Alfred the Great: pocket GIANTS

Barbara Yorke

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780750961479
• eBook ISBN: 9780750963695
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

'Alfred is one of the most remarkable rulers of any time or place. This clear, readable and insightful book shows why.' - Michael Wood

Why is Alfred the Great? A simple answer is that he has been seen as a man who saved England, invented English identity and pioneered English as a written language. He is the first Englishman for whom a biography survives so that we know more about Alfred and his ideals than we do for most people who lived over a thousand years ago.

A slightly longer answer would say that things are a bit more complicated, and that one reason Alfred seems to be so 'great' was that he made sure we were told that he was. To get the measure of Alfred we need to look at what he actually managed to achieve. Can we resurrect the 'real' King Alfred? There may be limits, but even if we have to part company with some of the Victorian adulation, we are still left with a pretty impressive and surprising person.

1

Family and Childhood, 848/49–71

Now, he was greatly loved, more than all his brothers, by his father and mother – indeed, by everybody – with a universal and profound love … As he passed through infancy and boyhood he was seen to be more comely in appearance than his brothers, and more pleasing in manners, speech and behaviour.

Asser, 8937

Alfred was born on a royal estate at Wantage in Oxfordshire. The year is given as 849 by Asser, but information in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle suggests either 847 or 848. Alfred was the youngest of the six children – five sons and a daughter – of King Æthelwulf (839–58) and his wife Osburh, a West Saxon noblewoman (see Family Tree). There were several rival royal lines in Wessex. Alfred’s branch had only occasionally dominated the kingship, though he could trace his lineage to the brother of one of the most significant earlier kings, Ine (688–725). It was Alfred’s grandfather Ecgbert (802–39) who had changed the family’s fortunes in a spectacular way. He had been able to take advantage of the declining power of the previously dominant midland kingdom of Mercia to take control of its lands in the south-east of Kent, Sussex and Essex. From the time of Ecgbert Wessex consisted of all England south of the Thames plus Essex. Wantage, where Alfred was born, lay close to the northern border of Wessex and had only recently been taken back from Mercia.

We know next to nothing of the childhood of most Anglo-Saxon kings, but Alfred (thanks to Asser) is an exception. His early years were full of incident. By the time he was 5 or 6 he had lost his mother and gained a stepmother, been to Rome twice and witnessed a coup by one of his brothers against their father.

Æthelwulf’s decision to send his youngest son (and possibly also the one next in age to him, Æthelred) to Rome in 853 is hard to fathom. Rome was an unhealthy place and the journey was long and arduous – King Ine had died on a visit there in 725, and in 958 an archbishop-elect of Canterbury froze to death in the Alps en route from the Holy See. Perhaps Æthelwulf had hoped to make the pilgrimage himself, but sent Alfred instead as the family representative, while he fended off Viking attacks at home. When Æthelwulf did eventually manage to make the journey to the centre of Western Christendom a couple of years later, he took Alfred with him. On their way back in 856 they stopped for several months at the court of Charles the Bald, grandson of the Emperor Charlemagne, mighty ruler of western Francia (see Family Tree). There Æthelwulf, who was probably in his 50s by this time, married Charles’s 12-year-old daughter, Judith. Marriage into the premier royal family of western Europe was a major achievement for the much smaller and poorer West Saxon kingdom and probably sealed a pact between the two provinces against their mutual Viking enemies.

Before leaving for Rome, Æthelwulf had divided control of his kingdom between his two oldest surviving sons (their elder brother Athelstan had died sometime between 851 and 854). The senior of the two, Æthelbald, was given responsibility for the main part of the West Saxon kingdom, while his brother Æthelbert supervised the more recently acquired lands in the south-east.

Once established in power, Æthelbald and his advisers indicated that they were not prepared to allow Æthelwulf to return. Perhaps Æthelbald had not expected his father to survive the trip to Rome. Perhaps he feared for his position as heir-apparent if Æthelwulf had more sons by his prestigious and young second wife. There was a real possibility of civil war, but a compromise was brokered whereby Æthelwulf agreed to return merely as king of the south-eastern provinces of Wessex, leaving his oldest son as ruler of the main part of the kingdom. When Æthelwulf died in 858, Æthelbert resumed control of the south-eastern provinces – and Æthelbald married Judith (perhaps the alliance with western Francia was too important to pass up). He did not, however, enjoy his new status or his new wife for long as he died shortly thereafter. Alfred’s three brothers who ruled before him all had short reigns, but there is no evidence about the circumstances surrounding their deaths.

