The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great

by Benjamin R. Merkle

  The Vikings were caught in a difficult position. The ships of Wessex had effectively cut off their opportunity to sail out the mouth of the river. If they attempted to row upstream, they would eventually be overtaken by the new large Saxon vessels and would only be that much more exhausted for the inevitable combat. And, to make matters much worse, the Saxon fleet had arrived just after half of the Viking force had beached their ships and disembarked to scout out the woods behind the beach.

  Thus, as the Wessex ships cut off the escape to the channel and began closing in on the now panicking, Vikings, half of the Viking ships sat beached on the shore and unmanned while the other three sat in the water trying to decide how to escape. As the tide ebbed and the waters of the bay slowly drained out, the three Danish vessels still afloat decided to make a run for it, rowing hard for the mouth of the bay, hoping desperately to find some gap in the Saxon blockade through which they could shoot to freedom.

  But they could find no gap. All three of the fleeing Danish ships were easily overtaken before they had reached the mouth of the river. Then, in the shallow waters of the bay, the Saxon marines boarded the Viking vessels and turned their Danish hulls into floating fields of slaughter. They cut their way on board, and they waded through the muck and blood-filled bilge of the Viking boats. Significantly outmanned, the Danish sailors were ruthlessly slaughtered, having had little hope of escape. However, since this sea combat unfolded as the flotilla drifted in the ebbing tide, the flood soon drained out of the estuary leaving the longboats stuck fast in the sloppy muck of the muddy river banks. But not all of the ships were equally stranded in the mire. One of the Viking ships was able to break free from the grasp of the Saxon fleet and made for the open water of the channel. By the time they had shaken themselves free from the English sailors, there were only five surviving Vikings left in the ship.

  The Saxon ships were all stuck fast in the mud, having been beached by the retreating tide of the estuary along with the five remaining Danish crafts. As the historical account records, they were “very awkwardly aground.” Three of the Saxon ships had been stuck fast on the same side of the river as the three Viking ships, which had been previously beached by the Danes who were scouting out the surrounding woods. The remainder of the Saxon fleet was grounded on the other side of the river, leaving the three Wessex ships separated from the rest of their navy. Meanwhile the Vikings who had been exploring the neighboring forest had now returned and, after evaluating the situation, decided their only chance of survival was to launch an attack on the crews of the three Saxon vessels beached on their side of the river.

  Seeing the approaching Danes, the Saxons quickly clambered out of their beached craft and made ready for the coming melee. It was a sloppy affair, splashing into combat through the shallow tidal pools and fighting the pagan raiders in the muck and mire of the muddy river bank. Somewhere in the midst of this fight, the tide turned and the flow returned its waters to the bay. By the time the tide began to rush back up the river mouth, filling the estuary and washing clean the bloody gore of the afternoon’s combat, the Saxons had forced the Danish pirates to pay a heavy price. One hundred and twenty Vikings lay hewn down in the mud, compared to sixty-two Saxons cut down in the skirmish. As the river climbed back up the shoreline and began to lap at the grounded ships, the crews, seeing that their ships would soon be floating free in the rising waters, turned from the fight to return to their boats. The longboats of the Vikings were the first to be freed by the rising tide, giving them the opportunity to sail free from the bloodied estuary well ahead of the Saxon ships.

  The battle on the riverbank had taken its toll on the Viking crews, who were now badly wounded, battle-weary, and numbering significantly fewer than when they had first begun their raiding. As they fled back to Viking-held Northumbria, they were hard-pressed to make progress against the contrary winds and tempestuous seas off the coast of Sussex. Lacking the strength to press on, two of the three fleeing ships were cast onto the shores of Sussex.

  Unfortunately for the crews of these two vessels, word had already been sent to the fyrd of Sussex, alerting the shire to the approach of the limping Viking fleet. Thus, as the Vikings stepped ashore on the coast of Sussex looking for a moment’s respite, they were greeted by a large armed force, who immediately took them prisoner and marched them straight back to Winchester to be tried by King Alfred in his capital city. Alfred, at this point in his life, was in no mood to extend mercy to these brigands and ordered them hung as an example to any Dane who looked at the villages and monasteries of Wessex with piratical longing. Only one Viking crew returned to Northumbria, heavily wounded and probably ruing their earlier eagerness for a life of plunder.

