Gone Medieval - Alfred the Great

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

Alfred the Great - King of the West Saxons and later King of all the English not under Scandinavian rule - is the only English King to be given the title “the Great”.So why did he become such a legend that to become a British citizen you now have to answer questions about him?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman talks to historian, TV producer and publisher Justin Pollard, whose book on Alfred the Great dubs him “the man who made England.”The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited by Thomas Ntinas and produced by Rob Weinberg.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world. to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. And welcome to Gone Medieval. My name is Dr. Kat Jarman. Alfred the Great, king of the West Saxons from 871 and later king of all the English who are not under Scandinavian rule. He is the only English king ever to have been given the title The Great. But why is that? And what did Alfred do for us? And why has he become such a legend that if you want to become a British citizen and take the required life in Britain

test, you will have to answer questions about him. As a little aside here, I actually did one of those online mock exams for this recently, and one of the questions was who defeated the Vikings? You think that with a PhD in Viking Age English archaeology, that would be quite an easy one, and the answer they wanted, of course, was Alfred. But of course, it's not quite as simple as that. But why has he become so legendary? In today's episode, that's exactly what I'd like to delve a little bit deeper into. And to help me do that, I'm really delighted to have with me, historian Justin Pollard. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Justin. No, it's lovely to be here. Now, Justin is the author of several books, including one on today's topic, which has a title, Alfred the Great, The Man Who Made England. And incidentally, Justin is also very well known for his work as a TV producer, and not least as a historical consultant for film and drama shows.

And in fact, many of our listeners will very likely have watched some of the programs that he is responsible for the historical background for, including programs like the drama. show Vikings by Michael Hurst. And currently, you're working on the new series, aren't you, Justin, of Vikings Valhalla? That's it, yes. So this is, it's a Viking sequel. So Ragnar and all his friends are dead and we're a couple of hundred years later.

So this is the story of Cunute and Sven and basically the run-up to the Norman conquest, which in our version is going to be really sort of the final Viking conquest, because of course the Normans are Northman. Fantastic. I'm going to get back to that bit at the end because of course when you were working on the original series of Vikings, Alfred was one of the characters. Oh yes.

So I'm going to get back to that a little bit. But first of all, just for the sake of our listeners, there's a little bit of a kind of recap, I suppose, and those who might not be that familiar with Alfred's life, can you give me a sort of brief, basic Alfred 101 summary of his sort of main achievements? What he's known for? Surely.

So Alfred is king of Wessex originally, living in the middle of the 9th century. So it's a time when all the major Viking raids have started and the old kingdoms of England, the Heptarchy, sort of Mercia, Northumbia, East Anglia, are starting to fall under the influence of Vikings and Viking puppet kings. And everyone is basically trying to work out a way of dealing

with this scourge that's emerged from the north, which as Christians they think of as very much vengeance from heaven, come to damn them. So Alfred is one of a group of brothers who all sort of take it in turns to take the throne and fight repeatedly against the Vikings, sometimes win, sometimes lose, but fundamentally have this problem

that Vikings just keep coming back. So Alfred's big job in his reign, and certainly which will come onto, one of the reasons why you might consider him great, is that he finds new ways of dealing with Vikings that don't simply involve having a battle or paying them off. And in doing that, he sets some of the stage for what becomes England and then what becomes Great Britain after that.

So it's a long life by the stance of the day. He's about 50 or 51 when he dies. So he does very well compared to his brothers, certainly. And by his death, what was Wessex, which he grew up in, is now become powerful enough to have a lot of the other former kingdoms, if not actually be part of England, certainly holds some sort of allegiance to him. So there's a lot of the other former kingdoms. So there's a nascent England there, other than the bit to the east of Watling Street, which of course is Viking. But again, that is one of his achievements in turning the Vikings from raiders into people with problems like his, kings and rulers. So his basic life is an attempt to try and control this completely previously unknown, apparently impossible to deal with threat, a bit like trying to

