Alfred the Great

Alfred the Great: The King Who Fought Back With Books

In January 878 the Danish army under Guthrum attacked Chippenham over Christmas and the King of Wessex ran for his life. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it without decoration: he made his way with a little band by wood and swamp, built a fort at Athelney in the Somerset marshes after Easter, and from there kept fighting. Five months later he had won the battle that saved English England. Twenty years after that he was translating Boethius into a language most of his bishops could barely read.

The Fourth Son

He was born around 849 at Wantage, youngest of the six children of King Æthelwulf of Wessex and his first wife Osburh. Alfred could not read until he was twelve, though he had an extraordinary memory for poetry and psalms — a detail that matters, because the man who would later stake his reign on literacy came to it late and knew exactly what its absence cost.

Three older brothers ruled before him. Under the last, Æthelred, Alfred held the office of *secundarius*, something like an acknowledged heir, and fought beside him against the Great Heathen Army from 868. When Æthelred died in April 871 Alfred took the throne over his nephews' claims, by an earlier agreement between the brothers.

Nine Bad Years

The early reign was a losing war. Battles at Englefield, Reading and Ashdown in the winter of 870–71 produced mixed results at best; eventually Alfred was reduced to buying the Danes off. Then came the Christmas raid on Chippenham and the flight into the marshes.

What happened next was the hinge. Around May 878 Alfred summoned the levies of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire to Egbert's Stone and met Guthrum at Edington. He broke the Danish army, pursued it to Chippenham and starved it out. The terms he then offered were startling: not extermination but conversion. Three weeks later Guthrum and twenty-nine of his chiefs were baptised at Aller with Alfred standing as godfather. The Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum drew a line up the Thames to the Lea, on to Bedford and along the Ouse to Watling Street, creating the territory known as the Danelaw and leaving Alfred western Mercia and London.

The Machine

Alfred used the peace of the 880s to rebuild the kingdom's defences from first principles, and this is the work that historians most admire. He built a network of thirty-three fortified towns — *burhs* — spaced roughly thirty kilometres apart, so that no part of Wessex was more than a day's march from a garrison. The document known as the Burghal Hidage records the arithmetic: Wallingford's assessment of 2,400 hides meant 2,400 men to man 1.88 miles of wall. The whole system required something like 27,000 soldiers, about a quarter of the free male population of Wessex, drawn through the *trinoda necessitas*, the triple obligation of military service, fortress work and bridge repair.

Some burhs were repurposed Roman towns like Winchester; others were vast new earthworks like Burpham. Twin towns straddling rivers, joined by fortified bridges, blocked the waterways Viking fleets depended on, and military roads called *herepaths* linked the network. He also reorganised the *fyrd* into a rotating force so that men could hold garrisons and take the field at the same time — the difference between a militia and an army. In 896 he ordered longships built at sixty oars, roughly double the Viking standard.

The test came in 892, when a Danish force arrived with 330 ships. It was beaten repeatedly at Farnham, Benfleet, Buttington and on the Thames and Lea, and by 897 the survivors had dispersed. The ships proved less successful — too large for estuaries, and one 896 engagement cost 120 English dead against 62 Danes.

The Programme

Alfred's other campaign was against ignorance, which he regarded as a security problem. In the preface to his version of Gregory's *Pastoral Care* he complained that learning had decayed so far in England that very few men south of the Humber could understand their services in English. He founded a court school for royal children, nobles and commoners in English and Latin, and imported scholars: Grimbald and John the Saxon from Francia, Plegmund and Wærferth from Mercia, and Asser from St David's in Wales, who wrote his biography.

Then he did something no other early medieval king attempted. He translated, or presided over the translation of, the books he judged most necessary to Christian government: Gregory's *Pastoral Care*, sent to every bishop; Boethius's *Consolation of Philosophy*; Augustine's *Soliloquies*; the first fifty Psalms. Each copy of the *Pastoral Care* went out with an *æstel*, a reading pointer worth fifty gold mancuses — almost certainly what the Alfred Jewel, dug up in Somerset in 1693 and inscribed AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN, "Alfred ordered me to be made," actually is.

His law code, the *domboc*, runs to 120 chapters, matching the age of Moses at his death. It opens with the Ten Commandments in English and favours monetary compensation over mutilation — except for treason, which could not be bought off. He reviewed contested judgments personally and demanded that judges be literate, on pain of losing their posts. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun in his reign, gave the English a continuous account of themselves.

Why Alfred Is Called a Genius

The distinctive quality here is systems thinking in an age with no vocabulary for it. Most successful early medieval kings won battles; Alfred lost most of his and won anyway, because after Edington he stopped fighting the war he was in and redesigned the conditions of the next one. The burh network was an integrated design — spacing calculated against marching distance, manning calculated against wall length, roads laid to move troops between nodes, rivers closed by paired forts, and a rotating levy so the whole thing could run indefinitely. It converted Viking strength, which lay in speed and surprise, into Viking weakness, since raiders now faced sieges they had no equipment for. When the 892 invasion came, the system worked without him needing to win a decisive battle at all.

That he then spent his remaining years turning Latin philosophy into English is the second, stranger half of the case. He understood that a kingdom which could not read could not administer itself, and he treated that as a defence problem rather than a pious hobby.

The counter-case is real. He was called "the Great" only from around the thirteenth century, popularised in the sixteenth, and inflated enormously by Victorians who wanted a founder for the Royal Navy and the British Empire. Much of what we know comes from Asser, who wrote for Alfred and about him. The ships were a failure. He founded only two monasteries and had to import monks for one. He did not unify England — his son Edward and grandson Æthelstan did that. And the "genius" was not solitary: the translations came from a network of imported scholars, which is why specialists now say Alfredian rather than Alfred's. What survives scrutiny is the design of the defensive system and the decision to make literacy state policy. That is enough.

Legacy

He married Ealhswith in 868; their children included Edward the Elder, who succeeded him, and Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians. He suffered all his life from a painful illness — modern readings of Asser's symptoms suggest Crohn's disease or haemorrhoids — hunted expertly, carried a prayer book everywhere, and corresponded with the Patriarch of Jerusalem. He died on 26 October 899, aged about fifty.

He remains the only native-born English monarch called the Great. The burhs became towns that are still towns; the Chronicle he commissioned is still the spine of early English history; and the principle he insisted on, that a state should be able to read its own laws, outlasted every wall he built.

Achievements

• monarch of England (871–899)
• King of Wessex (871–899)