The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones Read Online Free PDF Page A

Eadfrith, and completed around 715. In time Northumbria was eclipsed by Mercia, literally ‘the boundary’, which had been founded by the most ferocious settlers on the frontier with the British. By the end of his reign in 796 its king, Offa, effectively ruled most of England from his court in Staffordshire, styling himself ‘king of the whole fatherland of the English’.
    The Saxons were part of the German Sea, as they called the ocean around which the German peoples all lived. Beyond that world they knew little, only of travelers’ tales at the court of the kings, of voyages by the fjords of Norway up to the Arctic Circle and its midnight sun, and across to the land of the mysterious Finns and their shamans, and down the waterways where the Rus lived; and to the glories of Constantinople, like Rome a gilded, ancient city that filled the imagination.
    Although English missionaries had made great efforts in spreading the faith in Frisia, by the banks of the great river Rhine, and in Saxony, further north in the original homeland of the Anglii the people still worshipped the old gods. These were facing hunger, and would export some 200,000 people between the 8th and 11th centuries. vi The seamen who terrorized neighbouring lands the English called Denes or heathens; since the 19th century we have known them through the Icelandic sagas as ‘raiders’, or Vikings . The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles records the first of these pagani from 792 and the following year it noted that ‘dire portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people’ – immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons, were seen flying in the air. That year the Danes raided the monastery at Lindisfarne in Northumbria. The Vikings returned in the 830s and in 865 King Ivan ‘the Boneless’ invaded with his great host; he captured the Northumbrian capital Eoforwic and established it as a permanent Danish kingdom. Unable to pronounce the name, they called it Jorvik, York.
    By the late 860s all but one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been conquered. Then in 871 the Vikings invaded Wessex. Within a few months its young king was hiding in the Somerset Levels, with only a small band, desperately fending off the invaders. His name was Alfred, grandson of bretwalda Egbert and from the line of Cerdic who had founded the kingdom in 519. The youngest of King Ethelwulf’s five sons, his reign began with the death of his last surviving brother, Ethelred, and soon afterwards the Vikings defeated his army in battle.
    By the end of 877 his situation was desperate. On Twelfth Night, January 6, 878, the invaders beat the Saxons once again at Chippenham, and the last English king barely escaped with his life, fleeing with his army, or fyrd, to the Isle of Athelney in Somerset. During his darkest moments it was said that dead saints visited the king. Anonymously wandering through the woods, he came to a poor woman’s house and was allowed to sit by the fire if he would watch the bread (or cakes). Alfred, with his mind understandably on other matters, let the bread burn, and so the poor woman scolded him.
    But the king then won a series of battles, starting with Edington in May 878, driving the Danes out of Wessex and making a peace with their king, Guthrum, whereby the Danes would keep the east of the country and recognize Alfred’s rule in Wessex. Guthrum also agreed to baptism, with Alfred as godfather; to Guthrum’s way of thinking Alfred’s victory was proof that this Christian God might be strong. vii
     Alfred built a series of burhs or forts, no more than 40 miles apart, and these boroughs became the first towns since the Romans left, among them Exeter, Oxford, Worcester and Warwick. As well as opening and re-founding schools, and forcing aldermen (local councillors) to learn to read, Alfred also laid down the first national legal system, and also established the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles , which provide a great deal of the history of