agan Vikings had pil-laged, torched and

butchered their waythrough the kingdoms ofBritain for much of the9th century. They hadtaken city after city, king-dom after kingdom untilonly the most powerfulkingdom of Wessex re-mained. For seven years,King Alfred of Wessexfought off the “great hea-then army.” But on thetwelfth night of Christ-mas in January 878 A.D. Alfred was driven from hiscastle at Chippenham by Guthram, king of theVikings. Alfred barely escaped with his family andbodyguards. The people of Britain now seemed des-tined to face a future of plunder, death and tyranny.

Alfred retreated to a tiny island hidden in the impen-etrable swamps of Athelney where he and his fatheronce hunted. Alfred could have slithered away to theEuropean continent like so many other leaders haddone. But he was determined to stand and fight forthe liberty of his people. From his secret base on thehighest hill in Wessex, Alfred could observe theViking movements. With his small band of warriorsusing guerilla tactics, Alfred attacked the raiding par-ties of his entrenched foe. As he wiped outGuthrum’s scouting parties, he also cut offGuthrum’s supply lines and the people of Wessexsaw that their king was not dead.1

That spring, Alfred’s defeated noblemen learned thehard way the unbearable yoke of Viking pagan rule.

The looting, plunder-ing, raping and kidnap-ping under the paganwarriors were devastat-ing his people. “Any-one who had thoughtthat life under theVikings would bepreferable to a cam-paign against them hadbeen thoroughly cor-rected. It was now clearthat freedom wouldhave been worth con-tinuing to fight for.”2

THE BATTLE OF EDINGTON

Five weeks after Easter, Alfred sent out a secret mes-sage through his spy network to all of his loyal no-bles. They and their men were to meet him atEgbert’s stone, a memorial to his beloved grandfa-ther, King Egbert. Alfred chose the day of Pentecostto gather for one last battle.

Traveling off road and through the forests, thou-sands of Saxons assembled at Egbert’s Stone to meettheir king. Alfred must have been elated as he turnedthe last corner on the forest path. On the grasslandsahead he saw his still loyal fighting men rising totheir feet—the armies of Wessex—5,000 strong. Al-fred’s biographer captures the moment: “When theysaw the king, receiving him as if one restored to lifeafter suffering such great tribulations, they werefilled with an immense joy.”3

The next day Alfred led them on a fifty-mile march.That night the army of nobles, farmers, commoners

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With such a ruthless pirate, the common practice of theday would have been for Alfred to drag Guthrum andhis leaders out of the fortress and behead them all.What happened next was one of the most gracious actsof the age. Alfred offered Guthrum his life and a rightto rule East Anglia if Guthrum would convert to Chris-tianity, be baptized and submit to the Treaty of Wed-more. This treaty committed Guthrum to maintainequal rights for all his citizens, whether Saxon or Scan-dinavian.

Guthrum agreed to these terms. He signed a treaty withAlfred that began the long process of integrating intoBritain the Scandinavians who were willing to live bythe laws of a Christian nation. Guthrum left for EastAnglia, but never forgot his vow. When the formerpagan minted his own coinage he placed his new name,Aethelson, the Christian name Alfred gave him, on thecoins. He was Alfred’s ally for the rest of his life.5

REBUILDING THE KINGDOM

Alfred returned to power after his great victory at Ed-ington, but his kingdom was impoverished and in sham-bles. Towns had been plundered, churches burned andhis men exhausted from fighting. “Law was barely exis-tent, literacy was effectively dead and Alfred was king ofa wasteland.”6

Alfred’s solution was revolutionary. His first concernwas the safety and protection of the people. He built anetwork of thirty strong walled cities, called burhs,twenty miles apart, surrounded by moats. Each was de-fended by soldiers from the local community who had apersonal stake in the safety of the city. These cities pro-vided protection from enemy attack for the surroundingrural population. Because of the safety this network en-sured, travelers and traders were free to travel and growthe economy. Prosperity was the result.

To reform his army of largely part-time farmers, Alfredturned to King Solomon’s biblical model of rotation ofenlistments. His army was divided in half and rotated.His mobile offensive force had their own horses andcarried provisions to respond instantly to any invasion.His other men were free to work their farms while pro-viding defense for the fortified towns. Even though Al-fred would lead his men in dozens of future battles withthe Vikings he was never again defeated on the field.

