BBC - King Alfred and the Anglo Saxons 2of3 The Lady of the Mercians
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00:00In the midwinter of 877, the existence of England hung on a thread.
00:12The Vikings had triumphed everywhere.
00:18The last surviving Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred,
00:21fought a desperate guerrilla war in the swamps of Somerset.
00:25But here, in his darkest hour, he had a dream.
00:31St Cuthbert made a prophecy to him,
00:35that from this place his descendants would become kings of all England and lords of Britain.
00:43Alfred took the dream as a mark of destiny.
00:56Alfred beat back the Vikings,
00:58but at the end of his life, his people still lived in a land torn by war.
01:04At this point in the story, it's by no means certain
01:07that Alfred's kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons will survive,
01:11let alone that one England will emerge.
01:14Now Alfred's children continue the family plan,
01:18and one of them is described by a medieval chronicler
01:21as a person of extraordinary ability and mental toughness,
01:26the planner of one of the most brilliant military campaigns in the whole of the Dark Ages.
01:34And she's a woman.
01:35It's one of the great untold stories of British history,
01:39Æthelflaed, the Lady of the Mercians.
01:51THE LADY OF THE MERCIANS
02:21THE LADY OF THE MERCIANS
02:39This is a family story,
02:41three generations of the most remarkable, the most gifted family in our history.
02:48And to pick up the tale, we need to go back to the last months of Alfred's life.
02:55Here in the British Library is a crucial clue
02:58to how Alfred hoped to shape events after his death.
03:04We have been digitising a lot of our medieval manuscripts in full
03:10and putting them up online.
03:13It's a fantastic idea, isn't it,
03:15that wherever we are in the world, we can click on this.
03:19We're looking for Alfred's last will.
03:22Here it is, the Liber Vitae from the New Minster in Winchester.
03:29In this book, we've got a copy of the will of King Alfred.
03:36The will starts on 29 Verso.
03:39The will starts on 29 Verso.
03:42Oh, yes, here we go.
03:44And we can zoom in.
03:48Tremendous.
03:50Here's Alfred's name at the beginning of the will
03:53and you can really see, you know, the sort of individual pen strokes of that scriber.
03:59Alfred, West Saxon King.
04:05That's absolutely amazing, isn't it?
04:07You can see every crinkle.
04:09Every stroke.
04:10And clues here to a bitter family rift.
04:14And he speaks like we do in wills today.
04:18Yeah, absolutely.
04:19So he's disposing the royal property to his chief children,
04:25the sons, Edward and Aethelwyrd, get most, don't you?
04:28Edward, the future king.
04:29His daughter, Aethelflaed, who's already married and gone,
04:33so her diary's been paid, if you like, if you put it in that way.
04:36And Aethelwyrd minus brothers sonna.
04:40This is his brother's son, whose dad, of course, had been king before Alfred.
04:46So he gets Godalming.
04:49I think this is the first mention of the name of the town of Godalming.
04:55And Guildford.
04:57And Staining.
04:59That's all he gets.
05:00Edward gets about 18 estates, doesn't he?
05:03So he might have come out of this meeting where the will was read out
05:06feeling a little aggrieved, perhaps.
05:09So Alfred had cut his nephew from the succession
05:12in favour of his children by his wife, Aelswith.
05:16And here's Aelswith. This is his wife, isn't it?
05:19The farm, the estate at Lambourne.
05:22And Wantage, which is where Alfred's born, isn't it?
05:27And Eddington, where he won his greatest battle.
05:31It's really quite an interesting psychological document.
05:35He gives these properties that are very important to him
05:39and associated with key events in his life to his wife.
05:45Sentimental?
05:46I don't know. You could read it like that, I think.
05:49There's a little touch of that in his character, isn't there?
05:52He's really trying to nail down the succession, isn't he?
05:55He absolutely is, I think.
05:57And, you know, particularly for his own family, his own son.
06:03So, yeah, he wants to make very, very clear what's going to happen
06:09because there were rival claimants to the throne.
06:28HE SPEAKS LATIN
06:43The early medieval royal family's genealogy conferred legitimacy.
06:50And the West Saxon royal dynasty had a pedigree second to none.
06:57Just look at this.
06:59The Wheel of Fortune.
07:01This is a later medieval royal genealogical roll,
07:0520 feet of it and more.
07:07And in a brilliant piece of graphic design,
07:10it shows you the family tree of the Anglo-Saxon kings.
07:14Here's Æthelwulf, Alfred's father,
07:17and underneath him the four brothers
07:20who successively became kings of the West Saxons.
07:25Alfred's the youngest, the last of those kings.
07:28But if you follow the green line down,
07:33you can see how Alfred outflanked the descendants of his older brothers
07:39and established his own branch of the dynasty,
07:42from which, incidentally, our own queen today is distantly descended.
