Athelney means ‘royal island’, and Alfred chose it as his fastness because the area at the confluence of the Rivers Parret and Tone was then an island. It was well screened in the middle of the marshes, and the water which flooded the fenlands in winter made it even more difficult to attack. His time here was the nadir of Alfred’s fortunes. Later, in one of his writings, he seems to recall the self-examination it provoked:
In the midst of prosperity the mind is elated, and in prosperity a man forgets himself; in hardship he is forced to reflect on himself, even though he be unwilling.
By this or other means, Alfred regained confidence in his own capacity. But the power of a king is not simply personal. It is also political or collective. Alfred understood this too. ‘A man cannot work without tools,’ he wrote in another of his works. And, he continued:
In the case of a king, the resources and tools with which to rule are that he have his land fully manned. He must have praying men, fighting men and working men … without these tools no king may make his ability known … nor can he accomplish any of the things he was commanded to do.
In the adjacent kingdom of Mercia, these collective ‘tools’ seem to have consisted of little more than the king’s war-band, which is why Mercian power was so vulnerable to challenge whenever the strong hand of an effective king, like Offa or Cenwulf, was removed. But in Wessex, luckily for Alfred, power was both more diffuse and more ‘popular’. This meant, paradoxically, that it was more durable and could survive even such a debacle of royal power as Twelfth Night 878.
Which is where, perhaps, the story of Alfred and the cakes fits in. The king, the story goes, had taken refuge, incognito, in the hovel of a swine-herd, where he found himself upbraided by the man’s wife for letting her bread-cakes burn as he dreamed in front of the fire of regaining power. The story is, of course, a legend. But it is a very old one since it dates from Alfred’s own lifetime or shortly thereafter. It also points, once again, to the closeness of monarch and people which would be the salvation of Wessex.
Alfred, as soon as he was able, moved to invoke these powers. At Easter, which fell very early that year on 23 March, he further strengthened Athelney’s natural defences by building a fort. He was helped to do this by the ealdorman or governor of Somerset, while the men of ‘that part of Somersetshire which was nighest to it’ also joined in the raids against the Viking occupiers which the king now launched from his island fortress. But these raids were a mere morale-boosting exercise to prepare the way for the full-scale counter-attack which Alfred began to organize.
And the key to the counter-attack was, once again, the shires. Historic Wessex (that is, the kingdom before its expansion under Alfred’s grandfather, Egbert) was divided into five ‘shires’ or, as we would now say using Norman-French rather than Anglo-Saxon, ‘counties’: Somerset itself, Devon, Wiltshire, Dorset and Hampshire. The shires were further subdivided into ‘hundreds’, so called because, in theory though rarely in practice, they contained a hundred ‘hides’ or parcels of land each sufficient to maintain a family. We do not know when the shires and hundreds began. The former are first mentioned in the seventh century and the latter in the eleventh. But they are clearly much older. Perhaps indeed they are immemorial and go back to the folk-moots of the first Saxon settlers in western Britannia. This would explain why their meetings took place in the open air, at traditional assembly points that were often marked by a prehistoric monument, like a tumulus or barrow. One such is Swanborough Tump in the Vale of Pewsey in Wiltshire. Here, as we have seen, Æthelred and Alfred had met with the witan to settle their affairs on the eve of the Viking attack. And here, on a much humbler scale, the free men of the Hundred of Swanborough met once a month to settle their affairs.
These meetings, and the less frequent but more important shire assemblies, which took place twice a year, were later called ‘courts’. They did indeed try legal cases, both criminal and civil. But they did much more. They kept the peace; levied taxes and raised troops. Finally, their sworn testimony, later systematized as the jury, supplied the basic information about property rights and inheritance without which royal government could not function: even William the Conqueror, in all his power, would depend on such juries to produce the myriad facts on which the Domesday Book was based.
For the hundred and shire were also, whatever their folk origins may have been, the agencies of royal government. It was one royal official, the reeve or bailiff, who presided over the Hundred Court, and another, much greater one, the ealdorman, who chaired the Shire Court. The ealdorman was the leading man in his shire and one of the greatest in Wessex. He commanded the shire levies, acted as intermediary between the court and the county, and used his authority to settle most local disputes.
Indeed, the ealdorman was so powerful that it was easy for him to forget that he was the king’s servant and to aspire instead to become a territorial magnate in his own right. Alfred was well aware of the temptation and, in a well-judged interpolation in one of his translations, he denounced the ealdorman who turned his delegated authority (ealdordome) to lordship (hlaforddome) and caused ‘the reverence of himself and his power to become the regular custom of the shire he rules’.
Alfred fought this tendency. So did his successors. So too, perhaps, did the people. The result was that the paths of government in Wessex and Francia started to diverge. In Francia, the nobility, like Alfred’s ambitious ealdorman, soon took over the king’s former powers in the localities and privatized justice, taxation and the raising of troops. In so doing, they interposed themselves between king and people: the people of a district were now their lord’s, not the king’s. In Wessex, this never quite happened. Here, instead, the partnership between king and people, into which rough and ready egalitarianism of the early Saxon settlers had developed, held. This partnership, with its sense of all being in it together, would make it easier for Alfred to impose heavy demands on his people as the crisis drew out over years and decades. It also provided, in ‘the self-government at the king’s command’ of the shires and hundreds, and the collective self-consciousness which they fostered, the means for Alfred to begin his fight-back against Guthrum.
III
The planning of the campaign, once again, started at Easter. Over the following weeks Alfred sent out messengers from Athelney in all directions. They went to lords in their halls and to meetings of the common folk at their outdoor Hundred Courts. Seven weeks after Easter (11 May) all was ready and the signal was given. Alfred himself set out from Athelney and marched east towards the rendezvous at Egbert’s Stone. There he was met ‘by all the people of Somersetshire, and Wiltshire and that part of Hampshire which is on this side of the sea [that is, excluding the Isle of Wight]’. These were the forces of three out of the five shires of Wessex. It is unclear why the other two, Devon and Dorset, failed to send troops. Dorset may have been incapacitated by taking the brunt of the Viking occupation. But the Devonians were probably assigned to coastal defence. Earlier that year, Viking reinforcements had tried to land in Devon.The ealdorman Odda had driven them off with heavy losses and captured their sacred raven banner. But other landings must have been anticipated.
Alfred had chosen the rallying point carefully. Egbert’s Stone has been recently identified as yet another prehistoric tumulus, high on the hills above the River Deverill on the edge of Salisbury Plain in western Wiltshire. It is close to the spot at which Somerset, Wiltshire and Dorset all meet, and it was here that Alfred’s grandfather, Egbert, had marched his soldiers after a decisive and final victory over the British people of Cornwall. But Alfred was not just evoking Wessex’s past glories. His campaign was also a kind of crusade: he was a Christian king and his enemies were pagans. Hence the launch of the campaign around Easter. This suited military realities. But it coincided as well with the most important feast of the Christian year, the feast of resurrection. The coincidence was not lost on his troops:
when they saw the King, receiving him not surprisingly as if one restored to life after suffering such great tribulations, they were filled with immense joy.