Anglican Commemoration
King of the West Saxons & Defender of the Faith
October 26 · d. 899
also known as Alfred of Wessex
Alfred was King of Wessex from 871 to 899, the only English monarch ever called "the Great." He rallied a beaten kingdom to defeat the Danish invaders at Edington, then turned to rebuilding the learning and faith that decades of war had nearly extinguished, translating Latin works of Christian wisdom into English with his own hand. He is commemorated in the Anglican calendar, not as a canonized saint of Rome, but as an example of Christian statesmanship. His feast is October 26.
Almighty God, you have surrounded us with a great cloud of witnesses: Grant that we, encouraged by the good example of your servant Alfred the Great, may persevere in running the race that is set before us, until at last, with him, we attain to your eternal joy; through Jesus Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Alfred was born in 849, the youngest of five children of King Æthelwulf of Wessex. As a small boy he was sent twice to Rome, where the old pope, Leo, received him kindly and, by one telling, anointed him almost as if he were already marked for a throne he had four older brothers ahead of him in line to inherit.
He did not expect to be king. But death came for his brothers one after another, in the way it did in those hard years, and in 871, when Alfred was only twenty-one, he found the crown on his own head and a kingdom under siege. The Danes had been raiding England for two generations, burning monasteries, breaking kings. Now they meant to take Wessex too, the last free English kingdom standing.
For years Alfred fought them as best he could, buying peace where he had to, fighting where he must. Then, in the depths of winter in January 878, disaster struck. A Danish army under King Guthrum swept into Wessex at Chippenham, catching Alfred and his court unprepared. His nobles scattered, or made their peace with the enemy, or simply vanished. Alfred himself fled into the marshes of Somerset, to a low island called Athelney, ringed by fen and river, and there he hid, a king with almost nothing, waiting through the wet English winter for anything at all to turn.
It is here that the English have loved to tell one story above all others, that in his exile Alfred sheltered in the hut of a poor woman who did not know who he was, and that she asked him to watch her cakes on the fire while she was away, and that he sat lost in thought over the ruin of his kingdom and let them burn, and that she scolded him roundly for it, a king reduced to a servant's blunder in a stranger's kitchen. It is a story every English child has been told for a thousand years, and if it tells us the king was, for one dark season, no better than any hunted man with nowhere else to lay his head, it has told the truth even if it never happened exactly so.
From that low point Alfred began to rise. He gathered what men he could find still loyal, and in May, seven weeks after Easter, he called them to him at a place called Egbert's Stone, and marched to meet Guthrum's army at Edington. There, against all the fear of the winter before, Alfred and his men broke the Danes utterly, and Guthrum himself was forced to sue for peace. Under the treaty that followed, Guthrum agreed to be baptized a Christian, with Alfred standing as his godfather, and the boundary of a Danish territory, the Danelaw, was fixed so that Wessex, at least, would remain a Christian and English kingdom.
With the fighting stemmed, Alfred turned to a different kind of rebuilding. Decades of war had gutted the monasteries and their schools, and the king grieved that hardly anyone left in his kingdom could read the Latin in which the church's wisdom was written, nor even understand the church's own services. So he set himself, an untrained man past thirty who had never been raised to expect a throne, to become a scholar, and he gathered scholars from Wales and Mercia and across the sea to help him. Together they turned Gregory the Great's guide for pastors, and Boethius's meditation on the consolation to be found in philosophy, and Augustine's own soliloquies with God, into the English tongue, so that his people could read them for themselves. He built up schools, reformed the law of his kingdom on the foundation of the commandments of Moses and the teaching of Christ, and set his little navy and his fortified towns in order against the day the Danes might come again.
He died on October 26, 899, an old man by the reckoning of his age, not yet fifty, having spent every year of a hard reign turning a broken kingdom toward the light. Where he had found a Wessex hunted into the marshes, he left one at peace, reading, and praying in its own tongue, and it was on that foundation, and no other conqueror's, that England itself would in time be built.
