Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Æthelstan

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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Æthelstan[edit]

Nominator(s): Dudley Miles (talk)


I am nominating this article for A-Class review because Æthelstan was the first king of England and a successful military leader who won a major victory against a joint Viking and Scottish invasion. I hope to take this article to FA, but this is my first A-Class nomination, so I hope I have done it correctly. Dudley Miles (talk) 20:43, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Support on prose per standard disclaimer. These are my edits. Well done. - Dank (push to talk) 20:44, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

CommentsSupport

  • "king of England " but "King of the English " - the capitalisation needs to be consistent.
Done.
  • "and on the continent." - I'd usually expect to see Continent capitalised here.
Done.
  • "However, after his death in 939" - while not every grammar guide criticises the use of "However..." like this, enough do that I'd advice against starting sentences with it.
Revised.
  • "he increased control over the production of charters" - "charters" needs a wikilink or some sort of explanation.
Wikilinked.
  • "More legal texts survive from his reign than from any other tenth-century king" - any king, or just any English king?
Specified English king.
  • "they show his concern for social order and especially for the threat posed to it by widespread robberies." - the second half of this sentence didn't read very smoothly to me.
Revised. OK now?
  • " the many kingdoms of the early Anglo-Saxon period had been consolidated into four major ones, Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia" - would "consolidated into four: Wessex, Mercia..." be sharper? (and avoid the question of any minor kingdoms)
Done.
  • " Alfred the Great," - I'd argue this needs linking on first reference in the main text
I am not clear about this. Do you think that any word linked in the lead needs linking again on first use in following sections?
  • In the Background section, it's very easy to lose track of how Æthelstan relates the characters being described (e.g. it's easy to miss that Edward is his dad); I'd advise incorporating a more direct reference to Æthelstan into the text to make it easier to see how he fits in.
Done.
  • It wasn't 100% clear to me how the background para starting "The Anglo-Saxons were the first people in northern Europe..." fitted into the flow.
I am not sure of the best way to deal with this. The para was originally the first in the law section. The GAN reviewer thought it was rather out on a limb, but did not think it should be deleted, and we agreed it should be moved to the background. As you say it does not fit there either, so maybe it would be best to move it back to the law section, amending to "later codes" to "later codes including Æthelstan's" to connect it with the following paras. What do you think?

Also worth checking for wikilinkage of words like Carolingian, ealdormen etc.

Done.
  • Primary sources. I'd have gone for putting this towards the end, rather than at the beginning; the reader is now three sections into the main part of the article, and we haven't got to the birth of Æthelstan yet.
Done.
  • "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in this period " - which period? (the last date to be mentioned in 2011; the 9th century as a whole? Æthelstan's life?).
Specified in Æthelstan's time.
  • "chronicle" - worth linking
Done.
  • "William of Malmesbury" - needs a link on first use
Done.
  • "However, Sarah Foot is inclined to accept Michael Wood's argument that William's chronicle draws on a lost life of Æthelstan, while cautioning that we have no means of discovering how far William "improved" on the original." - I found this sentence a little complex, and would advise breaking it in two.
Done.
  • " and in Dumville's view the lack of information is more apparent than real" - does this clash with the statement that "Source materials for the life of Æthelstan are very limited"?
Clarified.
  • "A scribe known as "Æthelstan A", " - known to modern historians perhaps, but probably not to his contemporaries.
Specified known to historians.
  • "bishop Ælfwine of Lichfield," - Capitalisation of bishop
Done.
  • "no charters survive" - NB: many readers won't know what a charter is.
Wikilinked - although I do wonder how many readers interested in Æthelstan will not know what a charter is!
  • "Historians are also paying increasing attention to less conventional sources, such as poetry in his praise and manuscripts associated with his name" - Worth dating this (is this present tense late 20th century? 21st century? etc.). I'd have gone for "such as the poetry in his praise"
Revised.
  • "There is very little information about Æthelstan's mother, Ecgwynn," - worth noting that I don't think you've said in the main text who his father was yet.
Put parents and birth at beginning of early life.
  • "An acrostic poem praising prince "Adalstan", and prophesying a great future for him, has been interpreted by Lapidge as a eulogy to Æthelstan, punning on the old English meaning of his name, "noble stone".[31] Lapidge and Wood see the poem as a commemoration of the ceremony by one of Alfred's leading scholars, John the Old Saxon" - I couldn't quite work out what this was trying to tell the reader.
Revised. Is it better now?
  • "Edward married his second wife Ælfflæd" - worth explaining earlier then that Ecgwynn was Edward's first wife (assuming she was legitimate etc.)
Revised.
  • " his deposition of Ælfwynn in Mercia in 918" - is deposition the right word here? (isn't it a legal term?)
Oxford online dictionary has my meaning as 1, legal term as 2.
  • "David Dumville" - not linked on first usage, but is on second and third
Corrected.
  • "he probably had a religious devotion to chastity as a way of life" - "a way of life" didn't feel quite right here ("followed a life of chastity out of religious devotion"?)
Changed it to a quote of Foot.
  • " Bishop of Winchester" - worth linking? (and note different capitalisation later)
Done.
  • "Welsh kings" - are these the same, or different, to the Welsh princes in the lead?
Changed all princes to kings.
  • "marriage between Æthelstan's great-grandfather Æthelwulf to Judith," - I think you can have a marriage "between" X "and" Y, but not "between" and "to".
Done.
  • Tense of "Alex Woolf described it" - sometimes these are in the present tense, other times in the past tense. Unless a historian is clearly dead, I'd advise being consistent in how you use the tense for these phrases (Woolf was published this year, by the looks of it, so I'd advise "Alex Woolf describes it")
Gone through changing all references to modern historians to present tense.
  • "mint" - worth wikilinking.
Linked "minting" as this is the first use of the word.

