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Chapter 3

Wessex

Æthelwulf, Æthelbald, Æthelberht, Æthelred, Alfred the Great

ONCE, IN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH CENTURIES, the Saxons had been Europe’s most feared pirates, plundering the coasts of Britain and Gaul at will. Then they grew bolder and became settlers and conquerors.

Now the process was about to repeat itself with another Germanic people on the move: the Vikings. They came from further north, from Denmark and even Norway. They were intrepid seafarers, as the Anglo-Saxons had once been; they were also pagan and they were (despite the whitewash of some recent historians) even more savage. The Viking raids on England began in the late eighth century, when Offa still held sway. An isolated raiding party landed at Portland and killed the king’s reeve, the leading royal official, at Dorchester. Then, in 793, they struck at the other end of the country and destroyed the monastic church on Lindisfarne.

Little more is heard of them for forty years. But from 835 the raids became regular. For Anglo-Saxon England was now rich – as rich, probably, as late Roman Britain and as vulnerable. Particularly attractive to the raiders were the forms of portable wealth which have appealed to thieves and robbers throughout the ages: the golden crosses and altar plate, the jewels surrounding the relics and studding the bindings of lavishly illuminated Bibles, the vast quantities of silver coin struck by Offa and his successors, the silver-mounted drinking horns and gold rings and brooches of the rich. Much of this portable wealth was concentrated in the minster-churches and monasteries, which thus became favourite Viking targets. Probably all that mattered was that these churches were rich. But the fact that they were centres of a rival faith may have made their destruction a duty to the pagan Vikings as well as a pleasure. Towns, which were also rich and lightly defended, were other victims of choice. As were captives, who could be ransomed, sold or enslaved.

All this was bad enough. But in the 860s there came a change in the raids that was both qualitative and quantitative: in 865 a ‘great army’ invaded England, and it was reinforced in 871 by ‘a great summer army’. Thousands of men were involved; they had royal leadership and their aim was conquest. Within a decade, everything north and east of Watling Street had fallen: Northumbria in 867, East Anglia in 869 and most of Mercia in 874–7. The kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia were obliterated, never to revive, and their kings were offered as sacrifices to Odin (the Nordic Woden), perhaps in the gruesome ritual of the ‘blood-eagle’, in which the victim’s ribcage was cut open and his lungs torn out and draped round his shoulders like an eagle’s folded wings. The succession to five bishoprics was disrupted for long periods and three of them were never re-formed. Everywhere, libraries and archives were destroyed; learning itself perished and the whole achievement of Anglo-Saxon England seemed on the point of obliteration.

I

In the rout, only one Anglo-Saxon kingdom survived, Wessex, and even that hung by a thread. It had certain advantages, however, which might give it hope. These included a secure succession, an unusually effective structure of government and, above all, it was to prove, the personal qualities of its king, Alfred. Like all Anglo-Saxon kings, Alfred was a man of action and a warrior. But he was also, uniquely for his own age and for long after, a true philosopher-king. Moreover, unlike many philosophers and almost all kings, he wrote and published widely. The result is that his very words have come down to us and, for the first time in our history, we can hear the genuine voice of an English king.

It is a very attractive voice too: reasonable, practical and persuasive. So much so, indeed, that it is easy to forget that it is also the voice of a master politician, who had an agenda and wants us to see things from his point of view. Actually, it is very difficult not to, since almost everything that survives from the period is written by Alfred or influenced by him. To a remarkable extent therefore our image of Alfred as ‘The Great’ is – still, and after over a thousand years – a product of Alfred’s own self-invention. It goes without saying that such a view is not impartial. But it has survived only because Alfred’s achievements matched the grandiosity of his vision.

Alfred was a grandson of the great King Egbert. His own father, Æthelwulf, succeeded in 839 after having acted for many years as sub-king or viceroy in the eastern provinces of Wessex, which he had conquered in 825. His marriage, to his first wife Osburh, was unusually fruitful, with five sons who reached maturity. This could be a mixed blessing, as the results of Edward III’s numerous progeny would show. But Æthelwulf was able to get his sons to agree to a sort of succession in survivorship, in which each brother would succeed his elder, saving all the time certain property rights to the children of the deceased. Rather surprisingly, the agreement held. Even more surprisingly, all four sons who survived Æthelwulf succeeded in turn to the throne.

