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00:00In the winter of 877, the fate of England rested on the shoulders of one man.
00:15At that time, the king wandered in great hardship through the woods and fenn fastnesses.
00:41There was no food except what they could find.
00:48All the king had left were his closest retainers, for most of the English people had submitted to the Vikings.
01:04The old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria and the East Angles had been destroyed.
01:09Mercia overrun, the monasteries plundered.
01:13The people lived in fear.
01:17And that winter, a Viking army attacked the last English kingdom, Wessex.
01:23And the young king, Alfred, was forced to take refuge here in the swamps of Somerset.
01:28All he ruled now, a few acres of marsh.
01:35But this is the moment out of which the chain of events will come, which will lead to the creation of a kingdom of England.
01:45The process will go through Alfred, his daughter Æthelflæd, his son Edward and his grandson Æthelstan.
01:55They're among the most gifted of all the rulers in British history.
02:00They will shape what we might almost call the deep bone structure of England, the English state and Englishness itself.
02:11Towns, shires, the monarchy, English law, the origins of parliament, English literature.
02:21What an impact they will have on the future history of the British Isles and of the world.
02:28And in their words, and in the words of their contemporaries, this is their story.
03:22The tale of Alfred's wars with the Vikings and the creation of the kingdom of England by his children and grandchildren
03:30is one of the great stories of British history.
03:35But it's also a detective story, for much of the evidence has been destroyed by time and war.
03:51In telling the tale, we'll be helped by experts from the world's greatest Anglo-Saxon archive, the British Library.
03:59Here's Alfred's will, his writings, his thoughts on life and kingship.
04:10Some of his works are only now being restored by cutting-edge science.
04:17This is what a manuscript looks like when it's...
04:19When it's been through the fire.
04:21It looks like skin that's shrunk up together.
04:23They were kind of in balls because of the fire, because they had contracted.
04:28Others are totally lost, or known only through later copies.
04:33My heart sinks each time I turn the page.
04:35Alfred's biography, written by the Welsh bishop Asa, was destroyed by fire in the 18th century,
04:42and only survives in Tudor transcripts.
04:46So here is a copy of Asa's chronicle.
04:51So to piece Alfred's story together, we'll also need to explore burned fragments and later notebooks.
04:58Alfred, King of the Anglo-Saxons.
05:00The precious clues out of which a tale emerges, not just of violence and war,
05:06but of vision and creativity in dark times.
05:10It faithfully reproduces the original Anglo-Saxon manuscript.
05:15And the first key story in Alfred's life, Asa says, took place not in England at all, but in Rome.
05:27In 853, when Alfred was about five, his father, King Athelwulf of Wessex, sent him to Rome.
05:36In 853, when Alfred was about five, his father, King Athelwulf of Wessex, sent him to Rome.
05:49It was to be an inciting incident in his life.
05:54Rome, for Alfred, was more than a pilgrimage.
05:58You feel that it somehow gave him a map for his life.
06:02As a man, he would lay the foundations of the English state,
06:06but the England that Alfred dreamed wasn't insular, it was tied to Europe,
06:11and above all, inspired by Rome.
06:16By Roman civilisation, Roman Christianity, and Latin culture.
06:27In the old English quarter, close to the Vatican,
06:30today's street names Harkback and Harkinian,
06:33but in the old English quarter, close to the Vatican,
06:36today's street names Harkback and Harkinian,
06:39but in the old English quarter, close to the Vatican,
06:42Close to the Vatican, today's street names Harkback to Alfred's day.
06:47Sassia, the Saxons.
06:49Borgo, the Burgh, the English word for town.
06:54For 500 years, this is where English pilgrims stayed,
06:58and it's where Alfred came as a boy.
07:03CHOIR SINGS
07:08The highlight of his trip was an audience with the Pope.
07:14Alfred must have walked open-mouthed.
07:20And if you want to get a sense of the splendour that he actually saw,
07:24just come and look inside.
07:28CHOIR SINGS
07:41The old Vatican was swept away in the age of Michelangelo,
07:45but this is what it looked like,
07:48the 5th-century church of Santa Maria Maggiore.
