4 - King Alfred the Great
He fought for the kingdom, then built the nation.
In the year 878, after seven years of war against the Vikings, King Alfred of Wessex had won his great victory at the Battle of Edington. The Viking army, starving and desperate behind the walls of Chippenham, had surrendered. Their war-leader Guthrum had knelt in a small Saxon church at Aller, in the Somerset marshes, and received Christian baptism, with Alfred standing as his godfather.
A treaty followed. By 886, after Alfred had recovered London, a formal agreement had been drawn up between Alfred and Guthrum. A line was drawn across the country, running up the Thames, up the river Lea, and then straight to Bedford and beyond, dividing the island between the English and the Vikings. Everything to the east and north of that line became the Danelaw, where Viking customs and Viking law prevailed. Everything to the south and west remained English.
It was not a perfect peace. There would be more fighting in the years to come. But for the first time since the Vikings had arrived in England, the two peoples who had spent a generation trying to destroy each other, had agreed to live side by side. And in the terms of the treaty, something new had appeared. The treaty document between Alfred and Guthrum does not speak of Wessex, or of the West Saxons. It speaks of the English. Alfred was no longer just the King of Wessex. He was becoming the king of a new English nation.
And now he turned his attention to something much harder than fighting – building.
It is easy enough to admire a king who wins battles. King Alfred had done that, against terrible odds, and the story of Edington and the marshes would be told for a thousand years. But what King Alfred did in the years after his great victory was, in many ways, more remarkable than anything he did on the battlefield. He looked at his battered, exhausted kingdom and asked a question that very few warrior-kings have ever thought to ask.
Why did I nearly lose?
The answer, when he found it, was not about courage, the Saxons had plenty of that. It was not about loyalty, or faith, or the willingness to fight. It was about organisation. The Vikings had been able to ravage through England because the English had no permanent defences, no standing army, and no way to respond quickly when an attack came. Every time the enemy appeared, the king had to send out messengers, wait for farmers to leave their fields, gather a militia, march it to the right place, and hope to arrive before the damage was done. And every time the militia had served its forty days, the men went home to tend their crops, and the country was undefended again.
King Alfred set about fixing this with the methodical intelligence of a man who understood problems and was good at solving them.
The first thing he changed was the fyrd.
The fyrd was an old system, and it was simple. Under the fyrd, when the king called, every freeman of fighting age was expected to come, bringing his own weapons and supplies. He served for a set period, usually around forty days, and then he went home. The fyrd was a citizen army, not a professional one, and it worked well enough in peacetime or for short campaigns.
Against the Vikings however, the fyrd had been a disaster.
The Vikings were professional soldiers. They did not go home after forty days. They stayed in the field for months, even years, moving fast, striking without warning, and waiting for the Saxon militia to give up and disperse before attacking again.
King Alfred’s solution was elegant. He divided the fyrd into two halves. While one half served, the other half stayed home and worked the land. When the first half’s time was up, the second half took over. This meant that there was always a force in the field, always men under arms, and always someone tending the crops so that the fighting men had food to eat. It sounds obvious now, but at the time, it was revolutionary. No English king had ever attempted it until King Alfred did.
The fyrd armies were smaller, but they were reliable. King Alfred no longer had to gamble everything on a single muster that might melt away after a few weeks. He had created something closer to a standing defence, a force that could match the Vikings’ endurance without starving the country that supported it.
But an army, however well organised, needs somewhere to stand – to live, when not fighting. King Alfred’s second great reform was the building of the burhs.
A burh was a fortified town. Not a castle, not a military camp, but a walled settlement where ordinary people lived and worked, protected by ditches, earth ramparts, and timber palisades. King Alfred planned a chain of these burhs running down the Channel coast, across to the Severn estuary, and back along the Thames valley, so that no part of southern England was more than a day’s march from a defended position.
Each burh was assigned a contributory district, a surrounding area of countryside whose people were responsible for manning the walls and keeping the fortifications in repair. The system was laid out in a remarkable document called the Burghal Hidage, which lists every burh and specifies exactly how many men were needed to defend it, calculated by the length of its walls. It is the kind of detailed, practical planning that most medieval kings had never attempted before. King Alfred did not just build defendable towns, he built a system to ensure it could be maintained and work.
