The hero of our nation

Alfred, truly the greatest of Englishmen

History was once the story of heroes, and there is no greater figure in England’s history than the man who saved, and helped create, the nation itself. As I’ve written before, Alfred the Great is more than just a historical figure to me. I have an almost Victorian reverence for his memory.

Alfred is the subject of my short book Saxons versus Vikings, which was published in the US in 2017 as the first part of a young adult history of medieval England. The UK edition is published today, available on Amazon or through the publishers. (use the code SV20 on the publisher’s site, valid until 30 November, which gives 20% off). It’s very much a beginner’s introduction, aimed at conveying the message that history is just one long black comedy.

The book charts the story of Alfred and his equally impressive grandson Athelstan, who went on to unify England in 927. In the centuries that followed Athelstan may have been considered the greater king, something we can sort of guess at by the fact that Ethelred the Unready named his first son Athelstan, and only his eighth Alfred, and royal naming patterns tend to reflect the prestige of previous monarchs.

Yet while Athelstan’s star faded in the medieval period, Alfred’s rose, and so by the fifteenth century the feeble-minded Henry VI was trying to have him made a saint. This didn’t happen, but Alfred is today the only English king to be styled ‘the Great’, and it was a word attached to him from quite an early stage. Even in the twelfth century the gossipy chronicler Matthew Paris is using the epithet, and says it’s in common use. 

However, much of what is recorded of him only became known in Tudor times, partly by accident. Henry VIII’s break from Rome was to have a huge influence on our understanding of history, chiefly because so many of England’s records were stored in monasteries.

Before the development of universities, these had been the main intellectual centres in Christendom, indeed from where universities would grow. Now, along with relics, huge amounts of them would be lost, destroyed, sold ... or preserved. 

It was lucky that Matthew Parker, the sixteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury with a keen interest in history, had a particularly keen interest in Alfred. It was Parker who published Asser’s Life of Alfred in 1574, having found the manuscript after the dissolution of the monasteries, a book that found itself in the Ashburnham collection amassed by Sir Robert Cotton in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 

Sadly, the original Life was burned in a famous fire at Ashburnham House in Westminster on October 23, 1731. Boys from nearby Westminster School had gone into the blaze alongside the owner and his son to rescue manuscripts, but much was lost, among them the only surviving manuscript of the Life of Alfred, as well as that of Beowulf. In fact the majority of recorded Anglo-Saxon history had gone up in smoke in minutes. 

A copy of Beowulf had also been made, although the poem only became widely known in the nineteenth century after being translated into modern English. The fire also destroyed the oldest copy of the Burghal Hidage, a unique document listing towns of Saxon England and provisions for defence made during the reign of Alfred’s son Edward the Elder. An eighth-century illuminated gospel book from Northumbria was also lost. 

So it is lucky that Parker had had The Life of Alfred printed, even if he had made alterations in his copy that to historians are infuriating because they cannot be sure if they are authentic. He probably added the story about the cakes, for instance, although this had come from a different Anglo-Saxon source. 

We also know that Archbishop Parker was a bit confused, or possibly just lying; he claimed Alfred had founded his old university, Oxford, which was clearly untrue, and he was probably trying to make his alma mater sound grander than Cambridge. Oxford graduates down the years have been known to do this on one or two occasions.

In fact Oxford university dates from the twelfth century, Cambridge a bit later, and in Alfred’s time the village of Oxford would have been no more than a few huts. Having said that, the myth that he founded the university in 886 dated back to the thirteenth century and was even officially recognised by the authorities, so he may have been genuinely mistaken. People in the past often assumed things were a lot older than they actually were. 

Alfred’s popularity continued to rise over time. Sir John Spelman’s version of the Life was published in 1642–1643, apparently for the edification of King Charles I, which obviously didn’t work out too well. 

Alfred’s reputation as England’s saviour would only grow. The oldest memorial to Alfred is a pub, dating from 1763, when John and Elizabeth Stevens of Wantage opened their new inn in Alfred’s home town, called ‘Alfred’s Head’. 

Alfred was among sixteen people included in the Temple of British Worthies, an eighteenth century feature of Stowe House, Buckinghamshire, one of the great country homes of the period, and he was one of only three monarchs to make the cut. His popularity reached a peak in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; when in 1740 the royal court celebrated the accession of Alfred’s German successor George I, Thomas Arne wrote an opera, Alfred, about the king who had been father to the nation. 

Alfred became the epitome of heroic kingship, justice and liberty, praised in poems by Shelley and Wordsworth; it was partly helped by the fact that we know relatively little of him, but also that the monarchs of the age seemed the exact opposite in character and nobility. George I, the first of a series of witless, boorish morons to compose the House of Hanover, had been cuckolded by a Swede, who he then had murdered, and had his wife locked in a dungeon for thirty-odd years until her death.

By William Wordsworth’s time the country was ruled by George III, who was insane, and who was followed by the debauched, grossly obese playboy, the former Prince Regent, now George IV. The upright Victorian period, a reaction to this decadent aristocratic lifestyle, therefore idealised Alfred, who was referred to as ‘England’s Darling’ in one poem. 

Schoolchildren were now taught the story of the king and the cakes as national folklore, the king epitomising everything that was good in the English character. The Victorians especially loved Alfred, considering him to have all the qualities that made a great Englishman: courage, fortitude, learning, sexual neurosis. Around 10,000 people turned up to a millennial celebration of Alfred’s birth in 1849 in Wantage organised by a sort of Victorian moralist called Martin Tupper whose odes to ‘King of a race that reigns and rejoices in every place’ would probably not be taught in schools today.

Fans also marked the millennial anniversary of his death with a ceremony in Winchester in which universities from Britain, America, and the other English-speaking countries put up a statue, raised at the cost of £5,000. There was also an exhibition at the British Museum, and among the items on display were passages from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a copy of Asser’s Life, as well as some of the books Alfred translated and illuminated gospels from the era. 

It also featured jewels from the period, including two gold rings, one belonging to Alfred’s father Ethelwulf, which had been found in Wiltshire in 1780, and picked up by a labourer who sold it for thirty-four shillings. The other had been commissioned by Alfred’s sister, Ethelswith, Queen of Mercia, and bears the words Eathelswitha Regna; it was discovered in Yorkshire in the 1870s. 

But in the wider scheme of things these trinkets are not important; his lasting legacies are the institutions around us, both in England and those countries that derive their political systems from the Anglo-Saxons. Alfred, having rescued the country from conquest, helped to establish one of the oldest and longest lasting of nation-states, whose inhabitants have been lucky to enjoy stable institutions and the rule of law for most of the time since. He also brought the country’s culture back in touch with Europe, spreading literacy and knowledge of the Latin world - for all this it’s right to call him the Great. Truly a hero and the father of our nation.