Alfred the Great

King of England (r. 871-899)

• Born: 849
• Birthplace: Wantage, Berkshire, England
• Died: October 26, 0899
• Place of death: Unknown

Alfred, through courage, leadership, and practical good sense, preserved the English kingdom of Wessex from Viking armies and laid the foundation for the later reconquest and unification of all England.

Early Life

Alfred was born the fifth son and sixth child of King Ethelwulf of Wessex and his Mercian first wife, Osburh. Even these few facts reveal important implications for Alfred's future. One is that as a fifth son he could never have expected to be king; even his name is significant, for all of his elder brothers Æthelstan, Æthelbald, Æthelbert, and Æthelred as well as his sister Æthelswith, contained in their names the Anglo-Saxon word “ethel,” meaning “noble,” an element closely associated with royalty. It may have been a sign of Alfred's apparent ineligibility for any future succession to the throne that he was not so distinguished. It is also striking that Alfred was not born in Wessex but (apparently) just over the border, in the neighboring English kingdom of Mercia. Relations between Wessex and Mercia were to be among the most critical issues of Alfred's life.

When Alfred was four, his father sent him to Rome, where he met Pope Leo IV. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (compiled c. 890 to c. 1150), composed starting some forty years later when Alfred was the hero of his age, insists that the pope consecrated Alfred “as king” which would have been highly improper and much resented by Alfred's father and brothers. It seems likely that Pope Leo in fact made the little boy an honorary consul of Rome, in gratitude for his father's presents, and that Saxons in the audience much later credited the pope with supernatural foresight.

In fact, Alfred's real youth must have been strained and insecure. His biographer Asser, who wrote an incomplete life of the king when Alfred was forty-five, insists that Alfred remained illiterate until he was twelve, or even later, and tells an amusing story of how Alfred won a book of poems from his brothers, not by learning to read it (as his mother intended) but by memorizing passages and reciting them. Asser also gives a confused but suggestive account of his subject's ill health, from which it appears that Alfred suffered badly from hemorrhoids in early youth, that he recovered from this (as a result of prayer, Asser said), but that hemorrhoids were replaced by another and unknown disease from which the king was still suffering in maturity and which first struck him on the day of his marriage, in 868, to the Mercian noblewoman Ealhswith. Many commentators believe that Alfred's illness must have been psychological, but there are no clues as to what disease it was.

Alfred had legitimate reason to fear for his life. His father and elder brothers died off with unpredictable speed, Æthelstan in the 850', Æthelwulf in 858, Æthelbald in 860, Æthelbert in 866, Æthelred in 871. In the intervening years, Alfred's mother died, and while his father was absent in France contracting marriage to Judith, daughter of the French king, Æthelbald had rebelled. On this occasion, the Wessex royal family had managed to avoid civil war and made an arrangement between all the parties concerned. Yet the Vikings were a growing menace.

These marauders had plagued England for many years, Alfred's grandfather Egbert having made great slaughter of them, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, at the Battle of Aclea (851) close to Alfred's birth. As time went by, though, the Vikings became more numerous and dangerous, and they developed the ominous habit of not returning home to Scandinavia each winter but taking bases in England instead, as if they meant to stay. In 865, a particularly formidable army appeared, called by the Anglo-Saxons the Great Army or the Great Host. Within a very few years, the Vikings had destroyed the English kingdom of Northumbria and East Anglia and thoroughly intimidated the Mercians. In 870, with Alfred's one surviving brother on the throne, the Great Army turned on Wessex.

Life's Work

Alfred's main achievement was to repel this army and to place Wessex in a position of strength for dealings with its descendants. He could hardly have succeeded to the throne under worse circumstances. During the winter of 870-871, the West Saxons, under King Æthelred and his brother Alfred, fought one battle after another against the Vikings; The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle counts nine “general engagements,” in addition to innumerable skirmishes. It seems likely that the Saxons lost nearly all of those battles. Even the Battle of Ashdown (871), which the chronicle insists the West Saxons won and which Asser said was decided by Alfred charging uphill “like a wild boar” in his brother's temporary absence, led only to a further remorseless Viking advance southward. After Easter of 871, Æthelred died, perhaps worn out by campaigning. Alfred, now king, continued fighting but with little support. Almost the first action of his reign was the dishonorable one of negotiating a peace with the Vikings, which could not have been arranged without the Saxons’ paying tribute.

On the other hand, the Vikings must have believed that Wessex was at least prepared to fight. In the next few years, they attacked Mercia, driving its king overseas with humiliating ease and setting up an English puppet king in his place. Many of the Vikings settled permanently in Northumbria. It was not until 875 that they returned to Wessex, when they fought an inconclusive and little-known campaign with Alfred. Three years later, however, they caught Alfred and Wessex totally by surprise.

The Vikings struck in midwinter, just after Twelfth Night in January, 878. The West Saxon levies were no doubt all at home, completely unprepared, and there was no immediate Saxon resistance. Many of the English fled overseas or surrendered. Alfred, however, escaped, and instead of going to Rome to retire (as the king of Mercia had done), he hid in the marshlands of Athelney and waged what would now be called guerrilla warfare against the Vikings.

The fact that Alfred did not abandon them seems to have rallied the West Saxons. In the summer of 878, while still under Viking occupation, they gathered an army and for perhaps the first time clearly and indisputably defeated the Great Host in the field at the Battle of Edington. They then besieged the survivors in their camp and forced them in turn to make a humiliating peace, including the proviso that the Viking king Guthrum (“battle-snake”) should accept baptism.

