In Search of England by Michael Wood

Author:Michael Wood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141931722
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 2009-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

Mounted strength: a numberless host of cavalry.

Eventually the voice of protest roused the king;

Not to let himself be branded thus:

That his people had meekly given in to barbarian arms.

This passage is clearly no flight of fancy. The idea that Athelstan of all people could be criticized for lassitude and complacency is inconceivable as a forgery of the twelfth century, and in Malmesbury of all places. This must be a reflection of the anxieties of the time. Kings were expected to be ever vigilant, ‘on a watchtower’, armed, always ready to attack the pagans. And Athelstan was not a thirty-year-old any more, basking in glory, but a hardbitten king in his mid forties now with his back to the wall, facing the ultimate test of nerve – and luck (fortuna) – that other great quality needed by medieval kings along with constancy, fortitude and greatness of soul. A text like this was obviously produced within living memory of these events, perhaps as an encouragement to less successful or less experienced successors, of which there were several in the half century after Athelstan's death. Behind it perhaps we can glimpse something of the nerve-shattering events which led up to the ‘Great Battle’.

The battle itself is truncated to a few lines of verse by William, and with that he ends his paraphrase of ‘the poet from whom we have taken all these particulars’. The king died exactly two years after the battle, on Wednesday 27 October 939 in Gloucester, and, as he had instructed in his will, was buried at Malmesbury. His brother Edmund led the cortége. Going off into the realms of speculation, one would expect a tenth-century royal biography to have ended with a description of the king's death, the funeral and a eulogy. As it happens, in a later section of his book William does in fact give us an unattributed description of Athelstan's funeral procession, with very circumstantial details of the holy relics and treasures carried along with the coffin. In another work, William gives the king's ‘epitaph’ in verse: ‘[Here lies] the Honour of the world, grieved by his country, the path of rectitude, the thunderbolt of justice, the exemplar of purity.’ When the king died, says this text, ‘the sun was in the sixth of Scorpio’ (the sixth of the kalends of November, i.e., 27 October). Though sometimes dismissed as another of William's concoctions, the Latin of this text has many parallels with tenth-century poetry. Particularly eye-catching is the use of munditia: an ancient word meaning ‘purity’ in the sense of chastity, and a very unusual word to use of a Dark Age king, most of whom were inveterate womanizers. Did the king not only not marry, but remain celibate? We simply do not know, but one might suspect that this ‘epitaph’ was in fact adapted by William from a eulogy of the king which followed the account of his funeral and burial, and with which the lost book ended.

What we have got here, I think, is the skeleton of a full-scale life of the king.

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