The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, David Woodman, Princeton University Press, £30

King Æthelstan is at last having his moment. For centuries he has languished in the shadow of his grandfather, Alfred the Great. It’s quite the shadow. Voltaire doubted whether there had ever been a ‘man more deserving of the respect of posterity’ than Alfred. Gibbon saw in him combined the ‘virtue of Antoninus, the learning and the valour of Cæsar, and the legislative genius of Lycurgus’. Hume made him the ‘model of that perfect character’, which philosophers had always longed for in a ruler; this found an echo when the Victorian Professor Freeman called him ‘the most perfect character in history’. How could the poor grandson compete? At least Dickens found space in his Child’s History to offer Æthelstan some praise – but only for having ‘remembered the glory of his grandfather, the great Alfred’.

It wasn’t always so. Æthelstan once was admired in his own right. When Æthelred the Unready set about naming his sons, he reached always for the names of prior Saxon kings. The last of his many sons was named Alfred, the penultimate Edward (known to us as ‘the Confessor’); but it was to his eldest son that he gave the name Æthelstan, after the man whom he presumably regarded as the most illustrious of his predecessors.

Æthelstan, who reigned from 924 to 939, was also held in high esteem by his contemporaries. The Count of Paris, seeking the hand of one of his sisters, thought him worthy of the finest gifts in Christendom: the sword of Constantine, the lance of Charlemagne, even a piece of the Crown of Thorns. The Annals of Ulster saw in him ‘the pillar of the dignity of the western world’. William of Malmesbury, two centuries later, called him the ‘thunderbolt of justice, model of purity’ – though he had some reason to do so, since Æthelstan was buried in his abbey. Alfred the Great has been the subject of much dreadful verse; the poet laureate Henry James Pye’s epic poem on Alfred was scathingly described by Southey as a ‘species of puff for which the writer is certainly entitled to a patent’. Æthelstan got some better poems in his own times, the most famous celebrating his glorious victory against a coalition of Norsemen and Scots at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937.

In the end, it’s not a fair fight. Alfred, for one thing, had an in-house PR machine, in the form of his court-biographer Asser; Æthelstan did not. The cult of Æthelstan’s grandfather was then also sustained by an ever-expanding mythology. Alfred, gushed his medieval and early-modern admirers, was the founder of the Royal Navy, the University of Oxford, the trial by jury – and that’s before we even get to the cakes. Henry VI tried to have him canonised. ‘Rule, Britannia!’ was first performed as the finale of the 1740 opera Alfred. What is worse, from Æthelstan’s perspective, is that his grandfather’s fan-club encroached on his own, stronger claim to be the ‘first king of England’.

To a lesser extent Æthelstan’s star has also been eclipsed by his nephew, Edgar the Peaceable. We know little about Edgar, but this redounds to his credit: it may be the mark of a successful reign to leave few traces. Soon after his conquest of England, Canute swore to ‘observe Edgar’s laws’; clearly these were then regarded as the gold standard of English kingship. Edgar’s reign was remembered fondly for some time. A 15th-century poem, the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, proclaimed that Edgar was to the English as Cyrus to the Persians, Charlemagne to the French, Romulus to the Romans. Sir Thomas Elyot’s 1531 Boke named the Gouenour likewise praised the reign of Edgar as the time in which ‘the realme began… to shewe some visage of a publike weal’. It was Edgar, on this telling, who had really established an English commonwealth. Edgar’s significance has been reasserted in some recent scholarship; and so Æthelstan’s current admirers have a two-front war on their hands.

They fight it at an auspicious time. On 4 September 2025, we mark the 1100th anniversary of Æthelstan’s coronation. Two years from now we shall celebrate the same anniversary of his incorporation of Northumbria into a single English kingdom; the year 927 is perhaps the closest England has to a 1776. The 20^th-century’s millenaries passed without a fuss, but this time the groundwork has been laid. In 2021, when Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland ran a competition on Twitter to decide England’s greatest monarch, Æthelstan narrowly defeated Elizabeth I in the final. Fans of their podcast, The Rest Is History, can become a ‘friend of the show’ for £6 a month; for £25 they rise to the coveted status of ‘Athel-STAN’, with all the perks that entails.

Frank Stenton once described Æthelstan as the ‘greatest English statesman for whom no biography exists’. That, thankfully, has now been rectified. Holland himself sounded the clarion for Æthelstan in his own brief biography for the Penguin Monarchs series in 2016. This joined two other 21^st-century biographies, one by Paul Hill and the other – the most scholarly and comprehensive – by Sarah Foot. Probably Æthelstan’s greatest champion in the public realm is Michael Wood, whose enthusiasm shines through not only in the episode on Æthelstan in a 2013 BBC series, but also in his academic writing stretching back decades.

