the heart of the London borough, is one of the most significant landmarks in the story of early England. For it was in Kingston, 1,100 years ago, that Æthelstan was presented with a ring, a sword, a sceptre and a rod – and proclaimed king.
The early medieval leader was the first of, perhaps, seven rulers to be crowned in Kingston over the next five decades. Yet none would leave a legacy quite like his. Æthelstan’s investiture on 4 September 925 acted as the springboard for a reign that would redefine the parameters of early medieval kingship. The new king triggered a cultural and governmental revolution. He became the most feared and respected leader across the British Isles. He made waves across north-west Europe. Above all, he presided over the establishment of ‘England’. To tell his story is also to tell the story of the emergence of a nation.
Whirlpools of cataclysms
Although Æthelstan was formally invested in the autumn of 925, he had actually become king in the previous year, following the death of his father, Edward the Elder. That delay tells its own story. Æthelstan may now be remembered as one of the great early medieval kings. But his rise to power was anything but straightforward – and far from uncontested.
There is evidence that one of his half-brothers, a man called Ælfweard, had also been recognised as king in 924. Power may, therefore, have initially been divided between the two men, with Æthelstan ruling over the kingdom of Mercia (roughly corresponding to the area we now know as the Midlands) and Ælfweard taking control of Wessex (in the south and west).
Ælfweard’s death soon after brought this division of power to an end, and Æthelstan now found himself sole king across both Wessex and Mercia, a polity known as the ‘Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’. But even then his position was far from secure: there were those in Æthelstan’s capital, Winchester – chief among them its bishop, Frithestan – who opposed his position as king.
Twelfth-century sources also tell us that there was a plot to end Æthelstan’s ambitions by having him blinded – only for the person involved (a certain “Alfred”) to be dispatched to Rome to be judged by the pope for his treachery. Æthelstan may have been safe for the time being, but that didn’t stop one contemporary royal document referring to the “whirlpools of cataclysms” that swirled around him.
The list of potential cataclysms extended far beyond Frithestan and Alfred. For decades, successive early medieval rulers had lived in the shadow of Viking aggression – and Æthelstan was no different. In the ninth century, there had been significant Viking settlement in the eastern parts of Mercia – not to mention the kingdoms of East Anglia and Northumbria, particularly the city of York. Many of the Viking kings based in York were the descendants of Ívarr, who had risen to power in Dublin and landed in English territory in the mid-860s, causing ruin and destruction. By the early 10th century, these same Viking rulers in York maintained their links to Dublin, which meant that Æthelstan found himself confronted by potential enemies on multiple fronts.
The largest threat was, perhaps, presented by Sihtric Cáech (the ‘one-eyed’), Viking king in York at the beginning of Æthelstan’s reign. Sihtric had coins minted in his name in Lincoln – a sure sign that he was attempting to increase the bounds of his authority beyond the traditional confines of Northumbria and into the east Midlands. Many of these coins give him the title of ‘rex’ (king) below an image of a sword on one side, while the reverse carries a hammer. Such objects convey obvious messages about the martial and pagan character of his rule.
Fire in the skies
Æthelstan and Sihtric’s relationship could, so it seems, have easily been defined by rancour and warfare. But diplomacy and then the fickle hand of fate intervened.
On 30 January 926, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records how the two kings “met together at Tamworth… and Æthelstan gave him his sister in marriage”. Although the Chronicle’s account is brief, the event referred to was clearly of great significance. No details of what was agreed in Tamworth have survived, but we can assume that Æthelstan and Sihtric would have recognised each other’s authority and the need to keep the peace between both parties.
Yet Sihtric’s pledge would soon be rendered redundant for, by 927, he was dead. As the Chronicle reports it, there “appeared fiery lights in the northern quarter of the sky, and Sihtric died, and King Æthelstan succeeded to the kingdom of the Northumbrians”.
With this short account, the Chronicle captures what is arguably one of the most important episodes in English history. Æthelstan’s absorption of Northumbria represents the moment when an ‘England’ of a recognisable geographical and political shape was formed for the very first time.
