Edward the Elder

King of England (r. 899-924)

• Born: 870?
• Birthplace: Unknown
• Died: July 17, 0924
• Place of death: Farndon-on-Dee, Chester, England

Building on the success of his father, Alfred the Great, and working in close collaboration with his sister Queen Æthelflæd, Edward defeated all Viking kingdoms and coalitions in England and moved toward the political unification of the country.

Early Life

What little is known of King Edward’s early life suggests a multitude of threats and pressures. He was the son of Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, and Ealhswith, the Mercian noblewoman whom Alfred had married in 868. Because Edward was in command of an army in 893, he must have been born fairly soon after the marriage. In these years, though, his father and family were under constant threat from Viking invaders. In 878, when Edward must have been no more than a young boy, Alfred and his kingdom were caught completely unawares by a Viking invasion in midwinter. If Edward stayed with his father and there can have been no safer place for him he must have spent some months hiding in the marshes of Athelney while his father conducted guerrilla warfare against the Vikings. At this point, the Vikings can have wanted nothing more than to find and kill Alfred, the last English leader opposing them. It is unlikely that they would have left Edward, or any other member of the royal family, alive to act as a focus for resistance. Although Alfred’s policy of continuous warfare was brilliantly successful, it must have entailed extreme risks for his family. Possibly this accounts for the grinding determination to eliminate all enemies that later characterized Edward’s politics.

A further threat to the young atheling (the Old English term for “prince”) came from his relatives. His father, though undisputed king of Wessex (when Alfred came to the throne in 871, only an experienced warrior could have been considered), had no less than four elder brothers. Though all of them had died before Alfred became king, at least one, King Ethelred, had left descendants, his sons Ethelwold and Ethelhelm. By the later laws of England, one of those sons should rightfully have been king. Even under Anglo-Saxon law, or convention, both of them would have had the same claim to the throne as Edward. The question of who would succeed Alfred was therefore open and a matter of concern.

In practice, Alfred may well have “engineered” the succession for his own son by giving Edward early power and responsibility while keeping his nephews back. There is some indication, though, that Edward may have simultaneously been kept well in his father’s shadow to eliminate any prospect of son rebelling against father (as one of Alfred’s brothers had done against their father, in 855-856). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (compiled c. 890 to c. 1150) notably ignores that affair; the rebellion is known only from other sources. In exactly the same way, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, describing the Viking invasion of 892-896, records a spectacular victory by the English at Farnham in 893, a victory that ended with the Vikings penned on an island, yet it fails to identify the English leader (though it clearly was not King Alfred) and complains loudly because the Vikings were allowed to slip away before the king arrived. The Chronicle of Ethelweard (973) identifies the English commander as Prince Edward, who seems accordingly to have won a major victory before he was twenty-five. At least one contemporary commentator was reluctant to allow him proper credit, clearly wishing to give Alfred no rival.

King Alfred died in late 899. Edward immediately succeeded to the kingdom, and almost as immediately his cousin Ethelwold rebelled. He seized a manor, defied the king, but then slipped away to the Vikings of Northumbria, who must have welcomed him gladly as a valuable pawn in their power struggle against Wessex, the only kingdom to defy them. For some years, Edward’s anxiety must have remained; The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle grimly records Ethelwold’s movements. Then, in 902, part of an English raiding force into the Viking kingdom of East Anglia was caught and cut off (through disobeying Edward’s orders, the chronicler says). Though the English were defeated, they inflicted many casualties, and among the dead was Ethelwold.

Life’s Work

Edward was still left with a very difficult political problem. Following the almost incessant warfare of 865-896, what is now England had become a bewildering patchwork of small states, in weak or shifting coalitions. On one side was Wessex, Edward’s kingdom, which by this time had thoroughly assimilated Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and perhaps Cornwall. Also English, anti-Viking, and Christian was the area of south and west Mercia (roughly speaking, the southwest English midlands), which had never been occupied by the Danes. Mercia was controlled by alderman Ethelred and his wife, Queen Æthelflæd, Edward’s sister. Edward knew that it would be enormously advantageous for the West Saxon kings to have this rich and populous area on their side, but Wessex and Mercia had long been in open warfare, and even King Alfred had never tried to assume direct rule there.

On the other side of England was a string of states controlled by Vikings (usually Danes). Some were kingdoms; others described themselves as the “army” of Cambridge, or of Northampton, or of the “Five Boroughs” of the Midlands. All these areas still had large numbers of English-speaking and presumably Christian inhabitants, whose loyalties must have been very uncertain. In the far north lurked English “splinter states,” owing allegiance to no one, while in the northwest the position was about to be upset by an influx of Norwegian Vikings from Ireland, from whom the Danish armies would in the end be glad to be rescued. Edward seems to have decided to reduce this confused situation by what would in chess terms be described as a strong pawn push.

