Dan Snow's History Hit - How and Why History: Alfred the Great

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

Ever since his reign in the 9th century, Alfred the Great has been celebrated as one of the most accomplished of our kings. A learned and religious man who encouraged education, Alfred defended his lands against Viking invaders. But how did Alfred, King of Wessex become Alfred the Great? How effective was he in fighting the Vikings? And why did he burn those cakes? Rob Weinberg asks the big questions about this unforgettable king to historian Justin Pollard, author of Alfred the Great: The Man who made England.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Stowe's History. It's another takeover today. I'm handing the reins of the pod over to our sister podcast, How and Why History, and the reason I'm doing that is because it features the brilliant Justin Pollard, who's a great friend, a great scholar, and he's like an international man of history, this guy. In this episode, we're going to find out all about Alfred the Great. We're going to work out how and why he burnt his cakes. Actually, probably mostly the why. How is presumably he exposed them to too much heat if you like this episode please search for how and why history wherever you get your podcast subscribe rate all that stuff coming up this friday how and why delves into the south african boer war if you

like this one there are 30 more episodes to enjoy if you subscribe to history hit tv we've also launched the world wars podcast the podcast coming thick and fast, everyone. That brings together all of History Hit's World Wars podcasts for five years worth of World Wars content. And there are new shows every week. That's from Professor James Rogers. In the meantime, let's find out how and why King Alfred burned those cakes. burned those cakes. Ever since his reign in the 9th century, Alfred the Great has been fated as one of the most accomplished of our kings. A learned and religious man who encouraged education, Alfred defended his lands against Viking invaders. In the same year, Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, after the burning of cities and the slaughter of peoples, honorably restored the city of London and made it habitable,

and he entrusted its defense to Æthelred, elderman of the Mercians, and all the Angles and Saxons who had before been widely scattered, or who were not in captivity with the pagans, voluntarily turned to the king and placed themselves under his rule. A tribute commissioned by Alfred the Great from Bishop Asser that inevitably emphasised his positive achievements. But how did Alfred King of Wessex become Alfred the Great? How effective was he in fighting the Vikings? And why did he burn those cakes? I'm Rob Weinberg, and to answer the big questions about this unforgettable king, I'm joined by the historian Justin Pollard, author of Alfred the Great, The Man Who Made England. This is How and Why History.

Justin, thank you very much for joining me. Oh, absolute pleasure. Why was Alfred, King of Wessex, known as Alfred the Great? Well, it's a very good question, because during his lifetime he wasn't known as Alfred the Great at all. In fact, he doesn't really become Alfred the Great until really the Tudor period. So he was known as a very good king during his lifetime. But it's after his death, really, that later chroniclers like William of Malmesbury and Geoffrey Gaemar hold him up as sort of like a mirror of monarchy, how a good king should be. And during the Tudor period, he gains this epithet.

The only king we have who gains this epithet. The only king we have who gains this epithet, the great. Henry VIII, being Henry VIII, did try to get people to call him Great Harry, but that never caught on. But with Alfred, the terminology has stuck, and that has a lot to do with who Alfred was and what he actually did. But also it has to do with what he became associated with later in the medieval period with being a great king, a mirror of monarchy. And in the 19th century, he becomes associated with being sort of the founder of the British Empire, which is not something he would have recognised in the slightest. And as such, having a great king as the founder of the British mission to civilise the world, the title was sort of reinforced then.

First of all, where was Wessex? and what do we know about Alfred's early life? Wessex was a kingdom. Up until Alfred's day, there was no kingdom of England. England was actually made up of lots of little kingdoms, some large, some small. Wessex, which is in the south, was one of the larger of the kingdoms. It was Wiltshire, Hampshire, Somerset, Dorset, Devon, that sort of area. There was Mercia in the Midlands. There was Northumbria, East Anglia in the Far East, then Essex, Kent and Sussex. And they formed what was called the Heptarchy. There were seven nations.

