The Great Turning Points of British History Read Free Page A

undiscovered near the Humber.
    Æthelstan established the idea of royal authority law and coinage over all the lands south of Humber, and a looser authority to the north: what medievalists call the
creation of an allegiance
; still a crucial thing today, this is what all governments aspire to since it is what lies at the root of all debates about identity and citizenship.
    Therefore, if you want to take one great turning point date before the eleventh century, I choose AD 927, when the kingdom of England was created by Æthelstan. The creation of the early English state was a political and military act, accomplished by war, but fired by a big idea: Bede’s history of the
gens Anglorum
, the English people. Æthelstan had not been intended to be king of Wessex, but following the death of his half-brother, Ælfweard, the designated heir, he emerged as king out of a power struggle tilted by the Mercians, who saw Æthelstan (who had been raised in Mercia) as their man.
    In early summer AD 927 Æthelstan overran Northumbria, captured York and called the northern British kings to a pact of mutual peace and protection at Dacre, Cumbria. That July a continental poet in his entourage sent a poem back to Winchester, remodelling verses originally addressed to Charlemagne, saluting ‘this completed England’ (
ista perfecta Saxonia
). So, less than two years after his accession, Æthelstan became king of a land ‘which many kings had held separately before him’. Soon on his coinage and in his charters he would be ‘Emperor of the whole world of Britannia’: the most powerful ruler in these islands since the Romans.
    Nothing was certain, however, and Æthelstan’s England might have collapsed, but the creation of an allegiance under his successors is one of the great facts in early English history: loyalty to the king (or queen) and his or her law. This is why, in the twelfth century, Æthelstan was remembered as a kind of English Charlemagne – an image distantly echoed in several Middle English romances and even on the Elizabethan stage. The Victorians idealized him and his kinsmen in stained glass and storybooks, on Gilbert Scot façades, and on the friezes at Frogmore. For us now, he presents a very different image: the ferocity of his wars and feuds, of an empire held together by ceaseless itineraries, by the taking of hostages and tribute with enforced rituals of submission. Nonetheless, in a real sense, we still live in the state that has its origin in that moment in the tenth century.
    *  *  *
    So, as you can see, ‘Turning Points’ is a fascinating idea: constantly throwing up new insights, asking new questions, and perhaps pointing to how a new kind of British history curriculum might be taught in our schools. It is the tale of all our histories as Britons: the narrative of a nation of ‘many races, languages, customs and clothes’, as a tenth-century writer put it. Whatever our origin, as citizens of Britain, owing our allegiance to Her Majesty’s government, it is the history of all of us.

1016
The Danish Conquest of England
SARAH FOOT
    One eleventh-century date in English history is so well known to the general public that banks warn customers not to choose it as a PIN number. Yet that year, 1066, marked the fiftieth anniversary of another decisive battle that also led to the conquest of England, one that is now largely forgotten. On 18 October 1016, victory by a foreign force on a hilltop in Essex called Assandun brought this country within the sphere of an outside European power.
    Just as the later Norman Conquest was to do, the Danish Conquest of 1016 threatened to alter the course of the island’s history. Although ultimately short lived, it was unquestionably the most significant single event in the half-century from 1000 to 1049. Its repercussions continued after the native English royal line was restored in 1042 and it was still a factor in Harold Hardrada’s first invasion and the ensuing battle