Æthelstan: why is writing a biography of one of England's greatest kings so difficult?

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 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.

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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 AD – 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.

Æthelstan’s comparatively short reign (he died in 939) has long been shadowy, but it has always looked like a turning point. The origins of the English state, the introduction of Carolingian-styled kingship, the beginnings of the English parliament, the transformation of English law, even perhaps the first English translation of the Gospels – all have their roots in those 14 years he was in power.

Æthelstan: greatest English monarch?

More than a millennium later, the Æthelstan bandwagon has truly begun to roll. In 2021, the king was crowned Greatest English Monarch by The Rest Is History podcast, in a poll of 84,000 voters. So it seems that I am far from alone in finding this pivotal time in English history fascinating.

My own interest in Æthelstan dates back to my schooldays, when I read Frank Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England. Stenton thought the king was the greatest English statesman of whom no biography existed. The Old English scholar Kenneth Sisam penned a letter to Stenton after publication in 1943, urging him to write that biography. “So many things,” Sisam observed, “begin with him.”

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They certainly do. Which is why, ever since I was a graduate student, I have hoped one day to write my own biography of Æthelstan. But though I have written many articles and made films about him, the draft of the book has been in my drawer for more than 30 years.

So why the long delay? Well, first of all, there’s the perennial problem of writing biographies of people in early medieval Britain – the complications presented by fragmentary sources. And, layered on top of that, there are challenges peculiar to Æthelstan himself.

Take the ‘Great War’ of 937. This saw the king defeat a huge invasion of England led by a coalition of Vikings, Scots and north British forces – at an unknown location. If we don’t even know where the most important event of Æthelstan’s reign took place, then our understanding of that reign is uncertain, to say the least.

Thinking about biography more broadly, and looking at the 500 or so years after the end of Rome, you think first of Peter Brown’s life of Augustine of Hippo, beginning with its brilliant evocation of the late Roman world on the sun-beaten shore of north Africa. But, of course, Augustine was a writer. He shares his thoughts and feelings with us. Some 250 letters survive, along with an autobiography, the Confessions. We feel we really can know him.

What wouldn’t we give to have something like that in the Viking Age? To the east, Byzantium has proven fertile territory for biography. For his sweeping Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint (John Murray Press, 2023) Peter Sarris could draw on a rich array of contemporary sources, not least the histories of Procopius, Agathias and John Malalas.

In western Europe, though, the things we really want to know are often hard to find, though there are exceptions. For that best-known of all Old English kings, Alfred the Great, we’ve got Asser’s biography, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and a body of writings in some sense dictated by the king – all assembled in the superb Alfred the Great (Penguin, 2004) by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge.

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But even here, modern historians have been curiously unwilling to try to exploit his personal writings for clues to Alfred’s religious beliefs, sex life and masculinity. The huge King Alfred the Great (OUP, 1995) by Alfred Smyth, for example, is not a sequential account of the king’s life and what he thought and felt.

Some would still say that such an undertaking is simply not possible. Early medieval people, they would contend, must remain largely hidden behind the veil of scholarly Latin until we get to the 12th-century renaissance and the likes of French philosopher Peter Abelard. Only then does human personality again open up as it did with Augustine more than half a millennium earlier: with feelings, loves, hopes and dreams.

What sources do we have for Æthelstan?

In the case of Æthelstan, we have none of that. There’s nothing, so far as we know, actually spoken or written by him, apart from a few fascinating remarks recorded by stenographers at law-making meetings. We’ve got letters written to him, but not by him. There are his book inscriptions, some perhaps dictated. There are his charters, among the most interesting pieces of Latin prose of the age, which meld a high-flown rhetoric of rule with the eschatological tone of a sermon or homily. These were surely approved by the king in this form – but they were not composed by him.

That, you have to say, is par for the course for that time in Britain. Faced with this, the historian Norman Cantor actually went so far as to invent, or ‘recreate’, conversations, for his book Medieval Lives (Harper, 1994). From there, it’s a short leap to Hilary Mantel’s brilliant fictions and her uncanny evocation in Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, 2009) not only of the life of Thomas Cromwell but his inwardness, his memory. This, we feel, is what he must have been like.

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What to do then? Well, sympathetic imagination can take you a long way while still sticking to the sources. The brilliant economic historian Eileen Power proved as much in the 1920s in her book Medieval People. I followed Power’s lead in my 2008 BBC film Christina: A Medieval Life, about a poor medieval villein on the St Albans estate of Codicote who lived between the 1270s and the Black Death.

This showed what you could get out of apparently unyielding sources: court books, surveys and rentals. When, in the worst winter of famine, Christina’s neighbour Roger Gorman sells off his remaining plough gear and eventually dies of starvation, leaving nothing “because he had nothing”, you are right down there with what life was like for poor medieval people.