Alfred, born in about 849, was the youngest of this band of brothers, being junior by at least twenty-five years to Æthelstan, the eldest. As the youngest of the family, he seems to have been a favourite child, indulged and even a little spoiled. He was also bright, curious, with an excellent memory and, like many younger sons, an unusually adventurous intelligence. But events were just as important in forming the man. His mother died when he was very young. Even more importantly, his father, taking advantage perhaps of his wife’s death, decided that thirty years as viceroy and king was enough. Instead, in 855, when Alfred was about six, he embarked on a pilgrimage to Rome. Æthelbald, his eldest surviving son, was left as king in his place, but Alfred, as the youngest, seems to have accompanied his father. They travelled in style and stayed in the city for about a year. It was far fallen from its ancient splendour. But more than enough remained to fire the imagination of a sensitive and impressionable child like Alfred. Probably his interest in history dates from this experience. As does his ambition, his lust for fame and his determination, as it were, to build a new Rome in England’s green and pleasant land.

But there was more to come. On the way back from Rome, Æthelwulf visited the Frankish court, and, on 1 October 856 at Verberie-sur-Oise near Paris, was married to Princess Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald, king of West Francia, and great-granddaughter of Charlemagne. At the same time, Judith was anointed and crowned queen by Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, the master-liturgist and inventor of tradition, in an ordo or form of service which he had devised. It was the first recorded coronation of an English queen and perhaps the first time as well that a crown had been used, rather than the royal helmet (which was, in any case, unsuitable for a woman). ‘May the Lord crown you with glory and honour,’ Hincmar intoned as he placed the crown on the queen’s head, ‘that … the brightness of the gold and the… gleam of the gems may always shine forth in your conduct and your acts.’

Was Alfred present? If so, we can only guess at the impact of the words. But their import would not have been unfamiliar. For, according to the official narrative of the House of Wessex, Alfred himself had already undergone some form of consecration, whether as king or consul, at the hands of Pope Leo IV himself in Rome.

Æthelwulf did not long survive his return home and was succeeded by Æthelbald. Æthelbald also stepped into his father’s bed and married his stepmother Judith. But Judith, who, after Æthelbald’s own premature death, would elope with Count Baldwin of Flanders, was cultivated as well as brazen. She also seems to have taken a shine to Alfred. So far, according to Alfred’s biographer, Asser, Alfred’s education had been oral and had consisted of learning by heart long passages of Anglo-Saxon verse. But Judith, literate herself, stimulated Alfred to learn to read by playing on his competitive instincts. She showed him a book with a richly illuminated initial and promised to give it to whichever of the two brothers, Alfred and Æthelred, who was only a couple of years older, would first memorize its contents. Alfred won.

But a harsher contest was imminent. In 865 the third brother, Æthelberht, succeeded but died after another brief reign. Æthelred, the loser in the book competition, now became king and Alfred stepped up to take his place as royal deputy and heir presumptive. Æthelred had need of all the help Alfred could give for his accession coincided with the arrival in England of the Viking great army.

Alfred’s life task had begun.

At first, Wessex got off lightly, as the brunt of the Viking attack fell on, successively, East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia. But in the early winter of 870–71 ‘the great army’ turned south-west from East Anglia and occupied a fortified camp to the east of Reading as its new forward base. The choice was perfect strategically. The camp, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Thames and Kennet, could be reinforced up the then still navigable Thames; it lay on the disputed frontier between Mercia and Wessex; while to the south and west, and within easy ride, lay the rich lands of Wessex.

