The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great (31 page)

For a brief moment in the summer of 894, Alfred’s kingdom was entirely freed from Viking invaders, and the king was able to return in peace to his home in Winchester. The Danes continued in their determination to topple Alfred’s kingdom and were resolved to make one more try, despite the loss of Hastein’s leadership. The remaining Viking fleet, harbored just inside the Danelaw at Mersea Island, set out once more, sailing up the Thames, turning north at the river Lea, and continuing twenty miles north of London. Here the Vikings, in the early winter months, built another fortification and settled in for the winter. One would think at this point that the Vikings’ plan was obviously hopeless. All of their efforts to overthrow Alfred’s kingdom had failed miserably, and their persistence in what had clearly become an impossible venture seemed flat-out maniacal. It is worth remembering that sixteen years earlier, a Viking raiding army seizing the northern town of Chippenham in the early months of the winter had been able to almost entirely overthrow the last Anglo-Saxon nation. This latest attack employed a strategy that had worked before.

An attempt to drive out the Danes early in the summer by the force garrisoned in the London burh failed to dislodge the Vikings from their fortress and resulted in heavy losses on the side of the Saxons. Seeing the difficulty the men of London were having with this army, Alfred returned to London to carefully consider the situation and help devise a more effective strategy.

First, the king dissuaded the Saxon garrison from attempting another assault on the Vikings’ fortress. This would only give the Vikings the upper hand by allowing them to fight from within a fortified position. Next, with autumn approaching, the king brought out a large army that camped near the Danes’ position, allowing the Saxon farmers to harvest all of the crops in the region under the protection of the Saxon fyrd. These crops were then taken into the burhs, where they were entirely safe from the plundering of the Vikings, who had been expecting to live through the oncoming winter off of this harvest.

Next, anticipating that the starving Danes would soon be fleeing from their fortification, Alfred looked downriver from the Vikings’ position for the right place to build a double-burh. This was a tactic that had been used with great success against the Vikings by the Carolingians. By building a fortress on either side of the river and connecting the two fortresses by a bridge spanning the waters, the Saxons could make the river a death-trap for any Danish longboats traveling down the river. Not only had Alfred avoided fighting the Danes on a battlefield that would have favored the Vikings, he was now starving the Vikings out of their position and forcing them into his own trap.

The Danes had seen up close the effectiveness of the double-burh defenses and knew exactly the predicament into which they had fallen. Exasperated with what had now become three years of failure, the Danes abandoned their longboats and fled. First, the army marched across Mercia and camped at Bridgnorth, on the river Severn, near Wales. As the fyrd followed this raiding army, the men of London seized the abandoned Viking longboats and destroyed the defenses of the Danish camp. The raiding army encamped in a fortified position in Bridgnorth for the rest of the winter, surrounded by the Saxon fyrd, who kept a close eye on the Danish marauders. During this time the Vikings finally came to the realization that their campaign against Alfred had become hopeless. And, just as spring came to the island of Britain, shaking loose the icy grip of a bitter winter, the Danish warriors abandoned their hopes of conquering, or even plundering, the Anglo-Saxon people and resolved to return home.

By the summer of 896, the Vikings had entirely ended their attack on the Anglo-Saxons. Some of the Danes, sick of the life of rapine and slaughter, found opportunities within the Danelaw to purchase land and begin their own settlements, quite literally beating swords to ploughshares. The rest of the Vikings, who still longed for a life of plunder and theft, banded together and returned to northern Europe, hoping to find the Frankish resistance less indomitable than the Anglo-Saxon spirit. However, of the two hundred fifty longboats that had originally landed on the shores of Kent three years before, not to mention the countless reinforcements that had joined the Viking campaign throughout those years, the Danes who returned to France in 896 could scarcely fill five longboats. Truly, the spirit of the Vikings had been broken by the kingdom Alfred had built.

Three years later, in the year AD 899, six days before All Hallows’ Day, King Alfred died. Having reigned twenty-eight and a half years, he died at the age of fifty. What may sound like a short life to the modern reader would actually have been considered a long and full life to Alfred’s contemporaries. Asser, Alfred’s friend and biographer, related how, especially in these later years, Alfred was often severely tortured by the pains of some unknown illness. Thus it is likely that Alfred’s death was neither unexpected nor untimely. The king was buried in the Old Minster of Winchester, though his bones would be repeatedly moved during the following centuries.

