The Kings and Queens podcast

The Kings and Queens podcast works through the English monarchy one ruler per episode. Jonny Langton hosts and narrates, and the numbered episodes in view cover six tenth-century Anglo-Saxon kings: Edmund I, Eadred, Eadwig, Edgar, Edward the Martyr and Æthelred the Unready. The openings are worth noticing. Several start with someone else's words, such as a verse by the poet Christopher Logue for Æthelred or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's praise of Edgar as a king under whom all things grew good. A line naming the king comes next, then his birth and parentage. Family is never just background here. Saxon succession did not simply pass to the eldest child, and the Edmund I episode sets out the elder half-brothers who fought for the crown when he was three years old. The political material is dense. Northumbria keeps coming back as the kingdom's weak point, pulled toward Viking rule and back again. Eadred, fighting a debilitating illness, confronts Bloodaxe, the berserker the Northumbrian leadership chose over a southern king, and answers with a campaign in which, by John of Wallingford's account, he burned towns. Edmund's reign reaches into Wales and Alba, taking in the killing of a king of Gwynedd and the abdication of Constantine II. Church politics run alongside the wars. Dunstan appears as a hardline Benedictine reformer under Edgar and flees the country under Eadwig. The Edward the Martyr episode describes a quarrel over the monasteries, and the land they had gathered, that looked set to trigger civil war. The show's most distinctive habit is how it treats evidence. Eadwig's episode notes that his image as a naive, capricious boy comes from the hagiographies of the men he dismissed. It closes by suggesting that whether a story really happened matters less than what it reveals about a tenth-century court. Æthelred is introduced through William of Malmesbury's charge that he was an accomplice to murder and a coward. The identity of Edward the Martyr's mother is flagged as something no contemporary source can verify. Edgar gets a quieter verdict: so few recorded incidents that the peace itself obscures his legacy. The Æthelred material adds the dread surrounding the year 1000 and a truce paid for in silver as Viking raids grew more frequent. Most episodes close by naming the next monarch, with Æthelred's pointing ahead to Svein Forkbeard, and by inviting questions through email, Instagram and X. A listener who wants the succession laid out could begin with Edmund I. One more curious about how reputations get made should try Eadwig.