07:53Here, in this glittering late Roman basilica,
07:57you can imagine the pilgrims from faraway Wessex.
08:03Pope Leo blessed Alfred
08:06and gave the inquisitive and impressionable boy
08:09the insignia of a Roman consul.
08:22You can imagine the Pope embracing the little boy, Alfred,
08:27investing him with the belt of a Roman consul
08:30and adopting him as his spiritual son.
08:33For Alfred, it was an unforgettable moment.
08:40Alfred later claimed the Pope had hallowed him as king.
08:45That was just hindsight.
08:48But he came to see it as a mark of destiny.
08:53Alfred's personality, like all personalities,
08:56it was formed in his childhood.
08:59And I think there are two things that I would stress particularly
09:03about his childhood which I think were formative.
09:06And one was not just one, but two visits to Rome,
09:11which he made with his father.
09:14The other was on his way back from Rome.
09:19His father remarried a Frankish princess, a Carolingian princess.
09:28Alfred, at this point, was eight, and she was 12.
09:34The relationship between those two,
09:36although it only lasted for four or five years,
09:39must have been a close one.
09:42Because they were at the court and they both had a very strong sense
09:46of belonging to a dynasty, of embodying a dynasty.
09:50She was the great-granddaughter of Charlemagne,
09:54and he was the youngest son of a king
09:58whose dynasty went back far beyond that of the Carolingians.
10:06The young boy grew up in a world torn by war.
10:11The old patchwork of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms,
10:14the Northumbrians and Mercians, West Saxons and East Angles,
10:19had already been shaken by Viking attacks,
10:22and in Alfred's youth, the map of England began to change forever.
10:30The story of the Viking Wars is told in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
10:36There are several different versions,
10:38but the key one was written in Alfred's reign and maybe under his direction.
10:43It's now in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,
10:47after the British Library,
10:49the greatest collection of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.
10:54Here, saved from the vandalism of the Reformation,
10:58are the records of our medieval ancestors' efforts
11:01to make a Christian civilisation.
11:05In savage times.
11:09And among them is the single most important source for English history.
11:15Compiled in the 1890s, early 1890s,
11:19probably in the court of Alfred the Great,
11:22and it takes us through English history,
11:25the peoples of Anglo-Saxon England,
11:28first in quite short notes,
11:30and then much more detailed accounts
11:34coming into the present day in the Viking Wars.
11:40This fateful sense of the momentum of events.
11:43Take this, 855.
11:51The first time that the heathens, the Viking armies,
11:54actually spent the whole winter in England.
11:57That's a landmark.
11:58And very soon, of course, those ancient kingdoms,
12:00the Northumbrians and the East Angles, would be destroyed.
12:03Their royal families exterminated.
12:06Mercia would be dismembered.
12:08Wessex very soon would stand alone.
12:11And that's the theme of the narrative, really.
12:13It's almost as if the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, this version of it,
12:17has been produced to be disseminated to show the peoples of England
12:21that they have a common history and a common destiny,
12:25and that resistance against the Vikings is the way forward.
12:32And, of course, that the West Saxon kings, Alfred and his line,
12:37will be the true inheritors of that history.
12:46Late in 870, the King of the East Angles
12:49was defeated and killed by the Danes.
12:52The scene was set for a full-scale attack on Wessex.
13:12The date the Vikings chose was the middle of the Christmas holidays.
13:17The Vikings studied the Christian calendar.
13:21They often make their big attacks on church festivals,
13:24and Christmas was a favourite.
13:26They came here late December to construct a typical Viking base
13:30between the two rivers, protected on all sides.
13:37Reading will be the centre for their attack on Wessex itself.
13:41It was the beginning of a deadly game of cat and mouse.
13:45On 1st January, the English defeated a Viking probe west of Reading.
13:50On January 4th, King Æthelred and his brother Alfred
13:53launched a frontal attack on the Reading defences, but were defeated.
