Ten Minute English and British History #06 - The Birth of England

Twitter: / tenminhistory
Patreon: www.patreon.com/user?u=4973164
This episode covers the unification of the Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian kingdoms in Britain during the tenth century. It begins with Edward the Elder's conquests and ends with the assassination of Edward the Martyr. Some consider this to be the birth of an England but since the Anglo-Saxons didn't really think of it like that, it's hard to argue.
Recommended Reading:
James Campbell et al. - The Anglo-Saxons (1991) - I will never stop recommending this book to everyone. Just be aware it is not up to date with the changes in the opinion of modern scholarship.
Sarah Foot - Æthelstan: The First King of England (2011). A very good book (as is all of the Yale English Monarch series) which covers pretty much everything.
Ten Minute English and British History is a series of short, ten minute animated narrative documentaries that are designed as revision refreshers or simple introductions to a topic. Please note that these are not meant to be comprehensive and there's a lot of stuff I couldn't fit into the episodes that I would have liked to. Thank you for watching, though, it's always appreciated.

[@HistoryMatters]

Sorry this one is late, I've had major issues with the syncing in this video so if it's still off let me know. Next episode is 'The Late Anglo-Saxons and the House of Denmark'.

[@PissedOffGhost]

Why were they constantly dying? Starvation? disease? murder?

[@Magenta-hk3eh]

Life expectancy was very low during those periods and wouldn't see a significant change until much later.

[@MrSpinaldan]

Meh, it was worth the wait.

[@Jack-ed9do]

Ten Minute History You're the best youtuber

[@k1er4n544]

Not acceptable ;) keep up the great work :) also can you or have you done a video regarding the panic wars?

[@BListHistory]

I love the "plunk" sounds whenever someone dies

[@samh1022]

B-List History it is disturbingly satisfying

[@sksShadow1987]

indeed. so simple, but hilarious

[@neemapaxima6116]

sounds like mic drop

[@lziv7583]

Neema Paxima be try e

[@ryshow9118]

Gets me every single time

[@lukaswillumvarberg3776]

"continued the long trend of mortality and died" bloody love the small things u put in these vids

[@AgentTasmania]

Varberg My favourite is definitely “Franz Joseph proved he could actually die”

[@fabulouschild2005]

I love it when he said "X caught a small case of death"

[@stanleysmooth]

@@fabulouschild2005 "He came down with a fatal case of being shot"

[@IcecreamMcGuy]

“And died at the ripe old age of 19”

[@mareufactory7993]

"Died at the ripe old age of 19"

[@Cjnw]

Just like Tutankhamun!

[@Sean.Vosler]

Netflix’s “the last kingdom” is based on this time period and highly recommended if you like this stuff

[@TragicHamad]

Yea it was really great. Especially scenes of Alfred and Edward. They tried including fiction with Uhtred’s story line but his character and acting feels so stale and boring.

[@cobrakai388]

@@TragicHamad hey... Destiny is All!!! 🍻🍻🍻 Skol!

[@WOLF-ZONE23]

I do hope we see aethstan king of all England

[@mumto2monsters737]

The books are better.

[@vladdracul5072]

*Bernard Cornwell's "the Last Kingdom" series of books, not Netflix's.

[@CrEeDy1990]

I guess it's time to boot up Crusader Kings II.

[@jakeconstable]

I know this is a year late but... Iron Century just dropped! You can play this time period now

[@zayan6284]

@@jakeconstable you forgot about viking age.

[@jakeconstable]

@@zayan6284 Viking Age bookmark starts in 867 and has little to none of the historic figures the Iron Centiry is known for...

[@zayan6284]

@@jakeconstable but you can fight vikings!

[@jakeconstable]

@@zayan6284 hahaha very true! You excited for ck3?

[@Bongo1020]

That satisfying thump everytime someone dies is a thing of beauty. These videos are great they really help fill out the gaps I had in early British history

[@wood7206]

1:38 Norse: "Please help!" Aethelflaed: "Nope" **dies**

[@mikesmyth8330]

Gosh I miss your deep dives, they’re such a great combination of pacing and richness. I totally understand the realities of KZbin these days, but I just wanted you to know how much your care in this work is appreciated.

[@leonisullivan6435]

Genuinely cheered when "Derby" got a mention. We hardly ever get mentioned in anything

[@tomben6180]

I always thought people liked horse racing as well.

[@pacco9532]

Apart from the lowest ever points total

[@richardgoodley7845]

@@pacco9532 wow spiteful ..... hopefully Forest get promoted so they can get less next year :-)

[@SamLemont]

9:47 aside from what historians think and what people believe, Aethelstan took on the title "King of the English" in 927, throwing out the previously held titles "King of the Anglo-Saxons" and "King of Wessex", which you might not have mention for time, but it's a pretty big one nonetheless.