  Strangely, modern historians seem almost universally to interpret this naval encounter as a complete failure on Alfred’s part. The debate focuses on the evaluation of the king’s new designs for the construction of the Wessex ships, questioning whether the king’s innovations were effective. The scholarly bias is inexplicably against the king of Wessex on this issue, arguing that the encounter with the Viking fleet at the river mouth proved Alfred’s design was a disaster and a total failure. The point is made that the king’s demand for a larger hull, making room for sixty oars rather than for thirty, must have resulted in a significantly deeper draft. This deeper draft, they speculate, must have caused the Saxon vessels to more easily run aground during the naval battle in the shallow estuary, giving the Vikings, whose longboats must have had a shallower draft, the advantage in the fight.

  It would be difficult to deny that Alfred’s design likely resulted in a deeper draft, though the historical account insists that they were more maneuverable than other ships. But it is impossible to insist that this was the primary reason the Wessex ships ran aground. Even if Alfred’s new design did result in a deeper draft, the manpower the new design afforded surely also added significantly to the speed with which the Wessex ships were able to cut off the Vikings at the river mouth, as well as to the numbers with which the Saxons were able to attack the Vikings in the ship-to-ship combat and in the following melee on the beach. Clearly, the entire encounter was a victory for the Saxons, to which the new ship designs contributed greatly, contrary to the miserly estimation of the scholarly world.

  Part of the final settlement between Alfred and Æthelstan had been a treaty that formally established the border between the territories of the two kings. Since Ceolwulf, the Mercian puppet king installed by the Danes, had been moved along, Æthelstan now controlled Mercia as well as East Anglia. In the treaty drawn up between Alfred and Æthelstan, however, Mercia was to be divided between the Saxons and the Danes. Although negotiations continued regarding the specifics of this new boundary, the treaty eventually decreed that the border between the English territory and Viking land ran up the Thames, then up the Lea to its beginning. From there the border ran in a straight line to Bedford, at which point it met the Ouse, which it followed to Watling Street. All the land to the northeast of this line was designated as the Danelaw, the territory of the Danish kings. The land to the south and west of this negotiated border was left to Wessex and Mercia. This remaining portion of Anglo-Saxon Mercia was governed by an ealdorman named Æthelred, who had been chosen by the consensus of the rest of the Mercian ealdormen. However, by the year 881, the northern Welsh kingdoms of Gwynedd and Powys had allied themselves with the Viking forces who held Northumbria and began to threaten both the southern Welsh kingdoms as well as the remaining portion of Mercia, now ruled by ealdorman Æthelred. After the Mercians suffered a major defeat at the battle of Conwy, they sought the assistance of Wessex, offering Alfred the position of king over Mercia, although Æthelred would still remain in place as the immediate Mercian ruler. Alfred agreed to this arrangement, taking Mercia and then the kingdoms of southern Wales into his protection. This new arrangement left Alfred as the only ruling Saxon left on English soil. Alfred was no longer merely the king of Wessex. He was now the king of the Anglo-Saxons.


  © MARK ROSS/SURFACE

  Alfred’s new position as Mercian overlord could have offered the king many easy opportunities for taking advantage of the weakened kingdom, giving him chances to exploit the kingdom through taxes or make unreasonable demands for military service. However, Alfred had an enduring fondness for Mercia for a number of reasons. While still a young boy, Alfred had watched his older sister Æthels with leave Wessex to marry the Mercian king Burgred, in an attempt to cement the friendship between these two kingdoms. The bond forged by this marriage held fast when the Mercian city of Nottingham was captured by the Danish raiding army in 867 and Alfred, still a young prince, had ridden with his older brother, King Æthelred, and the army of Wessex to deliver his sister’s nation from the Viking plague.

  Though that particular siege ended with the Danes marching peacefully from the city with their pockets jingling with the danegeld, for Alfred the siege still seemed to end well, since he found, sometime during that siege, a Mercian bride of his own—Ealswith. Now Alfred offered to renew his commitment to this important ally. He sent his daughter, his firstborn child Æthelflæd, to be the wife of ealdorman Æthelred.

