The Incident at the Coronation

Æthelgifu felt like a little experimentation herself. Standing behind Edwig she placed her arms under his shoulders, and nibbling his ear, playfully lifted him off her daughter, so that his cock popped out. Ignoring Ælfgifu's outraged cry of, "Mother!" she had Edwig kneel, and placing her daughter's feet on his shoulders, bade him draw her up onto his lap; this time his cock found her cunt without assistance. The young couple easily slipped into a comfortable rhythm, not questioning why Æthelgifu had had them change.

So Edwig's angel wanted to taste her mother's cunt, did she? Confident that Edwig could manage without further instruction, Æthelgifu decided the time had come to satisfy her own needs. Clutching the headboard behind her back for balance, she lowered herself onto her haunches and squatted over her daughter's face, being careful not to smother the girl. It took a little squirming, but she soon found her daughter's willing tongue.

Edwig's eyes were almost popping out of his face as the mature woman, her pendulous breasts swaying freely, ground her furry cunt into his sweet darling's face. "Don't stop thrusting boy," scalded Æthelgifu. "It is all part of your education."

From her vantage point at the head of the bed Æthelgifu was the first to see the door swing open as Cynesige, Bishop of Lichfield, spilled into the room. Behind him she heard Abbot Dunstan say, "Is he up there?"

As Cynesige speechlessly crossed himself, Dunstan appeared behind him. "Fornicator!" he bellowed, striding across the room. Roughly he dragged the naked boy off the bed, as the women sought to cover themselves, Æthelgifu clutching her daughter to her breast. "What means this boy, that you steal away from your coronation to consort with Jezebels?"

Momentarily Edwig stuck up for himself. "All day I have down what you asked of me. I wasn't gone long."

Dunstan shook the boy, his spittle spraying him as he shouted in his face. "Long enough to defile yourself with harlots!" Then catching sight of the still stiffly erect penis: "Cover your shame!" Gathering up the King's clothes he threw them at him, and then stood over him as the boy sulkily dressed himself.

"We were not doing anything wrong, not really," Edwig whined.

Dunstan goggled. "I saw what you were doing and I am scarce able to believe such depravity exists in the world." He turned to the cowering women on the bed. "Wantons, with what guiles of Satan have you ensnared the boy?"

Æthelgifu held her helplessly sobbing daughter in her arms, her anger rising, but not daring to defy the onslaught of the churchman's fury.

Straightening the King's clothes, Dunstan asked, "Now where is your crown?" Edwig's eyes danced around the room. "God in Heaven, boy, you must know what you have done with the crown!"

Despite her predicament, Æthelgifu found herself suppressing a smile as the Abbot and Bishop Cynesige began scouring the room. Then her daughter piped up, "I think I may have thrown it over there." She pointed to a dimly lit corner.

Dunstan retrieved the crown from where it had fallen behind a chest and plunked it down on the dishevelled blonde head. "There, at least you look like a king, even if you are incapable of acting like one."

"What about these?" asked Cynesige, leering at the women in the bed.

"Bring them," barked Dunstan, dragging the king to the door.

Cynesige roughly seized Æthelgifu's arm. "Take your hands off me!" she protested, and using all his strength the bishop struck her with the back of his hand across the face.

Grabbing Æthelgifu by her unbound hair, the bishop pulled her face close to his, so she could see the broken veins on his nose, the malice in the yellow eyes and the spittle hanging from broken rotten teeth as he breathed out the fumes of mead. "You'll come with me, bawds." Still holding Æthelgifu by the hair, he dragged her upright, and seizing a nipple with his free hand, twisted it as far as it would go, causing the widow to squeal with pain. Letting go, the bishop pushed her away, and then swung his boot, planting it squarely on her bottom, laughing gleefully as he sent her sprawling face down on the floor, the wind knocked out of her.

Ælfgifu sprung to her mother's defence, pummelling him impotently with tiny fists. Wrapping his hand in her auburn locks the bishop pulled back her head and clasped her neck in his thick-fingers. "Defy me, would you strumpet?" he snarled, spitting in the girl's tear-stained face, and with that he thumped her in the stomach.

Taking both women by the hair, Cynesige dragged them behind him down the stair, Ælfgifu sobbing and squealing, the streaming tears reddening her girlish freckled face, whilst her mother spat and resisted all the way, earning brutal kicks to her legs from the infuriated bishop. Ahead of them the doors of the hall swung open on Dunstan's orders.

