In the winter of 878, King Alfred of Wessex was a refugee in his own kingdom, hiding in the marshes of Somerset at a place called Athelney with a handful of retainers, while the Viking Great Army under Guthrum occupied Wessex and the rest of England's Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had already fallen. The man who would be called the Great — the only English king ever given that title — had reached the lowest point of his reign. His biographer Asser, writing within Alfred's lifetime, describes those months with understated poignancy. Whether Alfred consoled himself by accidentally burning a swineherd's cakes, as the famous later legend claims, we cannot know. What we know is that he did not give up.
Alfred had inherited Wessex in 871 at the age of twenty-two in the midst of a Viking war that had already devoured the kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia and Mercia. Wessex was the last significant Anglo-Saxon kingdom remaining, and it too had been fighting desperately all year. In January 878, the Vikings launched a surprise attack on Alfred's royal estate at Chippenham during the Christmas season, when the army was dispersed and the warriors celebrating. Alfred escaped with a small bodyguard into the Somerset Levels, and from there began rebuilding.
The recovery took four months. Alfred sent messages through the marshes and forests to the scattered fighting men of Wessex, summoning them to a rendezvous at Egbert's Stone in May. An army assembled. Alfred led it to meet Guthrum's forces at Edington in Wiltshire, and in a pitched battle fought the Viking army to exhaustion and defeat. Guthrum retreated to his fortified camp at Chippenham where Alfred besieged him for two weeks before he surrendered. The terms Alfred imposed — the Danelaw settlement that divided England between Viking-controlled north and east and Anglo-Saxon south and west — were remarkable in requiring Guthrum's baptism as a Christian, with Alfred standing as his godfather. The Viking king became Æthelstan.
Alfred's genius lay not just in his military recovery but in what he did with his victory. He understood that Wessex could only survive future Viking attacks if it had better defences, a more effective army and an educated governing class. He created the burh system — a network of fortified towns spaced so that no part of Wessex was more than twenty miles from a fortress — which transformed the defence of the kingdom. He reformed the fyrd, the Anglo-Saxon militia, ensuring that half its strength was always available for service rather than the entire force being called up at once. And he launched an educational programme, bringing scholars from across Britain and Europe to his court and personally translating Latin texts into English, believing that a literate people was a stronger people.
Alfred's son and grandchildren completed the project he had begun, reconquering the Danelaw and gradually uniting England under a single king. The English nation that emerged from this process owed its existence to the man who had refused to accept defeat in the Somerset marshes. When the Norman Conquest transformed England in 1066, it built on a foundation of English identity, English law and English language that Alfred had helped to create nearly two centuries before.
