In 878 the Danes mounted a surprise attack. Alfred was nearly captured and had to retreat into the Somerset marshes. The apocryphal story of his burning the cakes probably stems from this period: the lonely, troubled King so lost in thought while he shelters amidst his people that he forgets to watch the cakes before the fire as the farmer’s wife has told him. We have no evidence for this incident. What we do know is that this was a time of crisis for him. ‘King Alfred, with a few of his nobles and some knights and men of his household, was in great distress leading an unquiet life in the woods and marshes of Somerset,’ Bishop Asser tells us. ‘He had no means of support except what he took in frequent raids by stealth or openly from the pagans, or indeed from Christians who had submitted to pagan rule.’ From this position he managed to regroup and defeat the Danish leader, Guthrum, at Edington in Wiltshire. This decisive victory led to the Treaty of Wedmore in 878 in which Guthrum agreed to be baptised and to withdraw to behind the lines of existing Danelaw, leaving Wessex free. Alfred consolidated this victory eight years later when he recaptured London from the Vikings, and succeeded in beating them off when they attacked again in the mid-890s AD. This was a heroic achievement. The wars against the Vikings had left the Saxons demoralised and recalcitrant. They often resented royal orders and sometimes deserted to the other side. Alfred must have displayed impressive qualities of leadership to maintain an army capable of defeating the Danes. He knew he had no choice: it was the Vikings’ custom to kill the leaders of the forces they defeated in battle.
Alfred’s victory against Guthrum temporarily preserved the Anglo-Saxon tradition in a foreign world, but it might not have lasted had the victorious King not then demonstrated that he was as good a governor as he was a general. He ruled Wessex for another twenty-one years after the Treaty of Wedmore, a period in which he set about trying to improve the standards of education at his court. He recruited scholars from across the Channel where, following the civilising efforts of Charlemagne at the end of the eighth century, standards of literacy were higher. He was determined to resist the encroachments of the pagan Vikings and encouraged his clergy to improve both their teachings and writings. Most significantly he translated books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon, including Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He also introduced the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the first record of historical events to be written in English.
Women enjoyed greater rights in Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon world than they would for many years to come.
He also turned to the administration of his kingdom laying out laws, as other Anglo-Saxon kings had done, in his Doom Book. He wanted to protect weaker members of his disheartened country pronouncing: ‘Any judgement should be even, not one judgement for the wealthy and another for the poor.’ He provided a structure for rents and taxes, regulating how much people had to pay and to whom. He also introduced a system of fines – wergild – the money to be paid by those who committed crimes. Women enjoyed greater rights in Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon world than they would for many years to come under other rulers of Britain. They could own land in their own name; there was no natural right for a first-born son to inherit; no woman could be sold or forced into marriage; and wives were entitled to divorce their husbands.
Alongside all of this Alfred strengthened his country’s defences, copying the earthwork forts which the Danish used very successfully. He built a strong administrative system and, aware of how vulnerable his kingdom had been from attacks from the sea, created a fleet. Taken together these things gave his people a primitive nationhood. Alfred knew they needed an army for protection, and laws for their administration, but he also realised that these on their own would not be enough to keep them safe forever. To survive Wessex needed things that it believed in, that were worth fighting for. Alfred wanted his people to understand the value of their own history and the importance of their Christian learning. The importance of their past was their best defence against the uncertainties of their future. The little nation of Wessex was an embryo from which grew ideas and methods which would heavily influence the future course of British history.
In 1693 an Anglo-Saxon jewel was found in Somerset, not far from Athelney where Alfred hid before his successful counterattack against the Danes. It is made of gold and enamel and covered with a piece of rock crystal. The purpose of the jewel is unclear, but some believe it to be an aestel, a book pointer, which Alfred intended to send to his bishops with his translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care. Another theory is that it might have been a symbol of office for Alfred himself, or for one of his officials. The face of the jewel has a figure on it which may be Christ representing the incarnate ‘Wisdom of God’, or possibly the spirit of Sight. Whatever its use might have been, it is a beautiful relic from a time more than eleven hundred years ago when the Anglo-Saxon people of England faced the possibility of virtual extermination at the hands of a savage enemy. The jewel, now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, bears the inscription, in Anglo-Saxon: ‘Alfred ordered me to be made.’
Alfred died at the age of about fifty in 899 AD. In the biography that he commissioned from Bishop Asser he comes across almost as a saint, and succeeding ages have not demurred from that opinion of him. It was not only the eighteenth century that held him up as an icon of liberty. In the next century Charles Dickens in A Child’s History of England called him ‘the noble king … whom misfortune could not subdue, whom prosperity could not spoil, whose perseverance nothing could shake’. Today we tend to take a more objective view. Alfred’s achievements were momentous, though we probably feel they fell short of sainthood. But then a man does not need to be a saint to inspire affection or gratitude. When we think of the plight of Wessex in the second half of the ninth century and reflect on the King who rose out of the marshes of Somerset to rebuild his kingdom in such an extraordinary way, we realise that, saint or not, we owe a great deal to Alfred, the Anglo-Saxon King, and for the things he did. We might even say: ‘Alfred ordered me to be made.’
The Battle of Hastings represented the start of the last great foreign invasion of Britain. The Norman Conquest unified the country under a powerful monarchy and provided it with the foundations of the medieval state.
In the centuries leading up to the Norman Conquest of Britain, the future of Europe turned on the ambitions of individual men. The continent was in turmoil as peoples from its different parts travelled from their homelands in search of opportunity elsewhere. Powerful men grabbed land and held on to it during their lifetimes, but their successors were likely to lose it if they did not display the same aggressive qualities. Anglo-Saxon England might have been extinguished if Alfred had not turned the tide against the Danish invaders in 878 AD. Nearly two hundred years later the future of Britain and Europe might have evolved in a very different way if King Canute had reigned for longer. He was a Dane who became Emperor of Denmark, Norway and England. In England the successive Viking invasions had brought Anglo-Saxon and Danish cultures together, and Canute consolidated this process allowing both to prosper. However, when he died in 1036 his great empire broke up and England was once again ruled by Anglo-Saxon kings. But their survival depended entirely on their individual strengths and weaknesses. The country was eyed greedily by the Vikings, who by now had rivals to the south. In France the Normans were looking for new territory into which they could expand.
The Normans were, in fact, descendants of Vikings who had originally moved into France in the early part of the tenth century. By the time of the Norman Conquest they had become French-speaking Christians, but they had not lost the Viking taste for adventure and war. By 1066 they had already invaded Italy where they were the rulers of lands throughout the south. Only five