They all had their own king. They were elected. So there were a group of nobles who chose each generation from a group of families, a king for each. And one of those would normally be sort of the top king, Primus Interpares, and they were known as the Bretwalder. So Offa in Mercia was a Bretwalder. Redwald in East Anglia was a Bretwalder. And so Wessex was just one of those kingdoms, an important kingdom because it's in the south, so it faced across the Channel to Francia. But it was just a local kingdom. And it's only then over through Alfred's life and then beyond to take into the life of his grandchildren

when that slowly expands and becomes consolidated into what we would know as England today. In terms of the boyhood of Alfred, we do have a bit of information strangely it's very unusual to get much about these early medieval kings at all because we tend to have entries for them just in chronicles which literally usually have a line per year saying in this year king whatnot died or someone was born or there was a battle but for Alfred we have a biography by a monk called Asser, who was Bishop of Sherbourne. It's a strange book. Part of it seems to be from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and is sort of a year-by-year history of Alfred's life. And then part of it after that is sort of vignettes from his life.

And we do have some stories written by Asser, who's contemporary. He's living at the court of Alfred, of Alfred's early life. So we know he was born in Wantage in Berkshire in 849. His mother was called Osba, and she was a Mercian lady. We don't find out much about her. Queens in Wessex generally don't appear much in the history. They're not even actually really called queens, they're generally known as the wives of kings. But we have one story that Asa writes that she gets a beautiful book and she says to her children the first person who can read this book I'll give it to and a book is a very valuable object of the day and Alfred can't yet read but

he gets someone to read it to him and he learns it and he recites parts so he gets the book by reciting it which shows how sort of diligent and learned he was going to be. It's a convenient story. It might not be all that true, but it's the only moment we really get of a little boy with his mother in a Wessex royal family in the 9th century. Asser says he's his dad's favourite. His dad is King Æthelwulf. And certainly it's unusual in that he stays at court with his dad. It's quite usual in Viking and Saxon society for young nobles to be farmed out to other families. They go to other noble families and they're sort of adopted and brought up there away from their own people. But he stays at the court. So it looks like he's being trained up as king.

And he does this extraordinary thing when he's just a little boy, when he's four years old. His dad sends him to Rome. And we know about this because we have the papal records report him arriving. We have records of him at the various sort of way stations along the way. And he arrives there. He's very little. He's four years old. You know, he walks into Rome's huge city with the Colosseum and the great walls around it. And he meets Pope Leo IV, Leo the Great.

And Leo makes him a consul of the Roman Empire, which is not really something that is sort of an honorific title at the time. But it's an extraordinary thing that happens to him. And then he comes home and then he goes back with Ethelwolf. And they spend a year in Rome. By this point, Leo has sadly died, who's become his godfather. So he seems to be a bit upset by that. But this episode then builds up the story that Alfred is going to be some sort of divine king.

What Asser says is that Leo actually crowns him king, which he doesn't do. That's not what the Vatican records say anyway. And this is all really Asser, who's writing his book at a difficult time for the Wessex state, building up a propaganda backstory for this little boy. But it does give us these little moments in Alfred's young life. But that is about all we know. It's a huge amount compared to any other Anglo-Saxon child prince. But this is still the 9th century so it's slim pickings really. So he becomes king of Wessex how does he then go on to become king of the Anglo-Saxons? He comes up against the greatest threat of the day which is the Viking invasions which have started in 793 there's a very famous Viking attack on Lindisfarne and from that date on

there were more and more Viking attacks at beginners, piratical raids, but eventually become much more threatening with you have whole armies who come over and start overwintering. They start staying here. You know, they're not just here for a bit of cash. They're actually invading forces who go around the country, not just demanding money. We often think of them as always in battle and fighting and killing people. In fact, if they possibly could, they would just turn up, get money off whoever was living there and go away again. It was a protection racket that they ran, really.

