Alfred the Great and 'Englishness'.

Below follows a paper which was written in answer to the the
question; "What did Alfred do to foster a sense of Englishness?"
Whether it is the 'right' or 'wrong' is obviously up for debate.

Introduction
The establishment of a national identity is a crucial event in the life of a nation state. Not only can it provide a central, unifying focus in times of trouble, but it also provides a fundamental mechanism for the government of that state. In the case of Anglo-Saxon England there is some debate about when the people, that were referred to by Pope Gregory as ‘Angels not Angles’, actually thought of themselves as one people; the ‘English’. The debate also centres on how great the role of King Alfred ‘the Great’ was in encouraging this attitude, and although a united kingdom of the English did not in reality exist much before the tenth century, there is some evidence that Alfred came to see himself as King of all the English. That we are left with the impression of a people with a sense of national unity fostered by Alfred is, as Wormald argues possibly due to clever Wessex PR. From the time of Offa it appears that some, notably Bede, Anglo-Saxons recognised themselves as belonging to the ‘gens Anglorum’. However in spite of this knowledge, Alfred was the first English King who appears to have identified himself with the ‘English’ as a people, irrespective of their local affiliations. There can be no doubt that he deliberately encouraged and courted this, and his biographers kept this opinion alive. This paper will examine the mechanisms apparently used by king Alfred that were intended to foster a spirit of unity and sense of ‘Englishness’. As an examination of why he was fostering such a spirit is important. It will also explore whether or not these mechanisms were successful, or whether the contention that they were a clever Wessex ‘PR trick’ is valid.

Sources
When looking at the career of Alfred it is fortunate that there is a surprising amount of written and numismatic source material concerning his reign. Not only does the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle give an account of his reign, albeit in an arguably propagandised form, Alfred himself was responsible for an unprecedented outpouring of legislative and ecclesiastical material. This material does provide the usual problems that literary sources from the early Middle Ages present. However, the very fact that such a wealth of material exists at all, at least gives a unique look into the mind of a dynamic individual. At all times, however, whilst using this material to gain an insight into the reasoning behind Alfred’s direction and purpose we must be aware of who wrote it and for whom it was written. An interpretation of Alfred’s literary output both legal and ecclesiastical can lead to the opinion that he did indeed set out to promote ‘Englishness’ The same can be said for numismatic evidence of the period. Coins pronouncing Alfred as ‘rex Anglorum’ were designed to promote the idea, true or false, that Alfred had pretensions to the title of ‘Bretwalda’ as well as implying that the English were one people.

The Reign of Alfred
From the sixth to the ninth centuries there had been a progressive reduction in the number of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, most had been absorbed by expanding neighbours with dynastic aspirations, but others had fallen prey to the Viking invaders. By the ninth century there were only four survivors, of these four, only the Wessex of king Alfred had escaped the attentions of the Vikings, but only just. The rule of Alfred therefore was set against a time of political and military crisis. To go into any detail of his reign however is out of the scope of this essay but suffice to say it needed a man of great ability and charisma to accomplish all that was required. However, questions can be raised about how Wessex out of all the other surviving Saxon or ‘English’ kingdoms survived virtually untouched whilst all the others either lost territory, or in some respects came to terms with the pagan invaders.

One answer to these questions could be found in Alfred’s ability as a lord. There can be no doubt that he was a good lord who genuinely cared for his people inspiring genuine affection and great loyalty amongst his subjects. Here he was not unique was already following a tradition of good lordship in Wessex, and he built firmly upon this legacy. The strength of Alfred’s rule was therefore not in any uniqueness, but rather in his ability to exploit the foundations that had been laid by these predecessors. Using their formulae as a base he was able to affect changes in three ultimately inter-linked areas. He introduced sweeping military reforms, established effective legal and political measures, and importantly had an approach to the religious significance of his position and role that enabled him to establish an idea of the sacral unity of the Anglo-Saxon people. However the crucial element linking all these components together was his development of an administrative structure that was already possibly unrivalled in Europe. Thus enabling all these areas to play their part in allowing the idea of a single English people to take hold in the minds of later generations.

Military Reforms
The scope and mechanics of Alfred’s military reforms are well known, they were effectively applied and successful in their conclusion. And although he was not always locally successful he demonstrated clearly that he had the ability to learn from his enemy and apply what he learnt effectively. A full description of the reforms established by Alfred is again somewhat out of the scope of this paper, but can arguably be seen as part of the process that he used in promoting Englishness. The eventual creation of the so-called select fyrd, based on his division of the fyrd into two parts for example. Could have been, as Wormald points out, of the start of the process of pooling peasant resources therefore to provide enough equipped warriors for service whilst not stripping the land completely of its manpower. thereby laying the foundations of a form of ‘national’ army supported by the populace.