At this moment, Alfred showed a most unexpected quality for a Dark Age war leader, namely, a magnanimity extending to statesmanship. He treated Guthrum well and set the foundation for a relatively stable peace of respect between equals. The Great Host went away, some Vikings settling permanently in East Anglia or Mercia, some trying their luck in France, leaving Alfred with fairly secure boundaries.

Between 878 and 892, Alfred's main political problem must have been English Mercia. Other English kingdoms were settled and controlled by Vikings (mostly Danes). If the Danes also took over the whole of Mercia, the center of England, Wessex would be isolated. Fortunately for Alfred, the Danes probably overstretched had left several Mercian counties, including the richest and most populous, more or less to themselves. Alfred must have thought that if he could control the area from Middlesex (now part of Greater London) to Stafford he would be on much more even terms. The Mercians, however, had never obeyed a West Saxon king and probably saw no reason that they should. Alfred's task was to persuade them to think of themselves as the English and not as Mercians.

Alfred once again employed magnanimity. In a brilliant stroke, he reconquered London from the Vikings and handed it over to a Mercian alderman named Æthelred (no relation to Alfred's brother). Shortly afterward, he arranged a marriage between Æthelred and his daughter Æthelflæd, later the queen of Mercia. The arrangement seems to have been (though it may never have been put into words) that Alfred would leave Mercia alone if Æthelred did not establish himself as king, leaving open the possibility for Wessex and English Mercia to unite. Whatever the agreement, when the Vikings returned to Wessex in 892, assisted by their former companions now settled in England, they met a united front and a new style of defense. They faced an army with a developed system of reliefs, a network of fortresses that they could not usually reduce, continuous harassment by small forces to prevent them scattering to plunder, rivers blocked to prevent them using their ships, and counterstrokes by English naval forces with ships built to the king's own design. In four years of campaigning (892-896), the Vikings were never beaten decisively. They showed no sign of winning, however, and never succeeded in extorting tribute.

Alfred had preserved his kingdom militarily. He had also in a most surprising way for one so uneducated conducted an equally determined campaign for the strengthening of learning and Christianity. Works that survive from his era include his own personal translations of at least four Latin books, interspersed with his own reflections on statecraft. Several other works, including The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , were created at his orders or by his inspiration. His personal prestige enabled him to force through vital reforms on every level, such as compelling all West Saxon reeves and aldermen to learn to read which, says Asser, they did “sighing greatly from the bottom of their hearts.” He saw his country at peace when he died. In his relatively short life, he became one of the most successful and farsighted kings England ever had.

Significance

Arguably, if King Alfred the Great had given up in 878, as so many others did, the world's “universal” language would now be a form of Danish. Less dramatically, but of equal significance, if he had not devised his enlightened policy of nonprovocation of English Mercia, England might have remained much more permanently divided between the South and West (Wessex), and the center, North, and East (Mercia, Northumbria, and East Anglia). The consequences of this for English, European, and U.S. history are unimaginable.

Alfred did not totally rely on force. He was no doubt ruthless at times The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records his hanging of captured Vikings, and his laws offered no forgiveness to traitors. His recorded works, however, show a strange persuasiveness and a readiness not to take all that was his due. He also seems to have been a very early practitioner of lateral thinking, creating novel solutions to a variety of problems: ship design, river-blocking, and geography. He even discovered a method of telling time by using candles. Finally, his writings show a highly attractive and immediately personal blend of decisiveness and humility. He said often that he would have liked to do better.

Anglo-Saxon Kings of England, 802-1016

Reign

• Ruler

802-839

• Egbert

839-856

• Æthelwulf

856-860

• Æthelbald

860-866

• Æthelbert

866-871

• Ethelred (Æthelred) I

871-899

• Alfred the Great

899-924

• Edward the Elder (with sister Æthelflæd)

924-939

• Æthelstan

939-946

• Edmund the Magnificent

946-955

• Eadred

955-959

• Eadwig (Edwy) All-Fair

959-975

• Edgar the Peaceable

975-978

• Edward the Martyr

978-1016

• Ethelred (Æthelred) II, the Unready

1016

• Edmund II Ironside

1016

• Ascendancy of Canute the Great (Danish line begins)

Bibliography

Brooke, Christopher. The Saxon and Norman Kings. 3d ed. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001. Contains a chapter on Alfred, together with a discussion of his successors and the problems of writing early biography.

Keynes, Simon, and Michael Lapidge, eds. Alfred the Great. New York: Penguin Books, 1983. Contains translations of important sources, including Asser’s Life of Alfred, coupled with an exhaustive introduction, bibliography, and notes.

Reuter, Timothy, ed. Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conference. Burlington, Vt.: 2003. A wide-ranging collection covering topics such as literature and the Alfredian canon, poetry and prose during Alfred’s reign, gender and inheritance in Alfred’s family history, urban policies, and more.

Shippey, T. A. “Wealth and Wisdom in King Alfred’s Preface to the Old English Pastoral Care.” English Historical Review 94 (1979): 346-355. Close analysis of Alfred’s proposal for educational reform, focusing on the king’s own words.

Stenton, F. M. Anglo-Saxon England. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. A complete history of the period, with extensive commentary on Alfred’s reign.

Stenton, F. M. Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England. Edited by Doris Maris Stenton. New York: Clarendon Press, 1970. Contains valuable pieces on Alfred’s last years.

Swanton, Michael, ed. and trans. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Rev. ed. London: Phoenix, 2000. A full translation.