A Hard Reign’s Gonna Fall: Birth of the English Monarchy
Alfred the Great (847/848 - 899)
While not technically the first king to rule England, Alfred is more or less accepted as the first “true” English monarch, in that he ruled over
all of England, defeated the Viking invaders and began the royal line of the House of Wessex. His predecessors, notably Offa and Egbert, are mostly discounted because the former was not interested in English unity, just power for himself, and the latter only ruled Mercia and soon lost control of it, so Alfred is seen as the first great unifying force in what would become England, and therefore accepted as the first English king.
With three breaks in between when other Houses ruled, and including so-called disputed claimants, the House of Wessex saw a total of fourteen monarchs sit the English throne, from Alfred’s reign in 871 to Edward the Confessor in 1066, though the final king to rule before the ascension of William the Conqueror later that year was of the House of Godwin, Harold Godwinson.
The year of Alfred’s birth is disputed, but believed to be generally somewhere between 847 and 848, in Berkshire, then part of Wessex. He had four brothers, one of whom would be sub-king of Kent, the other three all taking the throne of Wessex over a period ranging from 858 to 871. His only sister married the king of Mercia, Buggered, sorry Burgered sorry… Burgred. Yeah. Burgred. Alfred came to the throne, as we have seen, on the death of his older brother Aethelred at the hands of the Great Heathen Army, which he continued to battle and eventually subdued.
Alfred would also marry into Mercian nobility, taking Ealhswith for his wife in 868, and travelled twice to Rome, perhaps (though I can’t confirm) the first of the Saxon kings to do so. His exploits during the war against the Great Heathen Army have already been related above, so there’s no need for me to go into them again. Therefore we begin our history of Alfred the Great proper with his years after the defeat of the Vikings, apart from this one anecdote, which has followed his history and legend down to today, and may or may not be true. It’s the story of the “burning of the cakes”, and it’s really not as interesting, I feel, as it sounds.
While on the run from the Vikings Alfred is said to have taken shelter with an old woman in Somerset, who, unaware of his identity (which he was careful to conceal, being on the run and all) set him to watch some oatcakes she was baking. Distracted, and thinking of his kingdom and how he would save it from the northern invaders, Alfred is said to have not noticed the cakes burning, and when the old woman came back she gave him a piece of her mind. It’s not recorded as to whether he ever revealed himself, or whether she, later, found out who she had castigated. There: like I said, hardly worth waiting for, was it?
Anyway, back to the good stuff. Under the Treaty of Wedmore (sounds like an adjuration to marry as many spouses as possible, doesn’t it?) in 878 Guthrum was granted the part of England which became Danelaw, basically East Anglia and some of Mercia, while Alfred ruled over Wessex. A further treaty in 880 sealed the deal, and though Alfred had to fend off some smaller sea incursions by Vikings throughout the first half of the decade, the threat of land invasion was pretty much gone by then. The only real battle - as such - of note was at Rochester in 885, where the Vikings seem to have sh
it their pants and legged it for their ships, buggering off altogether.
Whatever about the treaties signed, Alfred was not averse to plundering his old neighbour, and a weird kind of see-saw battle took place soon after the Rochester rout, when he sent his fleet to East Anglia on a raiding mission, succeeded, was on the way home when the Viking fleet (I’m not sure if it was the same one he had defeated or a different one) appeared and took him on, defeating him and, presumably, either making off with the spoils or, if they were the same fleet, bringing them back home. Either way, it was an interesting case of turnabout, kind of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The next year he took London back and began refortifying and redesigning it. This year, 885, begins the period historians typically accept as Alfred being seen as the first proper King of England, but he wasn’t to have it all his own way. The death of Guthrum in 889 created a power vacuum, and though he had been Alfred’s foe he was a known quantity, and they had come to a general understanding, leaving each other’s kingdoms alone apart from the odd raid here or there, men being men and all that, fills in the long boring evenings, you know how it is. But now, with the passing of Guthrum and no heir to speak of, unrest broke out across East Anglia. This was exacerbated by the arrival of over three hundred Viking ships in 892. Having had no luck on the continent, they hied them back to the shores of Merry England, where they engaged the forces of Alfred, now pretty much the only thing standing against a complete colonisation of the country. The Vikings, in preparation, had packed up the wives, children and probably a few chattels (never go anywhere without your chattels, never know when you might need them) and were all ready to hammer in - probably literally, and perhaps with Saxon thigh bones - the “SOLD” signs they had brought with them, for planting in Wessex and East Anglia.