The Vikings’ greatest advantage was their naval mobilitymade possible by their fast, shallow-draught longboats.They struck with lightning speed using Britain’s rivers, wa-

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and priests encamped just below Battlesbury Hill.There the great heathen army awaited them on thehigh ground.4

Early the next morning, Alfred’s men melded into amighty shieldwall and marched up the ridge at Eding-ton. Guthrum’s army, confident of victory, marched outof their stolen fortress at Chippenham to fight an openbattle of the shieldwalls.

Alfred exhorted his men to remain faithful to their fel-low warriors and especially to God who promised themeternal life, whatever the outcome. Then Alfred lockedhimself into the front of the shieldwall and led the attackup the steep hill toward the enemy.

The Viking “berserkers,” filled with drugs and demonicdedication, dove over the Saxon wall only to be impaledon the Saxon spears. The armies locked in a deadlydance of shields, as spears stabbed through the shield-wall, dropping hundreds of men where they stood. Bothsides filled the bloody vacancies instantly. The battleraged all day. But the Saxons—facing the loss of theirwives, families and their entire nation—were ultimatelymore determined to hold the line.

Suddenly the Viking shieldwall began to crumble. Alfredand his men poured through the gaps and took on theViking raiders in hand to hand combat. A total rout en-sued as the Vikings fled the field. The Saxons were unre-lenting, annihilating the enemy.

Guthrum and some of his leaders escaped back to Chip-penham. They madly tried to fortify the wall, butquickly realized there was no way out. Alfred and hisvictorious army were at the gates. Guthrum’s only alter-native now was starvation or surrender.

Memorial Stone at the site of the Battle of Edington, where an army of theAnglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex under Alfred the Great defeated the GreatHeathen Army led by Guthrum in May 878.

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terways and surrounding seas. Alfred was the first Eng-lish leader to create a naval force to overcome this advan-tage. He designed ships almost twice the size of theViking vessels, with twice the manpower. These were thebeginning of the English navy that expanded to rule theseas of the world up until the rise of America.

ALFRED’S RENAISSANCE

Alfred’s rebuilding project required something morethan the rebuilding of towns, the reorganization of thearmy and the restarting of the economy. “The answerto his and his people’s problems was not weaponry butwisdom. He needed nothing less than a renaissance inlearning. This alone would put an end to the Vikingmenace.”7

Alfred was a student of history. From great historianslike the venerable Bede he knew of a golden age inEngland which emerged soon after the pagan Saxontribes had been converted. In those days the Scriptureswere read, schools founded and voluntary obedienceto the Bible and its liberating truths led to peace andprosperity. Alfred wrote, “…very often it has come tomy mind … how there were happy times thenthroughout England; and how the kings … obeyedGod and his messengers … and how they not onlymaintained their peace, morality and authority athome … they succeeded both in warfare and in wis-dom…”8

Alfred believed that the Vikings were a divine scourgeto awaken the people to return to the Lord and beblessed. Alfred, an expert hunter, used a huntingmetaphor as he wrote: “Our ancestors, who formerlymaintained these places, loved wisdom, and through itthey obtained wealth and passed it on to us. Here onecan still see their track, but we cannot follow it.”9 Heconcluded that the people had lost their wealth as wellas their wisdom, because “we did not wish to set ourminds to the track.” His people were slipping backinto pagan illiteracy.

Alfred believed that the future of England rested on arevival of faith and learning, especially at the local level.He said, “Local government ought to be synonymouswith local Christian virtue; otherwise it becomes localtyranny, local corruption and local iniquity.” Alfred’stask, his greatest goal, was to help rebuild the Chris-tian virtue and wisdom of his people.

Almost no one in Wessex could read when Alfred be-came king. Latin was the language known only by the

elites: clerics, bishops and kings. The people had oftenbeen kept intentionally illiterate and therefore easy tocontrol by their leaders. Since the Bible and literaturewere only in Latin, it was nearly impossible for a Saxonto gain the wisdom of the ages.10

Like a modern corporate headhunter, Alfred searchedfor the best Christian scholars from Mercia, Wales andthe Continent. He paid them well to help him teachliteracy to the people. They then helped Alfred trans-late many of the great works of Christendom fromLatin to English. Alfred himself translated many of thepsalms of King David. The king personally translatedPastoral Care by Gregory the Great in which Alfredwrote; “As often as you can, freeyourself from worldly affairs sothat you may apply that wis-dom which God gave youwherever you can. Remem-ber what punishments be-fell us in this world whenwe ourselves did not cher-ish learning nor transmit itto other men.” He trans-lated Consolation of Phi-losophy by Boethius andthe Soliloquies of Au-gustine because thesebooks would “turn themind upward towardwisdom and to valuethis virtue more thanany other earthly treas-ure.”11