The burhs changed the nature of the war. Before King Alfred, a Viking raiding party could land on the coast, ride inland, burn and plunder, and be gone before any organised defence could reach them. Now they faced a landscape studded with fortified positions, each one garrisoned and ready. A raiding party that rode past a burh risked being cut off from behind. A Viking army that tried to besiege one would find itself pinned down while the fyrd gathered to attack from neighbouring burhs.
Burhs were not glamorous, the age of beautiful stone castles was still hundreds of years away, but they worked. Building them was slow, patient, expensive work of digging ditches, raising embankments, cutting timber, and convincing local communities to maintain defences that they hoped would never be needed. It was the work of a builder, not a warrior. And it saved England.
King Alfred also looked to the sea. The Vikings’ greatest advantage had always been their ships. They could appear anywhere on the coast, strike, and vanish before a land army could respond. If England was to be safe, it needed ships of its own.
The king designed new vessels. The Saxon Chronicle describes them in some detail: long-ships that were well-nigh twice as long as the Viking vessels, some with sixty oars or more. They were both swifter and steadier and higher than the Viking ships. King Alfred did not simply copy the enemy’s design. He studied it, thought about what made the longships effective, and tried to improve on them.
It was a bold experiment, and like many bold experiments, it did not go entirely to plan. The big ships were difficult for their inexperienced crews to handle. In one early battle, when nine English ships engaged six Viking vessels, several of King Alfred’s fleet ran aground. The Chronicle records that only two enemy ships were captured, and the crews were executed by hanging at Winchester.
It was not yet the Royal Navy. But it was the beginning of the idea that a navy would define England’s future for a thousand years: that an island must command the sea around it to be safe.
With the fyrd reorganised, the burhs built, and the first English fleet at sea, King Alfred turned to the thing that perhaps mattered most to him. The law.
His Book of Laws, known as King Alfred’s Dooms, was not an entirely new creation. King Alfred was too careful, too respectful of what had come before, to sweep away centuries of custom. Instead he gathered the existing laws of Kent, Wessex, and Mercia and wove them together with Christian teaching and the old Germanic customs that still governed everyday Saxon life. He took the code of Moses from the Bible and blended it with the practical traditions of the people he ruled.
At the heart of his code was a principle that he adapted from the Gospels. The Golden Rule says, ‘Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you.’ King Alfred turned it around. His version was more cautious, more realistic, more suited to a world where people could not always be trusted to be good: ‘What ye will that other men should not do to you, that do ye not to other men.’
Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself.
It is the same idea, but from the other direction. Instead of asking people to be generous, it asks them not to be cruel. And King Alfred added an instruction for judges: put yourself in the other person’s place, and consider what judgement would satisfy you, if you were the one seeking justice.
In the preamble to his new laws, King Alfred wrote something even more remarkable. He explained, modestly, that he had not dared to set down too many laws of his own, ‘for I cannot tell what will meet with the approval of our successors.’ A king who had defeated the greatest military power in northern Europe, who had saved his country from conquest, who had every right to impose his will on anyone, chose instead to say: I do not know what future generations will want. I will leave room for them.
The laws of King Alfred, continually added to by his successors, grew over the following centuries into the body of customary law that became the foundation of English Common Law, the legal tradition that still governs not only England but much of the world.
King Alfred cared about the law because he cared about fairness and justice and learning. A kingdom without educated people could not be justly governed, because the men who administered the law and ran the churches could not read the books that told them how to do it.
The state of learning in England at the time appalled him. King Alfred wrote a letter to the Bishop of Worcester that has been preserved, and its words are worth reading because that letter tell us more about King Alfred the man than almost anything else he wrote.
King Alfred recalled how there had once been wise men throughout England, in both the Church and ordinary daily life, and how kings had obeyed God while keeping peace and enlarging their territory. He remembered how foreigners had once come to England to seek wisdom and instruction. He said with sadness, that learning had fallen away so badly that there were very few men left who could understand their service books in English, or even translate a letter from Latin.
King Alfred understood that a country which cannot read its own laws, its own history, and its own prayers is a country in danger of losing itself. The Vikings had burned the monasteries where learning lived. The books had been destroyed, and the teachers killed. A whole generation had grown up without the knowledge that had once made England one of the most learned kingdoms in Europe.
King Alfred set about restoring that learning. He invited scholars from across the kingdom, from Wales, and from the Continent. He established schools. He translated books from Latin into English himself, working through them slowly and carefully, so that ordinary people who could not read Latin might be able to read them.
