Many historians say there is one incontestable fact about early British history: on 12 July 927, Æthelstan created the permanent, unified Kingdom of England that forms the foundations of the country we know today. There is only one problem with this claim. Despite the intensely emotional and deep patriotic feeling that sustains this widely-held conviction, it is not true. As historian Alex Woolf wrote of Æthelstan: "All that he had achieved crumbled with his death."

File 16 in a continuing series. AETHELSTAN. New readers can start with File 1 here

Every 12th July, historians, campaign groups and local communities across England celebrate what they call the birth of England.

They say that day in 927 AD is when the kings of Scotland, Wales, Cumbria and Bamburgh submitted at Eamont Bridge near Penrith, marking the “unification of England under one single monarch, Æthelstan, the first King of all England”.

Except that it does not. It is historically inaccurate to say that a permanent, unified England was created on that day. Æthelstan had to fight the same kings again in the tumultuous battle at Brunanburh ten years later, winning only what scholar Alex Woolf called a “pyrrhic victory” that was almost as costly for the victor as the vanquished.

Just two years after that, on October 27, 939, Æthelstan died and the political structure fractured. Within less than a year, the border of the fledgling English kingdom collapsed back to the line of Watling Street, which meant every single territorial conquest achieved by Alfred the Great’s successors over a thirty-year period was wiped out.

Even the leading scholar of the period, Sir Frank Stenton, concluded on page 356 of his seminal work “Anglo-Saxon England” that Aethelstan never did create a permanent “England” at all: “In reality it was an artificial piece of statecraft, which still depended for existence on the strength and political ability of the reigning king,” the scholar wrote. Without Aethelstan’s intimidating presence, it vanished.

Despite Stenton’s authoritative disavowal, the idea that Æthelstan forged the direct ancestor of England in 927 has enjoyed massive academic support for generations. But why are the massed ranks of senior historians so sure Æthelstan is the father of England if his version of England fragmented after only twelve years? Above all, why is this fragility not better known?

The answer is that acknowledging that England was actually a highly unstable, stop-and-start experiment that failed multiple times is more historically defensible but inconvenient. Nations are deemed to require a legitimising myth to justify the authority of the current Government and monarchy. The grand myth-making was needed to obscure a foundation built on fratricide, regional hatred, dynastic fracturing, and near-instant collapse.

The instability in the foundations of the Alfredian dynasty is illustrated perfectly by the strange and highly suspicious way Æthelstan ascended to the throne in 924.

When King Edward the Elder died, the Anglo-Saxon realm immediately split along its old fault lines. Wessex elected Edward’s son Ælfweard as king while the Mercian aristocracy, who had raised Æthelstan in the martial court of his aunt Æthelflæd, declared for Æthelstan.

All was set for a catastrophic civil war. Yet, mysteriously, sixteen days later Ælfweard died in circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained. Further conspiracies and manoeuvrings delayed the new king’s coronation for over a year.

The foremost modern biographer of Æthelstan, Professor Sarah Foot, noted that the bitter Wessex resistance to his investiture forced Æthelstan to be crowned on the border between the two kingdoms at Kingston-upon-Thames, demonstrating that the early English state was deeply unstable, and that Æthelstan initially relied on Mercian military muscle to force a resentful Wessex into submission.

She explicitly emphasised that from the start of his reign the new king was heavily dependent on his personal “charisma” and military menace to keep his deeply unstable state together.

She notes the allegations by Ælfweard’s family that he was illegitimate, falsely describing Edward’s aristocratic first wife Ecgwynn as a low-born concubine, hindered him from gaining full acceptance. Doubts about his origins prompted Æthelstan to adopt deeply pretentious high-flown vocabulary to describe himself, hoping to smother his past political vulnerability in majestic verbiage.

As Clare Downham records, Æthelstan’s first act on becoming king showed the weakness of his position. While desperately fending off the continuing fury among Wessex nobles against him taking the throne, Æthelstan needed to neutralise the threat he faced from the Norse regime on his northern flank. So, he met the new king of York, Sihtric of Dublin, at his headquarters in Tamworth and gave his sister Eadgyth to the Viking leader in marriage. This looks less like the act of an overlord with the upper hand and more like a frantic diplomatic concession to keep the Norse king from exploiting the Anglo-Saxon succession crisis.

Then, in the following year, Sihtric died suddenly. Opportunistically, Æthelstan marched into Northumbria and took it over. He expelled Sihtric’s brother, Olaf Guthfrithson, who had just arrived at York from Dublin aiming to grab power. He demolished the defences the Vikings had built within the Roman walls surrounding the town.

Æthelstan’s taking of York, which controlled all of old south Northumbria from the Tees to the Humber, meant that the king of Scotland, Constantine II, had no longer any buffer between him and the ambitious Wessex regime. If Constantine were to prevent his kingdom from becoming a satellite of Wessex, it was in his interests to ensure the Norse Vikings returned to power in York. As historian Alfred P. Smyth wrote, the imperial aspirations of Alfred’s successors were now becoming an existential threat to the whole north of Britain: “It is not surprising the descendants of these fiercely independent rulers should resent the ambitions of men like Æthelstan.”

To make sure his takeover of York stuck, Æthelstan within weeks called all the northern kings to a summit on the banks of the River Eamont near Penrith, the new border between Æthelstan’s expanded English kingdom and the Kingdom of Cumbria. His main aim was to prevent them allying with the Norse Vikings against him.

There, accompanied by his intimidating southern army, he gave them no immediate option but to swear solemn oaths of loyalty. He insisted the oaths were backed up by pledges. This probably meant they were obliged to hand over nobles as hostages who would be killed if they broke their word. The House of Wessex’s propagandist news outlet, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, declared the assembled kings “renounced all idolatry and afterwards departed in peace,” which means they promised to break all treaties, marriage alliances, trade agreements, and military pacts with the pagan Norse Vikings.

However, Constantine was a seasoned operator. He had been king of Alba for 27 years. His ally, the King of the Cumbrians, Owain ap Dyfnwal, had ruled for seven. They were not going to put up for long with being forced to sign documents describing themselves as sub-reguli (under-kings).

They knew Æthelstan was operating 300 miles north of his Winchester base, with strained supply lines and mounting expense. The Wessex leader could not keep dragging his army north to inspect his newly-conquered territory. They thought Æthelstan was staging elaborate royal theatre on the riverside to disguise his strategic weakness and once their forces were assembled it would be worth the risk of taking him on.

As Alfred P. Smyth wrote, Æthelstan may have been gambling that since the northern kings had hostile relations for decades with the Norse Vikings, they were unlikely to unite against him. He was wrong about that.

As the eminent historian of the Anglo-Saxons, Sir Frank Stenton, noted: “After the events of 924 it must have been clear throughout the north that Æthelstan could only be held within his own country by the union of all his enemies.”

As David Woodman adds, the northerners’ fury will have been intensified by the ostentatious new language Æthelstan was adopting. After Eamont he issued coins emblazoned with new imperial titles.

One was Rector Totius Angliae which translates as Governor of all England. This title represents a major shift in vocabulary. Alfred and his successors used a different style, Rex Anglorum, on coins. Anglorum is a noun in the genitive plural meaning “of the Angles”, in other words, the people. But Angliae is a proper noun meaning “of England”, the physical land itself.

By switching from the people, Anglorum, to the place, Angliae, Aethelstan abandoned the old, kinship-based terminology of the “Angle-kin” and replaced it with a title explicitly claiming he was king of a bordered, geographical entity: England.

This is strong evidence that Aethelstan was the first of Alfred’s descendants to conceive of an England. George Molyneaux concurs. In his groundbreaking book on the formation of the English kingdom Molyneaux writes that before Aethelstan grabbed York, the words the Cerdicings used to describe themselves “give no hint that the Cerdicings aimed to create a kingdom corresponding to the area of English habitation.”

The other term Aethelstan put on his coins was Rex Totius Britanniae (King of all Britain). This will have enraged the northern kings because it clearly implies that Aethelstan was claiming not just to be king of the Saxons but over-king of their Celtic kingdoms as well.

The northern kings grudgingly fulfilled their obligations as vassals. Sarah Foot notes they were forced to attend Æthelstan’s court at places such as Cirencester to witness charters and carry out other footling duties. But they were not kept down for long. Within two years both kings broke the Eamont pledges. As historian Michael Wood relates, they committed the ultimate offence of burying their differences with the Norsemen, forging an alliance with the notorious Guthfrithson who aimed to recapture Northumbria.

Infuriated by this insubordination, Æthelstan launched a land and sea punishment raid that devastated both Cumbria and Scotland, reaching as far north as Caithness, 520 miles north of Winchester. But that led to only a temporary peace. A massive bout was inevitable to decide whether the house of Wessex or the Norse King Ívarr’s line at Dublin and York should dominate the England of the tenth century.

Now we come to the crux of why the fragility of England is not better known. It is because the Chronicle scribes, Æthelstan’s employees, systematically misrepresented the nature of the opposition Æthelstan faced.

The giants of Edwardian and Victorian historiography, figures including Sir Charles Oman and Edward A. Freeman, were both determined to affirm the early creation of England. They were driven by deep patriotism and a methodological desire to treat the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as an objective historical record, rather than the highly curated dynastic propaganda of the House of Wessex.

They ignored or glossed over the fact that Aethelstan’s England was a fragile phenomenon sustained by the charisma of one terrifying individual that utterly disappeared when he died. But the influence of their misleading interpretation has persisted. Here is how it happened…

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File 15 in a continuing series. EDWARD. New readers can start with File 1 here

Traditional patriotic historians portray Edward the Elder as an unstoppable conqueror. His aggressive burh-building campaign isolated the Viking-dominated Danelaw, they say. Then, in 920 AD, Scotland, York, and Bamburgh supposedly surrendered at Bakewell. That, the nationalists add, left his son Æthelstan a simple job to finish creating England. But new research says the opposite: Edward had pushed Wessex into imperial overstretch. He had no choice but to sign a compromise ceasefire with his enemies at Bakewell. The diplomatic retreat broke the uneasy alliance with Mercia on which Wessex depended to keep fighting. Then Edward died and a succession crisis exploded.

You can almost hear the sweeping, emotional strings and brass of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance march booming as you read the traditional story of Edward the Elder’s triumph in pushing history to the brink of England’s birth.

Suddenly, according to the conventional narrative, Edward’s incremental, defensive, 20-year burh-building campaign transforms itself from a gruelling slog almost overnight into an absolute, uncontested triumph of Anglo-Saxon dominance over the north.

In 920, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the king advanced into the Peak District, built the House of Wessex’s 60th fortress at Bakewell and somehow that seemed to do the trick.

Instantly, all his enemies supposedly surrendered. The wily English Lords of Bamburgh stopped sitting on the fence to see who would win. The tough, exceptionally shrewd veteran Scottish king Constantine II apparently threw in his cards. Then, most surprisingly of all, the brilliant, opportunistic, professional Norwegian-Irish Viking warlord Ragnall, who had just driven out the Danes and established himself as King of York, submitted.

The whole gang apparently “chose him (Edward) for father and lord.” Or, at least, that is what the A manuscript of the Chronicle claims, the official version of the Wessex dynasty’s history that was completely in the control of Edward himself.

That was enough for Sir Charles Oman, the great British military historian whose massive and influential 1910 work, England Before the Norman Conquest, became a standard academic textbook. The submission, he declared, was the consummation of Edward’s life. Edward was triumphantly acknowledged as the undisputed master of all the South and Midlands, Oman declared. The northern rulers had capitulated knowing that their turn would come next if they did not avert his wrath by making a timely surrender.

To sceptics who disagreed with his interpretation, Oman was withering. Doubters pointed out that it was militarily nonsensical for Constantine to surrender Alba’s sovereignty. Why would the Scottish king do that when Edward was in no position to threaten him? After all, the Wessex king was hundreds of miles south behind two mountain ranges. Edward was hopelessly militarily overstretched. He had never marched anywhere near Scottish territory and he lacked the logistical capability to invade Scotland anyway, the sceptics argued.

From his great eminence, Oman poured contempt on the disbelievers: “What can be more rational than to trust the Chronicle, when it states that he (Constantine) took the opportunity of connecting himself with the newly-risen power of Edward, which had just shown its capacity for humbling the common enemy?”

No, Oman insisted, the idea that Constantine “owned himself as his inferior, seems entirely probable.” He added: “It is hard to see how the compiler of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle can have had any political object for inventing his statement.” The charge of “falsifying past history is not one that can be rationally ascribed to him,” Oman concluded.

History had moved in a straight line toward a predetermined, glorious goal. In this case, that goal was the creation of a unified England under a single West Saxon king, Oman suggested. Edward had pushed his kingdom’s boundary an unprecedented distance from Wessex to the Humber. In Sir Charles’ view, Edward the Elder had done the heavy lifting by systematically grinding down the Danish armies and reclaiming the vast territories south of the Humber. His son, Æthelstan, simply had to fulfil the mission set by Alfred the Great and deliver the final, logical finish by conquering the rest of Northumbria.

Yet, over the following decades, scholars felt forced to admit things did not go quite as smoothly as Oman implied. Northumbria was a completely different beast compared to the Midlands. It was deeply independent, heavily Norse-Irish and had a history of fiercely resisting southern rule.

So, thirty-three years later, the even more eminent historian Sir Frank Stenton was more careful. He acknowledged the forces of history were perhaps not marching quite so determinedly to a pre-ordained destination. The peace pledges of the northern kings only dimly foreshadowed the creation of England. The Bakewell deal was not a total submission, Sir Frank admitted. Instead, all the Bakewell participants got something out of the peace deal, Sir Frank said.

Ealdred of Bamburgh, isolated between Britons, Scots, and Norwegians, received the promise of Edward’s protection. The king of Strathclyde, Owain ap Dyfnwal, got to keep lands he had annexed from ancient Northumbria. Constantine gained temporary security against the unpredictable Ragnall who, in turn, got to keep York. These are not the acts of men submitting to an overlord, Stenton conceded. They are men doing deals.

But then Stenton pivoted. Having correctly acknowledged it was not a surrender but a series of pragmatic bilateral arrangements between roughly equal parties, he still concluded that this “gave to the West Saxon monarchy a new range and dignity which greatly strengthened its claim to sovereignty in England.” So, unlike Oman, he suggested Wessex had only a contested legitimacy not settled authority over its conquests, but he still clung to the mythology that Bakewell established a platform for the imminent creation of England.

By 1989, historian Alfred P. Smyth was prepared to dismiss the Chronicle account as merely Edward’s propaganda. He wrote: “This is a West-Saxon account and it must be treated with caution, since it was in the interest of Wessex to record what was essentially a treaty between kings as nothing less than a submission to Wessex. It would be nonsense to assume that Edward was strong enough to impose the same conditions on Constantine or Ragnall as he had forced on the men of Bedford or Nottingham.”

So, why has the opinion of historians swung around 180 degrees in half a century? After all, literally none of the facts, that is the facts in the A version of the Chronicle, has changed by one dot or comma. The answer is that scholars have become increasingly aware that the Chronicle was not a neutral record. It was commissioned and written by West Saxon scribes working directly for the royal court of Wessex, in this case, Edward.

On the other hand, the military facts have always been obvious. Edward was desperately over-extended, running out of troops and logistically compromised at the end of his supply lines. Most ominously of all, Mercian rebels were tearing up the alliance that the entire military effort depended on back home. The king could not fight on even if he wanted to. He had no choice but to sign a non-aggression pact with his enemies. But, of course, his scribes were never going to write that. So instead, they used grandiose biblical and political language talking about how his erstwhile enemies “chose him as father and lord” to make their king look as dominant as possible.

Even Oman admits in his book that plenty of sceptics doubted his pro-Edward interpretation. Sir Charles was a supremely erudite scholar. He understood military logistics inside out. He was fully aware of the counterarguments. He was not deluded, nor was he stupid. So, why did he adopt the apparently naive stance that the Chronicle compilers could have no reason to lie?

The answer is that the academic establishment of which he and Stenton were two great pillars were afraid. Because Anglo-Saxon sources are so incredibly sparse, Oman genuinely feared that if historians adopted what he saw as “cynical scepticism,” the entire narrative framework of early England would dissolve into thin air. He chose to trust the document because, to him, the alternative was historical nihilism, leaving no history to write.

In his 1939 book, On The Writing of History, he attacked “hypercritical researchers” and proponents of “political theory” with an “axe to grind” who doubted the Chronicle’s veracity and were taking over university departments at that time. He argued instead for a cautious literalism, trusting the source unless there was definitive, physical evidence to disprove it, to avoid falling into historical negativism. He argued that history was not a “science” but a branch of literature and that a historian’s overriding duty is to tell a compelling, scannable, and beautifully written story.

This approach received a devastating response seven years later from R.G. Collingwood in his landmark 1946 book, The Idea of History. Collingwood blasted Oman’s method as “scissors-and-paste history” where scholars commit themselves to blindly trusting so-called authorities without rigorously testing or checking them. Collingwood dismissed this as “pre-scientific” history which “is therefore about as useful to the modern reader as would be a discussion of physics in which no mention was made of relativity.”

The only plausible explanation for the wilfully trusting attitude to sources is that traditional historians acted out of an overriding, deeply felt English patriotism. For Oman and Stenton, history was not just an intellectual exercise; it was an act of national duty.

A messy, incomplete history where England was born from fragile diplomacy rather than glorious dominance did not fit the story of the great nation they loved and sought to defend.

But moving away from Oman and Stenton’s sentimentalism is not an act of vandalism. It is a necessary part of a nation growing up. It is the only way to actually learn from the people who walked before us rather than being hampered by delusions.

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The brilliant military achievements of Alfred the Great’s daughter, the Lady of the Mercians, Æthelflæd, were both a blessing and a political nightmare. She played an indispensable role in saving the Anglo-Saxons from destruction by the Danes. But the image of a woman successfully commanding armies, taking a foreign queen hostage and executing brilliant grand strategies threatened, on her death, to cause her nationalistic supporters to split Mercia from Wessex. So, her brother and military partner Edward the Elder reduced the legendary warrior queen to a mere footnote, “the king’s sister.”

File 14 in a continuing series. AETHELFLAED. New readers can start with File 1 here

How could a brilliant and powerful ruler who beat bloodthirsty invaders and played a crucial role in saving a nation be written out of history? The answer is: by being a woman in early medieval Wessex.

Æthelflæd was Alfred the Great’s eldest child, born into an existential war against marauding Vikings. Not just a court ornament, she was educated alongside the future king in Latin, statecraft, logistics, royal bureaucracy and survived the family exile in the swampy marshes of Athelney.

She went on to become the only woman ever to rule an Anglo-Saxon kingdom. She built fortresses, commanded armies, forged diplomatic alliances from Wales to Scotland and played an indispensable part in the campaign that broke the Danelaw.

Without her contribution, it is highly likely the Danes would have destroyed the kingdom that became England.

Yet after her death, all trace of her victories and the high reputation she had built in the north was eliminated from the main record of Wessex’s history, the Winchester Chronicle, the A version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under her brother Edward’s direct control. Nothing about her share of the hugely successful national programme of fortress-building, her loyalty or her successful co-operation with Edward made it into the official accounts.

