"Men living during the early Middle Ages (the ninth to 11th centuries) were several centimeters taller than men who lived hundreds of years later, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution," said Richard Steckel, a professor of economics at Ohio State University and the author of a new study that looks at changes in average heights during the last millennium.

"Height is an indicator of overall health and economic well-being, and learning that people were so well-off 1,000 to 1,200 years ago was surprising," he said.

Steckel analyzed height data from thousands of skeletons excavated from burial sites in northern Europe and dating from the ninth to the 19th centuries. Average height declined slightly during the 12th through 16th centuries, and hit an all-time low during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Northern European men had lost an average 2.5 inches of height by the 1700s, a loss that was not fully recovered until the first half of the 20th century.

Wessex expanded significantly in the time of King Alfred's children. Aethelflaed, Alfred's daughter and the wife of the Mercian ealdorman, turned out to be as important as Edward.

Almost as important, too, was their cousin Aethelwold, because he nearly upset the whole applecart. Aethelwold was the son of Alfred's brother and predecessor Aethelred. Aethelwold had been excluded from politics. Now that his uncle Alfred was dead, Aethelwold tried a coup d'etat to push his cousin Edward aside. He seized a royal manor, thus defying the new king.

Edward promptly called up his levies and surrounded the hall where Aethelwold and the men who had sworn allegiance to him. Aethelwold refused to come out, saying he would live or die there in true heroic fashion. Then, in a scene out of satire instead of epic poetry, he sneaked out in the middle of the night and made his escape. Even in the heroic age, some people thought that discretion was the better part of valor.

Aethelwold ran off to Northumbria, presumably to the kingdom of York, and began to look for Viking allies. Indeed, over the next few years Aethelwold acted just the way we expect Vikings to act, raiding parts of Wessex and Mercia, until he was killed in 903.