Alfred the Great by Justin Pollard & The Age of Arthur by John Morris

Alfred the Great left a warning more than a thousand years ago that Kevin Rudd (and other government leaders) should bear in mind: “But even though afflictions teach and instruct him, if he acquire the kingdom, he immediately becomes perverted with pride at the people’s reverence for him, and becomes accustomed to flattering praise.”

Alfred is the first political leader in the English-speaking world of whom we have detailed knowledge —enough to make a biography possible—and many of the basics of the ruler’s life remain. He had to follow a narrow path between compromise, delay and the hard decisions, while keeping the knives out of his back. He knew the value of image and spin.

A good economy made for a better society—and the reverse applied too. Social change required bigger government, with more administration, but taxes had to be high enough to make government work, though not so high that he lost popular support. Education and urban and other land-use planning were priorities. Unwanted or reluctantly accepted immigration produced multicultural challenges. Defence was a huge burden but essential. Religion was a regular issue; travel relentless.

Above all, good leadership based on courage, judgment and an appeal to the patriotic feelings of the day did work—most of the time—and accomplished much.

Alfred was king of Wessex, the southernmost part of what became England, from 871 to his death in 899, aged about fifty. Wessex was then one of the main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the future England. The others were Mercia, stretching north from London through the Midlands; East Anglia; Kent; and Northumbria, covering most of the north. Over the centuries, wars of defence and conquest and dynastic marriages and other alliances and squabbles had produced these five big kingdoms from ancient smaller kingdoms and tribal lands.

In effect, Alfred inherited Wessex from his father and three deceased older brothers, though an element of election or consent by the Witan, the council of elders or notables, still applied. In Alfred’s day, however, the system was moving steadily towards pure hereditary monarchy, as experience was showing that made for greater stability.

Vikings were the great challenge of the day. Norse marauders appeared at the end of the eighth century and were a menace throughout the ninth, as the raids became bigger and more numerous and the Northmen increasingly stayed on as uninvited immigrants. At the peak, invading armies numbered thousands, sacking and looting monasteries—then one of the few repositories of wealth, used in ornamentation—plundering farms to feed themselves, murdering and raping as they went. They often demanded big payments to leave—the Danegeld—and notoriously did not stick to these or any other agreements. Experience with them was much like that of earlier times with “barbarians” in the Roman empire, menaces who over time mostly became absorbed into the Roman world.

Vikings invaded Wessex shortly after Alfred took the throne and in some versions drove him from his Winchester headquarters. In this most recent biography, Justin Pollard says it is more likely to have been a coup by his thegns (nobles), who did a deal with the Vikings to avoid the higher taxes that more defence would require. This experience toughened Alfred up for what lay ahead.

Alfred fled to Somerset in the western part of his kingdom, then largely “untamed” forest and swamp. There in the village of Athelney, the legend goes, he took refuge in a lonely swineherd’s cottage. His troubles and plans so preoccupied him, he forgot that the swineherd’s wife had asked him to keep an eye on the oven and she—not knowing who the stranger was—scolded him when the bread or cakes (the stories differ) burnt.

Pollard rejects this hoary old tale as after-the-event spin, but it was nevertheless true that Alfred hid out in the then swampy “levels” (long since drained for productive farmland) until he could raise a loyal western force to retake his throne and drive the Vikings from Wessex.

Shrewd statecraft followed, when he did a deal with the defeated Viking leader, Guthrum. Guthrum changed his name to Aethelstan and with his leading men, whom Alfred held as hostages, converted from the old faith in Odin to Christianity. Alfred then arranged for Aethelstan to take the throne of neighbouring and smaller East Anglia, which the Vikings virtually controlled anyway. This also kept Aethelstan away from the bigger Mercia to the north, where the Vikings were strong and settling in the eastern half—the Danelaw. London, near the borders, was semi-independent.

Vikings had previously often converted to Christianity as a tactic. Part of Alfred’s success was in getting the captured officer class to convert as a body, with elaborate ritual and making it worldly attractive for them to do so. They were bound into the Anglo-Saxon web of mutual obligations.

