Slain by the sword-edge, such as old writers
Have writ of in histories,
Happed in this isle, since up from the East hither
Saxon and Angle from over the broad billow
Broke into Britain with haughty war-workers who
Harried the Welshman, when Earls that were lured by the
Hunger of glory gat hold of the land.
The Anglo-Saxon Tyrtaeus in this shrill song of triumph naturally makes no mention of the losses on his own side, but we learn from another source[169] that two of Athelstan’s cousins, Elwin and Ethelwin, fell “in the war against Anlaf,” which probably means at Brunanburh. However, one-sided as all our information is about the great battle, it cannot be doubted that it was a real and important victory for the English.
The campaigns in Northumbria were apparently the most memorable events in the reign of Athelstan, but we hear also of his forcing the king of Wales to pay him tribute, of his visiting Cornwall, probably in hostile guise, of his expelling the “West Welsh” from Exeter and turning it into a purely Saxon city. He thus fixed the Tamar as the limit against the old British population in the south of England, as the Wye had been fixed further north.[170] It is clear that he came somewhat nearer than any of his predecessors to the position which would have been described in feudal times as lord paramount over the whole island. It is not only that he is generally described in the charters, which he granted with lavish hand to the monasteries, as rex totius Britanniæ, sometimes substituting for Britannia the half-mythical word Albion, which he must have learned from his ecclesiastical friends. Nor is it only that he first uses of himself the Greek word Basileus, which was regarded with awe throughout Western Europe as expressing the mysterious majesty of the Cæsars at Constantinople. These titles might be regarded as only the ornaments of style affected by the clerks of this period, or as the pompous assumptions of regal vanity; but when we find the meetings of the witan attended, and Athelstan’s charters signed, by Welsh kings (Howel, Juthwal and Morcant) who are styled sub-reguli; when we find, even at a meeting of the witan held as far south as Buckingham (in 934), the attesting signature of “Ego Constantinus subregulus,” and when we know that this is Constantine II., King of Scots (900–43), we feel that there was something real in Athelstan’s claim to be lord of all Britain; and the story of Constantine’s commendation of himself to Edward the Elder becomes decidedly more probable, even though “that old deceiver” did afterwards break his frith and stand in arms against his patron on the field of Brunanburh.
Athelstan does not seem to have ever married, and we may perhaps conjecture that he purposely abstained from leaving issue who might contest the claims of the legitimate descendants of his father. With one doubtful exception his relations with all his half-brothers and sisters seem to have been not only friendly but affectionate. That exception relates to his half-brother Edwin, as to whom the Chronicle for the year 933 simply asserts: “Now the Etheling Edwin was drowned in the sea”. Symeon of Durham, however, or rather the Cuthbertine annalist from whom he quotes,[171] has this ugly entry under the same date: “King Athelstan ordered his brother Edwin to be drowned in the sea”. This annal grew by the time of William of Malmesbury into a long and fanciful narrative, which William himself only half believed, and which connected the death of Edwin with some opposition to Athelstan at the time of his accession to the throne, on the ground of his illegitimacy. This evidently legendary story need not weigh greatly with us, and is at least balanced by the statement of Henry of Huntingdon, that Athelstan “was moved to tears by the news of the drowning of his brother, a youth of great vigour and of fine disposition”.[172]