After Alfred’s death, the holdings of the king of Wessex were steadily expanded by Alfred’s son, Edward, and his grandson, Æthelstan, until soon the throne of Alfred came to rule over the entirety of the island of Britain. Even though Æthelstan is often referred to as the first king of England because all of England was first united under his reign, the accomplishments of Æthelstan and Edward were really just the natural culmination of the reforms first established during Alfred’s reign. Alfred truly was the great king of England, the one monarch who rightly understood the needs of the nation and unrelentingly gave all he had to supply those needs.

England, and the many nations descended from her, still have Alfred to thank for a substantial portion of the heritage and freedoms that they enjoy today. The title “Alfred the Great,” so strangely offensive to the modern ear, was well deserved by the Anglo-Saxon warrior-king. Of course these words of unreserved praise are all in need of much qualification. Alfred was, after all, a mere mortal and 234 certainly had his fair share of foibles. Nevertheless, he was a fierce warrior, a devout Christian ever thirsting for wisdom, deeply committed to justice, a lover of mercy, and a king who gave himself for his people. He was practically a myth and a much-needed reality. He was the king of the Whitehorse—Alfred the Great.

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Acknowledgments

T
his book is the fruit of my studies for an MA in English literature at the University of Idaho, under Dr. Rick Fehrenbacher. Although utterly unlike my dissertation for that degree, a translation and commentary on Alfred’s version of Augustine’s
Soliloquies
, most of my appreciation for Alfred flows from my research for that project, as well as from Dr. Fehrenbacher’s infectious love for Anglo-Saxon literature. Many thanks to Aaron Rench for getting me into this. And many more thanks to my wife and children, who have richly blessed me throughout this work.

All translations, and any silly mistakes, are my own.

About the Author

B
enjamin R. Merkle is a Fellow of Theology and Classical Languages at New Saint Andrews College and a contributing editor to Credenda/Agenda. He received an MA in English literature from the University of Idaho and an MSt in Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford, and is currently pursuing his doctorate at the University of Oxford.

Annotated Bibliography

GENERAL ANGLO-SAXON HISTORY

The Anglo-Saxons
, James Campbell, Penguin: New York, 1991.

A very good place to start with any studies in the Anglo-Saxon era is the helpful, and beautifully depicted, introduction written by James Campbell.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, trans. Michael Swanton, Routledge: New York, 1998.

The premier primary source for this era is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a year by year accounting of the events considered most significant to the recorders of early English history.

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED

Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England
, Richard Abels, Longman: Harlow, 1998.

The best scholarly biography available is by Richard Abels, Professor of History at the U.S. Naval Academy.

King Alfred the Great
, Alfred Smyth, New York: Oxford Press, 1995.

Another very informative biography is offered by Oxford Press, authored by Alfred Smyth.

However, Smyth is convinced that the primary source for our knowledge of the life of Alfred, namely the biography produced by Asser, is a late forgery. Convinced that most of what we know about Alfred is a hagiographical manipulation of the facts, Smyth dedicates himself to exposing the real Alfred to his readers. Nevertheless, Smyth’s work is still a treasure trove for the historical background to Alfred’s reign. His previous publications on the Vikings of this era (works like
Scandinavian
Kings in the British Isles 850-880
and
Scandinavian York and Dublin:

The History and Archaeology of Two Related Viking Kingdoms
) are also invaluable for understanding the context of Alfred’s reign.

Alfred the Good Soldier
, John Peddie, Bath: Millstream Books, 1992.

John Peddie’s biography focuses primarily on Alfred’s campaigns, and carefully retraces likely routes of travel and the chronologies of Alfred’s many battles.

ALFRED’S LITERARY WORKS

Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary
Sources
, Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, trans., Penguin: New York, 1983.

Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge have translated a selection of excerpts from Alfred’s works, along with the full text of Asser’s biography of the King and a number of other contemporary sources.

Bately, Janet. “The Books That Are Most Necessary for All Men to Know: The Classics and Late Ninth-Century England, A Reappraisal” in
The Classics in the Middle Ages: Papers of
the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and
Early Renaissance Studies
, eds. Aldo Bernardo and Saul Levin. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1990.