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

the period. And he achieved all this despite being struck down with a mysterious stomach disease on his wedding day, and being in agony for much of his life. He also re-founded London on the old Roman settlement – Anglo-Saxon Ludenwic, built in 600 a couple of miles west, now became known as the old city, or Aldwych . viii In 886, in the newly rebuilt city, Alfred was declared king of all the Anglo-Saxons not under Danish rule. He was, in the eyes of the people, rex Anglorum – King of the English.   
    Alfred died in 899, and although his brother Ethelred’s living sons had a greater claim, he ensured his own son Edward ‘the Elder’ became king after him, recognised as fader and hlaford (father and lord) of all the island. The term lord, used by kings until Richard II, came from Loafward literally ‘loaf giver’, and this relationship was at the heart of Anglo-Saxon and later medieval society; men had certain duties towards their lords, whether it was working on the land or the taking up of arms, in return for which they received protection and food.
    Edward was crowned at a location close to the borders of Mercia, Kent and Essex called Kings-Town-upon-Thames, on the same spot where his father and grandfather had been anointed, and where his son’s coronation is still immortalised on a stone. That son, Athelstan, was the product of Edward’s liaison with a shepherd’s daughter, a ‘noble concubine of his father’s youth’, and despite being illegitimate, he succeeded in 924. The crowning achievement of Athelstan's rule came in 937 when he won a spectacular victory at Brunanburh. An Anglo-Saxon poem about the battle stated that at the end of the day five young kings lay dead: ‘Stretched lifeless by the sword, and with them seven of Olaf’s earls and a countless host of seamen of Scots.’
    Although Athelstan united England, becoming in effect its first king, a feature of medieval kingship was that of constant struggle for power by families, and within them. He was succeeded by his brother Edmund ‘the deed-doer’, whose line would continue until the time of Ethelred the Unready, who at the turn of the millennium faced the return of the Danes, now Christian but still as violent as ever. The Vikings – Danes and Norwegians – had most heavily settled on the rocky islands off the north and west of Britain, especially Orkney and Shetland, the Hebrides and the Isle of Man, and they maintained a raiding culture. (Like Westeros’s Iron Islanders, they also sometimes kept a second wife, a ‘handfast’ of lower status, often non-Scandinavian.)
    This time a Viking king, Canute, took the crown and ruled for 20 years before it eventually passed to Edward the Confessor, Ethelred’s son by his Norman wife Emma. He spent his reign in conflict with Godwin, Earl of Wessex, and his six vicious sons, a division that would trigger the invasion of Emma’s great-nephew Duke William against the ‘usurper’ Harold Godwinson.
    Edward hated Godwin, who had began life as a pirate before rising up through violence and cunning, and had murdered the king’s brother Alfred. He had no choice but to recognise his power, and agreed to marry Godwin’s daughter Edith, although their marriage remained childless, and possibly chaste. The king’s relations with the Godwins reached crisis point in 1051 when Eustace of Boulogne, the husband of Edward’s sister and a major ally, made a diplomatic visit to England, and ended up stabbing a Dover innkeeper to death and starting a brawl that left 20 people dead. Edward ordered that Dover be harried, but Godwin, as the Earl of Wessex and therefore the immediate overlord, refused. Edward exiled the entire family; but Godwin had enough powerful allies for the ruling council, the Witan, to force the king to back down.
    Godwin died suddenly at a feast, possibly from choking to death on bread, or perhaps a stroke, and with the childless king growing old and sick Godwin's son Harold