Alfred the Great

War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England

Richard Abels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317900405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This biography of Alfred the Great, king of the West Saxons (871-899), combines a sensitive reading of the primary sources with a careful evaluation of the most recent scholarly research on the history and archaeology of ninth-century England. Alfred emerges from the pages of this biography as a great warlord, an effective and inventive ruler, and a passionate scholar whose piety and intellectual curiosity led him to sponsor a cultural and spiritual renaissance. Alfred's victories on the battlefield and his sweeping administrative innovations not only preserved his native Wessex from viking conquest, but began the process of political consolidation that would culminate in the creation of the kingdom of England. Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England strips away the varnish of later interpretations to recover the historical Alfredpragmatic, generous, brutal, pious, scholarly within the context of his own age.

Chapter 1
Alfred’s Wessex

To his companion and biographer Asser, Alfred was ‘my venerable and most pious lord, ruler of all the Christians of the island of Britain, Alfred king of the Anglo-Saxons’. In choosing this royal style, Angul-Saxonum rex, Asser echoed formulas used in Alfred’s charters from at least the late 880s.¹ In its entry for the year 871 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that ‘Alfred, the son of Æthelwulf, succeeded to the kingdom of the West Saxons’; twenty-nine years later it records the death of Alfred who ‘was king over the whole English people [cyng ofer eall Ongelcyn] except for that part which was under Danish rule’.² This was more than a mere change in diplomatic formulas. When Alfred’s father and brothers asserted that they were kings of the West Saxons and also of the people of Kent, the political statement was clear. The West Saxons were a ‘people’ with a common ‘history’ (even if largely mythical), inherited customs, and a sense of shared biological descent. The ‘Anglo-Saxons’ were not. They did not exist as a people, a tribe, or a nation. The phrase itself was foreign, coined by Continental writers to distinguish the ‘Saxons’ who had gone to Britain from those who had remained at home. Yet Alfred chose to be called ‘King of the Anglo-Saxons’, and in doing so distinguished his kingship from that of his forebears. On the most literal level the title celebrated Alfred’s rule over Anglian Mercia. It also suggested something more, perhaps a consciousness of a profound political transformation in the making, the gradual and halting emergence of a new kingdom that extended beyond the territorial or tribal confines of the ancient kingdoms of Wessex, Kent, or Mercia. For Alfred’s achievement was to lay down the foundations upon which his successors were to erect a new and lasting state, one that was to give political substance to the spiritual, linguistic and cultural unity of the ‘English people’ first posited by the Venerable Bede in the early eighth century.³

That at least is how it looks in retrospect. In the course of the tenth century Wessex was transformed into England, and Alfred’s reign was the critical precondition for this process. But this must not mislead us into endowing Alfred with a prescience he could not have possessed. What Alfred ruled and how he ruled it had far more in common with the kingship of his father and brothers than with that of his great-grandson, Edgar the Peaceable (959–75), who could justly claim to be ‘king of the English’ and ‘governor and ruler of all of Britain’,⁴ let alone with the Norman and Angevin monarchies of medieval England. The very language used by Asser and the Chronicler in describing Alfred’s political world possesses an archaic flavour, especially to those accustomed to the concepts and jargon of modern political scientists. It removes us to a Dark Age world defined not by ‘nation states’, ‘citizens’ and ‘political institutions’ but by lords, followers, Christian kingship, and tribes.

To understand Alfred’s life and accomplishments, we must begin with what he inherited, not only the kingdom over which he came to rule, but the social structures and cultural assumptions that governed his thinking about kingship and defined for him the possibilities of action. We must also appreciate the legacy of military glory and political success to which he fell heir. From his grandfather, Egbert, and his father, Æthelwailf, Alfred inherited a prosperous and powerful West Saxon hegemony. Their labours provided Alfred with a foundation for his own efforts; they gathered the ‘timber and staves’ with which he built the kingdom of the West Saxons into the germ of what would become ‘England’. It is with an examination of the political and material world into which he was born that our study of Alfred should begin.