And over the period of Alfred's reign, this became more and more serious. And what the Vikings started doing was actually deposing local rulers in the Heptarchy. So they turn up at Repton, which is an important centre in Mercia. And just by turning up, the King of Mercia scuttles off to Rome, never to return. He runs away because he daren't face them. And they don't take over themselves, they install a puppet king. So then they have all the money they want. And Alfred is the only king who finds a way of fighting back against them. And through that, he begins to bring the country together, becomes effectively primus inter pares, first amongst equals amongst the remaining rulers of the heptarchy,

such as they are. He never becomes king of England. It's his grandson who's the first person who could really call himself King of England. But he does become the head of the Anglo-Saxon peoples in England. He represents those people who are not under Viking control. And his life is the process of building up from Wessex into that position of having hegemony over the Anglo-Saxon part of the island, really. hegemony over the Anglo-Saxon part of the island really. In the meantime the king during the frequent wars and other trammels of this present life the invasions of the pagans and his own daily infirmities of body continued to carry on the government and to exercise hunting in all its branches to teach his workers in gold and artifices of all kinds, his falconers, hawkers, and dog keepers,

to build houses majestic and good beyond all the precedence of his ancestors by his new mechanical inventions, to recite the Saxon books, and especially to learn by heart the Saxon poems, and to make others learn them. And he alone never desisted from studying, most diligently, to the best of his ability. He attended the Mass and other daily services of religion. He was frequent in psalm singing and prayer, at the hours both of the day and the night. What was it that Alfred did that made his fighting the Vikings effective? Well, he was very ineffective to start with so one of the things that made him so effective was how badly he did to begin with which is just what his brothers who were king before him had done and his father before them

and his father before them. The great problem with Vikings were they're sort of the terrorists of the day. They don't fight nice. They will turn up and if necessary, they will have a pitched battle. And these are professional fighters. So they're very good at what they do. They're formidable. is if you're king of Wessex you pay them a large amount of money and they say right we'll go away and of course they go away for a year and then they come back again and they do the same thing again and the problem that all early medieval kings in northwestern Europe have is this goes on all the time so the Wessex king will pay them off they go to Francia the Frankish king thinks oh no they've arrived here he pays them off They go back to England and they just bounce backwards and forwards across the channel. And they're very adaptable. They are a naval based operation. So where Anglo-Saxons tend to think of rivers and seas as boundaries to Vikings, they're highways. They don't really care whose

land is whose. They go where they wish. If something looks undefended, they take it. If it is very heavily defended, they run away. Although a Viking would tell you that, you know, it is a great honor to die in battle. They're not fools. If it looks like a bad deal, they just go away. So they're a very difficult, elusive enemy to deal with. And all the Anglo-Saxon kings, up to and including Alfred, did this incredibly badly. What they did was they raised the fyrd, which is the peasant levy. Their army is just ordinary working men, really. You often turn up for battle, you know, with agricultural tools. And they attempt to fight the Vikings, and usually they lose. Sometimes they win, and when they win,

the Vikings will dutifully get themselves baptized and say, I've become Christian, and they will write a treaty and swear, and their new Christian name, the treaty that they won't invade again, and they go away, and next year they come back and do exactly the same thing again. There were cases of Vikings converting to Christianity and back twice in the same day. They were very, very elusive and difficult enemy for a Christian king to get his head around. And Alfred does no better than anyone else at it, really, until an extraordinary event happens where eventually he's deposed. And it's this deposition, which is the famous events

in Athelni, which changes his thinking, and which sets him out on a path that is completely different from any other European king in how to deal with this new sort of threat. So this is the point where he allegedly burns the cakes, the story that survived about Alfred the Great. This is this extraordinary thing. It's rather like George Washington was remembered for being quite a good surveyor. I know all the things Alfred did, burning cakes, which is a made-up story.