The 'interior life' of Æthelstan

Sympathetic imagination was also to the fore in Janet Nelson’s dazzling attempt to recreate the life of an early medieval ruler. In King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne (Allen Lane, 2019), Nelson uses a lifetime’s experience to subtly tease magic out of the sources. Quarrying hints from Charlemagne’s early years, Nelson gives us convincing flashes of insight, even (from a later source) the king’s own voice as an inquisitive seven-year-old: “The day I lost my first milk tooth.”

In the ninth century, the Frankish scholar Einhard wrote a biography of Charlemagne telling of the king’s vita et conversatio, his ‘life and life style’. But then, Einhard says, he will turn from public deeds to the king’s “interior and domestic life”. This was what medieval readers really wanted to know about. Charlemagne had a full domestic life that would have engrossed the tabloids today. There were many concubines and he was later imagined howling in hell for his sexual indiscretions.

In the case of Æthelstan... there’s nothing, so far as we know, actually spoken or written by him, apart from a few fascinating remarks recorded by stenographers at law-making meetings

There are similar hints in Asser’s account of Alfred: that the king’s painful disease of the bowels (which started on his wedding night!) might have been divine punishment for his libidinous teens.

With Æthelstan, there are no such gems. He never married, so it would appear. He had no children (we think). No women are mentioned. (Was he gay? asks Sarah Foot in her book on the king). But the idea that Æthelstan had a vita interior at all – at a time when kings can hardly have enjoyed much of a private life – is worth pondering.

A hundred years ago, in The Times of Saint Dunstan, J Armitage Robinson showed what might be gathered about Æthelstan’s interior life from unconsidered trifles: book inscriptions, burnt manuscripts, relic lists; his intellectual curiosity, his love of books. And also, of course, his religion, with what are to us the weird obsessions of the early Middle Ages: the pervasive belief in the cult of relics and the literal trust in dreams and visions.

There were other aspects, too: the king’s friendships, his guests and the foreign scholars in his international court. The biographer’s main focus inevitably falls on Æthelstan’s time as king. But what of his early life? Here we must admit we will mostly never know.

There are hints: a tale of the boy and his grandfather; a childhood poem; a teenage encounter with the divine. Especially, I would guess, there was his reverence for his grandfather King Alfred, whom he knew till he was five or six but who had “affectionately kissed him… in omen of a kingdom”. There was also his beloved aunt Æthelflæd, his foster mother who brought him up in Mercia.

Æthelstan's lost sources

We would know much more if only we had the lost 10th-century biography discovered by the historian William of Malmesbury in the 1120s in “an obviously ancient manuscript”, perhaps in the library at Glastonbury. If this had survived, our view of Æthelstan – indeed of the entire beginnings of the English state – would be totally transformed.

In the modern edition of William of Malmesbury’s Deeds of the Kings, the excerpts from the lost book amount to eight pages of prose precis and 63 lines of verse. From these we can see the poem was in Latin hexameters in the style of the school of St Æthelwold of Winchester, written maybe in the 970s.

Judging by what William gives us, the poem was weighted towards the early part of the reign with fascinating and otherwise unknown detail on the first few years. The text evidently drew on an eyewitness, and it is tempting to speculate that the informant was Æthelwold himself, who as a young man spent several years in the king’s court. We know that Æthelwold later told his own biographer, Wulfstan Cantor, many stories of his childhood and youth, looking back more than half a century, and described himself as the king’s “inseparable companion”.

This enables us to see, for example, William’s story of the Frankish embassy to Abingdon in 926 in a new light. Our eyewitness was evidently there that day, and conveys the sense of wonder, the sheer thrill of the king and his court, as stupendous treasures, including the Holy Lance and the Sword of Constantine, were laid out for all to see, “lighting up the eyes of the bystanders”.

In a precious late Antique onyx vase “you seemed to see real ripples of corn waving, men really moving… its surface reflecting the faces of the onlookers”. A magnificent Carolingian crown “dazzled all around with its shine”. There was also “a small piece of the holy and ever to be adored cross enclosed in crystal, which the eye could see through, solid rock though it is, and discern the wood, its colour and size”.

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In moments like that, we are right there with them. The sources, then, can give us more than has been thought. From all this, I think we can paint a believable picture of a man who, as William of Malmesbury says, writing 200 years on, was still viewed by popular opinion as “the most just and most learned in Latin letters who ever ruled the state”.

An English-style Carolingian renaissance prince. And England’s Greatest Monarch? Unlikely as that would have sounded even recently, the point of a new biography is to show that it is not entirely fanciful.

This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine