The Vikings have come in force this year, so they say. I only wonder how King Ethelred and his mother will deal with those crow armies, those violent men. Perhaps they will meet the same end as Edward, I do not know. Ethelræd means ‘noble counsel’, but I tell you he is unræd – ‘badly advised’. His was a great vine and I can hardly bear to see it fail. I weep too easily in old age – for my youth, for my father and mother, for all those I have lost. I shall see them again. In the name of Christ, I will.
Dunstan
Historical Note
The year of Dunstan’s birth has never been known for certain. It is a useful marker to have it started here as late as AD 920. That should have made him too young for certain age-limited appointments, but it’s hard to know if such rules would have been applied to a man of extraordinary ability, any more than they were to Julius Caesar.
Dunstan appears to have been one of the rare, great minds of history – a Leonardo of Glastonbury, a Newton of Wessex. His birthplace is claimed by the village of Baltonsborough, a few miles from Glastonbury, in Somerset.
In the tenth century, Glastonbury Tor and Abbey was more island than hill, surrounded by vast and dangerous salt marshes that would not be drained to golden farmland for centuries. Dunstan first visited with his father Heorstan and was apprenticed to the monks there. To find a community with knowledge of art, sculpture, engineering, metallurgy, carpentry and architecture must have been like water to a dry soul. The boy Dunstan absorbed it all.
He first appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as part of King Æthelstan’s court. Æthelstan’s own birthdate and place are unknown, but his father, Edward the Elder, and of course his grandfather, Alfred the Great, turned Wessex into the kingdom of the south, and then the kingdom of the English. Æthelstan ruled from AD 924 to 939 – just fifteen years. It was Dunstan’s first experience of a royal court – and he made his mistakes early.
Godwin is an Old English name, common enough in England before the Norman conquest. He is, however, a fictional character. Nothing is known of Dunstan’s early schooling, beyond what he must have learned as judged by his adult skills – and the subjects all Christian monks learned in those early years, such as calligraphy, herbs and medicine, and the lingua Franca of Latin. Greek was usually the second language of scholarship, though not everyone had the ability. St Augustine of Hippo found Greek almost impossible.
Note on spelling: The entire concept of spelling is fairly modern. Even four hundred years ago, Shakespeare spelled his own name in different ways. A century before that, the Paston letters might contain the same word spelled differently in the same document.
I have simplified Dunstan’s mother’s name ‘Cynethryth’ as ‘Cyneryth’, because it’s a little easier on the eye. As with Boadicea/Boudicca a thousand years before Dunstan, no one really knows how it would have been said.
The character of Elflaed is a simplification of the name ‘Æthelflæd’. It may also have been Elfgifu or Ælflæd. She was King Æthelstan’s niece and visited Glastonbury with her spiritual adviser. I have not been able to discover which of the king’s sisters was her mother, however. I chose the spelling also to save confusion with Æthelstan and a much better-known Æthelflaed, Lady of Mercia.
It is not known if Elflaed sought out Dunstan or he her, but their friendship – that of a mentor and sponsor with a young talent – would prove vital to his ambitions. King Æthelstan himself came to visit Glastonbury, even then famous for its relics. Not only did Elflaed introduce Dunstan to her uncle’s royal court, she also left him a huge fortune in her will. When he became abbot of Glastonbury, he would make it the richest abbey in England.
The scene of Dunstan predicting the death of an otherwise healthy monk and then seeing him die within three days is from near-contemporary accounts of his life written in the 990s. It is the sort of thing that made Charles Dickens suspicious of Dunstan as a saint. Either he had the vision and saw it come true, or he made it come true – and saw his status raised as a result.
Dunstan’s earliest miracle set the pattern. It is too easy to suspect skulduggery in every aspect of his life – some there certainly was – but we only have a few mostly admiring descriptions from the period and must read between the lines. It was said that when he was still very young, he had a vision of the great abbey he would one day oversee. He climbed a tower and walked along scaffolding in a trance. Instead of falling to his death, however, an angel brought him back to the ground.
I will not say his version was impossible. I will only suggest that a master artificer, a man who could make a harp worthy of a royal court, for example, or an entire upper floor drop away and yet know exactly where to stand, might not have had too much difficulty with an arrangement of pulleys. From my first encounter with Dickens’s suspicions about Dunstan, it has been my delight and sense that Dunstan was a very unusual man indeed. That should not be such a surprise. A towering intellect born to that age would have sought out the Church – and thrived, going to the highest post in England. There has only ever been one English pope and perhaps that highest honour was denied Dunstan, but what a life he made for himself otherwise!
Note on titles: At the beginning of Dunstan’s life, senior men of power appointed by the king were known as ‘ealdormen’. Towards the end, a more recognisable contraction, influenced by the Danish jarl was more common: ‘earl’, or ‘eorl’. I’ve used that version for simplicity. We know so little about Dunstan’s family that it is hard to say if his father, Heorstan, was an ealdorman, but the balance of probability is that he was. They were certainly a high-status family, with two bishops, court connections and some degree of wealth.
I have also used ‘prince’ for its root in the Latin princeps, over ‘ætheling’, which was just too close to some of the names.
Although his exact age is unknown, we know Dunstan appeared at Æthelstan’s court before AD 937, when the battle of Brunanburh took place. A ‘burh’ was a hill fort and market, the seed of a town. They were the creation of Alfred the Great, his son, Edward the Elder, and of course Æthelstan himself, as launch points to repel the ‘Wicingas’, the ‘robbers’: the invaders better known as ‘Vikings’.
The location of Brunanburh is lost to us, unfortunately. In fact, very little is known at all of that day, except that King Æthelstan faced a great host: Viking forces landing from Ireland, the warriors of King Constantin in Scotland and the men of King Owen of Strathclyde. In essence, these were small kings rebelling against the idea of a high king – of Æthelstan ruling all Britain.
Æthelstan took a great army north and won. Until Towton, five hundred years later, this was said to be the bloodiest battle on British soil. I recommend the hundred-page book Athelstan: The Making of England by Tom Holland. It does rather well with the few facts that have survived a thousand years from that time.
Egill Skiallgrimmson is not a fictional character. An Icelandic berserker, he was at Æthelstan’s court and fought for him at Brunanburh. It has always been one of the great pleasures of writing historical fiction to come across characters who deserve a book all to themselves, for the sheer fascination of their packed lives. Egill is one of those.
As well as his uncle Athelm, who was archbishop of Canterbury, Dunstan is said to have had another kinsman at court: a bishop known as Ælfheah the Bald. For fear of strangling the tale with too many characters, I have conflated two uncles and given the story to Athelm instead as the lead – though he died rather earlier than I have it.
Ælfheah the Bald was briefly involved in Dunstan’s life as one who supported Dunstan taking holy orders. Dunstan refused at first, preferring instead to become engaged to a young woman. He was then struck down by such terrible ‘swelling blains’ that he thought he had leprosy.
For a man who would have seen lepers, that is no small item of description. There could of course be a number of causes, but some sort of sexually transmitted pox would explain it neatly. Unfortunately, the name of the lady to whom Dunstan was engaged
is unknown. I chose ‘Beatrice’ because the name existed in some form from the fourth century onward – and bore no resemblance to all the names beginning with Athel, Ethel, Aelf, Ath or Aethel.
It is true that King Æthelstan was his father’s first-born son, but royal inheritance was more complex. His father openly favoured the first-born of a second marriage, to a mother of royal blood. That son was named Ælfweard, but he died before he could contend for the throne with Æthelstan – a death that does appear to have been from natural causes, all too common then.
Æthelstan was the only son of fighting age able to resist the Vikings in the north. It is not known if he swore not to marry or have children in favour of his brother. It is interesting that he and Edmund remained on excellent terms for the fifteen years of Æthelstan’s reign and Edmund fought at his side at Brunanburh in AD 937. The evidence suggests Æthelstan really was that very rarest of creatures: a great king and a decent man.
All that survives of Brunanburh is a poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. We know Constantin of Scotland escaped, as did Anlaf Godfreyson (sometimes called Guthfrithsson), king of Dublin. He would return. Their armies were left for the crows and wolves that had learned to follow armed men to battlefields.
Æthelstan had triumphed. The stakes were simply the survival of England as a nation. In later centuries, distance and the Normans would mean Scotland became an independent kingdom, before the throne was eventually reunited by James I and VI of Scotland – and then the formal Act of Union in 1707.
Brunanburh is said to have involved a great cavalry charge by Æthelstan’s forces. He would have faced Viking berserkers, Irish mercenaries, Picts who had never been troubled by Roman legions in their highland fastnesses. They would have been followers of pagan gods and Odin (or Woden) in particular. In comparison, Æthelstan was a devout Christian king, though in those years, following Christ in war was proven by victories. Those who lost battles did not live to tell the story – so the spread of Christianity is often a tale of victors.
Battlefield numbers are always exaggerated in poems and song – that is in part the purpose of poems and songs. Yet Brunanburh certainly involved thousands and perhaps tens of thousands: ‘Never before this, were more men on this island slain by the sword’s edge’ (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle).
William of Malmesbury wrote that Anlaf, king of Dublin, spent the night before the battle in the camp of Æthelstan, pretending to be a ‘skald’ or bard. As unlikely as that sounds, the rest of Anlaf’s life suggests that was something he might have done.
To the Romans, Winchester was ‘Venta Belgarum’, ‘town of the Belgae tribe’. To the Saxons who settled the area in later centuries, it was ‘Venta Caesta’, which as the years passed became ‘Winchester’. I have used this spelling, though Dunstan would have known it as an earlier form: ‘Wintancaester’.
It may have been King Edmund who appointed Dunstan abbot of Glastonbury, rather than Æthelstan, who had no affection for him. Though Dunstan spent some three years at Æthelstan’s court, he was expelled from it, probably for practising sorcery of some kind. Whatever it was, he does seem to have made enemies easily – he would later be briefly expelled from King Edmund’s court as well, before being banished by King Edwy.
Æthelstan died of natural causes in AD 939, just two years after Brunanburh and at the age of forty-seven. In those pre-antibiotic days, he could have developed sepsis from any scratch or minor cyst, but the exact cause is unlikely ever to be known. He was the first king of England and had a good claim to have been the first king of Britain.
King Edmund was on much better terms with Dunstan. Records survive of land given by Edmund to Dunstan as abbot of Glastonbury. Numbers vary by source, but one figure was 368½ hides of land, a vast holding.
Dunstan did indeed appoint his brother Wulfric as a ‘prepositus’ (a bursar), to administer those estates, trusting him completely to provide the income and funds without oversight. Wulfric turned out to have quite the knack for gathering wealth and lived till AD 951, dying a very rich man indeed, owning over a hundred hides in his own name – though it is likely he left a lot of it to the abbey in his will.
Anlaf Godfreyson, Viking king of Dublin, did indeed come back after Æthelstan’s death in AD 940 and take the city of York. Aged eighteen, King Edmund was not the renowned battle king his brother had been, though he had done well at Brunanburh. He felt he had no choice but to give up the city. The treaty was immediately followed by a land grab by Anlaf of a hundred miles of territory in the heart of England, including Derby, Lincoln and Leicester. Anlaf was an insatiable enemy for the young king of England to face.
However, fate intervened. Anlaf died in AD 941, just as he was getting going, presumably of a heart attack for its suddenness. King Edmund did not need the full might of his brother’s army to take back the north in the chaos that followed. He acted quickly and surely, giving some sign that if he had lived a full life like his brother, or certainly his father, he would be much better known.
The scene in Cheddar Gorge is from the earliest sources, though I have told it a little differently. King Edmund had fallen out with Dunstan after a group of courtiers took against the monk and told many and various lies about him. The young king actually banished Dunstan for a time, sending him home from a hunt around Cheddar Gorge.
The following day, Edmund chased a great stag to the edge of the sheer drop. It went over the edge, followed by his dogs. He could not stop and apparently promised God that he would make his ill-treatment of Dunstan right if his life was spared. The king’s horse stopped and Dunstan was back in the royal favour.
It is possible that the story is exactly accurate, but it seemed to me that Dunstan being present as a local lad and calling a warning that saved the king is just as likely.
