Born at Wantage, Berkshire, in 849, Alfred was the fifth son of Aethelwulf,
king of the West Saxons. At their father's behest and by mutual agreement,
Alfred's elder brothers succeeded to the kingship in turn, rather than
endanger the kingdom by passing it to under-age children at a time when the
country was threatened by worsening Viking raids from Denmark.
Since the 790s, the Vikings had been using fast mobile armies, numbering
thousands of men embarked in shallow-draught longships, to raid the coasts
and inland waters of England for plunder. Such raids were evolving into
permanent Danish settlements; in 867, the Vikings seized York and
established their own kingdom in the southern part of Northumbria. The
Vikings overcame two other major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, East Anglia and
Mercia, and their kings were either tortured to death or fled.
Finally, in 870 the Danes attacked the only remaining independent
Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Wessex, whose forces were commanded by King Aethelred
and his younger brother Alfred. At the battle of Ashdown in 871, Alfred
routed the Viking army in a fiercely fought uphill assault. However, further
defeats followed for Wessex and Alfred's brother died.
As King of Wessex at the age of 21, Alfred (reigned 871-99) was a
strongminded but highly strung battle veteran at the head of remaining
resistance to the Vikings in southern England. In early 878, the Danes led
by King Guthrum seized Chippenham in Wiltshire in a lightning strike and
used it as a secure base from which to devastate Wessex. Local people either
surrendered or escaped (Hampshire people fled to the Isle of Wight), and the
West Saxons were reduced to hit and run attacks seizing provisions when they
could.
With only his royal bodyguard, a small army of thegns (the king's followers)
and Aethelnoth earldorman of Somerset as his ally, Alfred withdrew to the
Somerset tidal marshes in which he had probably hunted as a youth. (It was
during this time that Alfred, in his preoccupation with the defence of his
kingdom, allegedly burned some cakes which he had been asked to look after;
the incident was a legend dating from early twelfth century chroniclers.)
A resourceful fighter, Alfred reassessed his strategy and adopted the Danes'
tactics by building a fortified base at Athelney in the Somerset marshes and
summoning a mobile army of men from Wiltshire, Somerset and part of
Hampshire to pursue guerrilla warfare against the Danes. In May 878,
Alfred's army defeated the Danes at the battle of Edington.
According to his contemporary biographer Bishop Asser, 'Alfred attacked the
whole pagan army fighting ferociously in dense order, and by divine will
eventually won the victory, made great slaughter among them, and pursued
them to their fortress (Chippenham) ... After fourteen days the pagans were
brought to the extreme depths of despair by hunger, cold and fear, and they
sought peace'. This unexpected victory proved to be the turning point in
Wessex's battle for survival.
Realizing that he could not drive the Danes out of the rest of England,
Alfred concluded peace with them in the treaty of Wedmore. King Guthrum was
converted to Christianity with Alfred as godfather and many of the Danes
returned to East Anglia where they settled as farmers. In 886, Alfred
negotiated a partition treaty with the Danes, in which a frontier was
demarcated along the Roman Watling Street and northern and eastern England
came under the jurisdiction of the Danes - an area known as 'Danelaw'.
Alfred therefore gained control of areas of West Mercia and Kent which had
been beyond the boundaries of Wessex.
To consolidate alliances against the Danes, Alfred married one of his
daughters, Aethelflaed, to the ealdorman of Mercia. Alfred himself had
married Eahlswith, a Mercian noblewoman, and another daughter, Aelfthryth,
to the Count of Flanders, a strong naval power at a time when the Vikings
were settling in eastern England.
The Danish threat remained, and Alfred reorganised the Wessex defences in
recognition that efficient defence and economic prosperity were
interdependent. First, he organised his army (the thegns, and the existing
militia known as the fyrd) on a rota basis, so he could raise a 'rapid
reaction force' to deal with raiders whilst still enabling his thegns and
peasants to tend their farms.
Second, Alfred started a building program of well-defended settlements
across southern England. These were fortified market places ('borough' comes
from the Old English burh, meaning fortress); by deliberate royal planning,
settlers received plots and in return manned the defences in times of war.
(Such plots in London under Alfred's rule in the 880s shaped the street plan
which still exists today between Cheapside and the Thames.)
This obligation required careful recording in what became known as 'the
Burghal Hidage', which gave details of the building and manning of Wessex
and Mercian burhs according to their size, the length of their ramparts and
the number of men needed to garrison them.
Centred round Alfred's royal palace in Winchester, this network of burhs
with strongpoints on the main river routes was such that no part of Wessex
was more than 20 miles from the refuge of one of these settlements. Together
with a navy of new fast ships built on Alfred's orders, southern England now
had a defence in depth against Danish raiders.
Alfred's concept of kingship extended beyond the administration of the
tribal kingdom of Wessex into a broader context. A religiously devout and
pragmatic man who learnt Latin in his late thirties, he recognised that the
general deterioration in learning and religion caused by the Vikings'
destruction of monasteries (the centres of the rudimentary education
network) had serious implications for rulership. For example, the poor
standards in Latin had led to a decline in the use of the charter as an
instrument of royal government to disseminate the king's instructions and
legislation.