Historian F.T. Wainwright famously called this a “conspiracy of silence.” He wrote: “Edward dared not do anything to encourage the separatist forces in Mercia. And so, a blanket of official silence had to be thrown over all Æthelflæd’s achievements.

“She was, after all, the Lady of the Mercians, and her reputation could be used with effect by nationalists who hoped to revive the independent kingdom of Mercia.”

The reason for that anxiety was the persistent, unresolved tension between Mercia and Wessex that made Æthelflæd’s prominence dangerous to Edward. This fissure runs as an underground fault line beneath the entire story of the reconquest of the Danelaw. And when that fault line finally broke open after Edward’s death, it revealed why the emergence of a unified England was never inevitable. It was always fragile, always contested, and always dependent on the personal authority of whoever happened to be holding it together.

In 886, Alfred arranged Æthelflæd’s marriage at 16 to the much older Mercian ruler Lord Æthelred, who had accepted Alfred as his lord in the early 880s. But she was not simply a bride. By orchestrating this dynastic alliance, Alfred was placing his most trusted confidante right at the heart of Mercian power.

It was a crucial political marriage intended to cement the alliance between Wessex and a Mercia crippled by recent history. Its king Burgred had been written off as a weak, cowardly ruler who rolled over for the Vikings and abdicated to Rome in 874. Then it suffered the degradation of losing the eastern half of its territory to the invading Danes under Ceolwulf II, who disappeared from history in 877.

Despite these indignities, Mercian nobles remained stubbornly determined to retain their national independence. As Nicholas Higham and M.J. Ryan show, Æthelred and his wife made no reference to Edward when issuing their own charters and used regal wording to describe themselves, such as “holding, governing and defending the sole rule of the Mercians.” Many non-Wessex histories, including the later 10th century Chronicle of Æthelweard and Welsh and Irish sources, call them king and queen. By 909, however, Edward was able to command both the Wessex and Mercian armies. It is probably best to say that while the royal pair acknowledged Edward’s supremacy, they enjoyed considerable freedom of action.

One symbol of their independence was the richly furnished church they built at Gloucester. In a daring military raid into Viking-held Lincolnshire, the pair seized the relics of Saint Oswald of Northumbria, killed by King Penda in 642, and used the saint’s bones to turn the church into a pilgrimage site. By doing this they asserted Mercia was not under the thumb of Wessex, and they chose to have themselves buried there.

Æthelflæd came from a line of influential female Mercian predecessors including Queen Cynethryth, the wife of King Offa, Queen Æthelswith, wife of King Burgred, and Abbess Cwenthryth, daughter of King Coenwulf. All of these royal women had greater scope for action than would have been possible in patriarchal Wessex, where the status of the king’s wife was considerably lower. She was also half-Mercian through her mother Ealhswith. She came from what Alfred’s biographer Asser called “the Royal stock of the Mercians.”

Æthelflæd’s husband Æthelred spent more than a decade as an invalid. The Fragmentary Annals of Ireland repeatedly describe him as “in a disease” or “on the point of death.” He was for more than a decade not in any condition to command or direct Mercian forces. Because of his prolonged illness, Æthelflæd effectively took the reins of power and acted as de facto ruler of Mercia for nearly a decade before he died in 911.

When he did eventually die, the Mercian lords could have chosen to submit to the direct rule of Edward. It is striking that they did not, and instead decided to support Æthelflæd as his successor, thereby maintaining the distinct Mercian national identity. She was acceptable to them because she was part-Mercian, but also because she had already been imposing her authority over Mercia for years as her husband’s deputy. In the opinion of the scribal sources, she dispensed justice, patronage and directed armies with as much, if not more, skill than her male contemporaries.

She played an indispensable part in the success of her brother Edward the Elder’s campaigns. She not only held her territory but expanded it. Her army followed her west to fight the Welsh and north to attack the Danes.

But it is essential to understand from the outset that their collaboration, though brilliantly effective, was also a reflection of structural weakness rather than settled unity. The Mercian-Wessex alliance was never a merger. It was a partnership between two distinct political entities, one of which had always resented the subordination, and the joint campaign preserved rather than resolved that underlying tension.

Edward, who had adopted the grandiloquent royal style of “King of the Anglo-Saxons” to suggest he had inherited authority over greater Wessex and a subordinate Mercia, was resented by Mercians who never forgave his presumption. Æthelflæd’s authority rested on Mercian loyalty, not West Saxon appointment, which is precisely why her achievements had to be suppressed once she was gone. Publicising a female co-architect of the reconquest would have given Mercian nationalists a rallying figure and a precedent for independence.

One of the secrets of her success was that she directed her own campaign against the Danes separately from Wessex’s, carefully avoiding any possibility of conflict arising with Edward’s forces. She concentrated her fight against those Danes who were the subjects of the Kings of York, in an area north of the boundary line along the River Welland. Edward, by contrast, set his forces against the Danes subject to the Kings of East Anglia, south of this boundary. They ran no joint campaigns at all. This clear and sensible division of responsibilities prevented confusion between the two armies and remained in place right up to the day of her death.

Between 910 and 916, they jointly worked to expand Alfred’s network of 33 reinforced burghs. These new fortresses formed a double line of impregnable bases for operations against the Danes stretching from north of the River Thames in the east to the Mersey in the north-west.

Æthelflæd built ten new burghs at Bremesburh, Scergeat, Bridgnorth, Tamworth, Stafford, Eddisbury, Warwick, Chirbury, Weardburh, and Runcorn. Edward built his at Hertford, Witham, Buckingham, Bedford, Maldon, Towcester, Wigingamere, Colchester, Stamford, Nottingham, Thelwall, Manchester, and Bakewell.

One of their most effective tactics was to build paired fortresses on opposite banks of a river, double burghs, to block Danish supply lines completely. A double burgh would halt Viking longships from moving inland or escaping to the sea. This happened at Hertford on the River Lea, Nottingham on the River Trent, and Stamford on the River Welland. By boxing the Danes in with this permanent network of twin fortresses, Edward and Æthelflæd removed the Vikings’ main advantages of lightning mobility and surprise at the cost of transforming the conflict into a gruelling, twenty-year war of attrition.

The Mercian Register, a fragment of a Mercian chronicle preserved by loyal clerics determined to honour her memory, describes the bare bones of the military operations she directed, without any expressions of astonishment that it was a woman doing so. The annal for 914 reads: “In this year by the grace of God Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, went with all the Mercians to Tamworth, and built the fortress there in the early summer, and before the beginning of August, one at Stafford.”

As Christine Fell points out, “the Register does not imply she sat at home sending men out to do the work.” As Kim Klimek notes, she is mentioned twice as much in the sources as her husband Æthelred. Noblewomen usually appeared, if at all, in early medieval literature only in contexts relating them to their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. Æthelflæd features almost uniquely for a woman as an individual power in her own right.

She proved her toughness on several occasions. On 16 June 916, a Mercian abbot named Egbert, travelling through Wales with his English retinue, was killed. Three days later, the Mercian Register reports: “Æthelflæd sent an army into Wales and destroyed Brecenanmere and captured the Welsh king’s wife and 33 others.”

Æthelflæd was not fighting on a single front. Irish-Norwegian settlers from Dublin landed in alarming numbers in the north-west within Mercian territory, settling in the Wirral and threatening towns to the south. The hyper-aggressive Norse-Irish warrior Ragnald, grandson of the legendary Ivar the Boneless, appeared to lead them and completely destabilised the military balance in the north. He seized control of lands between the Tees and the Wear. Æthelflæd’s reaction was prompt. To the fortress she had already built at Chester she added others at Eddisbury and Runcorn.

The Fragmentary Annals of Ireland report that the Britons, Picts and Scots, who respected her as a military figure, forged an alliance with her against Ragnald. When her force won the victory, “her fame spread abroad in every direction” and she was seen as the leader of an anti-Norse coalition in the north.

The Annals of Ulster describe her as famosissima regina Saxonum, the most famous Saxon queen. Writing two centuries later, William of Malmesbury says she “protected her own men and terrified aliens” and dwells on the paradox of her feminine nature and her masculine achievements.

But this growing fame was to prove a headache for her brother Edward. It was such a threat that it could have erased all the gains the fragile coalition had achieved.

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File 13 in a continuing series. TINTAGEL. New readers can start with File 1 here

For 150 years, the dominant historical narrative of post-Roman Britain was simple, dramatic, and catastrophic. In 449 AD, a massive, single invasion by upwards of 200,000 Anglo-Saxon troops wiped out the native Celtic Britons. That supposedly meant the English were an overwhelmingly Germanic bunch of Teutonic empire-builders. However, excavations at Tintagel in Cornwall overturn that claim. They show the Celtic kings of Dumnonia, modern Devon, Cornwall and Somerset, survived. They ran an extraordinary regional monopoly in luxury Mediterranean goods. This demolishes claims that English culture, laws, monarchy and religion stem exclusively from Anglo-Saxon roots.

The supreme majesty of the ruinous but unforgettable Tintagel castle, clinging limpet-like to black cliffs over a spectacular sea in Cornwall, has produced a stunning piece of historical evidence.

Finds unearthed from the impregnable sixth century island fortress show the Celtic kings of Dumnonia, who ruled modern-day Devon, Cornwall and Somerset, ran a monopoly trade in Mediterranean goods which brought them enormous power for centuries.

By dangling the prospect of highly desirable wine, olive oil and fine tableware, they exerted influence over dozens of other Celtic kingdoms across the coasts of Britain and Ireland for three hundred years.

This discovery undermines claims that an invasion by Anglo-Saxon soldiers in 450 AD killed almost all native Celts in Britain right down to the tip of Land’s End. The genocide was said to have ensured that England’s culture, laws, religion and monarchy derived exclusively from Anglo-Saxon roots.

But this notion has been overturned by the dig at Tintagel. Funded by English Heritage, it indicates that far from being liquidated by marauding Anglo-Saxons, the kings of Dumnonia flourished.

Archaeologists found more fragments of high-status 5th and 6th century Mediterranean pottery, luxury tableware, wine and olive oil amphora there than at any other single site in all of Western Europe. You are not misreading that — there is more evidence of early medieval luxury goods at this ancient Cornish castle than anywhere else on the entire Continent.

The source of this enormous wealth was shiploads of prestige goods sent directly to Tintagel by the rulers of the Byzantine Empire based around Constantinople, who exchanged them for scarce Cornish tin vital for making weapons, casting church bells and creating components for imperial engineering projects.

The rulers of Dumnonia used this cornucopia of luxuries to build a formidable defence force to protect their kingdom and keep other kings dancing to their tune, thus enjoying an era of supreme regional dominance that peaked between 450 and 650 AD. As the eminent Cornish historian Bernard Deacon wrote, Tintagel “appears to have been at the pinnacle of a pyramid of tribute centres.”

All this, academics say, is a paradigm-shifting discovery. It suggests the story about a complete Anglo-Saxon wipeout has been profoundly overstated, at the very least. The archaeology indicates that large Celtic populations survived in the west of Britain untouched until the Norman Conquest in 1066. Far from the British being exclusively the descendants of Anglo-Saxon invaders, Celtic culture, genes and ethnicity form a substantial part of today’s English people.

The discoveries on Tintagel Island are a major setback for supporters of the “maximalist” view which proposed a single, overwhelming Anglo-Saxon invasion wiped Britain clean of Celtic influence. This theory was first propounded by the founding father of academic history in Britain, the former Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, Edward Augustus Freeman.

In 1867, Freeman published the invasion hypothesis in his magnum opus, The History of the Norman Conquest of England. In it, he wrote: “Our forefathers…wiped out everything Celtic… as thoroughly as everything Roman was wiped out of Africa by the Saracen conquerors of Carthage.” He added: “The power of the Cornish Britons was now utterly broken…and the English supremacy was certainly extended to the Land’s End.”

Freeman argued that practically all the British Celts were killed in a genocidal conquest. The few stragglers that escaped death were enslaved, driven into the western mountains or forced abroad. Freeman was a leading Anglo-Saxonist, part of a group of intellectuals who believed that the civilisation of English-speaking nations was superior to that of any others because of racial traits and characteristics inherited from the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain.

For roughly 150 years after Freeman unveiled his thesis, until well into the late 20th century, the standard textbook narrative was of the Adventus Saxonum, the arrival of the Saxons. This model argued that a catastrophic wave of incoming Angles, Saxons, and Jutes essentially ethnically cleansed Britain.

This conviction is still fiercely supported by traditionalist academics. Historian David Starkey told his Channel 4 show Monarchy there had been an almost total genocidal wipe-out of indigenous people by an army of 200,000 Anglo-Saxon troops, adding that “it was ethnic cleansing at its most effective”.

But the Tintagel finds suggest what used to be regarded as an unassailable fact of early medieval history is not true at all.

One reason why the concept of an all-conquering Anglo-Saxon invasion has retained prestige is the hyper-focus of historians on Alfred the Great, encouraged mainly by the fact more documents survive from Alfred’s realm than any other early medieval kingdom. This created a Wessex-centric lens that treats the birth of England as an inevitable, southern-led march toward destiny. But the actual evidence increasingly shows a far more complex past than Freeman suggested. Archaeology, field studies and DNA indicate England evolved not from a genocidal holocaust or the will of Alfred. It was the product of chance and the amalgamation of highly distinct regional identities.

The Tintagel finds unearthed on the steep, rocky headland connected to the north Cornwall mainland by a fragile, sylph-like bridge are enormous in their number and richness. Written off as an isolated monastery in the 1930s, the discoveries indicate the peripatetic Celtic Kings of Dumnonia continued to exploit their links to Roman culture after the legions departed Britain in 410.

Diggers uncovered more than 100 mainly permanent, substantial high-status buildings on the headland. They are rectangular in shape, a highly unusual feature for a period when most houses in the south west were circular peasant huts or “rounds”.

The evidence indicates the source of the Dumnonian kings’ astonishing prosperity was a pipeline of Mediterranean wine, olive oil, silk and fine tableware brought in shiploads by deep-sea traders direct from the Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople to coves beside Tintagel in north Cornwall.

There, the luxuries were exchanged for supplies of the ancient world’s scarcest and most sought-after mineral resource: the Cornish tin essential for forging weapons, shields, and armour. The kings of Dumnonia built arguably the most intensely active international maritime trading port in the entire Western European world.

The importance of this cannot be overestimated, wrote Professor Ken Dark. The unearthing of the “largest assemblage of Early Byzantine pottery found outside the Mediterranean” was exceptional, he wrote, adding: “the specifically Constantinopolitan composition of the Tintagel ceramic assemblage appears to be unique in the West, suggesting that it had more direct links with Constantinople than did many regions in Gaul or Spain.”

Cornish archaeologist and polymath Professor Charles Thomas declared the discovery meant that a major portion of Britain didn’t descend into isolated, chaotic poverty, as has been widely held for decades. Instead, Tintagel emerged as a powerhouse of survival and sophistication.

Professor Philip Payton stressed there has been a concerted campaign to play down the cultural survival and economic importance of non-Anglo-Saxon peoples who survived the so-called Anglo-Saxon invasion. The hard evidence shows the culture of Cornwall today “pre-dates not only the emergence of the English state but also the arrival of the English themselves”. Yet English academic and government institutions have worked hard “to marginalise the histories of the other peoples of the British Isles, either by ignoring them altogether or by co-opting them as subsidiaries of the central English theme,” he wrote.

Bernard Deacon wrote that for a long time scholars had remained blind to the existence of a powerful and prosperous Dumnonian kingdom because of a general “groupthink”. For example, in the 1990s, an academic fashion grew up that said the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had filled up the same boundaries as the Roman occupation, leaving no room for native Celtic kingdoms to have survived. This, Deacon wrote, “became widespread currency, to the point where it was unquestionably accepted despite a paucity of any hard evidence”.

In fact, it is now clear that, as Thomas points out, while the eastern half of Britain was disrupted by the Germanic invasions and cut off from continental Roman networks, the Celtic southwest remained untouched, fully British, and actively Romanised in its elite tastes. Tintagel represents the nodal point of a Western British kingdom that completely bypassed the Anglo-Saxon-dominated east to deal directly with the Mediterranean by sea.

Tintagel was identified as the birthplace of King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fanciful History of the Kings of Britain, written in 1136. But Thomas emphasises the castle had no military value for fighting Anglo-Saxons. Although the island has naturally defensive characteristics, even in the sixth century Tintagel was a highly specialised royal citadel and international trade gateway without heavy defensive walls, occupied seasonally. As Bernard Deacon wrote: “Arthur may be ephemeral but Tintagel in the fifth and sixth centuries most certainly wasn’t.”

Remains of a large bank and ditch across the neck of the peninsula were built, probably, as a symbolic boundary marker to partition the sacred or elite royal zone from the mainland, rather than as a defensible military wall. Richard, Earl of Cornwall, the younger brother of King Henry III and one of the wealthiest men in Europe, built a castle on the site in the 1230s as a piece of theatrical propaganda to capitalise on the Arthur myth, but it was a medieval folly not a fortress.

This excavation is not the only example of a site where the local facts fail to back up the notion of a complete Anglo-Saxon takeover. Cumbria was also long said to have been the victim of a similar racial wipeout followed by a takeover by the Anglo-Saxon Northumbrian kingdom. But in fact, the accumulating evidence indicates it continued as a powerful, independent Celtic Kingdom for more than 500 years and was only incorporated into England by the Normans as late as 1157.

The Tintagel discovery also throws new light on the apocalyptic writings of early medieval writer Gildas. His extraordinary polemic, On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, has been interpreted by many historians as confirming the genocide theory.

The monk, who some modern scholars believe wrote within 60 miles of Tintagel in around 530 AD at the very peak of Dumnonian prosperity portrayed a horrifying nightmare. He described the Anglo-Saxon arrival as triggering a charnel house featuring “fragments of human bodies, covered with livid clots of coagulated blood, looking as if they had been squeezed together in a press.” Gildas’s hysterical jeremiad reported Celtic bodies piling up with the “miserable remnant” of the population hunted in the mountains, butchered in great numbers or forced to flee across the sea “with loud lamentations.”

But Gildas was delivering a tirade against what he saw as lazy, corrupt and greedy sixth century British kings and clergy who had failed to act with sufficient vigour against the Pagan Anglo-Saxon incursion. The cleric claimed God had summoned the Germanic onslaught to punish their sins. He was sermonising, not writing a factual, journalistic report. In fact, Gildas’s text can be read as a backhanded proof that Dumnonia was indeed prosperous, something Gildas saw not as a good thing, but as a spiritual trap.

Instead of this ghastly vision of ethnic cleansing, the emerging archaeological evidence shows Dumnonia was extremely wealthy, highly organised, robustly alive and its elite were drinking wine from the Eastern Roman Empire, eating olives imported from North Africa, and using fine glassware from France.

The Celtic kings of the south west weren’t just surviving; they were thriving at the top of the social ladder. They held a monopoly over the distribution of luxury goods. This meant that if a rival chieftain in Wales or Ireland wanted Byzantine wine or prestigious red-slip dining ware, they had to go through the rulers of Tintagel to get it.

This control of the luxury economy made Dumnonia economically and politically very strong. They fielded a highly equipped, wealthy, and fiercely loyal warrior elite, transforming the south west peninsula into an impenetrable Celtic redoubt. While the rest of England was rapidly overrun and conquered by successive waves of Anglo-Saxon invaders in the 5th and 6th centuries, the Kingdom of Dumnonia held its ground.

