Edward the Elder
Edward the Elder took the Danelaw south of the Humber in twenty years with his sister, and the England his son was crowned king of in 927 was the one he had made. He was the son of Alfred the Great and was in the field in his father's last war, beating a Danish army at Farnham in 893. When Alfred died in 899 his cousin Aethelwold, the son of the elder brother Alfred had succeeded, claimed the throne, went to the Danes of Northumbria and was accepted as their king, and was killed at the Holme in East Anglia in 902 in a battle the West Saxons lost. After that Edward and his sister Aethelflaed, who ruled Mercia for her invalid husband and then alone, worked the same method from two sides: a fortified burh built each season a few miles into Danish territory, garrisoned, and used as the base for the next. His went up the Thames valley and into Essex and the east Midlands - Hertford, Witham, Buckingham, Bedford, Maldon, Towcester, Colchester; hers along the Welsh border and into the north-west. The Danish armies of the boroughs submitted one by one, or were beaten at Tettenhall in 910 and Tempsford in 917, and by the end of 918 everything south of the Humber was his. Aethelflaed died that June, and Edward took Mercia from her daughter Aelfwynn and had the girl carried into Wessex, which ended Mercian kingship. In 920 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says the kings of the Scots, the Strathclyde Britons and the Danes of York chose him as father and lord, which was probably less than it sounds. He married three times and had fourteen children whom he married across Europe. He died at Farndon in Cheshire in July 924, putting down a rising at Chester, and his eldest son Athelstan, raised at his aunt's court, took York and the title King of the English three years later.
- Lived: 874 CE – 924 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: king, monarch