[@ulvihajili3222]

I love the way how all of them die by dropping in a 90 degree angle to the left or to the right.

[@xaviersaavedra7442]

Well since Ethelred earned the title of "the unready" I can imagine that his rule went swimmingly

[@xal3xmedia]

I read somewhere that "the unready" doesn't mean what it means in todays term, but more along the lines of "poorly advised".

[@ognjengaric2687]

Ethelred is going to get skullfucked by the Scandinavians.

[@xaviersaavedra7442]

Ognjen Garić dude spoiler alert!

[@ognjengaric2687]

Xavier Saavedra Bruh, this shit is a thousand years old, I'm not putting a spoiler alert for that. Besides, I didn't go much in detail and you could have guessed it anyway.

[@xaviersaavedra7442]

Ognjen Garić fine but he'll probably not say how the unready died any way so this is moot

[@user-gp5yz5yz4x]

Who else is binge watching these as a 2 hour lecture lol

[@Algo1]

Me

[@geronimo8159]

I find it quite exhausting to stay concentrated enough for just these 10 minutes...

[@chiefjohnson2642]

Yes our last day of level 4 lockdown in New Zealand🇳🇿 these kept my sanity intact.....Thank u sir and production team🤭👍🤣

[@silviasanchez648]

Me.

[@fabulouschild2005]

Same

[@Bastogne1944]

The simplest explanation is that Ivar the boneless had an erectile dysfunction...

[@jamestang1227]

Ivar the bonerless

[@dustycrustyhomelessman1648]

too bad boneless pizza is dead. I was going to say "can I get uhhhhhhh *_B O N E L E S S I V A R_* " but that's not funny anymore

[@michaelmilburn911]

Smashing video honestly I'm loving this series. Short, to the point and very interesting

[@the_rover1]

I find it a bit too slowly presented. luckily there's the option of speeding up by 2, though. hence I'm fine.

[@supersteamkitty8902]

Loving this series, keep up the good work. I was happy to hear the reference to Edgar at Chester as it's my hometown. There is still part of Chester today called 'Edgar's field' where the crowd watched Edgar and the other Anglo Saxon Lords row down the Dee. ^_^

[@teiloturner2760]

Chester was called dyfrdwy and was in wales in the 12th century and was capital of powys until the 9th century though?

[@T.GLongstaff]

Continued the long trend of Viking mortality. The way you talk about death is hilarious and oddly soothing.

[@jayjohn9893]

With a title like ''the unready'' you know the dudes got some heavy backstory! Awesome video, looking forward to the next.

[@urthtvbyjess]

Aethelred's name makes no sense, Aethelred means "noble-counsiled" and unready means "bad-counsiled"

[@MuchWhittering]

@@urthtvbyjess That's the joke.

[@Dave-lk4qc]

Best short history videos on KZbin! Well presented, informative and easy to follow. Keep them coming! I'm English so obviously love this series but would love to see other nations history broken down in such detail too 👍

[@garrykambimbi]

i swear the death sound is just him bopping the mic lol

[@mingusboodle]

This whole series of English history is fantastic.

[@mikefm4]

I love when I learn more in 10 minutes about English history than I did in 12 years of public school.

[@generalpatton7795]

"Which you do" dear lord you crack me up. This is my favorite channel.

[@vinnyjhawer7847]

Love the format of your video's, to the point, quick and fun. 👍🏼

[@alexrileyc]

Anybody here after watching The Last Kingdom?

[@freetocomment1946]

😄 the last kingdom and vikings

[@edwardcalcutt3417]

Your videos are brilliant, extremely helpful and funny. Great job!

[@britishlaw3027]

As someone from who lives near corfe is is anyone to hear this pronunciation but it is a great video and deeply informative in 10 minutes.

[@sallipuma]

Love these videos! Thanks for sharing

[@JamieBrady]

Great videos - very informative, well presented. Subscribed :)

[@Monstadangles]

I love the dying sound cue. Its hilarious.

[@JenniferinIllinois]

The Anglo-Saxon kings seem to have a habit of dying. 🤣🤣🤣

[@geronimo8159]

Ikr, what's up with those guys?

[@jameskuyper]

That makes them so different from everybody else!

[@scott228]

This is my favourite series on this chanle please make more

[@fuzzypickles3129]

Very informative and entertaining. Per usual.

[@martonk]

This series is wonderful

[@OneMinuteHistoryChannel]

Another solid episode

[@tyto6332]

Great video, keep it up!

[@noamsmuha7442]

i love this series plz continue

[@Mugofbrown]

"Corfe" pronounced like "Morph" (as in the cartoon character). Corfe Castle is worth a visit, especially when you learn way it's a ruin.

