Æthelwulf (; Old English for "Noble Wolf"; died 13 January 858) was King of Wessex from 839 to 858. In 825, his father, King Ecgberht, defeated King Beornwulf of Mercia, ending a long Mercian dominance over Anglo-Saxon England south of the Humber. Ecgberht sent Æthelwulf with an army to Kent, where he expelled the Mercian sub-king and was himself appointed sub-king. After 830, Ecgberht maintained good relations with Mercia, and this was continued by Æthelwulf when he became king in 839, the first son to succeed his father as West Saxon king since 641.
The Vikings were not a major threat to Wessex during Æthelwulf's reign. In 843, he was defeated in a battle against the Vikings at Carhampton in Somerset, but he achieved a major victory at the Battle of Aclea in 851. In 853, he joined a successful Mercian expedition to Wales to restore the traditional Mercian hegemony, and in the same year, his daughter Æthelswith married King Burgred of Mercia. In 855, Æthelwulf went on a pilgrimage to Rome. In preparation he gave a "decimation", donating a tenth of his personal property to his subjects; he appointed his eldest surviving son Æthelbald to act as King of Wessex in his absence, and his next son Æthelberht to rule Kent and the south-east. Æthelwulf spent a year in Rome, and on his way back he married Judith, the daughter of the West Frankish king Charles the Bald.
When Æthelwulf returned to England, Æthelbald refused to surrender the West Saxon throne, and Æthelwulf agreed to divide the kingdom, taking the east and leaving the west in Æthelbald's hands. On Æthelwulf's death in 858, he left Wessex to Æthelbald and Kent to Æthelberht, but Æthelbald's death only two years later led to the reunification of the kingdom. In the 20th century, Æthelwulf's reputation among historians was poor: he was seen as excessively pious and impractical, and his pilgrimage was viewed as a desertion of his duties. Historians in the 21st century see him very differently, as a king who consolidated and extended the power of his dynasty, commanded respect on the continent, and dealt more effectively than most of his contemporaries with Viking attacks. He is regarded as one of the most successful West Saxon kings, who laid the foundations for the success of his youngest son, Alfred the Great.
Background
At the beginning of the 9th century, England was almost completely under the control of the Anglo-Saxons, with Mercia and Wessex the most important southern kingdoms. Mercia was dominant until the 820s, and it exercised overlordship over East Anglia and Kent, but Wessex was able to maintain its independence from its more powerful neighbour. Offa, king of Mercia from 757 to 796, was the dominant figure of the second half of the 8th century. King Beorhtric of Wessex (786–802), married Offa's daughter in 789. Beorhtric and Offa drove Æthelwulf's father Ecgberht into exile, and he spent several years at the court of Charlemagne in Francia. Ecgberht was the son of Ealhmund, who had briefly been King of Kent in 784. Following Offa's death, King Coenwulf of Mercia (796–821) maintained Mercian dominance, but it is uncertain whether Beorhtric ever accepted political subordination, and when he died in 802 Ecgberht became king, perhaps with the support of Charlemagne. For two hundred years three kindreds had fought for the West Saxon throne, and no son had followed his father as king. Ecgberht's best claim was that he was the great-great-grandson of Ingild, brother of King Ine (688–726), and in 802 it would have seemed very unlikely that he would establish a lasting dynasty.
Almost nothing is recorded of the first twenty years of Ecgberht's reign, apart from campaigns against the Cornish in the 810s. The historian Richard Abels argues that the silence of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was probably intentional, concealing Ecgberht's purge of Beorhtric's magnates and suppression of rival royal lines. Relations between Mercian kings and their Kentish subjects were distant. Kentish ealdormen did not attend the court of King Coenwulf, who quarrelled with Archbishop Wulfred of Canterbury (805–832) over the control of Kentish monasteries; Coenwulf's primary concern seems to have been to gain access to the wealth of Kent. His successors Ceolwulf I (821–823) and Beornwulf (823–826) restored relations with Archbishop Wulfred, and Beornwulf appointed a sub-king of Kent, Baldred.
England had suffered Viking raids in the late 8th century, but no attacks were recorded between 794 and 835 when the Isle of Sheppey in Kent was ravaged. In 836, Ecgberht was defeated by the Vikings at Carhampton in Somerset, but in 838, he was victorious over an alliance of Cornishmen and Vikings at the Battle of Hingston Down, reducing Cornwall to the status of a client kingdom.
