Historical Setting: The Great Skellig, 924 C.E.
The abbot is telling me of the Kings and their power struggles — things I missed through the past century. We both share the perspective that wars are made by people, not God, so, we value the acts of earthly rulers who choose not to have wars, though these human choices don’t always come with splashy monuments and remembrances kept as chronicles.
Yet Abbot Mactyre sees all this English history from the shores of Éire.
He explains, “It could have been a war for power between father and son, but that isn’t what happened. Æthelwulf divided the kingdom of Wessex so father and son both reigned as Kings — at least for a very brief two years before Æthelwulf’s death, when Æthelbald again gained the full power over Wessex. In fact, Æthelbald then married, Queen Judith, that teenaged widow of his father. Maybe this continuance of the queen served the interests of both her father, Charles the Bald and his original agreement with Æthelwulf, or maybe it was just another despicable act of Æthelbald, as was the opinion of so many people at the time. ” [footnote]
“Yet the ways of this family don’t seem nearly as brutal as the ways of the Merovingian kings. I lived through the divvying of Francia by the Merovingians, wars and murders among brothers and their queens, then I witnessed the passing of generations of kings when the broken pieces of Francia finally came together under Charlemagne.”
“Apparently, a truly great king doesn’t arise from nothing to immediately put everything back together while embers of wars are smoldering. Unifying a people is a legacy of several kings past. Also, Æthelwulf provided the example of making agreements for ending wars rather than maintaining old disputes as embers of hatred for starting future wars. It was the foundation for Alfred to bring the divisions of England together with the Danes waiting on the doorstep to takeover the whole of England.
“It seems any king with lots of sons can either scatter a kingdom dividing it into small pieces for each son to be a king, or it can be drawn as a powerful unity. But is strength of unity a good thing for the peaceful lives of the people?”
“With Alfred it was a good thing, friend Laz. The deaths of father and the older brothers eventually left this youngest, the one anointed as a child by Pope Leo IV, to be the King of England. And when his time came, the Danes were already prepared to take the whole land.”
[footnote] Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred with other contemporary sources, Translated … by Simon Kenes and Michael Lapidge, 1983, The Penguin Press, Middlesex, England. pp.
(Continues tomorrow)
