Alfred the Great

Alfred was born in 849 at the royal estate of Wantage, then in Berkshire, the youngest son of King Æthelwulf of Wessex and his wife Osburh ^[1]. Four older brothers stood between him and the throne, so nothing in his childhood suggested that he would ever rule. The ninth century biography written by the Welsh monk Asser, who later joined Alfred's court, preserves most of what is known about these years, including the famous story of the young Alfred winning a book of English poetry from his mother by memorizing its contents ^[2].

As a boy Alfred twice traveled to Rome. Asser records that on one of these visits Pope Leo IV received him with honor, an episode later embellished into a supposed royal anointing ^[1]. His father Æthelwulf accompanied him on the second journey in 855, leaving the kingdom in the hands of Alfred's eldest surviving brothers. Æthelwulf died in 858, and the crown of Wessex then passed in turn through Alfred's brothers Æthelbald, Æthelberht, and Æthelred ^[3].

The England of Alfred's youth was not a single country but a patchwork of kingdoms: Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, and Wessex chief among them. From 865 a large Danish force, remembered in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as the Great Heathen Army, moved through these kingdoms one by one, killing or expelling their kings ^[3]. By the time Alfred reached adulthood, the survival of any independent English rule was in doubt.

Alfred first appears as a military commander during his brother Æthelred's reign, when the Danish army turned on Wessex. In January 871 the West Saxons met the invaders at Ashdown on the Berkshire Downs, and Asser credits Alfred with leading the decisive uphill charge while his brother lingered at prayer ^[2]. The victory was real but temporary; the Chronicle records a string of further battles that year, most of them defeats for Wessex ^[3].

Æthelred died in the spring of 871, and Alfred, though his brother left young sons, succeeded to the kingdom by the practical logic of wartime: Wessex needed a grown man who could fight ^[1]. His reign opened badly. Within weeks he was beaten at Wilton and forced to pay the Danes to withdraw, buying time rather than peace ^[3].

The crisis came in January 878, when the Danish king Guthrum launched a surprise midwinter attack on the royal estate at Chippenham. Much of Wessex submitted, and Alfred fled with a small band into the marshes of Somerset, where he built a fort on the island of Athelney ^[2]. The later legend of the distracted king scolded for burning a peasant woman's cakes attaches to this low point, though it appears in no contemporary source ^[4]. From Athelney, Alfred waged a guerrilla campaign and quietly summoned the militias of Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire. In May 878 he emerged, gathered his forces at Egbert's Stone, and defeated Guthrum's army at the Battle of Edington ^[3]. The Danes surrendered after a two week siege of their camp, and Guthrum accepted Christian baptism with Alfred standing as his godfather ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Alfred the Great usually receives the answer that he saved England from the Vikings, but his real achievement was more constructive than a single battle. After Edington he negotiated a formal settlement with Guthrum, preserved in a surviving treaty text, which drew a boundary along the Thames, the Lea, and the old Roman road of Watling Street. The lands to the north and east became the Danish sphere later called the Danelaw, while Alfred kept Wessex and western Mercia ^[5].

Alfred then rebuilt his kingdom's defenses so that no future attack could repeat the disaster of Chippenham. A document known as the Burghal Hidage lists a network of some thirty fortified centers, or burhs, spaced so that most of Wessex lay within roughly twenty miles of a stronghold, each supported by assessed land and garrison duties ^[5]. He reorganized the army so that half the levies served in the field while half stayed home to tend the land, and he commissioned larger ships to meet Viking raiders at sea, an effort that earned him a later and somewhat inflated reputation as founder of the English navy ^[3]. When a new Danish army arrived in 892, these defenses held: after four years of campaigning the invaders dispersed without conquering anything ^[3].

Among Alfred the Great achievements, his cultural program is the most unusual for a warrior king of his era. Lamenting the collapse of Latin learning in England, he recruited scholars from Mercia, Wales, and the Continent, and set out to translate the books he judged 'most necessary for all men to know' into English ^[6]. Alfred is credited with personally translating Pope Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, Augustine's Soliloquies, and the first fifty Psalms ^[6]. His court also produced a translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History and began, or at least encouraged, the compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the year by year record that remains a foundation of early English history ^[4]. He issued a law code that combined West Saxon, Mercian, and Kentish precedents with a long biblical preface, presenting royal law as part of a Christian moral order ^[5].

In 868 Alfred married Ealhswith, a Mercian noblewoman whose mother belonged to the Mercian royal line ^[1]. The marriage bound Wessex and Mercia together at a moment when both kingdoms faced the same enemy, and the alliance deepened when Alfred later married his daughter Æthelflæd to Æthelred, the ruler of English Mercia. Alfred and Ealhswith had five children who survived to adulthood: Æthelflæd, who governed Mercia in her own right after her husband's death; Edward, who succeeded his father; Æthelgifu, an abbess; Ælfthryth, who married the count of Flanders; and Æthelweard ^[2].

Asser describes a king troubled from youth by a painful, recurring illness, which struck him at his own wedding feast and returned throughout his life. Modern writers have suggested Crohn's disease or a similar intestinal disorder, though no diagnosis is possible at this distance ^[7]. Asser also portrays a man of intense, sometimes anxious piety who divided his time, his revenues, and even his candle lit hours by careful rule, allotting fixed shares to religious houses, to his craftsmen and foreign visitors, and to study ^[2].

Alfred's own voice survives in the prefaces to his translations. In the preface to the Pastoral Care he recalled a time when learning had flourished in England and grieved that so few south of the Humber could now understand their Latin service books, framing his translation project as a duty owed to God and to his people ^[6].

The final decade of Alfred's reign tested everything he had built. In 892 a large Viking force crossed from the Continent in two fleets and dug in at camps in Kent, joined by allies from the Danelaw. The war that followed lasted until 896 and ranged from Devon to the Welsh border to Essex, but the pattern differed sharply from the 870s: the burhs denied the invaders any base in Wessex, the reformed army shadowed and harried them, and Alfred's son Edward and son in law Æthelred won victories of their own ^[3]. By 896 the Chronicle could report, with evident relief, that the army had dispersed, some settling in East Anglia and Northumbria and the rest sailing back to the Seine ^[3].

By then Alfred's authority reached well beyond the old borders of Wessex. After recovering London from Danish control in 886 he entrusted the city to Æthelred of Mercia, and the Chronicle says that all the English people not under Danish subjection submitted to him ^[3]. His charters and coins from these years style him king of the Anglo-Saxons rather than merely king of the West Saxons, a deliberate claim to lead all the English, and a stepping stone toward the unified kingdom of England that his grandson Æthelstan would rule ^[5].

Alfred died on 26 October 899 at about fifty years of age and was buried in Winchester, the chief city of his kingdom ^[1]. His remains were later moved to the New Minster and then to Hyde Abbey outside the city walls; the abbey's destruction in the sixteenth century and later disturbance of the site mean that his grave is now lost ^[7]. The succession he had prepared held firm. His son Edward the Elder defeated a rival claim by his cousin Æthelwold and went on, with Æthelflæd, to conquer the southern Danelaw ^[3].

No other English king is called 'the Great', and the title, though it only became standard centuries after his death, has stuck for good reasons. Alfred preserved the last independent English kingdom at the moment of its greatest danger, and the institutions he created, fortified towns, a reorganized army, a written law code, and a royal claim to lead all the English, gave his successors the tools to build a single kingdom of England within two generations ^[5]. Historians debate how much of that later unification Alfred himself foresaw, but few dispute that it began with him ^[4].

His literary legacy is just as distinctive. The translations produced by Alfred and his circle mark the first sustained attempt to make serious Latin learning available in English, and they helped establish Old English as a written language of law, history, and philosophy at a time when almost every other European kingdom kept such matters in Latin ^[6]. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, continued in various monasteries for two and a half centuries after his death, owes its existence to the intellectual revival of his reign ^[4].

Alfred's afterlife in memory has been long and sometimes distorting. Victorian Britain celebrated him as the founder of the navy, the empire, and English liberty, and marked the millennium of his death in 1901 with a large bronze statue by Hamo Thornycroft that still dominates the Broadway in Winchester ^[8]. A statue in his birthplace of Wantage, unveiled in 1877, likewise presents him as the ideal Englishman. Modern scholarship has trimmed the myth while confirming the substance, and the basic Alfred the Great facts remain remarkable enough: a fifth son, chronically ill, who beat back conquest, rebuilt a state, and wrote books with his own hand ^[7].