Æthelstan: First King of the English

Gone Medieval

History Hit

History

4.6 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The grandson of Alfred the Great, Æthelstan the Glorious was the first King of England, reigning from 924 to 939. Æthelstan inherited the title King of Mercia from his father Edward the Elder, but was not immediately accepted as King of England. Shortly after his crowning he married one of his sisters to the Viking King of Northumbria, Sithric. When Sithric died only a year later, Æthelstan seized Northumbria making him king of more land than any other before him, roughly the same as modern England.

In this explainer episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis tells the story of a reign that is sometimes overlooked but which was of great importance to political developments in the 10th century.

This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Elena Guthrie.

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Transcript

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0:44.3	Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis and today I thought we take a look at
1:02.8	the story of the first man to call himself Rex Anglorum, King of the English.
1:08.6	When Rome evacuated the British Isles in the 5th century, they created a power vacuum.
1:16.8	Into that came Angles, Saxons, Jutes and other Germanic tribesfolk. They bought paganism back
1:24.8	to Britain and precisely how they settled is a hotly debated matter. Were they violent invaders
1:31.8	or settling traders? Fortunately for me, I don't have to try and answer that today.
1:37.2	They came and they stayed.
1:43.0	Their Germanic origins gave rise to the term Anglo-Saxon, which is now used to describe
1:48.3	the period between the withdrawal of Rome and the Norman conquest. Like everything else,
1:53.8	it isn't quite that simple. And it's also an odd thing that that term has been hijacked to give
1:58.3	it nationalistic, peculiarly English connotations when it really describes a group of people coming
2:04.1	to England to make their homes. After a period of conflict, numerous smaller kingdoms eventually
2:10.4	merged and melded together into the Heptarchy, the seven major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. These were
	...

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