For the man who had saved the kingdom and who had reigned for longer than any king of Wessex, the Chronicler’s announcement of Alfred’s death was muted. But there were other, urgent, matters for his attention in the year 900. Alfred had reigned for twenty-eight-and-a-half years and, certainly for the latter part of his reign, there were no credible internal challengers to his rule. But when an Anglo-Saxon king died, there were no clear rules on succession; whichever ætheling could command the support of the witan and gather the magnates of the kingdom to his cause would be the man who took the crown. Alfred had done his best to ensure that the ætheling would be his eldest son, Edward, by settling on him, in his will, the largest part of his land and wealth. Thus, Edward had the means to buy support, and his performance as a commander against the Viking invasions of the 890s had also served to show his ability. But there were other candidates for the crown of Wessex: the sons of Alfred’s older brother, Æthelred. Æthelred had had two sons before he died in 871, Æthelhelm and Æthelwold (yes, Æthelred kept up the family naming tradition). Born before Edward, if they had not been children on their father’s death one or other of them could have claimed the throne rather than Alfred. Through Alfred’s long reign, they had remained in the background, but as the king grew older, and made moves to signal that he wanted his son to succeed him, one of the two sons of Æthelred grew increasingly restive. Æthelwold was convinced his right to the throne was superior to that of Edward, and when Alfred died, he made his move.
Calling those men who were beholden to him to his side, Æthelwold seized the royal vills at Wimborne, where his father was buried, and Twyham. By taking Wimborne, Æthelwold was making a clarion call for his right to rule – he had stepped aside for Alfred, when the kingdom should have fallen to him, and waited. Now, with Alfred dead, Wessex was his due because of his patience and forbearance. Barricaded in Wimborne, Æthelwold proclaimed that he would live, or die, upon the holy ground where lay his father.
Edward did not see the matter in the same light. Bringing his forces to Badbury, near Wimborne, he prepared to storm the royal vill. However, before he could do so, Æthelwold chose to live and fight another day, stealing away with his retainers – but, the Chronicle reports, without his mistress, a former nun. If Æthelwold could not attract enough warriors to his side in Wessex to support his claim for the throne, he knew there were other places that would be more than happy to provide swords for an ætheling to what had become the most powerful kingdom in the country. Æthelwold fled to Northumbria, where, according to the Chronicle, the Vikings of York acclaimed him king. The son of Æthelred now had a power base from which to launch his attempt to take the throne, and the Vikings had found a wedge to break the political unity of the kingdom of Wessex.
Having secured his support in York, in 902 Æthelwold attacked East Anglia, forcing the submission of the Vikings there to him. Edward, watching, knew that the test was coming for him soon too.
In 903, the storm broke. Æthelwold, ætheling of Wessex, led his Viking forces into Mercia and started ravaging the kingdom. Edward, in response, attacked Essex and East Anglia, and then withdrew. But his rearguard, led by the ealdorman of Kent, lingered and was caught by Æthelwold’s returning army. In the savage battle that followed, both the ealdorman of Kent and Æthelwold himself were killed. While the Viking forces were the ones who held the field of battle, the death of Æthelwold removed the only rival to Edward’s rule, for Æthelred’s other son was quite content not to be king.
With unity regained in the house of Wessex, Edward, with his sister Æthelflæd and her husband Ealdorman Æthelred, the lord of the Mercians, began the slow reconquest of the Danelaw, that part of Britain that had fallen under Viking rule. Using the strategy pioneered by Alfred, Wessex and Mercia combined to put constant pressure on the Viking kingdoms, building fortified burhs to hold the land they took. When Ealdorman Æthelred suffered a debilitating illness sometime between 899 and 909, Æthelflæd took command of the Mercian half of the assault on the Danelaw, becoming known as the ‘Lady of the Mercians’. Together, brother and sister pushed deeper and deeper into Viking-held territory, slowly forcing the submission of the Viking kings to their sovereignty.
Æthelflæd died on 12 June 918, having received the submission of the Vikings of York. Edward completed the process of taking the Five Boroughs of the Viking Midlands – Derby, Leicester, Stamford, Nottingham and Lincoln – and the Chronicle concludes its entry for the year 918 by saying, ‘And all the people who had settled in Mercia, both Danish and English, submitted to him.’
Edward’s son Æthelstan took the throne in 924 upon Edward’s death. His father had reigned for twenty-four years, nearly matching Alfred’s longevity. Æthelstan continued the expansion and consolidation wrought by his father and grandfather, adding the kingdom of Northumbria to his dominion. There was now one king ruling a territory that matches the marches of England and Æthelstan himself can legitimately be called the first king of England. Where Alfred had become, by the end of his reign, the king of the Anglo-Saxons, and Edward expanded that realm to include much of the territory previously held by the Vikings, it was Æthelstan who brought all the petty kingdoms and earldoms of the land under a single dominion. Five centuries after the Angles and the Saxons had first landed on the shores of Britain, amid the fragmentation of the unity of Rome, a single country had been created again. And chief among its architects were Alfred, his son Edward, his daughter Æthelflæd and his grandson Æthelstan. The house of Wessex had weathered the storm and created a country from the wreckage of the Viking invasions. Although the Vikings would return again, the idea of England was such that it survived even when England was, in fact, conquered, and in the end the idea conquered the conquerors.
