500 years of history, and they were difficult years.

War, famine, invasion, disease.

Right from their earliest arrival on the island,

time and time again, the Anglo-Saxons had faced destruction.

The solutions they found were specific to their circumstances.

Alliances were formed and broken. Common cause was found.

Dinesties were merged, while others were obliterated.

Kingdoms rose and fell. These people blended with the local population. They mixed with new

arrivals and they did what the people of the island had always done. They

adapted and they survived.

But it wasn't easy.

One by one, the kingdoms of the Heptarchy had fallen.

But under the direction of Alfred's children, what crawled out of the ashes of war was a single kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.

And after centuries of catastrophe and mere annihilation, now there was just one Anglo-Saxon royal family.

Alfred's family.

But Unity is more than simply the absence of borders.

Even Athelstan, who is as much an emperor as a king, had struggled

to unite this fractious, clanish kingdom. The very character which had brought the House

of Wessex to power, their ruthlessness,

their shrewd opportunism, their hunger for control, had accelerated the growth of a cancer,

and it was starting to eat away at the heart of England.

The structure of English society, once fluid and responsive to talent and drive and merit,

...