It's ludicrous, but the story is an allegory and it has meaning. What happened is that Alfred was at Chippenham for Christmas and during that time, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Vikings invade. And he just has time to escape to Athelney, to the sunset levels. And the Vikings take over Wessex, basically. So he's lost everything. Finally, they're not just going to come over and raid, they're going to take the whole thing of themselves. And while he's in the wilderness, wandering around very disconsolate, we get this story.

And this story first appears in A Life of St. Neot, about 100 years after Alfred's death, so quite close to the time. And the story says that Alfred is disconsolately wandering through the sunset levels, and he comes to a swineherd's house. And he begs for shelter, and the swineherd's house and he begs for shelter and the swineherd is out with his pigs and the wife of the swineherd says oh come in come in yes and she looks after him and she's baking some loaves or in some cases some cakes and Alfred is you know he's had a bad time of it and he's in a bit of a dream and he's not really thinking about what

he's doing and he's not watching the loaves and they start to burn so the swineherd's wife rushes in having smelt the smoke and tells him off extraordinary thing to do to a king said you're very happy to eat my loaves when they come hot from the oven but you're not prepared to stop them burning and Alfred meekly takes this telling off from a peasant woman of all people. Now it's an odd story in that what does it mean? And you can tell there are lots of versions of this throughout the medieval period and none of the writers, they all know the story but they're not quite sure why. What I think it means is something that neither Asser nor the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tell us is that it wasn't

just a Viking attack at Chippenham, it was a coup what had happened was the Witton the senior nobles in Alfred's court had decided like the other kings before him he wasn't dealing with the Viking threat probably better the devil you know and they sided with the Vikings as had happened in Mercia just recently and they invited the Vikings in got rid of Alfred and he ran away but what happens now is the extraordinary thing because in the case of Mercia when the Vikings arrived the king rang away to Rome and that was it end of the Mercian dynasty but Alfred goes into hiding in the Somerset levels where this story arises which appears to be I think is an allegory on how in the previous four years he hadn't

attended to his people in his kingdom the cakes are his people and because of that he was punished he was kicked out by his own people because he had failed to prepare for the return of the vikings and as such he was no better than any previous king but what he decided to do at athelny then was summon an army and fight back and actually take the Vikings on in a battle and after that battle change the whole system of how the area was governed. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. You mentioned the Vikings were obviously this naval power.

Did that force Alfred to develop his sea defences and his own navy? He did later, certainly. After the Battle of Eddington, he had this great battle in which he confronts Guthrum and the Viking army. This is very much a land-based campaign at this time. And he wins. But he decides to do something very different now. And the different thing he does is rather than say, right, become a Christian, promise to go away, and we'll leave it at that, or kill him, which was the other option that lots of people were keen on. What Alfred decides to do

is he'll give Guthrum the same problems he has. So what he does is make Guthrum a king in his own image. And this appeals to Guthrum, you see. He says, you can have the land to the east of Watling Street, what becomes the Danelaw. And you can be a king just like me, a Christian king with all the benefits of that. And Guthrum thinks, well, this is quite good. I have my own kingdom. And he agrees. But of course, in doing so, Alfred also gives Guthrum all the problems of being a king he makes him sedentary he makes him have to sit in one

place he makes him have to raise taxes and deal with nobles he gives him the same problems that Alfred has himself and so he now has a settled Viking force in one side of the country and the Anglo-Saxons to the west of Watling Street. But now he has to decide what is he going to do just to stop this happening again or just to stop another load of Vikings coming in saying right we'll have everything to the west of Watling Street now. And he does several things. The first one is he decides he is going to build a navy. It's not if I'm honest a fabulously good navy it does have a habit of crashing into the south coast of england but alfred is the first king to realize that the waters around england

