The First King of England by David Woodman

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom

By David Woodman

Princeton University Press 2025

University of Cambridge history professor David Woodman opens his indispensable new book The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom with an appropriately dramatic scene: it’s high summer in the year 927, and Æthelstan is at Eamont Bridge for a very important reason. He’s accepting the submission of two Welsh kings (a third submitting at roughly at the same time), making official an unprecedented title he’d adopted for himself, “King of the English.” He’d accomplished something neither his father, dour Edward the Elder, nor his grandfather, Alfred the Great, had ever been able to manage and had perhaps been careful not even to dream.

As Woodman points out, it was something of a quicksilver thing, with the country still more than a century away from having anything like inner cohesion (maybe a good deal more than a century, since Shakespeare scholars are fond of pointing out that his Warwickshire accent would have been almost incomprehensible in the London of his day, and even in 2025, ask a Loiner to pour our his heart to a citizen of Mobile, Alabama and see how things go). “When he formed ‘England’ in 927, Æthelstan was not only the first king to have done so, but he was simultaneously confronted by unprecedented complexities in holding it together,” Woodman writes,  “… The England that emerged under his leadership must have looked very different to the person standing on the banks of the River Humber than to the person standing on the River Thames in London, or on the River Tamar in the south-west.”

That quiet working-in of “leadership” is key: through the thicket of a millennium, through the patchwork of lacunae, in these pages a picture of Æthelstan emerges that’s convincing, humane, and surprisingly detailed. Woodman has brought a formidable amount of research muscle to the task of writing what will surely be the definitive life of this pivotal figure barring the discovery of some barrow stuffed with sealed chests of documents.

Æthelstan’s brief reign (a bit more than a decade) as King of the English is partially-well documented with royal documents like “diplomas” (mostly land grants) and law codes, but the main reason The First King of England is a 200-page book instead of a 70-page monograph is because in the 12th century a monk named William of Malmesbury wrote a great book called Gesta Regnum Anglorum (still awaiting a popular edition in English, much less a Penguin Classic), in which he lavished a good deal of attention on Æthelstan. Like every modern historian of the period, Woodman relies quite a bit on William, although he’s use is cautious. “While he was rigorous in the research for his historical writings,” Woodman writes, “he was not above embellishing his works and paying more attention to style than content, while also, at times, trusting too much in popular opinion.”

William had a generally positive opinion of Æthelstan, and even without William, looking only at all those royal documents so fussy about acreage but so earnest about common justice, a generally positive opinion shapes itself for the reader’s view. Woodman investigates every aspect of the reign, from religious and educational reform to the all-important concentration of what we would now call state power – a crucial element of which was of course money. How did coinage operate in the king’s reign, he asks, looking at one of Æthelstan’s own law codes stating, “We declare that there shall be one coinage throughout the king’s realm, and no man shall mint money except in a town.”

Woodman’s book is about “a king who could at once be ruthless and cunning, but also deeply concerned about his own – and his kingdom’s – intellectual and spiritual welfare,” and thanks to serious research and a light narrative touch, The First King of England presents a lively account of both sides of the king’s nature.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News