It’s been a wonderful couple of decades for medieval royals. King Edward I has bestridden the stage again, thanks to Marc Morris’s gripping biography, A Great and Terrible King. Edward’s father has emerged from the shadows in David Carpenter’s recent doorstopper, Henry III. And five queens – Eleanor of Aquitaine and Margaret of Anjou among them – have bathed in the spotlight once more, courtesy of Helen Castor’s She-Wolves. When it comes to historical biography, the Middle Ages – or, at least, the latter half of the Middle Ages – remains a perennial favourite.
Further back, in the so-called Dark Ages and the Viking Age in Britain, it’s a different story. Though there’s no end to popular fiction (think The Last Kingdom, the wildly successful TV drama based around the adventures of a Saxon lord), biography is more problematic. The sources are often hugely difficult to penetrate, and so the challenge of producing a sequential narrative of a life – revealing personality, motivations and feelings – is an enormous one. It’s something I have found myself mulling over as I finally return this year to a long delayed project: a biography of Æthelstan, first king of the English.
It was 1100 years ago this summer that the Mercians chose
