Alfred the Great: the Bandit King, Viking Invasions

The campaigning season of 871-872 saw Wessex face the Vikings no less than eight times. In May, Alfred fought his first battle as king at Wilton and managed to break their shieldwall and force them into a rout. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that the Saxons pursued their enemy in bad order, and the Vikings were able to regroup and counterattack, totally destroying Alfred’s army. 

The defeat was disastrous for Wessex and a bad start to Alfred’s reign. The Saxons were able to hang on until winter, and with the end of the campaigning season approaching, the exhausted Vikings agreed to negotiate a peace in exchange for a Danegeld payment. Though it was an expensive, humiliating, and short-term solution, it did get the Vikings off Wessex’s back for a few years. Ivar turned his attention to raiding in north Mercia, where it’s said he was killed sometime around 873.

In the early months of 878, the Vikings, now led by King Guthrum, broke the agreement and launched a surprise attack deep into the Wessex heartland. They killed almost all of Wessex’s horses, then, in a lightning campaign, conquered most of Wessex, hitting Chippenham first, then sacking Alfred’s capital, Winchester, then Exeter, and then occupying the rest of the countryside.

Alfred was forced to flee. Taking his few remaining followers, he headed to the forests and swamps of the Somerset levels, making his stronghold in Athelney, a low-lying, defensible island surrounded by marshes, reed beds, wet woodland and waterways. From here, he fought a bitter guerrilla war against the invaders, striking where they were weakest, and then disappearing back into the woods.

As he warred from the shadows, the bandit king’s legend grew, and Saxons from across Wessex and Mercia left their homes to join the fight. This period of Alfred’s reign was mythologised over the centuries, Alfred stepping into a sort of Robin Hood role; his band of Merry Men striking from the woods, defending helpless Saxons against their Viking oppressors. Among the many legends is the story of King Alfred’s cakes, which is known by all British schoolchildren. It goes something like this:

After the Viking ambush, Alfred fled into the Somerset woods. Bruised, exhausted and hungry, he came upon a little cottage in the middle of the woods. Inside was a little old woman, bent over her fire, cooking some oat cakes on a cast-iron griddle. The exhausted king asked if he could rest at her cottage, and the old lady agreed, as long as he kept an eye on the cakes as she went to the forest to gather wood. More used to fighting than baking, Alfred fell asleep, and the cakes burnt. When the old woman returned, she chased the king out of the house with a broomstick.

In early 878, the Vikings were handed a serious defeat by the Welsh of Dyfed, and then at the battle of Cynwit, Devonshire Saxons overcame Ragnar’s son Ubba, killing him in battle. After this, the sources suggest that the remaining sons of Ragnar were starting to quarrel with Guthrum’s faction. With Guthrum lacking the support of Ragnar’s sons, Alfred may have sensed opportunity, and, in May 878, he marched through the lush chalk hills of Wiltshire to a place known as Edington. This was the Saxons’ final chance to throw off the Great Heathen Army, and Alfred, as he rallied his men around Egbert’s Stone, must have known it was do-or-die: triumph here or become a footnote in the history of Viking Britain.

The battle was joined, and Alfred’s men came out on top. The Vikings suffered great losses and retreated to their fortress, where Alfred laid siege to a broken enemy. After two weeks, the torments of hunger and thirst became too much, and Guthrum sued for peace. Alfred agreed on two conditions: first, that the Vikings would retreat to Northumbria and East Anglia, and leave Wessex in peace. Second, that Guthrum and his men would forgo their Pagan gods and convert to Christianity. Guthrum accepted and took the new Christian name Aethelstan.

Alfred and Guthrum established new borders, with Alfred receiving Wessex and south Mercia, plus London. With these new lands, Alfred became the first king of a united Saxon kingdom, calling himself rex Angul-Saxonum, King of the Anglo-Saxons. Here, he paved the way for the eventual English nationality and state. Once again, the pressure of the Viking invasion led to a deepening of the Saxons' sense of themselves as a single people, with a shared culture and political destiny. 

As Alfred’s reign entered its more peaceful years, a new Britain developed. Norse were a permanent presence now, part of the ethnic makeup of the Isles, just the same as the Saxons, Welsh, Scots, Picts and Irish. Over the next few years, Alfred and Guthrum would hammer out a series of treaties that would define the rights and equalities of Saxon and Norse, creating a new peace and a new era in the history of Britain.