do with terrorism today. How do you stop a lone person with a gun or a bomb? Vikings to Saxon kings are like that. Everything they try seems to fail and Alfred finds a way, at least in part, of solving this problem. So that's the basis of it. He dies in 899 and like all great kings,

he's currently buried under a car park. Obviously. Where else would you do yet? So, no, that's a brilliant summary. So we're going to get into some of those details a bit later on. But I think one important point to make about Alfred as opposed to other early medieval kings, is that we know an awful lot more about him, or at least we think we know an awful lot more about him,

because so much more is it written about him. In fact, I'm researching some of these early Wessex Kings at the moment for my next book, and I cannot find any information about many of them. So there's literally, no, so there's kind of a sentence here or there. But Alfred is different. What sources do we have for him and for his life, and are they reliable? Ah, well, is any source reliable? It's good, because one of Alfred's great projects in his life,

life is to increase literacy in the kingdom which he considers has sort of fallen away, which it has to be fair under Viking attack. And so he's probably responsible for really getting things like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle going, which is this year-by-year account of events happening in his kingdom and other kingdoms in England. It starts off very sparse in the sort of periods you're dealing with where literally each year has a line written about it. But during his reign, it becomes a lot more elaborate. And this is probably partly propaganda. He is telling his side of the story of how he's bringing together his nation. So we have the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is being written pretty much by his reign year by year. So we're going through it.

And then we have a biography by a monk from Sherban, or the Bishop of Sherban, rather. He's a Welsh monk originally called Asa. And Asa writes a really peculiar biography, part of which is sort of like little vignettes from childhood. part of which is clearly chunks just copied out of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and quite important bits like the year in which he's deposed from power and goes and hides in Atholny and supposedly burns the cakes. He leaves that bit out altogether. And that's led to a great spat amongst historians as to whether or not this books are fake.

Certainly Alfred P. Smith, who is a famous Saxonist, claims it is a forgery, written later to sort of justify the past. Most other people, including me, think it is probably original, but it isn't a complete biography. It looks to me like it's, well, like you're doing when you're preparing your next book. These are materials being put together to write a biography. So it's not surprising that the year in which he gets deposed is missing from it, because you're not going to put that in. But I think it's almost impossible to prove, but it looks to me like it was happening. He gathers these materials for a propagandistic biography of his master, his patron.

he's a patron and by the time it's becoming ready the need has gone the Viking problem has to some degree been solved so these things are just put aside

because it is a weird mish mash of things but the information in it feels very of its time the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle no parts from it and certainly if you talk to people like Simon Keynes at Cambridge

they are very convinced of the time a lot of this is of course to do with linguistics and I'm not a linguist and a lot of the arguments in its favour are linguistic. But we also have a problem with ASSA in that it doesn't survive. Of course, it was in Cotton Library, and in 1731, the British government, in their usual careful and considered way, let their greatest treasure go up in flames,

and ASSA's book was completely destroyed on the Otho bookcase. So fortunately, Bishop Parker had made a copy of it. So we have a copy, but he did add in bits to it in the way that people in the 16th century did. so we don't have a clean copy and that may also be one of the reasons why some people think it's not genuine because it has been messed around quite a lot

but I think it's certainly a genuine document it's unique in that it lets you see a Saxon king up face to face which nobody else does you know when's the next biography of an English king written in their lifetime trying to think long time after and beyond that of course also we have some ways of proving the events that are talked about by Asa and the Saxon Chronicle in that they're a European chronicles. So you've got the

annals of Fulder, the annals of San Boutan, you've got the Vatican authors. And we also, we have letters. We have the laws of Alfred. We have various legal documents, charters. Most of all, we have some books, partly written by Alfred himself, which again, I don't think any English king could read properly into what Henry VIII after him, but we do have a series of books he wanted translated into English. Obviously, they're just translations and may partly have been done by other people, but he wrote prefaces in them. And there you can hear an English Saxon king's own thoughts. And again, that is absolutely unique. So it's a completely different set of materials to any king either side, really. Yeah, I mean, it is really absolutely

