Why England's violent first king couldn't crush Cumbria

Saxon monarch Athelstan spilt a lot of blood to create England in 925 AD. But he failed to bully Cumbrians into joining his new Empire

Athelstan (left) and the strange Mayburgh Henge near Eamont Bridge where he held his Imperial council

A thousand years ago, the man who had just created England with the edge of his sword summoned five Celtic kings. He gave them an offer they couldn’t refuse, or so he thought.

After a lightning military campaign, Athelstan had massively expanded his West Saxon kingdom, gobbling up the British mainland all the way up to the River Eamont just south of Penrith. Now he told the monarchs reigning north of that line to submit to him as well, or else.

The uneasy summit took place on 12th July 927 AD on top of the spooky Neolithic earthwork now known as Mayburgh Henge. Athelstan demanded they acknowledge that he was so powerful that he was now their overlord. He convinced himself that he had got their agreement. But, we shall see, his presumption and arrogance outraged his royal guests and led to the most devastating war of the early Middle Ages.

To the modern eye, the grassy mound near Penrith, squashed between the unsleeping horror of the M6 motorway and an accident black spot, seems an unlikely place for a royal conference.

Athelstan, left, portrayed as meeting Cuthbertt who was nearest thing to a national saint in the 19th Century

The five kings may have guessed he selected that location to put them at the maximum disadvantage. It was, Athelstan reckoned, a magical spot. Eamont Bridge lay at the “pen rhyd” (chief ford) on what had been the main north-south and east-west routes serving the west side of the island since prehistoric times.

In Anglo-Saxon folklore, a crossroads was a location between worlds where angels, demons, gods and spirits could be contacted and supernatural events could take place. Athelstan aimed to use the magic of this strange location to cajole his counterparts into line.

With his slender, muscular body trained to the peak of martial fitness and his beautiful blonde hair curled in shoulder length tresses, the ambitious thirty-three-year-old warrior-king Athelstan was a majestic and unnerving sight surrounded as he was by an enormous retinue of soldiers. Devout, bookish and shrewd, Athelstan had inherited much of his grandfather Alfred the Great’s political and military talent - and he was all too aware of the precarious nature of power.

Athelstan had summoned the rulers of Celtic northern Britain after he had expelled the hard-boiled Viking king Guthfrith from York. He had further annexed the Anglo- Saxon lands north of the Tees. He was therefore the first ruler with a valid claim to call himself King of all England.

Now, Athelstan aimed to force the Celtic kings of the north and west to acknowledge that he was so powerful that they had to do what he told them from now on.

Athelstan had achieved the extension of his empire in a very short time. The problem he faced as a result was that his regime was already close to operating beyond its military and economic capacity, a situation that has been called imperial overstretch.

It was a physical impossibility for Athelstan to travel regularly from his headquarters in Winchester to inspect the new outposts of his territory in York and Northumberland.

So, he needed to ensure the other northern kings were not going to cause trouble. By staging his elaborate piece of royal theatre on the riverside near Penrith, strewn with astonishing and baffling prehistoric earthworks, he was tacitly declaring that the northern most frontier of his empire would now run along the Eamont.

It was an aggressive move because it blocked any further expansion southwards by Owain, King of the Cumbrians, whose family had been extending its sway during the time the Vikings controlled York.

As the five kings arrived at the watery place for the first imperial council ever to be held in Britain, Athelstan’s guests had no illusions.

After his menacing feat of arms in York, they knew that he was the most powerful monarch Britain had ever seen and he was determined to serve as “Rex Totius Britanniae” – king of the whole of Britain, a slogan Athelstan would soon stamp on his coins. Following his triumph in York, no Scottish, Northumbrian or Cumbrian ruler would have doubted Athelstan’s ability or military preparedness to invade their lands.

Athelstan wanted a pledge from the other kings that they would accept him as their master – and that they would not join forces with the pagan Vikings to challenge his bid for supremacy.

The scale of the threat that Athelstan posed is illustrated by the impressive list of attendees at Eamont Bridge: Constantin, king of Alba (the north of Scotland); Hywel the Good, a powerful South Welsh king; Ealdred, son of Eadwulf, the king of Northumbria and Owain.

Obtaining a pledge of subservience from Owain was particularly important to Athelstan as the Cumbrian king’s lands now bordered on his. Owain was a British Celt, a proud blue-blooded aristocrat who led a fiercely independent people.

He spoke a language known as Cumbric, similar to Welsh. He was the descendant of a long line of kings of Strathclyde, a land which had expanded dramatically southward over the previous two centuries to include the ancient kingdom of Rheged. Increasingly this realm, stretching from Loch Lomond to the Eamont had come to be known as the Kingdom of Cumbra-land as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle put it, or, in Latin, Cumbria. Essentially, Cumbria had retained its identity as an independent Celtic country since the Romans left in around 410 AD.

Owain’s followers had inherited the traditions of the warlike Carvetii tribe that had inhabited the area for up to 1,200 years. Owain’s followers were the descendants of the warriors who, in coalition with the Brigantes, had given the Roman occupation a very hard time for nearly four hundred years. It was a lengthy history of independence that the wily Owain would stop at nothing to defend. As we shall see, Owain would triumph apparently against the odds over the ambitious Athelstan.

The kingdom of Cumbria would (just) survive when Athelstan launched the greatest single battle to take place before 1066, Brunanburh, in 937. Some 100,000 warriors took part. It ended the threat of a Viking takeover of Britain. Officially, Athelstan won this encounter, but it was a Pyrrhic victory that shattered his military capacities. Cumbria proved to be too far away and too militarily well organised to be pacified by the English king. Athelstan died two years after the battle aged 45, seemingly exhausted.

England would have to wait another 165 years before it swallowed Cumbria and even then the distinctiveness of the northern kingdom would endure despite nominally being under the Norman yoke. But what qualities helped Cumbria resist a takeover by the vastly more powerful English empire for so long when the rest of southern Britain capitulated…?

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