England's First King, Viking Invasions

In 924, Edward the Elder died, and the witan (the council of nobles advising the ruler) elected his son Aethelstan as the new king of the Anglo-Saxons. Aethelstan inherited a strong position: his aunt Aethelflaed had retaken Mercia, and his father, Edward the Elder, had won back East Anglia. The Danelaw was now a far smaller, far more vulnerable realm, centred on Northumbria and the city of Jorvik. What’s more, the Viking realm’s king was a man named Sitric, a relative of Guthrum, and, as husband to Aethelstan’s sister Aelfgif, an ally to the House of Wessex.

In 926, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records “fiery lights in the Northern Firmament”. Aethelstan had been picked out for greatness. William of Malmesbury, the great 12th-century chronicler of the English kings, relates that Alfred took a particular shine to his young nephew, making him a knight at an unusually young age, gifting him a belt studded with diamonds. He then sent him to gain battlefield experience with his great aunt Aethelflaed in Mercia. Here, Aethelstan probably joined the campaigns against the Vikings in the north, and by the time of his accession, he was an experienced and respected warrior.

In 927, Sitric died. Aethelstan jumped on the opportunity and invaded Northumbria. Within the year, he had taken Jorvik, and now, for the first time since the invasion, all of England was once again in Saxon hands. For the first time in history, all of England was ruled by a single, native-born king.

Aethelstan now controlled by far the largest, richest and most powerful realm on the British Isles. Immediately after his victory, he sent word to the other kings of Britain and ordered them to meet at Eamont Bridge, probably a river island on the border between Northumbria, Mercia, and the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde. Here, near Mayborough Henge, in the shadow of the ancient mythology of the islands, its kings were expected to gather, and pay homage to Aethelstan as their overlord. 

The other British rulers chafed at this humiliation, and though they promised Aethelstan submission, they were not about to take English overlordship lying down. A coalition gathered. The Scots, the Welsh of Strathclyde, and King Olaf of the Dublin Vikings all pledged to destroy Aethelstan and his new English kingdom. After their meeting, a Welsh poet penned The Prophecy of Britain, which foretells the expulsion of the Saxons from Britain, and curses the English thus:

“Let a bush be their shelter in reward of their bad faith.
Let the sea be, let an anchor be, their counsellors.
Let gore be, let death be, their reward.” 

Aethelstan gathered his troops and met the coalition at Brunaburg, probably in the Wirral in Merseyside. The Saxons had their own poets, and one gives a stirring description of the events. He recounts that the battle lasted all day, that it:

“Flow'd, from when first the great
 Sun−star of morningtide,
 Lamp of the Lord God
 Lord everlasting,
Glode over earth till the glorious creature
Sank to his setting.”

The fighting was furious, with thousands of men on the field, and the losses were great:

“Five young kings put asleep by the sword−stroke,
Seven strong earls of the army of Olaf
Fell on the war−field, numberless numbers,
Shipmen and Scotsmen.”

At day’s end, all five of the kings put asleep by the sword-stroke were Aethelstan’s enemies. There had been one last attempt to challenge English superiority in these Isles, and now the Scots, Irish, Vikings and Britons were vanquished. Only Olaf survived, adrift on the North Sea.

Aethelstan was now the undisputed overlord of the British Isles. He quickly got to work tearing down the defences of Jorvik, so it could not be used in rebellion, and purging the ethnically mixed city of Exeter of its British inhabitants, so that the city was less likely to rise. A huge new corpus of laws was published, and the king set about creating a vast royal bureaucracy to manage a realm far larger than any ruled by his predecessors.