Æthelstan’s seizure of Northumbria represents the moment when ‘England’ first became a unified political entity
The Chronicle provides no more detail about the way in which Æthelstan had acceded to Northumbria, the challenges that he faced in extending his authority, or the importance of what had happened. Some light is perhaps shed on this episode by a 12th-century source that describes Æthelstan razing a Viking fortress at York in order to gain the city’s full submission.
Whatever truly happened in the first half of 927, Æthelstan was clearly aware of the significance of this moment. After gaining Northumbria, the king held a ceremony on 12 July 927 at Eamont Bridge, a small town just to the south of Penrith, where he received the submission of various British kings, and a further Northumbrian ruler. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it, here “they established peace with pledge and oaths… and renounced all idolatry and afterwards departed in peace”.
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It’s a shame that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does not give more detail about this momentous year. Fortunately, we do not have to rely on the Chronicle alone for our understanding of what the occasion meant to contemporaries. The retinue of people that accompanied Æthelstan north in 927 included a poet who drafted verses celebrating the fact that “Saxonia”, by which the poet means ‘England’, was now “made whole”. “King Æthelstan lives,” he declares, “Glorious through his deeds!”
That there was a poet present with Æthelstan at this crucial juncture in 927 sent a strong message about the type of king he aspired to be: not just militarily dominant, but intellectually superior, too. This idea of a king who cherished learning is supported by the earliest surviving manuscript portrait of any English monarch (shown left), preserved today at the front of a manuscript in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Here Æthelstan is shown wearing a distinctive crown, book in hand, head bowed in front of St Cuthbert.
Obsessed with theft
Æthelstan now commanded more territory than any early medieval king before him.But, with his realm stretching from the English Channel in the south to the northern limits of Northumbria – and the Viking threat far from extinguished – how did he go about maintaining control? And what policies did Æthelstan enact?
Thanks to surviving coins, diplomas (grants of land to favoured subjects) and a large corpus of laws that survives in the king’s name, these are questions that we can answer in some detail. Careful scrutiny of Æthelstan’s laws, for example, reveals a king who was deeply concerned by the issue of theft, a crime that he and his advisers return to again and again.
We also know that Æthelstan’s legal system depended to a striking degree on the written word: on laws being sent to different parts of the kingdom to be implemented by royal officials. The king clearly sought to set up a single administrative system that worked across the entire kingdom. One of his law-codes hints at this aspiration when it calls for there to be only one coinage in use. Those coins that survive from Æthelstan’s reign are never entirely homogeneous in design, but they do all carry the king’s name.
Where Æthelstan’s laws and coinage travelled, the king himself would sometimes follow. Royal diplomas – issued in the period 928–35 by an anonymous royal scribe known as ‘Æthelstan A’ – reveal that Æthelstan moved regularly around the kingdom himself, making grants of land. Most of these assemblies were convened in the heartlands of Wessex, but the diplomas tell us that they also travelled further north – convening, for example, in Nottingham in early June 934.
The royal diplomas conventionally contain lists of the important ecclesiastical and lay officials who attended the assemblies – and these make for interesting reading. Not only do they contain English names of people from Wessex and Mercia, but also Old Norse names (presumably from the north and east of Æthelstan’s realm), and those of British kings hailing from the Welsh and Scottish kingdoms. It seems, then, that these assemblies (known by the contemporary Old English word witan, literally ‘wise men’) drew powerful figures from across the British Isles, reflecting just how widely Æthelstan had managed to extend his authority.
Æthelstan’s status is even reflected in the sheer complexity of the language used on his royal diplomas (all written in Latin, with a deft use of rhythm and alliteration, and with a clause in Old English, too) and repeated proclamations of the king’s undoubted power. In one diploma, ‘Æthelstan A’ tells his audience that the king has been “elevated by the right hand of the Almighty to the throne of the whole kingdom of Britain”.
