Michael Wood on Alfred the Great

That was the bleak situation when Alfred came to the throne of Wessex in 871. He can never have expected to be king, as the youngest of five brothers, but all of them died young. He was 21, pious and brave, but in poor health, with a crippling hereditary illness, perhaps Crohn’s Disease – the attacks were evidently brought on by stress and must have been agony for someone who spent his life in the saddle. As Alfred himself said, what he achieved was not only through all his external struggles, but the “manifold troubles” of his personal life.

He fought three wars with the Vikings. The first in 871 bought him time. Then in the mid-870s Mercia was dismembered when two sections of the ‘Great Heathen Army’ carved up the east Midlands and the north, settled down “and began to plough and make a living”.

This was a turning point. From now on England was Anglo-Scandinavian, and whoever wanted to rule all England had to deal with that. But Alfred’s dream of one kingdom of the English was only made possible by his dramatic victory in 878 at Edington. Had he lost, the history of Britain might have been radically different: no English state perhaps, no English law, or English ideas about government; maybe no English language as the world’s language.

Alfred made peace with Vikings but that didn’t stop further battles, indeed he never stopped fighting. His third war lasted from 892–97. But, by his death in 899, he had saved Wessex, and, as it turned out, England.

That story is as exciting as any in our history, but it is not war that sets Alfred apart. He was a man with great practical talents, planning and executing long-term administrative change; refounding cities, and laying out new ones; making provision for coinage, law and trade.

Perhaps his greatest achievement was in learning. As a young man Alfred was barely literate. But he was a Christian king, touched by the great cultural revolution in Europe under the Carolingians, when the principles of Christian humanism guided kingship, learning and law. So he gathered together an international team of scholars, several from Mercia, bishop Asser from Wales, John ‘the Old Saxon’ from Germany, and Grimbald from Francia, who brought knowledge of the achievements of the Carolingian renaissance to Alfred’s court.

These men set out to translate into the vernacular what Alfred thought were the key books for the times, “the ones it is most needful for people to know”. Some of these survive in manuscript today in the Bodleian and the British Library, and in the Vatican a late ninth‑century commentary on The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius is covered with marginal notes in a Welsh hand – perhaps a text used by Asser himself.

Alfred’s reign, then, was a founding moment in English politics, culture, language and literature. The roots of English law and poetry are Anglo-Saxon, and the continuity of English vernacular prose runs from Alfred to Chaucer and on down to us.

So while the dig for Alfred’s bones drew a blank, if it made more people aware of his story, then it served its purpose. If you want one example of why Anglo-Saxons matter to us today, it’s Alfred the Great.

This article was first published in the March 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine