ALFRED
'THE GREAT' (r. 871-899)Born at Wantage, Berkshire, in 849, Alfred was
the fifth son of Aethelwulf, king of the West Saxons. At their father's behest
and by mutual agreement, Alfred's elder brothers succeeded to the kingship in
turn, rather than endanger the kingdom by passing it to under-age children at
a time when the country was threatened by worsening Viking raids from Denmark.
Since
the 790s, the Vikings had been using fast mobile armies, numbering thousands of
men embarked in shallow-draught longships, to raid the coasts and inland waters
of England for plunder. Such raids were evolving into permanent Danish settlements;
in 867, the Vikings seized York and established their own kingdom in the southern
part of Northumbria. The Vikings overcame two other major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms,
East Anglia and Mercia, and their kings were either tortured to death or fled.
Finally, in 870 the Danes attacked the only remaining independent Anglo-Saxon
kingdom, Wessex, whose forces were commanded by King Aethelred and his younger
brother Alfred. At the battle of Ashdown in 871, Alfred routed the Viking army
in a fiercely fought uphill assault. However, further defeats followed for Wessex
and Alfred's brother died.
As king of Wessex at the age of 21, Alfred (reigned
871-99) was a strongminded but highly strung battle veteran at the head of remaining
resistance to the Vikings in southern England. In early 878, the Danes led by
King Guthrum seized Chippenham in Wiltshire in a lightning strike and used it
as a secure base from which to devastate Wessex. Local people either surrendered
or escaped (Hampshire people fled to the Isle of Wight), and the West Saxons were
reduced to hit and run attacks seizing provisions when they could. With only his
royal bodyguard, a small army of thegns (the king's followers) and Aethelnoth
earldorman of Somerset as his ally, Alfred withdrew to the Somerset tidal marshes
in which he had probably hunted as a youth. (It was during this time that Alfred,
in his preoccupation with the defence of his kingdom, allegedly burned some cakes
which he had been asked to look after; the incident was a legend dating from early
twelfth century chroniclers.)
A resourceful fighter, Alfred reassessed his
strategy and adopted the Danes' tactics by building a fortified base at Athelney
in the Somerset marshes and summoning a mobile army of men from Wiltshire, Somerset
and part of Hampshire to pursue guerrilla warfare against the Danes. In May 878,
Alfred's army defeated the Danes at the battle of Edington. According to his contemporary
biographer Bishop Asser, 'Alfred attacked the whole pagan army fighting ferociously
in dense order, and by divine will eventually won the victory, made great slaughter
among them, and pursued them to their fortress (Chippenham) ... After fourteen
days the pagans were brought to the extreme depths of despair by hunger, cold
and fear, and they sought peace'. This unexpected victory proved to be the turning
point in Wessex's battle for survival.
Realising that he could not drive
the Danes out of the rest of England, Alfred concluded peace with them in the
treaty of Wedmore. King Guthrum was converted to Christianity with Alfred as godfather
and many of the Danes returned to East Anglia where they settled as farmers. In
886, Alfred negotiated a partition treaty with the Danes, in which a frontier
was demarcated along the Roman Watling Street and northern and eastern England
came under the jurisdiction of the Danes - an area known as 'Danelaw'. Alfred
therefore gained control of areas of West Mercia and Kent which had been beyond
the boundaries of Wessex. To consolidate alliances against the Danes, Alfred married
one of his daughters, Aethelflaed, to the ealdorman of Mercia -Alfred himself
had married Eahlswith, a Mercian noblewoman - and another daughter, Aelfthryth,
to the count of Flanders, a strong naval power at a time when the Vikings were
settling in eastern England.
The Danish threat remained, and Alfred reorganised
the Wessex defences in recognition that efficient defence and economic prosperity
were interdependent. First, he organised his army (the thegns, and the existing
militia known as the fyrd) on a rota basis, so he could raise a 'rapid reaction
force' to deal with raiders whilst still enabling his thegns and peasants to tend
their farms.
Second, Alfred started a building programme of well-defended
settlements across southern England. These were fortified market places ('borough'
comes from the Old English burh, meaning fortress); by deliberate royal planning,
settlers received plots and in return manned the defences in times of war. (Such
plots in London under Alfred's rule in the 880s shaped the streetplan which still
exists today between Cheapside and the Thames.) This obligation required careful
recording in what became known as 'the Burghal Hidage', which gave details of
the building and manning of Wessex and Mercian burhs according to their size,
the length of their ramparts and the number of men needed to garrison them. Centred
round Alfred's royal palace in Winchester, this network of burhs with strongpoints
on the main river routes was such that no part of Wessex was more than 20 miles
from the refuge of one of these settlements. Together with a navy of new fast
ships built on Alfred's orders, southern England now had a defence in depth against
Danish raiders.
Alfred's concept of kingship extended beyond the administration
of the tribal kingdom of Wessex into a broader context. A religiously devout and
pragmatic man who learnt Latin in his late thirties, he recognised that the general
deterioration in learning and religion caused by the Vikings' destruction of monasteries
(the centres of the rudimentary education network) had serious implications for
rulership. For example, the poor standards in Latin had led to a decline in the
use of the charter as an instrument of royal government to disseminate the king's
instructions and legislation. In one of his prefaces, Alfred wrote 'so general
was its [Latin] decay in England that there were very few on this side of the
Humber who could understand their rituals in English or translate a letter from
Latin into English ... so few that I cannot remember a single one south of the
Thames when I came to the throne.'
To improve literacy, Alfred arranged,
and took part in, the translation (by scholars from Mercia) from Latin into Anglo-Saxon
of a handful of books he thought it 'most needful for men to know, and to bring
it to pass ... if we have the peace, that all the youth now in England ... may
be devoted to learning'. These books covered history, philosophy and Gregory the
Great's 'Pastoral Care' (a handbook for bishops), and copies of these books were
sent to all the bishops of the kingdom. Alfred was patron of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
(which was copied and supplemented up to 1154), a patriotic history of the English
from the Wessex viewpoint designed to inspire its readers and celebrate Alfred
and his monarchy.
Like other West Saxon kings, Alfred established a legal
code; he assembled the laws of Offa and other predecessors, and of the kingdoms
of Mercia and Kent, adding his own administrative regulations to form a definitive
body of Anglo-Saxon law. 'I ... collected these together and ordered to be written
many of them which our forefathers observed, those which I liked; and many of
those which I did not like I rejected with the advice of my councillors ... For
I dared not presume to set in writing at all many of my own, because it was unknown
to me what would please those who should come after us ... Then I ... showed those
to all my councillors, and they then said that they were all pleased to observe
them' (Laws of Alfred, c.885-99).
By the 890s, Alfred's charters and coinage
(which he had also reformed, extending its minting to the burhs he had founded)
referred to him as 'king of the English', and Welsh kings sought alliances with
him. Alfred died in 899, aged 50, and was buried in Winchester, the burial place
of the West Saxon royal family.
By stopping the Viking advance and consolidating
his territorial gains, Alfred had started the process by which his successors
eventually extended their power over the other Anglo-Saxon kings; the ultimate
unification of Anglo-Saxon England was to be led by Wessex. It is for his valiant
defence of his kingdom against a stronger enemy, for securing peace with the Vikings
and for his farsighted reforms in the reconstruction of Wessex and beyond, that
Alfred - alone of all the English kings and queens - is known as 'the Great'.