The roar of revelry from the mead benches was stilled as, his hand resting firmly on the boy's shoulder, Dunstan marched the King to stand before the podium at the hall's end. Then the uneasy silence collapsed into astonished giggles as Cynesige paraded the naked mother and daughter in the abbot's wake. Wide eyed with horror Ælfgifu hunched her shoulders seeking to use hands and arms to shield her firm breasts and copper-trimmed snatch from the leers of the drunken revellers on the mead benches, her lip quivering as hot tears of shame poured down her violently blushing cheeks. But Æthelgifu made the long walk down the hall's length with head held high, her breasts thrust out defiantly, taking each step as deliberately as the churchman's tugging at her hair would allow, daring the thegns and cnihts gathered on the benches to want her, and returning the desire that twitched their cocks with cold disdain. Before the podium Bishop Cynesige hurled the women to the rush-strewn floor, their unbound hair and cruelly exposed flesh gleaming in the flickering glow of the hearth fire and of the torches guttering in the gusts from the open doors.

As Ælfgifu strove to hide her shame, prostrating herself as she buried her face in the straw, Æthelgifu defiantly attempted to struggle up, only for the bishop to plant his foot in her back, grinding her down with his heel. Behind the tables on the raised dais, to either side of the empty throne sat the members of the royal house with the aldermen and prelates, all gazing down upon the furiously blushing King and the two sprawled women, the slim sobbing girl, pert-breasted and freckled skinned, her glinting russet hair veiling her face, and the full-bodied brunette matron, the weight of the priest's sandal upon her back flattening the large breasts against the hall-floor while the wide buttocks arched and splayed as she tried desperately to raise herself, revealing thick, hairy pussy lips.

Archbishop Odo, stern and white-haired, looked as though the shock of having two naked Jezebels hurled at his feet might send him early to his grave. Æthelstan Half-King, for once in his long life, seemed at a loss, feeling perhaps that he should avert his eyes from the shame of his brother's wife and daughter, but unable to tear his rheumy eyes from the squirming pulchritude cast before his feet. Ealdorman Oswulf was trying hard not to laugh while taking the most unabashed interest in the naked forms of the humiliated noblewomen. The aetheling Edgar was craning over the table for a better view. Only the beautiful Queen Æthelflaed showed any compassion, clutching the arm of her husband Æthelstan the Red, who seemed torn between concern at his wife's discomfiture and joining the lummox Byrhtnoth in his ribald laughter as he pummelled him on the other shoulder. They were all, Æthelgifu realised, very drunk.

The King's grandmother, Queen Edgifu, rose unsteadily to her feet; stepping down from the platform tottered forward to where the King stood, and slapped him across the face.

"How dare you bring this disgrace upon our house," she railed. "Is this how you propose to behave as king? Shirking your royal duties so you might rut with whores?"

"I didn't mean to," muttered Edwig.

"What?" snarled his grandmother.

"They tricked me." he added lamely.

"Renounce these strumpets," commanded Dunstan.

"Yes, yes, take them away," the King cried, plaintively. "I never want to see them again."

"Edwig, no," the horrified Ælfgifu cried out jumping to her feet, her devastation complete as the King was the one man in the hall who refused to gaze upon the slim full-breasted figure standing helpless in her nakedness, her until-today virgin body revealed in all its bounty. In tears she hopelessly beseeched her lover to acknowledge her before these awful men as they ravished her with their eyes - callow cnihts, brutal thegns, pious clergymen, all with bulging cocks hidden in their breaches, longing to violate her girlish form.

Pushing aside the fat leg of the slobbering bishop, Æthelgifu struggled to her feet. Looking from rapt, twisted face to rapt, twisted face, Æthelgifu sensed the imminence of violence, a drunken, lust-fuelled passion which would outrage her daughter's every orifice and rend her limb from limb. The brutes shall not have her, thought Æthelgifu, with a mother's fierce determined love. Standing side side with her daughter, Æthelgifu placed a protective arm around Ælfgifu's naked shoulders, and stared defiantly around the hall.

In the sea of slavering faces Æthelgifu gaze settled upon the king's stepmother, Queen Æthelflaed, the long honeyed tresses framing a beauty that belied her womanly nature. This long-legged lovely with her high shapely breasts had not become the bedfellow of the lusty Edmund without knowing the tricks to satisfy a man's appetites or understanding the fine line that those who catch a king's eye tread between high honour and utter ruin; in the almond eyes Æthelgifu detected sympathy for her plight.