are actually the front line of england the seas and the rivers that go in from the seas are actually the highways the viking use so having a force to protect against that is the important thing too and he actually goes to see himself with these ships and actually fights on these ships himself so he's very active now this becomes a much greater thing than it actually was in the 18th and 19th century when britain is becoming a naval power and of course a country becoming a naval power needs a foundation myth and our foundation myth is that the royal navy was founded by alfred the great that's why we have you know that now contentious song rule britannia which was actually written by thomas arn for a mask about alfred the

great and the first ship in the american revolutionary war navy their first independent ship was called the alfred because the american Revolutionary War Navy, their first independent ship, was called the Alfred. Of course, the American Navy also claimed Alfred as their founder. So that's how he became known as the founder of the Navy. He did found a naval force, but it was just the very beginning of an idea of how to defend England. It wasn't actually much of a navy in itself. So we have Alfred as king of the Anglo-Saxons, more secure on his throne. What are some of the outstanding features of his reign in terms of

his administration and taxation activities? This is the greatness, this is the really extraordinary thing. I mean, winning battles is great, but there's a lot of luck involved. Diplomacy is important, but again, there's an awful lot of luck and personality involved. What he does is extraordinary, and it's administrative, really. The first and the main thing he does is he sets up the Burgle system. Now, a Burgle is a little fortified town. There are still lots of them around. Winchester is one. And in fact, the layout of the streets in the middle of Winchester is still the layout that Alfred the Great laid out. Everything has just been sort of built on since then. And all of these little towns, they were defended, and they're about 20 miles apart. And they had roads between them. And this

created a distributed defence network. What tended to happen with Vikings, they would go to wherever the seat of power was, like Repton or Winchester, and they'd just decapitate the regime. Easy, then it's all ours. With Boers, you have all these little towns 20 miles apart, you take one out, and people just move to the other ones. And from the other ones, they can come defend you if you're attacked. So it distributes power and defense in a way that is incredibly reflexive and can deal with these very sudden lightning raids that vikings like to do also it provides its own financing the great problem any early medieval king has is they don't have a coffer full of thousands of silver coins most of the tax they get is in kind. The farm, as it's called, is food mainly,

because kings travel around all the time. So they can't raise large armies and keep them in the field. But with Burr's, what Alfred did was he'd give the people in Burr's a plot of land that's there. So they have something to defend, something of their own. So they developed a sense of community and defended their own town of course they paid for their own defenses because they were successful financially because of course the roads that help armies to travel down also carried trade down them

so this defended network proved to be an economic trade network as well as defense network and allowed each of these nodes within it to provide for their own defence. So it was a sustainable defence system that could remain in place. And that is undoubtedly, I think, his greatest achievement. But he also altered a number of elements of the state. It was usually the case with the army, with the feared, that once they were summoned, they were summoned until the king said you could go home again and this was remarkably difficult for what is basically a levy of peasant farmers because if they stay away all year fighting nobody's tended their fields they're going to

go home eventually to find their family of starve to death that meant that what happened of course is if armies were kept in the field for too long, they deserted, as you would expect. So what Alfred does is he starts a shift system, whereby only a certain proportion of an army ever has to be on duty at one time. So all the others know when they can be off and when they can actually be doing their jobs and earning their living and tending their fields. And he does the same with his administration. so he starts to build a sense of a more professional administration and by having that and having people who do have enough time to do one thing and the other and not just answer to their king whenever he demands things of them he can start to do another extraordinary thing which is start to rule by writ and this is all part of his

literacy campaign medieval kings anglo-saxon kings rule by traveling around all the time they're peripatetic they go from ville to ville from village to village and town to town and law comes with them so they are the royal court they are the arbiter of justice where they are the kingdom is at that one time and that means it's very difficult to actually rule a large area what you want to be able to do is have a centralized government where you can send out orders to people who you trust who will then execute those orders and that is ruling by writ and that requires that you have people throughout your country who are literate to begin with and literacy was very low at this time. But once you have literacy,

