The terrible attack on their community by ‘heathen men’ in 793 must have long haunted the monks of Lindisfarne, and left them feeling vulnerable and unsettled. At some point in the first half of the ninth century, with viking activity increasing everywhere, they abandoned the island that St Aidan had selected for them two centuries earlier and moved to the mainland, bringing with them the bones of their most celebrated and powerful predecessor, St Cuthbert. For a time they resided on the banks of the Tweed at Norham, but in the mid-870s, as Northumbria was being carved up by Scandinavian warlords, they set off again, apparently wandering from place to place for seven years. Eventually, around 883, they settled at Chester-le-Street, an old Roman fort about sixty miles to the south, situated on the River Wear. They were still there half a century later, when they were visited by King Æthelstan.
The year was 934, and Æthelstan was leading an army from Wessex through Northumbria in order to fight the Scots. He decided to pause at Chester-le-Street to venerate the remains of St Cuthbert, and to shower the monks with gifts. These were described in a charter issued by the king at the time of his visit and copied into a history of the community composed a century or so later. They included many items of richly embroidered fabric: ecclesiastical vestments, altar coverings, curtains, tapestries, and ‘a royal headdress woven with gold’. There were also numerous other treasures worked from or decorated with both gold and silver: cups, candlesticks, armlets, bells, drinking horns, and a cross ‘finished with gold and ivory’. Æthelstan in addition gave the monks an extensive royal estate on the south bank of the Wear, and also several books: three ornate sets of gospels, a missal, and ‘a life of St Cuthbert written in verse and prose’.
Remarkably, some parts of this generous donation have survived. Six decades after the king’s visit, and more than a century after their arrival at Chester-le-Street, the monks decided to move again, and relocated seven miles further south, establishing a new church in a loop of the Wear which became Durham Cathedral. The shrine that was constructed in the cathedral for Cuthbert’s body after the Norman Conquest was destroyed during the Reformation, but his coffin was secreted in a wall space and survived. When it was rediscovered and opened in 1827, it was found to contain not only the saint’s complete skeleton, but fragments of the elaborately carved wooden casket in which he had originally been buried, his gold pectoral cross (colour picture 7), and a gospel book written not long after his death. It also contained some scraps of the embroidered items donated by Æthelstan in 934 – probably the stole and the maniple mentioned in the king’s charter (colour picture 19). All these items are now on display in the cathedral’s treasury.
No less miraculously, one of the books donated by Æthelstan is still with us. Many items from the cathedral’s library were dispersed during the sixteenth century, including the Lindisfarne Gospels, which ultimately ended up in the British Library. In the case of Æthelstan’s books, we do not know what happened to the missal, and two of the three gospel books are also unaccounted for. The third survived until the eighteenth century, but perished in the fire of 1731 that also consumed Asser’s Life of Alfred and singed the pages of Beowulf. But the volume donated by the king that contained a life of St Cuthbert is still in existence, having found its way to Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. It is a copy of the two lives of Cuthbert written by Bede, and has at the beginning a full-page picture of the saint being presented with the book by Æthelstan himself (colour picture 18). It is the earliest manuscript image of an English king.
This image, and the royal visit that inspired it, tell us several important things about Æthelstan. In the first place, he was notably pious. ‘The most pious King Æthelstan’ is how he was described on the first page of the gospel book that was destroyed by fire in 1731. The scale of his donation indicates that he was also abundantly rich: a ruler who could afford to reward his favourite subjects with almost embarrassing quantities of precious artefacts, as well as land and money. And, as his pronounced wealth implies, he was extremely powerful – arguably the most powerful of all the English kings before the Norman Conquest. Æthelstan was in Northumbria in 934 not as a foreign visitor but as its self-appointed ruler, having forcibly annexed the formerly independent kingdom seven years earlier. The army he was leading against the Scots was composed of men drawn from every region in southern Britain – not only English warriors from Wessex and Mercia, but also Danes who had settled in the eastern parts of the island, and Britons from the west. As the ruler of all these regions, Æthelstan has good claim to be considered the first king of England (although the word ‘England’ had yet to be invented) and even grander titles were touted at his court, where he was sometimes styled ‘king of all Britain’.
According to the same chronicle that preserved his charter, before Æthelstan continued on his expedition against the Scots, he gave instructions that ‘if anything sinister should befall him’, his body was to be returned to Chester-le-Street for burial near St Cuthbert, who would be able to present him before God on the Day of Judgement. As it turned out, this precaution proved unnecessary: the king’s campaign was a success, and he returned south to reign for a further five years. When he eventually died in 939, he was buried in Malmesbury, an ancient monastery in Wessex, founded in the late seventh century. The abbey church, now the parish church, still contains a tomb chest built for his remains in the late Middle Ages, topped with a life-sized effigy of its sometime royal occupant. But Æthelstan was less fortunate in death than Cuthbert, and during the Reformation his remains were destroyed. All we have now is a description of his body, written in the early twelfth century by William of Malmesbury, one of the greatest English historians. William was a monk at Malmesbury and had evidently seen inside the king’s tomb. He describes Æthelstan as being slim, ‘not beyond what is becoming in stature’, and having blond hair, ‘beautifully mingled with gold threads’.
It is thanks to William that we know more about Æthelstan than most other tenth-century English kings, whose lives are on the whole very poorly chronicled. Writing his Deeds of the Kings of the English, William interrupts his section on Æthelstan to explain how he had recently discovered ‘a certain obviously ancient volume’ that contained an earlier account of the king’s career, and goes on to incorporate some of this new material into his own narrative. Doubts have been raised in recent years about the authenticity of this information, chiefly because the sections that William appears to present as verbatim quotes can be shown on stylistic grounds to have been composed in his own day, rather than at some point in the more distant past. But this apparent obstacle is not insuperable, since William himself tells us that the original text in his ‘ancient volume’ was written in such a florid, bombastic style that he felt compelled to rewrite it using simpler and more comprehensible language. In addition, some of the information William reproduces from his lost source is so mundane in its detail that it seems unlikely to have been whimsically invented. Most modern historians are therefore prepared to admit this material as evidence, though perhaps with the caveat that it might not be wholly reliable.
The most famous anecdote that William of Malmesbury relates from his ancient book sits on the cusp of plausible history and convenient legend. As a child, we are told, Æthelstan was good-looking and graceful, and these qualities endeared him to his grandfather, King Alfred, who publicly acknowledged the boy’s suitability as a future ruler by investing him at a young age. Æthelstan, who could have been no more than six, was given a scarlet cloak, a jewelled belt, and a Saxon sword with a golden scabbard. Since his accession, which eventually happened twenty-five years after Alfred’s death, proved to be a very contentious affair, stories of him having been pre-approved by his illustrious grandfather might rightly be viewed with suspicion. But the tale draws some support from a poem dedicated to Æthelstan as a child that expresses similar sentiments, and from the fact that Alfred himself, at a comparable age, had been blessed and invested by the pope in a similar ceremony. Perhaps, then, the old king had indeed publicly bestowed honours on his grandson as his own reign drew to a close. The pity was he had not done more to quell the family feud among the generation immediately below him, which erupted in the days after his death.
The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, pp. 247-51.
