Æthelberht

Æthelberht (; also spelled Ethelbert or Aethelberht) was the King of Wessex from 860 until his death in 865. He was the third son of King Æthelwulf by his first wife, Osburh. Æthelberht was first recorded as a witness to a charter in 854. The following year Æthelwulf went on pilgrimage to Rome and appointed his oldest surviving son, Æthelbald, as king of Wessex while Æthelberht became king of the recently conquered territory of Kent. Æthelberht may have surrendered his position to his father when he returned from pilgrimage but resumed (or kept) the south-eastern kingship when his father died in 858.

When Æthelbald died in 860, Æthelberht united both their territories under his rule. He did not appoint a sub-king and Wessex and Kent were fully united for the first time. He appears to have been on good terms with his younger brothers, the future kings Æthelred I and Alfred the Great. The kingdom came under attack from Viking raids during his reign, but these were minor compared with the invasions after his death. Æthelberht died in the autumn of 865 and was buried next to his brother Æthelbald at Sherborne Abbey in Dorset. He was succeeded by Æthelred.

Background When Æthelberht's grandfather Ecgberht became king of Wessex in 802, in the view of the historian Richard Abels, it must have seemed very unlikely to contemporaries that he would establish a lasting dynasty. For two hundred years, three families had fought for the West Saxon throne, and no son had followed his father as king. Ecgberht's nearest connection to a previous king of Wessex was as a great-great-grandson of Ingild, brother of King Ine (688–726), but he was believed to be a paternal descendant of Cerdic, the founder of the West Saxon dynasty. This made Ecgberht an ætheling – a prince who had a legitimate claim to the throne. But in the ninth and tenth centuries, descent from Cerdic was no longer sufficient to make a man an ætheling: Ecgberht's line controlled the kingdom and all kings were sons of kings.

At the beginning of the ninth century, England was almost wholly under the control of the Anglo-Saxons. The Midland kingdom of Mercia dominated southern England, but their supremacy came to an end in 825 when they were decisively defeated by Ecgberht at the Battle of Ellendun. The two kingdoms became allies, which was important in the resistance to Viking attacks. In the same year Ecgberht sent his son Æthelwulf to conquer the Mercian sub-kingdom of Kent (the area of the modern county plus Essex, Surrey and Sussex) and appointed him sub-king. In 835 the Isle of Sheppey was ravaged by Vikings and in the following year they defeated Ecgberht at Carhampton in Somerset, but in 838 he was victorious over an alliance of Cornishmen and Vikings at the Battle of Hingston Down, reducing Cornwall to the status of a client kingdom. He died in 839 and was succeeded by Æthelwulf, who appointed his eldest son Æthelstan as sub-king of Kent. Æthelwulf and Ecgberht may not have intended a permanent union between Wessex and Kent as they both appointed sons as sub-kings and charters in Wessex were attested (witnessed) by West Saxon magnates, while Kentish charters were witnessed by the Kentish elite; both kings kept overall control and the sub-kings were not allowed to issue their own coinage.

Viking raids increased in the early 840s on both sides of the English Channel, and in 843 Æthelwulf was defeated by the companies of 35 Danish ships at Carhampton. In 850 Æthelstan defeated a Danish fleet off Sandwich in the first recorded naval battle in English history. In 851 Æthelwulf and his second son Æthelbald defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Aclea and, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "there made the greatest slaughter of a heathen raiding-army that we have heard tell of up to this present day, and there took the victory".