The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great Read online

  THE WHITE

  HORSE KING

  The Life of Alfred the Great

  BEN MERKLE

  © 2009 by Ben Merkle

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc. titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Maps on ♣ and ♦ are inspired by maps in Richard Abels’ Alfred the Great.

  Map on ♣ is inspired by a map in Ryan Lavelle’s Fortifications in Wessex c. 800–1066.

  Map on ♣ is inspired by a map in Alfred P. Smyth’s King Alfred the Great.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2009935985

  ISBN: 978-1-5955-5252-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  09 10 11 12 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR BEKAH

  Hwa þeos, þe gesihþ swa swa se morgen

  Fæger swa se mona

  Beorht swa se sunne

  Torhtmod swa se scildweall.

  Before the gods that made the gods

  Had seen their sunrise pass,

  The White Horse of the White Horse Vale

  Was cut out of the grass.

  Before the gods that made the gods

  Had drunk at dawn their fill,

  The White Horse of the White Horse Vale

  Was hoary on the hill.

  Age beyond age on British land,

  Æons on æons gone,

  Was peace and war in western hills,

  And the White Horse looked on.

  For the White Horse knew England

  When there was none to know;

  He saw the first oar break or bend,

  He saw heaven fall and the world end,

  O God, how long ago.

  —FROM G. K. CHESTERTON’S The Ballad of the White Horse

  Contents

  Family Tree

  Chronology

  Introduction

  ONE: Holy Island

  TWO: The Blood Eagle

  THREE: The Battle of Ashdown

  FOUR: Danegeld

  FIVE: Whitsunday and the Battle of Edington

  SIX: Rebuilding Wessex

  SEVEN: Alfred the Wise

  EIGHT: A Final Test

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Bibliography

  Index

  Family Tree

  Æthelwulf (king of Wessex AD 839–858)

  married first to Osburh and then to Judith

  CHILDREN OF ÆTHELWULF AND OSBURH:

  Æthelstan

  Æthelbald (king of Wessex AD 858–860)

  Æthelswith (married to Burgred, king of Mercia)

  Æthelberht (king of Wessex AD 860–865)

  Æthelred (king of Wessex AD 865–871)

  Alfred (king of the Anglo-Saxons AD 871–899), married to Ealswith (died AD 902)

  ALFRED’S CHILDREN:

  Æthelflæd (queen of Mercia, died AD 918) married to Æthelred (ealdorman of Mercia AD 880–911)

  Edward the Elder (king of the Anglo-Saxons AD 899–924)

  Æthelgifu (abbess of Shaftesbury)

  Ælfthryth married to Baldwin (count of Flanders)

  Æthelweard

  Edward’s son was Æthelstan (king of the Anglo-Saxons AD 924–939)

  Chronology

  AD 410: Visigoths attack Rome, causing Emperor Honorius to abandon Roman Britain.

  AD 410–600: Migration of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from the continent to the island of Britain.

  AD 597: Augustine of Canterbury takes office and begins the

  Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons.

  AD 635: Aidan founds a monastery on Lindisfarne.

  AD 684: Cuthbert becomes bishop of Lindisfarne.

  AD 793: Vikings raid Lindisfarne.

  AD 839: Æthelwulf becomes king of Wessex.

  AD 849: Alfred is born in Wantage.

  AD 853: Alfred is sent to Rome, and his mother, Osburh, dies.

  AD 855: Alfred travels to Rome once more with his father.

  AD 858: Æthelwulf dies, and the crown passes to Æthelbald.

  AD 860: Æthelbald dies, and the crown passes to Æthelberht.

  AD 865: Æthelberht dies, and the crown passes to Æthelred; the great heathen raiding army lands in Kent.

  AD 866: York and the kingdom of Northumbria fall to the Vikings.

  AD 868: Æthelred and Alfred march to besieged Nottingham; Alfred marries Ealswith.