you can start sending out judges, you can start sending out laws, you can start sending out documents that people can read and understand and then reply to. So you don't have to be running around the country all year, trying to keep up with what's going on, whilst all of your detractors are running along behind you whispering. So those are the main sort of administrative changes. You mentioned the importance of education to Alfred. How much was that also to do with his desire to spread Christianity and Christian wisdom? It's interesting. I mean, at one level, very much. He is absolutely a Christian king, and we know he's a devout Christian king. And literacy is very important. But interestingly, what he wants to put out to his people, those

books most important for all men to know, as he calls them, it's not just about being literate, which in those days tended to mean reading and writing in Latin. What Alfred does, and he does this partly himself, as well as getting other people to do it, he translates books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon, into Old English. It is largely religious books, obviously. You have the first 50 Psalms he translates, Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care, and he translates the Soliloquies of Augustine. And he does these himself, which is an extraordinary thing. And included in these books, he translates Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, which of course is a pagan book. Boethius was an administrator in the late Roman Empire, and he writes Consolation of Philosophy while he's waiting to be executed. So it's a very philosophical tome, as you might imagine, but it was an important medieval tome. And so clearly, Alfred is not

simply thinking about literacy as a way of spreading the word of God or getting clerics to brush up their Latin. He's actually thinking about getting the philosophy of Christian kingship and rule and law out to the people as a whole, whereby everyone can understand it. Even if they can't out to the people as a whole, whereby everyone can understand it. Even if they can't read themselves, they can have read to them in their own language what these things mean. So it is very much an early attempt at a universal education system. And he sets up schools to try and spread this around the country. And of course, the more literate people he has,

particularly young people around his country, he has the better chance he has of being able to rule a country by writ and actually spread a law that is adhered to because he rewrites a lot of English laws which are all based on mosaic law originally but he rewrites those in English so that people actually understand what is going on so it is about Christianity, but most importantly, it's about understanding. Now the king was pierced with many nails of tribulation, though placed in the royal seat. For from the 20th year of his age to the present year, which is his 40th, he has been constantly afflicted with most severe attacks of an unknown complaint, so that he has not a moment's

ease either from suffering the pain which it causes, or from the gloom which is thrown over him by the apprehension of its coming. Moreover, the constant invasions of foreign nations, by which he was continually harassed by land and sea, without any interval of quiet, were a just cause of disquiet. What shall I say of his repeated expeditions against the pagans, his wars and incessant occupations of government, of the daily embassies sent to him by foreign nations, from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the farthest end of Ireland?

Land a Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. You've mentioned the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and we've also talked a little bit about Asser, Alfred's biographer. How important were those two books to our knowledge of Alfred and the propaganda, if you like, which has perpetuated this image of Alfred the Great. You're absolutely right. The most important books we have are the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle and Asser. Asser is living and writing at the time of Alfred the Great. He's a friend of Alfred. And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, although it starts off long before Alfred's reign and continues long after, it is originated in Alfred's reign. It is Alfred's project to start the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and both the Chronicle and Asser, whilst they are useful historical sources, are absolutely pieces of propaganda. They exist as a propaganda tool. The reason for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is to show the development of the Saxon state and to give a sense of how the Saxon state should continue and how it should become hereditary, which is something that we talked about earlier that it wasn't originally hereditary. Alfred wants his children and their children to rule after him. And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle sets up the idea of heredity within the kingdom. Asser's book, it doesn't look so much like a book as a selection of materials put together before you write a book.

And in fact, I think that's exactly what it is. It's being written at the time Alfred faces another invasion. He faces a large invasion led by a man called Haston towards the end of his life. And this biography is put together as a form of propaganda to justify the position of King Alfred, and also, I think, to prevent the dangers of another coup happening as happened with Guthrum. So the first part of the book is basically just nicked from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Then you have all of these little vignettes of his life, but there are odd things. So the year of the Chippenham is completely missing. He just pretends it didn't happen. There's just no mention of it. But of course, as a propaganda piece, you wouldn't want to talk about the year that Alfred was deposed and had to run away before coming back.

