First, a few words from Kevin Crossley Holland:

"I must first have read about Alfred in Our Island Story as a small(ish) boy, and his story still excites and moves me as much as it did then. It's one of the rewards of being a historical novelist to be able to add 'new leaves to the tree'... I've now read Warrior King with great pleasure. Fleda is my kind of girl (!) and Cerys the mist-weaver wonderful... I think you've done Alfred proud."

 

 (Click on the cover to buy.)

And now, rather a lot of words from me...

   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?

 

 

On the trail...

 

   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...

 

 

 

Glastonbury Tor, which isn't far from Athelney, and which features in the book.

 

 

 The Time Team

 

   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 9^th 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.

   I visited other places - like the site of the Battle of Ashdown, near Wantage, 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. I went to Edington, which used to be Ethandun, and I retraced the route of Alfred's journey to his confrontation with Guthrum there.

   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.

 

Is this just a book for boys?

 

   Totally and absolutely not!

   Just as Alfred was so much more than just a soldier, this book is about so much more than war. There are some very strong female characters - much of the story is seen through the eyes of Athelfled (Fleda), Alfred's daughter. She was a remarkable girl, warm-hearted and brave, who grew up to become a ruler in her own right. Then there's Cerys, beautiful and mysterious, with silver eyes and strange powers: and Judith Martel, princess of the Franks, who became twice a queen of Wessex before finally being set free to marry the man she loved.

   It's a book with something for everybody - adventure, romance, and magic. And at the end of it you'll know a lot more about a great British hero, and a remarkable man.