Amazingly, two 10th-century ‘Æthelstan A’ originals survive today in the British Library in London. Large, highly professional in their script and layout – with long columns of witnesses at their conclusion – they were evidently designed to make it clear that this was a king who wielded new levels of power. Those coming from the far limits of Æthelstan’s kingdom could not fail to have been impressed by what they saw and heard.
Power couples
But what about those beyond the far limits of Æthelstan’s kingdom, in continental Europe? Here, too, it seems that Æthelstan was able to exert a degree of influence – courtesy of a series of strategic marriage alliances involving his half-sisters. Eadgifu married Charles the Simple, king of the West Franks; Eadhild wed Hugh the Great, Duke of the Franks; Eadgyth was matched with Otto the Great, king of the East Franks and later emperor; Ælfgifu (or Eadgifu) married into the Burgundian royal line.
While his half-sisters were dispatched to Europe, scholars increasingly moved in the opposite direction to exchange the latest prose and verse texts at an English court that was becoming a hub of bookish activity. We think it is in Æthelstan’s court that some of the earliest English interactions with the Indian game of chess can be evidenced – yet more proof of 10th-century England’s growing cultural pulling power.
Scholars from continental Europe were drawn to an English court that was becoming a hub of intellectual activity
A hostile coalition
The tentacles of Æthelstan’s power now stretched far and wide. But such power could provoke intense resentment. And so it proved in 937 when a coalition of hostile forces – led by Óláf Guthfrithson, Viking king of Dublin; Constantine II, ruler of the Scottish kingdom of ‘Alba’; and Owain, king of ‘Strathclyde/Cumbria’ – clashed with English armies at a place called Brunanburh.
Modern discussion of Brunanburh has focused on the enduring mystery of its location. But it’s important not to lose sight of the significance of the battle itself: nothing less than Æthelstan’s newly forged ‘England’ was at stake that day.
It was certainly a large and bloody clash. A famous poem, written in the immediate aftermath to commemorate Æthelstan’s deeds, tells us that: “Never yet in this island before this by what books tell us and our ancient sages, was a greater slaughter of a host made by the edge of the sword.”
Like its location, precise details of how the battle unfolded have been lost to history. But what is certain is that the English prevailed. As the Brunanburh poet tells us: “Edward’s sons [Æthelstan and his brother Edmund] clove the shield-wall, hewed the linden-wood shields with hammered swords, for it was natural to men of their lineage to defend their land, their treasure and their homes, in frequent battle against every foe. Their enemies perished; the people of the Scots and the pirates fell doomed.”
So important was the outcome of Brunanburh that, unusually, sources from outside the English kingdom – from Wales, Scotland and Ireland – all register its result. Æthelstan had confronted the greatest threat to the authority of his reign and he’d faced it down.
Yet his triumph was to be short-lived. Two years later, the king lay dead. And within a few short months of his burial in Malmesbury Abbey, the kingdom he had forged over the past decade began to fall apart. Vikings came to power once more. Óláf Guthfrithson, who had failed to unseat Æthelstan at Brunanburh, finally realised his ambition of seizing control in York.
The political fragmentation that followed Æthelstan’s death has left some modern historians to question just how successful he had been in creating ‘England’ in the first place. We should certainly not think of his kingdom as any kind of homogeneous whole. What ‘England’ meant to the people of Winchester would have been very different to someone living in St Germans (Cornwall), or to a resident of Durham (Northumbria). But, at a time when English territories had for generations been riven by divisions, the very fact that Æthelstan was able to bring all of these areas together for the first time, and to be formally recognised as their king, shows how precociously successful he had been.
It’s for these achievements that 927, the date of England’s formation, should be as well known as those other landmarks of the medieval era: 1066 (the Norman Conquest), 1215 (the issuing of Magna Carta), 1348 (the arrival of the Black Death) and 1455 (the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses).
Æthelstan had presided over a transformative moment in English history. In his 15 or so extraordinary years on the throne, a new nation had been born.
David Woodman is professor of history at Robinson College, Cambridge. His new biography of Æthelstan, The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, is published by Princeton University Press
This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine