What we now call England came into shape during the times of the family of King Alfred the Great of Wessex. Wessex can be thought of as the southwest of England excluding Devon and Cornwall. A long additional chapter at the end of my book, “The Mustard Seed”, recounts how Alfred’s Wessex royal family, from which today’s UK royal family descends, founded England. There were six main family members to focus upon, in four generations:

• Alfred’s parents, Aethelwulf and Osburh of Wessex. They were in power 839 to 858. They passed on the Christian worldview which shaped Alfred.
• Alfred the Great, reigning in Wessex 871 to 899.
• Edward the Elder, Alfred’s son, reigning in Wessex 899 to 924.
• Aethelflaed, Alfred’s daughter, the Lady of the Mercians.
• Athelstan, Alfred’s grandson, son of Edward, mentored by Aethelflaed. In 927, Athelstan became the first King of the English as one nation.

Alfred established a vision for a Kingdom greater than Wessex, a Kingdom of the Angelcynn, meaning, the kin or nation of the English. This term was meant to designate all people of their ethnicity and Christian heritage (you cannot separate the two within Alfred’s vision) throughout the territory that became known as England. The family developed a sense of mission to fulfil the vision. Within the family, let’s have a closer look at Aethelflaed, the Lady of the Mercians. What I would infer to have been her dying prayer is the focus of this blog.

Aethelflaed was married in the 880’s into the royal family of Mercia (the Midlands of what became England). Mercia was Wessex’s neighbour and rival, though becoming the less powerful of the two. From 911, following the death of her husband, the Mercians made Aethelflaed their ruler in her own right. That was quite something in those warrior days – to make as ruler someone who was (a) female, and (b) from the rival kingdom.

Aethelflaed must have been a remarkable person. I will return to her shortly. Before that however, we must encounter the man she mentored, Athelstan, first King of the English. Alfred the Great had singled out Athelstan, his grandson by Edward the Elder, for a special destiny. Athelstan was just five at the time. Grown up, in 925, he became the King of Wessex and Mercia – both the territory and the peoples combined. He then took the title King of the English. But that was an over-claim. He was the King south of the River Humber. However, in 927 Athelstan also took Danish York without bloodshed. Whereupon all north of the Humber lay open before him, and all of what became England began to come under his rulership. Whereupon, (a) England as we know it came into being in forms recognisable from that day to this; (b) the title, King of the English, became an accurate title, not an over-claim; and (c), the vision of his grandfather, Alfred the Great, to establish the kingdom or nation of the Angelcynn, came to fulfilment. Important to note here, of first importance in fact, Athelstan was a devoted Christian, like Alfred had been. The kingdom of the English formed around the Christian Identity that was a passion in both of them.

Now, although Athelstan was the son of Edward the Elder of Wessex, and he did inherit in the end, he was not the favoured heir. Therefore, early in the 900’s, the young Athelstan was packed off to then-lowlier Mercia, there to be mentored into adult life by Edward’s sister, Alfred’s daughter, the remarkable Aethelflaed, the Lady of the Mercians. It was Aethelflaed who mentored the young man into the destiny for which Alfred had first singled him out.

Therefore, to return to Aethelflaed. Like Alfred and Athelstan, she was a most devoted Christian. Although it is fashionable to appraise our history with only the one eye open, the secular eye, it is in fact impossible to appraise any of these Wessex royals accurately without also opening the second eye, the Christian eye. You see, Christian faith and worldview motivated all of them, except Edward, in large measure; and even Edward in some measure. In “The Mustard Seed” I recover this lost dimension of them. In a nutshell, founding England was the by-product of a drive to rescue and restore the Christian Identity of their people. Alfred’s vision for a kingdom of the Angelcynn had that at its heart.

In the case of Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, it went like this. During the time of her father Alfred, peoples of Anglo Saxon ethnicity and Christian Identity came to treaty with peoples of Danish ethnicity and Pagan Identity. The Danes occupied the East of what became England, known as the Danelaw, their main HQ being York. It was an uneasy peace. Out of realism, I should say, more than out of conquest, Alfred’s children, Edward the Elder and the Lady Aethelflaed, made it their mission to gradually roll back the Danelaw.

In the year 909, Edward made a daring raid into Danelaw territory to recover the bones of Saint King Oswald of Northumbria. Oswald – originating godfather in 635 of the UK royal family – features in other blogs on this website and is a central figure in “The Mustard Seed”. After the raid, his bones were laid in Aethelflaed’s newly constructed church in Mercian territory, at Gloucester. There we can confidently expect that the family gathered around them to pray. It is important to understand how they would have prayed. The fashion is to portray the ancients as praying superstitiously to bones for war victory. Well, of course they would have commended themselves to God for war victory. But what they would have sought more than that, and from God rather than the bones, would be that what had been good and great in Oswald would be alive again in their own times. Which is what they got – in Athelstan, son of Edward, protégé of Aethelflaed.

After this, in 910, Aethelflaed’s forces joined battle with the northern Danes of York at Tettenhall, in the West Midlands of what is now England. Aethelflaed prevailed. Hindsight shows that the ultimate overcoming of the Danelaw became irrevocable from that day. The day of the battle was Saint King Oswald’s Day. I show you in my book how to understand that in a reasoned rather than superstitious way.

After this, in 918, the Danes of York made suit to Aethelflaed to become their ruler. It seems that her Christian rulership was preferred to a new wave of pagan Norsemen coming in. However, Aethelflaed, the Lady of the Mercians, passed away before she could take up the opportunity.

Next up, something amazing. Unprecedented in those times. In 927, Athelstan slipped forces into Danish York and took it without bloodshed. That goes largely unremarked, unless to infer sneakiness on the part of Athelstan, notwithstanding his nobility of character. However, with Christian eye open as well as secular one, it is obvious to infer what happened. The Lady Aethelflaed made a prayer before dying. She commended the suit from Danish York to her Christian God. And that God gave the bloodless fulfilment of her prayer to the noble Christian nephew she had mentored. The episode has the hallmarks of the way the Christian God actually works if human beings will let him.

Now, of course, it is anathema to most fashions of learning to admit that the Christian God could have had any impact on real world political history. The fashion is to set out history as a system closed to God. But as you can deduce in “The Mustard Seed”, on many occasions, if you keep an open mind, the system has obviously not been closed. The Christian God broke in on numerous occasions to the early history of the people who became the English. Once you allow the Christian eye to open, it becomes harder not to see it than to see it.

And here we have a classic case in which the experienced Christian eye can see what happened under the surface of things. The Lady Aethelflaed knew how to lay hold of the Christian God in prayer; and her prayer before dying paved the way for a defining contribution to the making of England when the time came.