07:46But the son of King Æthelred,
07:50the Ætheling, Prince Æthelwold,
07:53the man who got Godalming in Alfred's will,
07:57is cut out completely.
08:00And in the early Middle Ages, in the Viking Age,
08:04hell had no fury like an Ætheling scorned.
08:12And a renegade prince could always find an army to back his cause.
08:18Half of England was under the Danelaw,
08:21ruled by Vikings settled since Alfred's day.
08:24And as soon as Alfred's son Edward took the throne,
08:27his embittered cousin made his move.
08:52HE SPEAKS GERMAN
09:14For the new king, Edward, it was a deadly threat.
09:17Wessex couldn't have two kings.
09:20We have to go back to Cambridge, to the source we've followed through this tale,
09:24the original manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle.
09:30It's a contemporary narrative now.
09:32It's being written as these events go on.
09:35Alfred the Great has died in October 899, aged about 50.
09:41Edward's crowned, Pentecost, Whitsunday, 900.
09:45And no sooner was Alfred dead and Edward crowned
09:48than hungry Æthelings began to prowl.
09:51Chief among them, Æthelwald.
09:54Here he is in the chronicle.
10:11These were shattering events for the royal family.
10:14The redoubtable queen mother, Eadgufu, 60 years later,
10:18looked back on this time when she was a little girl
10:21and her father, Sigelm, the Earl of Kent,
10:24had gone to the war in East Anglia,
10:27paying off his debts before he went.
10:30The denouement of the campaign took place on December 13th, 902,
10:37between the northern Fens and the Devil's Dyke.
10:45With his Viking allies, Prince Æthelwald struck down
10:49all the way into Wiltshire, plundering and burning.
10:52And then Edward retaliated by attacking Danish territory
10:56in East Anglia, ravaging the countryside.
11:05Between the river Ouse at Huntingdon and all the way to the Fens
11:09in the north around Peterborough, they just burned the land.
11:14Vastatio de Populatio, they called it.
11:19As far as these massive dykes here in Cambridgeshire,
11:23built in the 7th century to defend the kingdom of the East Angles
11:26and still a huge obstacle.
11:29Imagine columns of smoke across the horizon
11:34and somewhere beyond, the Viking army,
11:38the Danish army led by Prince Æthelwald and the Danish king Jorik.
11:59The Chronicle says the place was called The Home.
12:04In Anglo-Saxon times, this was the end of the dry land.
12:09From this point, the deep Fens stretched across the Whittlesea Mere
12:13and all the way to the Wash.
12:15And somewhere close to where we're standing,
12:18the battle was fought in December 902.
12:34The bloodbath of The Home was remembered for generations.
12:40According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
12:42King Edward had issued an order for a general withdrawal
12:45for all the units of his army.
12:49But the Kentish detachment, who were the vanguard and the furthest north,
12:53refused to obey orders, stayed where they were.
12:56Even though the king sent them seven messengers,
13:01they were caught by the Danish army under Prince Æthelwald.
13:07The Kentish nobility were wiped out in the battle.
13:10All their senior men were killed.
13:13But even though the Danes won the battle,
13:16it was their losses that were the most significant.
13:18Their king, Jorik, was killed, several of his big leaders,
13:22a Mercian prince who was fighting on their side,
13:25and most important of all for King Edward,
13:28Prince Æthelwald himself died in the fighting.
13:32The key threat to King Edward as king in Wessex had been removed.
13:38MUSIC
13:55So King Edward had won, but at great cost.
14:03He was still forced to make peace.
14:06The Anglo-Saxon chronicle doesn't admit that, but battered by his losses,
14:11the king was compelled by necessity.
14:17He met the leaders of the Danes not up in the Midlands or the north,
14:21but in the heart of rural Buckinghamshire.
14:27The place was on an ancient route from Mercia into the Danelaw,
14:31called Ittingerforda.
14:36Here at the ford where the old track crossed the river Ousel,
14:41they parleyed, and Edward gave them silver and treasure to buy peace.
14:51And above all, to buy time.
15:07MUSIC
15:11We're living through an age of iron, wrote one churchman.
15:18A succession of savage winters with thick snow and extreme cold
15:22brought famine and misery.
15:28To pay for his army, Edward had to squeeze every last penny
15:32from his starving people.
15:34From Surrey, one tenant wrote to the king...
16:05MUSIC
16:15But sometimes in history,
16:17ages of iron can be more important for the future than ages of gold.
16:26Now a new character enters the story.
16:30The daughter of Alfred the Great, King Edward's older sister.
16:35The wife of the Lord of Mercia, she was in her mid-30s.
16:39Her name in Anglo-Saxon, Æthelflaed.
16:43Noble beauty.
