Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

even more resonant than ‘King of the English’: ‘King of all Britain’. Across the sea too, in Ireland, admirers had been brought to acknowledge him as ‘the very roof-tree of the dignity of the western world’.

But it was not only on the margins of Christendom that men had marvelled. From beyond the Channel, in France, none other than Hugh Capet’s father, the mighty ‘Duke of the Franks’, had sent messengers seeking the hand of one of Athelstan’s four sisters in marriage. As a dowry, the duke had dispatched to England a rich collection of relics -- including, most priceless of all, the very spear that had pierced the side of Christ. Once owned by Charlemagne, and wielded by him in his wars against the Saracens, this had been a weapon of self- evidently miraculous power. All the more fitting, then, that it should have passed into the hands of the Cerdicingas: for so triumphant had been their fightback against the Northmen that their achievement had seemed almost a miracle in itself. Other Christian kings, certainly, had been able to draw from it a most potent and inspiring lesson: not merely that the heathen could be repulsed, but that their defeat might provide a stepping stone to empire.

Naturally enough, perhaps, it was in Saxony, the primordial homeland of Cerdic, that the victories of the House of Wessex had been tracked most appreciatively of all. In 929, the Lady Edith, another of Athelstan’s sisters, had duly travelled there to marry a teenage prince, the future Otto the Great: a man with an imperial destiny indeed. Just like the House of Wessex, the Saxon royal family had already come into possession of a supernaturally charged spear, a Holy Lance of their own; but the presence at Otto’s side of a saintly and much-loved English queen had undoubtedly served his people as a yet further reassurance of the glories ordained for them by God. It was at Edith’s urging, for instance, that her husband had embarked on the building of his great monastery at Magdeburg; and years later, with Edith long dead and Otto himself crowned Caesar, it was to the selfsame monastery that he had moved the relics of St Maurice and — when it was not required out on campaign — the Holy Lance itself.

Meanwhile, back in England, the Cerdicingas had begun to look a trifle provincial in comparison. Athelstan, concerned to secure his subjection of the Cornish, had set about refurbishing the frontier town of Exeter; and it was here, in an abbey church founded by the king himself, that he had enshrined his own holy lance. Priceless relic or not, however, it had soon begun to gather dust: for whereas Magdeburg stood sentinel over vast expanses of heathendom, beyond Cornwall there extended only the sea. No matter that it was the kings of Wessex who had originally blazed the imperial trail; they could never hope to compete in the glamour stakes with an emperor anointed by a pope in Rome. In 973, when Athelstan’s dwarfish but formidable nephew, Edgar, who had already been crowned once, decided that he wished to emulate Otto’s coronation, the best venue that he could come up with for the ceremony was Bath: a place littered with relics of the Roman past, to be sure, but hardly the Eternal City. Even his next stunt—summoning assorted Celtic princelings to row him down a river – was in truth not quite as impressive as it must have appeared to the gawping spectators watching him glide by: for already, since Athelstan’s day, the lordship claimed by the English king over his turbulent neighbours had declined to little more than show. The rule of ‘all Britain’ had shown itself a will-o’-the-wisp, melting through Edgar’s outstretched fingers. The sober truth was that all his attempts to promote himself as imperial served only to emphasise how small scale, in comparison with the Reich, the kingdom of the English actually was.

Small-scale -- but compact as well. This, as developments were to show, was no disadvantage: for it had enabled an experiment in state- building that was to prove as enduring as it was innovative. While the lands ruled by the House of Wessex may have lacked diversity, they made up for it in cohesiveness. The seas that bounded in Edgar’s ambitions had helped to foster in the lands that he did rule a precocious sense of unity. Even in the most northerly and bloodstained reaches of the kingdom, through which a West Saxon king would only ever travel with a bristling military escort, and where a dynasty of Viking warlords, in the wake of Athelstan’s death, had blazed a spectacular if fleeting comeback, the people of Northumbria could still recognise themselves as English. Though they might be distant from the royal heartlands of the south, they nevertheless spoke the same language as the West Saxons, venerated the same saints and gloried in belonging to the same national Church. Above all -- and here, perhaps, was the most startling of all the feats of statecraft achieved by the House of Wessex -- they acknowledged the right of the same central authority to administer them, and to poke its nose into theif affairs. In England, there were no equivalents of the Count of Flanders or Anjou. A figure of menacing and even ferocious power a Northumbrian earl might be - and yet he swayed the north, not by virtue of heredity, but as an appointed agent of the king. Further south, and royal control was even more inescapable. The Cerdicingas owned lands everywhere. There was no question of Edgar permitting his nobles to run amok, whether by building castles, or recruiting private armies, or usurping control of the public courts. Whereas in Francia the sight of a mutilated corpse abandoned by the side of a road for birds to peck at was a cause for alarm among travellers, a mark of lawlessness, in England it was likelier to speak of