32 In England, running decisively against the grain of what had been happening elsewhere in Christendom, ancient princedoms had been brought, not to splinter, but to cohere and coalesce. The King of Wessex had ended up the King of the English too. The lands he ruled had become a united kingdom.This was a bold and brilliant achievement. What had served to render it truly remarkable, however, was that its foundations had been laid in the most unpropitious circumstances imaginable, amid the fire and slaughter and calamity of defeat. Realms such as Northumbria had first lost their independence more than a hundred years previously – and it had not been to the West Saxons. Other foes, far more agile, far more predatory, had been abroad. Set as the English were upon an island, in kingdoms studded with rich and defenceless monasteries, it was hardly to be wondered at that they should have found themselves the targets of the Northmen. They had termed the invaders “Wicingas”: “robbers.” As well they might have done; for the Wicingas, the “Vikings,” had sought to strip their kingdoms bare. Realm after realm had been plundered, dismembered and brought crashing down.Even Wessex itself, for a few terrible months, had seemed on the verge of collapse: for in the winter of 878, its king, Alfred, had been ambushed, and sent fleeing into a marsh. This, at a moment when the entire future of a Christian people had hung in the balance, suspended between the twin poles of ruin and redemption, had been a test more perilous than anything ever faced by a king of Francia. Alfred had passed it: he had not buckled, and by refusing to buckle, he had saved his people for Christendom. Emerging from the marshes, he had succeeded in scouring his kingdom free of the invaders; he had planted towns, ringed about with fortifications and endowed with marke places for the generation of war taxes, at regular intervals all over Wessex; he had steeled his people for continued struggle. The harvest of these labours, reaped by his heirs over the succeeding decades, had been a truly spectacular one. The Viking overlords who had clung on to power beyond the borders of Wessex had been systematically subdued; so too, in the Celtic fastnesses, where the English had never settled, had the Cornish, the Welsh and the Scots. In 937, in a bloody and titanic battle that would long be celebrated as the greatest victory ever won by an English king, Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred, had confronted an assemblage of foes drawn from across the British Isles, and routed them all.33 On his coins and in his charters, he had laid claim to a title 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.”34But 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.35 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 re assurance 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 their 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 the opposite: of the long reach of the state. Blindings, scalpings, hangings: all were sponsored with a grim efficiency. Violence was met with violence; savagery with savagery. Even whole counties, if they presumed to oppose the royal will, might be systematically ravaged. Justice and order were what Edgar, in his coronation oath, had sworn to give the English; and justice and order, by his own stern lights, were precisely what he delivered. That such an iron-fisted man could end up being known as “the Peaceable” suggested that his subjects did not disagree.Were preachers merely deluded, then, when they warned the English that the signs of Doomsday were all around? There were many who feared not. When Edgar died in 975, only two years after his jamboree in Bath, the united kingdom of England that he left behind him was still very much a work in progress: none could be certain that it would hold together. As the