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It takes something special to be rewarded with the title ‘Great’ in English history. It’s true that if you were talking to a Dane, they might well argue that Cnut, also at one time a king of England, fully deserves the title. And others might throw continental rulers with names like Peter, Frederick and Catherine into the mix. Then there is also Charlemagne to consider, a name which literally translated means ‘Charles the Great’. But Alfred stands alone in English history, perhaps due to a sense of humility or a desire to avoid building up one of our own too much. We don’t want anyone, even a king, getting above their station.
So, does Alfred really deserve to be given such an illustrious title? Let’s start with a quick resumé of the man who has earned himself a reputation as a disastrous cook and a man who single-handedly defeated the Vikings, fighting back from near oblivion when deserted by all and sundry before going on to be the first king of England.
There’s one or two doubtful facts there, some out and out myths and a few grains of truth. So, let’s start by sifting the wheat from the chaff.
What Alfred Was Not
Let’s begin with some of the dubious elements of the . First of all, there’s that story about burning the cakes. The story first appears a century or so after Alfred lived in a work known as the Life of St Neot. Therefore, there is no contemporary account mentioning it. That in itself poses a question. So too does the nature of the story, that of a man down on his luck, so much so that the king, supposedly the greatest man in the kingdom, finds himself berated by a peasant’s wife, the humblest of the humble.
This type of story is not unique: Robert the Bruce and spiders in caves anyone? So, the story is probably not true. Rather it is a story within a story highlighting how low Alfred had fallen and how high he would later fly.
Then let’s look a bit more at that story about the abandoned Alfred, hiding away in the remote fastness of the Isle of Athelney. Well, here we have a bit more to go on. Alfred was certainly forced to run for cover when caught by a surprise attack launched by a Viking army at Chippenham in January 878. And he did make his way to Athelney, protected by its remote and isolated position in the Somerset Levels. True so far. But was he alone and abandoned?
Well, whilst he was hiding away on Athelney the Devon militia won a major victory over a Viking army on the shores of the Bristol Channel. And when shortly after he called up an army to take on the Vikings there was a significant response from the militias of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire, so he was hardly alone whatever his biographer, Bishop Asser of Sherborne, might suggest.
One element is easily dealt with. Alfred was never king of what we know as England. Rather he was the king of , which covered most of southern England, and he was also in practice the ruler of Mercia, which by his time covered the west Midlands. So, a reasonable part of modern England but far from all of it. Excluded were the east midlands and the north, areas that were still under Viking control in Alfred’s time. |