From what we know of his will, it seems to have been Æthelwulf’s intention that Æthelred and then Alfred would succeed Æthelbald, with Æthelbert remaining in charge of the south-eastern areas – presumably as an independent kingdom. But Æthelred and Alfred were still too young to rule in their own right in 860, so Æthelbert succeeded to the whole of Wessex. When he died in 865, he was followed by Æthelred. Alfred in turn succeeded Æthelred in 871, apparently just as their father had intended.

These early and formative experiences of travel, not to mention the tumultuous toing and froing of the crown of Wessex, must have had a profound impact on the young Alfred. The feeling that he had a special relationship with Rome seems to have remained with him throughout his life, and in his later years he corresponded with popes and sent regular alms payments to Rome. It is clear that he also wanted to bring aspects of the culture and learning of the Frankish world to Wessex, not only as a result of his stay there, but perhaps also because of the influence of his young stepmother, who may have supervised his upbringing to at least 858. She was, after all, much closer in age to the young prince than she was to his father.

Asser was outraged by Æthelbald’s coup and marriage to Judith:

Once King Æthelwulf was dead, Æthelbald his son, against God’s prohibition and Christian dignity, and also contrary to the practice of all pagans, took over his father’s marriage-bed and married Judith, daughter of Charles [the Bald], king of the Franks, incurring great disgrace from all who heard of it.8

As a churchman he would have seen the marriage of a son to his father’s widow as scandalous and against Christian custom. Perhaps he was also reflecting the views of Alfred. The more formal record of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does not acknowledge that Æthelbald began ruling before his father died. Only a close reading of a list of West Saxon kings and the years they reigned confirms Asser’s account that Æthelbald had taken the throne prematurely. As we might expect, the sympathies of Alfred’s court were firmly with Æthelwulf.

We have only limited information about Alfred between 858 and the accession of his brother Æthelred in 865. Asser tells us that he had learned to read Old English by the age of 12, and particularly valued traditional poems – probably those which celebrated the great Germanic heroes of the past:9 Beowulf with its tales of monster- and dragon-slaying is the best-known example. In later life Alfred apparently lamented that he had not received a more scholarly education. The emphasis was on developing his skills as a warrior. Asser tells us that hunting was one of the skills in which the young Alfred excelled as part of his training for the realities of war.

Asser provides only one real sidelight on Alfred as an adolescent, and this concerns some mysterious illnesses.10 Asser tells us that, disturbed by lustful thoughts, the young Alfred prayed for an illness to distract him. (The sowing of wild oats is a distinct possibility, and there is even a putative candidate for an illegitimate son of Alfred.)11 Alfred’s request was rewarded with what Asser called ficus, something fig-like, perhaps a growth of some kind or a particularly nasty attack of haemorrhoids (all that horse-riding). As always, one should be careful what one wishes for, and Alfred found that although his lust abated, so too did his ability to carry out his public duties. On a hunting trip in Cornwall he prayed at the shrine of St Guerir for a less severe and less visible disease. In 868, when he was approaching 20, he experienced the first of a severe series of abdominal pains which were to recur throughout his life and leave him temporarily incapacitated. For maximum embarrassment, the first attack occurred in the midst of the celebrations of his wedding to Ealhswith, a well-connected Mercian noblewoman. Doctors at the time do not seem to have known exactly what the trouble was, and neither do we – some people assumed it was the result of witchcraft. A putative diagnosis of Crohn’s disease is often suggested, but this would surely have been too severe a malady for Alfred to have coped with in the absence of modern medicine.

How historians have responded to the accounts of Alfred’s illnesses provides something of a touchstone for their attitudes to the king and to Asser as a source of information. Some have refused to believe that a king who achieved so much could have suffered serious illness, and they have accused Asser of exaggeration. Others have seen it as confirmation that the Life was a later forgery. Yet others – especially in the nineteenth century when people often had to carry on as best they could with all sorts of afflictions – regarded the illnesses as a realistic and indeed inspiring aspect of the king’s character.