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File 12 in a continuing series. PARKER. New readers can start with File 1 here

When Elizabeth I appointed Matthew Parker as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1559, she tasked him with defending the fledgling Church of England against Roman Catholic accusations of illegitimacy. To substantiate the pretence that a Pope-free English church existed long before the Reformation, Parker salvaged early medieval manuscripts written in many Germanic dialects, aggressively doctored them and published them using a single archaic-looking typeface. He created the optical illusion that there had been a unified, ancient “English” language. Academics have been held hostage by his falsehoods ever since.

A spectre is haunting the universities: the spectre of England.

A tight, elite circle of medievalists and Anglo-Saxon specialists is in on it. All the powers of institutions like Oxford, Cambridge, York, Durham, and the University of London know that using the terms “English” or “England” to refer to places or events before 927 AD is a lie.

Yet they continue plastering the covers of the books they write about Alfred the Great’s kingdom, its language and people with the wildly inappropriate name, England.

They know perfectly well that the name “England” is exactly the wrong way to describe 9th Century Wessex.

It is not simply an innocent slip of the pen. Claiming that the language the people spoke and wrote then was “English” is an act of institutional bad faith.

Modern academics are quite aware that using the terms “English” and “England”to refer to Wessex before King Æthelstan actually created England in 927 is not just ignorance, it is a choice.

But why would hundreds of the most expensively-trained scholars Britain has ever produced perpetrate such an outrageous intellectual imposture? Well, they do not do this out of lack of knowledge, education, or awareness.

This deception has become routine in the academic world because of the inertia of university departments, the financial demands of academic publishing, and the lingering impact of Reformation-era propaganda on Britain’s intellectual life.

Modern scholars operate in full awareness that England did not exist in the eighth or ninth century. Yet, bound by the desire to boost book sales, win Government funding, climb the greasy academic pole and a profound reluctance to challenge the popular image of Alfred as the first King of England, founder of the Royal Navy, and under-dog who saved civilisation from the Vikings, the academic establishment actively chooses to maintain the fiction.

Modern academics know that Alfred the Great never tried to create England, never dreamed of England and never used the word England. Neither of the terms “England” or “English” appeared in written records until the late 10th or early 11th century, long after Alfred was dead and buried.

Yes, the Old English term “Engla land” or “Engla londe” did appear 10 years after he died. It popped up in the translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People from Latin into Old English. But these terms literally translate to the “Land of the Angles”, not, England.

The clearest single example of how academics use the term England in a totally anachronistic way is paradoxically provided by one of the leading Anglo-Saxon scholars of her generation.

In her seminal 1996 paper The Making of Anglecynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest, published in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, the brilliant scholar Sarah Foot, one of only 70 Regius Professors in the UK, the most prestigious academic rank that exists, does something remarkable and strangely contradictory.

First of all, she rigorously demonstrates that Anglecynn was an ideological label invented by Alfred’s scriptorium to rebrand Wessex’s disparate Germanic inhabitants, Angles, Jutes and Saxons, as “Christians” in order to contrast them with the “Pagan” invading Danes.

She correctly says the label was a piece of political propaganda and it was not designed to describe a geographical, ethnic or national group. Anglecynn, she stressed: “does not prefigure any sense of political unity among the Anglo-Saxons before the late ninth century”.

But then, having correctly stated the facts she completely switches around and speculates, without evidence, that, “Through his promotion of the word Anglecynn to reflect the common identity of his people…King Alfred might be credited with the invention of the English as a political community.”

So, moments after arguing that Anglecynn was a religious label used to rebrand Wessex’s multi-cultural hotchpotch of peoples as Christians she slides into translating Anglecynn as “English”, suggesting its creation represents the birth of “the English” people as a national and geographic identity. She accurately points out the teleological trap of interpreting the past through the lens of the present and simultaneously flings herself into it. Because England emerged 42 years after Alfred died, he must have been trying to create England, she seems to be saying.

Professor Foot achieves the transition in her paper so smoothly most readers do not notice it. They expect England to appear in any discussion of Alfred.

This perversity, the persistent use of the words England and English when they mean Wessex and Old English, cannot be written off as carelessness. Senior scholars writing peer-reviewed papers are not doing this as part of a conspiracy or out of stupidity, but through conscious policy.

So, you may ask, what is wrong with projecting today’s concept of England back into the past? After all, doesn’t it just make it easier for the general reader to understand how England emerged? Well, no. Using inaccurate, unhistorical terms misrepresents how our nation actually came to be. It strips away the complexity and hard-fought nature of the political realities that lie behind the story.

It falls into the trap of the fallacious Whig theory of history. The Whig approach, which developed in the seventeenth century, evaluates the past through the lens of the present. It portrays history as a triumphant, inevitable march away from absolutist monarchy and tyranny toward liberty, Parliament, and Enlightenment and suggests no other outcome was possible.

“England”, the Whig theory advocates insist, could not be a messy accident, as indeed it was, born out of a four-way tussle between Anglo-Saxon Wessex, the Irish Vikings, the Celtic Kingdoms and the fractured remains of Northumbria in 927. England had to be inevitable, an ancient, slumbering giant destined from the dawn of time to rule.

To understand why this matters, you need to grasp what Anglecynn and Englisc actually meant to Alfred and his contemporaries. These concepts refer to something entirely different from what modern historians project onto them.

Patrick Wormald, one of the greatest authorities on Anglo-Saxon law and society, traces the true story with characteristic rigour.

He points out that it was the 8th Century historian, Bede, who first argued that all the Germanic peoples who had come to Britain after the Romans left, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes shared a single, unified identity before God. Bede called this identity the “Gens Anglorum” in Latin, which literally translates to “the tribe or kin of the Angles.” Gens Anglorum is an ethno-religious identity, a sense of belonging based on a shared heritage, ancestry, and culture, combined with a specific religious affiliation. Bede saw the label as separate from and transcending the shifting borders of regional kingdoms.

About 150 years later, Alfred took up Bede’s concept of the Gens Anglorum and rendered it in the Wessex vernacular as the “Anglecynn,” which literally translates to “the tribe or kin of the Angles.”

But again, as Wormald explained, Alfred’s concept of the Anglecynn did not refer to a national or geographical identity like “the Men of Ireland”. It was a religious label: “It was what each Anglo-Saxon was called in heaven” Wormald stressed. Alfred did not want to tie Anglecynn to Wessex’s borders because he aspired to be the leader of all the Germanic kingdoms in Britain that were not under Danish rule, including Mercia. He needed to convince people from different regions to fight and die for each other.

As part of his major project to reintroduce literacy to the Wessex elite and enforce doctrinal conformity, Alfred translated, in fact heavily re-wrote, six key books “necessary for all men to know” from Latin into what he called “Englisc”. Many leading figures in the imperialistic cultural campaign known as the Cult of Alfred have pounced on this word Englisc and translated it as, you guessed it, English.

Of course, Englisc is not English. Englisc was the vernacular language of Wessex, a Germanic language closely resembling modern German or Icelandic, that conveyed meaning through a complex system of word endings. Englisc differs a lot from modern English, not least in having three genders — masculine, feminine, and neuter. Englisc was spoken between approximately 450 to 1150 AD. Modern universities, academic societies, lexicographers, and research institutions now call Englisc “Anglo-Saxon” or “Old English”.

Modern English is entirely different. It started in the late 15th Century. It depends on a fixed word order and gets its vocabulary predominantly from French, Latin and Old Norse. Roughly 85% of all Anglo-Saxon words have fallen out of use.

Alfred first mentioned the concept of the Anglecynn in the Prose Preface to his translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care. In doing so, he was making a religious and political argument about the community of Christian people who spoke the vernacular tongue, not defining a sovereign political territory.

“Englisc” was an adjective derived from Engle, the Angles. When Alfred used the term in his prose translations, he used it to refer to the vernacular language as opposed to Latin, Leden. He was making a linguistic distinction, not a nationalist one. It was a conceptual, religious and political strategy, not a geopolitical description.

When Alfred laments in the preface to the Pastoral Care that few people south of the Humber could translate Latin into Englisc, he is trying to revive literacy among his administrative elite. He is not declaring pan-British sovereignty. He is describing a practical problem of clerical competence in a specific region of a specific kingdom.

For an early medieval reader, speaking Englisc did not mean you owed political allegiance to a single king. Both Mercians and West Saxons spoke variants of Englisc. Yet they would kill each other over border disputes. The language was shared, but the political allegiance was not. As historian Marc Morris wrote in his 2021 book The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, speaking Englisc no more made you a citizen of England than speaking English today makes a Jamaican a citizen of Canada. It was a linguistic tool, not a geopolitical boundary.

According to the Judith McClure and Roger Collins translation of his Ecclesiastical History, published in 731, Bede, writing in Latin, noted that Britain had five languages: Englisc, British (Welsh), Irish, Pictish, and Latin. When this passage was translated into the vernacular Englisc under Alfred’s watch, Englisc was understood as a lingua franca for a fractured group of tribes, not a national identity. Translating Englisc as English makes modern readers think of a people and a state. To Alfred, it was simply the tool to understand God’s word without needing to know Latin.

In his foundational essay “King Alfred and the Mercians”, Simon Keynes made clear Alfred was not trying to build an England. In fact, he went to great lengths to respect and maintain the distinct identities and administrative structures between Wessex and Mercia. This allowed the Mercian nobility to feel they were part of a cooperative alliance against the Danes under West Saxon leadership, rather than subjects of a foreign conquest.

Contemporary charters, coins, and texts show that for the first decade of his reign Alfred styled himself Rex Westsaxonum (”King of the West Saxons”) or Rex Saxonum (”King of the Saxons”). Even when he established over-lordship over English Mercia in the 880s, his title evolved into Rex Angulsaxonum (”King of the Anglo-Saxons”), a compound title deliberately formed to acknowledge the union of separate groups. He never called himself Rex Anglorum (”King of the English”) or “King of England.”

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File 11 in a continuing series. CEOLWULF. New readers can start with File 1 here

The discovery of the Watlington Hoard in 2015 shattered eleven centuries of Alfred the Great’s propaganda. Coins featuring a “Two Emperors” design revealed that Alfred and Ceolwulf II fought as equal, powerful allies, pooling their resources against the Great Heathen Army. But when the Danes eventually fractured Mercia around 879 and Ceolwulf vanished, Alfred wiped all trace of his partner’s achievements from historical records, besmirched him as a traitor, smoothly absorbed western Mercia into Wessex and framed himself as the sole saviour of the Anglo-Saxons.

It was one of the most extraordinarily destructive early medieval smears.

A major political and military figure, who it has only recently emerged fought heroically for five years against the Vikings, was denounced by his former ally Alfred the Great as a traitor.

Alfred airbrushed him, Stalin-style, out of history and wiped his true role from the record without leaving a trace.

The man Alfred expunged from the historical files was Ceolwulf II, the last king of independent Mercia. According to Alfred’s news outlets, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the writings of his adoring biographer Bishop Asser, the story is very simple.

In Dorothy Whitelock’s translation of the Chronicle annal for 874, Ceolwulf is described as “a foolish king’s thane”. He is presented as a puppet of the Vikings and a traitor to his fellow Anglo-Saxons.

Alfred, by contrast, is portrayed as the divinely-ordained leader who organised the resistance that eventually defeated the Norse marauders.

This image of Alfred as the solo saviour of the Anglo-Saxons, propagated by the scriptorium attached to his travelling court, is a major reason why the name of Alfred the Great has resounded so loudly down the centuries.

The story of Ceolwulf’s alleged betrayal, framing him as a wicked bit-part player, remained unchallenged for more than a thousand years.

That is, until a metal detectorist called James Mather, in an Oxfordshire field in 2015, discovered what became known as the Watlington Hoard.

As Naylor and Standley relate in their analysis, James unearthed a cache of Anglo-Saxon arm bracelets, ingots and a dozen silver coins. Each coin was stamped on one side with the image of two kings dressed as Roman emperors, sitting facing each other.

Such coins were usually struck only during co-reigns, dual monarchies or to signal formal political alliances. Several were minted with Alfred’s name, others with Ceolwulf’s, but apart from that they were identical and scientists established they were issued at the same time from the same mint in London.

This discovery suggests the story put about by Alfred’s scribes was, at the very least, misleading. According to Naylor and Standley, the joint coinage indicates the two kings’ relationship clearly extended to “mutual military aid.”

The evidence from the Two Emperors coins is that there was a coalition in war between Mercia and Wessex, quite contrary to the impression Alfred’s propaganda had created for eleven centuries.

The unearthing of the hoard has triggered a fundamental reassessment of how the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other documents produced by Alfred’s scriptorium should be interpreted.

Many of the most senior scholars, such as the noted medievalist Dorothy Whitelock, had for decades promoted the view of Alfred as verdicus, the “truth-teller”, endorsing the flattering epithet given to him by Asser.

In her lecture “The Genuine Asser” she declared that the Chronicle was not “intended as political propaganda.” The king was largely seen, until the Watlington discovery, as the Victorian historian Edward Freeman put it: “the most perfect character in history.”

The purity of the precious metal in those coins has changed all of that.

The telling of big lies is not unknown in top-level politics. The justification for the 2003 Iraq War was based on unsubstantiated claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, something the Chilcot Report later established had been deliberately exaggerated.

Hitler framed the 1933 Reichstag Fire as a Communist conspiracy to suspend civil liberties and pave the way for totalitarian rule. In 1939 the SS staged fake attacks on German border stations to justify the Nazi invasion of Poland.

The existence of the hoard is evidence that Alfred inserted a false story into his main news outlets. The coins indicate Ceolwulf was not a traitor but, for a substantial period, a close ally whom the Wessex king treated as an equal.

By turning up in an Oxfordshire field after eleven centuries, they have dealt a serious blow to the traditional portrayal of Alfred as a pious, wise and truthful leader.

Many other ambiguous incidents portrayed in the literature from Alfred’s scriptorium, over which academics were previously prepared to give the king the benefit of the doubt, are now being reassessed.

Here is Alfred’s hatchet job:

874: This year went the army [the Danes] from Lindsey to Repton, and there took up their winter-quarters, drove the king, Burgred, over sea, when he had reigned about two and twenty winters, and subdued all that land. He then went to Rome, and there remained to the end of his life…And the same year they gave Ceolwulf, a foolish king's thegn, the Mercian kingdom to hold; and he swore oaths to them, and gave hostages, that it should be ready for them on whatever day they would have it; and he would be ready with himself, and with all those that would remain with him, at the service of the army (from Dorothy Whitelock's highly regarded English Historical Documents translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for the year 874).

As Rory Naismith wrote in History Today: “A larger issue which will have to be revisited is the relationship between money and politics.”

That reassessment includes the claims Alfred put forward in his famous will of 885, that he had been made heir apparent by his brother at a meeting in Swinbeorg and that his nephews should be disinherited.

Some experts compare the erasure of Ceolwulf to Stalin’s removal of his one-time ally Trotsky from Soviet history, even though, or more likely because, Trotsky had created the Red Army which played the decisive part in destroying the Nazi war machine.

Stalin was determined not to be outshone. As Masha Gessen wrote, he systematically rewrote the record, airbrushed photographs, and of the 139 full and candidate members elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee at the 1934 party congress, 98 were arrested and shot, many after transparently fake show trials.

Stalin ordered Trotsky murdered in August 1940 by an assassin with an ice-pick in his Mexican exile.

There is no evidence Alfred had Ceolwulf liquidated. It is unknown whether he abdicated, was deposed, or died in battle. But what we do know is that Alfred took control of his lands shortly afterwards without having to fight for them.

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Victorian imperialists hijacked 9th-century King Alfred the Great for a 19th-century propaganda campaign. They rebranded him as the founder of England and the father of the British Empire. Yet Alfred was the King of Wessex. He never ruled England. He never even used the word “England”. It did not exist until his grandson Aethelstan created it 28 years after he died in 899. The Victorians claimed there was an unbroken line from his gritty Anglo-Saxon kingdom to the British Empire. They did this to make their modern conquests seem like an ancient, inevitable destiny. But that is one of the most misleading myths in all of history.

They celebrated Alfred the Great’s 1,000th birthday at 12.17 am on Friday, September 20, 1901, fifty-two years late. Someone had miscalculated the date. The guns of the Royal Field Artillery fired, cathedral bells pealed and thousands of spectators applauded.

Onlookers crammed onto rooftops and balconies and hung out of windows. At the climax a huge canvas screen fell to reveal a 17-foot bronze statue.

The sword in the king’s right hand symbolised his defeat of the heathen Vikings, as historian Joanne Parker reported. The shield in his left honoured his protection of the realm. Carved into the 40-ton granite plinth, unfortunately installed upside-down, were two simple inscriptions: “ALFRED” and “To the Founder of the Kingdom and Nation”.

Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was the keynote speaker. He boomed: “What we are really commemorating is not merely the anniversary of the death of King Alfred but the greatness of those institutions which he founded. Today is the thousandth milestone in the majestic journey of our race . . . From the greatest of English kings to the greatest of British queens, there extends an unbroken record.”

Standing alongside him, the former Liberal Prime Minister Lord Rosebery drew a direct line to the present: “Alfred had to deliver and reorganise the England of his day as our statesmen have to deliver and reorganise the Empire today.”

From the perspective of the 21st century this tableau seems all very odd, as the eminent medieval scholar Richard Abels pointed out in his authoritative 1998 work, Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England.

Alfred did “not father the ‘English nation.’” He was the “King of Wessex,” Abels noted. He never ruled England. Alfred’s sole objective was to survive “the furnace of the Viking invasions” and secure the survival of his dynasty, the scholar wrote. The emergence of England was an entirely unintended consequence 28 years after he died in 899.

The “Super King of Wessex” celebrated on Winchester Broadway was a pure invention of the “romantic and imperial age of 19th Century Britain”, Abels noted, conjured to provide “historical justification for the ‘divine destiny of the British Empire.’” It was, he added, illogical to argue that Alfred’s uncompromising, autocratic and often brutal methods were justified by what they produced, if he never intended to produce it.

As we have learned from the research presented in the previous nine Wessex Files, the Winchester ceremony was the culmination of a nationalistic political campaign. In his landmark paper “The Cult of Alfred”, Simon Keynes made clear this was a historical phenomenon where successive generations adapted his legacy to fit contemporary needs. In 1714, when the German George I took the throne, disaffected Whigs used Alfred as an emblem of the kind of monarchy they preferred.

Victorian adherents of the Alfred cult were unwittingly and retrospectively justifying a medieval coup d’état. Alfred had illicitly sidelined his brother’s heirs, Æthelhelm and Æthelwold, in favour of his own bloodline and the Victorians praised him for the England that resulted. Victorian scholar Edward A. Freeman called Alfred “history’s most perfect king” and imagined him as an almost saintly figure. Modern revisionist historians take a sharper view.

Alfred P. Smyth points to hard evidence that Alfred cemented his power through outright deception, rigged succession laws, state-sponsored propaganda and bribery to install his son Edward the Elder on the Wessex throne. Durham University professor Guy Halsall argues that the violence, bullying and centralisation of Alfred’s regime cannot be excused as necessary evils: Alfred was focused on survival, dynastic perpetuation and asserting his own legitimacy, not altruism.

