page_title: Æthelstan
section_title: British monarch
hierarchical_section_title: Æthelstan / Kingship / British monarch
caption_attribution_description: This image is a JPEG version of the original PNG image at File: Athelstan from All Souls College Chapel.png. Generally, this JPEG version should be used when displaying the file from Commons, in order to reduce the file size of thumbnail images. However, any edits to the image should be based on the original PNG version in order to prevent generation loss, and both versions should be updated. Do not make edits based on this version. &#160;See here for more information. Athelstan, c.895-939. Stained glass window, All Souls College Chapel, Oxford. Originally obtained from Warden and Fellows of All Souls, Oxford. According to [1], "The large stained glass window [containing this image] in the west wall is known as the Royal Window. Dating from the mid-15th-century but much restored, it was originally located in the Old Library of All Souls."
context_page_description: Æthelstan or Athelstan was King of the Anglo-Saxons from 924 to 927 and King of the English from 927 to 939 when he died. He was the son of King Edward the Elder and his first wife, Ecgwynn. Modern historians regard him as the first King of England and one of the greatest Anglo-Saxon kings. He never married and had no children. He was succeeded by his half-brother, Edmund.
  When Edward died in July 924, Æthelstan was accepted by the Mercians as king. His half-brother Ælfweard may have been recognised as king in Wessex, but died within three weeks of their father's death. Æthelstan encountered resistance in Wessex for several months, and was not crowned until September 925. In 927 he conquered the last remaining Viking kingdom, York, making him the first Anglo-Saxon ruler of the whole of England. In 934 he invaded Scotland and forced Constantine II to submit to him, but Æthelstan's rule was resented by the Scots and Vikings, and in 937 they invaded England. Æthelstan defeated them at the Battle of Brunanburh, a victory which gave him great prestige both in the British Isles and on the Continent.
context_section_description: Historians frequently comment on Æthelstan's grand and extravagant titles. On his coins and charters he is described as Rex totius Britanniae, or "King of the whole of Britain". A gospel book he donated to Christ Church, Canterbury is inscribed "Æthelstan, king of the English and ruler of the whole of Britain with a devout mind gave this book to the primatial see of Canterbury, to the church dedicated to Christ". In charters from 931 he is "king of the English, elevated by the right hand of the almighty to the throne of the whole kingdom of Britain", and in one manuscript dedication he is even styled "basileus et curagulus", the titles of Byzantine emperors. Some historians are not impressed. "Clearly", comments Alex Woolf, "King Æthelstan was a man who had pretensions,"  while in the view of Simon Keynes, "Æthelstan A" proclaimed his master king of Britain "by wishful extension". But according to George Molyneaux "this is to apply an anachronistic standard: tenth-century kings had a loose but real hegemony throughout the island, and their titles only appear inflated if one assumes that kingship ought to involve domination of an intensity like that seen within the English kingdom of the eleventh and later centuries."
  Foreign contemporaries described him in panegyrical terms. The French chronicler Flodoard described him as "the king from overseas", and the Annals of Ulster as the "pillar of the dignity of the western world". Some historians take a similar view. Michael Wood titled an essay, "The Making of King Aethelstan's Empire: an English Charlemagne?", and described him as "the most powerful ruler that Britain had seen since the Romans". In the view of Veronica Ortenberg, he was "the most powerful ruler in Europe" with an army that had repeatedly defeated the Vikings; continental rulers saw him as a Carolingian emperor, who "was clearly treated as the new Charlemagne". She wrote:
  Wessex kings carried an aura of power and success, which made them increasingly powerful in the 920s, while most Continental houses were in military trouble and engaged in internecine warfare. While the civil wars and the Viking attacks on the Continent had spelled the end of unity of the Carolingian empire, which had already disintegrated into separate kingdoms, military success had enabled Æthelstan to triumph at home and to attempt to go beyond the reputation of a great heroic dynasty of warrior kings, in order to develop a Carolingian ideology of kingship.
caption: Æthelstan in a fifteenth-century stained glass window in All Souls College Chapel, Oxford
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