Very deliberately the Queen rose to her feet; her long limbs were trembling, but she stood very straight and spoke very clear. "I think you should leave now," she said, her eyes entreating the widow and her daughter to go, as she dismissed them with an imperious gesture of her hand.

The spell broken, Æthelgifu 's sons came leaping off of the cnihts' benches, Æthelward wrapping his sister in his cloak, as, averting his gaze, Ælfward shyly held his out for his mother.

As the boys led the women past the hooting benches, Æthelward turned on Æthelgifu, "You have ruined us all, mother."

Clutching her younger son's arm for strength, Æthelgifu dissolved into sobs.

Behind them Edwig was humbly promising to be a better king to his people.

Having lain awake most of the night half mad with worry, Æthelgifu slept in late. She awoke to a sense of cold dread. She had disgraced her late husband's memory, ruined her daughter and blighted her sons' prospects, been cast out by the church and forbidden the court. All men's hands would be turned against her and her children. What had she done?

She heard her sons protesting outside, and then the flap opened as the dishthegn Ælfheah barged his way into the tent.

"My lady, the King would see you," he announced. Æthelgifu blanched. What now?

The dishthegn did not seem inclined to leave, so Æthelgifu, past modesty, dressed in front of him, Ælfheah smirking and twiddling his moustache as he unashamedly surveyed her ample matronly charms. She did not hurry, taking the time to ensure her wimple was straight and powdering the bruise where Cynesige had slapped her. Whatever was to happen she would face it like a noblewoman.

When she was finished, Ælfheah came and looked her over. "The King will find you pleasing," he said, satisfied. "That is to the good." Æthelgifu's heart skipped.

"Edwig has recollected to himself what it means to be a king," the dishthegn continued, taking her arm. "Those who laid rough hands upon the King and upon his friends shall feel his wrath."

As he led her through the village of tents that had grown up outside the town to accommodate the overspill of thegns and their retinues gathered in Kingston for the coronation, Ælfheah told her more of what had passed. Once Dunstan had sobered up, it had begun to dawn on him that he might have gone too far, and, being warned of the King's wrath, he had taken to his heels. Bishop Cynesige too had fled the court; and when Queen Edgifu had demanded to see her grandson, she had been refused. Now that Edwig had seized the initiative, Æthelstan Half-King and the other thoroughly hungover ealdormen were uncertain how to act.

Æthelgifu tried to imagine the petulant young King acting so decisively, and found herself instead contemplating the bold confident manner of his dishthegn. This is your doing, she thought, seeing the stocky Ælfheah through fresh eyes.

In the royal bower, Edwig, surrounded by a press of cnihts and young thegns, was in deep conversation with Ælfhere and the bishop of London, Byrhthelm. However, Queen Æthelflaed greeted Æthelgifu with a kiss on the cheek, calling her sister, as Æthelstan the Red beamed on uxorially.

"Are you quite recovered from your ordeal?" the young Queen asked solicitously, resting a hand upon Æthelgifu's arm.

"Thank you, my lady," Æthelgifu replied. "I am a little shaken; it is not everyday one finds oneself dragged from one's bed and paraded naked before the greatest in the land."

"These churchmen who do not allow themselves women can be such brutes; what they can't bring themselves to fuck they turn their hand against. My late husband despised Abbot Dunstan," she confided, vehemently. "He would have banished him, but my poor Edmund was a superstitious man and when his horse bolted almost sending him over a cliff, he became convinced it was God's wrath for having planned to exile the wretched bully."

"He will not be allowed back this time? Or Cynesige?" Æthelgifu asked hopefully.

"We shall have to see that they are not, you and I." Æthelflaed, then whispered in her ear. "My Edmund told me once that Edric's widow was among the comeliest of the women of the West Saxons; after what I saw of you in the hall last night I know he spoke no less than truth. I do hope you and I shall be the best of friends," she added holding Æthelgifu eyes with hers, and discreetly laying a caressing hand her upon the bottom.

Æthelgifu smiled at her gratefully. Some good had come from the humiliation of the night before if some ember of desire had be stirred in this influential lady. Surveying the pale complexion, long chiselled nose, full lips and high, firm breasts of the tall, golden-haired Queen, Æthelgifu felt that it would be no hardship to fan those embers. She wondered if Æthelflaed would want her red-headed buffoon of a husband to watch, if she did then Æthelgifu would at least insist that he refrain from his apparent need to fill any silence with a joke.