The crux is Alfred’s famous will of 885, in which he claimed to have been appointed heir apparent, secundarius, by his brother King Aethelred I, in an 871 agreement at Swinbeorg. This assertion has been exposed as a lie. As the eminent historian David Dumville identified, no such post ever existed in the history of Anglo-Saxon kingship: “In Anglo-Saxon England there seems to have been no regular institution of ‘the designated heir.’” Alfred was able to get away with the claim because his account of the supposed agreement is the only one ever written down.

By means of this ruse, and a claim that he was the only man capable of beating the Vikings, Alfred moved to grasp the throne and deliberately extinguish the succession hopes of his infant nephews who had a far stronger claim under traditional Anglo-Saxon rules than either Alfred or his son Edward. Alfred persuaded the witan that with Vikings rampaging across Wessex, it was no time to put the kingdom in the hands of an infant managed by a squabbling regency because that would threaten internal faction-fighting and civil war.

Which is, of course, precisely what happened when Alfred himself died aged 50 in 899.

It was because of Alfred’s backstairs manoeuvring that his surviving nephew Æthelwold, by then 31, and deliberately denied battlefield command by Alfred, launched a bloody armed rebellion, as Ryan Lavelle relates. Æthelwold slipped across the border into the Danelaw and, through remarkable diplomacy, persuaded the Norse leaders to make him king of all the British Vikings. The resulting three-year war came within a whisker of defeating Wessex and installing him as its ruler. Only Æthelwold’s death on the cusp of victory ended the rebellion.

History is filled with phonies and fabricators who clawed their way into high office. In “Why Leaders Lie”, political scientist John J. Mearsheimer concluded it was because of “the broader public’s inability to handle truth.” He wrote that the most effective tool for those with a weak claim to leadership is “fearmongering”, motivating the public to make sacrifices to counter a threat, real or exaggerated.

Alfred’s argument to the witan used the fear strategy. He warned them that the traditional practice of electing the most privileged prince had already nearly destroyed Wessex. The 858 revolt by his elder brother Aethelbald against their father “could have been the point at which everything collapsed into civil war”, as Barbara Yorke wrote. With Christian civilisation facing Viking annihilation, Alfred demanded, wasn’t it worth dispensing with tradition to select the best fighter rather than an inexperienced child? What was needed in this dire emergency was a bastard with the capacity to succeed, not biological legitimacy. This, Yorke wrote, was enough to “frustrate the ambitions of Æthelred’s heirs” and put Alfred in the top job.

But there is a fundamental problem with the argument Alfred used. Harvard professor Arthur Isak Applbaum, in his paper “Legitimacy in a Bastard Kingdom”, argues it is impossible for a regime to be seen as fully legitimate, even as it goes superficially through the motions of apparently fair processes if the underlying system remains corrupt.

Applbaum uses Shakespeare’s Edmund from King Lear to make his point. Edmund is a bastard, but one far more capable than his legitimate rivals. Using ruthless cunning and barefaced lies he takes power by exploiting the naïveté and self-regard of his victims. Edmund shouts: “God stand up for bastards!”, effectively asking why good candidates should be excluded because of the stigma of low birth when they are often far more able than their wedlock-born competitors.

As the critic A.C. Bradley points out, Shakespeare turns the tables on Edmund. The play shows that while society’s arbitrary rules are flawed, abandoning all morality and adopting a “survival of the fittest” worldview “founds nothing” and leads to catastrophe. Applbaum’s conclusion is the same: the policy of deception is philosophically flawed, deeply immoral, and in practice dangerous.

Applbaum concedes that statesmen are not always wrong to lie. There is a legitimate category of deception for raison d’état, a lie that genuinely benefits the state. In 1943, the Allies planted falsified invasion documents on a corpse dressed as a Royal Marines officer to convince the Germans the real target was Greece, not Sicily. The deception saved thousands of lives. Janet L. Nelson argues Alfred developed an early version of this doctrine, placing dynastic and national survival above conventional morality.

But Mearshiemer draws a hard moral distinction here: there is a vast gulf between “strategic lies” that leaders tell for their country’s survival and “selfish lies” designed to protect personal interests. Alfred’s claim that his brother made him heir apparent at Swinbeorg and agreed his nephews should not succeed, cannot have been true. It was, by Mearsheimer’s definition, a selfish lie deployed to secure his bloodline and bulldoze his son onto the throne.

Modern politics provides identical examples. The Chilcot Report condemned Tony Blair’s use of bogus intelligence to persuade MPs to back the Iraq invasion. The notorious “dodgy dossier” “deliberately exaggerated” and “overstated” the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, presenting flawed intelligence with unjustified “certainty”. Blair’s retrospective defence, that Saddam Hussein was a bad man and the world was better off without him is structurally identical to Alfred’s position: the lies were justified because the Vikings were a genuine existential threat.

In May 2026, Blair extended his rear-view mirror argument further still, publishing a 5,700-word essay claiming his methods were justified by three general election victories that no other Labour leader had achieved, while demanding the party move toward Trump-style populism. His critics point out that the advantages of electoral success pale against the damage: hundreds of thousands of direct casualties in Iraq, millions displaced, and a financial cost to the United States alone estimated by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz at over three trillion dollars.

Alfred’s selfish lie produced its own disaster. Far from keeping Wessex safe, it triggered the three-year civil war that nearly handed the kingdom to the Norsemen. Had Æthelwold’s rebellion triumphed, as Pauline Stafford argued, the emergence of a unified English kingdom would have been far from inevitable; the island would more likely have remained a patchwork of rival Germanic kingdoms. As Paul Hill speculated, the Norman invasion of 1066 would also have been unlikely. Modern Britain would have been a rather different place.

The thing that misleads people is that the machine Alfred built turned out to be strong enough to survive his blunders. His successors used what remained of Alfred’s legacy after the appalling slaughter and near-catastrophe of the Aethelwold insurrection to build England. But Alfred never intended that, never foresaw it and his duplicitous handling of the Aethelwold problem nearly wrecked Wessex anyway.

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File 9 in a continuing series. AETHELWOLD. New readers can start with File 1 here

Far from being the flawless character celebrated by Victorian historians, Alfred caused immense bitterness by the way he seized the throne. He lied about being made “secondarius” by his brother – no such post existed in Anglo-Saxon kingship. He cheated his nephews, who had a better claim to the throne than he had, out of royal lands and wealth. That prevented them from buying an army, paving the way for his own son, Edward the Elder, to secure the succession. But when Alfred died, the legacy of this trickery almost destroyed the Wessex he claimed to be saving.

Within hours of Alfred the Great dying, his nephew shocked the regime by launching an armed rebellion.

Aethelwold, a 31-year-old aethling prince, declared that despite Alfred’s heroic and successful twenty-five-year struggle against the Vikings and his lifetime battle against baffling illnesses, he had always held the throne by questionable right.

As historian Ryan Lavelle makes clear, the rebel royal rose up because by traditional Germanic rules he possessed a superior direct birthright to the crown, as the son of Alfred’s predecessor and older brother.

Aethelwold argued that Alfred schemed to put his 25-year-old son Edward the Elder onto the throne against all precedent, and this was legally invalid and spurious.

He was right. As the leading modern scholar David Dumville wrote in a devastating 1979 paper, Alfred’s claim in his famous will that he had been appointed the official “heir apparent”, or secundarius, to the Wessex crown by his brother, King Aethelred I, in a private deal at Swinbeorg was a lie. No such post ever existed in Wessex law. Dumville added: “In Anglo-Saxon England there seems to have been no regular institution of ‘the designated heir’.”

Aethelwold launched his rival bid for the crown the moment he learned that Alfred had gasped his last aged 50 on October 26, 899, in the crowded, sprawling wood and stone Winchester palace complex.

The prince threw down the gauntlet after Edward sent royal signet-ring wearing horsemen out in all directions demanding an oath of loyalty from the Wessex elite so he could don the crown immediately.

Aethelwold refused to pledge allegiance and, as Lavelle writes, sped south with probably several hundred weapon-wielding retainers to stage a highly symbolic protest.

Aethlwold’s war band seized the walled royal manor of Wimborne Minister thirty miles away, along with the massively fortified burgh port of Christchurch in Dorset ten miles further on, as a potential escape route if the rising went wrong.

En route to the minster, the fugitive broke into Wimborne’s St. Cuthburga monastery. He seized one of its nuns and made her his wife. It was rumoured Aethelwold had always wanted to marry her but Alfred had blocked the union.

As a leading medieval author Marc Morris speculated she was probably “a member of a powerful family whose lands and support would prove useful in pressing his claim” for the kingship.

According to Dorothy Whitelock’s translation, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle attempted to denigrate Aethelwold’s actions. The Chronicle claimed that by occupying Wimborne Aethelwold had broken the peace. He had acted without permission. He had gone “against the will of the king and his councillors” and he had violated Church decrees. It reported that when the fugitive reached Wimborne he “barricaded all the gates against him (Edward) and said that he would either live there or die there.”

But Edward had anticipated his cousin’s likely resistance. He had mustered his Fyrd of probably over 1,000 men well in advance. Edward “rode” them to the Iron Age hill fort of Badbury Rings three miles north-west of Wimborne, astutely blocking Aethelwold’s southern path to the port.

Facing a siege he was unlikely to survive and the refusal of his own warriors to fight without a clear statement of support from the ruling witan of royal counsellors, Æthelwold abandoned his men along with the woman he had abducted.

He fled north in the dead of night over the border of the Danelaw. There, he soon achieved the astonishing feat of being made king of all the Vikings in Britain. Aethelwold successfully arranged for a military onslaught on Wessex by hard-bitten Norse commanders whose armies outnumbered Edward’s by thousands of men.

However, in only four entries, the Chronicle tells how Edward went on eventually to defeat Athelwold after a bloody three-year war.

The deceased rebel was then systematically omitted from all future Wessex royal genealogies. His status was downplayed, his bid for the throne characterised as an illegal usurpation and his brief emergence as Viking king deemed traitorous. You might easily think the insurrection was a mere blip. It was anything but. In fact, it proved that Alfred’s claims to be preserving Wessex by usurping his nephews was nonsense.

There is a bitter irony at the heart of this story. Alfred spent his entire reign manipulating the succession on the grounds that he was trying to avoid the dynastic civil war that the traditional elective system risked producing. But that was quite wrong. The three-year war that followed his death was not a failure of his system. It was its direct consequence. The instability Alfred claimed to be preventing was the instability he created.

Although the propagandists working for Alfred’s scriptorium did their level best to conceal the truth afterwards, Aethelwold’s rebellion inflicted arguably the greatest challenge to the rise of the Wessex dynasty in the whole 10th Century. It exposed Alfred’s 28-year career of will manipulation, succession-rule rewriting, rival-marginalisation, image-making, relentless propaganda and political spin as having no force in the end.

Alfred had attempted to bully, bribe and bulldoze his way past the established succession procedure, under which the witan of senior royal advisers chose the most able candidate by election. But, although the witan bent to his will and elected him king, this political manoeuvre turned out to be irrelevant to cold political reality in the longer term.

In short, Alfred did not occupy the throne legitimately and that meant his son Edward was also not the rightful successor, according to the ancient system of king selection. By rebelling, Aethelwold highlighted that fact and forced Edward to legitimise his rule in the time-honoured Anglo-Saxon way - by fighting for it.

As the renowned medieval scholar David Dumville crisply put it, the regime learned that: “in the eleventh century…the eventual arbiter in matters of succession was the sword.”

And, but for a fluke of chance, Aethelwold’s insurrection came within a whisker of succeeding. If it had, England would not exist today. It would probably have remained a patchwork of Germanic kingdoms and, logically, the Viking-origin Normans might not have invaded in 1066.

Despite the garnish of denials and obfuscation, it is still easy to read between the lines of the Wessex historical record and see Aethelwold had a perfect right to retire to Wimborne. The prince deliberately chose to relocate to the minster because, as historian Marc Morris put it, it was a powerful symbolic demonstration of his right to the throne.

The site was the ancestral stronghold of his father, King Æthelred, Alfred’s elder brother, and the Minster was where Æthelred was buried.

Aethelred had bequeathed the church and the land around it to his son, as Keynes and Lapidge wrote. Athelwold was enraged because this and other estates should have passed to him on his father’s death. But Alfred had used legal manovering to divert the land to Edward.

By launching his stand at Wimborne, as Johnathan Tickle wrote, Aethelwold emphasised his solid patrilineal status. As the legitimate local lord and he needed no “permission” to go there, despite what the Chronicle claimed.

It is clear Aethelwold’s challenge was strategically astute, initially effective and, by the standards of the time strong and legitimate. It was opportunistic of Aethelwold to launch his challenge in the interregnum before the new king Edward could consolidate his authority, secure the loyalty of the Witan royal council, and fully establish his military dominance.

But the crux of Aethelwold’s case was solid. He suspected, it now seems quite correctly, that Alfred had denied his right to Wimborne and a vast array of royal lands and resources that his father had bequeathed to him by falsifying and publicly misrepresenting a crucial power-broking deal at Swinbeorg.

Aethelwold’s father, King Aethelred I, is said to have met Alfred at Swinbeaorg, probably near Pewsey in Wiltshire, as the Vikings rampaged across Britain in the early spring of 871. The two men feared that the massive invasion by the Great Heathen Army might cut either of their lives short.

So, the serving king and Alfred allegedly agreed that whichever of them outlived the other would inherit all the personal estates and riches that their father, King Æthelwulf, had left them.

The unstated premise was that with the Vikings devastating southern England, the kingdom could not afford a child king. Alfred claimed repeatedly ever after that his brother had effectively designated him as ‘secundarius’, or the official successor to the throne over the heads of Æthelred’s two infant sons, Æthelhelm and Æthelwold. But there are real doubts about the words Alfred used to describe the agreement.

As Keynes and Lapidge note, Alfred’s word secondarius was odd. Alfred’s Welsh biographer Asser deployed this rarely-used Latin word to describe Alfred’s status as king-in-waiting in his 893 work, Life of King Alfred. Modern academics almost universally regard the Life as a masterpiece of propaganda. The word secundarius is very unusual. It crops to sparsely in certain Late Anglo-Saxon texts to denote the secular second-in-command of a cathedral. The word has nothing to do with kingship.

According to Alfred the Pact of Swinbeorg allegedly stipulated the children of the surviving brother would be guaranteed maintenance. But they would only inherit their own personal lands, not any of the far larger and hugely valuable royal estates. The nephews’ supporters insisted Aethelred would have never agreed to that.

Æthelred died a few months after the Swinbeorg pact was allegedly agreed from wounds suffered during the brutal but indecisive Battle of Meretun.

With the throne suddenly vacant in the middle of a great emergency, Alfred convinced the Witenagemot that he was the only leader capable of defending the realm. He argued against a regency and the rule of an inexperienced juvenile monarch. He argued this even though, strictly, the infants Æthelhelm and Æthelwold had a far superior dynastic claim.

While electing Alfred king gave Wessex much-needed stability to fight the Vikings, it became an immediate source of internal dynastic rifts. Supporters of the nephews began accusing Alfred of manoeuvring legally to restrict their wealth and land holdings in a way Æthelred would not have intended.

They were suspicious because only account of what was actually agreed under the Pact of Swinbeorg was written by Alfred himself in his so-called will of 885. The king drew up this document fifteen years before his death. He did so because there was so much criticism of his behaviour towards the nephews. In fact, he had to have two goes at composing the will because an earlier draft was roundly rejected by his critics. Alfred had to spend huge amounts of political capital and money in bribes to get the watered-down version approved.

Alfred composed this testament to defend his own legitimacy, his son’s right to succeed and the perpetuation of his bloodline’s control of the Wessex monarchy. The text attempts to suggest Wessex should abandon the age-old system of election of kings by the witan - which usually chose the most “throne worthy” candidate with the closest dynastic connection to the outgoing king. Instead, Alfred demanded that the witan switch to the principle of primogeniture, handing the crown directly from father to eldest son and thereby circumventing the, on paper, superior claim of Aethelwold.

His will set in concrete his decision to severely restrict the amount, value and quality of the lands and wealth his nephews were allowed to inherit from their father.

All of this was Alfred’s attempt to establish a new convention. Instead of the witan choosing the royal aetheling with the best dynastic claim, they should rigidly hand the job to the outgoing king’s son. The unavoidable conclusion is that Alfred was deliberately manoeuvring to curb the value of the inheritances and power bequeathed to the nephews so as to deprive them of the wealth they would need to pursue their legitimate claim for the succession.

As we shall see, modern scholars are extremely sceptical about the legality and veracity of Alfred’s will and his crucial claim that Swinbeorg deal made him the official heir apparent to the throne of Wessex.

For example, historian Ryan Lavelle points out in his book “The Politics of Rebellion” that Alfred seemed extremely vulnerable to accusations that he had come to power illegitimately: “As Asser points out (no less than three times), Alfred had agreed with Æthelred to become, and was recognised as, ‘secundarius’, a term previously unused for Anglo-Saxon succession which may be translated as ‘heir apparent’, before the latter’s death in 871.”

This repetition of the point by Asser “ reflects sensitivity on the subject of Alfred’s succession,” Lavelle suggested.

The pre-eminent Alfredian scholar, Richard Abels, conceded that at the time the witan chose Alfred as king, the nephews were too young to rule and few would have challenged the decision in the middle of the Viking onslaught.

Abels wrote that “given the military crisis facing the kingdom Alfred’s succession was probably not contested by his young nephews or their supporters” in 871 because the boys “were much too young to provide military leadership.”

He adds that Asser insisted that Alfred “took over the government of the whole kingdom as soon as his brother had died, with the approval of divine will and according to the unanimous wish of all the inhabitants of the kingdom”.

Contemporary charters do indeed confirm Alfred enjoyed the support of his dead brother’s outgoing witan, Abels notes.

But Abels suggests Alfred’s court remained highly nervous over whether this official line would hold. This became especially acute because Alfred encouraged Asser to exaggerate how enthusiastic the elite were about Alfred’s crowning. Abels notes: “Asser goes further, insisting upon Alfred’s unanimous popularity as well as the workings of divine providence.”

This, Abels notes, went well over the top and it made it look as though Alfred was engaging in sharp practice: “The reader may be excused for thinking that he doth protest too much.” Abels’ remark echoes the dry observation made by Gertrude in Shakespeare’s Hamlet “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”. Gertrude says this while watching a play-within-a-play, in response to a character who is over-theatrically vowing never to remarry.

The renowned early medieval historian David Dumville delivered possibly the most damaging modern blow to the Alfredian claims of legitimacy. In his seminal 1979 study of “The Aethling” Dumville points out: “In Anglo-Saxon England there seems to have been no regular institution of ‘the designated heir’.”

Dumville added: “though the reigning king would doubtless make every effort to ensure that his preferred candidate succeeded…it must be emphasised…the eventual arbiter in matters of succession was the sword.”

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File 7 in a continuing series. ASSER. New readers can start with File 1 here

Alfred’s masterstroke was to hire the Welsh cleric Asser as his propagandist. Despite reorganizing his defences, Alfred lacked enough troops to defeat the Vikings and needed Welsh allies – but the Welsh hated Wessex’s arrogance. So, Asser orchestrated a brilliant PR campaign by writing The Life of King Alfred. Dropping traditional Anglo-Saxon boastfulness, he reframed Alfred as a humble, physically suffering, and deeply pious underdog holding the line against pagan chaos, strongly mirroring the mythical archetype of King Arthur.

