I shall therefore take such parts of Williams account as seem likely to be true history, and work them in with what I find in the Chronicle, and I will tell as stories such stories as seem worth telling in that way.

Altogether there are perhaps as many stories about thelstan as there are about either Alfred or Edgar, but they do not generally seem to have been so famous in later times, or to be so well known now.

-Ethelstan was thirty years old when he was chosen King.

He was therefore born in 895, when his grandfather Alfred was still alive.

He was a fair and graceful child, and his grandfather loved him, and is said to have made him a soldier while very young for he was only six years old when Alfred died and to have given him a purple cloak aftd a belt studded with gems and a sword 1 with a golden scabbard.