“No you f
ucking don’t”, thought the new King of England. “I've spent the last few years getting this shiny new kingdom of mine just how I like it, and I’ll be thrice-damned if I let you bastards mess it up with your filthy marauder boots and your pagan ways!” And off he rode to meet them. Actually, he didn’t plunge into screaming battle (getting a bit old for that now, at the ripe old age of forty-five!) but opened negotiations instead. While he was so engaged though, one of the two divisions decided to attack Appledore and were chased by Alfred’s son Edward, who met them in battle and kicked their arses at Farnham in Surrey, taking back the booty they had half-inched and sending them scurrying across the Thames. No doubt this provided his dad with a crucial piece of leverage with their boss, Hastein, when he learned that not only had one of his divisions broken the truce (to his entire surprise, honest, your Majesty! Swear on me wife’s grave, and I should know: I put her there myself. Not in the mood for sex, indeed! But I digress) but also fu
cking LOST the battle, he was more amenable to Alfred’s terms.
Well, no actually. That’s kind of the opposite of what Vikings do, after all. F
uck this sitting around and talking lark, I’m gonna kill me something, is more their style. Well actually no it isn't - Vikings often held conferences and mediated rather than fight, but who wants to hear that? And so Hastein saddled up and went to war too, placing Exeter under siege. His first division (commander’s name not recorded) rather stupidly took refuge on an island after the Battle of Farnham, where, surprise, surprise! They were surrounded and forced to surrender, booted out of Wessex. They then tried their luck in Essex, but got short shrift there too. Hastein is reported to have said “Hold on lads I’m coming!” and promptly got caught in the middle of a battle at Buttington. No, seriously. And again they were besieged. You would think by now they would have realised how dangerous and counterproductive it is to make your stand somewhere where you can be surrounded, but no, off they went, and our friendly local Chronicler tells us how bad it was for them.
"After many weeks had passed, some of the heathen [Vikings] died of hunger, but some, having by then eaten their horses, broke out of the fortress, and joined battle with those who were on the east bank of the river. But, when many thousands of pagans had been slain, and all the others had been put to flight, the Christians [English and Welsh] were masters of the place of death. In that battle, the most noble Ordheah and many of the king's thegns were killed."
Like anyone in a siege situation, there are four possibilities: surrender, hope the besiegers get tired and go away, starve to death or break out and make a battle of it. The Vikings, you won’t be surprised to hear, decided to break out and make a battle of it. They lost. Meanwhile, the lads who had been turfed out of the Siege of Exeter tried their luck at Chichester, but those people had seen bigger and more scary attacks when their local football team played their rivals in a friendly, and they beat the s
hit out of them and nicked their ships. It was all going a bit, as they say, Pete Tong for the Vikings. After a few more years of wandering around disconsolately, trying this or that attack, they eventually shrugged and gave up and went home, probably muttering “Too much fu
cking rain in that country anyway. Who’s for the Riviera, lads?”
With the kingdom basically at peace now, Alfred set his mind to reorganising the military, changing the very structure of manner in which men were marshalled at a time of need. By 897 he had a full standing army ready to repel any invaders, a bigger and much improved navy, and a network of garrisons across the country. He streamlined the administration and taxation system, and set up a system of burhs (fortified settlements) so that help would always be no more than a day away, no matter where the raiders might strike. Many of these were sited at strategic points such as rivers or protecting bridges, and perhaps taking his cue from the Roman occupation of England, Alfred made sure there were roads connecting each burh to the next, and also used the Romans’ expertise (and that of the Greeks) to construct better ships than the Vikings had. From these burhs comes the word now in use, borough. Just thought you'd like to know.
However, with no seaborne weapons such as cannon or other guns, and with his ships faster and bigger than the longships, but not suited to manoeuverability, battles between the ships of Alfred’s navy and those of the Vikings presaged the pirate attacks of almost a thousand years in the future, where the two ships would be roped together and then men would swarm from them to engage those on the other ship in hand-to-hand combat, basically making the deck of the attacked ship a battlefield. Hey, at least there was no need to bury those who fell in the battle!
He set about repairing, to some degree, relationships with the Welsh and Irish, and eradicating forever the stain of paganism from his kingdom, as he instituted religious learning and endeavoured to improve literacy in a country in which few people outside of monasteries could read or write; he had a chronicle written that appeared to trace his family’s ancestry right back to Adam, which showed that his authority then came directly from God; he built monasteries, many of the originals having been sacked by the Vikings during their time in England, and he invited foreign monks to come minister there. He was however hands-off about religion, believing this best left to those who had trained for it all of their lives, and had dedicated themselves to it.