16:47Here she is, and what's interesting about this
16:50is she's still remembered as a woman of power
16:53and of high education and intelligence.
16:56Just listen to this. This is the caption underneath.
17:00Æthelflaed, la plus sage de toute femme séculaire,
17:06was the most wise of all lay women
17:11and she ruled the kingdom alongside her brother
17:17with great wisdom and great intelligence.
17:22MUSIC
17:30The eldest child of a king,
17:33very conscious of her position in the dynasty.
17:39A daughter very aware of her relationship with her father
17:44and through marriage to the Mercian prince, one might call him.
17:52She took what she had learned at the court of her father
17:56to another court, to the Mercian court.
18:04And she attempted to instil a similar political culture...
18:11..there.
18:15The ancient kingdom of Mercia
18:18stretched from the Severn to the Trent.
18:21It had long been a rival of Wessex,
18:23but they'd found common cause against the Vikings.
18:30They fought together, their royals intermarried.
18:36And Æthelflaed had roots here.
18:38Her mother was Mercian and so was her husband,
18:42whom she'd married when she was 16 and by whom she had a daughter.
18:49In the early Middle Ages,
18:50it was hard for any woman to take a leading role in events,
18:54but without her, England might never have happened.
19:01And in part, that was because in Mercia,
19:04royal women had long had special status.
19:10Women were terribly important transmitters
19:13and legitimisers of male power throughout this period.
19:19Not so much in politics in the formal sense,
19:22because I don't think women, royal women,
19:25were invited to devise agendas for assemblies.
19:29That was pretty much a male field.
19:32Still less to ride into battle.
19:35But women played a terribly important role in culture,
19:39in the culture of the court.
19:41In fact, you could say the queen was at the heart of that culture,
19:45alongside the king.
19:49Being educated at Alfred's court
19:52must have meant that she imbibed
19:55a kind of training for rulership.
20:00As far as her intellectual training was concerned,
20:04Alfred's biographer is rather keen to stress
20:07that it was the same as her brother's, as Edward's.
20:11Athelflead's lost biography
20:13is only now being pieced together from clues
20:16which are still being uncovered,
20:18rescued from the accidents of time and war.
20:21But, of course, the history of women as a whole
20:24has been erased everywhere.
20:26And perhaps Athelflead herself understood that,
20:29for someone in her circle
20:31recorded the story of her deeds for future generations.
20:35The main version of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle
20:38written in Winchester
20:40tells the story from the point of view of King Edward.
20:43It completely cuts out the story of Athelflead, his sister.
20:48What you would really love to have
20:51would be the story from Athelflead's point of view.
20:54But, astonishingly, embedded in this later manuscript
20:58is a chronicle written in English.
21:01Embedded in this later manuscript
21:04is a chronicle written in the Midlands,
21:07maybe originally in Latin,
21:09whose central character, whose hero, if you like,
21:12is Athelflead, the woman.
21:15So, following the annals of Athelflead,
21:18we can tell the story of the next 20 years
21:21not only from the point of view of the Mercians,
21:24but from the point of view of the woman.
21:28A short copy of the lost original,
21:30it's a mix of the public and the private.
21:33It starts right on the middle of the page
21:36with the death of Athelflead's mother,
21:39here Ealswith Fortherna.
21:43But then it moves on to her deeds,
21:45starting in 907
21:47with the refounding of the Roman city of Chester.
21:53907, the city of Chester was restored.
22:01Here was Lee Chester, near Edneywood,
22:06baby-border Atheraldus Eldermannus
22:09and his wiefes, Athelflead.
22:17With Vikings from the Irish Sea on one side
22:20and the Welsh on the other,
22:22if you went from Chester,
22:24you could follow the Roman road network straight to York.
22:27Once you have Vikings who are ruling in York
22:29and in Dublin,
22:31Chester would be a natural meeting point for shipping
22:34and I think that makes it really strategic.
22:38Chester soon became rich on the Irish Sea trade
22:42and to protect it, an Irish source says
22:45that Athelflead settled a Viking army
22:48as a colony in the north of the Wirral.
22:52Athelflead at that period donates land to them
22:55so that they might settle.
22:57You might be tempted to think,
22:59oh, well, that could be a little bit fanciful.
23:01It could actually have been a good strategic move
23:03if we remember that the foundations of Viking Normandy
23:06was Vikings being given land on the Seine Estuary
23:09to defend against other Vikings.
23:11Maybe Athelflead had a similar idea in mind
23:14when she gave Vikings strategic land
23:17at the entrance of the River Dee and Mersey.
23:22There's a Dee over there
23:24and over that way is the Mersey.
23:27In the 10th century, people's connections would have been
23:30from here in Wirral, across the Mersey,
23:32to their kin in what was south-west Lancashire
23:35and the other side of Merseyside,
23:37but much more so with Ireland.
