Alfred the Great

• 1. Introduction

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  Alfred the Great is the only native-born English monarch ever to carry that epithet. He was born around 849 at a royal estate called Wantage, in the district of Berkshire, named, as his biographer recorded, from Berroc Wood, where the box tree grows very abundantly. He was the youngest of six children, the son of King Æthelwulf of Wessex and his wife Osburh. Three of his brothers, Æthelbald, Æthelberht and Æthelred, sat on the throne before him. By his death in 899, he had defended the last unconquered Anglo-Saxon kingdom against a Viking onslaught that had swallowed all the others. How did a youngest son who could not read until he was 12 become the dominant ruler in England? Why did he answer Viking longships not with more warriors but with walls, roads, and a code of law? And how did a king buried before a high altar end up disturbed by convicts digging a jail? The answers run through marshes, monasteries, and a small book he carried everywhere.

• 2. A Dynasty Against The Odds

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  Alfred's grandfather Ecgberht became King of Wessex in 802, and the historian Richard Abels argues that few contemporaries would have bet on a lasting dynasty. For two centuries, three families had fought over the West Saxon throne, and no son had succeeded his father as king. Ecgberht claimed paternal descent from Cerdic, founder of the West Saxon line, which made him an ætheling, a prince eligible to rule. Mercia dominated southern England until 825, when Ecgberht broke its supremacy at the Battle of Ellendun. That same year he sent his son Æthelwulf to invade the Mercian sub-kingdom of Kent, and its sub-king Baldred was soon driven out. By 830, Essex, Surrey and Sussex had submitted, and Æthelwulf ruled the south-east as king of Kent. Vikings ravaged the Isle of Sheppey in 835 and beat Ecgberht at Carhampton the next year. In 838 he turned the tables, defeating an alliance of Cornishmen and Vikings at the Battle of Hingston Down, reducing Cornwall to a client kingdom. When Ecgberht died in 839, his son Æthelwulf succeeded him, and every West Saxon king after that descended from the pair.

• 3. The Boy And The Book

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  Osburh, Alfred's mother, was descended from the rulers of the Isle of Wight, and Asser called her a most religious woman, noble in character and noble by birth. According to Asser, she once held up a beautifully decorated book of English poetry and offered it as a prize to the first of her sons who could memorise it. Alfred, the youngest, took it to his teacher, learned it, and recited it back to her. He must have had it read aloud to him, because his mother died when he was about six, and he did not learn to read until he was 12. Asser called this delay a shameful negligence on the part of his parents and tutors. In 853 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that Alfred was sent to Rome, where Pope Leo IV confirmed him and anointed him as king. Victorian writers read this as an anticipatory coronation, but that is unlikely, since Alfred then had three living elder brothers. A surviving letter shows Leo IV instead made him a consul, an honour later confused with kingship. Around 854 to 855 Alfred accompanied his father on a pilgrimage to Rome and spent time at the court of Charles the Bald.

• 4. Years Of Defeat

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  In 865 the Great Heathen Army of Danes landed in East Anglia, intent on conquering the four kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England. Alfred's public life began that year, at age 16, when his brother Æthelred took the throne. Asser gave Alfred the unique title secundarius, perhaps marking him as a recognised successor closely tied to the reigning king. In 868 Alfred fought beside Æthelred in a failed effort to keep the Danes out of Mercia. When the Danes reached Wessex at the end of 870, nine engagements followed in a single year. The Saxons won a skirmish at Englefield in Berkshire on the 31st of December 870, then suffered a severe defeat at Reading days later. Four days after that they won at Ashdown on the Berkshire Downs, before losing at Basing on the 22nd of January and again at Merton on the 22nd of March. Æthelred died in April 871, and Alfred took the throne under an earlier agreement made at a place called Swinbeorg. While Alfred buried his brother, the Danes beat his army, and beat it again in his presence at Wilton in May. That defeat crushed his hope of expelling the invaders, and he was forced to make peace, probably paying the Vikings silver to leave.

• 5. Athelney And Edington

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  In January 878 the Danes struck Chippenham, a royal stronghold where Alfred had been staying over Christmas, and killed most of the people there. Alfred escaped with a small band through wood and swamp. After Easter he built a fort at Athelney, an island in the marshes of Somerset near North Petherton, and from there kept fighting. One historian has suggested that a Witan coup at Chippenham, rather than mere surprise, may explain his sudden fall. The year 878 was the nadir of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, with all others fallen and Wessex alone resisting. From this low point comes the legend of the burnt cakes, in which a peasant woman, unaware of Alfred's identity, scolded him for letting her wheaten cakes burn by the fire. The first written account of that tale appears a century after his death. In the seventh week after Easter, around Whitsuntide, Alfred rode to Egbert's Stone east of Selwood, where the people of Somerset, Wiltshire and part of Hampshire met him and rejoiced to see him. He won a decisive victory at the Battle of Edington, possibly near Westbury, then chased the Danes to Chippenham and starved them into surrender. Three weeks later the Danish king Guthrum and 29 of his chief men were baptised at Aller, with Alfred standing as Guthrum's spiritual father.