The most important product of his military reforms however, was that, apart from a gloomy, desperate period, Alfred was seen to hold the most important qualification for an early medieval war leader- success, or at least so it appeared. For there are some myths to be dispelled here about the warrior ability of Alfred. His son Edward and Grandson Æthelstan were by far the more proficient warriors, but like Augustus and Agrippa before them, Alfred as king took the credit due to his position and control of the propaganda machinery. However, that aside, he began to conduct the war against the Danes on his own terms. He took the war to them on the sea, despite mixed fortunes there, built fortified bridges and established the most crucial component of his reforms, the burghs. The importance of the burghs cannot be understated as they were not merely defensible forts, but seats of royal power and administration. It was these components combined under his skilful direction, trust in his well known ‘good’ lordship and his military ‘success’ making Alfred a prime candidate for a figurehead, a unifying military leader of all ‘free English’. The Wessex propaganda machine made certain that it was he alone that had shown the path to how to eventually defeat the Danes, he became the ‘leader and spokesman of all councillors of the English race’ . Any military reform, however small, that was in any way successful could be linked to his name. Indeed it is for this successes in this field he is most widely remembered today.

Once accepted as a figurehead he was able to start his attempts to draw together the wider Diaspora of Anglo-Saxon peoples under a single ‘English banner’. The burghs were key assets in this process. Not only did they make it possible for his administration to have bases, to survive and provide focal points for the local population, but they also provided outlets for official government policy and propaganda. Through their mints the royal coinage proclaimed Alfred’s status as ‘rex Anglorum’. He first secured the loyalty of his own people in Wessex and made it possible to allow other English people from the different kingdoms to express their loyalty to him. Loyalty to him was put forward as loyalty to a free, from the Danes, England. Allegiance in the early Middle Ages was often founded in a sense of the threat posed by outsiders to shared Christian values as well as personal virtues. For the Anglo-Saxons, the model had a more lasting relevance than for even the Franks faced with the threat of Islam. In the Vikings, a pagan people crossing the North Sea, they saw an appalling mirror image of their own past, one that confronted them. They too had come by sea and taken some areas by the sword. By the very fact of their one time success, they were now threatened, apparently, with the prospect of annihilation. Whether or not Vikings actually posed any such threat is besides the point. Alfred had only to remind the Christian ‘English people’ (his repeated term), ‘what punishments had come upon us’ at pagan Viking hands for the message to get home to anyone tempted to seek a specifically East Anglian, Mercian or Northumbrian accommodation with them.

Alfred’s Law code
Although the military achievements of Alfred were impressive, he had secured the loyalty of his own people, and if he was to make his kingdom secure he also had to get the support of others. The first purpose was probably secured in the opening chapters of his law code: that ‘each man keep his oath and pledge’, and that plotting against the king’s life or harbouring his enemies was punishable by death and forfeiture. The Anglo-Saxons were, in common with most Germanic cultures, governed by a system of stratified legal codes that covered each section of their society. Alfred used the law codes in a specific way and they were arguably the most important element of his attempts to promote ‘Englishness’.

His code was probably issued early in his administration, in the late 880s or early 890s, and so represents perhaps one of his first ‘literary’ endeavours. He introduced his code with a lengthy prologue, setting forth his concepts of law and lawgiving. It is both a theoretical and practical re-casting of the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, and has been called a public display of royal power. Which provided him an opportunity to express his political and ideological aspirations in legal form. It is also a sign of his faith in the power of literature-to propagate values and forge a national consciousness among his people.

He used the law code to tie the legal precedence for his reign to a ‘tradition’ extending back to the time of Moses. It was through this mechanism that he spread his notion of the single English people ‘special to God’. Thus he began to use literature not only as an important reinforcement for the source of his royal power, for the ideals of Wessex kingship and the loyalty that held Wessex together. He used them to promote the idea that the English were a chosen people. This ‘tradition’ was not a narrowly focused ideal, but a broad based attempt to link the four remaining English kingdoms under a single political entity - Wessex. Alfred included the laws of Ine and Offa because publishing a ‘national code’ he was attempting to unify written law creating a new concept of ‘English law’. The code was intended to apply to a whole nation, and brings to notice the new political unity Alfred was trying to promote - even force upon the English peoples by the struggle against the Danes.

