In this edited extract, David Starkey sets out his thesis for his history of the English monarchy, and then describes the two moments when England truly became a nation-state – first, under the politically sophisticated Edgar, and then under the man who would later be considered one of the worst English kings: Aethelraed.
To most people today, monarchy seems to be a matter of ceremony and sentiment. But, in fact, it's far more than that. It's the natural, universal form of government. Not all monarchs are kings, of course, They can just as well be presidents or dictators. But everywhere, in the end, power comes down to the decisions of one person, the person with authority. A prime minister or a president is a king for the time being, and can be as powerful as any medieval monarch or Roman emperor.
Dialogue between king and people
But in Britain – or, rather, in England – monarchy takes on a special meaning because we still have our monarchy. It is over 1,500 years old, which means it is the oldest functioning political institution in Europe. It is also unique because, right from the beginning, the English monarchy had a strong popular element. This means that its history is more than a tale of kings and queens, or royal heroes like King Alfred and Henry V and crowned villains like King John. It's also the story of a dialogue between king and people in which the English people learned to rule themselves, and thus became the envy and the example of the world.
The English monarchy is, and has been for centuries, a driving force in Britain. And that is the theme of this book: how English kings and queens of long ago built this nation, beginning in the chaos and violence of the Dark Ages.
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In 973, about 70 years after King Alfred died, his great-grandson Edgar came to Bath for what was probably his second coronation. He had already been crowned 'King of the English', but in the meantime he had established his authority over all Britain.
Participatory kingship
Hence the choice of Bath for another, bigger ceremony. For in Bath there was a unique combination of a Christian abbey next to the largest, most impressive ruins of Roman Britain. It was an incomparable setting for Edgar's coronation as king of the first British empire, 10th-century style. And the ceremony matched the occasion's significance. Unlike Saxon kings of a previous age, Edgar was invested with a crown, not a helmet. And the service, conducted by his archbishop, Dunstan, deliberately compared the king to Christ.
This coronation was so spectacular that, when in 1910, more than a thousand years later, the King-Emperor George V was eager to emphasise his imperial status, he turned to Edgar's coronation service as a model. And he was right to do so. For George V's kingship was the lineal descendent of Edgar's and of Alfred's and of that participatory kingship what had been pioneered in England over a millennium before.
Out of the chaos of a post-Roman Dark Age Britain, the English had created perhaps the world's first nation-state: one king, one country, one Church, one currency, one language and one single, unified representative national administration. Never again in England would sovereignty descend to the merely regional level. Never again, despite disagreements and troubles, wars and even revolutions, would the idea of England – and the unity of England – ever be challenged.
Silver pennies
His second coronation celebrated the fact that Edgar had managed to establish his leadership over the whole island of Britain. But the heartland of his power was the country then called Aenglaland – one of the best organised, richest and most united countries in Europe. Its stability was founded on the close relationship between the monarch and his people. He could not rule without their participation, and his power and laws protected them from exploitation by local warlords. As a result, the country was experiencing an age of unusual prosperity. Under royal patronage, English art and literature flourished.
An indication of the sophistication achieved in Edgar's England is the fact that the English currency achieved a standard unmatched in Europe. Every six years, all the silver pennies in circulation were called in, melted down and reminted with new designs. This was done in local mints with designs and dies centrally supplied to the moneyers by the king, who was thus able not only to ensure uniformity and maintain standards, but to increase or decrease the silver content.
Practical politics
Another technique used by Edgar to promote strength and centralisation was monastic reform. At the beginning of his reign, there was only one properly constituted Benedictine monastery, that at Glastonbury. By the end, there were 22.
Edgar personally gave a gift of land to Winchester, but the gift was more than just an act of piety. By gifts such as this, Edgar was serving another god: he was promoting the idea of a united Aenglaland. Monasteries like Winchester were national institutions; they held land all over the country, they were centres of a self-consciously English culture and, above all, they were royal.
All this was good PR, but it was also vital practical politics, because Edgar's England, the unified England, was only a few decades old. There was always the possibility that it could be destroyed by enemies abroad or, more dangerously, at home.
Golden age
Only two years after the ceremony at Bath, Edgar died. Immediately there was trouble. At that time, for all the political sophistication in England, there were no rules of succession. Edgar had two surviving sons. The elder, Edward, was crowned king. But just three years later at Corfe, he was attacked and killed by his own half-brother's henchmen, probably on the orders of his stepmother. The murder brought to the throne that half-brother, a man who is remembered today as one of the worst kings ever to wear the crown.
His name was Aethelraed, still known today as 'the Unready'. His real nickname, though, was 'the Unraed' – that is, 'badly advised or counselled'. It's a pun on his own name of Aethelraed, meaning 'noble counsel', and is a product of hindsight, first appearing almost a century later. It is also, at least for the earlier decades of the reign, unfair. England in the 990s enjoyed something of a golden age of church building and of legal and administrative reform.
But soon it was again being threatened by seaborne raiders. The Danes had almost been too much for Alfred the Great himself. How would Aethelraed the Unraed fare?
Shock and awe
A century before, Englishmen had beaten off the Scandinavians. But now a far greater storm was about to break over their heads. First, many of the raiders were refugees from the Danish rulers. They were seeking to restore their fortunes by marauding in England, and to establish their futures by settlement.
Second, a new tough professionalism characterised the Viking world. The Danes (probably under the leadership of their first Christian king Harold Bluetooth) had created a formidable military machine, backed up with engineering and organisational skills, and this they released on England. It was blitzkrieg – even shock and awe.
The stuff of legend
In the year of our Lord 991, a menacing fleet approached the coast of East Anglia. The Norsemen were back. The Viking fleet sacked Ipswich and then made landfall on an island in the Blackwater estuary near Maldon in Essex. The whole of eastern England was threatened. The Danes' first move was to send a messenger to the English, demanding money with menaces. Aethelraed's commander retorted that they should come across the causeway and fight it out like men.
There then took place one of the greatest battles in English history. On the seaward side of the causeway, there were the hordes of the most dangerous invader yet faced by an English king; on the landward side, the forces of the most sophisticated monarchy in western Europe.
The English defeat that followed became the stuff of legend and of literature, the subject of a famous Anglo-Saxon war poem that encapsulates exactly the Dunkirk spirit of the English warriors.
Unusual propaganda
But it also tells about the men who fought. The soldiers are described as hailing from all over the country. Among the English, so the poem tells us, there is an aristocrat from the Midlands called Aelfwine, then a local man, a yeoman called Dunnere, and from far-off Northumbria a warrior called Aescferth. It was an English army, not an Essex army, that went down to defeat that day.
So every region of England was represented in this roll-call of the army and each rank of society from the top almost to the bottom. The result was to emphasise the unity of England as a country in which a common sense of nationhood overrode distinctions of locality and class. The poem is propaganda, of course, but it is unusual propaganda at a time when, in most of Europe, horizons were much narrower and loyalty to a local warlord came first and last.
For England in 991 was the first nation-state. It wasn't a modern state, of course, but it did have representative institutions, it was ordered, it was united and, above all, it was rich.
