Æthelstan the first King of Britain?

Speaker: Professor Sarah Foot

Thursday 19th November 2026

7.45pm, The Northcourt Centre, Northcourt Road, Abingdon OX14 1NS 

2027 will mark the 1100^th anniversary of King Æthelstan’s conquest of Northumbria and the submission to him of other kings in the island of Britain. This paper sets that event in a wide context, tracing the growing power of Wessex from the later ninth century onwards and exploring the family politics of the West Saxon royal line. It will consider Æthelstan’s contested accession and the continued threats to his rule later in his reign and explore how the king sought to build alliances in continental Europe by arranging marriages for his sisters. Abingdon played a part in those negotiations since it hosted an embassy from Hugh, duke of the Franks, to the king in 926 at which sumptuous gifts were exchanged. The paper then turns to the major military events of Æthelstan’s reign. The implications of his bloodless conquest of the north and the submission of other rulers from the islands were wide ranging and enduring. We shall explore how the expansion of Æthelstan’s realm sat within his wider strategies for ruling a people still recovering from decades of war, and its implications for his own sense of the nature of his kingship and the ways in which his circle chose to represent him. Æthelstan was the first king to rule all the united peoples of England, but did he have wider aspirations to an imperial authority over all Britain?

Professor Sarah Foot is Dean of Christ Church, Oxford and was previously the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Oxford. She has published widely on aspects of religion and politics in England before the Norman Conquest and wrote a biography of Æthelstan which was published in 2011.

 Æthelstan with Saint Cuthbert. By kind permission of parker.stanford.edu

Sarah Foot