He realised that the Law book was a powerful symbol. The juxtaposition of Alfred’s laws with Ine’s emphasised the continuity of the West Saxon achievement in peace, just as the Chronicle did in war. By respectfully mentioning the laws of Offa and Æthelbert in the code’s preface, and by incorporating some of their ideas, he informed Mercians and Kentishmen of his concern with their traditions. The Mosaic preface invited the West Saxons and perhaps their neighbours too, to see themselves as a new people of God. In the ninth century the pursuit of learning for God’s sake achieved more than the use of literacy in government. Thus he invited all the Christian Saxons to see themselves as a single people unified by a tradition of law and faith.

His code appeared at the end of a century in which no English king had issued laws. Everywhere in western Europe kings were ceasing to exercise the legislative powers which traditionally belonged to their office. In England alone, through Alfred’s example, the tradition was maintained, to be inherited by each of the two foreign kings who acquired the English throne in the eleventh century. The acceptance of Alfred’s overlordship expressed a feeling that he stood for interests common to the whole English race. As a national leader his authority outside his own kingdom was different in kind from that which had belonged to the lords of earlier confederacies. It was with a sound political instinct that the writer of the Chronicle, recording Alfred’s death, threw back his mind to the events of 886, the treaty with Guthrum, and reiterated the statement that he was king of all Englishmen who were free to give him their allegiance. The importance then of the Alfredian laws is that they were the first written legislation in England since Offa, that it applied to all lands under English rule, and that it projected aspirations which could be translated into practical forms by his successors.

Religious and Cultural Renaissance
Alfred would have realised that his military successes, although considerable, could only be consolidated by equal success in other areas. The war against the Vikings was not only a fight for survival, it was a fight for supremacy, and not only against the Vikings. The first part of the war was in some respects the most straightforward, though not easy it was a straight military contest between the skills of generals, each of some ability. Alfred realised that he had to exploit whatever advantage his military successes had presented him. His use of law codes is outlined above. With this in mind his ‘renaissance’ of learning takes on a whole new meaning. His patronage of learning and literature take on an ‘aggressive’ nature, it too becomes a tool of the state, an instrument of propaganda. As Campbell rightly points out, the religious problem posed by the Danes was central for Alfred. There can be no doubt that Alfred’s revival of learning was primarily designed to win God’s approval, a real issue at the time, but there was also the underlying political issue of having a Wessex overlord in charge at such a crucial time, and having its king as a figurehead. Having the seat of learning established in and patronised by the royal house of Wessex was therefore of primary importance.

However he took the notion of ‘Christian kingship’ exceptionably seriously, his selection of the texts to be translated reflect both his astute nature and devout Christianity. He really did see himself, as king, as God’s earthly representative. The foundation of Alfred’s whole conception of kingship and the basis upon which he ruled was his religious faith. It is easy in today’s highly cynical and secular climate to view Alfred’s concept of Christian royal duty as merely a vehicle for manipulation. There may be an element of this, but it must be remembered that to the people of the early Middle Ages the ‘end of the world’ was close at hand, the Millennium that would bring the second coming, was a real and rapidly closing event. Alfred clearly saw his responsibility as king to be one of creating the same conditions upon earth as there would be in heaven and fully prepare his people for it. He also saw himself as answerable to God about the use of the power placed in his hands by God and took this as an awesome obligation. As king he had accepted responsibility to God for the welfare of his people, in order to fulfil the divine mandate it might be necessary for him to extend his intervention into areas which earlier kings had ignored because they had no personal interest or profit in them. In doing this his authority was vastly augmented. It was this attitude that set Alfred apart from his predecessors and provided a model for his successors.

It was also the attitude that set in motion the so-called renaissance of Alfred. He gathered around him some of the most learned men, established schools that would eventually train the lay clergy that would act as administrators in the new burghs. This arguably is the main mechanism that would have been used in any Anglicisation. Alfred not only supervised the great work of translating the selected texts he even tried his hand at the actual scribing. But its use as an instrument of government remains. What more powerful testimony of an individual’s power to impose his will over others, a book with a preface in the hand of the king, with a page marker carrying the words ‘Alfred had me made’

Whilst it is probable that Alfred overplayed the realities of the amount of destruction of the English tradition of literature by the pagans to suit his own needs. What is true is that he did teach himself Latin, translate into English sacred texts and gathered a circle of scholars and advisors from all over England. As such, in a literary sense at least, local identities became blurred. These clergymen were then dispersed throughout the ‘English’ kingdom of Alfred and began the painstaking building of centres of learning which would have no doubt carried on teaching the message of ‘English unity’. Here is the first demonstration of what became one of the greatest strengths of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, their administrative capability. And what appears also is a spreading of the ‘theory’ of ‘Englishness’ by these recently educated clerics as they took up their posts and ran their schools.

