Chalke Talk

The podcast from the Chalke Valley History Festival
Released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings

Chalke Talks for CENTURY: C1st


  • 27. KING ALFRED AND THE BATTLE FOR WESSEX
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    Broadcaster and historian Professor Michael Wood tells the incredible story of King Alfred’s Battle for Wessex. After defeat at Chippenham, Alfred’s kingdom was reduced to a postage stamp of marshland in Somerset, yet he survived and built his army again, leading them to victory at Ethandun. It is unquestionably one of the great moments in […]

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  • 97. THE DARKENING AGE: THE CHRISTIAN DESTRUCTION OF THE CLASSICAL WORLD
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    The Roman Empire had been generous in embracing and absorbing new creeds. But with the coming of Christianity, everything changed. This new faith, despite preaching peace, was violent, ruthless and intolerant. Catherine Nixey paints a dark but riveting picture of life at the time of the ‘triumph’ of Christianity and gives a gripping account of […]

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  • 145. ATHELSTAN
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    Athelstan is arguably England’s greatest monarch and here best-selling and award- winning author Tom Holland tells the truly amazing story of how Athelstan built on the foundations of his grandfather and mother to become the first King of a united England.

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  • 163. THE MAP OF KNOWLEDGE: HOW CLASSICAL IDEAS WERE LOST AND FOUND
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    Violet Moller traces the journey taken by the ideas of three of the greatest scientists of antiquity – Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy – through seven cities and over a thousand years. In tracing these fragile strands of knowledge, Moller reveals the web of connections between the Islamic world and Christendom, connections that would both preserve […]

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  • 176. WHY THE ANGLO-SAXONS MATTER
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    Acclaimed historian and broadcaster Michael Wood tells fascinating tales from our early history: Augustine of Canterbury and the coming of Christianity, Theodore of Tarsus, the golden age of Northumbria, the Lady of the Mercians, Alfred, Athelstan, and the Norman Conquest; stories of men and women, kings and peasants, of the beginning of English literature and […]

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  • 177. Viking Britain: An Exploration
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    To many, the word ‘Viking’ brings to mind scenes of violence and pillage, of marauders from beyond the sea rampaging around the British coastline in the last gloomy centuries before the Norman Conquest. Thomas Williams, however, offers a vital evocation of a forgotten world, its echoes in later history and its implications for the present, […]

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  • 185. THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST OF ENGLAND, WESSEX AND THE CHALKE VALLEY
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    We speak English today; not Celtic, Latin, nor Norman French. England is England because of the Anglo-Saxon conquest. Yet we know very little about how it happened. This talk describes astonishing new evidence, hidden in plain sight, spread across the whole length and breadth of England. Some of it in the Chalke Valley near Salisbury.

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  • 189. LOTHARINGIA: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF EUROPE’S LOST COUNTRY
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    In 843 AD the territory of Emperor Charlemagne was divided between his three surviving grandsons. One inherited the area now known as France, another Germany and the third received the piece in between: Lotharingia, a huge swath of land that stretched from the mouth of the Rhine to the Alps. Simon Winder explains how the […]

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