The witan, the advisory council or ‘parliament’ of the leading men, lay and ecclesiastical, of Wessex, met in emergency session at Swinbeorg (almost certainly Swanborough Tump, a prehistoric burial mound in the Vale of Pewsey, in Wiltshire). First, King Æthelred and his younger brother Alfred, facing the imminent prospect of death in battle, solemnly confirmed their father’s arrangements for the succession; then they rode off, up the chalk road on to the Marlborough Downs and across the River Kennet to Reading, to try to dislodge the enemy. The results were mixed. A direct assault on the camp failed. But the West Saxons were victorious in a battle fought in the open field on the chalk ridge known as Ashdown. Alfred distinguished himself in the battle. But it failed to swing the campaign and two more Saxon defeats followed.

At this point disaster struck twice. The Vikings were reinforced by the arrival of ‘the great summer army’. And in mid-April 871 King Æthelred, still only in his twenties, died. The body was taken to Wimborne Minster in Dorset for burial and the great men of the witan, gathered for the funeral, met once more and confirmed Alfred as king. He was just twenty-two or -three. There is no suggestion of a coronation. Perhaps in view of the crisis there was neither the time nor the inclination.

The crisis soon got worse. Only a month after his accession Alfred, seemingly caught off guard and with only a small force, was defeated at Wilton. The victorious Vikings were within twenty miles of Wimborne and Alfred had to sue for peace.

It was not a good start to a reign.

But, once more, events elsewhere in England gave Wessex respite. Faced with more pressing concerns, ‘the great army’ withdrew from Reading, first for London and then for the north, to deal with the Northumbrian revolt against their Viking overlords. Its suppression, and the ensuing partition of Mercia, occupied ‘the great army’ till 874–5. Then it split into three divisions. The leader of one was ‘King’ Guthrum. And he had decided to carve out a real kingdom for himself – in Wessex.

First Guthrum struck south, cutting right across Wessex to Wareham on the south coast, which he held in 875–6. Then he turned west to Exeter, which he occupied for the following year. For three years, that is, Guthrum marched the length and breadth of Wessex, pillaging, burning and living off the land as he went. Alfred, for his part, was able to bottle Guthrum up in both Wareham and Exeter. But he was not strong enough to take them and, in both cases, had to agree terms. These the Vikings negotiated with almost flamboyant bad faith. That Alfred seems to have taken their worthless promises at face value means either that he was naive – or, more likely, that he had no choice.

After slinking out of Exeter under cover of night and with the solemn promise to Alfred, sworn ‘on [his] holy armlet’, that ‘they would speedily depart from his kingdom’, Guthrum took up winter quarters at Gloucester. Alfred shadowed him up to the northern border of Wessex, where he spent Christmas at his royal hall at Chippenham in Wiltshire. But on 6 January 878, the last day of the Christmas festivities known as Twelfth Night, Guthrum appeared before Chippenham. He had marched fast and in the depths of winter. Alfred was taken by surprise and had no choice but to flee. Guthrum now occupied the heartland of the defenceless kingdom and Wessex seemed about to go the way of the rest of Anglo-Saxon England.

II

In his flight, Alfred was accompanied only ‘by a little band’ and he deliberately avoided centres of population, seeking instead the cover of the forests and uplands of Wiltshire (‘the woods and fastness of the moors’). Gradually, he moved south and west towards the Somerset fens and Athelney. Here at last he began to feel safe.

Athelney means ‘royal island’, and Alfred chose it as his fastness because the area at the confluence of the Rivers Parret and Tone was then an island. It was well screened in the middle of the marshes, and the water which flooded the fenlands in winter made it even more difficult to attack. His time here was the nadir of Alfred’s fortunes. Later, in one of his writings, he seems to recall the self-examination it provoked:

In the midst of prosperity the mind is elated, and in prosperity a man forgets himself; in hardship he is forced to reflect on himself, even though he be unwilling.

By this or other means, Alfred regained confidence in his own capacity. But the power of a king is not simply personal. It is also political or collective. Alfred understood this too. ‘A man cannot work without tools,’ he wrote in another of his works. And, he continued:

In the case of a king, the resources and tools with which to rule are that he have his land fully manned. He must have praying men, fighting men and working men … without these tools no king may make his ability known … nor can he accomplish any of the things he was commanded to do.