Edmund was killed after only five years on the throne, at the age of just twenty-three. He had two sons at the time, but they were too young to succeed him. Once again, a brother would wear the crown.
He was indeed killed by a banished thief named Leofa. There is nothing else known about Leofa, so the rest – being a thane and fighting with Edmund at Brunanburh – is my own invention. There is a story of Edmund grabbing hold of the banished man at a feast, which I’ve used. The exact sequence of events is unknown, unfortunately.
Edmund’s early death set off a sequence of relatively short-lived kings: his brother Eadred, his sons Edwy and Edgar, his grandson Edward, who was also murdered, and finally Ethelred the Unready, who paid the Danes to go away and lost everything. Dunstan was there for all of it.
Note on Gothic arches: The pointed arch which became the hallmark of Gothic architecture in the great cathedrals was first seen in England around 1093, in Durham Cathedral – so a century later than I have it being used here. That said, the ruins at Glastonbury have many examples of the pointed arch that moved architecture on from the Roman forms – and the abbey was destroyed and rebuilt two or three times in the thousand years since Dunstan. No one knows for sure, and he was the sort of man who would have understood such an innovation. Glastonbury is worth a visit, for the ruins – and for the Tor and the views from the top.
Edwy and Edgar: Quite how a country, previously united under one king, came then to be divided is not clear. I wrote it as a decision of the Witan, based on Edwy being unfit. It is mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as if it was unremarkable – ‘And Edwy succeeded to the kingdom of the West Saxons, and Edgar his brother succeeded to the kingdom of the Mercians …’ – though their uncle Æthelstan had taken oaths of fealty from the king of Alba in Scotland and claimed to be ‘Rex totius Britanniae’! The earliest written lives of Dunstan describe a period of unrest in the country while Dunstan is banished, so that by some alchemy, the north chooses to be ruled by Edgar. I’m afraid there are too many gaps in the records here to be certain of the chain of historical events.
Dunstan being banished from the court of King Edwy is one gossipy part of the historic record that is well attested. Ed
wy (Eadwig/Edwig) left his own coronation feast to sport himself with a mother and daughter. Archbishop Oda asked for someone to fetch the king back and remind him of his duty. Dunstan and the bishop of Lichfield went, finding the king and both ladies in passionate embrace, with the crown rolling on the floor. It seems Dunstan lost his temper. He told off the women, laid hands on Edwy, put the crown on the sixteen-year-old’s head and marched him back to the royal company.
The young woman was Aelfgifu (‘Elgiva’ as I have written it) who was, if anything, more furious with Dunstan than the king. She was certainly involved in his banishment and in his losing Glastonbury and all the lands around it. It is not difficult to imagine how hot she burned at his public humiliation of her. It was unfortunate for Dunstan that the woman he had called a whore in front of the king should then go on to marry King Edwy and become his queen. Such mistakes can curtail the most promising careers.
Dunstan’s exile in Flanders is mentioned only in the Lectiones of one Adelard of Ghent. He spent his three-year exile at a Benedictine abbey called St Peter’s, built on a hill in what is modern-day Belgium. Interestingly, very rich gifts were made to St Peter’s a few years later, by King Edgar of England – as thanks for their hospitality to the banished Dunstan.
The historical story of King Edwy’s queen being sold into slavery and then killed cannot be known for certain. It does not appear in the earliest accounts of his life, though in fairness, it would not. The difficulty of thousand-year-old sources – particularly the lives of saints – is that some things would simply not have been written. Yet the tale persists and appears in many histories.
The manner of young King Edwy’s sudden death is unknown, which goes to show some of the difficulties of incomplete records. A suicide would not have been recorded, so I have filled that gap in a way that would not have appeared in the history. We do know the marriage was annulled by Archbishop Oda, on grounds that Edwy and Elgiva were too closely related. It is not clear exactly when this happened. There was no heir born of that brief marriage, so King Edgar took on the mantle of the entire realm once more. Depending on the source, the country was split between those two brothers either in the beginning or after unrest in the north. However it happened, it is interesting to consider that this run of kings begins with three brothers, continues with two brothers – and ends with two brothers.