23:39That's where they had come from.
23:41In 902, this is where they'd settled from,
23:43so their connections, their family connections,
23:45must have clearly been across the water in Ireland.
23:49This is very characteristic of the Viking period,
23:52a disc-headed pin, probably 9th, 10th century in date.
23:55Still sharp. I can't believe that.
23:57After 1,100 years.
24:03The Vikings, having settled on Wirral,
24:05sort of get a bit impatient and they get greedy for power.
24:08They can see that Chester is developing
24:10into quite an important port
24:12and that they then besiege the town.
24:15Got accounts of how the people in the town
24:19defending their settlement very vigorously,
24:22throwing beer and beehives over the wall
24:25at the attacking Vikings,
24:27and eventually, you know, Chester is preserved
24:29and the Vikings are kind of put back
24:31into their settlement on the Wirral.
24:45And then in 909,
24:47she sends an expedition across Viking territory
24:51to rescue the bones of the great Northumbrian saint, Oswald.
24:56Bringing his heavenly power
24:58to her newly restored city of Gloucester.
25:03We're in the centre of Anglo-Saxon Gloucester here.
25:06This is the meeting place of the streets,
25:08as you can see, Sarnia and Gloucester.
25:10That's the main street where the people of Gloucester meet.
25:15The town of Gloucester,
25:16which is a large part of the city of Gloucester,
25:19is now part of the town of Gloucester,
25:21in Gloucester here.
25:22This is the meeting place of the streets,
25:23as you can see, south-east, north-west.
25:27That's the Roman pattern.
25:28These main streets go down to the Roman gate.
25:37But what Ethelflead does, once she's restored the wall,
25:40is create a pattern of streets that go off,
25:44settling burgesses who'll provide the garrison,
25:48but also civic life, markets, and all that sort of stuff.
25:53And little churches all along.
25:55Michael, Martin, Mary, Kuenenburg.
25:58Good old Anglo-Saxon female saint down by that gate.
26:01And that way, St. John's.
26:07It's a political act.
26:09They're re-founding Gloucester,
26:11restoring this, what was in fact a ruined Roman town
26:16with tumble-down walls and very little inside it
26:19except ruined buildings.
26:21The main street plan is Roman,
26:24but the pattern of streets, just like Winchester, I think.
26:27It's an exact match, or at least the eastern part
26:30of the street pattern is an exact match for Winchester
26:33and other towns which Alfred, of course,
26:37restored and relayed and created.
26:42And it's partly military and partly commercial.
26:54Here, she built a church where the bones of St. Oswald
26:57were placed in a gilded shrine,
26:59where she planned she and her husband would be buried.
27:06These fragments of sculpture, once brightly painted,
27:09came to light in Caroline's excavations.
27:12CAROLINE CLEMENTS, ARCHIVAL PHOTOGRAPHER,
27:15GLOUCESTER
27:18Well, we would have seen a great wall there
27:22with an arch in the middle and a vivid wall painting above it
27:27with, we don't know, certainly with an angel included.
27:33You would go through the archway up to a high altar
27:38where the relics of St. Oswald might have been.
27:42Further still is another building
27:44which is sunk into the ground. It's a crypt.
27:51We can be certain that there were pillars
27:53holding it up in the middle.
27:55It's very like the Royal Mausoleum at Repton.
27:58CAROLINE CLEMENTS, ARCHIVAL PHOTOGRAPHER,
28:00GLOUCESTER
28:09It's interesting, isn't it, that it's so small?
28:13Compared with the great Carolingian churches,
28:16which were contemporaries, it could have been enormous,
28:19it could have been very ostentatious,
28:21and they built it small.
28:24Maybe this is...
28:26Maybe it was the shrine that was important
28:28and the relics that were important
28:31and the size and the ostentation were not important.
28:35Humility was a very important virtue to her.
28:40Well, perhaps. I like that, I like that.
28:43But the constant in her life was war.
28:48In 910, Mercia suffered a devastating attack
28:52by a huge Viking army from Northumbria and the Danelaw.
28:58Over midsummer, they cut a swathe through the heart of Mercia,
29:02ravaging the city.
29:04It was a bloody massacre.
29:06It was a bloody massacre.
29:08It was a bloody massacre.
29:10They cut a swathe through the heart of Mercia,
29:13ravaging all the way down to the Bristol Avon,
29:17and then they turned up the Severn Valley to make their way home.
29:25Our key source for what followed is a 10th-century chronicle
29:28by one of the royal family,
29:30but the only manuscript was destroyed by fire in 1731.
29:35Very so often, you find a little word, a little piece of text.
29:40This is just one small fragment of one medieval manuscript
29:45which was damaged by the fire in 1731.