Family Æthelwulf's father Ecgberht was king of Wessex from 802 to 839. His mother's name is unknown, and he had no recorded siblings. He is known to have had two wives in succession, and so far as is known, Osburh, the senior of the two, was the mother of all his children. She was the daughter of Oslac, described by Asser, biographer of their son Alfred the Great, as "King Æthelwulf's famous butler", a man who was descended from Jutes who had ruled the Isle of Wight. Æthelwulf had six known children. His eldest son, Æthelstan, was old enough to be appointed King of Kent in 839, so he must have been born by the early 820s, and he died in the early 850s. The second son, Æthelbald, is first recorded as a charter witness in 841, and if, like Alfred, he began to attest when he was around six, he would have been born around 835; he was King of Wessex from 858 to 860. Æthelwulf's third son, Æthelberht, was probably born around 839 and was king from 860 to 865. The only daughter, Æthelswith, married Burgred, King of Mercia, in 853. The other two sons were much younger: Æthelred was born around 848 and was king from 865 to 871, and Alfred was born around 849 and was king from 871 to 899. In 856, Æthelwulf married Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald, King of West Francia and future Carolingian Emperor, and his wife Ermentrude. Osburh had probably died, although it is possible that she had been repudiated. There were no children from Æthelwulf's marriage to Judith, and after his death, she married his eldest surviving son and successor, Æthelbald.
Early life Æthelwulf was first recorded in 825, when Ecgberht won the crucial Battle of Ellandun in Wiltshire against King Beornwulf of Mercia, ending the long Mercian ascendancy over southern England. Ecgberht followed it up by sending Æthelwulf with Eahlstan, Bishop of Sherborne, and Wulfheard, Ealdorman of Hampshire, with a large army into Kent to expel sub-king Baldred. Æthelwulf was descended from kings of Kent, and he was sub-king of Kent, and of Surrey, Sussex and Essex, which were then included in the sub-kingdom, until he inherited the throne of Wessex in 839. His sub-kingship is recorded in charters, in some of which King Ecgberht acted with his son's permission, such as a grant in 838 to Bishop Beornmod of Rochester, and Æthelwulf himself issued a charter as King of Kent in the same year. Unlike their Mercian predecessors, who alienated the Kentish people by ruling from a distance, Æthelwulf and his father successfully cultivated local support by governing through Kentish ealdormen and promoting their interests. In Abels' view, Ecgberht and Æthelwulf rewarded their friends and purged Mercian supporters. Historians take differing views on the attitude of the new regime to the Kentish church. At Canterbury in 828, Ecgberht granted privileges to the bishopric of Rochester, and according to the historian Simon Keynes, Ecgberht and Æthelwulf took steps to secure the support of Archbishop Wulfred. However, Nicholas Brooks argues that Wulfred's Mercian origin and connections proved a liability. Æthelwulf seized an estate in East Malling from the Canterbury church on the ground that it had only been granted by Baldred when he was in flight from the West Saxon forces; the issue of archiepiscopal coinage was suspended for several years; and the only estate Wulfred was granted after 825 he received from King Wiglaf of Mercia.
In 829, Ecgberht conquered Mercia, only for Wiglaf to recover his kingdom a year later. The scholar David Kirby sees Wiglaf's restoration in 830 as a dramatic reversal for Ecgberht, which was probably followed by his loss of control of the London mint and the Mercian recovery of Essex and Berkshire, and the historian Heather Edwards states that his "immense conquest could not be maintained". However, in the view of Keynes:
In 838, King Ecgberht held an assembly at Kingston in Surrey, where Æthelwulf may have been consecrated as king by the archbishop. Ecgberht restored the East Malling estate to Wulfred's successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, Ceolnoth, in return for a promise of "firm and unbroken friendship" for himself and Æthelwulf and their heirs, and the same condition is specified in a grant to the see of Winchester. Ecgberht thus ensured support for Æthelwulf, who became the first son to succeed his father as West Saxon king since 641. At the same meeting, Kentish monasteries chose Æthelwulf as their lord, and he undertook that, after his death, they would have freedom to elect their heads. Wulfred had devoted his archiepiscopate to fighting against secular power over Kentish monasteries, but Ceolnoth now surrendered effective control to Æthelwulf, whose offer of freedom from control after his death was unlikely to be honoured by his successors. Kentish ecclesiastics and laymen now looked for protection against Viking attacks to West Saxon rather than Mercian royal power.
Ecgberht's conquests brought him wealth far greater than his predecessors had enjoyed and enabled him to purchase the support which secured the West Saxon throne for his descendants. The stability brought by the dynastic succession of Ecgberht and Æthelwulf led to an expansion of commercial and agrarian resources, and to an expansion of royal income. The wealth of the West Saxon kings was also increased by the agreement in 838–839 with Archbishop Ceolnoth for the previously independent West Saxon minsters to accept the king as their secular lord in return for his protection. However, there was no certainty that the hegemony of Wessex would prove more permanent than that of Mercia.
King of Wessex