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Athelstan

Duration:
45 minutes
First broadcast:
Thursday 01 July 2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the reign of King Athelstan.

Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great, came to the throne of Wessex in 925. A few years later he unified the kingdoms of England, and a decade after that defeated the Scots and styled himself King of all Britain.

As well as being a brilliant military commander, Athelstan was a legal reformer whose new laws forever changed the way crime was dealt with in England. Unlike his predecessors, he pursued a foreign policy, seeking alliances with powerful rulers abroad. And unusually for an Anglo-Saxon king, we know what he looked like: he's the earliest English monarch whose portrait survives.

With:

Sarah Foot
Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Christ Church, Oxford

John Hines
Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University

Richard Gameson
Professor of the History of the Book at Durham University

Producer: Thomas Morris.

  • FURTHER READING

    Dumville, David, ‘Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar: Six Essays on Political, Cultural and Ecclesiastical Revival’ (Woodbridge, 1992)

    Foot, Sarah, ‘Where English becomes British: Rethinking Contexts for Brunanburh’, in ‘Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks’, ed. Julia Barrow and Andrew Wareham (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2008), 127-44

    Foot, Sarah, ‘Æthelstan’ (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, forthcoming, 2011)

    Hill, Paul, ‘The Age of Æthelstan: Britain’s Forgotten History’ (Tempus: Stroud, 2004)

    Keynes, Simon, ‘King Æthelstan’s Books’ in ‘Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England’, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1985), pp. 143-201

    Wood, Michael, ‘The Making of King Æthelstan’s Empire: an English Charlemagne?’ in ‘Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society’, ed. Patrick Wormald et al. (Blackwell, Oxford, 1983), 250-72

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