How we know Alfred is unusually well attested for an early medieval king. The near-contemporary Life of King Alfred, written around 893 by Asser, a Welsh monk who served at Alfred's own court, gives a detailed personal portrait from someone who knew him; and Alfred's own surviving writings, above all the preface he wrote to his English translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, let the king speak for himself in a way almost no other ruler of his age can. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, compiled under Alfred's patronage, supplies the year-by-year framework of the wars.
Alfred was born in 849 at Wantage in Wessex, the fifth and youngest child of King Æthelwulf. As Asser records, Æthelwulf sent the boy to Rome twice as a child, in 853 and again in 855, and on the first visit Pope Leo IV received him. Asser writes that Leo "anointed [him] as king," a phrase that later medieval tradition inflated into a prophecy that the boy was marked out for kingship from that day, even though he had four living brothers ahead of him in the succession. Most historians read the ceremony as something more modest: very likely an honorary Roman consulship or a confirmation, the kind of ceremonial dignity Rome sometimes conferred on visiting Frankish and English nobility, later remembered and reshaped by a kingdom that wanted its great king's greatness foretold from the cradle.
Alfred came to the throne in 871 after the deaths of his father and, in succession, three older brothers, inheriting a Wessex under sustained Danish assault. The crisis came to a head in January 878, when a surprise Danish attack on the royal court at Chippenham forced Alfred into hiding in the Somerset marshes at Athelney, reduced for a time to leading a small band of followers. From that position he rallied, defeating the Danish king Guthrum decisively at the Battle of Edington that May, and securing the resulting peace with Guthrum's baptism and the boundary later called the Danelaw.
The story of Alfred burning the cakes belongs to this same exile at Athelney in the church's memory, but it is not part of the earliest record. It does not appear in Asser's original ninth-century text at all; the earliest surviving version is found in the eleventh-century Vita Sancti Neoti (Life of St. Neot), more than a century after Alfred's death, and it was from there that later medieval retellings of Asser absorbed it. It belongs to a recognizable and much-loved kind of story the church and the folk memory of England have long told about kings brought low, a humility tale in which greatness is proved by the indignity it is willing to bear before it is restored. Whether the incident happened as told, it may well preserve something real about how completely the winter of 878 stripped Alfred of every mark of royalty, down to sheltering unknown in a peasant's hut; that the English have kept telling it for a thousand years is itself part of Alfred's history, whatever its origin.
Alfred is remembered on October 26, the day of his death in 899, and is one of a small number of English kings kept in the Anglican calendar as a commemoration of faithful and scholarly kingship rather than as a canonized saint. He is the only English monarch ever popularly called "the Great," a title earned not by conquest but by the double achievement of saving Wessex from conquest and then rebuilding, almost single-handedly, a broken culture's access to its own Christian and literary inheritance.
His reputation has outlived his kingdom by a thousand years. The system of English common law draws on foundations he laid; the English navy, such as it later became, traces a lineage of memory back to the ships he built against the Danes; and Winchester, his capital, still holds a large bronze statue of him raised in 1901 on the thousandth anniversary of his death, sword lifted hilt-upward like a cross. Victorian England, in particular, took up Alfred as a founding figure of the English nation and its Christian character, and though the legends have gathered and sometimes overreached, the plain record Asser and Alfred's own writings leave behind is remarkable enough on its own: a king who, having saved his people by the sword, spent the rest of his life trying to give them back their books.
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Preface to the Pastoral Care (Cura Pastoralis)(Old English, c. 890-897)
Alfred's own account, in his own words, of the collapse of learning in England and his program to translate the church's key texts into English. The famous "very few on this side of the Humber" passage.
Public domain: Wikisource (Sweet's EETS translation)
Life of King Alfred(Latin, c. 893)
The near-contemporary biography by a Welsh monk at Alfred's own court: the Rome visits and Pope Leo IV, the wars, the illness Alfred bore from young manhood, and the king's own character. Confirms the burning-of-the-cakes story is absent from the earliest text.