In the adjacent kingdom of Mercia, these collective ‘tools’ seem to have consisted of little more than the king’s war-band, which is why Mercian power was so vulnerable to challenge whenever the strong hand of an effective king, like Offa or Cenwulf, was removed. But in Wessex, luckily for Alfred, power was both more diffuse and more ‘popular’. This meant, paradoxically, that it was more durable and could survive even such a debacle of royal power as Twelfth Night 878.

Which is where, perhaps, the story of Alfred and the cakes fits in. The king, the story goes, had taken refuge, incognito, in the hovel of a swine-herd, where he found himself upbraided by the man’s wife for letting her bread-cakes burn as he dreamed in front of the fire of regaining power. The story is, of course, a legend. But it is a very old one since it dates from Alfred’s own lifetime or shortly thereafter. It also points, once again, to the closeness of monarch and people which would be the salvation of Wessex.

Alfred, as soon as he was able, moved to invoke these powers. At Easter, which fell very early that year on 23 March, he further strengthened Athelney’s natural defences by building a fort. He was helped to do this by the ealdorman or governor of Somerset, while the men of ‘that part of Somersetshire which was nighest to it’ also joined in the raids against the Viking occupiers which the king now launched from his island fortress. But these raids were a mere morale-boosting exercise to prepare the way for the full-scale counter-attack which Alfred began to organize.

And the key to the counter-attack was, once again, the shires. Historic Wessex (that is, the kingdom before its expansion under Alfred’s grandfather, Egbert) was divided into five ‘shires’ or, as we would now say using Norman-French rather than Anglo-Saxon, ‘counties’: Somerset itself, Devon, Wiltshire, Dorset and Hampshire. The shires were further subdivided into ‘hundreds’, so called because, in theory though rarely in practice, they contained a hundred ‘hides’ or parcels of land each sufficient to maintain a family. We do not know when the shires and hundreds began. The former are first mentioned in the seventh century and the latter in the eleventh. But they are clearly much older. Perhaps indeed they are immemorial and go back to the folk-moots of the first Saxon settlers in western Britannia. This would explain why their meetings took place in the open air, at traditional assembly points that were often marked by a prehistoric monument, like a tumulus or barrow. One such is Swanborough Tump in the Vale of Pewsey in Wiltshire. Here, as we have seen, Æthelred and Alfred had met with the witan to settle their affairs on the eve of the Viking attack. And here, on a much humbler scale, the free men of the Hundred of Swanborough met once a month to settle their affairs.

These meetings, and the less frequent but more important shire assemblies, which took place twice a year, were later called ‘courts’. They did indeed try legal cases, both criminal and civil. But they did much more. They kept the peace; levied taxes and raised troops. Finally, their sworn testimony, later systematized as the jury, supplied the basic information about property rights and inheritance without which royal government could not function: even William the Conqueror, in all his power, would depend on such juries to produce the myriad facts on which the Domesday Book was based.

For the hundred and shire were also, whatever their folk origins may have been, the agencies of royal government. It was one royal official, the reeve or bailiff, who presided over the Hundred Court, and another, much greater one, the ealdorman, who chaired the Shire Court. The ealdorman was the leading man in his shire and one of the greatest in Wessex. He commanded the shire levies, acted as intermediary between the court and the county, and used his authority to settle most local disputes.

Indeed, the ealdorman was so powerful that it was easy for him to forget that he was the king’s servant and to aspire instead to become a territorial magnate in his own right. Alfred was well aware of the temptation and, in a well-judged interpolation in one of his translations, he denounced the ealdorman who turned his delegated authority (ealdordome) to lordship (hlaforddome) and caused ‘the reverence of himself and his power to become the regular custom of the shire he rules’.

Alfred fought this tendency. So did his successors. So too, perhaps, did the people. The result was that the paths of government in Wessex and Francia started to diverge. In Francia, the nobility, like Alfred’s ambitious ealdorman, soon took over the king’s former powers in the localities and privatized justice, taxation and the raising of troops. In so doing, they interposed themselves between king and people: the people of a district were now their lord’s, not the king’s. In Wessex, this never quite happened. Here, instead, the partnership between king and people, into which rough and ready egalitarianism of the early Saxon settlers had developed, held. This partnership, with its sense of all being in it together, would make it easier for Alfred to impose heavy demands on his people as the crisis drew out over years and decades. It also provided, in ‘the self-government at the king’s command’ of the shires and hundreds, and the collective self-consciousness which they fostered, the means for Alfred to begin his fight-back against Guthrum.