29:51Someday, somebody will come along and actually find which place
29:54and which text it is as well.
29:56So you're not giving up? Never give up hope, Michael.
30:00As so often in Anglo-Saxon history, a key source has been lost.
30:05But now, with the benefit of new scientific techniques,
30:09the experts are restoring the fragments,
30:12and among them, now just a handful of blackened folios,
30:16is the chronicle of Alderman Athelweard.
30:21There is a microfilm, but, of course,
30:23it's a microfilm of a black manuscript,
30:26and therefore, in itself, the microfilm is also illegible.
30:30We're therefore indebted to...
30:33..an Elizabethan antiquarian, Henry Savile,
30:36who, in 1596, did this wonderful printing.
30:39It's an absolutely fabulous book, isn't it? Gorgeous.
30:42And the Great War of 910 is described with...
30:46..wonderful circumstantial detail.
30:48They went across the River Severn into the Western District
30:52along the Welsh border.
30:54They devastated and took huge plunder,
30:57and on their way home, rejoicing in their enormous spoils,
31:04they were still in the process of crossing the River Severn.
31:08At Quadbridge, it says here.
31:10Then they were intercepted at this place called Wednesfield...
31:17..in Woodensfeld-a-Campo...
31:20..which today is right in the middle of the most industrialised
31:25district of the West Midlands, next to Wolverhampton.
31:38The Vikings were caught in line of march.
31:41Ethelweard says the Mercians intercepted them at Wednesfield,
31:45where the Viking vanguard hastily formed a battle line,
31:48waiting for the rest of their army to catch up.
31:54And there, says Ethelweard,
31:56the Mercians with their West Saxon allies launched their attack,
32:00and they overwhelmed them in a storm of spears.
32:09Hard to imagine, I know, but the road here,
32:12running along the canal between Wolverhampton and Wednesfield,
32:16is what the Anglo-Saxons called the Erle de Strete,
32:19the old highway which went from the Severn Valley at Bridge North
32:23into Danish territory in the East Midlands.
32:26That's why the battle was fought here, in the field of Woden,
32:30a fitting place for a Viking apocalypse.
32:36The fighting ended at Tettenhall, near Wolverhampton,
32:39which gave its name to the battle.
32:47Thousands of them were killed, says the Anglo-Saxon chronicle.
32:51Among the dead, two kings and ten major leaders,
32:55including the seer, or the soothsayer.
32:58One imagines the Viking equivalent of the army chaplain.
33:02All of them hastened to the Hall of Hell, says Ethelweard in his chronicle.
33:08And the date is interesting.
33:10It was the 5th of August, the feast day of St Oswald,
33:15whose bones Athelflead had brought out of the Danelaw only the previous year.
33:20So she and her generals had tracked the invaders
33:24and then intercepted them and attacked them on the ground
33:28and the date of their own choosing.
33:38For Athelflead herself, the afterglow of victory was tempered.
33:44Her husband of 25 years was dying,
33:47suffering from long-term illness or perhaps from wounds.
33:52Earl Ethelred has been shortchanged by history.
33:57For, as the Mercian chronicle says,
34:00he was a man of great virtue who had performed many noble deeds.
34:08The chronicle records the death of her husband,
34:11the Lord of the Mercians, in 911.
34:15Ethelred, though, the Mírc na hLafdír, the Lord of the Mercians.
34:19And almost immediately afterwards, the chronicle calls her the Lady of the Mercians.
34:25Athelflead, Mírc na hLafdír.
34:28Mírc na hLafdír.
34:37I think her position is analogous to that of some Carolingian queens
34:42when the king was absent at war or on pilgrimage.
34:50She ran the cometatus, the following, the court,
34:55and when Athelflead's husband died, all this was amplified.
35:00And the political relationship that held the Mercian kingdom together
35:05was between her as a lord, a female lord.
35:10They had to invent, in a way, a new word for this lady.
35:17That relationship between her and the leading men of the kingdom
35:21was what enabled the Mercian kingdom to continue and succeed.
35:30So, backed by her earls and thanes, her friends, as she liked to call them,
35:34she was now partner in the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons
35:38with her younger brother Edward.
35:44Edward the Elder is a good medieval ruler, a good early medieval ruler.
35:50He's an effective early medieval ruler.
35:53He adapts to circumstances and is ruthless where it counts.
36:01Edward has experienced a gritty childhood, a gritty youth.
36:09He's experienced the difficulties of his father's reign against the Vikings.
36:14We can imagine him being dragged along on campaigns.
36:20He's given experience of leadership in the 890s.
36:26Edward brooks no nonsense, and when his cousin Athelwald,
36:31who had a very, very good claim to the throne after the death of Alfred,
36:36Edward responded very quickly.
36:39He basically hunts him down.
36:42That's not to say that Edward wasn't a pious ruler in conventional terms.
