The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great (4 page)

By the year AD 854, Alfred had returned to Wessex and had suffered a terrible loss. Death had taken his oldest brother, Æthelstan, and his mother, Osburh. The death of his brother was not a significant blow for Alfred. Æthelstan was more than twenty years older than Alfred and had already been serving as a subking, in place of his father, over the kingdoms of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Essex. He had been absent for all of Alfred’s life, so Alfred was not terribly attached to him. But the death of his mother, Osburh, must have shaken the boy Alfred profoundly.

At this time, Alfred’s father, Æthelwulf, began to turn his mind to more eternal questions. The death of a son and of his wife, as well as his own advancing years, focused his thoughts on his mortality. As he considered his impending death, he was gripped by questions about the state of his soul. It was time to sort out a few things. During an Easter feast at the royal estate in Wilton, in AD 854, Æthelwulf announced a significant gift—an unprecedented royal tithe. In front of his four surviving sons, a handful of bishops and other churchmen, and a collection of his noblemen, the king of Wessex declared that he would give one-tenth of all his properties to the church “for the praise of God and his own eternal salvation.” Then, spurred on by the stories that his youngest son had related, Æthelwulf announced his intentions to make a pilgrimage to Rome.

Æthelwulf made the necessary preparations for his journey and arranged for the governing of his kingdoms in his absence. Æthelbald, now the oldest of the sons, would rule Wessex. Æthelberht would rule the regions that Æthelstan, his now deceased older brother, had ruled as a subking—Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Essex. It is not clear what role Æthelred, Æthelwulf ’s fourth son, played. But, as further proof of his favored status, Alfred was selected to stay by his father’s side and to travel with his father on a pilgrimage to Rome, once again.

Once they entered the kingdom of West Francia, they were welcomed and entertained by the king of the West Franks, Charles the Bald. Charles also appointed a guide to lead them on the remainder of their trip, a monk named Markward, who accompanied them all the way to Rome. From Charles they passed to his brother, Emperor Lothar, and from Lothar to Rome. Only a few months before their arrival in Rome, however, Pope Leo IV had died, and all of Rome had fallen into a bitter dispute about his legitimate successor. The clergy of Rome had appointed Benedict III, while the Carolingian Emperor Lothar had appointed a man named Anastasius. Alfred and Æthelwulf arrived in the midst of this ecclesiastical feud and the rioting that it inspired, although Benedict III was finally recognized as the legitimate pope shortly after their arrival.

This time, the party of Anglo-Saxon pilgrims stayed in Rome for an entire year. There were more than one hundred churches to visit and countless architectural feats to admire. And even though he was a young boy at the time of this visit, Alfred would still recall the buildings of Rome decades later and mention them in his writings. Æthelwulf, as king of Wessex, recognized his own particular responsibility for the
Schola Saxonum
and worked to restore the buildings that had been damaged in a recent fire. And, of course, Æthelwulf spent time paying his respects to the newly installed Benedict III.

The king of Wessex knew how to demonstrate his affections for the pope. He gave Benedict a golden crown weighing four pounds, bowls, beakers, various garments, and a beautiful sword crafted in the Anglo-Saxon style, with gold inlaid into the blade in a mesmerizing pattern. After presenting these gifts, Æthelwulf then went out and threw gold and silver coins to the crowds. This scene, the image of a king as a munificent gift-giver, became a foundational picture for Alfred of what true royalty looked like. It confirmed everything he had heard in the poetry of his native tongue about the importance of being a generous lord, a “ring-giver,” as the poems would describe the legendary masters of old.

After the Anglo-Saxon royal party arrived back at the court of Charles the Bald in Verberie-sur-Oise, Æthelwulf announced his intention to take a new bride—Judith, Charles’s twelve-year-old daughter. A marriage to the great-granddaughter of Charlemagne would ally Wessex with the most powerful family on the continent, shoring up his own authority and legitimacy throughout the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England.

Charles demanded that his daughter be received not only as the wife of Æthelwulf, but also as the queen of Wessex. Though it might seem to go without saying that the wife of the king would naturally be the queen, this was not the case in Anglo-Saxon Britain. Not since the infamous Queen Eadburh, wife of the Wessex king Beorhtric, had there been a queen of Wessex. Eadburh, in an attempt to control her husband, had worked to drive off the noblemen and advisors who surrounded him with her slanderous worm tongue. When defamation and gossip didn’t work, she turned to murdering them with poison. One day she filled a poisonous cup for one of her intended victims and had it mistakenly given to her husband, King Beorhtric. After his death, Eadburh was driven from the kingdom.

The cautionary tale of Eadburh gave the later kings of Wessex cause for hesitation in crowning their wives as queen. Thus the kings of Wessex took wives but shared no royal authority with them and did not call them queens. The Wessex crown was meant to be passed on the “spear-side” and not on the “spindle-side,” meaning the power was to be passed through male heirs and not through female heirs. But Charles insisted that Judith be anointed as queen, and Æthelwulf, desperate for the political alliance, consented.

From the raiding of Lindisfarne in AD 793 until well into the ninth century, the Viking raids continued to grow in intensity and regularity. Additionally, in the ninth century, the nature of the raiding parties began to shift. At first, a Viking band might be filled with an assortment of farmers and craftsmen—men who saw joining a raiding band as a two-month diversion from their regular work, a diversion that offered a bit of wealth and adventure. By the middle of the ninth century, however, the Viking ships were filled with professional warriors, men who considered plundering and pillaging as their life’s calling. It is difficult to determine what caused this shift. Many suspect that the Scandinavian regions experienced a shortage of available farmland during this time due to either an overly abundant population (polygamy was common in Viking tribes) or changes in the weather patterns that rendered some of the Viking farmland unusable.