III

The planning of the campaign, once again, started at Easter. Over the following weeks Alfred sent out messengers from Athelney in all directions. They went to lords in their halls and to meetings of the common folk at their outdoor Hundred Courts. Seven weeks after Easter (11 May) all was ready and the signal was given. Alfred himself set out from Athelney and marched east towards the rendezvous at Egbert’s Stone. There he was met ‘by all the people of Somersetshire, and Wiltshire and that part of Hampshire which is on this side of the sea [that is, excluding the Isle of Wight]’. These were the forces of three out of the five shires of Wessex. It is unclear why the other two, Devon and Dorset, failed to send troops. Dorset may have been incapacitated by taking the brunt of the Viking occupation. But the Devonians were probably assigned to coastal defence. Earlier that year, Viking reinforcements had tried to land in Devon.The ealdorman Odda had driven them off with heavy losses and captured their sacred raven banner. But other landings must have been anticipated.

Alfred had chosen the rallying point carefully. Egbert’s Stone has been recently identified as yet another prehistoric tumulus, high on the hills above the River Deverill on the edge of Salisbury Plain in western Wiltshire. It is close to the spot at which Somerset, Wiltshire and Dorset all meet, and it was here that Alfred’s grandfather, Egbert, had marched his soldiers after a decisive and final victory over the British people of Cornwall. But Alfred was not just evoking Wessex’s past glories. His campaign was also a kind of crusade: he was a Christian king and his enemies were pagans. Hence the launch of the campaign around Easter. This suited military realities. But it coincided as well with the most important feast of the Christian year, the feast of resurrection. The coincidence was not lost on his troops:

when they saw the King, receiving him not surprisingly as if one restored to life after suffering such great tribulations, they were filled with immense joy.

The day after the rendezvous, Alfred struck camp at dawn. The army followed the course of the river north-east beyond its confluence with the Wylye to Iley Oak, the traditional site of another Wessex Hundred Court. It lies in a bend in the river and offers ample room for a force of about three thousand to bivouac. In the morning they would go out to meet Guthrum and his Vikings, marching up over Battlesbury Hill on to the high ground of Salisbury Plain.

For Guthrum had moved his forces to another royal estate at Edington (Ethandun). And it was there, probably on the hill above the village, that the two armies met. We cannot be sure, because there has been no systematic excavation of the site. But chance finds have turned up a number of bodies of the right date, some of them badly mutilated. That is not surprising. For the battle was to be both savage and bloody. There was too much at stake on both sides for it to be anything else. Guthrum knew that, for his takeover of the kingdom of Wessex to succeed, he had to kill Alfred outright. As for Alfred and the men of Wessex, they knew that this was probably their last chance of independence: if Guthrum won, Viking domination of Wessex and England would be complete. So both sides were hoping for a decisive result. They were not to be disappointed:

Fighting fiercely with a compact shield wall against the entire Viking army, [Alfred] persevered resolutely for a long time. At length he gained the victory through God’s will [and] destroyed the Vikings with great slaughter.

Alfred’s victory at Edington was complete, and decisive. The broken remains of Guthrum’s army fled back to their fortified base at Chippenham. Alfred pursued them, cutting down the stragglers on the way. Then he laid siege to the fort. After two weeks, the Viking leader surrendered. But this time Guthrum was in no position to equivocate. He promised to withdraw from Wessex and he confirmed his promise by agreeing to be baptized. The baptism occurred three weeks later. Alfred stood as Guthrum’s godfather, which made the Viking his moral and political dependant. And the ceremony took place at Aller in Somerset, only three miles east of Athelney, which avenged Alfred’s darkest hour.