remarkable. And I think only when you compare them to everybody else, you've realised the extent of that. But I think it also does mean, as you've already pointed out quite clearly, there's some motivation, there's a lot of propaganda here. And he's obviously trying to do it. He's trying to gather and put himself as this sort of legitimate person who's going to gather the whole country, which obviously has an effect on how we've seen him later on as well. So exactly, sort of all of that tied together is giving him this legend. And what about this title of the great? When does that come in? Is that during his lifetime or is it later? No, it's much later. If you look at his death notice, as it were, in the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle, it basically just said, Alfred's dead. It's really very, very downbeat. You know, he doesn't get any great incommium at all, but through later writers, through medieval writers in particular, so Simmon of Durham and William Malmesbury, they sort of develop with for him a reputation of being Alfred the Wise. And to them, and so he started getting all sorts of quotes attributed to him, which are completely made up. But, you know, he did make some really fantastic quotes, but he becomes this epitome of wisdom, partly because he was literate, and partly because these later writers, as we do to some degree, we fall for the propaganda. He was writing in a difficult time trying to establish, first of all, his legitimacy on the throne of Wessex,

and then his legitimacy in a wider area of England, and tell a narrative that explained how and why he was going to defeat the Vikings, and how and why that was a good thing, really, because several kingdoms had taken the Vikings in and had vassal kings, and weren't necessarily all that unhappy about it. We tend to fall for it. And then we get him with the eighth course, who tries to get everyone to call him Great Harry. And nobody does.

It's really in the 18th and 19th century that he starts to be called Alfred the Great, as sort of basically our version of all those other Great. So, you know, there's Darius the Great and Charlemagne. And as the English or the British Empire begins to expand and we begin to feel more confident on the world stage, we sort of need a great. And so songs like Rural Britannia

first appears in Thomas Arms, Alfred Amas, because at this period we also start to get this myth that Alfred founded the Royal Navy. You know, he was a clever man. He did realise, and was one of the first to realise that the boundaries of the nation were not now the rivers and field boundaries between the old Heptarchy,

but were the seas around us. And the seas were what Vikings used. They were roads to Vikings, whereas they were barriers to Saxons. So he does fall. a navy of sorts. But it's really not very effective. It keeps bumping into the south coast of England, which is terribly helpful. And where we have accounts of how it worked, they tend to get. They were very heavy ships. They'd get stranded. And then the Vikings would just run away because they couldn't get away. So it's an 18th, 19th century sense that he becomes, Britain needs a founding

father. So he starts getting associated with being the founder of everything. And he becomes great. He's Victorian great rather than Saxon. great. He's medieval wise. He's Alfred to the Saxons. He's wise to the medieval period and he's great in the post-medieval period. So it's partly the propaganda of his own and it's partly the propaganda of the nascent British Empire that makes him into this ludicrously overblown character, really. Yeah, absolutely. And then we get to the 21st century and we don't quite know what to do with him, but we still call him with him in the syllabus and make him great. It's a bit more complicated. Well, yes, well, we still call him great.

And again, partly this is retro, because we currently have this rather sort of, certainly in government circles, it's retro feel about how 80th and 19th century history has been done down and we should still be proud of elements of it, which I suppose is a natural pushback against post-colonial studies and having to start dealing with the downsides of having an empire, which are substantial, to say the least.

So there has been pushback, which again is really just propaganda. Alfred should absolutely be studied, but not because of a title, The Great. He would have been absolutely embarrassed, I would think, about being called that, really. His writing, show him to be a modest man, a quiet man, and a man who talks specifically about the dangers of hubris. So it's a difficult balance. Because of the Victorians, he has become indelibly associated with that sort of tub-thumping empire-building jingoism.