The center of Edward’s strategy was to build fortresses and garrison them, so as to tie his mobile enemies down. His father had begun this policy, and it is hard to say which of the two was responsible for which fortress, but a document from Edward’s reign known as the “Burghal Hidage” lists thirty-one fortresses demanding garrisons totaling some twenty-seven thousand men. To these Edward added more, moving from a defensive to an offensive position. He built fortresses at Hertford to threaten the armies of Bedford and Cambridge; he built others at Buckingham to threaten Bedford and Northampton. His position was eased by the events of 909-910, when Edward launched a combined West Saxon and Mercian host against Northumbria, drew a reprisal raid the following year (Vikings were not accustomed to being raided as opposed to raiding), and destroyed it so utterly at the Battle of Tettenhall in 910 that the Northumbrian Danes never quite recovered. The mixture of destruction and the threat of destruction forced army after army to come to terms.

Æthelflæd played an extremely important role in these disputes. She, too, was a potential rival: After her husband Ethelred died in 911, she seems to have run the counties of English Mercia on her own and could (following Ethelwold’s example) have provided a rival focus for English loyalties. In fact, she seems to have coordinated her policies with her brother’, building fortresses on a lavish scale, conquering Derby and Leicester, fighting the Welsh, and extorting submission even from York. In response (following family tradition), Edward suppressed mention of her. West Saxon copies of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle barely acknowledge her existence, although the Mercian Register (902-924), used by other chronicles, lists her achievements and refers proudly to her, not as “queen” or even “alderwoman” but as lady of the Mercians.

Æthelflæd died at Tamworth on June 12, 918, leaving no son, perhaps fortunately. Her daughter Ælfwynn, a possible focus for Mercian independence, was soon carried off to Wessex, and Edward became in practice king of English Mercia a position firmly ratified by his son Æthelstan, deliberately brought up in Mercia by his aunt. Edward’s power and influence reached their peak in the year before he died, when according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle he not only was master of the South and Midlands, both English and Danish, but also was accepted as “father and lord” by the king of Scots, by all the Northumbrians including “splinter states” and Norwegian Vikings, by the “Welsh” of Strathclyde, and, a year or two before, by the kings of Wales. Few of these groups, however, remained loyal: Edward was to die in Cheshire only a few days after suppressing a joint rising by the Welsh and the English Mercians of Chester. Yet even the fiercest or remotest rulers of England had to recognize and fear his authority. It must have seemed a long step from the fearful months of his childhood at Thelney, when his father’s kingdom ran no farther than the cover of the marshes.

Significance

King Edward the Elder is remembered almost entirely as a military leader, and his leadership contains few of the brilliant strokes of his father or his son. Nor did he show any of the magnanimous and unexpected statesmanship displayed by Alfred, though he did on one occasion ransom a Welsh bishop from the Vikings, either out of altruism or to gain support in Wales. Nevertheless, Edward converted a successful defensive position into a successful offensive one. He worked single-mindedly, and he demonstrated with Æthelflæd the ability of his family to stick together in spite of rivalry. His quarter century of rule consisted of one long campaign, which has been described as the most remorselessly efficient ever recorded in any country during the Middle Ages. In other respects, too, Edward may have left his mark on the map. He seems to have fostered a policy of quiet infiltration, by which Englishmen simply bought their way back into Danish-controlled areas; he reorganized the bishoprics of Wessex; and the familiar shires of central England, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Oxfordshire, and others appear to have been created during his reign as standardized military and administrative units to oppose the Danish boroughs and armies. All these moves bear the mark of Edward’s unspectacular, organizing mind. His European credibility is shown by the marriages of four of his daughters to the kings (or dukes) of France, Germany, and Burgundy.

Anglo-Saxon Kings of England, 802-1016

Reign

• Ruler

802-839

• Egbert

839-856

• Æthelwulf

856-860

• Æthelbald

860-866

• Æthelbert

866-871

• Ethelred (Æthelred) I

871-899

• Alfred the Great

899-924

• Edward the Elder (with sister Æthelflæd)

924-939

• Æthelstan

939-946

• Edmund the Magnificent

946-955

• Eadred

955-959

• Eadwig (Edwy) All-Fair

959-975

• Edgar the Peaceable

975-978

• Edward the Martyr

978-1016

• Ethelred (Æthelred) II, the Unready

1016

• Edmund II Ironside

1016

• Ascendancy of Canute the Great (Danish line begins)

Bibliography

Higham, N. J., and D. H. Hills, eds. Edward the Elder, 899-924. New York: Routledge, 2001. A biography of Edward from the perspective of the history of kings and rulers of Anglo-Saxon Britain.

Hill, David. An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Invaluable for its maps of the complicated campaigns and interconnections of the Reconquest.

The Laws of the Earliest English Kings. Edited and translated by F. L. Attenborough. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1922. Includes the laws of Edward as well as those of his father and his successors.

Stenton, F. M. Anglo-Saxon England. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. An excellent account of the period, gathering together material from many fields.

Stenton, F. M. Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England. Edited by Doris Maris Stenton. New York: Clarendon Press, 1970. Includes valuable pieces on the Battle of Farnham and The Chronicle of Ethelweard.

Wainwright, F. T. Scandinavian England: Collected Papers. Edited by H. P. R. Finberg. Chichester, England: Phillimore, 1975. Contains the chapters “Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians” and “The Submission to Edward the Elder.”

Whitelock, Dorothy, David C. Douglas, and Susie I. Tucker, eds. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Revised Translation. 2d ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Translation of all forms of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The major primary source for a history of the period.