The battle of Edington was the turning point in Alfred’s life and one of the great turning points of English history. Alfred, fighting at the head of the shires, had established himself as a great war leader. And Wessex was saved, for the moment at least. But the future of the rest of England still hung in the balance.

Alfred’s victory at Edington bought him almost a decade and a half of peace. But Alfred did not sleep on his laurels. Instead he embarked on a considered and ambitious programme of military and moral rearmament. As a result, Wessex was able, not only to survive a third Viking challenge, but also to expand until, within half a century of Alfred’s death, it ruled, directly or indirectly, all Britannia.

The foundation of all this was Alfred’s transformation of his kingdom into a society on a full-time war footing. He built a navy, with bigger ships constructed to his own design. There were early technical problems. But they seem to have been overcome and the sixty-oared vessel he pioneered became the standard unit of the Anglo-Saxon navy. He also reorganized the fyrd or army, ‘so that always half its men were at home, [and] half on service’. This enabled him to put troops into the field at almost any time. Most effective of all, however, was his scheme of fortification. In the first Viking attacks in the 870s, Guthrum and his men had been able to range great distances throughout Wessex at will and virtually unopposed. Alfred’s fortifications were designed to prevent any repetition.

The result was an undertaking on a massive scale. Thirty burhs or fortified settlements were built, strategically sited so that nowhere in Wessex was more than twenty miles (or a day’s march) away from one, and 27,000 men were assigned to defend them. The figure was based on the assumption that four men were needed to man each pole (five and a half yards) of rampart. The circuit of each burh was measured (very accurately) and the number of its garrison calculated accordingly. Finally, each burh was assigned an endowment of land to maintain its garrison, on the basis of one hide for each man.

The document in which all this was set out, known as the Burghal Hidage, survives in a slightly later form, which probably dates from the early tenth century. The Burghal Hidage demonstrates the tremendous bureaucratic achievement of which Anglo-Saxon government was capable. But it also shows that its bureaucratic competence was firmly harnessed, as Alfred’s high Christian concept of kingship required, to the common good. For these burhs were not private castles, owned by some lord or bishop and manned by his retainers. Instead, they were fortified communities, founded by the king, defended by his people, and defending and protecting them in turn.

Moreover, the significance of the burhs went beyond their defensive capacity, since many, though not all, developed into real towns. Once again, this seems to have been Alfred’s intention from the beginning. For burhs like Winchester, which Alfred was to make into the capital of Wessex, were laid out as proper planned new towns, with a set, regular street pattern. Such places quickly became market centres and, most importantly of all, mint towns, where the king’s coin was struck according to centralized patterns and fixed weights and fineness. The result of this rapid urbanization was a virtuous economic cycle in which everybody benefited. Trade boomed and with it taxes; the king got rich and his people grew prosperous, while the word ‘borough’, as we pronounce it today, started to assume its modern meaning of a self-governing urban community under royal patronage. In short, probably more by design than by accident, Alfred had turned the burhs into the urban equivalent of the hundreds, or, in the case of the largest of them, of shires in their own right.

And the burh of burhs was London. It was already the largest town and the commercial powerhouse of England. As such, it had been the jewel in King Offa’s crown and the fiscal key to Mercian power. But it suffered the common fate of eastern Mercia and passed under Viking domination. This lasted, almost certainly, for fifteen years, from 871, when the ‘great summer army’ took up winter quarters there, to 886, when Alfred felt strong enough to take it. The result was a turning point in the history of the City – and of England.

The original Anglo-Saxon settlement, known as Lundenwic, was not based in the abandoned Roman city but further west at Aldwych, from which it sprawled out along the line of the modern Strand. Alfred moved most of the population back within the Roman walls, which he rebuilt and refortified. He also constructed another burh at Southwark, which is still known as ‘Borough’ today.

