Why did I want to write about Alfred the Great, a king from way back in the Dark Ages? Read on to find out...
How I got interested...
A few years ago, I was writing a story in which Alfred the Great played a part. All I knew about him was that he was supposed to have burnt some cakes, and I needed to find out a little more.
I soon became fascinated. Alfred wasn't just a great fighter - he was clever, and imaginative, and interested in everything around him – how we live, how things work, how things might work better. He was the last king left standing in Britain in 878, and if, like the others, he had fallen to the Danish Vikings, the entire country would have been ruled by the Danes. Just think how that might have changed things! Our language, our culture, our ruling systems – everything would have been different.
I began to wonder - why do all of us know so much about a mythical Dark Age king, Arthur, and yet so little about Alfred, a very real and remarkable one?
I realised that Athelney, where Alfred made such a botch of baking the cakes, is only about fifteen miles from where I live, although I’d never actually been there. It’s in a very rural part of Somerset; unless you’re specially looking, you’re not likely to come across it.
I decided to go there, expecting to find lots of information about him. I thought it would be like Tintagel and Arthur, with a baker’s called Alfred’s Cakes, a café called Burnt Offerings – that kind of thing.
But there was nothing like that at all. There was a low green hill with a stumpy stone monument and apart from that, just a magical landscape, with rows of willows, water birds calling above stretches of floodwater, and in the distance, the iconic outline of Glastonbury Tor. You could see hardly any houses. It struck me that this place had scarcely changed in hundreds of years.
As I leaned on the gate looking at the hill – at Alfred’s Athelney – an old man came up to me. “Ah,” he said – and I swear this is absolutely true – “you’ll be looking for Alfred.”
Well, it was obviously a sign, wasn’t it? After that, I began to look harder...
The old man told me that Channel 4’s Time Team were coming to Athelney shortly – they were going to excavate the site. I wasn't the only one who was interested!
A few months later, I went as an extra adult on a history trip from my daughter’s school. I happened to overhear the teacher asking one of the children to mention to her father that there was to be an open day on the site the following Saturday, at which Somerset archaeologists would show people round the dig and explain its findings. Hot on the trail, I went along.
They had discovered that Athelney was an ancient fortified site – there had been a fence and a ditch long before the ninth century, when Alfred came there. Athelney means ‘Island of the Princes’; it had evidently been a significant site for centuries.
They also found blackened stones, which they could date to the 9th century, and a Saxon knife. What’s more, the metal was of a kind which was expensive to make, and only likely to have been used by a king.
Alfred really had been here! He'd stood where I stood, seen almost the view that I could see...
He’d had a smithy here, where the weapons were made with which he and his army would emerge to fight and conquer the Danes.
I read all I could find about Alfred. I was thrilled to find that there was a contemporary life of him, which he’d commissioned one Bishop Asser to write. Obviously it wasn’t going to be objective – Asser wasn’t going to write anything bad – but it felt as if I was getting really close to him.
Disaster!!!
Then, a few months later, I read that a very well known adult writer was bringing out a trilogy about Alfred. He'd beaten me to it! I was plunged into despair. Who would bother to read my story now?
It just happened that soon after this, we went for a weekend to stay at a bed and breakfast place near Wantage – Alfred’s birthplace. When I mentioned that I wrote children’s books, the hostess asked what I was working on. I explained about Alfred. Her eyes widened in surprise.
It turned out that her sister worked for the publisher of David Starkey’s new book and TV series, called Monarchy. Our lady had just been reading a proof of the book. Starkey had turned up all sorts of interesting material about Alfred, she said. She encouraged me to carry on: Alfred’s time was coming, she thought, and there was certainly room for another book about him, especially as mine was for children.
On the way home, we went to find the site of the Battle of Ashdown, where Alfred and his brother won a famous victory. It was an extraordinarily atmospheric place, near an ancient white horse carved into the surface of the downs, and not far from Wayland’s Smithy. Dark Age Britain seemed very close.
Okay - what was so great about Alfred?
- Without him, we might all be speaking Danish!
- He didn’t just make war – he made peace. When he defeated Guthrum, the Danish leader, he could have killed him. Instead, he made a lasting peace with him.
- He valued learning. He wasn’t taught to read as a child, but he learned later. He set up schools, he brought scholars to Wessex, and he had books translated into English so that they could be more widely read – most books then were written in Latin. He was in communication with civilisations in Europe and Asia.
- He ‘invented’ the navy. Until he thought of it, Wessex didn’t have a fleet of ships standing ready to take on invaders. He’s therefore credited as the founder of the Royal Navy, and of the US Navy. (The first ship commissioned by the forerunner of the US Navy, the Continental Navy, was named USS Alfred.)
- He planned a system of new fortified towns in England, such that everyone would be in reach of one and could shelter there in times of danger.
- He left England a safer and a better place to live.