For Guthrum had moved his forces to another royal estate at Edington (Ethandun). And it was there, probably on the hill above the village, that the two armies met. We cannot be sure, because there has been no systematic excavation of the site. But chance finds have turned up a number of bodies of the right date, some of them badly mutilated. That is not surprising. For the battle was to be both savage and bloody. There was too much at stake on both sides for it to be anything else. Guthrum knew that, for his takeover of the kingdom of Wessex to succeed, he had to kill Alfred outright. As for Alfred and the men of Wessex, they knew that this was probably their last chance of independence: if Guthrum won, Viking domination of Wessex and England would be complete. So both sides were hoping for a decisive result. They were not to be disappointed:
Fighting fiercely with a compact shield wall against the entire Viking army, [Alfred] persevered resolutely for a long time. At length he gained the victory through God’s will [and] destroyed the Vikings with great slaughter.
Alfred’s victory at Edington was complete, and decisive. The broken remains of Guthrum’s army fled back to their fortified base at Chippenham. Alfred pursued them, cutting down the stragglers on the way. Then he laid siege to the fort. After two weeks, the Viking leader surrendered. But this time Guthrum was in no position to equivocate. He promised to withdraw from Wessex and he confirmed his promise by agreeing to be baptized. The baptism occurred three weeks later. Alfred stood as Guthrum’s godfather, which made the Viking his moral and political dependant. And the ceremony took place at Aller in Somerset, only three miles east of Athelney, which avenged Alfred’s darkest hour.
The battle of Edington was the turning point in Alfred’s life and one of the great turning points of English history. Alfred, fighting at the head of the shires, had established himself as a great war leader. And Wessex was saved, for the moment at least. But the future of the rest of England still hung in the balance.
Alfred’s victory at Edington bought him almost a decade and a half of peace. But Alfred did not sleep on his laurels. Instead he embarked on a considered and ambitious programme of military and moral rearmament. As a result, Wessex was able, not only to survive a third Viking challenge, but also to expand until, within half a century of Alfred’s death, it ruled, directly or indirectly, all Britannia.
The foundation of all this was Alfred’s transformation of his kingdom into a society on a full-time war footing. He built a navy, with bigger ships constructed to his own design. There were early technical problems. But they seem to have been overcome and the sixty-oared vessel he pioneered became the standard unit of the Anglo-Saxon navy. He also reorganized the fyrd or army, ‘so that always half its men were at home, [and] half on service’. This enabled him to put troops into the field at almost any time. Most effective of all, however, was his scheme of fortification. In the first Viking attacks in the 870s, Guthrum and his men had been able to range great distances throughout Wessex at will and virtually unopposed. Alfred’s fortifications were designed to prevent any repetition.
The result was an undertaking on a massive scale. Thirty burhs or fortified settlements were built, strategically sited so that nowhere in Wessex was more than twenty miles (or a day’s march) away from one, and 27,000 men were assigned to defend them. The figure was based on the assumption that four men were needed to man each pole (five and a half yards) of rampart. The circuit of each burh was measured (very accurately) and the number of its garrison calculated accordingly. Finally, each burh was assigned an endowment of land to maintain its garrison, on the basis of one hide for each man.
The document in which all this was set out, known as the Burghal Hidage, survives in a slightly later form, which probably dates from the early tenth century. The Burghal Hidage demonstrates the tremendous bureaucratic achievement of which Anglo-Saxon government was capable. But it also shows that its bureaucratic competence was firmly harnessed, as Alfred’s high Christian concept of kingship required, to the common good. For these burhs were not private castles, owned by some lord or bishop and manned by his retainers. Instead, they were fortified communities, founded by the king, defended by his people, and defending and protecting them in turn.
Moreover, the significance of the burhs went beyond their defensive capacity, since many, though not all, developed into real towns. Once again, this seems to have been Alfred’s intention from the beginning. For burhs like Winchester, which Alfred was to make into the capital of Wessex, were laid out as proper planned new towns, with a set, regular street pattern. Such places quickly became market centres and, most importantly of all, mint towns, where the king’s coin was struck according to centralized patterns and fixed weights and fineness. The result of this rapid urbanization was a virtuous economic cycle in which everybody benefited. Trade boomed and with it taxes; the king got rich and his people grew prosperous, while the word ‘borough’, as we pronounce it today, started to assume its modern meaning of a self-governing urban community under royal patronage. In short, probably more by design than by accident, Alfred had turned the burhs into the urban equivalent of the hundreds, or, in the case of the largest of them, of shires in their own right.
And the burh of burhs was London. It was already the largest town and the commercial powerhouse of England. As such, it had been the jewel in King Offa’s crown and the fiscal key to Mercian power. But it suffered the common fate of eastern Mercia and passed under Viking domination. This lasted, almost certainly, for fifteen years, from 871, when the ‘great summer army’ took up winter quarters there, to 886, when Alfred felt strong enough to take it. The result was a turning point in the history of the City – and of England.
The original Anglo-Saxon settlement, known as Lundenwic, was not based in the abandoned Roman city but further west at Aldwych, from which it sprawled out along the line of the modern Strand. Alfred moved most of the population back within the Roman walls, which he rebuilt and refortified. He also constructed another burh at Southwark, which is still known as ‘Borough’ today.
All this entitles Alfred to be regarded as the second founder of the City. But in what capacity did Alfred, king of Wessex, thus act in former Mercian territory? Alfred answered the question by giving charge of the refounded City to the ealdorman Æthelred. Æthelred, however, was not ealdorman of any of the historic shires of Wessex; instead, his charge was Mercia, or rather the rump of the kingdom to the south and west of Watling Street which had escaped the Viking conquest. How and when Æthelbert and Lesser Mercia passed into Alfred’s sphere of influence is unclear. But Alfred moved to cement the relationship personally, by marrying Æthelbert to his masterful eldest child, Æthelflaed, who proved to be every inch her father’s daughter. He also did so juridically, by starting to style himself in his charters ‘king of the Angles and of the Saxons’ or ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’. Could a claim to be King of All the English be far behind?
For that, de facto, was Alfred’s position with the Viking destruction of all the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. And the position, it seems, was recognized de jure in the aftermath of his capture of London, when ‘all the English people that were not under subjection to the Danes submitted to him’. Was there a formal ceremony? Did it involve oath-taking? We cannot know. But at this point the idea of a common ‘English’ identity, first (mis)understood by St Gregory and powerfully expounded by Bede, started to assume concrete political form.
Its first expression, appropriately enough – since Guthrum’s defeat had been the making of Alfred – was in a treaty with King Guthrum which was agreed between 886 and Guthrum’s death in 890. After his defeat and baptism in 878, Guthrum and his host had retreated east. Here Guthrum had found the kingdom he craved by becoming monarch of the Danes of southern England. He was called king of East Anglia. But the actual boundaries of his kingdom were much wider, embracing all England east of Watling Street and the Ouse and (probably) south of the Humber. Guthrum and Alfred thus negotiated as equals in power. But the preamble to