13:58Driven across the Thames at Twyford, they regrouped to the west.
14:03And there, on 8th January, the Viking army attacked them...
14:08on Ashdown.
14:11The site of the Battle of Ashdown has never been found,
14:15but it must have been on the main east-west route, the Great Ridgeway.
14:20According to Bishop Asser,
14:22the heaviest fighting was around a single thorn tree,
14:26and that must be the local meeting place, known later as the Naked Thorn.
14:35Up on the ridgeway, where five tracks met.
14:40Alfred himself later told the tale to Bishop Asser,
14:44with a vivid insight into his character.
14:49So, the English army had camped in front of us the previous night on these fields.
14:56And early in the morning, the Danish army comes on that ridge over the horizon
15:00in full battle array in two great divisions.
15:05But at this moment, Æthelred is still in his tent,
15:08performing the morning mass with his priests,
15:11and he refuses to come out until the rituals are complete.
15:16For Alfred, though, this is a critical moment.
15:19We either retreat, or we go forward.
15:22And Asser says, then, without any hesitation,
15:25Alfred gave the order for the attack.
15:29And he went for the Viking army like a wild boar.
15:42Eventually, the Viking line was broken.
15:58Their bodies were strewn all over the breadth of Ashtar, says the chronicle,
16:02and we chased them back to Reading.
16:06Alfred would remember the dramatic events of this year
16:10as his year of battles, nine major battles,
16:14countless forays and expeditions, he remembered later,
16:18through which the untested young warrior would emerge,
16:22not only as king, but as a born leader.
16:30That April, King Æthelred died.
16:33All four of Alfred's brothers were gone,
16:36and at 22, he became king.
16:43There were more battles that year.
16:45The people were worn out by the constant fighting.
16:48Wracked by ill health, it was long odds on Alfred even staying alive.
16:52He could only pay the Vikings off.
16:55And the Viking line was broken.
16:58By the time he was alive, he could only pay the Vikings off.
17:02And by time.
17:18But in Northumbria and the East Midlands,
17:21Alfred's world was about to change dramatically.
17:25The great heathen army had divided into three,
17:29and the main force moved to Repton in Derbyshire.
17:35A great view from up here of the landscape of Repton.
17:39You can see the River Trent over there in the middle distance,
17:42and the old track of the Trent right down there behind the trees.
17:47It was here that the Viking great army,
17:50the Mikkelherra, as the Anglo-Saxons called it,
17:53came here in the winter of 873-4,
17:56and they dug a great defensive earthwork round their camp here,
18:00anchored on the river at both ends,
18:02with the church here in the middle of the defences.
18:16Then, the chronicle says, they shared out the land
18:19and began to plough and make a living.
18:22And still today, their names, Slager the Sly, Blood the Blade,
18:28can be read on our village signs.
18:31Vikings putting down roots,
18:34staking their claim to their part of England.
18:40The news of those developments in the Midlands and East Anglia and Northumbria,
18:44the idea that the great heathen army were actually taking the land,
18:49settling, beginning to plough, forming their own kingdoms,
18:54must have been deeply disturbing.
18:56The whole geopolitical map, if I can put it that way,
18:59of Anglo-Saxon England was shifting,
19:02maybe permanently before their eyes.
19:05Then, the remaining section of the great army turned on Wessex.
19:19To Chippenhamme.
19:23And Jeridon, Wessex, the land, and Jessaton,
19:26and Mitchell, those vultures, oversaw a draught.
19:31And those others, from the mast and dahl here, Jeridon,
19:35and him too, Jethirdon.
19:38Buton, some king of Alfred.
19:42And he...
19:52Caught off guard, Alfred fled into the marshes of Somerset.
19:59There, in the freezing new year of 878,
20:03he survived by hit-and-run raids.
20:06All was moving from place to place
20:09in a landscape he'd known from his youth.
20:14Here, at least, he would be safe.
20:28Our most famous story about him comes from this time,
20:31how he stayed with a peasant woman and burnt the bread in her oven.
20:36Her cakes.