Recent commentary has provided more nuanced analysis of what might have been an early medieval churchman’s understanding of illness. Asser saw such tribulations as a sign from God.12 Just as Christ had been pierced on the Cross, so the illness which afflicted Alfred was one of several ‘nails’ (along with Viking raids and disobedient subjects) he had to endure. As a king on earth he suffered so that his subjects did not have to. The implication was that he should therefore receive from them the type of respect and obedience accorded to the King of Heaven. Such an interpretation, written in 893, boosted Alfred’s esteem while helping to nudge the king in the direction that his advisers wished him to go in order to fulfil their programme of Christian rule. Back in 868, however, the young Alfred must have struggled to make sense of what was happening to him.

Whatever the nature of his illness, it did not prevent Alfred from siring five children: two sons and three daughters. Asser says that there were a number of others who died in infancy.13 The oldest child was a girl, Æthelflaed, who went on to marry Æthelred of Mercia in 886 or 887, and – remarkably – took over his role when he died and led Mercian forces in battle. Next came a second daughter, Æthelgifu, who as a young teenager became abbess of Shaftesbury in Dorset, a nunnery founded by King Alfred. His son Edward, who was to succeed him, seems to have been close in age to the third daughter Ælfthryth, and the two were raised together at the royal court. Ælfthryth would make a diplomatic marriage towards the end of Alfred’s reign with the count of Flanders (who was the son of Alfred’s stepmother Judith by a third marriage). The youngest was Æthelweard, of whom little is known except that he had two sons, died in 920 and is buried in Winchester.

We have only scant insight into the marriage of Alfred and Ealhswith. Asser scarcely alludes to her and never even mentions her by name. We know little more than that she had an estate in Winchester which became a nunnery after Alfred’s death and that she possessed a prayer book which survives to this day and can be seen in the British Library.14 It was quite normal in the early Middle Ages for a king’s widow to retire to a nunnery after her husband’s death, though Ealhswith only survived Alfred by two years. It can at least be said that Alfred remained with Ealhswith, even after she passed childbearing age. This was by no means always the case. Alfred’s son Edward was to have three wives, and one of Edward’s grandsons married three times before dying in his early thirties. Some queens probably died in childbirth, but others had to withdraw to nunneries to allow the kings to remarry. Perhaps Alfred was affected by the experience of his early illness and the lessons his religious advisers drew from it about the necessity of continence in marriage, especially for godly kings.

Asser’s account of Alfred’s childhood is suffused with the idea of a young prince born to rule. Asser does not miss a chance to emphasise that Alfred was more skilled and accomplished than his older brothers, better at hunting, better at learning poetry by heart and better loved by his parents and by the people, as the quotation at the head of this chapter shows.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 853 the Pope had crowned the 4- or 5-year-old Alfred as king. In fact a fragment of a surviving letter from the Pope to Alfred’s father makes clear that he had merely accorded him a ceremony that made him an honorary consul.15 Alfred’s memory of what happened when he was so young may have been hazy, but it must have suited him to stress that his father had always intended him to be king. Such a destiny would have seemed unlikely in 853, but by the time of his last surviving brother’s death in 871 there was no realistic alternative. Although Æthelred had two sons, neither was old enough to rule – especially given the military emergency in that year. But when the Chronicle was being compiled and Asser was producing his biography in the early 890s the question of the succession after Alfred’s death must have been a major issue. Alfred’s son Edward was reaching an age when he was grown-up enough to rule. But should he be preferred to his older cousins, the sons of Æthelred? The portrayal of Alfred’s childhood was strongly coloured by such concerns. As far as Asser was concerned, the child was father to the man – or at least the type of man he and his fellow advisers wanted future generations to remember.

Notes

A Note about Sources

Many of the sources for Alfred’s reign can be found in translation, either full or abstracted, in Keynes, Simon & Lapidge, Michael (eds), Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (Penguin, 1983). Many of the same, and some additional sources, are contained in Whitelock, Dorothy (ed.), English Historical Documents, Volume 1, c. 550–1042 (2nd edn, Eyre Methuen, 1979). Citations from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle have been taken from this work, but a more easily obtainable tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction: Background and Sources
• 1 Family and Childhood, 848/49–71
• 2 King Alfred’s First Viking Wars, 868–78
• 3 The Years of Reconstruction, 878–92 (1): Relations with Other Kingdoms
• 4 The Years of Reconstruction, 878–92 (2): Learning and Religion
• 5 The Last Battles, 892–99
• 6 Alfred’s Posthumous Reputation
• 7 Conclusion: Alfred’s Character and Achievements
• Maps
• Family Tree
• Glossary
• Timeline
• Further Reading
• Web Links
• Copyright