The task of writing a biography of Æthelstan was avoided for so long because it is so difficult. David Woodman, the latest to take it up, was set along this path by an undergraduate essay at Cambridge: ‘If you were to write a biography of King Æthelstan, what would its main themes be?’ A trickier question might have been: ‘what would its facts be?’ There are, as Woodman acknowledges at the outset in The First King of England, ‘too many holes to be plugged’ in Æthelstan’s life. We possess too few sources, and the sources that we do have often contradict each other. Some tell us that he was born of a concubine, while others say his mother was a noble woman. William of Malmesbury appears to do both. Some cast suspicion on Æthelstan in relation to the mysterious drowning of his brother in 933, an allegation that Woodman thinks ‘credible’. Yet others seem to have been immune from such dark thoughts.

Given all these unknowns, a biography of Æthelstan must contain plenty of conjecture. Indeed, one cannot venture into the tenth century without a healthy imagination. Here is one of Woodman’s many tantalising conjectures: that Æthelstan might have been named after Alfred the Great’s one-time nemesis, the Viking Guthrum, who – once pacified and baptised – took on the name Æthelstan. But historical imagination must be well checked by the constraints of evidence, and Woodman never allows himself to get carried away: so, for example, when suggesting that there may have been a ‘coup of some sort’ in Æthelstan’s later years, he bases this on a series of curious absences and alterations in the witness-lists of Æthelstan’s charters. Aside from an investigation of Æthelstan’s law, foreign relations, and (insofar as they can be known) his religious and intellectual preoccupations, there is also an enjoyable discussion of his bit-part in the early history of board games. What emerges is an impressively well-defined picture of a great Anglo-Saxon king (Woodman occasionally uses that controversial term, despite an early health-warning about its ‘adoption by far right white supremacists’).

The unknowability of so much of Æthelstan’s character and reign can lead historians to be evasive, but Woodman, where possible, is forthcoming in his judgements. As with other apparently childless medieval kings – such as Edward the Confessor or William Rufus – it can be tempting to speculate about Æthelstan’s sexuality. Woodman does not dwell here, but sees no reason to doubt William of Malmesbury’s explanation that Æthelstan remained celibate out of respect for his younger half-brothers, whose position would have been imperilled by the presence of any ambitious princelings.

About Æthelstan’s early life, meanwhile, we know frustratingly little. William of Malmesbury tells us that he was reared in Mercia, at the court of his aunt Æthelflæd. But the same author also has Æthelstan being knighted by Alfred as a boy, and given that there was no knighting in the tenth century, we know that that can’t be true. Still, there does appear to be a Midlands connection. Our ‘first king of England’ was most likely king of Mercia before he was ever king of Wessex; his earliest charters are attested only by Mercian bishops. It is revealing, in any case, that Æthelstan’s coronation took place at Kingston upon Thames, the boundary between the ancient kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia.

Does Æthelstan deserve the title of first king of England? Woodman, as with Æthelstan’s previous biographers, thinks so, and he makes the case effectively. Æthelstan made himself known that way, when he was styled ‘rex Anglorum’. An early genealogy of the West Saxon royal family described him as the ‘first of the kings of the English who ruled alone throughout the entirety of England’. A Latin poem rejoiced that ‘Saxonia’ had been ‘made whole’ (‘perfecta’) in 927, when Æthelstan took over Northumbria. That year, Woodman contends near the end of his book, ought to be ‘as recognisable as 1066’. ‘Perhaps it says something about our collective outlook as a nation’, he continues, ‘that we have historically focused on England’s conquest rather than its formation.’

There are, we might object, some good reasons to remember 1066 better than 927, reasons which go beyond questions of national pathology. One is simply narrative. We know, in considerable detail, what happened in 1066. There are plenty of mysteries, too – was poor Harold killed by an arrow to the eye, or hacked to pieces by a crack team of William’s knights? Had he been crowned by Archbishop Stigand of Canterbury, or Archbishop Ealdred of York? – but we are in the main on solid ground. Not so in 927. It is possible that Æthelstan was able to obtain the north without a stir: he was the brother-in-law of the deceased Viking king, Sihtric, and might therefore have been the acknowledged heir. Some of our sources would rather have us believe that Æthelstan had to make good on his claims with force. We must in the end plead ignorance. England might have been born in 927; but we have no idea what its birth looked like.

More fundamentally, the kingdom that Æthelstan stitched together was a flash in the pan. It didn’t take long, after his death, for Northumbria to slip away. Not even the kingdom as he had found it in 924 was made into a solid, unbreakable unit. In 957 it was briefly divided at the River Thames between his nephews Eadwig and Edgar; in 1016 it was divided again, along the same lines, between Edmund Ironside and Canute. Nor should we forget that Alfred’s, Æthelstan’s, and Edgar’s kingdom was, in the end, conquered twice in the subsequent century. When we commemorate the 1100th anniversary of Æthelstan’s coronation at Kingston – and when, in two years’ time, we celebrate England’s 1100th birthday – we might find it difficult to avoid relapse into the characteristically English pessimism that Woodman holds responsible for our fixation on 1066. We ought not only to give Æthelstan the praise which has for so long been denied him, but also to reflect on the ultimate fragility of his achievement.