[@MuchWhittering]

As in the word morph which is a perfectly normal English word and doesn't need explaining?

[@iter9290]

@@MuchWhittering yes exactly

[@gstudios5074]

Awesome! Keep it up!!

[@cnmkhonza]

Nice one!

[@ed2635]

Great Work! You make confusing things less confusing. That's saying something, esp. for this period of English history.

[@noamsmuha7442]

you should read the book ''Shieldwall'' by Justin Hill, it tells the times of and after Ethelred the unready very well and also explains the way of life at the time

[@mqbitsko25]

"....the long trend of Viking mortality...." LOL!

[@champagnedance7524]

Amazing videos

[@Tom-pr3yh]

'Coronated'!! *gasp* I was wholly satisfied up to this point!

[@HistoryMatters]

I promise I've stopped saying that now.

[@Tom-pr3yh]

Hahaha! Excellent news! Keep up the good work :)

[@owenembleton7716]

I live in Maldon. FYI it’s pronounced mol-don. There’s also a village near Maldon called Danbury abbreviated from Danes-Bury. Settled by the Danish.

[@inco9943]

Can't wait for the history of Norman England!

[@qlnbd]

Ooo please do one on the birth of Scotland too.

[@Caroleonus]

Kor-fay? Great video, but I couldn't help but pick up on that, Corfe (Korf) Castle is local to me ;)

[@austinrodriguez1858]

Watching this cause I just finished the last kingdom season 5, glad things went well for Aethelstan

[@briansebor]

woooh, love these

[@teddybeddy123]

Fraud! Only 9:59. I trust nothing you say.

[@decades1912]

There is zero-th second to add to the rest of 599 seconds(9:59). Then it's 600 seconds, or 10 minutes, of history.

[@korakys]

It actually seems to be a technical problem with KZbin. Ten Minute History is the most consistent in terms of length of any KZbin channel I know.

[@HanBaby82]

Love love love the thump!

[@dnaseb9214]

"the shire system" Me as a lord of the rings intellectual: "I know quite a lot about the shire"

[@carmenudoye6949]

Next season of the last kingdom is about to be lit

[@wildsurfer12]

4:52 Looks like this Olaf wasn’t so keen on warm hugs...quite the opposite!

[@odysseusrex5908]

Very, very interesting.

[@maxbramwell.1598]

Nice to see videos on britian it's self. I know loads about the Byzantine empire or the reconquista but not much about the island I live on. Thanks.

[@einundsiebenziger5488]

Britain* itself* (combination of "it" and self", not "it is self")

[@Miamcoline]

Very good.

[@purplepie589]

Very good 👍

[@bigteo5262]

We all know it was Uhtred who killed Aethelwold

[@nostress6353]

The last kingdom makes sense now

[@lentoturmahub8214]

So, what I gathered from this is: Anglo-Saxons with confusing names rule over England, but there are also some Danes and Norwegians, and Willie isn’t in the picture yet... Basically, the whole thing is a hot mess.

[@adventussaxonum448]

Not sure that Alfred, Edward and Oswald are THAT confusing, but I get your point. The real mess comes after Bill the Bastard.....and has caused many problems ever since.

[@neilbain8736]

Just what is that monk doing as the screen pans down from the king to the monk in the illustrated document. At 8:48, and you have to be quick to freeze frame it, it's just as he says 'dia' in 'Regularis Condordia', you get a fleeting glimpse of a monk up to something that at first appears to involve legs being forced apart by arms, but it cuts to the next scene before whatever is going on is revealed. If you can freeze it, you definitely see an unshaven monk, head to one side, looking up, in repose on his back grasping two spindly things that although unlikely to be legs, might actually be part of something stylised that dives under him below the screen, reappearing with a pointy tail the right of the picture. Whoever drew it drew also took the trouble to draw his nipples. These are visible for a large part of the pan sequence so there's no mistaking them. The worrying thing is that they are visible under his vest, which must therefore be thin, or otherwise he has very folded skin hanging to his sides- but he looks healthy enough. Yet the illustrator took the time to add all this extra detail. This is all very peculiar!

[@pizzatime3367]

What a time to be alive, that was

[@the_rover1]

as a noble, maybe. as a worker, or a farmer, or even the worst of all - as a woman - definitely no fun at all I guess.

[@viridisxiv766]

@@the_rover1 anglo saxon laws were pretty good to women. they had legal equality and they could own land etc. on the continent, not so much.

[@the_rover1]

@@viridisxiv766 Nixe to know, thanks.