  AD 869: East Anglia falls to the Vikings; Edmund is martyred.

  AD 871: Æthelred and Alfred fight the battle of Ashdown;

  Æthelred later dies, and the crown passes to Alfred.

  AD 878: Guthrum invades Wessex; Alfred is driven into hiding in Athelney; Alfred fights the battle of Edington; Guthrum is baptized.

  AD 885: Alfred drives the Vikings from the gates of Rochester.

  AD 887: Alfred begins to read Latin.

  AD 890: Guthrum, now Æthelstan, dies.

  AD 892: Raiding army returns from the continent.

  AD 896: Alfred’s new longboats fight a sea-battle.

  AD 899: Alfred dies, and the crown passes to Edward.

  AD 924: Edward dies, and the crown passes to Æthelstan.

  AD 937: Æthelstan is victorious at the battle of Brunanburh.

  Introduction

  This past year, while taking a moment between classes to relax in an Oxford common room, I began a conversation with an older English gentleman over a cup of tea. Noticing my American accent, he asked how I was getting on in England and if I had seen much of the beautiful countryside yet. I mentioned that I had hoped to take my family to Wantage that weekend because it had been the birthplace of Alfred the Great. He sipped his tea silently for a moment and then looked off into the distance with a skeptical eye and said, “Alfred, hmmm. It’s all very shrouded in myth, you know. I’m not sure if there actually was an Alfred.”

  You could tell that he was grappling with two problems. The first, I’m fairly certain, was a confusion between King Alfred and King Arthur. The second was a deep, deep need to express a scholarly dubiousness. This is the burden of the scholar, the need to scratch through the gilding that obscures the stories of history’s heroes, to lay open the ugly truth of ulterior motives, vainglorious pride, and bad breath. But sometimes the heroes of history are truly worthy of the golden reputations they carry. Sometimes the truest retelling of the story is permeated with hero worship.

  In the early, frigid months of AD 878, the whole of Britain had fallen to the savage dominion of the Viking invaders. The Saxon kings who had fought against the Danes had been either cut down in bloody combat or captured and executed in a gory sacrifice. A few lucky ones escaped the clutches of the Vikings and fled the island in humiliating defeat. Only one Anglo-Saxon king remained to hold off the Viking assault—King Alfred, the young king of Wessex. This is the story of the Anglo-Saxons’ greatest king, the young man who, though driven from his throne and hunted everywhere by his savage enemies, refused to give up his fight for his nation.

  This is the king who took a war-weary band of Anglo-Saxon men, hidden on the small swampy island of Athelney, and led them from where they teetered on
the edge of extinction back to face their enemies once more on the battlefield. This is the man who later kindled such a flame for Christian learning in the hearts of his people that he launched the greatest literary renaissance that Anglo-Saxon England ever knew. This is the story of the only English king xv to be known as “the Great.” He was a seasoned warrior, a scholar, a poet, a law-giver, an architect of towns and ships, and a zealous Christian.

  Alfred was great because Alfred was a great king.

  CHAPTER 1

  Holy Island

  Behold the church of saint Cuthbert, splattered with the blood of the priests of God, plundered of all its treasures, a place more venerable than anywhere in Britain is given over to pagan nations for pillaging . . .

  —ALCUIN TO ETHELRED , KING OF NORTHUMBRIA

  In the year anno Domini 937, Æthelstan, king of the English people, stepped resolutely onto the battlefield of Brunanburh, leading the might of the Anglo-Saxon nation out to face the combined forces of Vikings and Picts in what would be referred to by successive generations as “the great battle.”1 awaiting Danes and Picts. A thundering tumult the Saxons came, a reckless battering ram of mortal flesh, propelled by the passion and zeal of the king, whose fierce commands mounted up above the din and clamour of the chaotic charge. The linden shields of the Viking marauders split and shattered under the raging crush of the Saxon force. The Northmen faltered and staggered backward, yielding ground and, more importantly, leaving a number of gaps ripped through the center of their defensive wall.

