Heritage Month Day Four: King Alfred

Happy King Alfred Day!

It is day four of Heritage History month.

We now venture deep into the Anglo past to visit the great defender of the Anglo-Saxons against the Viking invaders, King Alfred. Alfred was perhaps the first royal figure to really stress and act upon a self-conscious “English identity” that brought a unity to the pre-existing independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms spread throughout Britain.

To this day, Alfred remains the only English monarch to hold the label “the Great.” It was applied to him during the Reformation to celebrate specifically his Christian patriotism: his love of his own fatherland and its language and culture as unique from the world of Latin Christendom at large.

This is a vital point to grasp in understanding Alfred—more than anything else Alfred recognized that his function as King was to be a protector of both the spiritual and the material integrity of his people. In our time, the denizens of officialdom (both secular and religious) are fiercely dogmatic about the chasmic separation between religion and state.

King Alfred would find such an approach utterly absurd. He saw himself—much like the later continental reformers in Europe would say of monarchs—as the mediator between God and the Anglo-Saxon peoples God had entrusted to him. He was responsible to God for the spiritual and temporal health of his subjects.

This doesn’t mean that he jumbled the institutions of church and state, but he did take it upon himself to care about the quality of the bishops that he was to appoint; allowing them the leeway to oversee the spiritual details of his people. In many ways, Alfred practiced the same dynamic between church and state that would be reawakened during the Tudor dynasty and their separation from Rome.

Alfred was himself a warrior king. He lived in an age when part of the meaning of true rulership was to lead his men into battle, to himself wield the sword he would call upon his subjects to take. In one crucial struggle between the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes, Alfred (then still prince over only the Western provinces of England) and his diminishing army had been driven into the marshes after losing a battle. Alfred resolutely refused to surrender and sustained a guerrilla war of sorts while he rebuilt his forces and finally overcame the army of Viking King Guthrum. After defeating Guthrum, pushing him eastward to temporarily hold only East Anglia, he included in his peace terms the obligation that King Guthrum be baptized, take on a new Christian name, and operate within his own jurisdiction within the boundaries of Christian jurisprudence.

For Alfred, as for many early European kings, the law flowed forth from power; the political preceded and gave foundation to the legal. And as the sovereign, he took up the burden of identifying the proper and effective foundation for the rules and standards to which his country would adhere. Being a Christian, he leaned heavily on the civil legal instincts given by God to Moses, yet adapted through the coming of Christ and in light of the particular needs and customs of his own English way of life. Alfred’s understanding of the Old Testament’s relevance to English legal code was not in the absolute application of Jewish civil codes, but in the tone and overall vision of justice that he believed had stood the test of time.

Alfred founded monasteries, befriended and subsidized bishops and monks, made learning an explicit objective of his domestic policy, and was an ardent proponent of standardizing Latin literature into the English vernacular of the realm. Alfred was always looking out into the horizons of the English future, yet guided by his own heroes, which likely includes European Christian predecessors such as Charlemagne himself.

As such, Alfred would expend significant energy during times of peace studying and developing new strategies of defense, better lines of communication, and projects that catered to the needs of shifting international and domestic sociopolitical factors. One example of this was his peacetime reconstruction of the fyrd system (a militia network) that was intended to mobilize defenses in the case of a Viking invasion.

If Britain much later became known as the extraordinary sea power among the Great Powers of Europe, Alfred did much to blaze this trail— conducting a sustained study of ancient Roman and Greek navy infrastructure. By integrating these small ship fleets to monitor the rivers and waterways, Alfred was able to bolster the flawed fyrd network and effectively deter Viking attacks.

Alfred was anything but a political universalist: his objective as king was not to make the world a better place, or to provide a system that might be welcome to all men, but rather to preserve and promote the specific interests of his kingdom. This required of him constant confrontation with Viking invaders for several decades. It was under Alfred’s watchful eye, military genius, and resolute commitment to Anglo-Saxon well-being that the Danes were neutralized as a threat to England once and for all—abandoning their dream of conquering the British isles.

One of the greatest privileges we have in the English speaking world is being the inheritors of the Anglo-Saxon culture and way of life. This would not have been possible without King Alfred, the absence or failure of whom would have resulted in the complete victory of the Vikings and the disappearance of the Anglo-Saxon domination of the British isles. Alfred is in many ways a true founding father of the Anglo-American experience.

We owe him a great debt. He went to war for his people against enemies that sought their complete destruction. And while our wars are different in nature, we too are engaged in a struggle for our existence.