It is one of the most poignant and powerful legends in early medieval literature.

In chapter 56 of the chaotic 9th-century historical compilation traditionally attributed to a Welsh monk named Nennius, there appears the shimmering vision of the legendary King Arthur.

He is bearing armour emblazoned with a picture of Christ’s mother as he storms into his famous eighth battle at Guinnion fort.

The medievalist Dr. Oliver J. Padel translates the key passage from the Historia Brittonum like this: “Arthur carried the image of the holy Mary, the everlasting virgin, on his shield, and the heathen were put to flight on that day, and there was a great slaughter upon them, through the power of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the holy Virgin Mary, his mother.”

In the early Middle Ages, this enduring visual symbol of sovereignty and resistance epitomised the fierce, undying spirit of a people who refused to be conquered. It emblematically fused the martial prowess of the native Celtic British with the certainty of absolute divine protection. The image framed Arthur not merely as a warlord, but as a defender of a devout, faithful, imperilled people.

As Keynes and Lapidge make clear, this was the paradigm the beleaguered Alfred the Great of Wessex desperately needed to get his hands on. He needed it to attract allies from outside his own tribe from across ethnic lines. He wanted it to unify his fractured realm. He had to have it to get enough troops together and have a hope of defeating the Vikings posing an existential threat to his kingdom.

Alfred had realised that the revolution he had wrought in Anglo-Saxon military policy alone was not going to be enough to save Wessex from annihilation by the Danes. As Abels argues, survival and true stability also required a deep-level psychological campaign to unite not just his own newly rebranded Anglecynn nation, but all the disparate anti-Viking forces as well, in order to build a big enough army.

The solution he came up with was to harness those elements of divine symbolism that the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons shared - and focus them all on himself. Then Alfred needed to couple that with concrete, rational state-building. Nobody could be forced to unite with the Wessex regime. They needed to be attracted, then persuaded.

Unfortunately, some of the most powerful iconic imagery he needed to pull this off was out of reach. As Bromwich writes, the “early Celtic mythological substratum”, suffused with an ancient longing for a sacred king’s leadership that later became associated with the figure of Arthur was the possession of his erstwhile enemies, the Welsh.

But gradually, by the mid 800s, as Keynes and Lapidge show, the Welsh under their native ruler, King Rhodri the Great, realised they could not succeed alone against the frightening Norse onslaught without help from Alfred.

A major Danish army had overwintered in the Severn Valley, and it was making brutal forays into the Welsh hinterland. The South Wales elite was also facing intense pressure from northern Welsh rulers who allied with the Vikings. That pincer movement spelled doom for the Welsh if they did not reach out to Wessex.

They very reluctantly and warily accepted Alfred’s overlordship for protection against the highly destructive Viking raids.

The parallel with Gordon Brown’s greatest political masterstroke is closer than it might appear. He daringly created a synthesis between seemingly diametric opposites: Thatcher’s neo-conservatism and Labour’s social democracy. When this was unveiled under the banner “New Labour” in October 1994, his party had been out of office for 18 years and its chances of returning to power had appeared utterly remote.

But by absorbing the strongest elements of his opponent’s position and rebranding them with just enough modification, Brown produced a hybrid both sides could live with. Alfred and Asser did something structurally identical, and the stakes were considerably higher.

The rapprochement between Wessex and Wales that followed not only handed Alfred a vast expansion to his military forces and a strategic foothold in Welsh territory. It also gave him an opportunity to pull off one of the most daring acts of ideological appropriation that occurred in the early medieval period, a move that still has resonances in today’s Britain.

Alfred set out to exploit the fact that both Wales and Wessex shared a deep romanticised longing for ideal leadership by a “perfect” king, as Abels points out. Both cultures expected their leaders to be brave, physically capable warriors who led from the front – but they differed in fundamental ways.

As J.M. Wallace-Hadrill wrote, Anglo-Saxon monarchs such as the Wessex dynasty were seen as “sacral” kings. They were anointed, semi-divine political-religious figures in a highly moralised system. The Anglo-Saxons prioritised rigid hereditary succession passed directly to royal sons by primogeniture. Their kings were “often associated with Woden”, Wallace-Hadrill adds. They were viewed as divine mediators responsible for both the spiritual salvation and the physical flourishing of the people. Wallace-Hadrill notes an Anglo-Saxon king was: “ ‘chosen’ by his armed followers in the sense that they would never follow a man they mistrusted.”

By contrast, British-Welsh-Celtic Arthurian “secular” style of kingship was much more flexible. It was based on a war-band model. A king’s grip on power depended on being successful in battle. Their kings were elected by their followers as first-among-equals figures. They secured their power over their decentralised fighting forces through face-to-face alliances and generous, reciprocal gift-giving. A Celtic king was the embodiment of the Law of the Country to which even the monarch was subservient. Land and titles were divided among all eligible sons, a share out that regularly fractured unified Celtic kingdoms. Members of a Celtic war band were “bound by oaths to its leader, whom to survive in battle was deepest dishonour!”, he wrote.

With enormous ambition, King Alfred the Great set out to embody both these hallowed traditions of leadership.

He strove to personally combine the Anglo-Saxon sacral, clerical and anointed, martial, Anglo-Saxon warlord with the Celtic secular, warrior, scholarly, law-and-gift giving Christian king model.

Alfred envisaged ending up being a divinely ordained, literate, and scholarly leader who governed for the common good, rather than just a warlord.

The opportunity Alfred spotted to achieve this hybrid status was not to crudely assume the mantle of Arthur himself. That would have been implausible. But he thought he could absorb the deep, underlying ancient Welsh archetype from which the idea of Arthur sprang. Alfred knew the Arthurian concept had enormous power over early medieval Celtic minds. Harnessing it could help him position himself as the ultimate protector of the whole island’s Christian heritage.

Alfred’s appropriation of his opponents’ intellectual and spiritual clothing changed Wessex and, ultimately, the world. It laid the ideological groundwork for his descendants, like Athelstan, to smash the Norse invaders, grab their territory in the Danelaw, hasten the extirpation of paganism from Britain, and compete the unification of England only 42 years later.

It happened in this way: in 885 AD Alfred recruited Asser, a Welsh cleric who worked within the same British Latin scholarly tradition as Nennius, to perform the brilliant hi-jack.

The main mechanism for this technology transfer was his 20,000-word essential, deeply revealing, yet heavily flawed historical document called the “Life of King Alfred”, one of the earliest royal biographies. It details King Alfred’s genealogy, his childhood, his pivotal military victories against Viking invaders, and his efforts to promote education and religious reform.

Asser was an intellectual who used, as Alfred P Smyth put it, the same “quarry” of materials as Nennius: origin legends. Asser used the same complex formula for calculating of the date of Easter. He was also well versed in the same pseudo-histories, genealogies, and the foundational writings of Gildas and Bede. Both Nennius and Asser were fascinated by the ancient history of Britain as a land defined by divinely ordained shifts in power. Using this text, Asser actively purloined British-Celtic historical traditions and integrated them into Anglo-Saxon Wessex’s dynastic propaganda.

Nennius’ Historia is a foundational document of Britain’s history partly because it contains the earliest notable listing of Arthur’s battles. They frame Arthur as a dux bellorum, a war leader close to the Kings of Strathclyde who were based at a fortress on Dumbarton Rock. To the Welsh of that time, Arthur was a real, historical ancestral hero. In their minds, he unified his people against a foreign, pagan invader. This was exactly the persona Alfred wished to adopt.

Ninth Century Welsh scholars were convinced Arthur was a genuine flesh-and-blood warrior. They were sure he had valiantly defended Britain in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. This Arthur operated primarily in the Hen Ogledd, the “Old North”. This area encompassed Northern England, the Scottish Lowlands, Cumbria, and parts of Yorkshire.

They did not view him as mythical. As the Historia and the 10^th century Annales Cambriae both make his reality clear by providing specific dates for his activities. (The epic, magical King Arthur of Camelot, complete with Excalibur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table, is primarily the invention of Geoffrey of Monmouth more than two centuries after Alfred’s death.)

Therefore, it would have made no sense for Alfred the Great to claim he “was” Arthur in any sense. Doing that never crossed his mind. As an Anglo-Saxon king, that would have meant him posing as the enemy who fought his own Germanic ancestors. Elevating the warrior who is supposed to have fought and defeated the Saxons was not on Alfred’s political agenda. Alfred could not have adopted the persona of Arthur without undermining his own people’s heritage and legitimacy. His aides ignored and avoided mentioning King Arthur.

But, under Asser’s extremely sophisticated propaganda framework, his court adopted, at times, almost identical rhetoric to the terms used by the Welsh around their saviour-king.

For example, according to Keynes and Lapidge’s translation of the Life, Asser describes Alfred a “warlike beyond measure and victorious in almost all battles.” This is reminiscent of Nennius’ description of Arthur in Latin as “In omnibus autem bellis victor exstitit” or “victorious in all his campaigns.”

Alfred commissioned Asser to write the Life as a propaganda exercise. It was designed to seduce the Welsh by familiarising them with his character, or a palatable version of it. The aim was to reassure them that Alfred’s growing political dominance in South Wales was a positive, stabilising force. As R.H.C. Davis’s seminal paper on Alfred’s propaganda points out: what gives away the fact that the Life was principally aimed at Wales is how Asser frequently includes both English and Welsh-British names for places, such as calling Nottingham Tig Guocobauc.

Asser draws a stark line between the opposing sides. He portrays his boss as a divinely appointed, messianic defender of Britain. He claims Alfred encompasses both Saxons and native Britons. Asser framed Alfred as the leader of both the Anglo-Saxon and Welsh Christian regimes, battling with “wisdom” and the support of God against the “pagan” Vikings.

The version of Alfred that Asser puts forward is subtle. He portrays the Wessex king as combining the common qualities of the ideal Christian monarch that both the British Celts and the Anglo-Saxons wanted. By conjuring up an image of Alfredian as Arthur-like in many respects, he deliberately tugged at Welsh emotions. That helped nudge them towards the desired Anglo-Saxon-Celtic coalition. Thus, Alfred was able to absorb Wales’ armies without which the Wessex king had no hope of beating the Danes.

As Richard Abels makes clear, Asser’s background made him uniquely qualified for the role of creating this synthesis of two apparently hostile visions. Asser understood intimately from direct experience - as a cleric from the monastery in the western wilds of St Davids - what the grievances of Celtic-Welsh leaders were. The Welsh elite resented Alfred’s swingeing taxation and high-handed methods. Asser knew what Alfred’s faults were and, rather than covering them up, he knew how to turn them to advantage.

Here’s how he did it…

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File 6 in a continuing series. ATHELNEY. New readers can start with File 1 here

“Him the Almighty Pow’r / Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky.- Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 44–49

Alfred’s dramatic exile at Athelney and his subsequent victory at Edington in 878 were masterfully engineered by his scriptorium and his propagandist, Asser, to read like a divine resurrection. The Wessex king used the desertion of his nobles as an excuse to dismantle the old, decentralised defence system controlled by aristocrats and seize absolute royal control. He instituted compulsory army service, built 33 fortified towns known as burghs, linked taxes to elite landholdings and launched a vernacular literacy programme enforcing strict ideological conformity.

Suddenly, Alfred is the king of nothing.

Outwitted by the Viking leader Guthrum, Alfred lets his guard down and sends his army away for the holidays.

The Norse king, practising his “usual treachery”, as Alfred’s biographer Asser puts it, exploits Alfred’s strategic naivety. “Paying no heed” to the oaths he pledged and the lives of the hostages he handed over to guarantee the ceasefire; the Scandinavian chieftain breaks his word not to attack in winter.

Emerging silently out of the snowbound darkness and bitter cold of January in 878 AD, the Viking warrior horde surrounds Alfred’s lightly-defended manor on the royal estate at Chippenham.

“By strength of arms” it traps Alfred and his closest courtiers and sends them scattering in panic from their chaotic, topsy-turvy Twelfth Night merrymaking.

Alfred with his small band of nobles, soldiers and thegns is forced to retreat into the dismal waste of the “woody and marshy places” of Somerset. There, condemned indefinitely to a lead a “restless life”, Asser reports, the fugitive king is plunged into a spiritual trial, like Christ, “pierced with many nails of tribulation”.

Asser claims the famished Alfred “had nothing to live on” except what he could “forage by frequent raids”. He is forced to steal food “secretly or even openly” from his own people - the very ones Alfred had pledged to protect but who had now submitted to the “authority” of the Vikings, power that so recently Alfred used to wield.

Alfred is “in great distress” according to Keynes and Lapidge’s translation of Asser’s Life of Alfred, facing humiliation as Britain’s last remaining Christian Saxon realm teeters on the brink of extinction. Stripped of military leadership and denuded of the golden gifts required to maintain the brittle loyalty of his few remaining thegns, Alfred’s death at the hands of the Great Heathen Army seems imminent.

Yet, as Professor Robert Bartlett points out, the technique of building “suspense” by emphasising the dire peril of a religious hero to heighten the miraculous nature of their survival or victory was a fundamental literary trope in early medieval ecclesiastical manuscripts.

That was particularly true of saints’ lives and collections such as the Miracles of Saint Swithun compiled in the Wessex capital, Winchester, during the late 10th century.

Asser’s famous biography of Alfred, in which the dramatic scenes of discouragement and self-reproach appear, has often been deprecated as an excessively admiring or fawning “saint’s life”. Its hagiographic tone is not surprising since it was an in-house job. It is widely believed by academics that Alfred directly commissioned Asser to write it and that it was part of the Alfredian public relations plan, not an objective outsiders’ view.

Alfred P Smyth alleged Asser’s Life of Alfred was a forgery filled with legendary fabrications and anachronistic information that a Welsh cleric could not have known in 893 AD, all concocted to serve the political needs of later medieval kings.

But most modern scholars now reject this. The emerging consensus is that the text is genuine and, indeed, one of the most precious accounts of a real king written in the early Medieval period.

Many scholars currently see Asser’s work as a remarkably subtle, lifelike and surreptitiously critical portrait written by someone who knew Alfred personally, a familiarity that enabled him to describe the king’s character, habits, physical appearance and flaws.

Yes, historian Dr Robert Gallagher does complain that Asser’s work is an awkward and convoluted text with weak syntax, stylistic pretensions, and that its author makes an overly conscious effort to adopt a high, “scholarly” Latin and a turgid, bombastic manner.

But others, such as the prominent Latinist David Howlett, while declining to call the Life a polished literary masterpiece, judges it a highly sophisticated, meticulously crafted, and “clever” narrative with a level of design not immediately obvious to a casual reader, making the text a “rhetorical gem”.

Yet, for all its humanity and seeming psychological insight, some specialists still regard the Life as deeply strange. This is not just because the narrative stops abruptly and mysteriously without explanation six years before Alfred’s death.

The problem is much bigger: Asser’s work lacks almost all the celebrated elements that made Alfred famous throughout English history. There are no burning cakes, no swineherd’s hovel, no visit to the enemy camp disguised as a harpist, no sharing his last loaf with a poor pilgrim and, above all, rather than presenting us with a bold warrior, Asser paints a portrait of a king who is obsessed with intense religiosity, troubled by baffling illnesses, feelings of inadequacy, egotism and sanctimony.

A kernel of reality does seem to peep through Asser’s text, however. The Welsh cleric is too good a writer and has too much empathy with his subject not to include telling human detail. The chronic illness passages, especially, are usually cited by academics as the most authentically observed details in the Life and they seem too specific and too unflattering to be pure invention. However, even this apparent frankness about Alfred’s weaknesses - his suffering - cannot be take at face value either. Asser is a supremely intelligent and cunning writer.

It may very well be that Alfred had Crohn’s disease as Dr D G Craig argued in a famous paper called “Alfred the Great: the Diagnosis”. But Asser seems to have used the notion of righteous invalid to associate Alfred’s trials with biblical narratives such as Job or David. Few of the elite would miss the implication of this - Alfred is like Job, Asser implies, because he maintains his integrity and faith in God despite experiencing extreme, undeserved loss, pain, and confusion.

Asser therefore is admitting that, like Job, Alfred is not perfect, but he remains faithful and refuses to “curse God and die” as Job’s wife suggested her husband should. Alfred sticks faithfully to his duties even while wrestling with God and questioning why the Almighty has rained so many difficulties on his head.

Subliminally this narrative strategy simultaneously exploits an old cultural memory of another “suffering defender”, King Arthur. Asser, acting as a willing agent of Alfred’s propaganda strategy, thereby helps to create the image of a moralising monarchy, distinguishing Alfred from his rivals. In this way Asser implicitly seeks to justify Alfred’s policies - heavy taxation and the extraordinary demands he made on all Wessex subjects in building and maintaining the system of fortified towns. We will explore further how and why Alfred appropriated the Arthur myth in the next Wessex File.

Asser’s account reveals him as an admirer of Alfred, a willing collaborator in the king’s enterprise, but a critical friend. Early medieval clerical texts functioned primarily as tools of persuasion, authority, and memory, rather than objective reports. Like all other chroniclers of the period, Asser’s task was explicitly not to tell the literal truth, but the truth that the Alfred regime needed people to know.

To expect Asser to have done otherwise is to impose anachronistic 21^st Century journalistic standards on him. As Ian Watt points out, the convention that literary texts, and specifically prose, should tell the literal truth and report on “actual” life only began in the early-to-mid-18th century.

The famous folkloric stories that made Alfred world famous, presenting him as “the most perfect character in history”, as the 19th-century English historian Edward Augustus Freeman put it, did not begin appearing in written form until about 100 years after Asser wrote “De vita et gestis Alfredi” in 893 and Alfred’s death in 899. These stories served as a form of cultural, and in some cases political, propaganda that perpetuated the myth of a perfect, wise ruler, moving beyond the historical, military-focused king as part of a continuing effort by the Alfred’s successors to use his myth to maintain political consent for their growing power.

The cakes episode is one of many legends involving kings and that life-giving commodity, bread, that can be found in traditional stories from Italy to ancient Egypt, as Burcu Gunay makes clear.

The famous scene of the burning cakes only appeared in the 12^th century in the Life of St Neot. It was quite likely to have been borrowed from Scandinavian legend by an anonymous cleric who was aligned with the regime. It is designed to show Alfred’s humility and his willingness to accept the blame when he is wrong. It was written perhaps to validate the growing dominance of the Wessex dynasty and reinforce morale and loyalty at a time when power of the emerging English state was becoming immense in the century after Alfred’s death.

It is no coincidence that Alfred is associated with bread. The Old English word for lord is hlāfweard, bread-giver. This refers to the fundamental Germanic concept that it is the duty of a lord to ensure the survival, sustenance, and security of his followers.

The author is thereby linking Alfred to Jesus’ articulation of a fundamental metaphor of Christianity in John 6:22-59: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst”.

As Smyth points out, Alfred’s scolding at the hands of the swineherd’s wife and even her beating of him with a broomstick is a parable. It shows that, in the eyes of God, even a king is a servant who must accept chastisement for failing to fulfil his duty to protect his people.

