In 847AD, in the Kingdom of Wessex,
an Anglo-Saxon prince named Alfred, later Alfred the Great, was born.
But first what is an Anglo-Saxon well, by about 50AD England and Wales had been
incorporated into the Roman Empire, but due to the small problem that they were
being invaded by just about everyone, Rome left the British Isles around the year 400,
never to return. Britain’s native peoples, the Britons (a term which describes a whole
bunch of similar though certainly distinct people groups, but we’ll use the broad
term Britons for simplicity’s sake) were suddenly free to rule themselves. Though,
the power vacuum left by Rome’s absence made them a tempting and fairly easy target for anyone
looking to seize land and glory for themselves. And that is where the Anglo-Saxon’s come in.
The Angles and Saxons were two Germanic people groups native to northern Germany and southern
Denmark who migrated to Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries and eventually drove the
Britons out of everywhere bar Wales. The period from the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons
to the year 927 is usually referred to as the Heptarchy meaning rule by seven,
because of the seven major Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms that ruled England at that time. Though keep in
mind that as one gets closer to the year 927 more and more of those Kingdoms were absorbed into
others. Also in 793 the monastery Lindisfarne in Northumbria was raided by Scandinavians,
Vikings, beginning the Viking age and drastically changing the dynamics of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms.
So to come back to Alfred the Great, in the year 865 his elder brother Aethelred became
King of Wessex, which now looked like this, and Alfred entered public life for the first time as
his designated successor. Incidentally, unlike in traditional royal succession, Aethelred succeeded
not his father, but his elder brother, who himself had been preceded by another brother. This was
allowed because under West Saxon law, succession was not guaranteed by birth order, and a council
of West Saxon nobles ultimately decided which royal would become the new king. It’s for this
reason that the adult Alfred was made Aethelred’s successor and not the King’s own young son.
Also in 865, a Danish force, the Great Heathen Army, landed in East Anglia,
whose King promptly gave them horses in exchange for short lived peace. We don’t know the exact
size of the Great Heathen Army but it was much larger than any Viking raiding party that came
before it because this time, the Northmen had come to England not just to take wealth, but to conquer
the now four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms; Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, and of course Wessex.
By 868 Northumbria and East Anglia had both fallen
to the Vikings and under the leadership of the warrior-king Ivar the Boneless,
they were making incursions into Wessex’s neighbour, and ally, Mercia. Aethelred,
accompanied by Alfred rode out to defend Mercia from the Danes but by December 870 the invaders
had reached Wessex itself. The West Saxons and the Vikings fought a series of engagements
across Wessex notably the siege and then Battle of Reading on January 4th, the Battle of Basing
on January 22nd and the Battle of Merton on the 22nd of March. All three were Viking victories.
Interestingly the leader of the Vikings invading Wessex was a man called Halfdan Ragnarrson,
the brother of Ivar the Boneless. According to legend they in particular,
as well as several other brothers, were motivated to invade England because their
father Ragnarr Lodbrok, the King of Denmark and Sweden, had been thrown
into a pit of snakes by the Aella the King of Northumbria after a failed raid on England.
In April, 871 Aethelred died, possibly from injuries sustained at the Battle
of Merton. He was succeeded by Alfred who promptly lost to the Vikings again in May,
but he wouldn’t lose to them again, instead Alfred paid the Danes off in exchange for
peace. So did the Mercians the next year, but by 878 the Vikings had invaded again
and took control of the Kingdom. The rest of Anglo-Saxon England was also firmly within the
influence of Viking lords, the most powerful of whom was the new King of East Anglia, Guthrum.
In 876 he invaded Wessex but Alfred’s forces managed to hold him off. In 878
Guthrum invaded Wessex again, this time pushing Alfred south into the marshes of Somerset,
but a few weeks after Easter, Alfred managed to raise an army and he defeated Guthrum at
the battle of Edington in early May. With it clear that neither side could effectively
defeat the other the two men agreed to a peace treaty that would formally be signed in 886. It
split England between Alfred’s Wessex, which received half of Mercia, and the Danelaw,
a loose union of Viking Kingdoms led by Guthrum, which ruled the rest of the country.
