Despite becoming popular only after the publication of a royal biography entitled Alfred the Great in 1709, King Alfred’s title is widely regarded as well-deserved. The 31-year-old ascended to the crown of Wessex in 871 to find a sweeping threat across the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms driven by the Great Heathen Army. From then on, he worked with tenacity and wit and died in 899 claiming to be the King of the Anglo-Saxons, having forced the Danish threat to disband.
When the Great Heathen Army first invaded England in 865 Alfred’s older brother Æthelred was king. Seemingly unstoppable, they had quickly taken Northumbria and East Anglia. Mercia didn’t succumb to their force so soon thanks to help sent from Wessex, eventually managing to negotiate a truce. In 870, the Viking horde moved onto Wessex, whose people fought back with desperate fury. After one exulting victory at Ashdown, many West Saxons believed that the Danes would retire from their land. However, many clashes followed, and many losses. Then, the ranks of the heathen host were replenished by a new Viking fleet, and at this crucial moment, King Æthelred died.
With the fourth king of Wessex dead in just thirteen years, the kingdom’s warrior class greatly depleted and the Viking force terrifyingly strong, Alfred inherited the throne with a mammoth task on his hands. Understandably, his first confrontation was a defeat at Wilton, which, according to his biographer, he had gone ahead with ‘almost unwillingly’ because his numbers were so few. Alfred consequently made peace with the Vikings on the condition that they were to leave, which would have cost his kingdom vast quantities of valuables.
While the Vikings did withdraw from Wessex as agreed, occupying London for the winter, Alfred was conscious that this meant only temporary reprieve. Although, this was prolonged by rebellion in Northumbria, diverting the invaders. After this, in 873, they turned their attention once again towards Mercia, where they quickly occupied Repton. This heralded the eventual fall of Mercia, leaving Wessex the only surviving Anglo-Saxon kingdom.
Again, however, Alfred got lucky; the Great Army split, one force going to Northumbria, led by Halfdan, and the other remaining in the South, led by Guthrum. The latter was the force which would break Alfred’s fortuitous streak, as in 875 the attack on Wessex resumed. They moved quickly past the Saxon levies to Wareham. Here, Alfred again tried for peace to make the Danes to leave his kingdom, yet immediately after the peace was agreed they rode west, seizing Exeter. A stand-off ensued for several months, however in the summer of 877 the Vikings once again agreed to peace terms and, this time, they did withdraw to Mercia.
Despite seeming to settle down and hang up their swords in the north and south, the Danish army launched another attack on Wessex in January 878. Their first target was Chippenham, attacking while Alfred and his forces were feasting and celebrating, thus catching them off-guard. The West Saxons suffered a terrible defeat, yet, unlike many Saxon leaders and men who fled overseas or submitted to their authority, Alfred refused to surrender and disappeared into the woods of Somerset, accompanied only by a small band of nobles, soldiers and thegns.
Alfred and his crew established a fortress of their own in Athelney, surrounded by swamps and only accessible by punts. From here, he made secret communication with other ealdormen and thegns who had submitted to Danish dominion in Wessex or also gone into hiding. In May, they rode east to Egbert’s Stone on the border of Somerset and Wiltshire, a prearranged rallying point. There, Alfred was joined by the supporting people of those shires, as well as those of western Hampshire. He had come out of hiding with one purpose – to confront the Danes and force them out of his kingdom. He marched his forces north, towards Chippenham, and met Guthrum’s Viking Army at Edington. A day-long battle followed, and eventually Alfred’s Saxon army forced them back, presumably to Chippenham. The Saxons chased and slaughtered any Danes that did not reach the compound in time, then laying siege on the remaining Vikings. Having been deprived of all livestock, Guthrum sought terms of surrender after just a few days.
In the treaty that followed a modus vivendi was arranged between Guthrum and the West Saxon king: limits were fixed, arrangements were made for trade, and the elements of border law, that were to provide for peaceful intercourse, were agreed to. Above all, Guthrum and his men were to accept the Christian faith. The terms were fairly well kept by the Danes, and Alfred had again freed Wessex of its unwelcome presence.
These conditions demonstrate the magnitude of Alfred’s win at the Battle of Edington, as never before had the Vikings made peace on such terms. Most momentously, the agreement to convert the Viking leaders to Christianity is the first recorded instance in Britain. While it was Alfred himself who raised Guthrum from the font in the process, becoming his godfather, this must not be seen as a naïve misplacement of Alfred’s belief in forgiveness. Instead, it was a major shift in his strategy.
Previously, Saxon leaders, including Alfred, had paid off the Danes to keep them at bay. The Vikings’ refusal to play by Christian rules had made this especially undependable. Yet, in making his defeated enemies receive baptism, Alfred aimed to normalise relations with the new rulers on his borders. Further, the submission and acceptance of the Danes to convert indicated a willingness on their side to abide by these Christian rules.
