49 Facts About King Alfred

King Alfred was the youngest son of King Æthelwulf and his first wife Osburh, who both died when Alfred was young.

King Alfred won a decisive victory in the Battle of Edington in 878 and made an agreement with the Vikings, dividing England between Anglo-Saxon territory and the Viking-ruled Danelaw, composed of northern England, the north-east Midlands and East Anglia.

King Alfred defended his kingdom against the Viking attempt at conquest, becoming the dominant ruler in England.

King Alfred had a reputation as a learned and merciful man of a gracious and level-headed nature who encouraged education, proposing that primary education be conducted in English, rather than Latin, and improving the legal system and military structure and his people's quality of life.

King Alfred was given the epithet "the Great" in the 16th century and is only one of two English monarchs, alongside Cnut the Great, to be labelled as such.

Related searches

King Alfred's was described by Alfred's biographer Asser as "a most religious woman, noble by temperament and noble by birth".

King Alfred's had died by 856 when Æthelwulf married Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald, king of West Francia.

In 868, King Alfred married Ealhswith, daughter of the Mercian nobleman Æthelred Mucel, ealdorman of the Gaini, and his wife Eadburh, who was of royal Mercian descent.

King Alfred must have had it read to him because his mother died when he was about six and he did not learn to read until he was 12.

In 853, Alfred is reported by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to have been sent to Rome where he was confirmed by Pope Leo IV, who "anointed him as king".

King Alfred is not mentioned during the short reigns of his older brothers Æthelbald and Æthelberht.

In 868, Alfred was recorded as fighting beside Æthelred in a failed attempt to keep the Great Heathen Army led by Ivar the Boneless out of the adjoining Kingdom of Mercia.

The brothers had agreed that whichever of them outlived the other would inherit the personal property that King Alfred Æthelwulf had left jointly to his sons in his will.

King Alfred negotiated a peace that involved an exchange of hostages and oaths, which the Danes swore on a "holy ring" associated with the worship of Thor.

From his fort at Athelney, an island in the marshes near North Petherton, King Alfred was able to mount a resistance campaign, rallying the local militias from Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire.

Legend tells how when Alfred first fled to the Somerset Levels, he was given shelter by a peasant woman who, unaware of his identity, left him to watch some wheaten cakes she had left cooking on the fire.

Preoccupied with the problems of his kingdom, Alfred accidentally let the cakes burn and was roundly scolded by the woman upon her return.

King Alfred then pursued the Danes to their stronghold at Chippenham and starved them into submission.

In 882, King Alfred fought a small sea battle against four Danish ships.

The pope sent gifts to King Alfred, including what was reputed to be a piece of the True Cross.

King Alfred entrusted the city to the care of his son-in-law Æthelred, ealdorman of Mercia.

King Alfred had been on his way to relieve his son at Thorney when he heard that the Northumbrian and East Anglian Danes were besieging Exeter and an unnamed stronghold on the North Devon shore.

King Alfred determined their tactic was to launch small attacks from a secure base to which they could retreat should their raiders meet strong resistance.

Once inside the fortification, King Alfred realised, the Danes enjoyed the advantage, better situated to outlast their opponents or crush them with a counter-attack because the provisions and stamina of the besieging forces waned.

King Alfred's burhs ranged from former Roman towns, such as Winchester, where the stone walls were repaired and ditches added, to massive earthen walls surrounded by wide ditches, probably reinforced with wooden revetments and palisades, such as at Burpham in West Sussex.

Related searches

The author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle related that King Alfred's ships were larger, swifter, steadier and rode higher in the water than either Danish or Frisian ships.

King Alfred appended, rather than integrated, the laws of Ine into his code and although he included, as had Æthelbert, a scale of payments in compensation for injuries to various body parts, the two injury tariffs are not aligned.

Similarly King Alfred divided his code into 120 chapters because 120 was the age at which Moses died and, in the number-symbolism of early medieval biblical exegetes, 120 stood for law.

King Alfred, according to Asser, insisted upon reviewing contested judgments made by his ealdormen and reeves and "would carefully look into nearly all the judgements which were passed [issued] in his absence anywhere in the realm to see whether they were just or unjust".

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, commissioned at the time of Alfred, was probably written to promote unification of England, whereas Asser's The Life of King Alfred promoted Alfred's achievements and personal qualities.

King Alfred corresponded with Elias III, the patriarch of Jerusalem, and embassies to Rome conveying the English alms to the pope were fairly frequent.

King Alfred undertook no systematic reform of ecclesiastical institutions or religious practices in Wessex.

King Alfred was equally comfortable distributing his translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care to his bishops so that they might better train and supervise priests and using those same bishops as royal officials and judges.

King Alfred lamented in the preface to his translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care that "learning had declined so thoroughly in England that there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could understand their divine services in English or even translate a single letter from Latin into English: and I suppose that there were not many beyond the Humber either".

King Alfred established a court school for the education of his own children, those of the nobility, and "a good many of lesser birth".

King Alfred recruited scholars from the Continent and from Britain to aid in the revival of Christian learning in Wessex and to provide the king personal instruction.

Conscious of the decay of Latin literacy in his realm, King Alfred proposed that primary education be taught in English, with those wishing to advance to holy orders to continue their studies in Latin.

King Alfred sought to remedy this through an ambitious court-centred programme of translating into English the books he deemed "most necessary for all men to know".

King Alfred was, until recently, often considered to have been the author of many of the translations, but this is considered doubtful in almost all cases.

King Alfred meant the translation to be used, and circulated it to all his bishops.

King Alfred believed, as did other kings in ninth-century England and Francia, that God had entrusted him with the spiritual as well as physical welfare of his people.

King Alfred was an excellent listener and had an incredible memory and he retained poetry and psalms very well.

King Alfred is noted as carrying around a small book, probably a medieval version of a small pocket notebook, that contained psalms and many prayers that he often collected.

In 868, King Alfred married Ealhswith, daughter of a Mercian nobleman, Æthelred Mucel, Ealdorman of the Gaini.

King Alfred's mother was Osburga, daughter of Oslac of the Isle of Wight, Chief Butler of England.

Related searches

King Alfred was temporarily buried at the Old Minster in Winchester with his wife Ealhswith and later, his son Edward the Elder.

King Alfred commissioned Bishop Asser to write his biography, which inevitably emphasised King Alfred's positive aspects.

In 2002, King Alfred was ranked number 14 in the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide vote.

Centerpiece of Alfred University's quad is a bronze statue of the king, created in 1990 by then-professor William Underhill.