  Ealswith had born Æthelflæd to Alfred at approximately the same time the prince had been fighting his first great battle, the battle of Ashdown. This young princess of Wessex grew up in the turbulent and eventful court of her father, throughout the most perilous years of the king’s reign. She had been old enough to remember vividly the night the family rushed from Chippenham under cover of darkness during Guthrum’s surprise winter attack. And she well remembered the darkest days of Wessex, hiding in Athelney with her parents, ever watchful of the Danish prowlers who hunted her and her family. She had also experienced firsthand the splendor of kingship as her father’s ultimate victory over Guthrum and his growing renown had brought fame and fortune to the once-destitute court of Wessex. Æthelflæd was thus a tremendous blessing to be granted to any ealdorman, since with her went the wisdom and experience of the Wessex court, as well as the love and affection of the great king.

  Æthelflæd lived as the wife of the ealdorman of Mercia for twenty years, until Æthelred’s death around the year 908. Throughout his reign, Æthelflæd proved an invaluable aid to her husband as he sought to rebuild the infrastructure of Mercia, which had been ravaged by the concerted actions of pillaging Vikings and cowardly rulers over the course of decades. Since Mercia essentially formed the bulk of the Anglo-Saxon border with the Danelaw, the rebuilding of this nation was essential to ensure the future safety of the Saxons against the Danes.

  Æthelred fell gravely ill with a debilitating illness several years before his death, and Æthelflæd ruled the kingdom in his place. Surprisingly, after her husband’s death, the Mercian nation continued to recognize her authority, making her one of the few Anglo-Saxon women to have wielded any sort of political power. Her people lovingly referred to the tough and battle-savvy woman as the Myrcna hloefdige, or the “Lady of Mercia.” During her reign, Æthelflæd ordered the remodeling of a number of the Mercian towns into new Wessex-style burhs, following carefully the patterns and strategies she had learned at the feet of her father. This project expanded Alfred’s burghal defense system across all of Mercia. One generation later, Æthelflæd’s efforts to reorganize and strengthen Mercia against the Viking raiders became the critical foundation for a major Wessex campaign against the Danelaw, which finally dislodged the Vikings from the island of Britain entirely.

  On several different occasions, Æthelflæd played the Old Testament Deborah and led the armies of Mercia in battle against the Danes to the north, driving the Viking armies from her northern borders.

  Alfred’s first son, Edward, was born shortly after Æthelflæd and shared with his sister a clear childhood memory of their terrifying flight from Guthrum’s advancing forces. And though the two children shared many of the same dangers in their early years and learned together the same lessons that later shaped Æthelflæd into the great “Lady of the Mercians,” Edward, as the oldest son, was still set apart from Æthelflæd, being groomed from birth to take his father’s place as king of the Anglo-Saxons. What his sister picked up about kingship and war craft by careful observation from a safe distance, Edward learned in a sometimes dangerously close proximity—standing in Alfred’s court, witnessing charters, and personally leading the warriors of Wessex into battle against the Vikings, all before he had turned twenty years old.

  In years to come, however, when Edward (later known as “Edward the Elder”) was to be crowned king of the Anglo-Saxons, he sent his son Æthelstan to be raised by Æthelflæd. King Æthelstan, having been raised under the tutelage of Alfred’s firstborn daughter, would be the king who would ultimately drive the Vikings from his territories, finally uniting all of the Anglo-Saxons under one crown.

  Alfred’s other children are mentioned less in the historical accounts, so it is difficult to say much about their lives. His second daughter, Æthelgifu, was troubled by an illness of some sort, which forced her to keep her face always mysteriously covered. Eventually, the young princess, troubled by her illness, decided to devote herself to the service of God and took monastic vows as a nun.

  Her father had ordered two monasteries to be built—the first was in the marshy wastes of Athelney and was given to a community of monks; the second was constructed at the gates of his Shaftesbury burh, and was given to his daughter Æthelgifu to rule as the abbess. Alfred ensured that the financial support for this institution was well established by endowing the abbey with a number of surrounding estates.

