Alfred the Great

Alfred was king of Wessex, in southern England, from 871 to 899. He survived a Viking onslaught that destroyed every other English kingdom, defeated the Danish leader Guthrum in 878, and then reorganised his kingdom's defences so thoroughly that later Viking attacks failed. A patron of learning who translated Latin books into English himself, he laid the groundwork for the unified Kingdom of England that his son and grandson built, and he is the only English king to be called "the Great".

Alfred was born, probably in 849, at the royal estate of Wantage, then in Berkshire. He was the youngest son of King Æthelwulf of Wessex and his wife Osburh. With four older brothers he had little prospect of the throne. As a small boy he was sent to Rome in 853, and in 855 he went again with his father, who stayed on the way back at the court of the Frankish king Charles the Bald. A story told by his biographer, that his mother promised a book of English poetry to whichever son learned it first and that Alfred won, may be true or may be a flattering invention.

Much of what is known about his life comes from that biographer, Asser, a Welsh monk who joined Alfred's court and wrote a life of the king in 893, while he was still alive. Asser modelled parts of it on Einhard's life of Charlemagne, and it is plainly written to praise. One historian, Alfred Smyth, argued that it is a later forgery, but most scholars accept it as genuine. The other main source, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was compiled in Wessex in Alfred's reign and naturally presents events from his side.

In 865 a large Danish force, which the Chronicle calls the Great Heathen Army, landed in East Anglia. Within five years it had taken York, killed the king of East Anglia and dominated Mercia. In 871 it attacked Wessex. Alfred fought alongside his brother King Æthelred at the battle of Ashdown and in a series of other clashes that year, and when Æthelred died in April 871 Alfred, now about 22, became king. After further defeats he made peace, probably by paying the Danes to leave.

They returned in 876 under Guthrum. In January 878 they made a surprise attack on Chippenham, where Alfred was spending the Christmas season, and most of Wessex submitted. Alfred escaped with a small band into the marshes of Somerset and built a fort at Athelney, from which he raided the Danes. The famous story that while hiding he was sheltering in a peasant's hut and let her cakes burn first appears in a source written about a century later, and there is no evidence that it happened.

In May 878 Alfred gathered the men of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire and defeated Guthrum's army at Edington in Wiltshire. He besieged the survivors until they surrendered. Guthrum agreed to leave Wessex and to accept baptism into Christianity, and some weeks later he and about 30 of his leading men were baptised, with Alfred as Guthrum's godfather. Guthrum withdrew to East Anglia and ruled it as a Christian king. A later treaty, probably from around 880, set a frontier running along the Thames, the River Lea and Watling Street, with the lands to the north and east under Danish rule, the area later known as the Danelaw.

In 886 Alfred took control of London, restored its defences and handed it to Æthelred, lord of the Mercians, who married Alfred's daughter Æthelflæd. From around this time Alfred was styled king of the Anglo-Saxons, claiming authority over all the English not ruled by the Danes.

Alfred used the years of peace to rebuild his defences. He created a network of about 30 fortified towns, called burhs, placed so that almost no one in Wessex lived more than a day's march from one. Some reused Roman walls, as at Winchester; others, such as Wallingford, were laid out new with a regular grid of streets. A document known as the Burghal Hidage records how many men each district had to provide to garrison them. He also divided the army so that half the men were in the field while the other half stayed home, keeping a force ready all year round, and he had larger warships built to meet raiders at sea.

When a new Danish army arrived from the continent in 892, these measures worked. Over four years of campaigning the invaders were harried from burh to burh, unable to take the fortified towns or to live off the land, and in 896 they broke up, some settling in the Danelaw and others leaving for Francia.

Alfred issued a law code, drawing on the laws of earlier kings of Wessex, Kent and Mercia and opening with a long passage based on the law of Moses. He believed that the Viking disasters were a punishment for the decline of learning, and in a preface he lamented that very few priests south of the Humber could understand their services in Latin. His remedy was to have books "most needful for all men to know" translated into English and to encourage free-born young men to learn to read.

He brought scholars to his court from Mercia, Wales and Francia. The translations of Pope Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, of Augustine's Soliloquies and of the first fifty psalms are attributed to Alfred himself, though historians debate how much of the work was his and how much his helpers'. Other works, such as the English versions of Bede's history and of Orosius, came from the same circle. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a year-by-year history of the English, was compiled at about the same time.

Alfred suffered for most of his adult life from a painful illness that Asser describes but does not name. He died on 26 October 899, aged about 50, and was buried at Winchester, his main royal centre. His remains were later moved to Hyde Abbey, and after the abbey was destroyed in the sixteenth century they were lost; a fragment of pelvis found there in 2014 may belong to him or to his son.

His son Edward the Elder and his daughter Æthelflæd won back much of the Danelaw, and his grandson Æthelstan became the first king to rule all of England in 927. Alfred's descendants held the throne until the Danish conquest of 1016 under Cnut and again from 1042 until 1066. The title "the Great" was used of him by the thirteenth century but became common only in the sixteenth. Victorian Britain turned him into a national hero, founder of the navy, the law and the liberties of the English, and raised a large statue to him in Winchester in 1901. Historians today are more cautious, since so much of his image rests on writings produced at his own court, but they generally agree that his military reforms and his promotion of English as a written language were real and lasting achievements of the Viking Age.