Hchc2009 (talk) 20:31, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your help. Dudley Miles (talk) 22:20, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Later Anglo-Saxon England had the most advanced currency in Europe, with a good quality silver coinage, which was uniform and abundant, but this dates to King Edgar's reform of the monetary system in the 970s.[89] In Æthelstan's time it was far less developed, and minting was still organised regionally long after Æthelstan unified the country." - I'd reverse this - i.e. start with the description of Æthelstan's coinage, and then compare it to the later coinage. That way you'd be positioning the reader on the subject of the article initially. Done this way round, I started off assuming that the sentence was about Æthelstan's advanced, uniform and abundant coinage etc.
I could not see how to put Æthelstan first without breaking the flow, so I have made clear at the start that the first sentence refers to the later coinage. Is it OK now?
  • I've cleaned up the image of the coins. Give me a shout if you want me to try and get rid of the lines altogether.
Thanks. It looks fine to me now.
Done.
  • I noticed it was "crowned-bust" but "Circumscription Cross"; if that's the usual form in the literature, that's fine, but I wondered if the capitalisation should be the same in both cases. Later, btw, it is "Crowned Bust".
Searching Google Scholar, there does not seem to be any rule on capitalisation, but the terms are generally shown without hyphenation, so I have settled on lower case and not hyphenated.
  • "socially and politically" - might just be me, but I've have expected "both socially and politically"
Done.
  • "Ecclesiastical scholarship had fallen to a low state in the second half of the ninth century, and Æthelstan built on his grandfather's efforts to revive it by what John Blair called "a determined reconstruction, visible to us especially through the circulation and production of books, of the shattered ecclesiastical culture"." - a long sentence; I'd break into two, and start off the sentence with a focus on Æthelstan.
Done.
  • "Breton" - worth linking (e.g. to the Duchy of Brittany article)
I am not sure there is a good article to link to as the Brittany articles seem confused about chronology. Nominoe describes him as first Duke of Brittany from 846, but Duchy of Brittany says it started in 939, which would put it after Æthelstan's time.
  • a board game called "Gospel Dice" - I loved the sound of this! :)
  • "Norse-influenced praise of the king " - worth checking the capitalisation of king here; if it's referring to Æthelstan personally, the MOS states that it should be capitalised.
Done.
  • "Historians frequently comment on Æthelstan's grandiose and pompous titles." - I wondered about this a bit. I think that it wouldn't be POV for us to note that historians have considered his titles to be grandiose and pompous; I felt that the sentence, as written, implied that they were grandiose and pompous, which didn't feel neutral. For comparison, "grand and extravagant" might mean roughly the same thing, but wouldn't carry the same negative connotations.
Done.
  • "In Sarah Foot's view, "Any man whose parents managed to provide him with eight or even nine sisters deserves our sympathy."" Much though I liked the quote, I didn't feel that it felt informative about the subject of the article.
Well it could be argued that it emphasises that the need to provide for his sisters was a factor in Æthelstan's European activism.
  • "duke of the Franks" - capitalisation of duke
Done.
  • "In early medieval Europe, it was common for kings to act as foster-fathers for the sons of other kings, and Æthelstan was known for the support he gave to dispossessed young royals." - as written, it is unclear if the young royals mentioned in the second half are the same as the foster-sons in the first - i.e. were foster-sons always royals who had been dispossessed?
Made two sentences to make clear they are separate points.
  • "Æthelstan's court was perhaps the most cosmopolitan of the Anglo-Saxon period,[126] and the close contacts between the English and European courts ended soon after his death, but descent from the English royal house long remained a source of prestige for continental ruling families." A bit convoluted. I wondered if it needed an "although" after the first clause, to make the contrast clearer?
Made two sentences. Is it OK now?
  • "who will bear comparison with Alfred" - I know that these are the quotes from the historians, but this gets repeated twice in the same paragraph because two different authors use the phrase, which read a bit oddly.
Revised so that bear comparison with Alfred is only stated once.
  • "the first king of England" (and king of English etc.) - capitalisation
Done.
  • "Sharon Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons," - the title of the book should be italicised I think
Done.
  • "According to Michael Wood: "Among all the great rulers of British history, Æthelstan today is the forgotten man",[152] while according to Ann Williams: If Athelstan has not had the reputation which accrued to his grandfather, the fault lies in the surviving sources; Athelstan had no biographer, and the Chronicle for his reign is scanty. In his own day he was "the roof-tree of the honour of the western world"." - I'd recommend running this as a single para, without the block quote; it would avoid a slightly "bitty" first clause to the paragraph, which is effectively just two quotes anyway.
Done.
  • Great see an Anglo-Saxon king under review, and best of luck with the FA process! Hchc2009 (talk) 09:45, 21 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks again. Do you have a view on whether the last para of the background section on law should be moved back to being the first para of the law section? Dudley Miles (talk) 13:53, 21 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I have moved the introductory paragraph on law. Dudley Miles (talk) 16:57, 2 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I have installed the 'Highlight duplicate links' tool and removed the duplicates. I assume that is what you meant? Thanks. Dudley Miles (talk) 13:21, 5 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. I support now. Good job! --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 20:45, 5 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your support. Dudley Miles (talk) 23:10, 5 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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