20:40It's a fable, perhaps, but easy to imagine in a guerrilla war,
20:46when the resistance depended for food on the local people.
20:53People used to eat all the birds, ducks, the swans.
20:58So those stories that they didn't have much to eat are probably true.
21:02If you caught a duck, you'd be well fed, yes.
21:05It's catching it as well, really.
21:07Cos they can fly a lot faster than you can walk through this.
21:11It'd be a harsh life to live out here, I think,
21:14if you didn't have a home to go to.
21:20And the water supply? What would the water be like here?
21:23It's not pleasant. It's black most of the time.
21:26You'd probably boil it to drink it.
21:29You don't want to be falling in it, either,
21:31cos it's wet and sticky and muddy and deep.
21:35But there's one story about that time that emerged within living memory.
21:41One day, Alfred, here in the woods,
21:44met a wandering hermit, a poor pilgrim,
21:48and Alfred shared with him the tiny amount of food that he'd got left.
21:53And the pilgrim blessed him and then went on his way.
21:57And that afternoon, Alfred and his wife,
22:01And that afternoon, Alfred and his men
22:03made an almost miraculous catch of fish in one of the lakes here.
22:07So for the first time in days, they ate well.
22:17That night, the pilgrim appeared to Alfred in his dreams.
22:23It's St Cuthbert himself.
22:25He told Alfred,
22:27Don't lose courage. You will triumph in the end,
22:30and your descendants will be rulers of all England.
22:40In such divinely sent dreams, medieval people saw the future.
22:49And from that moment, Alfred began to create his own myth of destiny.
22:57THE MYTH OF DESTINY
23:05And that was the first time that King Alfred had created his own myth of destiny.
23:13In the spring, Alfred's fight back began.
23:16Around Easter, the 23rd of March,
23:19they built a fort on an island in the marshes,
23:22a place called Athelni.
23:24From up here on Lyng Church,
23:26you can really get an idea of the layout of the land in 878.
23:32Surrounded by marshes, of course,
23:34and the borough itself, the fortress, over here.
23:39You're looking down on the Alfredian Burg of Lyng.
23:44If you just look to the end of the village there,
23:46you can see the causeway snaking out past that last house.
23:51That's where Alfred's fortress of Athelni was,
23:54joined to the fortress of Lyng by a causeway or a bridge.
24:00This is the place from where Alfred launched the Salvation of Wessex,
24:04and, if it's not too dramatic to say so, of England.
24:13According to Asser, Athelni was surrounded by swamp on every side.
24:18You can't reach it, he said, except by punts
24:21or along the causeway from Lyng.
24:24You see Lyng Church over there?
24:27Small hill, Athelni, maybe 400 or 500 yards long.
24:31Alfred's fort, probably at that end,
24:34where there were the remains of Iron Age defences, ditches and mounds,
24:38and the monastery he built in thanksgiving for his victory on this spot,
24:43where they built the monument a couple of hundred years ago.
24:46But it was from here that Bishop Asser says
24:48Alfred was able then, after Easter,
24:51to mount his attacks against the pagan army.
24:55And archaeology here has turned up a few details of what was happening then,
25:00especially slag from furnaces.
25:03Alfred and his warriors were perhaps day and night
25:07forging weapons ready for the coming climax to the war.
25:12A Saxon sword would have three twist left hand
25:17and three twist right hand.
25:22Sword blades, spears, chain mail.
25:27War gear good enough to take on battle-hardened Vikings.
25:32Come on!
25:33It's rather magical, isn't it?
26:01It was as if he'd risen from the dead, said Asa.
26:09They made their last camp at Eile Oak near Warminster, protected by an old earthwork.
26:22Jenny and Mike Dunford know the site, and here it is, hidden in a plantation of monkey
26:34puzzle trees.
26:35Oh, look, there's a ditch here.
26:36This is what we were referring to.
26:37Oh, fantastic.
26:38Look at this.
26:39Is this the mound that you were talking about?
26:40It is, exactly, yes.
26:41A circular earthwork.
26:42Can you see it?
26:43It curves around there.
