Much of the novel is fictional. We do not know how Ælfweard died, and his death probably took place at Oxford rather than Lundene, and it took another month before the West Saxons accepted Æthelstan as their new king. He was crowned at Kingston upon Thames that same year and was the first king to insist on being invested with the crown rather than with a helmet. Much of the reluctance to accept Æthelstan as king surely arose from the rumour that Edward had not married his mother, that he was indeed a bastard.

Edward’s reign left much of southern England free of the Viking scourge. King Alfred’s strategy of building burhs, which are heavily fortified towns, had been adopted by Edward and by his sister Æthelflaed in Mercia. East Anglia, which had been a Danish kingdom, was conquered and its towns fortified. Edward built more burhs along the Welsh border and in the north of Mercia to deter raids from western Northumbria where there were powerful Norse settlements. Sigtryggr, a Norseman, was King of Northumbria, ruling from York, and for purely fictional purposes I have brought his death forward by three years.

King Alfred undoubtedly dreamed of a united England, or Englaland, which would be one realm of everyone who spoke the ‘Ænglisc’ tongue. That sounds simple, though in truth an inhabitant of Kent would have found the English speech of a Northumbrian difficult to comprehend and vice versa, but nevertheless it was the same language. Nor was that ambition restricted to language. Alfred was famously pious, a man dedicated to the church, and all Christian folk, whether Saxon, Dane, or Norse, were included in his dream. Conversion was just as important as conquest. Æthelstan, when he assumed the throne of his father, inherited a much wider realm, a kingdom that included most English speakers, but there was still that awkward kingdom to the north, a kingdom that was part Christian and part pagan, part Saxon and part settled by Danes and Norsemen; the kingdom of Northumbria. That country’s fate must wait for another novel.

Æthelstan ruled for fifteen years and completed the unification of the English-speaking peoples. He never married and so left no heirs and was succeeded first by Edmund, the eldest son of Edward and Eadgifu, then by Edmund’s younger brother, Eadred. I have set the battle at the end of the novel at the Crepelgate, Cripplegate, and though the name does stretch back to Saxon times I invented Alfred’s decree allowing the severely handicapped the right to beg at that gate.

Sword of Kings is fiction, yet I hope it echoes a process that is little known; the creation of a country called England. Its birth is still some time off, and will prove bloody, but Uhtred will live to see it.