How England misplaced its first king

Summary

The new English kingdom held throughout the rest of his lifetime. It was reinforced at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937AD, when he defeated an alliance of Vikings, Scots and Strathclyde Welsh, who were attempting to challenge his rule of England. It's not known exactly where this battle took place, but it may have been in north-west England.What was Æthelstan's England like? Amid all the battles and conquest, however, Æthelstan brought a cosmopolitan flair to his new kingdom. Today there is a tendency – particularly among the far right – to depict early England as being cut off from the rest of Europe, and homogeneous in its cultural makeup. In truth, the newly formed kingdom of England was an outward-looking society."There's been a big debate about the very use of the word Anglo-Saxon, so much so that people in our field of scholarship are not using the word anymore, and are going towards Early Medieval instead because of the connotations that Anglo-Saxon now has with the far right," says Woodman. "When [the term Anglo-Saxon] is invoked by the far right, they're thinking of it as very one-dimensional – people from one background in England in the 10th Century." In fact, that's a big misconception of what the period was like. "It was actually a very diverse place in early 10th Century. I always think about Æthelstan's Royal Assemblies, and there were people there from lots of different kingdoms within England, Britain more widely, from Europe. They were speaking a multiplicity of languages, Old Welsh, Old Norse, Old English, Latin. I just feel [the term Anglo-Saxon] is used without thinking, and without factual detail about the early 10th Century."Downham agrees. "There was a lot of cultural variety in the area we call England today. There wasn't this English monolith that started in 500AD."