It has proved an odd experience to find myself writing a biography at thesame time as my husband, the modern British historian and historiographe Michael Bentley. While I have explored a shadowy tenth-century king, he has worked on the life of a leading twentieth-century historian, Regius Professor, head of a Cambridge college and Vice-Chancellor of his university. Outwardly, our tasks could not be more different: his subject, Sir Herbert Butterfield, left not only a large body of historical writing but also a huge personal archive, complemented by a wider public record. Mine left no personal records at all and, despite his claim to fame as England’s first monarch, is ill-attested in the contemporary record and subsequent historiography. Yet in many ways we have grappled with similar difficulties and have benefited substantially from sharing our methodological perspectives. This life reflects that mutual journey towards making our subjects biographable. ithout Michael’s historical perceptions, his unsentimental criticism and unstinting support, this book would have been greatly impoverished; it is dedicated to him with loving gratitude. He bears no responsibility, however, for my decision to make the attempt, which is one I owe to my former research students, particularly Morn Capper and Martha Riddiford. It was they who first persuaded me that I should resurrect a project first begun as an undergraduate and revitalized by the invitation to write a short biography of бthelstan for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. They went on asking, ‘How’s бthelstan?’ at regular intervals not only until I started to write, but whenever I seemed to be flagging as the project progressed. I hope they – and also Geoff Little, who took with typical equanimity this invasion onto what he might have seen as his own territory – feel that the resulting book was worth the wait. Simon Keynes has been a constant source of information and advice throughout the gestation of the project; he supervised the original BA dissertation from which all followed and has continued to offer help and stimulating advice throughout. That I have not always followed his lead is not for want of his trying to persuade me to see things differently. I could not have completed this without his guidance. At a critical moment – when the project seemed to have flagged to the point of morbidity – Nicholas Brooks provided a badly needed appraisal of what ought to happen, the more valuable for his robust refusal to soften critical recommendations. Susan Kelly has consistently provided much support and substantial assistance with the charter material. I am extremely grateful to George Molyneaux for sharing a chapter of his Oxford DPhil thesis with me and for reading and commenting in detail on two of my chapters, thereby saving me from numerous errors and infelicities. Jinty Nelson and Edmund King have also struggled with writing lives of medieval kings, albeit ones whom history has served a good deal better than бthelstan, and I am grateful for a number of discussions over the years and their advice on specific problems. The completion of the project would have been impossible without a research leave award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, for which I acknowledge my gratitude, and also to the History Department at Sheffield for matching that leave and releasing me from teaching and especially administrative burdens. In the final stages my new colleagues in Oxford have offered continuing support. Among them I should thank particularly Judith Maltby, whose sense of what a seventeenth-century king might do and think have often provided helpful comparisons, and also John Watts, who once approached a medieval English monarch’s life from an entirely different perspective. Latterly, Laura Ashe has provided a useful foil on whom to bounce some of my wilder ideas and an invaluable source of advice on points of detail, especially in the translation of Old and Middle English.