The Saxon Secret to Avoiding a Bad Ruler

What if the worst rulers in English history didn't have to happen?

Bad kings - the weak, the cruel, the catastrophically incompetent - weren't inevitable. They were the consequence of a system that handed the most powerful job in the kingdom to whoever happened to emerge from the right womb in the right order!

Primogeniture, succession by (male) birth order, gave England Edward II, whose personal failings and political incompetence ended in his deposition and probable murder. It gave England Richard II, whose erratic tyranny triggered a constitutional crisis and cost him his throne. It gave England Henry VI, whose mental collapse plunged the country into thirty years of civil war. These weren't accidents of fate. They were what happens when a system prioritises birth order over every other human quality.

But before the Normans locked this system in place, the Anglo-Saxons did something far more interesting.

The Aetheling System: Choose the Best, Not the First