"My Lady Æthelgifu," the King exclaimed, Ælfheah having discreetly brought her to the royal notice. "I humbly beg your pardon for the outrage of last night." Approaching her he added confidingly, "You have my assurance that the traitors responsible shall be punished."

"I hope it shall be so, sire," murmured Æthelgifu.

The King looked at her shyly. "The insult to my lady Ælfgifu..." he began tentatively, "I hope she may find it in her heart to forgive me that I did not spring to her defence?"

"Her hurt runs deep, sire," Æthelgifu replied, not untruthfully; the girl had sobbed half the night for her poor Edwig.

Edwig held her gaze earnestly. "If you should allow it, and if your daughter should consent, I would hope to erase the smear upon her name, and yours."

"How so, sire?" Æthelgifu asked, her heart skipping a beat.

"By making my darling Ælfgifu my queen."

*****

Slipping out of the honeymoon chamber, where the young king sprawled exhausted the slender limbs of his queen draped across his body, Æthelgifu returned to the private room that had been set aside for her use. Ælfheah was waiting on the bed. "I thought you would never be done with them," he grumbled.

"They are young and in love and eager to learn," explained Æthelgifu snuggling up against the man ten years younger.

"I hoped they have not tired you out," he said hopefully, squeezing her breast in his hard hand.

"Not quite," she replied, stroking the short thick cock. "There is still work for you to do."

Ælfheah was a married man, but while he was at court his wife was at home running their estates, whereas Æthelgifu's place was at her daughter's side; certainly she had no intention of taking a husband. The arrangement with the dishthegn would suit them both. Now her daughter was Queen Æthelgifu had thought better of encouraging the attentions of the flirtatious Æthelflaed, indeed she did not want the royal beauty at court any more than could be helped. Edwig would not be the first young king to have his roving eye fall upon a comely stepmother.

Æthelgifu was forceful in encouraging her son-in-law to assert his new found independence. At her insistence, the King's grandmother Queen Edgifu was not only banished from court, but stripped of her estates. Æthelgifu also added her voice to Ælfheah's on the need to secure the royal treasury at Glastonbury, but went further in urging the confiscation of the immense personal wealth accumulated by Abbot Dunstan. The biddable king's thegn sent to ransack the monastery had other orders from Æthelgifu: Dunstan was to be struck down while resisting. The abbot, scurrying from hiding place to hiding place, one step ahead of his would-be assassins, had been obliged to flee abroad to Flanders. To justify the abbot's banishment Æthelgifu had word put about that he had been helping himself from the royal coffers.

With this new wealth, and with the seizure of lands from those who had prospered under his uncle, the King was able to reward his followers, men closer to his own age, often with some royal blood in their veins, such as Bishop Byrhthelm, the brothers Ælfheah and Ælfhere, or Æthelgifu's own sons, Æthelward and Ælfward.

The timely deaths of incumbents meant that Edwig was also free to begin appointing his own ealdormen. Mercia south of the Trent became the portion of Æthelstan the Red, the genial husband of the King's stepmother; while Byrhtnoth, the husband of Queen Æthelflaed's sister, succeeded to Essex where his and his wife's families had both held office in the recent past. Since the death of the father of Ælfheah and Ælfhere, those lands of the Middle Angles and Middle Saxons where the English law still held had come under the jurisdiction of Æthelstan of East Anglia, who also held the boroughs north of the Watling Street that kept the Danish law, and whose writ ran as far north as Lindsey. Edgar now-filled the vacant ealdormanry, at Æthelgifu's prompting appointing Ælfhere, so the elder brother might remain at the King's side to counsel him, and to service his queen's mother.

Æthelstan Half-King's powers were failing, his eldest son assuming many of his duties as ealdorman; in due course the young man would be allowed to succeed fully, but without his father's influence. With the formidable Oswulf in Northumbria and the old warhorse Æthelmund holding North Mercia, the new appointments ensured that Æthelstan and his family were hemmed upon all sides with potential rivals. Edwig and his advisors were determined that no one ealdorman would again wield the power of a Half-King.

And then the wily old ealdorman dealt Edwig the most damaging blow imaginable: he retired. For a quarter of a century he had kept the peace in the southern Danelaw, allowing the Danish jarls a degree of self-governance while upholding the rights of the old Mercian nobility and commanding loyalty to the West Saxon crown. His ostentatious withdrawal to a cell in Glastonbury ushered in an uncertainty, a space within which old fears could be reawakened and old grievances freshly aired.