And so the response then after, certainly the 70s, 80s, was, ignore him, he's not important. Neither of those are true. They're both in themselves propagandistic approaches to it. The real Alfred lies in the middle. And if people actually looked at him, they'd get a much better idea not only about the 9th century,

but actually about, frankly, modern politics. They could all learn from reading some Alfred. Absolutely, that's very well said. And actually, a great way to get back to the actual Alfred and his actual achievements. So let's go back to him and his life. I could talk about the latest stuff for hours, but let's go back to 12 from them.

So he is in the kingdom of Wessex in the 9th century. And what do we know about his sort of family background? You already mentioned he's got several brothers. What sort of do we know about his family? We know a little from Asa, because again, with this unique biography, you get some personal details. You just don't get for other Saxon kings. His predecessor was his brother Ethelred,

and he's descended from Ekbert. There were a line of brothers that take on the throne one after the other. We know that his mother. was a woman called Osba. And we have one little vignette from his childhood, which Asser writes, which says that his mother tells her children that the first person who can recite

this beautiful book she has, she'll give the book to. And of course, Alfred, who at the time actually is younger than we know he'd learned to read, somehow probably not almost read it to him, he puts this book to memory and this little boy, of all the children then is the one who recites this book perfectly, and Osbo is seen giving him this sort of

beautiful little book. But after which, like so many Saxon women, she disappears off the page. We know he married Elswith, and it looks like all his children were had with Elswith, and he's unusually for the period. His eldest, Edward the Elder, went on to be king after him. His eldest daughter went on to be the Lady of the Mercians, mercy of being the other big former kingdom just to the north. It's interesting, because it's a time when succession to the throne in Wessex or in any of the Saxon states

it's not a done deal. It's not a case that the eldest son of the eldest son of the eldest son, there are certain families who vie for control. And at the end of the day, when a king dies, it is up to the government, the Witten, to vote for the next king. So you see particularly in mercy around this period, there are various dynasts, the C-Dinistry, the B-dinistry, the W-dinistry, and they're endlessly fighting with each other to try and take control and gain legitimacy through being voted in by their wittain. So again, this is one of the reasons why Alfred has to write this very positive propaganda about itself. He's trying to turn this very unstable system that the Vikings use and abuse by siding with underdogs and turn it

into what becomes a hereditary monarchy. So he's trying to turn a family who are basically senior nobles who have a chance at the top job into a family who are royal and as such, by definition, get the top job. So that's the main hereditary attempt he's making in his reign to change what had, you know, which is very unusual, sort of in our world, in an elected monarchy. Might be a good idea. Who knows? Airplanes, space suits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships. Over on the patented podcast by History Hit, we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions and the people who claim these ideas as their own. We uncover exceptional stories behind

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wherever you get your podcasts to catch new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. Interesting one, isn't it? So, of course, we've talked a little bit about this earlier, but so battles the Vikings are his absolute main enemy, really. And especially the Great Army. We've had episodes on the Great Army before on the podcast here, but it's really in that particular time period from the 860s and to the 870s that these really become the major threat to the entire country, really. And we have kingdoms falling one by one, and they do eventually also head for Wessex and try to get to Wessex.

But Alfred does successfully keep them out. Can you say a little bit more about exactly what he does that is so successful and that sort of sets him apart, really? It's interesting because what has been happening was there have been these early Viking raids, which were purely sort of piratical raids, but they build up and up into larger and larger armies, and armies which later on they bring their family over, clearly they're not just visiting.

And the problem with traditionally how kings have dealt with this, is you either fight them and beat them and they run away, and then next year they come back, or you fight them and lose, at which point you have to pay them off. So you give them vast amounts of silver or gold, particularly in France, Charles the Bald is giving away tons of the stuff to get them to go away.