And he did something else, something that would prove more lasting than any fortress or fleet of ships. He commissioned the writing of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a year-by-year record of events in England, beginning with the coming of the Romans and continuing through his own reign and beyond. It was kept up by monks in various monasteries for more than two centuries after King Alfred’s death, and it remains one of the most important historical documents in the English language. Without it, we would know almost nothing of this period. King Alfred did not just make history. He made sure it was written down.
All of these reforms were tested in 892, when the Vikings came again.
This time the invasion was enormous. Two hundred and fifty ships appeared off the Kent coast, carrying a great Viking army that had spent years ravaging France. They had besieged Paris itself, battered at its walls for more than a year, and failed to take it. Beaten on the Continent, hungry and restless, they turned once more to England.
They were followed by a second fleet of eighty ships under a war-leader called Hæsten, who sailed up the Thames and fortified himself on the southern bank at Milton, near Sittingbourne. Kent was caught between two Viking forces, attacked from the north and south at once.
But England in 892 was not the England of 878. The burhs held. The reorganised fyrd could keep men in the field for months without the army melting away. King Alfred’s son Edward, still in his early twenties, proved himself a formidable commander. His son-in-law Ethelred of Mercia fought alongside him. The old king, worn down by illness, was not always at the head of the armies now, but his system held, and the young leaders he had raised struck hard.
At Benfleet, on the Thames below London, King Alfred’s forces stormed the Viking camp, captured Hæsten’s wife and his two sons, and burned every ship they could not carry away. When a railway was being built a thousand years later, workmen found charred ship timbers and skeletons in the earth.
And then King Alfred did something that baffled his own people. He sent Hæsten’s wife and sons back.
The wife he returned on simple grounds of humanity. The two boys he returned because they had been baptised as Christians. King Alfred was godfather to one of them, Ethelred of Mercia, to the other. They were Christian brothers, and King Alfred would not punish children for their father’s war.
His people were furious. The kingdom was fighting for its survival against brutal raiders, and the king was sending hostages home out of mercy. It made no sense to them. But this single act, above all others, is the reason why King Alfred is now called ‘the Great.’ Not from his battles, his laws, the ships or the burhs, but because of mercy.
The war ground on for four more years, but the Vikings could not break through. In 896 it ended. The great army dispersed, some settling in the Danelaw, some drifting back to France. The Chronicle, summing up years of desperate fighting in a single weary sentence, declared that by God’s mercy the Viking army had not afflicted the English people too greatly.
King Alfred died in 899. He was about fifty years old, which was old for a man who had spent his life at war and had suffered from painful illness since his youth. He was buried at Winchester, the capital of Wessex, in the Old Minster. Later his body was moved to the New Minster, and later still to Hyde Abbey, just outside the city walls. By the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, six hundred years after his death, the exact location of his remains had been lost. A single bone fragment, found during excavations in 2014, may belong to King Alfred or to his son Edward, but no one can say for certain. The greatest English king lies in an unmarked and unknown grave.
King Alfred left behind a kingdom that had been transformed. When he became king at twenty-two, Wessex was the last Saxon kingdom standing, battered, isolated, and on the edge of destruction. When he died, England south of the Humber was united, defended, and governed by law. The fyrd could be called and kept in the field. The burhs guarded the coasts and the river valleys. Ships patrolled the Channel. The laws were written down.
He left behind a son, Edward, who would carry the work forward with the same energy and skill. And he left behind a daughter, Æthelflæd, who would become the Lady of the Mercians and prove herself one of the most remarkable leaders of the age, conquering Leicester and receiving offers of submission from as far north as York.
But perhaps the most lasting thing King Alfred left behind was the idea that a king’s job was not just to fight, but to build. Not just to win battles but to make laws, teach children, write books, design ships, plan towns, and think carefully about what kind of country his people deserved to live in.
He was not called ‘the Great’ in his own lifetime. That title came later, when people looked back and tried to find a word large enough to contain everything King Alfred had done. He is the only English monarch ever to receive it.
The boy who had visited Rome, the young prince who had charged like a wild boar at Ashdown, the fugitive king who had burned the cakes in a cowherd’s cottage, the commander who had stepped out of the marshes to rally his people at Egbert’s Stone, had become something more than a warrior or a survivor. He had become a builder, and the things he built, the laws, the defences, the learning, the very idea of England itself, outlasted everything the Vikings ever destroyed.