The Rise of Wessex

Alfred, the fifth and youngest son of Æthelwulf, king of the West Saxons, was born some time between 847 and 849 on a royal estate at Wantage, Berkshire, in what had until recently been Mercian territory. Too few charters have survived for us to make sense of the movements of the ninth-century West Saxon royal court, or to venture even a guess as to why Alfred’s mother, Osburh, happened to be at Wantage at his birth. That she was there, however, is historically significant, for it provides clear evidence that by 848 King Æthelwulf’s dominion extended over the long-disputed middle Thames valley.⁵

Between the mid-eighth and mid-ninth century, the kings of Wessex and Anglian Mercia, the dominant kingdom of the Midlands, had contended for control of the rich agricultural lands of Berkshire. In 844, only a few years before Alfred’s birth, Ceolred, bishop of Leicester, had given an estate at Pangbourne, Berkshire, to Berhtwulf, king of the Mercians, in exchange for the ‘liberty’ of Abingdon and other monasteries of the see. King Berhtwulf, in turn, had granted this land to his ealdorman, Æthelwulf.⁶ Four years later all of Berkshire was in the hands of King Æthelwulf and its Mercian ealdorman in the service of the West Saxon king.

King Æthelwulf’s acquisition of Berkshire was the final chapter in a long and involved history of relations between Mercia and Wessex in the middle Saxon period, a story of alternating conflict and diplomacy that was to culminate in Alfred’s own marriage to a Mercian noblewoman and the marriage of their daughter to a powerful Mercian ealdorman. The basic thrust of the tale was a shift of power south of the Humber from Mercia to Wessex during the first half of the ninth century. By Alfred’s birth West Saxon power had outgrown the boundaries of the ancestral realm; his father, Æthelwulf, ruled a composite kingdom that stretched from beyond the River Tamar in the west to the isle of Thanet in the east and which embraced the once independent kingdoms of Cornwall, Surrey, Sussex, Kent, and Essex. Just as Alfred’s own son and grandsons were to build the kingdom of ‘England’ upon foundations that he laid, Alfred himself was heir to a legacy of military glory, conquest, and prosperity, much of which had been achieved at the expense of the Mercians by Alfred’s celebrated grandfather, King Egbert.

Egbert’s story has the quality of a saga. Exiled in his youth, he was to achieve not only kingship in his native Wessex, becoming the first of his line in nine generations to sit on the throne of Cerdic, but dominion over all the English peoples south of the Humber by crushing the Mercians in battle. The West Saxon Chronicler, looking back from his vantage point in Alfred’s reign, celebrated Egbert’s achievement by adding him to Bede’s list of kings who enjoyed imperium over southern England, making him the eighth such ‘bretwalda’.⁷ Alfred must have grown up listening to tales of his grandfather’s heroic deeds, learning from them what it meant to be a good king. Like Beowulfs Scyld Scefing, from whom Alfred and his kindred claimed descent, Egbert had risen from inauspicious beginnings to be a mighty king who took

mead-benches away from enemy bands, from many tribes, terrified their nobles … [and] lived to find comfort from that, became great under the skies, prospered in honours until every one those who lived about him … had to obey him and pay him tribute.⁸

For these accomplishments Scyld won the praise of the Beowulf-poet – ‘peel wees god cyning!’ – and by this measure Egbert was at least the equal of his legendary forebear. Leadership in war was a basic function of kings in eighth- and ninth-century England.⁹ Though the clergy were wont to emphasize the sacral quality of kingship and the king’s duty to defend the Church and maintain justice, the secular sources portrayed kings largely as warlords and measured their greatness in terms of victory in battle and conquest. Military success brought not only glory but wealth through the acquisition of new territories and the imposition of tribute upon the defeated. The wealth Egbert won through war not only helped establish his dynasty within Wessex but secured West Saxon hegemony over all of southern England.

The rise of Wessex was of recent vintage at the time of Alfred’s birth and its long-term prospects were uncertain. West Saxon hegemony had been hard won in battles fought within living memory. Nothing guaranteed that West Saxon glory would prove any more lasting than Mercian, and to judge by the fatalism that is so prominent a leitmotif in Anglo-Saxon poetry and Christian historiography, neither Æthelwulf nor his sons would have expected their efforts to bear permanent fruit. Wyrd, destiny (or God’s providence, as the mature Alfred would view it), had already greatly favoured the dynasty established by Egbert, the ‘Ecgberhtings’, raising them above their royal predecessors in power, wealth, and glory. But, as the proems to their charters reminded kings, all earthly things are transitory and ‘the wanton fortune of this deceiving world … is shamelessly fickle’.¹⁰ What God had given, He in his providence could as easily take away.