Regardless of the cause, the year AD 865 was setting up to be a formidable one for Alfred’s father, King Æthelwulf, and his new bride.

1
The Vikings were Scandinavian men who traveled on expeditions mostly in the North Atlantic acquiring wealth for their respective homelands in the territories known today as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It was the Danish Vikings, sometimes called the “Northmen,” who were particularly active during the ninth and tenth centuries in the British Isles. Having already conquered the Picts in the area that would become Scotland a century later, the Vikings used the men as mercenaries against the Anglo-Saxons.

2
At Alfred’s birth, the island of Britain was divided into a number of different nations. In addition to the division between the Celtic tribes that ruled Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall, the area of modern-day England was divided up between a number of different Anglo-Saxon nations— Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Wessex, and the several subkingdoms of Essex, Kent, Sussex, and others. Over the course of the reigns of Alfred, his son Edward, and his grandson Æthelstan, these various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were gradually united into one great kingdom of the English people. And though we might anachronistically refer to the people Alfred ruled as the “English,” this was a concept that was introduced by Alfred, halfway through his reign. And it was not until the end of the reign of Æthelstan, and his victory at the battle of Brunanburh, that one could really speak of one English people.

3
The four preceding sons had each been named with variations on their father’s name—Æthelstan, Æthelbald, Æthelberht, and Æthelred. Even the Wessex king’s one daughter, Æthelswith, carried this element in her name. The Anglo-Saxon word “Æthel” meant “princely” or “noble.” But the “Æthel” element was dropped for his fifth son, Alfred, meaning “Elf wisdom.”

4
The Anglo-Saxon poet was called the scop, pronounced as “shope.” He was the “shaper” or “creator.” The poet was 6 the closest thing to God himself, who was the shaper of all of history. And the scop imitated the divine as he retold this history.

5
Contrary to many perceptions of this period in history, dragon stories were actually quite rare in Anglo-Saxon literature. The only significant account of a dragon to appear in the Old English stories was the story of the dragon in the poem
Beowolf
. And that dragon was not in England, but in Sweden.

6
From AD 43 until AD 410, England was under the control of the Roman Empire and known by the name
Britannia
. But as Rome became weakened by barbarian attacks through the end of the fourth century and into the beginning of the fifth, the Roman legions were pulled out of the island and returned to defend Rome. In the fifth century, migrating Anglo-Saxon tribes began to fill the power vacuum left by the Romans and, by the end of the sixth century, had conquered and settled the area that is now known as England.

7
During their stay, the Anglo-Saxon pilgrims would have stayed in the
Schola Saxonum
, which lay just within the new defensive walls. The
Schola
had been established by an earlier king of Wessex, Ine, who had traveled to Rome over a century before to atone for his wicked reign. The
Schola Saxonum
was a large community of Anglo-Saxons living and working in Rome. It provided a hostel for Anglo-Saxon pilgrims and an Anglo-Saxon church, Saint Maria. The community of the
Schola
was large enough that during the recent Saracen assault on Rome, the Saxon troops mustered from the
Schola
constituted a significant portion of the city’s defensive force.

CHAPTER 2
The Blood Eagle

Then King Edmund, the brave man that he was, said “I do not desire nor wish that I alone survive after my beloved thegns have been fiercely slain by these pirates in their beds, along with their children and wives. I never was the sort to take flight, and I would rather, if necessary, die for my own nation. God almighty knows that I will never falter from his service, nor from loving his truth. If I die, I live.”

—FROM ÆLFRIC’S Life of Saint Edmund

I
n AD 865, a Viking army invaded Britain— an army unlike any of the preceding raiding bands, an army that was uninterested in quick plunder, an army set on long-term conquest. Three Viking brothers commanded this great army: Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan, and Ubbe. According to some later legends, these three warriors had come to avenge the death of their father, Ragnar Lothbrok (or Ragnar “Hairy Breeches”), who was said to have failed in an earlier invasion of Northumbria. The Northumbrian King Ælle had captured Ragnar and had him thrown into a pit of poisonous snakes. As Ragnar died, he cried out: “How the little pigs would grunt if they knew what was happening to the old boar!”

Before his failed attack on Northumbria, Ragnar had led a raiding party up the Seine River, into the heart of Charles the Bald’s West Francia. Ragnar’s Vikings encountered a minimal amount of resistance from the retreating Francian military as they plundered their way to Paris. The Francian forces retreated behind the fortified walls of monasteries, such as the monastery of Saint Denis, and watched in horror as the Vikings tortured and barbarically executed the captured Francian forces to the delight of the pagan raiding army. Ragnar and his men were eventually turned back, though it wasn’t a fear of the Francian army that prompted the Viking’s departure. Charles paid a hefty sum of seven thousand pounds in silver and gold to Ragnar, as
danegeld
, a bribe to convince the Vikings to leave. Usually the paying of the danegeld only guaranteed a much longer visit from the Danes, but at the same time that the payment was negotiated, the Viking forces were plagued by a severe epidemic of dysentery. The disease was so severe that Ragnar’s forces were more than satisfied with the danegeld and immediately returned to their homes, hoping to recover in peace.