All this entitles Alfred to be regarded as the second founder of the City. But in what capacity did Alfred, king of Wessex, thus act in former Mercian territory? Alfred answered the question by giving charge of the refounded City to the ealdorman Æthelred. Æthelred, however, was not ealdorman of any of the historic shires of Wessex; instead, his charge was Mercia, or rather the rump of the kingdom to the south and west of Watling Street which had escaped the Viking conquest. How and when Æthelbert and Lesser Mercia passed into Alfred’s sphere of influence is unclear. But Alfred moved to cement the relationship personally, by marrying Æthelbert to his masterful eldest child, Æthelflaed, who proved to be every inch her father’s daughter. He also did so juridically, by starting to style himself in his charters ‘king of the Angles and of the Saxons’ or ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’. Could a claim to be King of All the English be far behind?

For that, de facto, was Alfred’s position with the Viking destruction of all the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. And the position, it seems, was recognized de jure in the aftermath of his capture of London, when ‘all the English people that were not under subjection to the Danes submitted to him’. Was there a formal ceremony? Did it involve oath-taking? We cannot know. But at this point the idea of a common ‘English’ identity, first (mis)understood by St Gregory and powerfully expounded by Bede, started to assume concrete political form.

Its first expression, appropriately enough – since Guthrum’s defeat had been the making of Alfred – was in a treaty with King Guthrum which was agreed between 886 and Guthrum’s death in 890. After his defeat and baptism in 878, Guthrum and his host had retreated east. Here Guthrum had found the kingdom he craved by becoming monarch of the Danes of southern England. He was called king of East Anglia. But the actual boundaries of his kingdom were much wider, embracing all England east of Watling Street and the Ouse and (probably) south of the Humber. Guthrum and Alfred thus negotiated as equals in power. But the preamble to the treaty defines their kingship differently. Guthrum’s is the territorial kingship of (greater) East Anglia; Alfred’s, in contrast, is national: he is the king ‘of all the English nation’ (ealles Angelcynnes) and his witan is Council of the English Nation too.

‘Of all the English nation’. These few words contain the germ of a national political idea. But, in the circumstances of 886, in which the Vikings held half England and still threatened to take the whole, it was only an idea. Nor is it clear how many shared it, or thought that its realization was inevitable or even desirable. But, whatever their number, Alfred determined to increase it by a sustained programme of writing and publication. An earlier generation called the result scholarship. It was, of course. But it was also propaganda – for Alfred and for England. And the king was his own Minister for Information, and, as in everything else he did, a highly effective one.

But first Alfred had to address his own inadequacies. For most of his adult life, the king was literate only in Anglo-Saxon. That was enough for most practical purposes. But, for the task which he now had in hand, Alfred required access to the surviving riches of Classical culture which only a knowledge of Latin could give. His first, interim, solution was to get some of his more learned clergy to read Latin texts with him, translating and expounding as they went. This could have been the lazy man’s way out. Alfred instead treated the experience as one-to-one language teaching and benefited accordingly. His pious biographer, Asser, presents the result as a miracle, in which, on 11 November 887, Alfred learned to read Latin at a stroke. We can discount the miracle, but accept the idea that by this stage the king felt confident enough to tease the good bishop by doing the translation himself. We should also take the date – a year after the occupation of London – seriously too. Alfred was now ready to launch his propaganda campaign.

It was announced in the Preface to his translation of St Gregory’s Pastoral Care. Why, Alfred asked himself, had not the scholars of the pre-Viking golden age of Anglo-Saxon England translated the key works of Christianity into ‘their own language’? Then knowledge of them would have survived into his own, post-Viking, iron age, when (he recollected of the time he came to the throne) there were very few ‘who could … even translate a single letter from Latin into English’ and not ‘a single one south of the Thames’. Moreover, by translating, they would only have been following a long line of distinguished precedents:

Then I recalled how the Law was first composed in the Hebrew language, and thereafter, when the Greeks learned it, they translated it all into their own language, and all other books as well. And so too the Romans, after they had mastered them, translated all through learned interpreters into their own language … Therefore it seems better to me … that we too should turn into the language that we can all understand certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know.

His present translation would, Alfred hoped, set the ball rolling.