And then they go away and they go and do the same thing in France. And France, or Francia, Francia then pays them off and they come back. You don't ever solve the problem. So that was the big problem that Alfred had to deal with. And Mercia had fallen recently, again, by a coup. The Vikings had supported one of the dynasts and taken over. And we hear that on Christmas, Alfred is in Chipponham

and he's attacked by Vikings and deposed. This is where he runs away to Atholney and supposedly burns the cakes. And normally that's told just as a story of the Vikings come and take over. I think it reads so much like the Mercian story, I think probably there is a court coup as well. And if you look at who's signing shelters before and after this,

once Alfa gets back into power, a lot of those names who were there before have disappeared. So to some degree, either it's just a straight Viking invasion or there's an associated coup, but Alfred is thrown into exile. He burns the cakes, according to the annals of St. Neat. But he does manage to form together three thirds, three levied armies,

and fights the battle of Eddington against Guthram and his forces, and wins. Now, at that point, it can all just go wrong again. Winning a battle doesn't necessarily help you at all. They'll go away, but they'll be back. But he does a number of brilliant things, really. First of all, he gets Guthrim to be baptized, and then he tells Guthram he can have a kingdom to the east of Watling Street. So he turns Gathrim from being a warlord, a pirate king, into a king.

And in doing that, of course, he gives Guthrum all the problems that he has as well. Because now Guthrum has to worry about Vikings and attacks and raids and looking after his people and staying popular and doing all of these things. So he quite brilliantly gives Githrum what he thinks he really wants, but actually it's a nightmare for a Viking, really. And that buys him time. And it's the time then that makes the real difference. He does three things, really. He reorganises his administration, both the military administration, the civil administration, and puts them on a shift system whereby you can have some people defending you and other people, because they're peasant levies working the fields. What used to happen was you gather as many people you have together and have a battle. And depending what happens, there's nobody tending the fields. It's an economic disaster. So he puts his admin and taxation is taxisers. collector, all onto a shift system, so some people do it and some people don't. He then builds these

burrs, which are small fortified settlements. They're not forts. He's not building castles. They're 33 of them. They're built to similar plans, and they have high street in them. Winchester is one. It's still laid out actually in the same units that it was laid out by Alfred. And within those, you put people, traders, and you defend it. And because you give them land and you put them in this network of trading centres with good roads between them, they prosper. And as they prosper, they have something to defend. They have a sense of ownership, a sense of belonging to their nation. So they help to provide for the defence of each burr. Also, when Vikings do attack, Vikings use like to attack their headquarters and decapitate the state. When you've got 33

burs, you can move your power around that. If somewhere's attacked, you can move somewhere else. If somewhere's attacked, other burs can come to your aid. So it's a bit like the origins of the internet by the American military. Rather than have a centre and an outlier, you have a network system which can adapt around whatever the attack is. And this is brilliant, because not only is it very militarily effective,

but it gives people a sense of ownership of their land and a reason to be English or Wessex and defend it for themselves. So he does that, and then thirdly, literacy. He's very big on literacy, because he thinks quite rightly that it's been destroyed during the Viking years. But he's not just talking about let's get monks reading Latin again.

He wants things put into English so that anyone should be able to read them. And so he starts himself and through his court translating books into English. He rewrites the laws of the country, puts those into English. They're odd laws. They're more of a sort of a manual of kingship rather than literally laws for a judge to use. And this is an extraordinary thing. Most people in the medieval period, they use Latin as an exclusive language. You don't want the peasantry to know it.

You don't even want the lower barons to know it. And yet he wants things in English, so everyone may know it. And in doing that, he massively increases the educational base. He sets up a school at court, so his own barons, his own earls are educated. And that not only improves the general standard of education, he brings in people from Europe as well. It also, of course, improves the sophistication of his court, and allows it to function at a much higher level, which makes it more stable. And so those are the three real foundation stones,

the administration of the country, the burgle system, and the literacy. And that is what he does different. You don't get really anywhere else in the world many rulers choosing to do those. They tend to fight and feast. Yes. Absolutely.