But such was the glory that Edward the Elder, Æthelstan and his successors accrued in the tenth century that Alfred’s fame waned to some extent after his death. In a culture that was still largely oral, renown rested more on the gifts of a scop than the scratchings of a chronicler. The two combined, however, in praise of Æthelstan, when the Chronicle records a praise poem telling of the king’s victory at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937. But, in the long run, memories fade where writing, in haphazard fashion, endures. And, in particular, legends began clustering like barnacles around the time in Alfred’s life which most resembled myth: his exile on the Isle of Athelney. About a hundred years after his death, the anonymous Life of St Neot included, for the first time in writing, the story that grew so much it has eventually all but swallowed up the name: ask what people today know of Alfred and they will answer, ‘Cakes.’ Given that Alfred had escaped with his household retainers, it seems unlikely that any swineherd would not have known that he had someone out of the ordinary staying in his hut – the presence of heavily armed bodyguards would have given the game away. But the way in which the story presents Alfred meekly accepting the rebuke of the swineherd’s wife when he let her cakes burn suggests a compelling insight into the king’s character: he took her chastisement, and the greater chastisement visited upon him by the Vikings, as being God’s scourge, to bear, to understand and to amend his conduct accordingly. After the relative inaction of his first period as king, Alfred emerged from the marshes a man transformed, a man on a mission from God. Only such a commission could explain the energy and persistence he brought to the transformation of Wessex such that, when the final Viking storm broke, the kingdom could weather it relatively unscathed. And through folk tales like this, Alfred’s name lived on, becoming proverbial in tale and folklore as a synonym for good governance.
However, it was not until the sixteenth century, and the Reformation, that Alfred became politically important again. As the Tudor rulers of England sought to separate themselves from the Catholic Church, Alfred slowly came to be seen as an important figure in preserving the integrity of the country against foreign invasion and influence – just as the later Tudors presented themselves. In fact, it was Elizabeth’s archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, who began collecting Anglo-Saxon manuscripts that had come on the market after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It was he who first published Asser’s Life of King Alfred in 1574. Through the seventeenth century, a number of scholars used Alfred as the vehicle for criticising or praising the monarchy, while scholars from Oxford University cultivated the (erroneous) idea that the king had been the founder of their university – thus ensuring its priority over Cambridge.
Alfred’s stock continued to rise in the eighteenth century, particularly among the nobility. Anyone wandering through the magnificent grounds of Stowe House in Buckinghamshire will find the Temple of British Worthies, a monument containing busts of sixteen men the architect, William Kent, and his client, Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Cobham, deemed most honourable in British history. Alfred was one of four monarchs and princes commemorated (the others were Edward, the Black Prince, Elizabeth I and William III) and above his bust the inscription shows how Alfred’s standing had increased through the centuries:
The mildest, justest, most beneficent of Kings; who drove out the Danes, secur’d the Seas, protected Learning, establish’d Juries, crush’d Corruption, guarded Liberty, and was the Founder of the English Constitution.
Through the mysterious alchemy of symbols, Alfred had become the prototype of the nation and of Englishmen. As England began to project power abroad with increasing confidence, Alfred came to be seen as the source of that strength, so much so that when, in 1740, Frederick, Prince of Wales, commissioned Alfred: a Masque, its finale took the form of a rousing chorus announcing Britain’s emergence as a major power and, by its own announcement, guarantor of freedom. ‘Rule Britannia’ is the finale, and Alfred, who at least did take a considerable interest in naval matters even if the results of his sea battles were rather mixed, was the man to first rule the waves and ensure Britons never will be slaves.
Through the end of the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth, as the Napoleonic Wars raged and the threat of invasion loomed large, patriotic dramas filled the London stages, with Alfred appearing as the guarantor of English liberty. When that storm was finally spent, the nineteenth century saw the millennium of Alfred’s birth as the British Empire neared its zenith of power and confidence; in such circumstances the first king of the Anglo-Saxons could hardly escape the attentions of Imperial hagiographers. In 1877, a statue to Alfred was erected in his place of birth, Wantage in Berkshire. In 1901, slightly late for the millennium of his death, another statue of Alfred was installed in Winchester. The stream of books that had flowed from the printing presses about Alfred during the nineteenth century slowed somewhat after the carnage of the First World War, when the imperial project lost its lustre in the mud of the Somme, but through the decades since there has been a steady stream of books and articles, many of the more recent bemoaning the diminution of Alfred into the king who burned the cakes. But with the excitement of the possible location of some of Alfred’s remains, and the ongoing hope that more might be located, I hope that Alfred’s stock will rise again, stripped free from propaganda and simply looking at the extraordinary life and deeds of the first king of the Anglo-Saxons, and the only king in English history to be called ‘the Great’.