Political and Diplomatic measures
Although religion was the central issue and foundation of the reign of Alfred, it was not the only tool at his disposal. He well appreciated the need for stable conditions in what remained of the other three English kingdoms. He took a Mercian wife; he attacked the Danes in London and won a momentous victory and not only in military terms. Yes it was the first real victory for the Christian English over the pagan Vikings in an offensive war, he took territory that had been occupied by the Scandinavians for some time. But he then made a clear political statement to the rest of the English kingdoms. He demonstrated his respect for the traditions of other kingdoms by returning London to Mercia. His reasoning behind this action can be readily perceived. By returning London to Mercia he distanced himself from the unpopular attempts by Offa to absorb other kingdoms and made sure that a man was installed that was pro-Alfred, recognising Alfred as his lord. He ensured that the process of Anglicisation, to the Wessex model, was firmly established. London, was now firmly in his political area of influence. To that end he married his eldest daughter Æthelflæd to the recently installed Mercian ruler of London, Æthelred. Until his death in 911 Æthelred remained a staunch ally of Alfred and Edward his son; content with ealdormans title, but presiding over the Mercian council and leading the Mercian armies with an authority that was unchallenged. In reality this attitude made English Mercia a province of Wessex. Having influence in London also allowed Alfred to control a position that was vital to the security of his own kingdom without the annexation of Mercian territory. Primarily though it demonstrated Alfred’s desire to be accepted as overlord over all the English.

Conclusion
There is a point to which one can say that Alfred was able to put forward the view that the ‘English’ were a single, special people united by their shared heritage and faith. He facilitated this by utilising the communications infrastructure that he revitalised and developed. He used this mechanism to promote the idea or concept of a shared ‘Englishness’, a sacral gens Anglorum. This he underlined with his law code and further enhanced by his own charismatic religious approach to lordship. His special ability was to use what has since become a tried and tested formulae for development of a nation-state. He harnessed three elements of what became standard state-craft and practice; the military, the religious and diplomacy (both external and internal), under the single concept of sacral kingship and used the administrative framework available to him through the burghs to spread the message of a romanticised origin ‘myth’ and enforce his will. His kingship however was the kingship, or overlordship, of Wessex not England. He used the term ‘English’ to suit an end, an attempt to link all the Germanic peoples under a single ‘traditional’ origin to gain control. There was no apparent or visible attempt to really politically unite the disparate parts of the Anglo-Saxon people under any pretext other than his own. He attempted, in reality, a relatively peaceful coup, absorbing all the remaining English kingdoms and placing them under the overlordship of Wessex. Whilst dealing with the common enemy the pagan Vikings. Through Alfred and his successors, the overlordship of Wessex was to be regarded as the overlordship of England, and they were careful to control all the elements that dealt with the transmission of such information. It was therefore not a sense of Englishness but a sense of ‘Wessexness’ that Alfred and later his successors were imparting into the Anglo-Saxon peoples that came into their sphere of influence. A sense of being of the same people as the West Saxons. It became politically and historically expedient in the tenth and eleventh centuries to view the whole as Englishness because it made historical, hence political sense, the two later became interdivisible. But not in the time of Alfred, he was securing and expanding the power base of Wessex. The concept of establishing ‘Englishness’ as a precursor to an ‘English’ kingdom could be considered a quite blatant and clever piece of Wessex propaganda used to underwrite this aim. Its success is judged by the way it has been embraced by later generations. The later state of England was not made in the period from the seventh to the ninth centuries, but had however been born as an idea. Its ultimate makers would achieve a more permanent creation than any continental counterpart because they did not have to invent their own ideological justification.

Select Bibliography

H. P. R Finberg (1974) The Formation of England 550-1042, Granada Publishing Ltd.

A. J. Frantzen, (1986) King Alfred, G. K. Hall & Co. Boston Mass

Sir F. Stenton (1943) Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edition 1971 Oxford University Press

P. Wormald (1984) The Making of Britain - the Dark Ages, L. Smith ed., Macmillan, London
P. Wormald (1982), The Anglo-Saxons, J. Campbell ed. Penguin Books London

P. Wormald, The Making of England, History Today vol. 45 Feb. 1995

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