![]() Back in an age unimaginable to even the greatest scholar at Athelstan’s court, 8,000 years before the birth of Christ, it was discovered by nomads moving northwards in the wake of retreating ice sheets. Fed by a warm spring, the waters of this pool - which today we call Blick Mead - never freeze. Beyond the light that spilled and flickered out through the doorways of his hall there lay a pool of water. The radiance of the king’s hospitality blazed all the more brilliantly for the cold and darkness all around.Īthelstan did not know it, but the festivities he presided over at Amesbury that Christmas of 932 had a pedigree that reached back millennia. Such munificence was widely seen as appropriate to the season. ![]() One was to an abbey, another to a lord named Alfred. On Christmas Eve he made generous grants of land. Sat on his throne, wearing his diadem, the King of the English bestowed largesse. There was feasting, drinking, gift-giving. Athelstan, a king who had won for himself his own imperial dignity, was the first of his dynasty to do the same. Across the Channel, in the lands of the Franks, it had long been the custom of emperors to sit in state at Christmas, publicly wearing a crown. That December, taking the road that led through the West Saxon heartlands of his kingdom, and arriving with his court in the fortified settlement of Amesbury, Athelstan could be well satisfied with the scope of his power. Never before had all the other kings of the island, from the northernmost reaches of Scotland to the mountains of Wales, been compelled to acknowledge the overlordship of a single man. Never before had a unitary kingdom been fashioned out of all the various realms of the Angles and the Saxons. In AD 932 the most powerful ruler in Britain spent Christmas on the edge of Salisbury Plain. ![]()
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