  With drawn swords and bloodcurdling yells, the Saxon warriors seized the opportunity and surged through the freshly torn gap in their enemies’ wall. They poured through the defensive line, rent by their charge, like flood waters through a breeched dam, overpowering the stunned Vikings with sharp sword edge and cruel blunted hammer blows. The Norsemen and their Pict allies attempted to withdraw quickly in a desperate endeavour to regroup at a distance and make one more try at repelling the Anglo-Saxon assault. The tenacity and discipline of the Saxon troops had been carefully groomed over three successive generations of incessant battle against the pagan invaders. They left no room for retreat, no space for an orderly withdraw. Into the lines of the Vikings and the Picts they continued to surge, fighting fiercely, hewing down the astonished defenders with sword and axe.

  The Viking shieldwall had been shattered; the nature of the combat shifted. Now the battlefield was no longer controlled by two large distinct armies. Instead it was bedlam, a chaotic quilt of thousands of small skirmishes with no rhyme or reason but rage and terror. On the warriors fought—man against man here, and two against one there. Soon the morning sun, God’s bright candle, was looking down on the once green slopes of Brunanburh, now painted red with the blood of the fallen. Sensing the inevitability of their defeat, the entirety of the Viking army began to flee, running from the battlefield, wide-eyed and terror-stricken, abandoning the corpses of their fallen. But the Saxon press was unrelenting, and they pursued their vanquished foes hard across the countryside and into the surrounding woods.

  By sunset, the Danes and the Picts had been entirely routed, and King Æthelstan, with his exhausted and bloodied troops, stood as the clear victor of the battle. This triumph made him the first Saxon king to be able to claim lordship over the whole of Britain, having driven the Vikings entirely from the island and having won the submission of the Picts and the Welsh. This battle also marked the end of a war against the Danish invaders that had begun many decades before Æthelstan’s birth, a war that had been fiercely fought by Æthelstan’s father, Edward, and his grandfather, Alfred.

  And though Æthelstan was privileged to be the king standing victorious at that final battle, his great victory on the bloody fields of Brunanburh was only a small part of a much greater campaign waged by his predecessors. Æthelstan would be remembered for winning the “great battle,” but his grandfather, Alfred, had set into motion the events that culminated in this victory, feats that ensured Alfred would always be remembered as the great king—Alfred the Great, king of Wessex.2

  In the year AD 849, Osburh, the wife of Æthelwulf, king of Wessex (the Anglo-Saxon kingdom in the southwest of the island of Britain), gave birth to the king’s fifth son during a stay at the small royal estate in the town of Wantage on the northern edge of the Wessex border. Alfred3 was the last child born to Æthelwulf and Osburh, his oldest brother being more than twenty years older than him. With so many brothers between him and his father’s crown, it was quite unlikely that Alfred would ever ascend to the throne of Wessex.

  Alfred grew up roaming the countryside of Wessex alongside his father, who regularly journeyed throughout the many towns and cities within his kingdom. Sometimes on horse and sometimes on foot, Alfred learned the network of Wessex’s old Roman roads, still used by the Anglo-Saxons. As they visited each city, Alfred’s father and his advisors busied themselves with ensuring that the governing and taxation of the people had been competently managed. It was often a dull and dreary business. But the monotony of these bureaucratic chores was offset by the entertainments of the Saxon court.

  There were the hunts, for which Alfred would have a particular fondness throughout his life. There were falconry, footraces, and horse races. There were wrestling, archery, sword fighting, and spear throwing. There were feasts with guests from afar—travelers, seafarers, experienced warriors, priests, traders, mercenaries, pagans, scholars, bishops, thieves, and princes. But most exciting of all, there were the poets. Alfred always had a particular fondness for the poetry of his native tongue. Late into the evenings, the Anglo-Saxon men would sit in the mead hall around a blazing fire, with their bellies full of roasted meat. The mead was poured out for each man from a gilded bull horn, and the enchanting thrumming of the scop4 on his lyre began.