Aware that Latin was declining, particularly with the twin factors of the fall of the Roman Empire and the depredations of the Vikings, Alfred began ensuring English people were taught to read not in the ancient tongue but in English. This meant many important books had to be translated into what would now be the mother tongue of his kingdom.
From what I read about him, Alfred seems to have been the first king who truly cared about his people, not about power or riches or standing. I’m sure he wasn’t the paragon he’s being painted as, but he does genuinely seemed to have believed that the welfare of his realm was paramount, and the worship of and devotion to God part of his mission. Seeing the attacks by - and eventual repulsion and defeat of - the Vikings as an assault on Christianity, I don’t know whether you could make the case that kings like Alfred and those who came after him lent weight and legitimacy to the ultimate holy wars, the Crusades in Palestine and Jerusalem, but certainly later kings such as Richard I must have taken their cue from him, a man who was determined to bring God back into the hearts, and worship, of his subjects after they had been partially enslaved by the heathen.
Alfred almost made it to the tenth century, dying in October of 899 (gonna party like it’s… yeah yeah all right) of some sort of bowel disorder from which he suffered most of his life, most likely Chron’s disease or, um, piles. Well, now ain’t that a pain in the arse. Sorry. His bones, however, were not to be allowed to
restus in paxus. When William the Conqueror defeated Harold in 1066 and a new dynasty began in England, many of the Saxon monasteries were destroyed as the Normans started redecorating, and one of those to go was the one where Alfred had been laid, or rather, not quite. He was laid in Old Minster, the cathedral in Winchester at Wessex, but had left instructions before his death for the building of the abbey of New Minster, which he had intended would become the family mausoleum. His body was moved there when it was ready, and it was here that the Normans decided they fancied putting up their own abbey, and knocked his down. Luckily, there was time to move the remains, although after over 200 years by now there can’t have been much to move but bones.
Reinterred just down the road in Hyde Abbey in 1110, Alfred and his family were again at rest. But four hundred and fifty-odd years later, King Henry VIII, in a snit because the Pope wouldn’t grant him a divorce so he could marry Anne Boleyn, declared all Catholic monasteries “dissolved”, and in the case of Hyde Abbey this was literal: it was reduced to rubble and this time there was no time - or perhaps, inclination - to save the bones of the first great English king. They lay under the ground, the abbey not even built on but left as a quarry, until 1788, when the land was needed for the construction of a jail. Catholic priest Dr. Milner gave this account:
“Thus miscreants couch amidst the ashes of our Alfreds and Edwards; and where once religious silence and contemplation were only interrupted by the bell of regular observance, the chanting of devotion, now alone resound the clank of the captives chains and the oaths of the profligate! In digging for the foundation of that mournful edifice, at almost every stroke of the mattock or spade some ancient sepulchre was violated, the venerable contents of which were treated with marked indignity. On this occasion a great number of stone coffins were dug up, with a variety of other curious articles, such as chalices, patens, rings, buckles, the leather of shoes and boots, velvet and gold lace belonging to chasubles and other vestments; as also the crook, rims, and joints of a beautiful crosier double gilt.”
The bones were not exactly revered either, sadly. The convicts, never the most respectful of people and certainly not giving two sh
its about some old historical bones of some geezer who had lived almost a thousand years ago, smashed open the coffins they found, ripped out the lead and flogged it for two guineas, then, for added indignity, threw the bones carelessly about. They were said to have been rediscovered a hundred years later, in 1866, and given over to St. Bartholomew’s Church, but later advances in radiocarbon dating in 1999 proved them only to date from about the fourteenth century. Finally, in 2014 one other bone found in the same place as the now-discredited ones did turn out to be dated to the right period, and though it can’t be proven conclusively has been tentatively accepted as being, um, the pelvic bone of maybe Alfred or his son. It’s no way for the first king of England to be remembered, that’s for sure.
Alfred left behind him a country that was, well, a country: no longer several separate kingdoms, no longer divided by Danelaw, and with a real sense throughout the kingdom of everyone working together. That’s totally naive of course: Englishmen would continue to fight Englishmen when they could find no common enemy to fight, and there would always be rivalries, but overall the actual idea of an “English people” as opposed to “people from Wessex” or “Those who come from Northumbria” or whatever began to coalesce as a real possibility thanks to his reign. He also solidified, or perhaps re-solidified the hold of the Catholic Church on England, bringing back the idea of Christianity to a country that had suffered much under both the original Saxons and Romans and later the Vikings. Perhaps an appropriate motto for his House might have been MEGA, huh?