Athelstan: Penguin Monarchs: The Making of England

For a century and more, the Vikings had treated Britain as the ravens who now swooped and hopped across the battlefield were treating the fallen: as prey to be picked clean. The struggle to heal what might have seemed its death wounds, to bind them up and to staunch the flow of blood, the great cause to which Athelstan's dynasty had devoted itself for three generations, had been decisively won.