Who Was Alfred the Great?

Short answer

Alfred the Great (849–899) was king of Wessex from 871 to 899, the fourth and youngest son of King Æthelwulf. In 878, at the Battle of Edington, he defeated a great Viking army and forced it to accept the Treaty of Wedmore, an agreement that gave Wessex peace and recognized the Viking occupation of eastern England. He then reorganized the Wessex army and the Wessex legal and ecclesiastical systems, brought in continental scholars, and laid the foundations of a single English monarchy. He is the only English king to be called “the Great.”

The Young Prince

Alfred was born in 849, the fourth son of King Æthelwulf of Wessex. He grew up in a kingdom that was under constant pressure from Viking raiders, who had first attacked England in 793 (the raid on the Lindisfarne) and had been ravaging the English kingdoms, especially the north and east, for the better part of a century. According to his biographer Asser, the young Alfred made a famous pilgrimage to Rome at the age of four, where he was confirmed by Pope Leo IV. The story may be legendary, but it suggests the importance of the Roman connection in the early life of the future king.

By 870, three of Alfred’s four brothers had died (the fourth, Æthelred, would die in 871), and Alfred had become the principal military leader of the Wessex resistance. He was crowned king in 871, on the death of his brother Æthelred, and inherited a kingdom that was, by any reasonable measure, on the verge of collapse. The Great Heathen Army, a major Viking force that had been operating in England since 865, had taken York in 867, had killed the East Anglian king Edmund in 869, and had occupied Mercia in 874. By the spring of 878, the army had crossed the Thames into Wessex and was rapidly overrunning the kingdom.

The Battle of Edington and the Treaty of Wedmore

The decisive battle was fought at Edington (in modern Wiltshire) in May 878. Alfred, with the local levies of Wessex and a small core of professional warriors, defeated the Viking army, besieged its remaining fortress, and forced it to accept the Treaty of Wedmore. The terms of the treaty, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, included the baptism of the Viking leader Guthrum, the establishment of a defined boundary between Wessex and the Viking-controlled Danelaw, and the payment of a ransom by the Vikings for the hostages they had taken. The peace that followed, although broken on several occasions, was the foundation of the political order that would become the kingdom of the English.

The Reforms of Alfred

Alfred used the breathing space given by the Treaty of Wedmore to reorganize the Wessex state. The reforms of his reign can be grouped under four headings: military, legal, ecclesiastical, and educational.

The military reform was the most immediately practical. Alfred reorganized the fyrd, the Anglo-Saxon militia, into a system in which one half of the available men served at any given time, while the other half stayed at home to work the land. He built a network of burhs, fortified towns at strategic points across Wessex, from which mounted patrols could respond to Viking incursions and to which the local population could flee in case of attack. The burghal hidage, a document of the reign of Edward the Elder, lists thirty-three burhs and the hides of land assigned to maintain them; the system was later extended to cover the whole of England. Alfred is also credited with founding a royal navy, the first English fleet of any size.

The legal reform was equally significant. Alfred issued a series of dooms (laws) that drew on the older Anglo-Saxon codes of Æthelberht of Kent, Ine of Wessex, and Offa of Mercia, but added a substantial body of biblical and Christian material. The prologue to the dooms, traditionally attributed to Alfred, contains the famous quotation that he “gathered together” the laws “from the time of the heathen” and “set them down in writing for the first time in a single book.” The code, in its surviving form, deals with homicide, theft, oath-breaking, the rights of the church, and the duties of the king.

The ecclesiastical reform was the work of Alfred’s later years. The Viking invasions had destroyed many of the older English monasteries, and the surviving churches were often in disarray. Alfred, with the help of continental scholars brought in by Asser — Grimbald of Saint-Bertin, John the Old Saxon, and others — established a court school at Winchester, supported the rebuilding of monasteries, and worked to bring the English church into closer contact with the continental reform movements. He corresponded with Elias, the patriarch of Jerusalem, and with other ecclesiastical leaders of the Mediterranean.

The educational reform, of which the law-code prologue is the most famous example, was the most distinctive. Alfred believed that the recent disasters of the English had been the result of a loss of learning, and he set about to restore it. He commissioned the translation of religious, historical, and philosophical works into Old English: Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and others. He also composed or commissioned a substantial body of original writing, including his preface to the Pastoral Care (one of the most striking pieces of English prose of the Middle Ages) and his will. The translations, made at Alfred’s court, were the foundation of a substantial body of Old English prose literature.

The Last Years

The last decade of Alfred’s life was, by his own account, a period of failing health, but the political and military events of the reign continued. In 885, the Northumbrian and East Anglian Danes submitted to Alfred; in 886, he captured London from the Vikings and entrusted it to his son-in-law Æthelred of Mercia; in 893–896, a major Viking invasion, supported by forces from Francia, was defeated by a combination of military and naval action. Alfred died on 26 October 899, and was buried at Winchester.

The Legacy

Alfred’s significance is twofold. In the short term, his military, legal, and ecclesiastical reforms kept the English kingdom alive in a moment of existential crisis. In the long term, the political and cultural framework he established was the foundation of the kingdom of the English, the most centralized state in the eleventh-century west. His successors — Edward the Elder, Æthelstan, Edmund, and Eadred — used the institutions he had built to absorb the Danelaw and to impose a single monarchy on the English. The late Anglo-Saxon state, which the Norman Conquest of 1066 would inherit, was, in its basic structure, the work of Alfred and his successors. The epithet “the Great” was not applied to him until the early modern period, but the political judgment that it expresses is sound.