Importantly, Mercia was not annexed into Wessex but it did cease to be a kingdom, instead it
became subject to Alfred and the new Lord of Mercia married Alfred’s daughter Æthelflæd. Around
this time Alfred also began to call himself the King of the Anglo-Saxons not just King of Wessex.
So, with peace mostly secure Alfred set about reforming his Kingdom. At his heart, he was
more of an intellectual than a warrior, but before he could focus on improving any of his subjects'
lives, he first had to make sure that the Vikings weren’t going to come back and take them. The most
impactful of Alfred’s reforms was the creation of the burh system. The burh’s were more than
30 fortified settlements built across Wessex and Mercia that made it so that no one within Alfred’s
realm was more than a day’s ride from the security of strong walls and soldiers. They also served as
markets for England’s primarily rural population and later as locations for England’s royal mints.
Each burh was given a value which determined how many soldiers it was expected to provide
both for its own defense and to serve the King in times of war. This value, denoted as a hide,
fluctuated over time, and what exactly the value of one hide was at any given time isn’t
always 100% clear. For example, if one hide was worth roughly one fully armed soldier,
then Alfred’s army would have consisted of some 27,000 men. A staggering amount for that time,
but if 5 hides were worth one soldier, his army would have been closer to 5,500 men strong.
Regardless, the burhs, combined with two other reforms of Alfred’s: the creation of England's
first standing army and a naval buildup, made defense of his lands considerably easier,
and when much of the Great Heathen Army returned in 892, they were held off and repulsed.
Back at his court, Alfred focused on turning his kingdom into a center for scholarship.
He believed that Viking raids on monasteries, medieval Europe’s most important intellectual
organizations, had left England lacking learned men and so he invited many of Europe’s brightest
minds, including St. Grimbald and the monk Asser, to join his court. He was right to some
extent but the existence of scholarly works from Mercia from around that time, as well as Asser
who was from Wales (the princes of which had recently sworn fealty to Alfred) have created
debate among modern historians as to exactly how much Viking raids affected learning in Britain.
Alfred himself was undoubtedly intelligent though, he spoke both Anglo-Saxon and Latin,
had a penchant for English poetry, and unlike most European Kings he encouraged
teaching to be done in the common language, English rather than Latin.
It was during Alfred’s reign that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which documents
English history from the arrival of Rome to well past the Norman conquest,
courtesy of later writers, was written. It serves as one of our main sources of Anglo-Saxon history.
In his personal life, Alfred was married to a Mercian Noblewoman named Ealswith with whom he had
three daughters and two sons, including Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Alfred’s successor
Edward the Elder. He is described by Asser in The Life of Alfred as “more comely in appearance than
his other brothers, and more pleasing in manner, speech and behaviour ... [and] in spite of all
the demands of the present life, it has been the desire for wisdom, more than anything else,
together with the nobility of his birth, which have characterized the nature of his noble mind.”
Admittedly though, Alfred was paying Asser, so draw your own conclusions. Alfred died in 899
of unknown causes, though he likely suffered from Crohn’s disease and haemorrhoids for all his life.
Alfred the Great was never given that epithet during his life, it was ascribed to him by writers
during the Protestant Reformation who saw him as an example of a king uncorrupted by the Catholic
Church and he also wasn’t the first monarch to claim rulership over all England. In fact,
his domain wasn’t even the largest up to that time, but as King of the Anglo-Saxons,
he ensured that England, or at least the parts he controlled, would be safe from Vikings,
and would remain intellectually vibrant (at least for the middle ages). The house of Wessex,
which he headed would, from his treaty with Guthrum onwards, rule progressively
larger parts of England until his grandson Aethelstan fully united the Kingdom in 927.
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