Alfred later was able to marry his daughter off to Mercian royalty, making Mercia over time in effect a client state of the once weaker Wessex. Gradually, the shape and idea of England began to emerge, except perhaps in Northumbria, and Alfred’s descendants continued the process.

The Viking problem and Alfred’s handling of it changed Anglo-Saxon life forever. His main strategy was war of attrition rather than confrontation, and increasing the confidence—and thus loyalty—of his own people. He played to his home ground advantage.

Not only did the country become more united. Alfred strengthened defences, for example by introducing regular periods of service for the fyrd, the compulsory citizen army, so that soldiers would be less tempted to escape from service and return to the farm at harvest or lambing time. He introduced maritime defence—arguably the embryo British Navy. He also introduced burhs—fortified embryo towns—as it would be difficult for the Vikings to conquer and hold them all. He wrote many new laws.

He believed, in the way of the time, that the Viking incursions were punishment from God of an inadequate society. Ignorance, he decided, was the problem. He gathered educated wise men from afar to his court, learned Latin and personally translated religious and philosophical works he regarded as essential into the fledgling English language of the day. He was not always scrupulous about the translation and often added his own thoughts—such as the advice in the first paragraph here. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was an Alfred innovation, produced regularly from scrappier early Chronicles. Ever since, it has been a principal source for Anglo-Saxon era history.

The role of the church, only lately unified as Catholic, pulsates throughout. Alfred and most other Anglo-Saxon leaders had a devout belief in Christianity as the way to a better society and people, as well as to a God believed to intervene almost magically in most of life. They believed the Vikings would and did behave much better if they forsook heathen beliefs and converted. They would respect life, particularly human life, much more and, under oath, would stick to bargains, which they otherwise usually did not.

Christianity, particularly in the monasteries, was also the main source of learning and literacy, in Latin and increasingly in English, in an otherwise illiterate and ignorant age. The bishops and monastic leaders wielded great power and often lived in opulence.

Alfred sources are numerous, and much has already been written, but reliability is a problem. The essential source, which makes other biographies possible, is a contemporary “Life” by the Welsh priest Asser, one of Alfred’s intellectual recruits. This, however, appears to be incomplete, unrevised and subject to some spin. The Chronicle is also a source, but has similar problems, as it was subject to pleasing the paymaster King. Other sources are scattered, mostly the remains of English and Continental monastery manuscripts, but collectively valuable. Much of Pollard’s book is devoted to a discussion of the sources and their adequacy, giving it sometimes the feel of a detective story.

Pollard also conveys the feeling of Alfred’s England: rural, almost townless except for straggling London, York and some small ports. The old Roman roads were still the few highways, with mainly tracks and paths elsewhere, often through vast, dense, wolf-infested forest.

The story of how Britain began to become England, Scotland and Wales (before it became Britain again) is told in all its intricate detail in the late John Morris’s The Age of Arthur. Although it first appeared in 1993, the book has been regularly reprinted since and is a standard work.

Germanic immigrants from across the North Sea took over England in the fifth to seventh centuries AD, becoming a ruling class, their language and culture prevailing. Morris was an early critic of the orthodox view that the incoming Anglo-Saxons wiped out in England the conquered Britons, with remnants fleeing to Wales and Scotland. Not so, says Morris, who relied mainly on a lifetime and eventually revisionist study of the documentation, supported by archaeology.

Since his time, studies based on DNA have shown that even more Ancient Brits than Morris suspected survived, to mingle their genes with those of the rulers to become the ancestors of the modern English (as well as Welsh, Scots and Irish) and thus of most Quadrant readers. (See my articles in Quadrant, April 2006 and July-August 2007.) The Germanic immigrants of the period may have contributed as little as 5 per cent of modern English genes (and the Vikings another 5 per cent), later studies have showed.

“Saxon” newcomers first came over as hired troops to help maintain security in late Roman times, the early 400s, putting them in a strong position from the first, and others followed. They were fragmented, without central leadership, and settled in isolated clusters in the south-east, mingling with smaller Germanic groups, including Jutes from what is now Denmark, Frisians from the northern Netherlands, and Scandinavians. The earlier Saxons, at least, probably were loyal to the old highly Romanised society.