There's such good points. So really some of these impacts were very much on culture and society, weren't they, rather than necessarily military and country, but it's actually also on quite a small and local scale. Well, exactly. Well, he even, you know, he starts, he dies before he finished it, he starts translating the Psalms into English. Quite what the Catholic Church thought at the time of having their holy texts being read out

so that everyone in church could understand them. Who knows? Of course, in the later medieval period, everything is back in Latin again and doesn't come out until the Reformation, do we actually get to hear it. He's way ahead of his time there. And there's a great increase in art at the time. We have the Alfred Jewel, which is maybe a bookmark. from one of the books he sent out, possibly, I don't know if you think it's from Visorosis or whatever, I actually have one, which was made for the Victorian anniversary of his

death, of course. So... Fantastic. I'm very envious. So it is really, it's almost a sort of a Carolingian renaissance, really. He goes from what was really just a mayhem of small states trying to fight off basically to them a terrorist enemy who don't play by the rules to actually slowing the... down and holding together everything enough to plant the seed of a real country. Yeah, and you've mentioned a couple of times the sort of continental links. And actually, there is quite a strong link, isn't there, between Wessex and between Alfred and continental Europe, the Carolingians, all these other people. Is he getting his inspiration from abroad or is

sort of all his own making? No, he is. Again, as you know, it's often sort of popularly thought that in this period everywhere is very insular, it's very difficult to travel. Alfred goes to Rome. When he's very little, he goes there with his dad, and he meets the Pope. The way Asa tells it, he's then an anointed king. Because again, Asa's trying to say that it's a done deal. In fact, the Pope makes him consul, which is a fairly empty title. And of course, but in doing that, he has to travel. So he has to go to San Boutan and then follow the pilgrimage route all the way down.

And on the way back, they stop off at the Carolingian Court. Ethelred meets Judith, Carolingian Princess, who he brings back with him. So he sees the sophistication of the Carolingian court. He would have, I'm sure, heard that they had started building fortified settlements on either sides of rivers to control Viking movement up and down rivers. And we find some of the burrs built in England are double burrs on either side of the river. So you have London Burr and the soothwork, Southwark, which are on either side of the river. Because they're starting to realise, and this I think is probably a Carolingian realisation,

that were to the Christians, rivers are boundaries to the Vikings, their roads. That's how they get in and out quickly. And so by throttling off those roads, by effectively putting tolls on those roads, they begin to control the threat. So Alphidette, his court are in correspondence with monks in Europe

and with the Carolingian court. He has contact with the papacy. Again, something very hard for his predecessors to have done when you're fighting for your life all the time and really jumping from battle to battle. but he puts down an anchor for a nation. He manages to just hold everything together, slow everything down long enough to start building up this big world,

to start having international relations. And as such, to start learning from those. And for the first time, really, learning that the Carol Indians, the Franks, were having exactly the same problems with Vikings that was happening in England. And that by getting together and working together, it was going to be a damn sight easier to deal with them than just always making them the other person's problem.

Yes, absolutely. And it clearly works very well for him, which is great. Now, just one sort of interesting thing about Alfred Lives is he was actually not a very well person, Wussi. He was very sickly. He was making, you know, all these great achievements. But he was really quite unwell. What do we know about his illness or his alleged illness anyway?

Well, it is, again, it's mentioned in ASSA. As you know, trying to diagnose people over a thousand years later is always difficult. But he had these agonising stomach cramps. I think it's often been said it may possibly be Crohn's disease, something like that. It may, in the original case, may have been a case of poisoning. But it certainly seems to be some sort of gastric problem he has that be devils him all his life. And to some degree he considers it a penance, that it is something he's been sent by God to live with and put up with. And clearly it's not deadly in that he lives to be a good age of 50, which, bear me mind the life he'd had is not a bad knock, really.

But certainly he was bedeviled all his life for this. In fact, when Michael and I were first thinking of doing a series Vikings, Michael had read my book and he wanted to do a movie called The Agony about Alfred's sort of struggle, his internal struggle and how that affected his outlook. And we couldn't get it off the ground. And eventually he rang me up and said, well, why don't we do it the other way around and we'll call it Vikings? So we did that because everyone had heard of Vikings.

