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CHAPTER 4

Alfred the Great Becomes King of Wessex

871 AD

Alfred the Great was the most important Anglo-Saxon king to rule in Britain between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Norman invasion of 1066. By protecting his kingdom against conquest by the Vikings, he ensured the survival of the English language and English laws.

‘Rule Britannia!’ is one of Britain’s favourite patriotic songs. Even those who find its expressions of national superiority a little hard to take can find themselves jolted into acquiescence when it is belted out with gusto at events like the Last Night of the Proms. It has been a hit ever since it was first performed in the grounds of Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire in 1740 where it was the last, rousing number in a masque composed by Thomas Arne for the daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales. The masque tells the story of a wise, brave king who has fled from his enemies to live anonymously in exile among his people. He is visited by a spirit who tells him not to despair. He rallies, rounds up his troops and leads them to victory. The plot ends as the King’s son announces that British values have triumphed – ‘See liberty, virtue and honour appearing’ – and then comes the song that tells us ‘Britons never will be slaves.’ The masque is called Alfred.

Alfred was a good subject for Thomas Arne’s entertainment. The Prince of Wales was the centre of opposition to the King’s prime minister, Robert Walpole. He and his followers called themselves ‘patriots’ – so it suited their purposes to make a connection between their beliefs and those of Alfred, the patriot king who had saved his country from the tyranny of the Viking invaders. In the early eighteenth century, Alfred came to be seen as the perfect representation of British liberty and justice. The gardens at Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, one of the great ornaments of the English landscape, contain a ‘Temple of British Worthies’ designed in 1734 by William Kent in which King Alfred is described as the ‘mildest, justest, most beneficient of kings’. He ‘crush’d corruption, guarded liberty and was the founder of the English constitution’. He is the only king in British history to be called ‘Great’. He looms out of the Dark Ages like a beacon of safety. He is seen as an image of courage and common sense around which the British can build the continuity of their history. Without Alfred all might have been lost. He is the link to our true past.

By the beginning of the ninth century Britain was broadly divided into the Celtic areas of Wales, Scotland and Cornwall and the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. The highly successful King of Mercia, Offa, who ruled in the second half of the eighth century, had built a fortification along the length of his boundary with the Celtic tribes to the west. Offa’s Dyke effectively created the outline of the country which has been known as Wales ever since. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had emerged through battle and conquest between rival warlords. Since the middle of the seventh century they had fallen under the command of the Roman Church and their monks and clergy held enormous power. The Church was divided into parishes which supervised the needs of the people in their immediate vicinity. The abbots and monks could read and write, but many of the people to whom they preached could not. The clergy became the administrators of many aspects of everyday life, making wills and apportioning land. Superstitious kings, anxious to save their souls, were often only too happy to grant estates to the abbeys and monasteries that were growing up everywhere, and the Church was equally happy to benefit from this need for spiritual insurance. Already the very early signs of feudal society were beginning to emerge, a world in which each man had his place and was expected to keep to it. The Anglo-Saxons were farmers and woodsmen. They lived in clusters in small townships or in groups alone in the forest. They were suspicious of each other and did not take kindly to strangers. Then, into this quiet, inward-looking, agricultural world came the Vikings.

The Vikings were seafarers: the Anglo-Saxons were landsmen. Towards the end of the eighth century and into the beginning of the ninth, Viking sailors began to cross the North Sea from Denmark and Norway to loot monasteries and churches positioned on the British coast. Throughout the ninth century the Vikings fanned out all over Europe in search of treasure to steal and land to conquer and some went further afield, across the Atlantic to the coast of North America. The British invasions came mainly from Denmark. Great armies of Danes, different bands of warriors who had agreed to unite behind a single leader for the purpose of carrying out a raid, landed on the shores of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. Their numbers grew as they learned more about the prizes Britain had to offer. By the end of the ninth century they had created ‘Danelaw’, the rule of Vikings over Anglo-Saxons, across the whole of Northumbria, Mercia and most of Wessex. Only the western end of Wessex, Somerset and Devon, the furthest point in England from their Danish base, had not yet fallen under Viking control.

Alfred became King of Wessex in 871. He had the foresight to get a friend and confidant of his, Bishop Asser, to write his biography and much of what we know about him comes from this. His four elder brothers, three of whom had served as Kings of Wessex for a brief period of time, had died, perhaps killed in fights against the Danes. He was only twenty-one when he succeeded to the throne but experience of fighting the Vikings meant that he was an ideal choice to take over. He was not in good health and his natural temperament seems to have been for scholarship rather than war. He was a devout Christian.

