Alfred the Great

The story

England under attack

In the 9th century England was not a single kingdom but a group of four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia and Wessex. In 865 a great army of Danish Vikings arrived from the sea, which the English chronicles call the “great heathen army”. They did not come only to raid, but to conquer. In a few years they took Northumbria, East Anglia and most of Mercia. Wessex, in the south, was the only kingdom still standing.

Alfred was born in 849 at Wantage, in Wessex, the youngest of King Æthelwulf's sons. As a boy he was sent to Rome, twice, on pilgrimage, and came to know a bigger world. One story says he was struck by a book of poems that his mother showed her children, promising it to whoever learned it first: he won it. He was not a born warrior, but he found himself becoming king in 871, at the age of twenty-two, when his brother Æthelred died during the war against the Danes.

In the marshes

In the first years of his reign Alfred fought, and now and then bought peace by paying tribute to the Danes. Then, on the night of Twelfth Night in 878, the Danish leader Guthrum made a surprise attack on Chippenham, where Alfred was celebrating the Christmas festivities. The king managed to escape with a few men and took refuge in the Somerset marshes, at Athelney, an island in the middle of mud and reed beds. It seemed to be the end of Wessex.

From this period comes the best-known story about Alfred: the legend of the burnt cakes. A tale that first appears in the 11th century, about a century after his death, says that the king, hiding under a false name in a peasant woman's house, was distracted by his thoughts and let the cakes he was supposed to watch burn, and was scolded for it. It is very probably an invention, but it shows how people remembered him as a humble man.

Meanwhile Alfred was preparing his comeback. In the spring he called together the warriors of three counties and, in May 878, at Edington, defeated Guthrum's army. After the battle, the Danish leader agreed to be baptised, with Alfred as his godfather, and to withdraw. North-eastern England stayed with the Danes, under their own laws: this was the “Danelaw”.

After the battle Alfred made a treaty with Guthrum, which fixed the border between the English and Danish lands along a line running from the Thames to Watling Street, the ancient Roman road. In 886 he retook London, which had fallen into Danish hands, and had it rebuilt, with great benefit to trade.

Burhs, a fleet and books

Alfred understood that to resist he needed a new way of defending the country. He had thirty-three fortified towns built, the “burhs”, spread out so that nobody in Wessex was more than a day's march from one of them. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle he divided the army into two shifts: half the men worked in the fields and half stood guard, so that the country was always protected. He also built ships bigger and taller than those of the Vikings.

But Alfred was also a learned king. He had been struck by the fact that many priests could no longer read Latin. He called scholars to court, such as the Welsh monk Asser, who wrote his biography, and had important books translated into Old English, partly by his own hand, such as Boethius's “Consolation of Philosophy”. He promoted schools and had the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” begun, a yearly record of the country's history. He gathered the laws into a code.

To make people respect the rules, in his law code he wrote that judges must judge fairly, with no distinction between rich and poor, and he reminded them that the laws had to respect the ancient customs of the kingdom. Alfred died in 899 and was buried at Winchester. He is the only English king we remember with the title “the Great”.