Public domain: Project Gutenberg
Alfred the Great: The Man Who Made England(English, 2016 paperback)
Recommended: Justin Pollard (Pegasus Books)
A lively, accessible narrative biography of the whole reign, the natural first book to hand a reader who wants the story told well without academic apparatus.
Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England(English)
Recommended: Richard Abels (Routledge)
The standard modern scholarly biography, examining the sources and the surrounding historiography in depth for the reader who wants to go further.
Primary sources. Alfred's own preface to his translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, addressed to Bishop Wærferth of Worcester, survives in Henry Sweet's edition with English translation for the Early English Text Society (1871), viewable at Wikisource. Asser's Life of King Alfred (c. 893) is the essential near-contemporary biography; Albert S. Cook's translation is free at Project Gutenberg, and the older J. A. Giles translation circulates in several public-domain editions. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle supplies the year-by-year military narrative.
Principal study. Asser's Life remains the single best entry point to Alfred as a person; read alongside the Chronicle, it gives the fullest picture available of any early English king from those who knew him.
Recommended modern biography. Justin Pollard's Alfred the Great: The Man Who Made England (Pegasus Books) is a lively, accessible narrative biography for a reader who wants the whole sweep of the reign, from the marshes of Athelney to the schoolroom at Winchester, without academic apparatus.
Further reading. Richard Abels's scholarly biography Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (Routledge) is the standard modern academic treatment for a reader who wants the sources and the historiographical debates examined in depth.
Online resources. Asser's Life of King Alfred (Cook translation) is free at Project Gutenberg; Alfred's preface to the Pastoral Care, in Sweet's translation, is at Wikisource; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is widely available in public-domain translation online.
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With Wessex secured, Alfred devoted the last two decades of his reign to a program of learning and reform without real parallel among his contemporaries. In the preface to his English translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care, addressed to Bishop Wærferth of Worcester and translated by Henry Sweet for the Early English Text Society, Alfred set down his own account of the crisis he had inherited: <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:King_Alfred%27s_West-Saxon_Version_of_Gregory%27s_Pastoral_Care_(2).djvu/12">"So general was its decay in England that there were very few on this side of the Humber who could understand their rituals in English, or translate a letter from Latin into English; and I believe that there were not many beyond the Humber. There were so few of them that I cannot remember a single one south of the Thames when I came to the throne."</a> Taking that decline as his charge, Alfred gathered scholars from Mercia, Wales, and the European mainland, and personally translated, or directed the translation of, Gregory's Pastoral Care, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, Augustine's Soliloquies, and part of the Psalter into English, so that his people could read the church's wisdom in their own tongue. He also commissioned the compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and a translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, reformed the law of Wessex on a foundation drawn from Mosaic law and Christian teaching, established a court school for young nobles, and reorganized his kingdom's defenses through a system of fortified towns and a rebuilt fleet.
Asser's biography also records, in unusual and unhagiographic detail, that Alfred suffered from a chronic and painful illness that afflicted him from young manhood onward. Asser reports that after a first affliction in youth, which Alfred prayed to have relieved, a second and worse illness struck him suddenly and publicly at his wedding feast, one that "continued uninterruptedly through the revolutions of so many years, from the twentieth to the fortieth year of his life and more," a condition modern physicians have sometimes suggested may have been Crohn's disease or a related chronic disorder. Asser presents this not as a legend but as plain observed fact, one Alfred bore, in the telling, with patience through decades of rule.
Alfred was never canonized by Rome; he holds no formal cause of sainthood in the Catholic sense. His place in the Anglican calendar, where he is kept as a commemoration on October 26, the day of his death, honors him specifically as a Christian ruler and scholar, one of the very few English monarchs the church has set aside a day to remember for the shape of his rule rather than for miracle or martyrdom.
British (Received Pronunciation): Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/
Readings for a Commemoration
Micah 6:6–8Psalm 11 Corinthians 1:18–31John 3:16–21