Saint Alfred the Great, king of Wessex (849-26 October 899)

Alfred is born at Wantage in 849, youngest son of king Æthelwulf of Wessex.^[4][5] In 853, his father sends him to Rome, where pope Leo IV anoints him king and adopts him spiritually; he returns there with his father in 855-856.^[6] In 871, the year his brother Æthelred dies, Alfred comes to the throne at twenty-two. It is one of the worst years of Anglo-Saxon history: the Danish Vikings have already taken Northumbria and East Anglia, and they defeat Wessex several times in the same year.^[7]

From 871 to 878, the war turns to rout. In 878, the Danish king Guthrum surprises Wessex; Alfred must flee into the Somerset marshes, on the island of Athelney. Asser tells this retreat without embellishing it: a king without an army, reduced to guerrilla warfare.^[8] Then Alfred gathers the fyrd of Wiltshire and Somerset, fights the battle of Ethandun and receives Guthrum from the font in the island of Alney; the Alfred and Guthrum settlement, distinct from the Wedmore settlement, then fixes the frontiers.^[9][10][11]

It is a turning point. For the first time in decades, a part of England is cleared; for the first time also, a Viking chief enters the Church by royal baptism. The settlement with Guthrum opens the way to the Danelaw, the eastern half of England that will remain under Danish domination.

Alfred spends the last twenty years of his life organizing the defence rather than conquering. He builds a network of fortified boroughs (burhs) covering Wessex, with roads that allow a besieged town to be relieved in a day.^[12] He reforms the army: service is organized by rotation so that the kingdom is never left undefended. He has ships built faster than those of the Danes.^[13]

The great invasions stop in his lifetime. When a new Viking army lands in 892, the system holds: the Danes can no longer settle durably.^[14] The Chronicle's formula on his death, king of “all the English nation except the part under the power of the Danes”, says exactly what he obtained: not the unification of England, but the survival of Wessex and the base of the kingdom that, under his grandsons, will unify the island.^[15]

What makes Alfred more than a warrior king is the restoration of letters that he carries out in the 880s and 890s. In the preface of his translation of the Pastoral Care of Gregory the Great, he describes the state of the country himself: the schools destroyed, Latin become unreadable for many clerics, the books burned by the raids.^[16] His response is radical: translate into English the books “most needful for all men to know” for everyone, and put them within reach of those who can read English but no longer Latin.^[17]

The program is known by the translations themselves. Scholarly consensus attributes directly to the king the Pastoral Care of Gregory the Great, the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius^[18], the Soliloquies of Augustine and the first fifty psalms.^[19] The Ecclesiastical History of Bede and the Histories against the Pagans of Orosius belong to the same program but are no longer held to be by Alfred's own hand: they are from his workshop, and the version of Orosius carries geographical additions, such as the account of the voyage of Wulfstan of Hedeby.^[20] The Dialogues of Gregory were translated by Wærferth, bishop of Worcester.^[21]

Alfred also founds a court school, where he has his own children raised, the sons of the nobility “and many also who were not noble”, and attracts foreign scholars: Asser himself, come from Wales, Grimbald and John.^[22] He himself, says Asser, learns Latin late, as an adult, like a schoolboy, and dictates his translations.^[23] The goal is not scholarship: it is that faith and justice be taught in the language of the people, and that judges know how to judge.

Alfred has a code of laws compiled, the domboc (the “book of judgments”), which gathers his own laws and those of Ine of Wessex in one hundred and twenty chapters, and which opens on a translation of the Ten Commandments and of chapters of Exodus.^[24] The preamble says that he gathered “the laws that he found in many books of synod”, kept “those that pleased him” and rejected the others with the advice of his counsellors.^[25] To his judges, he commands: “Judge very equitably: judge not one judgment for the rich, another for the poor; nor one for your friend, another for your enemy.”^[26]

The code is short, but it installs a lasting idea: the law is above the king, and the king is the guardian of a received law. It is one of the reasons why the memory of Alfred has survived in English history as that of a just king, not only of a victorious king.

Asser describes a man of prayer: daily mass, psalms, canonical hours, night prayer in the churches, “apart from others”. He carried on him a little book of hours and psalms, and he had made the vow to consecrate to God half of his services and of his revenues, divided among the poor, the monasteries, the court school and the churches.^[27] His health was poor, says Asser, and he is said to have received healing on a pilgrimage to saints Guerir and Neot, in Cornwall.^[28]

Alfred has not been canonized by Rome. A canonization was attempted unsuccessfully by king Henry VI with pope Eugene IV in 1441.^[29] He is not in the current Roman Martyrology.^[30]

He is nevertheless venerated as a saint in two precise traditions :

• The Church of England inscribes him in its calendar on 26 October, as a Lesser Festival: “Alfred the Great, King of the West Saxons, Scholar, 899”.^[31]
• The Russian Orthodox Church, by decision of the Holy Synod of 21 August 2007, blesses the venerability of “All Saints of the British Isles”; Alfred is named there, with a personal feast on 26 October and a common synaxis on the third Sunday after Pentecost.^[32]

A Nominis notice (French Bishops' Conference) indicates for its part a local feast on 12 December, without any reference of calendar or decree; the French Wikipedia has taken up this mention, still without a note.^[33] It is not the date retained here.

It is for this reason that the date of 26 October is kept: it is at once that of his death, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Annals of Saint Neot, and that of his feast where he is liturgically venerated.^[34][35] The degree of authority is clear: venerability is a tradition received from the Churches that celebrate him, not a Roman canonization; the article says no more.^[36]

The iconography of Alfred is late, above all English and romantic. He is represented as king of England: crown, royal mantle, often a book (allusion to his translations) and a sword (allusion to Ethandun and to the burhs). The nineteenth-century statues, like that of Wantage, his birthplace, make him a scholarly and warrior king.^[37] He is also seen with the instruments of science and of navigation, in memory of his fleet, or surrounded by monks and clerics, in memory of the court school. No scene of his life is as frequent as the retreat of Athelney and the settlement with Guthrum.

• Saint Gregory the Great († 604): whose Pastoral Care was Alfred's first great translation.
• Saint Bede the Venerable († 735): whose Ecclesiastical History was translated into English in Alfred's program.
• Saint Augustine of Canterbury († 604/605): the apostle of Christian England that Alfred defended.
• Saint Francis of Assisi (1181/1182-1226): later, another saint whose poverty changed the Church.