[@AdmiralBonetoPick]

A lot is said these days about "patriarchy" and "women being forced to stay in the home", but Europe was never like the Middle East. Most women worked (for example in the textile industry, on farms or as domestic servants). Some women owned and ran their own businesses, such as pubs. It was really only in Victorian times that the idea went around that it was a sign of status for a man to be so prosperous that his wife wouldn't have to work - and even then it was only an upper-middle class thing. Another fun fact: women in Britain actually *were* allowed to vote until 1832. Around 5% of the electorate was female until the 1832 Reform Act stripped women of the vote. That's because historically the right to vote was tied to how much tax you paid (on the reasonable basis that, if you're not actually paying tax, it's not really any of your business how the government is spending taxpayer money). Wealthy women, especially those who inherited land from their husbands or fathers (land being the main taxable asset) therefore paid enough tax to entitle them to vote.

[@Dizzy...]

I bet you would know.

[@dylanandrejic4902]

They all have the coolest names

[@rickwightman2366]

The content in these are great, but my favourite is when the characters die.

[@markballard9942]

The proper word for what happens to a King at a coronation is not coronated, but crowned.

[@Tyrkia123]

your animations are so funny

[@DominickvdHoff]

i'd love this kind of history for the dutch, i don't know much about my own countries history... :D

[@gladiatorz5677]

The Administration of Justice Act was given Royal Assent in 1977, not 1974.

[@arnedreitausend6446]

These videos are great. They would be much better though if the narrator would slow down a bit and put in a few pauses, catch his breath and allow me to process a thought or information for a second. I love the concept of condensed information but the delivery should not be as rushed as it is.

[@macnadoodle]

"Corfe"? "Cor-fey"? pronounced Corfe, as In Worf - the best Klingon Star Trek TNG ever had.

[@adventussaxonum448]

He's obviously not from Wessex.

[@FrancisCWolfe]

He doesn't know how to pronounce almost anything, unfortunately. There's about one weird pronunciation per video.

[@rianqi]

I fucking love British humour!! 🤣🤣

[@k1er4n544]

1:13 I live in Maldon was not expecting it to be mentioned xD

[@mattbraybrook232]

kieran544 I’m from burnham !

[@k1er4n544]

Matt Braybrook haha neighbours Burnham Is cool town i go to the Rio cinema quite often then get hammered afterwards xD

[@jaywilliams9294]

Can you do videos on the crusades?

[@dennispeters08]

It's is gonna happen in season 4 of '' The last kingdom''

[@Vroomi3]

Ahhhhh spoilers!!!

[@DavidElendu]

That's literally the only reason I'm watching this video

[@brunocerri9560]

'Help please!' **aethelflaed spontaneously dies**

[@anguscovoflyer95]

find the death animations funny

[@TragicHamad]

Thwack

[@kristiankepley5944]

“Keeping the Viking tradition of...dying” How fun

[@michaelkazmierczak2973]

Fucking I love this channel! Wish English history didn't make me want to cut vertically for attention. Lucky for me this channel manages to make it fun so I will hold off on it (or just roll down my sleeves a bit more).

[@SamButler22]

So there was a brief Edward here, king of a definitely united English kingdom, but another lad over 200 years later gets the "First". That always struck me as inconsistent, but I suppose that's the way things go back then

[@anthonyjoseph125]

Any idea when the next video will come out? It should be arriving any time soon.

[@quetzal1969]

what about "Uthred son of Uthred"? did he ever recover Beebendur?

[@mynameisconnorimtheandroid6080]

After you do the history of england ples do great moravia

[@kingofcards9516]

England: breaths Northumbria: ait, imma head out.

[@decoture9978]

“Charles the simple” LOOOOOL

[@joshygoldiem_j2799]

"until 911 when Æthelred, the Lord of Mercia, died..."

[@ssfc117]

Finished “The Last Kingdom” last night and instantly had to come here

[@anthonyjoseph125]

What is the timetable for the release of these episodes?

[@F40PH-2CAT]

My fave videos on this channel all open with someone dying.

[@Osric24]

Ceorl becoming churl later and referring to peasantry makes the word churlish make a lot more sense. Also, there are few more badass names than Erik Bloodaxe.

[@thatguyswavomeer]

Was there any rule that you can be a king only when your name starts with Ed-?

[@chloevitagliano9565]

There is a TV show the ends before the start of the video

[@harrisonshone7769]

How many of these videos are you going to be making?

[@eakintunde84]

Fascinating! Are there still any Brits left with Danish heritage today?

[@tamilvendans4892]

there's some purge happened but they do

[@ilovemuslimfood666]

The charter by Edmund has text in it that looks a lot like elvish script from the LOTR universe!

[@bobmantheawesome]

Corfe is pronounced 'Korf'

[@einundsiebenziger5488]

Interesting how all these kings in all their marches to invade and conquer neighbouring territories meticulously avoid stepping into Wales.

[@michaelfritts6249]

"Here Abide Monsters.." 😉🙃🙂🤣😃