Alfred the Great

When a Danish army broke a truce in early 878 and nearly captured Alfred at Chippenham, the king of Wessex spent the following weeks a fugitive in the marshes of Athelney, a retreat later legend would embroider with the story of the burned cakes. From that low point he rallied the levies of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire and met Guthrum's army at Edington, winning a victory decisive enough that the Danish king sued for peace on Alfred's terms rather than his own.

The peace was sealed in specifically religious form: Guthrum agreed to be baptized, with Alfred receiving him from the font as sponsor at Aller and hosting the customary eight day chrism loosing at Wedmore afterward, so that the Treaty of Wedmore that followed was a conversion as much as a border settlement, fixing a line along which Danish and English, pagan and newly Christian, could each hold their own ground. That religious framing of the peace was not new to 878.

Two years earlier, in 876, an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry records a different Danish army swearing peace to Alfred on a sacred ring at Wareham, an oath the chronicler notes they had never before sworn to any people, evidence that even before Edington, English observers recognized which Norse religious forms carried genuine weight and used them deliberately in dealing with an enemy who did not yet share their God. Alfred's reputation as a defender of Christian Wessex was built as much on this repeated, hard-won negotiation with a still-pagan enemy as on the battle itself.

Alfred judged that decades of Viking raiding had gutted English learning so thoroughly that, by his own account in the preface to his translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, he could recall no priest south of the Thames able to render a Latin letter into English at the start of his reign. His response was a personal program of translation, undertaken with scholars he drew to his court from Mercia, Wales and the European mainland, among them Asser, who later wrote his biography, and the Continental clerics Grimbald and John.

Alfred himself is credited with rendering Gregory's Pastoral Care, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, Augustine's Soliloquies and the first fifty psalms into Old English, adapting rather than simply translating, and inserting his own reflections into Boethius in particular. He had copies of the Pastoral Care sent to every bishopric in his kingdom, each accompanied by a costly pointer, an aestel, for following the text, and he required that free-born young men with the means to pursue it be taught to read English, with those destined for holy orders continuing on to Latin. Behind the program lay a stated conviction that wisdom given by God had been squandered through neglect, and that a kingdom without learned priests and lawgivers could not hold itself together, spiritually or politically, against renewed attack. Monasteries he founded at Athelney and Shaftesbury, though never richly endowed, were part of the same rebuilding, an attempt to restore a religious infrastructure that Viking raids on unprotected monastic houses had done much to destroy.