THE GENIUS IN THE SHADOWS

Æthelstan is one of the greatest of all Anglo-Saxon monarchs. So why, asks Michael Wood, does the first king of the English remain so fiendishly elusive?

- Michael Wood

It’s been a wonderful couple of decades for medieval royals. King Edward I has bestridden the stage again, thanks to Marc Morris’s gripping biography, A Great and Terrible King. Edward’s father has emerged from the shadows in David Carpenter’s recent doorstopper, Henry III. And five queens – Eleanor of Aquitaine and Margaret of Anjou among them – have bathed in the spotlight once more, courtesy of Helen Castor’s She-Wolves.

When it comes to historical biography, the Middle Ages – or, at least, the latter half of the Middle Ages – remains a perennial favourite.

Further back, in the so-called Dark Ages and the Viking Age in Britain, it’s a different story. Though there’s no end to popular fiction (think The Last Kingdom, the wildly successful TV drama based around the adventures of a Saxon lord), biography is more problematic. The sources are often hugely difficult to penetrate, and so the challenge of producing a sequential narrative of a life – revealing personality, motivations and feelings – is an enormous one. It’s something I have found myself mulling over as I finally return this year to a long delayed project: a biography of Æthelstan, first king of the English.

It was 1100 years ago this summer that the Mercians chose Æthelstan to be their king. His father, Edward the Elder, had died on 17 July 924 – followed to the grave, just 16 days later, by his designated heir, Æthelstan’s younger half-brother Ælfweard. A succession crisis ensued and Æthelstan was only (perhaps grudgingly?) accepted by the West Saxons the following year. On 4 September 925, he was crowned ‘King of the Anglo-Saxons’ – that is, of the Mercians and West Saxons. Within two years, he was king of all England.