Perhaps the Wessex regime was sincere. But doesn’t this sound a bit like Mao? The Chinese Communist leader put it about when his Great Leap Forward campaign in the early 1960s caused a famine that the shared the people’s suffering. His word went out: “everyone is starving: I can’t eat meat”. Then he sat down to “a comprehensive set of European menus under seven headings: seafood, chicken, duck, pork, lamb beef and soup - each with scores of dishes,” according to a contemporary document from an official banquet presided over by the heroic revolutionary.

Apart from a few nuggets of actuality written down in Alfred’s lifetime by Asser and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, therefore, the story we know of him seems to be founded not in eyewitness history but primarily on monastic legends. “Alfred” may largely be a meta-hero; a figure whose legacy is mostly a construction of later historical narratives.

But there is another issue. Asser’s Life clearly has several ambiguous and overlapping aims.

As Michael Wallace-Hadrill points out in his study of Early Germanic Kingship in England, the most important fact is that Bishop Asser was a member of an early medieval ecclesiastical hierarchy that deliberately promulgated models of ideal kingship often rooted in the figures of Christ, David or Solomon.

The aim was to guide and warn kings to balance their absolute power with moral accountability and by being seen to act as royal advisers, bolster the prestige of the Church among the people.

Asser seems to have written his biography in this tradition of the “Mirror for Princes”, a type of didactic work that deliberately recasts events to highlight specific virtues to emulate and vices to avoid and show kings how they should behave, not merely to make a neutral record of events.

Another piece of evidence that the popular version of Arthur originated centuries after he lived is that the earliest known reference to Alfred as “great” or, Rex Alfredus magnus (King Alfred the Great) came, as Mathew Firth points out, in a 13th-century marginal annotation within a manuscript of chronicler Matthew Paris’s Deeds of the Abbots of St Albans Monastery.

Firth adds that the next notable mention of his greatness came in 1548 when the fierce anti-Catholic campaigner John Bale coined the phrase to frame Alfred as a Protestant scholar-king and founder of the English nation. It is possible, though hard to substantiate, that a popular notion of a great Alfred may have been circulating orally two centuries after his death.

But Alfred P Smyth points out that sources produced by writers outside the influence of the Wessex regime at around the time Alfred actually lived depict him mainly as a learned, pious, but struggling West Saxon king, not significantly different from his ninth-century counterparts.

We have already established that propaganda was a key weapon in Alfred’s armoury. It was aimed at saving Wessex from imminent annihilation by the Danish Great Heathen Army which had destroyed every other Anglo-Saxon kingdom in Britain.

He assembled a scriptorium staffed with intellectuals of European-wide reputation and charged them with promoting his legitimacy as a ruler.

They included Asser, the Welsh Bishop of Sherborne who was Alfred’s tutor and adviser; Grimbald the learned Frank; John the Old Saxon, a teacher and later head of the monastery at Athelney; the Mercian scholar Plegmund who became Archbishop of Canterbury; Werwukf, Bishop of Worcester and Athelstan, a key Mercian scholar.

They fabricated Alfred’s backstory, presenting him as a descendant of Wessex’s supposed Germanic founder, Cerdic. The Chronicle said Cerdic landed in Hampshire in 495 AD with five ships and in six years conquered Wessex with, apparently, just 200 warriors. As Dumville notes, Cerdic’s name is not Germanic, anyway, but British, or to be exact, Celtic-Welsh. This presents us with a perplexing narrative suggesting a British warrior conquered other Britons to establish a Germanic state.

The scriptorium scribes portrayed Alfred as a pious, wise, warrior-king. They rebranded his messy multicultural tribe, the Gewisse, as a single, pure Christian nation known as the “Anglecynn”, or the English. This was a new identity created by Alfred which he believed all his diverse followers could feel equally loyal to.

But to sift truth from all this Alfredian propaganda, the watchword is Hadrill’s observation in his seminal 1949 paper indicating the king fabricated his own legend: “We hold that Alfred was a great and glorious king in part because he tells us he was.” As Simon Keynes also said in his essay “The Cult of King Alfred the Great”: “Alfred was already in his own lifetime to some extent a literary construction.”

We may never know exactly who this man really was.

The manuscript evidence for Alfred’s reign presents multiple problems. For example, as Keynes and Lapidge note, Asser’s Life of Alfred initially had very limited circulation, probably concentrated among senior Welsh aristocracy and clergy. For all its fame, Asser’s life is only 20,000 words long, the length of a short novella.

And a further difficulty is the only known medieval manuscript of the Life was part of the Cotton Library that was destroyed in the 1731 Ashburnham House fire. Before the blaze, the text had been transcribed by early historians, most notably Archbishop Matthew Parker, who published an edition in 1574. This included inaccuracies and one famous interpolation, the insertion by Parker of the cakes myth. So, we cannot examine the text that Asser actually wrote.

Close reading of the Life that we do have suggests Asser did not simply aim to create a warm and intimate portrait of the king. The text depicts Alfred’s sojourn in the Somerset marshes as a narrative of moral and spiritual failure and subsequent victory. It is not exactly a war correspondent’s on the-spot-report from the Somerset trenches. Instead, it unmistakably echoes Jesus’s withdrawal into the wilderness where he was tested by the devil and underwent spiritual preparation before he began his public ministry.

Asser also detectably exaggerates the direness of Alfred’s predicament to make his recovery seem all the more miraculous. He subtly suggests that Alfred’s youth was marked by arrogance, negligence and a headstrong nature and this is what led ultimately to the total collapse of West Saxon resistance. Alfred’s imprudence and excessively trusting nature was linked to how “very nearly all” of his subjects either died in Guthrum’s ambush, surrendering or, “through poverty or fear” abandoned him and fled overseas.

Asser’s real purpose surfaces when he daringly makes “a comparison…between the fortunate thief and the king”, likening Alfred to the repentant criminal Barabbas set free by Pilate from impending crucifixion in exchange for Jesus. Although Alfred’s earlier ham-fistedness caused his suffering, Asser insinuates, his ordeal is not a punishment, but a refining process designed to make Alfred a better Christian king, and deserving of his divinely-inspired resurrection.

By highlighting the desertion of his people, Asser emphasises Alfred’s fortitude. Rather than joining them in surrender, Alfred shows his resilience. Alfred and a “few men” build a fortress “at a place called Athelney”, Asser writes. From there, he and his thegns “struck out relentlessly and tirelessly against the Vikings”.

Within a few weeks, Alfred rides to a pre-arranged meeting place at Egbert’s Stone. His remaining followers who feared that he, like Jesus, had been defeated or killed are “filled with immense joy” and greet him, as “one restored to life after suffering such great tribulations,” like the risen Christ. Thus, Alfred’s victory over Guthrum at Edington is portrayed as a resurrection, a miracle granted to a pious man purified by his ordeal.

Yet this gathering of the Wessex warriors also gives the lie to everything Asser had told us up to then about Alfred’s military predicament.

The Chronicle tells us that only four months separated Guthrum’s ambush and Alfred’s Edington victory. So, Alfred’s military situation cannot have been as bad as Asser originally suggested.

In fact, Alfred’s retreat to a fortress on the inaccessible river island of Athelney was a master-stroke. It is impossible not to see that Asser has deliberately exaggerated the severity of King Alfred’s plight at Athelney to enhance the narrative of his miraculous comeback and piety.

But all this manipulation raises a serious doubt - can we believe anything at all produced by Alfred’s communications operation?

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File 6 in a continuing series. WERGILD. New readers can start with File 1 here

Alfred the Great adopted his predecessor Ine’s harsh legal code, including the wergild “man price” system. This valued an ethnically British life at less than a third of a Saxon neighbour’s. Yet this was an improvement. Instead of treating conquered Britons merely as slaves or property with zero rights they were at last integrated into the Saxon legal hierarchy, albeit at the lowest rung. It bound your social status to your racial origin unless, of course, you chose to adopt the identity of your conquerors.

Alfred the Great has a reputation for being a proto-democratic, liberal king who viewed all people as equal. But this is a romantic myth.

His progressive reputation was heavily fabricated by Victorian historians and mythologisers who wanted to portray him as the perfect, civilised founder of the English nation.

For example, in 1963, the historian Christopher Brooke declared of Alfred: “In a world falling into ruins he had the courage to plan for a happier future; not only to plan defence, but to plan for a fuller and richer life for his subjects. In this there is something heroic. The achievement is impressive; the vision astonishing.”

This is the kind of tribute admirers have been paying to Alfred for eleven centuries. Brooke’s assessment is not entirely wrong.

The intensely authoritarian and at times brutal emergency measures Alfred launched to save Wessex from imminent annihilation by the Danish Vikings were astonishing in their speed and comprehensiveness.

In one crucial move, he reached back two centuries to borrow the harsh and, for the time, revolutionary laws written in haste by his pioneering predecessor King Ine and merged them into the architecture of the new kind of state he was building.

But whose fuller and richer life was Alfred really aiming to create by doing this, exactly?

Alfred attached more than 70 laws, known at the time as “dooms,” composed by Ine to his own conservative but transformative law code. Thus he gave Ine’s laws, which were rough-and-ready measures compiled piecemeal as circumstances arose, huge power over the entire growing kingdom of Wessex.

But as Patrick Wormald points out, Ine’s programme was not systematic. It was largely thrown together by a youthful and initially inexperienced king on a case-by-case basis as he struggled to defuse the enormous and complex inter-ethnic conflict and blood feuds that threatened to shatter his newly-acquired kingdom.

When Ine came to power in 689 AD, the western part of Wessex was still thinly settled by the Germanic newcomers.

Many newly-conquered areas were essentially hostile environments where a tiny ruling elite presided nervously over a larger, restive native population boiling with rage over Anglo-Saxon oppression.

In a series of laws assembled usually to fix short-term problems, the new king began urgently addressing flashpoint issues over property rights, judicial procedure and social order. Ine decided he had no choice but to offer the subjugated Celtic Britons a measure of legal recognition.

He did this partly by introducing a system of wergild, man-payment fines, forcing perpetrators of crime to give cash compensation to victims and their families.

The catch was that the system set a lower value on the lives of native British inhabitants compared to West Saxon English residents.

Following Ine, the value of a Saxon ceorl’s life, a free peasant, was set at 200 shillings, as Wormald records. A Celtic British landowner, a man of equivalent social standing but someone who happened to have been born on the wrong side of the ethnic line, was valued at just 120 shillings. A poor, landless Briton was deemed worth only 60 shillings, one third of the value of his Saxon neighbour.

These were not abstract figures. In the new Ine-Alfred justice system, this schedule of prices told you exactly how much you could claim if you were injured and what your family could demand from your killer.

It declared precisely what your testimony was worth in court. Wergild set your value in the eyes of the law, determining at what level you fitted into the social pecking order in a way that has echoed down the centuries.

As Martin Grimmer demonstrated in his forensic analysis of King Ine’s Law Number 77, the protection offered to the indigenous Celtic Britons in these codes was not a generous acknowledgement of fellow countrymen and women.

The law was drawn up not to defend the liberties of Celts but to reinforce the rights of Anglo-Saxons over them. Grimmer argues Law 77 was really “the protection of a valuable asset — the labourer — rather than the recognition of a fellow citizen. It was a legal status that mirrored the physical reality of conquest.”

He went on: “Ine’s laws are often seen as inclusive because they mention Britons at all. However, they are more accurately described as a mechanism of apartheid. By defining the Briton as a separate legal entity with a fraction of the value of a Saxon, the code ensured that Britishness was a mark of low status that would eventually be shed in favour of a more privileged English identity.”

The impact of this was not simply to humiliate the Celtic Britons. It was an economic scourge. Every legal transaction, every injury claim, every boundary dispute, every act of violence forced an indigenous person to hand over far more money than was demanded of a Saxon culprit for the exact same offence. This ratchet promised to progressively bankrupt the Celtic Britons and build a fuller and richer life for the Saxons.

Over time the pressure became irresistible. If your life was legally worth one third of your neighbour’s, the rational response was to stop being British and to adopt a Saxon name and identity. You had every good reason to drop your native Celtic language and speak the Saxon tongue, and not many incentives in favour of keeping your original identity. Ine did not need to order Celtic culture to be erased. His law book simply made sticking to your accustomed way of life financially ruinous.

Professor Bryan Ward-Perkins of Oxford University wrote that the Laws of Ine “reveal a society in which the native British were legally and socially inferior to the Germanic newcomers. A Briton’s wergild was consistently lower than that of an Englishman of equivalent status. This was not a partnership of equals, but a system designed to manage and subordinate a conquered population.”

Alfred’s vision was indeed astonishing. But the question Brooke did not ask is: what did it cost the people it was designed to manage?

As Nicholas Higham wrote, this legal framework was the engine of a wholesale change of cultural identity, language and social status that forced the indigenous Celtic Britons to align with the new, politically dominant Germanic elite. “The laws of Ine provide a unique window into a society where ethnicity was a primary determinant of status. By institutionalising a lower wergild for the Briton, the West Saxon state did not merely recognise a minority, it codified their inferiority, creating a structural incentive for the British to seek assimilation through the loss of their own language and culture.”

Both Higham and Grimmer argue that because it was legally and economically cheaper to be Saxon, Britons were pressured to abandon their language, names and identity to survive. This created a legacy where Englishness became synonymous with legal privilege and Welshness, derived from the sneering Anglo-Saxon word wealh, meaning both foreigner and slave, became synonymous with servitude.

The post-colonial theorist Robert J.C. Young found that the prejudice against the Celts in modern Britain was not a recent invention but “a structural residue of the early English state’s foundation.” The laws transformed the ethnic distinction between Saxon and Briton into a permanent class distinction.

This structural prejudice did not vanish as the years passed. Professor Michael Hechter writes that these early medieval ethnic divisions evolved into modern structural inequality, what he calls internal colonialism.

He describes how a dominant group within a nation-state exploits and oppresses subordinate groups within its own borders, arguing that the early English state established a cultural division of labour that lasted into the twentieth century. Hechter’s research shows that the regions once legally subordinated in the seventh to ninth centuries remained the most economically disadvantaged during the Industrial Revolution.

The condescension is perfectly encapsulated in the derisive phrase coined in 1890 by Victorian Tory Prime Minister Lord Salisbury: the Celtic Fringe. The conservative grandee argued the inhabitants of the western parts of Britain should have less representation in Parliament because they were a backward people.

The pre-eminent historian Sir Rees Davies argued Alfred’s laws were the intellectual ancestors of British imperial expansionism and the modern sense of English superiority, creating a hierarchy of peoples within Britain.

This medieval mindset that the English were the law-worthy people and the Celts a subject race provided the framework for the later subjection of Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

Kelse Bright Merrill studied King Ine’s laws intensively in her Master’s thesis Gecnawan thou geweorth — “to know your worth” in Old English. Ine’s wergild system gave the “least prominent” members of society the lesser value, she concluded. “This class structure impacted all subsequent law codes” (p.28), was ‘later utilised by the Normans’ (p.1) and the laws “continue to impact England’s history of centuries” (p.95).

In other words, we are present at the birth of England’s notorious class system.

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File 5 in a continuing series. CYNEWULF AND CYNEHEARD. New readers can start with File 1 here

The sudden appearance of the steamy saga of Cynewulf and Cyneheard in the Chronicle is not a slip into tabloid sensationalism. Faced with the existential terror of the Viking invasion, Alfred resurrected this century-old, cinematic tale of a king ambushed at his mistress’s house to highlight what the Wessex king demanded of his followers. In future, the sacred bond of loyalty between a warrior and his lord must override the ancient ties of family blood. To survive the Viking onslaught, it says, the Wessex nobility must abandon insurrectionist plots and pledge absolute loyalty.

After over three decades of being celebrated for his unbreakable fortitude and stoic endurance against Welsh aggression and Mercian dominance, King Cynewulf made a terrible mistake. He fell victim to complacency and self-indulgence.

In a moment of devastating vulnerability, the royal warrior felt he deserved some of the good things in life at last, among them a clandestine liaison with a woman who was not his wife. His moral lapse paved the way for his slaughter at the hands of a rival harbouring a thirty-year grudge.

The king’s end came at a secret meeting with the woman in the seclusion of the Villa Regia royal hunting lodge near the sparsely-populated hamlet of Marten, deep in the Wiltshire countryside.

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for the year 755, though most scholars date the actual events to around 786, Cynewulf travelled with an unusually light escort to the gated manor house enclosed within its private estate.

Despite elaborate precautions to limit knowledge of the trip to a tiny band of ultra-loyal bodyguards, his enemy Prince Cyneheard had found out, followed him, and was now lurking in the undergrowth with eighty-six heavily armed followers, silently making ready to strike.

Watching carefully for the moment the king was most off his guard, Cyneheard’s men stormed the house. Outnumbered, Cynewulf fought valiantly in the doorway, then recklessly rushed out to meet his attackers, was overwhelmed and slain.

The following morning, Cyneheard’s own survival proved equally short-lived. When the rest of Cynewulf’s retainers, led by Osric and Wiverth, heard of the ambush and found their lord dead, they were thunderstruck. Cyneheard offered them lavish honours and wealth to change sides and give him the throne. The king’s thanes refused, chose vengeance, smashed the gates and killed the prince and his entire retinue.

So why was Cyneheard skulking in the grounds in the first place? Well, he was a blue-blooded exile driven to extremes by a festering thirty-year grudge over Cynewulf’s killing and deposition of his brother, the corrupt former king Sigebert.

The answer to the question lies buried in a single extraordinary word.

According to Michael Swanton’s authoritative translation of the Chronicle, Cyneheard had learned that the king was travelling with a small troop because he was wifcyþþe.

Encountering wifcyþþe in the text of the Chronicle is startling. The previous three hundred years of entries are dry, dense and formulaic: the nuts and bolts of military campaigns, royal successions and ecclesiastical appointments, delivered in the clipped one-sentence-per-year style of an official ledger. Then suddenly this.

The word carries the unmistakable tang of sexual impropriety. As doctoral researcher in Old English Song Tan noted, the first syllable, wif, is “amenable to all manner of different interpretations”, ranging from “woman” to “wife” to “mistress.”

The Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary translates wifcyþþe as “familiarity with a female acquaintance or knowledge of a woman.” Professor Francis Leneghan adds that if it indicates “unlawful sexual relations... the evidence certainly points in this direction.”

James H. Wilson goes further still, associating it with “lust” or “dalliance”, suggesting this is the proximate reason, symbolically, for what follows.

With annal 755, the texture of the Chronicle abruptly transforms. Instead of its usual terse record-keeping, it plunges into a full page of high drama: the ambush, the outnumbered king fighting in the doorway, the thanes’ fierce loyalty, the revenge at dawn. It adopts the breathless saga form, an oral storytelling tradition well known to the Wessex peasantry, to reach an audience well beyond the literate elite.

Alfred’s Chronicle, it turns out, was not simply a ledger. As Antonia Gransden wrote in her 1975 study, it is “the earliest surviving example” of an official publication put forward as history that was in fact “royal propaganda”, a text that pretends to be an authoritative, mundane record of factual events while functioning as carefully calculated political literature.

As Richard Marsden noted in his edition of the passage in the Cambridge Old English Reader, the story is “a carefully crafted narrative with a purpose beyond mere record.” Some scholars believe it was deliberately imported from a pre-existing source, perhaps a poem or an oral tradition.