36:48I mean, he found the new minster in Winchester.
36:58This enormous church, that's a sort of grand statement
37:01of a new dynastic chapter opening up in English kingship.
37:07Edward was a far more complex man than history gives him credit for.
37:11He made law, corresponded with foreign churches,
37:15and he kept up his father's contacts with Rome.
37:21Our sources describe large numbers of English crossing the Alps
37:26and crossing the Danube.
37:28There's no doubt about it.
37:31Our sources describe large numbers of English crossing the Alps,
37:36risking attacks by brigands and by Saracens
37:39for the sake of prayer at the shrine of St Peter in Rome.
37:46Some of them, indeed, to end their days here.
37:51The hostels of the Saxon quarter, still remembered on Roman street signs,
37:56can seldom have been busier.
37:59The oldest part of the complex comes from the time of Pope Gregory II
38:04when the king of Wessex, Enoch, founded the Schola Saxona.
38:09Destroyed by fire and restored under Pope Leo IV,
38:14who's the pope who received Alfred as a little boy.
38:18How about that?
38:21Edward sent a special embassy here,
38:23headed by his Mercian archbishop, Plegmund,
38:26who had helped King Alfred in his translation programme.
38:33They took gifts and perhaps brought back manuscripts
38:37like this Book of Psalms, later owned by Edward's son, Athelstan.
38:43THUNDER RUMBLES
38:53The embassy sent by Edward the Elder in 908
38:56came, we're told, bearing large sums of money,
39:00elimosina, as a gift from the people of England.
39:04So even in the most difficult times of Edward and Athelfleet's
39:08fledgling kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons,
39:11the English tenaciously and loyally hung on to that link with Rome,
39:17which they felt, to an extent, defined them.
39:42Together, brother and sister now began a joint offensive
39:46against the Vikings of the Danelaw.
39:51One of the bequests, if you like, of Athelfleet
39:54is her really very active campaigning,
39:58founding one borough after another, and if you plot these out on a map,
40:02you can see how her and Edward really kind of cooperated, if you like,
40:06to defend the interests of Mercia and Wessex
40:10and also to strengthen border zones,
40:13to bring areas of strategic significance under their sway.
40:17And so they made a really powerful alliance,
40:20you really see them kind of working together.
40:25Taking a leaf out of Alfred's book,
40:27the key to her warfare was fortress building.
40:32Some were restored Roman towns,
40:35some reused Iron Age hill forts,
40:38and others were built on new sites.
41:09And it was Tamworth, the old residence of King Offa,
41:13that meant most to the Mercians.
41:18It was a great rectangle of ditches and earthen ramparts
41:22with a wooden palisade, centring on the church
41:26and with the royal architecture of the city.
41:29It was a great place to live,
41:31a great place to work,
41:33a great place to live,
41:35with a wooden palisade centring on the church
41:38and with the royal palace, the royal hall next door to it.
41:42In fact, the main Mercian street is still the High Street today.
41:48We're just on the very edge of Mercian territory.
41:51You go across those hills there and you enter the Danelaw.
41:55Athel Flead, when she came here with her army that summer of 913,
42:00was bringing the war right up into Danish territory.
42:05More than that, it was a great symbolic moment for the Mercians.
42:09As the Chronicle says, she came here with all the Mercians,
42:13meaning all the earls and the fains of the Mercian kingdom,
42:17and she did it with God's help, God's blessing.
42:23We are forgotten. We're seen as a bit of a small market town.
42:26But you know it was an important place as a political administrative centre,
42:30right in the heart of Mercia,
42:32so we know that it was really an important place.
42:34In Athel Flead's day, they'd not forgotten the glorious past of Mercia.
42:38No, not at all, not at all.
42:41And here in Mercia, royal women had played that role before.
42:45King Offa's queen, Cunethryth, is the only Anglo-Saxon queen shown on coins.
42:54Do you ever imagine what Athel Flead might have been like?
42:57I do, actually.
42:58I have this vision of her being a really strong warrior woman,
43:02and we know obviously that women in Anglo-Saxon society were peace weavers,
43:06and I think that she had kind of earned her role.
43:09She knew how to negotiate.
43:10It's interesting, isn't it?
43:11Quite a lot of her achievements were by negotiation rather than by war,
43:15although she was still prepared to lead the army.
43:18Absolutely.
43:19And she obviously could command the army, and they were happy for her to lead them,
43:23so I think that that's a very unique position for a woman to be in.
43:28I, Athel Flead, queen of Mercia,
43:32with my faithful friend Achille,
43:35have chosen this land for the consensus of my friends.
43:44Leadership in this period really had to be personal
43:47because they were going to have to spend a lot of face time with their people.
43:51There wasn't some massive administration that was running things.