  Between the prestige of the royal abbess and the wealth of the abbey’s generous endowments, the Shaftesbury abbey’s renown spread quickly. Soon Æthelgifu was joined by a number of other women who chose to devote their virginity to God at Shaftesbury. Strangely, Alfred had a much more difficult time establishing the monastery at Athelney since the Anglo-Saxon men seemed far less eager to take monastic vows that would dedicate them to a life of celibacy, prayer, and meditation on the Scriptures. To man the Athelney monastery, Alfred eventually had to resort to recruiting men from abroad, drawing from Wales, Old Saxony, Flanders, and even some of the young Danes.

  Alfred’s youngest daughter, Ælfthryth, was given as wife to Baldwin II, the Count of Flanders. Even before this marriage into the house of Wessex, Baldwin already had several close connections to Alfred’s family. First, his mother was Judith, the daughter of Charles the Bald, who had become the unfortunate young second wife of Alfred’s father, shortly before his death. As the widowed queen of Wessex, she had then been shamefully taken as wife by Alfred’s older brother Æthelbald in a desperate attempt to demonstrate his own right to the throne. His subsequent reign was brief and tragic. After Æthelbald’s death in 860, Judith, now having reigned twice as the queen of Wessex despite being only sixteen years old, sold all her English property and returned home to West Francia. Her dismayed father placed her in the care of a monastery until he could once more arrange a suitable marriage for her. However, Judith outraged her family when the monks who served as her guardians reported that she had eloped with a mysterious count named Baldwin. Initially enraged and set on having the marriage annulled, her father eventually accepted his new son-in-law and entrusted him with the task of ruling the Viking-ravaged coast of Flanders.

  Sitting opposite the channel from Alfred’s Kent, the region of Flanders had been equally despoiled by the intensifying Viking raids throughout the 860s to the 880s. As Count Baldwin and his son after him sought to defend their shores from the Danish scourge, it was only natural that the Counts of Flanders work in close cooperation with the Wessex king, who was essentially fighting the same battle as the Flemish. As a result of this partnership, the two kingdoms began to exchange defensive strategies and military intelligence. This partnership eventually led to increased trade between the two regions as well as a deeper bond of friendship and cooperation between their clergies.

  Finally, this alliance was sealed when Alfred’s
daughter, Ælfthryth, was given as bride to Count Baldwin II. Of Countess Ælfthryth little is known, except that her husband granted her request that at his death, rather than be buried at Saint Bertin in Saint Omer where only the male line of his family was permitted to be buried, he would instead be buried at the Abbey of Saint Peter in Ghent, where Ælfthryth could eventually be buried next to him. Whatever romance lies behind the story of this shared tomb can only be filled in by imagination.

  Alfred’s youngest son, Æthelweard, had a very different childhood from his older brother Edward’s. Born in the year 880, Æthelweard’s boyhood coincided with the peace and prosperity of Alfred’s golden age. And while Æthelflæd and Edward had lived their youths as permanent fixtures of Alfred’s court, learning how to rule, Æthelweard devoted his life from an early age to learning the liberal arts. If Alfred’s will can be taken as evidence of his fatherly affections, then Æthelweard was clearly a well-loved son, receiving dozens of royal estates throughout Wessex at his father’s death. At his death, the prince was buried at the New Minster in Winchester, suggesting an enduring favor in the royal court throughout his brother’s reign as well.

  CHAPTER 7

  Alfred the Wise

  Alfred found learning dead and he restored it, education neglected and he revived it, the laws powerless and he gave them force, the church debased and he raised it, the land ravaged by a fearful enemy from which he delivered it. Alfred’s name shall live as long as mankind shall respect the past.

  —FROM THE INSCRIPTION ON THE STATUE OF KING ALFRED IN WANTAGE

  Alfred’s innovations in his radical restructuring of the military of Wessex, according to the program described in the Burghal Hideage, have long been acknowledged as one of the king’s most significant and lasting achievements. The transformation of an archaic, clumsy, and unpredictable system of shire fyrds into a swiftly moving, standing army of professional soldiers supported by a network of well-defended burhs, not only resulted in the complete resuscitation of an almost dead nation and a nearly extinct people but also created the sort of national military efficiency that would eventually drive the Danes entirely from English soil. To Alfred, however, the fortification of the burhs of Wessex, the organization of the standing army, and all the great battles won by these newly organized warriors of Wessex were only one portion of a much larger defense policy, which the king had sketched out in his own mind during the frantic years of the 870s.