These translations were theseedbed of a movement toward literacy and the read-ing of God’s Word by all the people. Later kingswould reverse Alfred’s bold move, but 700 years later,through men like William Tyndale, the Bible wasprinted in English by the thousands on the newly in-vented printing press. By the end of the 16th century,England would become a “people of the Book.”

ALFRED’S LAW CODE

Until Alfred, the laws of Wessex were a strange andmuddled mixture of various laws, useless to an illiteratepeople—especially useless for Illiterate nobles expectedto enforce the laws. Legal verdicts had more to dowith power, wealth and class than the facts of a case.There was little justice or impartiality.

Jeweledbookmark from

the time of Alfred.He gave these to hisnobles to encourage

them to read the Bible andthe great wisdom books.

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World History InstituteP.O. Box 4673Thousand Oaks, CA 91359(805) 523-0072www.WorldHistoryInstitute.com

Alfred restructured the law codes of Wessex. Withthe Holy Scriptures as his foundation, he set forth ajust legal system based upon the teachings of Jesusand the Laws of Moses. In his preface to his lawcode Alfred quoted the golden rule: “Do unto oth-ers as you would have them do unto you.” He thenwrote: “‘If a man understood how to apply this onelaw alone he would need no domboc [law book].’”12

He began his law code with his own translation ofthe Ten Commandments from Latin to English.(Exodus 20:2-17) Included are other passages fromthe Law of Moses (Exodus 21 to 23) describing theclear application of the law to their society. Thesewere followed by excerpts from Christ’s Sermon onthe Mount (Matthew 5-7), and a brief account ofapostolic history and the growth of Christian lawamong the Christian nations.

“By arguing throughout his preface that justice mustbe an eternal principle, handed down through bothScripture and the legal codes of the land, Alfred es-tablished the framework for what would later beknown as ‘common law,’ the foundation for the legalsystem of England for the following millennia, aswell as for the legal systems of the former colonies ofthe British empire—including the United States …and others.”13 The common law tradition is estab-lished explicitly in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Con-stitution.

Only in “common law” nations, even to our time, isthere the guarantee of “equal justice” based on “in-alienable, God-given rights” that cannot be takenaway through the whims of rulers. Our heritage offreedom based upon God-given rights has its rootsin Alfred’s common law and its appeal to God as thefinal authority, the ultimate Judge.

ALFRED’S LEGACY – SEEDBED FOR AMERICA

Having reigned for twenty-nine years, Alfred died inOctober of 899 A.D. His five children were welltrained in the faith and continued their father’s re-forms wholeheartedly. His grandson, Athelstan, atthe Battle of Brunenburh in 937, defeated the lastViking resistance to a united Christian nation.Going forward this united country would be calledEngland. But the people of England knew that itwas Alfred, King of Wessex who laid the foundationfor their new country: a nation that would carry thetorch of Christian liberty to a new world calledAmerica.

“…He was a fierce warrior, a devout Christian everthirsting for wisdom, deeply committed to justice, alover of mercy, and a king who gave himself for hispeople. He was practically a myth and a much-needed reality. He was the king of the Whitehorse—Alfred the Great.”14

— Marshall Foster

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References:1 Abels, Richard, Alfred the Great (Longman, 1998) p. 155-1572 Merkle, Benjamin, The White Horse King (Thomas Nelson, 2009) p. 1073 Alfred the Great, Trans. Keyens and Labidge (Penguin Books, 2004) p. 844 Abels, Op. Cit. p. 161-1655 Ibid, pgs. 1666 Pollard, Op. Cit., ps 1987 Ibid, p. 2338 Keynes and Lapidge, Op. Cit. p. 1249 Ibid, p. 12510 Pollard, Op. Cit. p. 25311 Merkle, Op. Cit. p. 189-19412 Ibid. P. 19913 Ibid, p. 20014 Ibid, p. 234

Alfred rebuilt London in 792 and laid out its streets in a pattern thatexists to this day. He also laid the foundations for many other citiesin England