• 6. Dividing The Land

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  The formal Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum, preserved in Old English at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and in a Latin compilation called Quadripartitus, was negotiated perhaps in 879 or 880. It drew a boundary running up the River Thames to the River Lea, along the Lea to its source near Luton, in a straight line to Bedford, then along the River Ouse to Watling Street. Alfred took western Mercia, while Guthrum folded eastern Mercia into an enlarged East Anglia that became known as the Danelaw. The treaty also gave Alfred control over London and its mints. Guthrum's army settled East Anglia around 880, and the Viking force that had wintered at Fulham sailed for Ghent, staying active on the continent from 879 to 892. Local raids still struck the Wessex coast through the 880s. In 882 Alfred fought a small sea battle against four Danish ships, destroying two and taking the others. In 883 Pope Marinus I exempted the Saxon quarter in Rome from taxation, probably in return for Alfred's promise of annual alms, possibly the origin of the medieval tax called Peter's Pence. In 886 Alfred reoccupied London, entrusted it to his son-in-law Æthelred of Mercia, and began calling himself King of the Anglo-Saxons.

• 7. Walls, Roads, And Ships

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  Wessex's long record of defeat taught Alfred that the traditional battle order favoured the Danes, who launched small raids from secure bases and retreated behind ditches and palisades. He had seen how the Carolingian kings dealt with raiders during his stay with Charles the Bald, and there had been a system of fortifications in pre-Viking Mercia as well. His answer was a network of burhs, thirty-three strongholds set about 30 kilometres apart, close enough that troops could meet an attack anywhere within a day. A document called the Burghal Hidage shows how it worked: Wallingford's hidage of 2,400 meant its landowners had to supply and feed 2,400 men, enough to hold 9,900 feet of wall. In all, 27,071 soldiers were needed, roughly one in four free men in Wessex. The burhs, of which 22 grew into boroughs, ranged from repaired Roman towns like Winchester to earthen ramparts like Burpham in West Sussex and the tiny outpost at Pilton in Devon. Many were twin towns straddling a river, linked by a fortified bridge that forced Viking ships to pass under garrisoned men armed with stones and spears. Roads called herepaths tied the burhs together for the army's use. In 896 Alfred ordered a small fleet of longships with 60 oars, twice the size of Viking warships, though Asser noted that many nobles balked at the demands the system placed upon them.

• 8. Law, Learning, And A Carried Book

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  In the late 880s or early 890s Alfred issued a long law code, the domboc, joining his own laws to those of his seventh-century predecessor King Ine, arranged across 120 chapters. He chose 120 because that was the age at which Moses died, and in early medieval number-symbolism 120 stood for law. About a fifth of the code is an introduction with English translations of the Ten Commandments and passages from Exodus. The historian Patrick Wormald read the code less as a legal manual than as an ideological statement of kingship, designed for symbolic impact. Asser presents Alfred as a Solomonic judge who reviewed contested rulings made by his ealdormen and reeves to see whether they were just or unjust. Alfred also lamented that learning had declined so thoroughly that few men south of the Humber could translate a single letter from Latin into English. He founded a court school for his children, the nobility, and a good many of lesser birth, recruiting scholars including Grimbald of Saint-Bertin, John the Saxon, Plegmund, Bishop Wærferth of Worcester, and Asser himself from Wales. He translated four works personally: Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, Augustine's Soliloquies, and the first fifty psalms. To every bishopric he sent copies of the Pastoral Care, each with an æstel, a reading pointer worth 50 mancuses. The Alfred Jewel, found in Somerset in 1693 and inscribed Alfred ordered me to be made, may be one such pointer. Alfred carried a small book of psalms and prayers everywhere, and Asser wrote that he was inseparable from it.

  Alfred died on the 26th of October 899, aged 50 or 51, after suffering throughout his life from a painful illness that modern doctors suspect was Crohn's disease or haemorrhoids. He had married Ealhswith in 868, daughter of the Mercian ealdorman Æthelred Mucel of the Gaini, and their children included Edward the Elder, who succeeded him, Æthelflæd, who became lady of the Mercians, and Ælfthryth, who married Baldwin II, Count of Flanders. He was first buried at the Old Minster in Winchester, but had ordered the New Minster as a mausoleum for his family. Four years after his death his body and his family's were moved there, where they rested for 211 years. In 1110 the monks carried them again to Hyde Abbey, north of the city, and interred them before the high altar. Hyde was dissolved in 1538, its stones reused like a quarry, and the graves stayed underground as the land returned to farming. In 1788 the county bought the site to build a town jail, and convicts sent to prepare the ground struck the coffins of Alfred and his family while digging the foundation trenches. The priest John Milner recorded the scene with horror, writing that miscreants now couched amidst the ashes of our Alfreds and Edwards, where once only the bell of regular observance had broken the silence. In his Boethius, Alfred had written that he desired to leave to those who came after his memory in good works.