So I think the book was never then written up as a final biography because, of course, the need for it went away because the changes Alfred had made in his country by the time the Vikings invade again means that this Viking invasion is complete failure. Haston arrives with 330 ships and they leave in five. The Burgle system holds, the state holds, people stay behind Alfred, and it's a great victory. So we have these bits and bobs that were going to be a heroic biography of Alfred surviving,

but the need to actually write that heroic biography evaporated, so it was never done. How did Alfred die? The thing about the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is our main source for the end of his life is that it's very matter of fact often there are only two or three lines for each year so we know that he died in October of 899 and we're told the date he died he was 50 he might have been 51 we're not exactly sure the year he was born but a good age for the time

you know particularly having had quite a difficult life and the anglo-saxon chronicle just says he was king over the whole of the english people except the part under danish rule and that's that that is all we know we know he suffered some illnesses during his life he had a stomach complaint which doctors still often argue over what exactly it was. He appears to have died naturally. We know he set himself the task of translating the Psalms into English, which at the time were kept in three books of 50. And he completed the first 50, but we don't have the second hundred.

So we assume that at that point he just died. And clearly, whatever happened to him it wasn't strange enough for the chroniclers to mention it so that would imply he just died of old age is there a tomb that people can visit ah it's a lovely thought there was alfred was buried in the anglo-saxon minster at winchester which was the great sort of family focus. The old minster was replaced by William the Conqueror with the cathedral, which is still there today. There was also a new minster next to the old minster, and the Normans had that moved. Obviously, what they didn't want is a big focus for the old Anglo-Saxon royal family right next to their

cathedral. So they moved that abbey tobey to hide which is just outside the walls of winchester and that meant of course digging up a lot of kings and queens and a lot of those were put in mortuary chests which are known as fox's boxes and they are still over the choir in the cathedral in the present day cathedral in winchester and and they have the bones of Alfred's granddad and Cnut and all sorts of other Saxon rulers in, although they're all muddled up now because during the English Civil War they were all torn off the walls and kicked around, so we don't know who's who. But Alfred and his wife Aelswith, they were moved with the new minster to Hyde, and they were buried, we believe, in front of the altar at Hyde Abbey, where they stayed very peacefully until, of course, the dissolution of the monasteries. And Hyde was dissolved, as all the monasteries were, and the

remains became a private house, and then later they became a bridewell, a prison. And it was during their time as the building of the bridewell that workmen reported breaking into two tombs in the site of the old church, hauling the lid off, emptying out the contents, which included various bits of sort of, you know, regal cloth and whatnot, and scattering it in the earth. We now know that area where that church was is now a car park in Hyde and there has been an excavation there and they have found bones there. I'm not sure quite if everyone has agreed whether or not those bones are Alfred the Great or not but his last known resting place was under

a car park in Hyde. The second English king to be found underneath a car park in fact. In conclusion what would you say was Alfred's legacy for subsequent kings? He was the mirror of kingship. So medieval kings certainly saw him as an exemplar of what a king should be. What he actually did that led to a lot of the modern world, I think, is the organisation of defence and economics, and that's the Burgle system. By setting up an economically independent system, which can also protect itself, was a stroke of genius. An early medieval internet, promoting literacy, which again is an extraordinary liberal idea at a time when the ability to read and write were

closely guarded by small groups of people, mainly clerics, who didn't particularly want anyone else to have access to book learning. And he believed in an open access in your own language. That was extraordinary. And that led to his ability to actually start ruling a large country, ruling by writ, where you can rule from an executive position where you can rule from an executive position, where you can send out information and receive information back, rather than have to charge around on horseback trying to get people to do what you want. These little towns, which still exist today, and that system of having a literate administration that enables you to rule and cohere

a large country, those are undoubtedly a legacy to all Western countries. Justin Pollock, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. How and why history? you