About 480 the Angles emigrated as a tribe from around the present German-Danish border, under pressure from neighbours, with established kings leading them. Their tight tribal structure made for political success, at first in what is now East Anglia, and then spreading into what became the large midland Mercian kingdom.

Morris sees Mercia as really an empire or federation based on smaller kingdoms and other units. This structure allowed a tenuous memory of Roman and Arthurian times to linger and flow into the future. Without getting into direct comparisons, he presents the Mercian kings Penda (633–55) and Offa (757–96) as comparable with Alfred in initiating England.

Morris says the Romano-British society largely collapsed from within, once the Roman idea and structure were no longer viable. Local military leaders, the duces, became corrupt tyrants; fragmentation and wars or major squabbles of succession were common. It reminded me of South Vietnam.

He accepts the existence of Arthur (though little is known about him) as the last effective Romano-British leader, who defeated the Anglo-Saxons at Mount Badonus (possibly modern Bath) about 490. He takes the near-contemporary monk Gildas as a fairly reliable source about this, whereas many historians mistrust him. Some think there were more likely to be several “mini-Arthurs” than one king. Morris, however, sees Arthur as a man of the south-east. As with nearly all serious historians, he rejects as later romance the tales of Camelot and the West Country or Wales.

Once Arthur died about 520, British society, Morris says, reverted to type. Over about 100 years all of England, except for parts of Cornwall, fell to the Anglo-Saxons, who developed their pattern of rule by king and council.

Arthur’s fight with the incoming “English” had originated with them joining an anti-Arthur side in what was effectively a civil war. Defeated, they were confined, apartheid-like, to limited areas. Bubonic plague in the mid-500s devastated British society, but had little effect on the English because of their isolation. Possibly sensing their new strength, the English began to stir and a full-scale revolt followed in the 570s. Their run of victories effectively turned the old Romano-British society into England, although the name was still centuries off.

In the lightly populated north, where the English were few, British freedom fighters offered to fight again to revive the old ways, but by then the people preferred to stay unfree under the new rulers.

Often there were distinctive rules and roles for the conquered “Welsh” population, sometimes as second-class citizens, including second-class upper class, but they were integrated and absorbed in all sorts or ways. With literacy and writing other than in Latin rare, when their language fell into disuse the memory and identity of old Britain faded out. The winning upper class wrote the new history. Nevertheless, through to the Norman Conquest in 1066, there were numerous references to a “Welsh” population in England, even in London.

Tens of thousands of British leaders emigrated to Brittany in France throughout the period but, says, Morris they were as often fleeing British enemies as English. Some may have hoped to return victorious but as with other upscale exiles since there was a long wait. Some of their descendants returned 500 years later with William the Conqueror, whose forces had a Viking-Breton-French background.

Morris’s work also covers in remarkable detail the history in the same period of Ireland, Scotland and Wales; relations between the four emerging countries; and the rise of Christianity in all four, with its profusion of approaches and personalities, many of them saints.

The usual form of government was a strong regional king, with sub-kings and local notables below, developed out of tribes. Some remote parts of Scotland still had self-governing local communities based on a few families, much as with the Australian Aborigines.

Morris rejects the notion of Celtic clans as a romantic invention of recent centuries, though some recent writers have wondered whether there might have been something in it after all, with DNA evidence indicating large-scale polygamy in remote areas in pagan days.

Morris was the pre-eminent late-twentieth-century scholar of the British Isles for the period after the Romans forces withdrew early in the fifth century. His work is remarkable for the detail, rather than the already established broad outline. He acknowledges debts to others whose work in recent times enabled this massive compilation of detail, from fragmented sources in several countries and languages, but often refers also to the potential of more detail still awaiting research at the time when he was writing.

Since his time, DNA study has shown that a large minority population of northern European origins had lived in eastern England, especially, for thousands of years before the Roman conquest of 43 AD. There has also been speculation that they might have brought an English-type language with them aeons before the Anglo-Saxons. If so, this would have explained much about the rapid and comprehensive Anglo-Saxon cultural dominance.

Robert Murray’s latest book is 150 Years of Spring Street: Victorian Government, 1850s to 21st Century (Australian Scholarly Publishing).