Outside of the UK, not everyone thought Alfred was great. Understandably. So his illness actually was sort of the first. seed of actually getting around to telling his story the other way round. So that sort of leads us quite nicely into how he's been represented. And so, of course, he is in that series and he is sort of unwell. So I wanted to ask you as a sort of historical consultant, obviously you're not responsible for accuracy or anything like that as such.

You're sort of providing the background and the information. But, you know, how do you feel about sort of presenting a character like Alfred on screen? What sort of considerations would you put into that when you, talk to someone like Michael or somebody else, you know, how much do you sort of feel like you sort of have to try and get to of that real character, if that makes sense? Whatever you're doing drama, you're aiming for authenticity rather than accuracy because we don't have the information. We don't have the data. We don't have the time and we don't have the money, frankly, to do everything and say everything. So it's always an impression. And it's always,

all historical drama is the impression of the writer. So there's as much of the writer as there's of Alfred in the same way when I wrote a biography of Alphabet the Great, there have been biographies since I wrote mine and before mine. Why is that with the same material, basically? It's because half of it is about when you write it, as opposed to when it's set. It's the mirror through which you're seeing this past. So with Alphabet, well, with all characters in Vikings,

I mean, I would work with my eclosure on a sort of a storyline of where we wanted to go, and we'd fill in all the background details of what we know actually happened to Alfred. So I had a commonplace book, a bit like Alfred did. I wrote in it each year of his life, and then I wrote out every source we had that mentioned Alfred from each year. So we had all the primary sources that I could find, which took a couple of years to put together for Israel. So you start very accurately with as much, and Michael always like to go back to primary sources, if possible. And you see, that's one of the reasons why we often have in the series people talking in Old Norse or Anglo-Saxon or Frankish or all sorts of language.

I think we've used about 17 languages now in the series. Also, partly because in those original sources, there's more drama in them than they're often in the later, more sort of cut back, dried sources. So we use the original sources in where we have them. Then you have to write that up as a show, and then things have to start to change. The main problem is time.

Obviously, you've got a character who ages 30 years during a series. You've only got one person playing that actor. So you have to try and compress time into much more, which is simply, we know it's not the case that it happened in five years, we know it happened in 30, but this actor is 25 and that's that. And this series goes out over 10 weeks, so that's a known difference from what you would do. And then obviously Michael writes in the very personal storyline, the love stories, the hate stories, which come as much from him as they do from the... They're inspired by what we know of the characters, but they are, of

cause his human experience of love and loss and fear and anger and that belongs to the author. And that always belongs to the author. And you should never go through someone's script saying you can't say that. That's wrong. You can't do that. That's their interpretation. And then once you've done all of that, then you come onto the background, which we try to be as authentic as possible in. And art departments these days are brilliant at it. And that's where it comes to building the villages, the towns, the ships, the clothing, the jewelry, and all the things that are going on in the background. It's not just a dead world of everyone sitting around in outfits. So there are people weaving.

There are smelters smelting. There are people buying and selling. There are funerals. There are births. And that's where we rely much more in archaeology, obviously, than the history. And that is to get the authentic look of it. That really helps to suspend disbelief for the audience. And that's an area where you try not to make mistakes.

Because you can, in as much as we have the archaeology, you can say what it look like and what's going on. and we do our very best there. So the evil story arc we try to make authentic, the look we try to make authentic, the emotional travel in the middle belongs to the writer. That's basically how we do it. Yeah, and it's quite important to know that, I think, for the viewers as well.

That's sort of how it happens. But think about Alfa then, so I think you made a really good case early on for him being created, this legend, mainly back in Victorian times. So modern, sort of the most recent film and media representations, They probably haven't done that much to sort of change his reputation in any way, have they? It's more further back, would you say?