Alfred and Guthrum undoubtedly discussed the future of Mercia in the two weeks they spent together after the baptism. In the months to follow, the western part of Mercia was annexed to Wessex, though it was still under the rule of the Saxon client ruler, Ceolwulf, put up by the Vikings. Guthrum and his forces stayed in this part of England for the next year, during which time Ceolfwulf’s reign mysteriously ended. It’s not known if they drove him out or he died, but if the latter was the case, then it was certainly convenient timing. It was likely in this period that Guthrum and Alfred drew the definitive line between their territories. Crucially, Alfred retained London, and also northwards along the River Lea. The border then continued right through the heart of Mercia, perhaps along a similar line to which Guthrum and Ceolwulf had agreed two years earlier.
However, there must have been some Mercians who objected to this dismemberment of Mercia. The most notable may have been Æthelred, a Mercian nobleman who by 883 was ruling this western rump of Mercia. Alfred took steps to assuage these feelings. Firstly, he never claimed that Mercia was being subsumed by Wessex. Secondly, he promoted the idea that the peoples of Wessex and Mercia were united by their common ethnicity, perhaps against the Danes. These attempts prompted Alfred and his advisors to claim that he was not just the king of Wessex, but of all the English peoples, therefore making explicit the difference between Mercia and Wessex. Such proclamations became more frequent in the following years, furthering the idea that the people of Mercia had not been simply annexed, but had become part of a new, larger entity – ‘the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’.
With this newfound peace with Guthrum in hand, Alfred began to strengthen the defensive system of, what he might have called, his new kingdom. He is widely credited with turning the situation around for the Anglo-Saxons, where previously the Vikings had been able to burst unopposed into a kingdom and seize an existing centre of power, as with Repton in Mercia. Burhs were fortified settlements, often built from scratch, with precisely laid out grids of streets and serving both military and urban functions – they could accommodate hundreds, sometimes thousands of soldiers and citizens. While Alfred himself did not come up with the idea of a burh, and perhaps was not exclusively responsible for all their constructions, he can be credited with the introduction of an effective, functioning network of them all across Wessex and western Mercia.
Burhs worked so well primarily because they could be permanently garrisoned with soldiers. During Alfred’s reign, about 30 burhs were built, in each of which one soldier was expected to defend about four feet of wall. Naturally, this meant that Alfred would require a huge overhaul of soldiers to fill them. To do so, he widened the participation in warfare from just the military elite, trying to persuade men that it was their duty to contribute to the kingdom’s defence. He would also often coerce individuals, and even churches, to contribute by depriving them of their lands or goods.
From 885 to 896, the network of burhs created by Alfred was constantly put to the test by various Viking forces – and was consistently effective. This was not only demonstrated by the peace that Alfred enjoyed in the final three years of his life, after the Viking attack on Wessex from 892 to 896 subsided, but also by the faith that he could put in his thegns, ealdormen, and the thousands of soldiers manning his burhs. This was especially crucial in 893, as while Alfred found himself caught between two Viking attacks in the southwest, the defence of Mercia from Danes this time fell on Alfred’s loyal subjects across his burhs. They successfully forced the Vikings from the north, now led by a man called Hastein, back into Northumbria.
The Viking raids on England since 793 and the campaign of the Great Heathen Army had not only ruined the economies of the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and rid them of many riches, but also had taken a particularly heavy toll on the Church. The raiders saw the libraries of minsters and cathedrals as worthless and put their contents continually to the torch. Alfred lamented this state of affairs and the deterioration of learning that had arisen from it. By the time that Alfred came to the throne, few could understand divine services or translate a letter from Latin into English. Often, scribes would produce charters in horrible Latin, ridden with mistakes. Alfred was determined to correct this, aiming not only to rebuild monasteries and churches and their libraries but also to improve the literacy of his clergy.
The king’s first initiative was to employ scholars from England and overseas to improve his own comprehension of books written in Latin and to produce books written in English, as before scholarly works had been written only in Latin or Greek. He also compelled his ealdormen and thegns to read, threatening their positions, and set up a school in court for both noble and non-noble boys. His broader aim was to make all Englishmen literate in their own language for use in both administration and literature. Alfred’s generalisation of the English language in his restoration of culture and literacy also promoted the idea that all the English are one people, and therefore the inhabitants of Wessex and Mercia not only shared ethnicity but a culture and language.
Alfred died on 26 October 899 as ruler over the whole English people except those under Danish rule, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us (not the first king to rule over all of England, as is often wrongly believed). To have saved his kingdom from destruction and wrested part of another from Danish conquest is certainly remarkable, but to so effectively bolster the defences of both and to unite them under a common identity is equally as deserving of praise.
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Morris, M., 2021. The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginning of England.
York Powell, F., 1901. The Alfred Millenary of 1901.
John, E., 1996. Reassessing Anglo-Saxon England.
James, E., Campbell, J. & Wormald, P., 1991. The Anglo Saxons.