By Alfred’s birth, the probable instrument of God’s providence was no longer the traditional enemy, Mercia, but an external threat. Relations between Mercia and Wessex had improved, largely because of the arrival of a common foe, the pagan Danes, who threatened the survival of both kingdoms. From 836, when King Egbert suffered defeat at Carhampton at the hands of a viking force of thirty-five ships, until 851 when Alfred’s father, King Æthelwulf, and his two eldest brothers, Æthelbald and Æthels tan, defeated the vikings on land at Aclea and at sea off Sandwich, the West Saxons were preoccupied with fighting off the increasingly virulent raiders. Mercia was also ravaged mercilessly by the pagan raiders. Faced with a common foreign enemy, Æthelwulf and the Mercian King Berhtwulf forged a lasting alliance between their kingdoms. Under Berhtwulf’s successor, Burgred (852–874), relations between the two kingdoms grew even closer. In 853 Æthelwulf sent an army against the Welsh in response to a Mercian request for aid. Later that same year Burgred took Æthelwulf’s daughter, Æthelswith, as his wife.

Berkshire passed permanently into West Saxon hands sometime before Alfred’s birth at Wantage in 848 or 849. What in the past had required sword and fire now took place peacefully, as King Berhtwulf acceded to the wishes of his more powerful neighbour to the south. In practical terms little probably changed in Berkshire. Even the ealdorman remained the same. The Mercian Æthelwulf, whose family came from Derbyshire, bowed to the West Saxon king of the same name and received from him rule over the shire that had been his under Berhtwulf. He held it as a loyal retainer of King Æthelwulf and his sons until his death in 871. London, on the other hand, remained a Mercian emporium. King Æthelwulf apparently had no intention of reducing Mercia to subjugation or even of weakening it significantly. Wessex’s acquisition of Berkshire left the River Thames as the border between the kingdoms and made defence of the upper Thames a joint responsibility. This may well have been the strategic thinking behind the boundary changes.

The Political Contours of Alfred’s Kingdom

The kingdom that Egbert patched together through claims of hereditary right and conquest has been called ‘Greater Wessex’ by modern historians. It is, to be sure, a convenient label for discussing the conglomerate realm that Æthelwulf and his sons ruled, but it is also misleading. Nothing in its history or geography lent coherence to this large, disparate region. In terms of claimed tribal descent, tenurial custom, and even agricultural organization, the lands and kingdoms that Egbert had won in the southwest and southeast differed significandy from Wessex.

The traditional land of the West Saxons embraced the shires of Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somersetshire, and Dorset.¹¹ A large expanse of chalk downlands, stretching from the Hampshire Downs in the east through Salisbury Plain and the Berkshire Downs to the Dorset coast near Abbotsbury, unified the region geologically and politically through the ancient ridgeway tracks exploited by both the Romans and Anglo-Saxons. The fertile countryside, rich in woodland and rivers, was dominated by large villages, open-field farming, and large manor-like estates. Each shire was administered for the king by an ealdorman of noble birth who served at the king’s pleasure, and by royal reeves responsible for maintaining law and order and collecting at royal villas the food rents and services owed to the king. The king’s presence was visible throughout these shires in the numerous royal estates, palaces, and farms that dotted the West Saxon landscape, and it was here that the itinerating king’s court could most often be found.

The region that lay west of Selwood, encompassing Cornwall, Devonshire and parts of Somerset, seems to have formed a separate political region, reflecting its historically later settlement by Anglo-Saxons and integration into the West Saxon kingdom. Here, as in the southeast, the landscape was dominated by homesteads and hamlets rather than open-field villages. The West Saxon colonization of Cornwall and perhaps even Devonshire was still an ongoing process during the reign of King Alfred. Certainly, the British presence grew stronger as one moved west, and much of the peninsula, with the exception of western Somerset, must have still been dominated by native British landowners in the late ninth century. The region ‘west of Selwood’ gained much of whatever political coherence it possessed fro...