If so, it represents a significant compromise on Alfred’s part. As Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge outlined, Alfred was systematically re-instating writing as the key form of cultural communication in Wessex, over which he was developing a monopoly.

That he was willing to adopt a popular oral genre here suggests he badly wanted this particular message to land, and knew that the saga form would carry it further than the written word alone.

The paradox is that such manipulative material can also be high art. As Orwell observed, all art is propaganda, the question is always whose interests it serves and how well it conceals the fact.

Jacob Hobson calls the tale “the earliest heroic narrative in English prose.” Rolf Bremmer praises it as a dramatic masterpiece whose dynastic theme he likened to a Shakespearean tragedy, “Hamlet’s conflict with his father’s brother Claudius.”

Professor Rory McTurk of Leeds University likens it to an intense, compacted Icelandic saga, noting how heavily it weighs on Alfred’s habitual themes of divided allegiances and the tension between loyalty to one’s lord and loyalty to one’s kin.

It is so entertaining that the propagandist undertow slips into the mind smoothly and subliminally. But it is still recognisably part of Alfred’s wider project to change the ideology and worldview of the Wessex people. As Patrick Wormald argued, he insistently drew their attention away from traditional blood-feud and kin loyalties toward a vision of centralised, Christianised loyalty focused on the king, the state, and God.

So what exactly happened that night, and what was Alfred really trying to say by inserting this dramatic tale into his main news organ? That story begins with a king who thought he was alone.

Paul’s latest book is called Secrets of the Hidden People. You can buy it at Bookends in Carlisle or Keswick and the New Bookshop in Cockermouth or Sam Read in Grasmere.

Alternatively, you can order a copy online here:

https://www.fletcherchristianbooks.com/product/secrets-of-the-hidden-people

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File 4 of a continuing series. CAEDWALLA. New readers can start with File 1 here

In his main propaganda outlet, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Alfred celebrated his ancestor Cædwalla’s brutal conquests of Sussex and the Isle of Wight. By showcasing the outlaw’s actions, Alfred established a precedent for the unified “Greater Wessex” that he wanted to create. He published this story to warn those regions to submit to rule by his Wessex kingdom. But glorifying the conquests of a violent former fugitive who built a private army, Alfred was making an incredibly dangerous move. So, to soften his image, Alfred also played up Caedwalla’s eventual pious abdication, baptism in Rome, and peaceful death to shift the identity of the West Saxon kingship from unstable warlordism to a stable, divinely ordained dynasty.

It was one of the coldest winters for two thousand years. The kingdom of Wessex that was eventually to become England teetered on the brink of destruction. Then it was saved by an angry ghost.

The Germanic realm of Wessex had floundered in chaos for decades following downfall of its veteran king Cealwin. His nephew Ceol seized power in a coup, but lasted only five years at the top. By 685 AD, order had collapsed. Petty local war-lords were tearing Wessex apart, inviting imminent conquest by its aggressive northern neighbour, Mercia.

Suddenly, King Centwine, the pious but embattled ruler of Wessex gave up the struggle to hold the state together after an arduous reign of nine or ten years. The sub-zero winter temperatures of the Late Antique Little Ice Age that hit the south of the island most intensely between 536 AD and approximately 660 AD had pushed his people to the brink of starvation. His mysterious abdication to a monastery triggered a violent scramble for the succession.

Life for Wessex people was miserable. A series of massive eruptions possibly in Iceland caused severe volcanic winters. Average global summer temperatures plunged by up to three degrees Celsius lower in Europe. In southern England. This led to dark, persistently chilly and wet summers that devastated agricultural output and triggered widespread famine.

A young social outcast called Cædwalla, an aethling prince from a minor branch of the royal dynasty was burning with resentment and frustrated ambition. He had been ejected from the kingdom by Centwine six years before at the age of 21 as a threat to the ruling dynasty. (He is not to be confused with the Welsh king Cadwallon — this Cædwalla is an earlier and largely forgotten figure whose Celtic name tells its own story about the origins of Wessex.)

When his enemy stepped down, the fugitive did not wait for an invitation to return. With his private army of misfits and landless youths Caedwalla launched a violent takeover.

Caedwalla was a desperate exile-turned-brigand. He had wandered like a spectre for years in the vast Andredsweald forest, a massive seemingly-impenetrable woodland barrier between the North and South Downs. He had had gathered around him outcasts and failures from the surrounding Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: debtors, younger sons with no inheritances, and battle-hardened mercenaries, drilling them into fanatical army that lived by raiding.

It was not unusual for princes that had been excluded from power to be banished.

Oswald of Northumbria was compelled to languish for two decades among the Gaelic-speaking tribes of Western Scotland before returning as king.

In the early Anglo-Saxon world, as long as a throne-worthy rival prince known as an ætheling breathed, he was a living spark that could start a wildfire.

As Bruce Mitchell and Fred Robinson observe in their standard guide to Old English, one of the “cardinal virtues” of Germanic society in the heroic age was unswerving loyalty to one’s sworn leader. You were expected to show fealty even when that went against the interests of your kin. This same code also gave a throne-worthy ætheling like Cædwalla the right to demand that loyalty be transferred to him. But only if the incumbent king had run out of luck or was leading the tribe in the wrong direction.

No doubt the hardship of living on stolen cattle, gold and slaves among the trees had palled when Cædwalla suddenly spotted his chance to restore his fortunes.

Although Centwine had won many battles, Wessex had never recovered from the ousting of Ceawlin, Caedwalla’s great-great-grandfather, a century before in a dynastic feud.

The kingdom had plunged into a century of political turmoil, territorial shrinkage, and external subjugation. Centwine had failed to repair the damage.

The fierce Mercians piled down from the north and drove the Saxons from their strategic capital at Dorchester-on-Thames. The incomers forced the Wessex people to retreat to the remote coastal outpost of Winchester. The result was the Gewisse were surrounded, fragmented, and running out of road.

That meant Wessex was finally on the verge of self-destruction. Rebellious ealdormen and sub-kings divided Wessex into petty fiefdoms struggling for supremacy. Meanwhile the rising power of Mercia and hostile indigenous Britons sought to exploit Wessex’s weakness by besieging its borders.

As Michael Swanton’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle put it: “685. Here Caedwalla began to contend for the kingdom.” He mustered his private army, seized the kingdom and ruthlessly liquidated all those sub-kings who did not immediately run away.

It was arguably the most concentrated period of state-sponsored violence in the history of Wessex. Caedwalla did not bother negotiating with rivals, he erased them.

Strategically brilliant, Caedwalla realised he was not strong enough to take on Mercia immediately. So, he turned his fury south and east, aggressively expanding Wessex in a blood-soaked conquest described graphically by the 8th century historian Bede in his Ecclesiastical History.

In Chapter 15 the cleric wrote: “Cadwalla, a daring young man of the royal house of the Gewissae, exiled from his own country, came with an army and killed King Ethelwalh” of Sussex amid “slaughtering and plunder”. It is worth noting that Bede, writing independently of Alfred’s scriptorium, still called Caedwalla “king of the Gewissae” rather than of the West Saxons. The name Alfred wanted buried was still in use.

Cædwalla installed his brother, Mul, as a puppet king in Kent. The locals launched murderous attacks on him. Mul and twelve of his followers were trapped, captured, and incinerated. As Swanton’s translation put it: “And Mul was the brother of Cadwalla, and he was later burned in Kent.” In retaliation, Cædwalla returned to Kent with a massive army, laying waste to the region, killing, and looting, leaving the kingdom in chaos.

Using extreme brutality, he won permanent control of Hampshire and the pagan Isle of Wight. Bede wrote, he “strove to exterminate all the natives and replace them by settlers from his own province” (Ecclesiastical History, IV.16).

Caedwalla attempted to ethnically cleanse the island by replacing the native Jutish population with his own West Saxon followers. He ordered the killing of all male members of the Jutish royal house.

In a strange ritual twist, before killing the royal princes of the island, he had them baptised. This was either to ensure their salvation or as part of a spiritual takeover, as Bede records in the same chapter.

The former exile went on to conquer and dominate almost the entire south of England, creating a short-lived Greater Wessex.

Cædwalla was among the first rulers to use the form “king of the Saxons” in documents, a significant shift from the Gewisse identity, as Barbara Yorke notes. The prefix “West” only became common in the eighth century. That was when Bede began consistently referring to the dynasty as West Saxons rather than Gewisse.

Eventually, Caedwalla, ailing from wounds sustained in the ghastly Isle of Wight massacre, abdicated too. Piously, he travelled south to be baptised in Rome in 689 by Pope Sergius I on the Saturday before Easter. Caedwalla died ten days later on 20 April 689.

The former outlaw’s frenetic campaign lasted only three years but he had pulled off an early medieval geopolitical miracle.

Caedwalla took a dying, fragmented sub-kingdom and forged it into the dominant force in Southern England. While historians usually give the “Father of England” title to Alfred or Athelstan, those men built on a foundation laced with the blood of Cædwalla’s victims.

Without Caedwalla’s audacious coup d’etat and his boldness in settling the territorial and political borders of Wessex, Alfred knew the powerful state he had inherited would not have existed for him to rule.

But while he respected the man who established the strength, expansiveness and stability bequeathed to him, Alfred felt compelled to manage and suppress the full story of his predecessor’s powerful, brutal and hugely successful reign.

Caedwalla’s brutal methods of warfare ran counter to the Christian, law-abiding image Alfred sought to project for himself and his new God-chosen realm. In the midst of his 9th century existential struggle with the marauding Great Danish Army, Alfred saw Caedwalla as a throwback to a more primitive and unruly era of Anglo-Saxon power the like of which he did not want to return.

Alfred ordered his hand-picked staff of intellectuals in the scriptorium of his travelling court to manage the story with extreme care.

His main vehicle was the newly-launched Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, an intensely propagandist document that, even so, is today nonetheless regarded by scholars as the main source of early English history.

Alfred established it to promote the heroic myth of Wessex’s origins and his own legitimacy as king. He intended it to foster the image of his people as a “pure”, Christian, God-chosen nation rebranded as the Anglecynn, the kin of the Angles. (It does not mean “The English” as many academics write).

But to be successful, Alfred believed people could only stand so much truth. Here’s why…

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File 3 of a continuing series. CEALWIN. New readers can start with File 1 here

King Alfred the Great wanted to bask in the reflected glory of his legendary predecessor Ceawlin whose massive territorial conquests validated the House of Wessex’s right to rule. But, in a striking example of medieval political spin, he ruthlessly suppressed how the famous warrior-king was deposed in a catastrophic internal coup led by his own nephew. Facing massive internal discontent over high taxation and his seizing of the throne over nephews who had a better claim, Alfred could not afford to draw attention to Ceawlin’s fate for fear of emulating him.

The bloody coup happened on a high, windswept hill named after the mighty Germanic god of war, death and wisdom known as Woden.

There, on a massive eminence above the Wiltshire countryside, an act of sudden and unexpected treachery took place in 593 AD. And because of it, the idea of a unified Saxon kingdom with the seeds of England inside nearly died before it was born.

The victim was King Ceawlin. He is portrayed in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as an ageing, oppressive warrior-lord of the Gewisse tribe. He processed up the prehistoric burial mound known as Wodnesbeorg in all the pomp an early medieval monarch could muster. But his fading strength was undermining his grip on power after a 32-year reign.

Once on the summit, he prepared to renew his claim to have inherited the authority of his dead ancestors. As the 8th century historian Bede records, he did this with the bloody sacrifice of cattle. Quite probably, the sacrificial animals were oxen, as Pope Gregory explicitly acknowledged to Abbot Mellitus in 597. The practice of animal sacrifice was so deeply embedded that the Church decided to absorb it rather than abolish it when the Anglo- Saxons converted to Christianity in 597.

Ceawlin’s sacrificial offering was a high-prestige act designed to win favour from Woden, a fierce, dangerous and demanding deity.

Silhouetted against the wide sky, the veteran monarch surveyed the staggering expanse of the Wansdyke. It is an enormous 35-mile long defensive barrier built against the British Celts. The scholar J.N.L. Myres argued that Ceawlin had made his followers carve the 32-foot high ditch and bank out of the unyielding chalk and clay. Jonathan G. P. Erskine reported modern excavations showed it would have dominated the landscape for miles.

Then, the High Priest most likely handed Ceawlin a ritual axe-hammer. A similar weapon, featuring an axe blade on one side and a solid hammerhead or poll on the other, was found at Sutton Hoo, leading the scholar Peter Burch to suggest a kingly involvement in religion. It is reasonable to suppose that Ceawlin, ascending to the summit in full ceremonial display, would have done the same.

Then, without warning, the warriors who had climbed the hill in a show of fealty, several hundred fighting men at most by the reckoning of modern scholars, silenced their rhythmic thrum of approbation.

In an abrupt, coordinated pivot, the shield wall turned and they butchered Ceawlin’s royal bodyguard where they stood. They cast the fading conqueror from his height down into a desolate exile. The aging leader of the Gewisse, once an icon of invincibility, died a year later in the wilderness, miserable, powerless, and forsaken.

The coup, perpetrated by Ceawlin’s nephew, Ceol, left the flanks of the Neolithic long barrow covered in bodies. The dethroning plunged the Gewisse, as Barbara Yorke relates, into sixty years of fractured, internecine chaos. It was a shocking fall. Ceawlin had been a monumental figure, portrayed in Alfred’s Chronicle as the founding father of West Saxon greatness.

Removing him delivered short-term glory to Ceol but at the price of creating a power vacuum. The emerging kingdom of Mercia capitalised on the youth’s impetuosity, immediately surging south to conquer the Gewisse’s Upper Thames heartland and relegate it to sub-kingdom status for 180 years.

The fate of the Gewisse, and the core of what would become Wessex and England, dropped into the melting pot.

The treasonous insurrection by Ceol in 592 AD was more than a simple family squabble. It led to a seismic shift in the political and spiritual foundation of the early West Saxon state.

Yet the entry for that year in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is famously terse. Michael Swanton’s translation renders it: “In this year there was a great slaughter at Woden’s Burg, and Ceawlin was driven out.” But why was the entry so brief? The catastrophic effects of this internal family dispute that led to the toppling of a leader with a vast if fragile power base was a major disaster. That surely deserved more than a single sentence?

The answer is that the Chronicle account was only written down 300 years afterwards by intellectuals working in the scriptorium of Alfred the Great. Their aim was by no means strict accuracy. Alfred allowed his public relations team to make only a clipped mention of Ceawlin and then ordered them to move rapidly on. The Wessex king had very good reasons to manage the Ceawlin story carefully, as will become clear as we examine what the Chronicle is actually hiding.

Ceol’s betrayal of Ceawlin would have been regarded as treachery on one level. But the complex dynastic politics of the time left a ruler vulnerable to challenge if he was seen to have run out of royal luck. As William Chaney argued, if a king suffered successive defeats, famine, or became too aged to lead the war-band effectively, supporting him was considered a spiritual and physical risk to the entire tribe.

The cause of Ceawlin’s downfall may very well have been a symptom of his success: imperial overstretch. As Nicholas Higham wrote, the king appears to have conquered so much territory that it may have been beyond the resources of the Gewisse tribe to administer it. The constant warfare became a terrible drain on prosperity.

Ceol had the right to make this challenge because he was an atheling, a prince of royal blood. Among the Gewisse you did not become king by inheriting the throne. The warlike Anglo-Saxons did not want any doltish first born wandering into supreme power and putting their survival at risk. The senior nobles took care to elect the most competent member of the royal dynasty to the top job. Yet any member of the royal house with sufficient electoral support and military prowess had at least the right to make a bid for the throne if a ruler was perceived as outliving his time. In those circumstances, Ceol’s move was framed not as destructive but as restoring the health of the kingdom.

Military loyalties in the early Middle Ages were brittle. As William Chaney argued in his study of Anglo-Saxon kingship, warriors were bound to their lord primarily through gift-giving. Kings were known as ring-givers, beah-gifa, who cemented fidelity by distributing gold, rings, and treasures as rewards for bravery and service. A king who cold not afford to distribute gifts quickly found the loyalty dissolved.

H.M. Chadwick identified the deep consequence of this fragility: “When this is realised it becomes easy to understand the instability of heroic society. The military followers of a peace-loving king, unless he was very wealthy and generous, were liable to drift away…in the absence of any truly national organisation or national feeling all depended on the personal qualities of the leaders.”

The chaos unleashed by the coup against Ceawlin helps to explain the Chronicle’s silence over the following half-century. The scribes were under orders to craft a narrative suggesting Alfred’s dynasty had a smooth and inevitable ascent to greatness. But Ceawlin’s displacement triggered a fractured era of internecine strife and a nasty survival struggle . That, Alfred decided, was not considered good publicity for the supposedly God-chosen elite of the House of Wessex.

As Barbara Yorke makes clear, the term Gewisse had become an inconvenient relic of the pagan past in Alfred’s eyes. They had begun life as an exclusive, formidable and rather mysterious high-status mercenary caste whose jewellery and uniform were designed to be impenetrable to outsiders.

To unite his diverse followers and defeat the Viking onslaught Alfred needed to transform them into a coherent national state. His subjects also included Jutes, Mercians and British and they felt excluded from the Gewisse elite. So, he set out to create a brand in which everybody could participate without feeling inferior - the West Saxon identity.

Who were the Gewisse Alfred so badly wanted to erase from history?

Before reach the paywall, beyond which lies the gripping second half of this piece, here is a list of the sources it is based on:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brooks, Nicholas. ‘The Development of Military Obligations in Eighth and Ninth-Century England.’

England Before the Conquest, edited by Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes, Cambridge University Press, 1971.

Yorke, B. Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England. Seaby/Routledge, London, 1990.

Yorke, B. Wessex in the Early Middle Ages. Leicester University Press, 1995, p 34.

Swanton, Michael, editor and translator. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Routledge, 1996.

Chaney, William A. The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England. University of California Press, 1970.

Dickinson, Tania. The Anglo-Saxon burial sites of the upper Thames region. University of Oxford thesis, 1977.

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Edited by Colgrave and Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts, 1969.

Higham, N. J. Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons. Archaeology of Change, Seaby, London, 1992.

Higham, N. J. The English Conquest: Gildas and Britain in the Fifth Century. Manchester University Press, 1994.

Dumville, D. N. “The West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List and the Chronology of Early Wessex.” Peritia, vol. 4, 1985, pp. 21–66.

Burch, Peter J. W. The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingship. PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2015.

Hutton, Ronald. The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles. Wiley-Blackwell, 1993, p 272.

Chadwick, H. M. The Heroic Age. Cambridge University Press, 1912.

Myres, J. N. L. ‘Wansdyke and the Origin of Wessex.’ Essays in British History, ed. Trevor-Roper. Macmillan, 1964, pp. 1-27. Antiquity 80, 894–909.

Wilson, David (1992). Anglo-Saxon Paganism. London and New York: Routledge.

The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingship by Peter J W Burch, a thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities., 2015.

Erskine, J. G. P. ‘The West Wansdyke: An Appraisal of the Dating, Dimensions and Construction Techniques in the Light of Excavated Evidence.’ Archaeological Journal, 164(1), 2007, pp. 80-108.

Gregory the Great: Epistola 76, PL 77: 1215-1216, Compare with Bede’s version in Ecclesiastical History XXX and NPNF version.