Finally, with characteristic attention to practical detail, Alfred set out how his text should be distributed: each bishop would be sent a copy, together with a pointer or aestel, worth the vast sum of fifty mancuses or the equivalent of six and a quarter pounds of silver. The book and its aestel must never, Alfred further stipulated, be separated and must be set up in church together. This, I think, makes clear how Alfred intended each copy of his book to be used: it was to be set up openly in church so that it could be used for public readings and instruction – for which, of course, the aestel would come into its own. Interestingly, a remarkably similar procedure (though without the precious aestel) was to be used by that later practical visionary, Thomas Cromwell, to disseminate the English translation of the Bible in Reformation England.

Alfred’s practicality also extended to his approach to the art of translation itself. For his books were intended to be, not academic exercises, but things that were useful and were used. This meant in turn that Alfred had to prevent his readers from seeing the late Roman world of Gregory or Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy Alfred (like Queen Elizabeth I) also translated, as foreign to their own experience and therefore irrelevant to it. Instead, he cut his Roman cloth, very thoroughly, into English dress. The ‘senate’ becomes the ‘Roman witan’ and ‘magistrates’, ‘ealdormen’. Most ingenious is his rendering of Boethius’s reference to the fleetingness of the fame of even the conqueror Fabricius. Alfred guessed that the name of the Roman hero would have meant nothing to his target English audience. Instead, he went to the root of the name in faber (‘smith’) and, for the unknown Roman, substituted a reference to Weland the Smith, the Germanic smith-god whose smithy the men of Wessex believed to have been a neolithic barrow on the Berkshire Downs. ‘Where now’, Alfred’s inspired translation read, ‘are the bones of the famous and wise goldsmith, Weland?’

It was also Alfred, or a member of his intimate court circle, who commissioned the national book of record known as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Its chronicle form is deceptively simple (and has deceived many historians). In fact, it is a highly sophisticated piece of historical special pleading, to be put on a par (in approach if not in method) with Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Like Bede, the Chronicle is a providential history of the Anglo-Saxon people: of their conquest of Britain, of their conversion to (Roman) Christianity, and of their quest for political union. The novelty of the Chronicle lies in the role it assigns to Wessex. In Bede, we see the torch of the bretwalda-ship (or overlordship) passing from the southern kingdoms of Kent and East Anglia to the strong hands of his native Northumbria. The Chronicle picks up the story in the ninth century. In so doing, the intervening, century-long Mercian supremacy of Æthelbald, Offa and Cenwulf is ignored; instead, following his victories of 829, the Chronicle hails Egbert of Wessex, Alfred’s grandfather, as the eighth bretwalda. Finally, the marriage of Æthelwulf, Alfred’s father, into the sacred house of Charlemagne, Æthelwulf ’s pilgrimage to Rome and Alfred’s own mysterious anointing there, confer divine sanction on the House of Egbert and mark out Alfred as the eventual heir to its glories.

‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,’ wrote another great Englishman, George Orwell. Alfred was determined that the future should be England as a greater Wessex, with his own issue on the throne. But the language of the Chronicle is just as important as its subject matter. For, as we would expect from Alfred’s general approach, the Chronicle is not written in Latin, like the chronicles produced elsewhere in Europe, but in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular. And that changed everything. The Chronicle was not written by churchmen for churchmen. Instead, it is a king talking to his people in the language that they understand and his people talking to themselves. The Chronicle is, in short, the greatest cultural achievement of Alfred’s reign and a symbol of national independence and identity that was so powerful that not even the Norman Conquest could extinguish it outright.

Alfred’s kulturkampf (cultural struggle) began in the years of uneasy peace. But it continued during the Third Viking War of 892–6. The war was as hard-fought as previously. But it was fought differently. For this time the Vikings, after an initial foray, were never able to cross large sections of Wessexian territory. The burhs, it seems, had done their work well.

So, too, had Alfred. Three years after the end of the war, Alfred died on 26 October 899, aged only fifty. He still ruled over only part of England. But, as he so clearly intended, his legacy was the permanent unification of the country. The actual work was the task of his sons and grandsons. But it was Alfred, who, in the crucible of the Viking invasions, had forged an idea of England that was more than simply cultural and linguistic, it was political as well. Or rather, uniquely in Europe at the time, it was a combination of all three.

In other words, Ængla Land was to be a nation-state, Dark Age style.