43:54A figurehead who would walk in and shake hands at the right time.
43:57She really had to be very active in making negotiations,
44:01planning campaigns, being there at the site where things were happening.
44:09Year by year, Athel Flead's chronicle faithfully records
44:13the dozen boroughs she rebuilt or founded.
44:25Step by step, consolidating mercy and power on the Mersey
44:30and on the borders of Wales and the Danelaw.
44:33To some of her older subjects, it must have felt like
44:36not so much a building programme, but the rebirth of a kingdom.
44:44It's amazing how the power of the Queen of Mercia
44:49It's amazing how the patterns can have been imposed so long ago, isn't it?
44:53Oh, yes, indeed.
44:55I mean, we're entering Oxford now through pretty much exactly the same route
44:59as the Anglo-Saxons would have entered it.
45:01How this extraordinary tower, which is both, indeed, a church tower,
45:05but also part of a defensive structure,
45:08and it might even have served as a sort of watchtower,
45:11looking to the north, which is the most vulnerable part of the city.
45:14It's just fabulous, isn't it?
45:16So the main northern ditch of the town running on this side?
45:19Yep. It would originally just have been an earthen rampart laced with timbers.
45:23And then to reinforce that, because inevitably as the timbers rot,
45:27it would have started to push out, they faced it with stone.
45:31So for the first time, really, since the Roman period,
45:34you would have had a stone-walled city.
45:39These are stone walls.
45:42These are such huge infrastructure projects,
45:45and you can't imagine one person being there all the time at each of these.
45:50On the other hand, there must be a degree of personal oversight.
45:53You know, in a situation where there are no means of kind of mass media
45:58or communication otherwise, she must to some extent
46:01have exerted personal control, personal involvement,
46:05and it's really just an extraordinary achievement
46:08to be almost everywhere at once.
46:12Like her father, Alfred, she was also a patron of learning.
46:17Educated in his court, she was literate and cultured.
46:23And Murcia was a centre of scholarship.
46:26The key figures in Alfred's translation programme had been Murcians.
46:35And one Murcian manuscript perhaps even offers us a way
46:40into her mind.
46:47It gives us an entrance to a characteristic aspect of their psychology,
46:51which is the tension between worldliness and piety.
46:58Written by West Saxon saint Aldhelm,
47:017th century saint, very famous writer,
47:04and it's about virginity and chastity.
47:11Contempta mundi blandimenta.
47:14She is to be praised who rejects worldly pleasures
47:17and suppresses carnal desires, for they are worthless.
47:23In the best of all possible worlds, Aldhelm says,
47:26chastity is the best armour against the wiles of the devil.
47:34Maybe there's a thread here.
47:37Alfred's father, Alfred, according to his biographer,
47:40had given himself up to the pleasures of the flesh
47:43when he was a young man and then felt very guilty about it afterwards
47:47and thought that the terrible affliction he had,
47:51the bodily affliction that he suffered from all his life,
47:54was punishment and in the end renounced sex altogether.
47:58Now, Alfred's eldest child, his beloved first daughter,
48:04and after the birth of her first child, her daughter Alfwen,
48:08it was such a difficult birth, according to a later story,
48:11that she too renounced sex as a religious vow.
48:15Could there be a thread there?
48:18For all their great achievements as leaders in war and peace,
48:23both of them were battle winners,
48:25maybe this intense inwardness and self-reflection
48:30and anxiety about the body was an ever-present.
48:36But the other ever-present was still war.
48:39In 917, brother and sister continued their campaign against the Danelaw
48:45and Æthelflæd attacked the Danish base at Derby.
49:01HE SPEAKS DANISH
49:13The Mercian army's broken into the town and there's fierce fighting going on
49:17and then the chronicle says there, right inside the gates,
49:21four of the thanes who were most dear to her were killed.
49:30In the oldest Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry,
49:33one of the big themes is the bond between the lord and his warriors.
49:37It's a reciprocal bond.
49:39The lord is generous with land and treasure and hospitality and affection.
49:44Friendship, as they said.
49:46And in return, the thanes give their service and their unswerving loyalty,
49:52even laying down their lives for their lord.
49:55And here, in the battle for Derby,
49:57Æthelflæd's thanes lay down their lives for their lady.
50:07The news of her triumphs spread like wildfire.
50:11Early in 918, the Danish army in Leicester submitted without fighting
50:16and chose her as their lord.
50:19And then, from their capital in York, the Northumbrians sent pledges
50:23that they, too, would bow to the Lady of the Mercians.
50:29In North Britain, her reputation now far surpassed her brother.
50:35To the Irish, she was the most renowned queen of the Saxons.
50:42I think that charisma that she had,
50:45I think that charisma that she had,
50:47did kind of cross political boundaries as well.