In 878 the Danes mounted a surprise attack. Alfred was nearly captured and had to retreat into the Somerset marshes. The apocryphal story of his burning the cakes probably stems from this period: the lonely, troubled King so lost in thought while he shelters amidst his people that he forgets to watch the cakes before the fire as the farmer’s wife has told him. We have no evidence for this incident. What we do know is that this was a time of crisis for him. ‘King Alfred, with a few of his nobles and some knights and men of his household, was in great distress leading an unquiet life in the woods and marshes of Somerset,’ Bishop Asser tells us. ‘He had no means of support except what he took in frequent raids by stealth or openly from the pagans, or indeed from Christians who had submitted to pagan rule.’ From this position he managed to regroup and defeat the Danish leader, Guthrum, at Edington in Wiltshire. This decisive victory led to the Treaty of Wedmore in 878 in which Guthrum agreed to be baptised and to withdraw to behind the lines of existing Danelaw, leaving Wessex free. Alfred consolidated this victory eight years later when he recaptured London from the Vikings, and succeeded in beating them off when they attacked again in the mid-890s AD. This was a heroic achievement. The wars against the Vikings had left the Saxons demoralised and recalcitrant. They often resented royal orders and sometimes deserted to the other side. Alfred must have displayed impressive qualities of leadership to maintain an army capable of defeating the Danes. He knew he had no choice: it was the Vikings’ custom to kill the leaders of the forces they defeated in battle.

Alfred’s victory against Guthrum temporarily preserved the Anglo-Saxon tradition in a foreign world, but it might not have lasted had the victorious King not then demonstrated that he was as good a governor as he was a general. He ruled Wessex for another twenty-one years after the Treaty of Wedmore, a period in which he set about trying to improve the standards of education at his court. He recruited scholars from across the Channel where, following the civilising efforts of Charlemagne at the end of the eighth century, standards of literacy were higher. He was determined to resist the encroachments of the pagan Vikings and encouraged his clergy to improve both their teachings and writings. Most significantly he translated books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon, including Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He also introduced the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the first record of historical events to be written in English.

Women enjoyed greater rights in Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon world than they would for many years to come.

He also turned to the administration of his kingdom laying out laws, as other Anglo-Saxon kings had done, in his Doom Book. He wanted to protect weaker members of his disheartened country pronouncing: ‘Any judgement should be even, not one judgement for the wealthy and another for the poor.’ He provided a structure for rents and taxes, regulating how much people had to pay and to whom. He also introduced a system of fines – wergild – the money to be paid by those who committed crimes. Women enjoyed greater rights in Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon world than they would for many years to come under other rulers of Britain. They could own land in their own name; there was no natural right for a first-born son to inherit; no woman could be sold or forced into marriage; and wives were entitled to divorce their husbands.

Alongside all of this Alfred strengthened his country’s defences, copying the earthwork forts which the Danish used very successfully. He built a strong administrative system and, aware of how vulnerable his kingdom had been from attacks from the sea, created a fleet. Taken together these things gave his people a primitive nationhood. Alfred knew they needed an army for protection, and laws for their administration, but he also realised that these on their own would not be enough to keep them safe forever. To survive Wessex needed things that it believed in, that were worth fighting for. Alfred wanted his people to understand the value of their own history and the importance of their Christian learning. The importance of their past was their best defence against the uncertainties of their future. The little nation of Wessex was an embryo from which grew ideas and methods which would heavily influence the future course of British history.

In 1693 an Anglo-Saxon jewel was found in Somerset, not far from Athelney where Alfred hid before his successful counterattack against the Danes. It is made of gold and enamel and covered with a piece of rock crystal. The purpose of the jewel is unclear, but some believe it to be an aestel, a book pointer, which Alfred intended to send to his bishops with his translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care. Another theory is that it might have been a symbol of office for Alfred himself, or for one of his officials. The face of the jewel has a figure on it which may be Christ representing the incarnate ‘Wisdom of God’, or possibly the spirit of Sight. Whatever its use might have been, it is a beautiful relic from a time more than eleven hundred years ago when the Anglo-Saxon people of England faced the possibility of virtual extermination at the hands of a savage enemy. The jewel, now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, bears the inscription, in Anglo-Saxon: ‘Alfred ordered me to be made.’

Alfred died at the age of about fifty in 899 AD. In the biography that he commissioned from Bishop Asser he comes across almost as a saint, and succeeding ages have not demurred from that opinion of him. It was not only the eighteenth century that held him up as an icon of liberty. In the next century Charles Dickens in A Child’s History of England called him ‘the noble king … whom misfortune could not subdue, whom prosperity could not spoil, whose perseverance nothing could shake’. Today we tend to take a more objective view. Alfred’s achievements were momentous, though we probably feel they fell short of sainthood. But then a man does not need to be a saint to inspire affection or gratitude. When we think of the plight of Wessex in the second half of the ninth century and reflect on the King who rose out of the marshes of Somerset to rebuild his kingdom in such an extraordinary way, we realise that, saint or not, we owe a great deal to Alfred, the Anglo-Saxon King, and for the things he did. We might even say: ‘Alfred ordered me to be made.’