Yes, I would think so. Obviously, in Vikings, I've tried not to change his reputation too much because I have genuine admiration for the man. I think that in all of these certainly screen reimaginings of historical characters now, we're trying to see a more real and a more personal character, which we tried to do with Alfred in Viking. I did a film years ago with Michael called Elizabeth. Kate Blanchett. And the idea they were showing someone who is actually young and female and vulnerable and not this magnificent, as we see her now, this sort of infallible queen, but to see her as a young

woman. And also to see courts, not as we tend to imagine everything in the past, certainly in courts is hugely glamorous and gilded and wonderful and there were thousands of people and everything. And of course, medieval and even Renaissance courts in part look pretty grubby, really. I was very inspired by a film called Larenne Margot, which is about the Bartholomey's Day Massacre, where you have the French court. But they've got grubby collars, and there's filth everywhere. They're doing well compared to most people in their country,

but it is not that imagination we had when we made things like Elizabeth R and all of those 60s, Hollywood movies, where everything is vast and grand and gilded and clean and perfect. And these people are magnificent. I think we've moved very much away from that, simply because partly is a way of saving them. Because if you set up these sort of ludicrous icons, the danger is that some degree happened to Alfred,

they get knocked down to nothing at all. And that isn't a fair historical estimation of them. They were never gilded, but nor were they irrelevant. And Alfred, pick him, I hope we've done him. Yes, I hope if he's up there, we've done him justice in this. But it was to make him real and fallible, but still a man of, ideas and integrity.

Absolutely. And I think that's a sort of takeaway message, really, very much on Alfred. And I think things I've pointed out very clearly, his impact on society and culture and the country in that sense is probably why he does still deserve the name great, doesn't he? Well, I think so. Many of those towns, those burs he set up, are still there today. So even just at the economic level, you can see his genuine influence, those networks of towns still largely exist.

We now take it for granted that everyone should be able to understand what's going on in their own language. That was Alfred's idea. We've only recently got round to actually doing that, really. And to the administration, obviously we've come a long way to administration,

but he sets up that idea, it is your duty to properly administer a nation and set out clear laws that people can understand and have judges who can read them so they're responsible for their judgments. It's just, it's largely about, honestly, there's what,

there's a brilliant quote in his introduction to Pope Gregory's pastoral care, which frankly any politician, certainly of today, should listen to. And he says, in prosperity, a man often destroys the good he has done. Admiss difficulties, he often repairs what he long since did in the way of wickedness. And I think if any politician today took that to heart, they'd frankly do a lot better. And this comes from personal experience. He had hubris, he thought he was great, and he ended up living on a tiny marshy island

in the sunset levels and had to fight his way back. You should listen to people in hardship. In prosperity, they're an absolute nightmare. Fantastic. Well, I think that's a great way to end this, actually. And let's hope that some of our current politicians take some of his advice as well. Absolutely.

So, Justin, thank you so much. That's been an absolutely excellent tour through their life and legacy of Alfred the Great. Absolute pleasure. So do check out Justin's book, Justin Pollard's, Alfred the Great, the man who made English. and it's got some of these brilliant stories that we haven't quite time to go into here

and is a really good read. And also, I mentioned briefly earlier on that we've had a few other episodes on topics that we talked about today. There's some on the Great Army. We also have another episode with Dr. Katie Tucker about what happened to Alfred's bones. So if you want to know, if we still think he is under a carpark or if he's somewhere else, do look at our back catalogue and find that episode there. We also have an episode on Judith, who married Alfred's dad, Ethel Wolf. And finally, we have an episode and an accompanying film on History Hit,

where Dan Snow and I went in search of the Great Army all the way around the country and ending up at Eddington, searching for that infamous battle between Alfred and Guthroom. So check that out both on the podcast and also on History Hit TV. That brings us to the end of today's episode. Do remember to leave us a review if you enjoyed the show. subscribe as well. My name is Dr. Kat Jarman. I'll be back again next Tuesday and don't miss my co-host Matt Lewis's episode coming up on Saturday. Thank you all for listening.