50:50There's a record in the year 918
50:52that the men of York were willing to submit to her authority.
50:57Which is quite amazing, really, that, you know,
51:00that so often in the writings,
51:02the Vikings of Northumbria are portrayed as the inveterate pagans and plunderers,
51:07and yet this woman was able to offer perhaps a more peaceful solution.
51:12And when a new wave of Viking invaders from Ireland occupied the Tyne Valley,
51:17she sent ambassadors to the Scots
51:20to form a northern alliance for mutual help and defence.
51:27In 918, the Vikings were defeated at Corbridge on Hadrian's Wall,
51:32and a later Irish source even claims she was there in person.
51:37Othara, Earl of the Vikings, it says, fled into a dense wood,
51:42and the queen ordered the wood cut down, and all the pagans killed.
51:48And her fame spread everywhere.
51:57I almost get the impression that she felt she had to do this,
52:01lest she be perceived as a weak leader.
52:04She had to make sure she made these shows of strength,
52:07but at the same time, you know, she was a very able communicator
52:11and used that skill to her advantage too.
52:16But then, in June 918, at the height of her power...
52:34HE SPEAKS IN LATIN
52:48She was in her late 40s.
52:50Of her tomb, nothing survives, save perhaps a broken coffin lid
52:54and one tiny fragment of gold.
52:58With Athelflead dead, Edward hurried to Tamworth
53:02to bring Mercia under his power,
53:05only to find that the Mercians had chosen a new lady, her daughter Alfwyne.
53:10It's the only time in British history that a daughter succeeded her mother.
53:17The Mercian assembly accepted her daughter in the absence of a son.
53:23I think that may well have been because they saw a daughter
53:27who I also think was likely then to have been married,
53:31but perhaps to another Mercian.
53:33It was a way of maintaining, over time,
53:37Mercian independence.
53:40And it had a chance of succeeding.
53:52Her daughter takes over.
53:54There's a real sense of independence from Wessex.
54:00This is resolved by Edward marching up to Tamworth and imprisoning her.
54:08Presumably put into a nunnery, but we can't be sure about that.
54:13But judging by the way that royal families worked in that period,
54:17that's the most likely...
54:19Very ruthless and unsentimental about royal women and royal daughters.
54:23The West Saxons especially.
54:30The elimination of nieces and nephews was not new.
54:35That was another feature of early medieval dynastic politics,
54:40which was played out yet again in 918.
54:45Yes, Alfrind's fate was rather like that of Charlemagne's nephews.
54:50That's to say, we know nothing about it.
54:54But we have horrible suspicions, which may be justified.
55:15ETHELFLEED
55:22Ethelfleed, her chronicle said,
55:24had been a person of extraordinary ability and intelligence
55:28who steered the kingdom strongly, justly and calmly.
55:36I think Ethelflead can indeed be imagined
55:40as having the diplomatic and international role of a king.
55:48Certain people had an interest in editing her out.
55:52And this is always, in this period, true of women, I think.
55:57Their activities and achievements have been underestimated.
56:01Ethelflead managed to salvage something
56:04by commissioning her own history, as her father had commissioned his.
56:09But also by having such a remarkably high profile.
56:15When Ethelflead dies,
56:17both she and Edward are at the height of their power.
56:21In the later years of Edward's reign, his power actually starts to decline,
56:25and I think that's almost because he doesn't have his powerful sister,
56:28Ethelflead, still active in Mercia on his behalf.
56:33And that brings us to the last entry in the chronicle of Ethelflead.
56:45For when Edward died, the Mercians chose as his successor
56:49Ethelflead's foster son, Athelstan, the son she never had.
56:55And not just as their lord, but their king.
57:01Athelstan was King Edward's firstborn, but by a concubine,
57:05and as a boy he'd been sent to Mercia to be brought up by his aunt.
57:13But when he was five, his grandfather, King Alfred,
57:17had invested him with a Saxon sword, belt and cloak,
57:21so it was said, in omen of a kingdom.
57:31These investiture ceremonies are really the beginnings of medieval knighthood.
57:36They took place around the age of 14,
57:38the transition from being a boy to being a young man, a warrior, a knight.
57:44The word is actually Anglo-Saxon.
57:47Now, Alfred the Great couldn't wait that long.
57:49He was dying, so he gives his blessing to his only grandson.
57:54In the world of early medieval royal families,
57:58such a gesture could have meant nothing.
58:01But rather like Alfred's own investiture by Pope Leo,
58:06aged five, in Rome, for Athelstan himself,
58:10the ceremony carried the mark of destiny.
58:13Next, how Athelfleet's foster son became the first king of all England.
58:43It's now, though, and Dan and Peter Snow explore another modern battlefield
58:47and the conflict which has become known as the 20th century's Forgotten War.
58:51Next.