  The songs Alfred heard in the mead hall as a boy intoxicated him. He was held in thrall by the stories of men charging grim-faced and stoic into battle. He was pierced by the lament of loss when lovers and lords were cut down by cruel blades or swallowed up by icy waves, and he quivered with a chilly awe when mortal men willingly sacrificed their lives for the sake of nobility and honor.

  Alfred’s mother offered a small book of poetry to the first of her sons who could commit the volume to memory. Though the book may have been small, the gift was a treasure—a small collection of Anglo-Saxon poems, carefully handwritten on pages cut from calfskin. The opening page was dazzling, with bright colors ornamenting the first letter of the first poem. Alfred, unable to read the book for himself, was fascinated by the beauty of the volume and jumped at the opportunity. He immediately took the book and found someone who could read the poems to him so that he could commit them to memory. Soon he returned, recited the entire contents of the volume, and collected his prize.

  Lindisfarne Island lies off the northeast coast of England, just south of the Scottish border. It is a tidal island—when the tide is low, a narrow causeway connects Lindisfarne to the English coast, turning the island into a bulbous peninsula attached to the Northumbrian shore. But when the tide is high, the causeway is swallowed by the North Sea, and Lindisfarne becomes an island—the thousand-acre Holy Island. It is the epitome of seclusion: cold and grey, the air chilled by wind and wave-spray, filled with the cry of gulls and a palpable sensation of northernness. The island had been made famous during the later half of the seventh century by the great bishops Aidan and Cuthbert, whose austere piety had nurtured the faith of the early Anglo-Saxon Christians and had set an example of Christian living that would become the epitome of early English godliness.

  During the following century, the stories recounting the godliness of Cuthbert and the miracles wrought by his relics grew into legends, and the legends in turn were embellished into awe-inspiring epics. As the fame of those saints and their Holy Island grew, however, the spiritual discipline of the monastery they had established there sadly began to languish. First, the stricter elements of the monastic regime handed down by Aidan and Cuthb
ert were neglected. Then, slowly, the austerity of Lindisfarne turned to slackness, and its piety turned to worldliness. This slow decline of the Christian zeal of the monks was so gradual that, like the change in the tide on the Northumbrian coast, the shift was probably imperceptible at first. But this spiritual decline was punctuated with such a calamitous blast that the story of God’s dreadful judgment on Lindisfarne was soon more famous than the story of God’s blessing on that Holy Island.

  An Anglo-Saxon historian gave this description of the year AD 793:

  In the year 793 terrible portents came over the land of Northumbria, and miserably afflicted the people, there were massive whirlwinds and lightenings, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. Immediately after these things there came a terrible famine, and then a little after that, six days before the Ides of January, the harrowing of heathen men miserably devastated the church of God on Lindisfarne, by plunder and slaughter.

  —Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

  For the historian who recounted these events, as he looked back on the year 793, it was easy to interpret the significance and import of these mysterious signs. Whirlwinds and lightning, famines and dragons5 —all nature had been summoned as a portent for the coming judgment. The description of this particular Viking raid is rather brief and gives none of the details of the notorious sacking of Lindisfarne, but a good deal can be inferred from other Viking raids.

  Lindisfarne was probably chosen as a target since churches and monastic communities offered the prospect of great wealth with very little protection. In the following years, monasteries throughout Britain and Ireland would fall prey to the Viking raids. The Vikings came from the sea, arriving in a handful of their longboats with little or no warning of their approach. Their shallow-drafted ships were beached on the shore of Holy Island and then pulled far enough up the shore to be safe from the tide for several hours. The monks, merely puzzled for the moment, watched from within the walls of the monastery. Then, once the ships were secured, the Vikings turned to the monastery.