On Twelfth Night we hear that silly carol, “We Three Kings”, but this year I will be looking forward to the celebration next year of the coming together of five kings in Britain’s own Garden of Eden, by Eamont Bridge on 12 July 927.
The coming together of wise men or kings may be marvellous, or terrible. When the Magi gathered in Bethlehem it was so that Christ, the new Adam, could be shown to the gentiles; whence we call it the Epiphany – the Showing Forth. When the kings gathered in Eden, a new creation was shown forth – England united for the first time, and Britain united by the oaths of its kings.
(Yes, but it is a silly carol: we do not know the number of the Magi, and know they were not kings. That said, there are three kings in the Gospel narrative of the nativity, but that is for another article.)
It seems a blasphemously presumptious thing to put the birth of the Son of God alongside with the birth of our nation, but our microcosm may reflect in its way a part of the macrocosm – it is no comparison, but an echo.
Hobbes talks of Christ’s kingship, noting:
That the Magi came to worship him as King of the Jews: That Herod for the same cause sought to kill him: That John Baptist proclaimed him: That he preached by himselfe, and his Apostles that he was that King; That he taught the Law, not as a Scribe, but as a man of Authority
Kingship of the nation should reflect a love for the nation according to the example of Christ’s love for his subjects. By all accounts, Athelstan did reflect a concern for his subjects, between battles.
The gathering of kings in Westmorland in 927 is barely recorded. The Chronicle says that King Athelstan conquered York on the death of its pagan, Viking king, and made all the kings of the island his subjects: gathered to swear oaths with him were the kings of Deheubarth, Gwent and Scotland, and the stewart of Bamburgh; also there, later historians tell us, was Owain of Strathclyde, at whose border the kings met. (Of the multitude of other Welsh kings of the time, they are not individually mentioned, but King Hywel of Deheubarth considered them his own subjects and if not present they were sworn by proxy.)
What though did it all mean? Nothing less than the Birth of England, and the Birth of Britain. There had never been one England until Athelstan took York, and Ealdred Ealdulfing of Bamburgh knelt at his feet by Eamont, and the kings swore their recognition of his greater kingdom.
Legend tells that St Cuthbert appeared to Alfred the Great, promising that his grandson would rule all Britain. King Alfred, Athelstan’s grandfather, had seen the kingdoms of England reduced to a camp in the frozen Somerset marshes: if someone had told him that in a thousand years the language of the world would be English, and that his descendants would rule far lands over the ocean that even Orosius could not imagine, he would have laughed, but it has come to be. That union sworn by Westmorland’s northern border was the beginning of the process which created the greatest realm and greatest culture that the earth has ever seen.
That, of all things, must be celebrated to the high heavens in 2027.