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File 2 of a continuing series. STENTON. New readers can start with File 1 here

At the turn of the 20th Century, critics began doubting the credibility of the main source for early English history, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the news outlet of Alfred the Great’s Wessex. Some said it was a worthless tissue of origin myths, false place-names, inconsistent etymologies and chronological errors. Writing in the depths of World War II which threatened Britain’s obliteration, Sir Frank Stenton won extravagant academic praise for allegedly saving what amounts to Alfred’s justification for being king from the sceptics. He argued that, despite flaws, the Chronicle preserved an authentic, long-lost oral tradition and the genealogies of early medieval chieftains and real history. Stenton thought he had exonerated Alfred of the doubters’ charges that the history of the kingdom that became England is a forgery and political propaganda.

Some myths are too important not to be true.

Myths like the naked emperor is wearing lovely new clothes, this piece of paper, or plastic, is really worth ten pounds or history is a one-way street leading to progress.

When it comes to the British Monarchy, Walter Bagehot, the most famous theorist of the British Constitution, argued: “we must not let in daylight upon magic.” Bagehot’s point was that the monarchy depends on people not looking too closely at the facts.

The formidably authoritative historian Sir Frank Stenton clearly bore Bageot’s dictum in mind when he set about producing his interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the most important source of early British history, in the desperate wartime days of 1943.

As the nation faced potential oblivion, Stenton treated the 9^th Century Chronicle as far as he could as a reliable historical document that reinforced the legitimacy of the English State as a stable, continuous, and inevitable institution.

Yet he was far too skilled a philologist and place-name expert not to see that the Chronicle was frequently a patchwork of fables, that its dates were often implausible and was strangely silent about long periods of time.

Added to that, there were many contradictory versions of the text, lots of seemingly legendary and fabricated events while many main figures, weirdly, bore the names of the places they invaded. Yet, Stenton addressed the absurdities and mythical elements embedded in the Chronicle entries by interpreting them as the remnants of authentic, long-lost and originally oral traditions.

He acknowledged they were not strict contemporary records of the 5th and 6th centuries.

But Stenton argued the document survived these flaws because the Chronicle was a profound, organic product of Alfred the Great’s Wessex court.

It functioned less as a modern history and more as a foundational national origin story for the unified English kingdom, rooted in legitimate West Saxon royal genealogies, he insisted.

Critics such as Patrick Wormald, in his seminal work on Anglo-Saxon law, argued that Stenton overestimated the reliability of the highly politicised, tendentious and fragmentary annals, downplayed the Chronicle’s bias and relied too heavily on it for early history.

In the first Wessex Files piece we found that the eminent British medievalist, David Dumville, galvanised the academic world by declaring his view that the alleged Germanic warrior, Cerdic, the heroic Saxon founder from whom the British monarchy traces its descent, almost certainly never existed.

Doubts particularly centred around J.N.L Myers’s observation that Cerdic was strangely named after the place he invaded, Cerdics-ora, and the fact that the name Cerdic is not Germanic anyway, but British, or to be precise, Celtic Old Wesh.

The Chronicle story about Cerdic landing in five ships on the Hampshire coast beneath Calshot in 495AD and the conquest of Wessex by his impossibly small band of 200 men was fabricated, Dumville surmised, by Alfred the Great’s scriptorium, although this myth has been widely accepted as historically credible for eleven centuries.

In the 42-year gap between Stenton’s Chronicle commentary coming out and Dumville releasing his paper in 1985, the flaws in the annals survived scholarly scrutiny.

The Chronicle weathered academic scepticism about its historical reliability mainly thanks to the highly influential, technically authoritative and exhaustively detailed reading Frank Stenton put forward in what was regarded as a masterpiece of 20^th Century history - and in what its author chose not to say.

Stenton’s landmark book, Anglo-Saxon England, was seen as the canonical interpretation of the Chronicle, the foundation text of Early Medieval English History, precisely because of Stenton’s expertise in interpreting place names.

He decoded them to trace the movement and settlement patterns of Anglo-Saxon people and he was praised for his paramount skill in using them to illustrate the development of English society. The conviction grew that he could not be wrong.

Generations of historians built their interpretations of early England on Stenton’s authority. When he translated the Cerdic annals and presented them as the best available evidence for West Saxon origins, most readers accepted that verdict. The minority who raised doubts found themselves arguing against a monumental scholarly reputation.

Re-reading Stenton on Cerdic today, the most striking feature is not his conclusions but his method. He is careful to admit many problems and acknowledge many of the contradictions. But he manages each problem rather than exploring its implications deeply or taking it to the logical conclusion. The document as a whole is too important, he frequently stressed, to dismiss just because of such flaws.

The way that Stenton managed the contradictions comes to the fore in his translation of the annal for 514. This occurs exactly nineteen years after Cerdic’s original landing in 495. That number leaps off the page because it was highly significant to medieval clerics.

Every 19 years the lunar and solar cycles synchronise. Clerics used this knowledge to calculate the precise date of Easter, which was doctrinally crucial to avoid having to dependend on the Hebrew calendar because it symbolised the independence of Christianity from Judaism. As Faith Wallis noted in her study of Bede’s chronological method, early medieval clerics adopted the Metonic cycle partly to break free of dependence on Jewish calendar traditions — a choice that was, she wrote, “highly political.”

Stenton does not treat the 19-year coincidence as an accidental event but as a clear sign of the artificial, constructed nature of the West Saxon origin myths. He viewed it as evidence of early, organised scholarship rather than a chaotic error or intentional forgery designed to deceive.

The problem is, as Kenneth Harrison demonstrated in his Framework of Anglo-Saxon History, that this proves the Chronicle’s early dates were not based on memories of actual history. They were artificially arranged to conform to the 19-year grid which the monks saw as a symphony composed by God. So, the annals are a literary artefact designed to persuade people of a religious view, not a record designed to preserve the truth.

While Stenton argued that beneath the fictions and contradictions lay a firm strand of real history, particularly in its early, concise annals, later scholars complained that the "truthful material" is sparse, difficult to isolate, and often reflects Alfred’s later political agendas rather than contemporary reporting.

Now, before we reach the paywall here are the sources this piece is based on:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stenton, F. M. Anglo-Saxon England (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press, 1971.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, translated by Rev. James Ingram (1823) and J.A. Giles (1847), CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018.

Swanton, Michael. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Routledge, 2000.

Higham, N.J. Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons. B.A. Seaby, 1992.

Dumville, D. N. “The West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List and the Chronology of Early Wessex.” Peritia 4, 1985, pp. 21–66.

Hopper, Vincent Foster. Medieval Number Symbolism: Its Sources, Meaning, and Influence on Thought and Expression.

Yorke, B. Wessex in the Early Middle Ages. Leicester University Press, 1995.

Yorke, B. “The Jutes of Hampshire and Wight and the Origins of Essex.” Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. Bassett, pp. 84–96. Harrison, K.

The Framework of Anglo-Saxon History to AD 900. Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Sims-Williams, P. “Gildas and the Anglo-Saxons.” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 6 (1983), pp. 1-30.

The Parker Chronicle. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 173. c. 890 AD. Available digitally via the Parker Library on the Web.

Myres, J. N. L. The English Settlements. Oxford University Press, 1986.

Cunliffe, B. Excavations at Chalton, Hampshire. Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society.

Bruce-Mitford, R. L. S. The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, Vols. 1-3. British Museum Publications, 1975-1983.

Härke, H. “Anglo-Saxon Immigration and Ethnogenesis.” Medieval Archaeology, 2011. Bede.

Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Penguin Classics, 1990.

Morris, Marc. The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England. Hutchinson, 2021. Keynes, S. and Lapidge, M.

Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources. Penguin Classics, 1983.

Crumlin-Pedersen, O. 1990. ‘The Boats and Ships of the Angles and Jutes’. In McGrail, S. (ed.). 1990. Maritime Celts, Frisians and Saxons. CBA Research Report 71. Council for British Archaeology: London. P98-116.

Geoffrey Hindley, A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons: The Beginnings of the English Nation, Robinson Publishing, 2006.

The Anglo-Saxons: Myth and History, by Rory Naismith Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2024.

Davis, R. H. C. (1971). “Alfred the Great: Propaganda and Truth”. History, 56, pp 172-3.

Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England, Hambledon Continuum, 10 Feb. 2007.

Stephen Johnson. The Roman Forts of the Saxon Shore. New York: St. Martins’ Press. 1976. Pp. ix, 172.

J. N. L. Myres: Anglo-Saxon Pottery of the Settlement of England. Oxford: University Press, 1969. 277 pp.

Keynes, S. and Lapidge, M. Alfred the Great. Penguin Classics, 1983.

Harrison, K. The Framework of Anglo-Saxon History to AD 900. Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Bede, The Reckoning of Time, trans. and ed. Faith Wallis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999) page xxxvi.

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File 1 of a continuing series. CERDIC.

When Alfred the Great became king of Wessex in 871, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms like his were falling to Viking invaders. He had secured the throne through a highly questionable political manoeuvre. It sidelined rival relatives such as his nephews, the sons of his elder brother, King Æthelred to ensure his own son, Edward the Elder, would succeed him. Alfred badly needed to justify his branch of the family’s doubtful right to take the throne. So, he ordered scribes in his scriptorium literally to invent a 300-year-long genealogy for himself claiming he had descended from a semi-mythological Germanic founder, Cerdic. This ignored great historical gaps, civil wars and usurpers to create a largely fictional unbroken line of father-to-son royal-blood succession. By this means, Alfred claimed his forebears were Germanic heroes descended from Woden. In fact, his family were Romano-British native and he claimed to rule Wessex by right of a conquest that never happened.

The Britons saw them coming on the horizon. The Celts had lived on that coastline for thousands of years. They had continued to mount Saxon Shore patrols started by the Romans, only now at a more straggly level.

Whenever hostile ships appeared, archaeology suggests, the watchers lit beacon fires on hills to signal the sighting. That roused the people in the farmsteads and they apparently rushed to the beach. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the two sides fought on the same day Cerdic landed in five ships.

Within six years, the Chronicle adds, the Germanic invader and his men had conquered the Britons, founded the kingdom of Wessex and established the royal line from which every English monarch since has claimed descent, including the present King.

That last detail matters. This is not supposed to be a fairy tale safely confined to the distant past. In fact, the genealogical connection between the present monarchy and Cerdic is regarded as the foundational fact of English royal history. But five ships does seem a very small number. Can this story be true?

Well, all these facts are preserved in what is regarded as a precious document known as the Parker Chronicle. It is kept at Cambridge Corpus Christi College under the signature code MS 173. The parchment is the oldest surviving manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and it is the document that modern historians regard as the main source of early English history.

Parker is a text of immense importance to England and to British history as a whole. For example, as Professor George Garnett relates, in the English Civil War Parliamentarians used the Parker Chronicle to challenge Charles I’s idea of “absolute” monarchy.

They argued that the story in Parker proved there was an ancient constitution predating the Norman Conquest. It proved Alfred the Great had ruled only with the consent of a council of high-ranking nobles called the Witan, considered the precursor to the modern UK Parliament and therefore Charles’ claim of autocracy was bogus, they argued. A king’s head was chopped off substantially because of Parker.

After all, Parker is the document that establishes that the West Saxon royal line runs all the way from Cerdic through Alfred the Great to the monarchs of England and ultimately to Charles III, our present king.

As the eminent scholar David Dumville wrote, descent from Cerdic has been cited for over a thousand years as a cornerstone of the British monarchy’s legitimacy. The story that a single heroic Germanic founder established England by right of conquest is not merely a casual byway of British history.

As Rory Naismith argues in his study of Anglo-Saxon myth and history, Cerdic’s alleged triumph is the origin story on which a continuous claim to English national identity and royal authority has rested for eleven centuries.

The only problem is, the possibility must always be seriously entertained that none of it happened.

The Chronicle account of the original invasion is a famously stirring narrative. But one also has to wonder about the geography.

For example, the Chronicle says Cerdic lands at a place already named “Cerdic’s Shore.” Did he name it the moment he stepped off the boat? Or was he returning to a place that already knew him?

And then there are the puzzling mathematics. The Chronicle says only five ships landed. As research by pioneering marine archaeologist Ole Crumlin-Pedersen found, Anglo-Saxon warriors of this era raided the southern British coast in flat-bottomed clinker-built craft. They had no sails and were powered instead by a maximum of forty rowers each.

That suggests Cerdic brought with him an attacking force of no more than 200 men, enough for a scouting party, but not pitched battles.

Cerdic’s men may have held the beach that day. But surely the story that his small force soon conquered the 400 square miles of Wessex was, as the renowned Anglo-Saxon scholar Yorke suggested, an origin myth rather than a factual account? “It would be unwise to assume that these foundation stories are historically valid,” she cautioned in her study of kings and kingdoms in Anglo-Saxon England.

She went on to argue in her separate analysis of early medieval Wessex that the tale that Cerdic’s tiny warband soon triumphed against a population conservatively estimated at 100,000 people and probably three times that number was a symbolic explanation, not history. She expressed great scepticism. Such narratives “belong to an established convention of Germanic foundation stories in which a pair of kinsman heroes appears with a small number of ships and after a few years’ successful battling win kingdoms for themselves and their successors,” she concluded.

The greatest advocate of reading the Cerdic story as reliabile history is the almost legendary historian Sir Frank Stenton. He published his definitive translation and commentary on the Chronicle in his book Anglo-Saxon England in 1943 when nationalist sentiment was running at fever-pitch. At the time he wrote it, Britain was at a precarious point in the Second World War. The exhaustion of fighting, along with the depletion of the country’s wealth and resources, was threatening its standing as a top-tier power.

While acknowledging some odd textual repetitions, obvious mythological elements and problems over names, Stenton emphasised that the Chronicle overall contained a cohesive narrative of English history and national identity. He succeeded triumphantly in pieceing together the fragmentary annals to produce an almost poetic tale of heroic expansion, establishing what he saw as the authoritative history of the Anglo-Saxon period.

Critics immediately recognised his work as a 20th Century masterpiece. The English Historical Review lauded it as “one of the most valuable contributions ever made to our knowledge of the history of our own land”. It remained extremely influential for decades. Most subsequent historians barely diverged from his reading of the Cerdic episode.

That is, until modern scholars, led by figures such as Professor David Dumville of Aberdeen University, began in 1985 to express grave doubts. In a paper that fundamentally unsettled the academic consensus, Dumville pronounced the early West Saxon annals retroactively created fictions.

He argued that Alfred’s scribes had looked at the map, seen place names like Cerdices-ora, and worked backwards to invent a reason for the name. By means of this fabrication, Dumville argued, Alfred was able to claim Cerdic as his direct Anglo-Saxon ancestor through an unbroken bloodline, an exclusive, “pure” lineage that justified his own legitimacy as king and Wessex’s authority over neighbouring kingdoms.

Using the Chronicle, Alfred published a genealogy connecting himself through Cerdic to the Germanic god Woden. Alfred further framed himself, through the biography he commissioned from the adoring Welsh monk Asser, as a righteous, God-anointed, and pious Christian ruler. He positioned his authority as inseparable from God’s will and clearly distinguished the Anglo-Saxons from the foreign, “heathen” Viking invaders.

Sir Frank’s account of Cerdic’s supposed conquest remained influential because he was highly regarded as a scholar by his contemporaries, for instance by the meticulous Anglo-Saxon landscape expert Dr. Margaret Gelling. She lauded his great skills in analysing Old English personal and place-names. Where primary documents, charters, wills, and the Chronicle itself did exist, Stenton also offered an impressively detailed and exhaustive explication. Thereby, Stenton defined and dominated the discipline of Anglo-Saxon history - until the late 20th century.

That was when Dumville published evidence showing the West Saxon pedigree and early annals were redacted, heavily altered, often fabricated outright and presented in the Chronicle in a highly tendentious, propagandistic style by Alfred’s scribes.

Re-reading Sir Frank’s rendering of the Chronicle’s annals today is revealing, not so much because of its authoritative tone, but because of the obvious labour he put into forging a coherent, rapid rise of Wessex supremacy from the heavily politicised, tendentious and fragmented entries.

The British historian Ralph Henry Carless Davis noted in his iconoclastic paper “Alfred the Great: Propaganda and Truth” that Stenton had to strain every intellectual sinew to extract reliable history from the Chronicle’s often deliberately ambiguous entries. After noticing one annal that seemed to be “genuinely misleading”, Davis wrote that that “the author of the Chronicle …has done it with great literary skill, for his words do not contain a single untruth but merely an invitation to wishful thinking.”

Before we reach the paywall: here are the sources this piece is based on:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stenton, F. M. Anglo-Saxon England (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press, 1971.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, translated by Rev. James Ingram (1823) and J.A. Giles (1847). CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018.

Swanton, Michael. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Routledge, 2000.

Higham, N. J. Convert Kings: Power and Religious Affiliation in Early Anglo-Saxon England. Manchester University Press, 1997.

Higham, N. J. Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons. B.A. Seaby, 1992.

Dumville, D. N. “The West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List and the Chronology of Early Wessex.” Peritia, 4, 1985, pp. 21–66.

Hopper, Vincent Foster. Medieval Number Symbolism: Its Sources, Meaning, and Influence on Thought and Expression. Columbia University Press, 1938.

Yorke, B. Wessex in the Early Middle Ages. Leicester University Press, 1995.

Yorke, B. Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England. Seaby/Routledge, London, 1990.

Yorke, B. “The Jutes of Hampshire and Wight and the Origins of Essex.” Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. Bassett, pp. 84–96.

Harrison, K. The Framework of Anglo-Saxon History to AD 900. Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Sims-Williams, P. “Gildas and the Anglo-Saxons.” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 6, 1983, pp. 1-30.

The Parker Chronicle. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 173. c. 890 AD. Available digitally via the Parker Library on the Web, Corpus Christi College Cambridge.

Myres, J. N. L. The English Settlements. Oxford History of England. Oxford University Press, 1986.

Cunliffe, B. Excavations at Chalton, Hampshire. Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society, 1971.

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Penguin Classics, 1990.

Morris, Marc. The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England. Hutchinson, 2021.

Keynes, S. and Lapidge, M. Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources. Penguin Classics, 1983.

Crumlin-Pedersen, O. ‘The Boats and Ships of the Angles and Jutes.’ In McGrail, S. (ed.). Maritime Celts, Frisians and Saxons. CBA Research Report 71. Council for British Archaeology, London, 1990, pp. 98-116.

Hindley, Geoffrey. A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons: The Beginnings of the English Nation. Robinson Publishing, 2006.

Naismith, Rory. The Anglo-Saxons: Myth and History. Cambridge University Press, 2024.

Davis, R. H. C. “Alfred the Great: Propaganda and Truth.” History, 56, 1971, pp. 169-182.

Johnson, Stephen. The Roman Forts of the Saxon Shore. St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1976.

Godden, M. (2009). The Alfredian Project and its Aftermath: Rethinking the Literary History of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, British Academy Proceedings of the British Academy, 162, 93–122.

Garnett, G. (2024). ‘The Legal Writing of Sir Edward Coke, the Anglo-Saxons, and Lex Mercatoria’, The Journal of Legal History, 45(1), pp. 1–25.

The Parker Chronicle, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 173, Parker.Stanford.Edu

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