26:44This is exactly where the famous oak tree was.
26:56Here they prepared themselves for battle.
26:58Oh, that's great.
27:01The last survivor of the oaks of...
27:03Looks like it.
27:04...of Eile Wood.
27:06Confessing their sins, praying before the holy relics carried by Alfred's mass priests.
27:14Runs all the way round.
27:15And then they took their last instructions from the king and his marshal, Edgewolf.
27:20Isn't that...
27:21That's brilliant.
27:22Yeah.
27:23Excellent.
27:24The highest point looks over here.
27:25It always pays to go on the ground, doesn't it?
27:29Perhaps they stood to arms all night, ready to move before dawn, maybe 3,000 or 4,000
27:34men with their horses.
27:38The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Asser both say this was the place that they spent that last
27:45night.
27:46And then at dawn, they rose and they went to a place called Eddington.
28:06Alfred's scouts had reported that the main Viking army under King Guthrum had moved to
28:11Eddington under Salisbury Plain.
28:13And there, at first light, he attacked them.
28:20There was a royal estate down there, an Anglo-Saxon royal estate, with a great wooden hall, stables,
28:27barns, outbuildings, maybe even flocks of sheep, as there still are.
28:32That's why Guthrum and the Danes had made this their forward base in the campaign.
28:39Alfred brings his forces under the escarpment of the plain there and makes his attack across
28:44these fields, along the line of those telegraph poles running out into the field.
28:55Asser says Alfred fought the battle at Trochita, atrociously, ferociously.
29:01Nothing romantic about these Viking Age battles.
29:03It was brutal stuff, toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball.
29:09Stabbing and slashing.
29:11And Asser says Alfred had to hang in there, tenaciously persevering for a long time, before
29:17with God's will, he won the victory, and there, destroyed the pagan army with great slaughter.
29:26Alfred pursued the survivors back to Chippenham, and two weeks later, they surrendered.
29:55And then, Alfred started what can only be called the peace process.
30:01About the 15th of June, King Guthrum and 30 of the best men of his army came here to meet
30:07King Alfred at Aller, and received Christian baptism.
30:15Asser says something very interesting about this.
30:16He says that King Alfred had been moved by fellow feeling, by compassion for his enemies,
30:25as he always was.
30:28Guthrum was received from the front by Alfred as his foster son, and with that moment, the
30:33relations between the Vikings and the English took a whole new path.
30:43What to me is interesting about the Vikings, as they're usually called, is that they're
30:48so often portrayed as violent and aggressive and destructive.
30:54All those aspects were true, which isn't to say that the West Saxons themselves weren't
30:59pretty violent and destructive on occasion, but what the Scandinavians wanted was to buy
31:06into European culture.
31:10Very soon, they began to settle, and they needed to integrate.
31:25The best way was conversion, adopting all the characteristics of Christian culture,
31:30which is really about organising your life, your personal life and your social life, about
31:35the rules that Christianity preached.
31:42Alfred honours Guthrum.
31:53That's laying a template for how he thinks relations with the Vikings will go.
31:58Yes.
31:59Catholicism literally integrated the Danish warlord, Chief Guthrum, into the family of
32:06Alfred, because Alfred was his godfather.
32:19For 12 nights, the chronicle says, the king feasted Guthrum and his 30 worthiest men,
32:28and he greatly honoured them and gave them rich gifts.
32:34It's an extraordinary way to end what had been a savagely fought war, in which the very
32:41existence of the kingdom of Wessex had hung in the balance.
32:44But it's going to be typical of the way Alfred operates.
32:49It's his idea of politics, of peacemaking, with this enemy who he knows by now will not
32:56go away in English history.
33:00And in 886, the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, amid all the detail of the campaigns, has a line
33:08that it would be very easy to miss, but which is very significant in the story.
33:14And it's this, all the English people acknowledged Alfred as their king, except those who were
33:24still under the rule of the Danes, in the north and the east.
33:33Anglekin, the English kin.
33:38Long ago, Bede had given the Anglo-Saxons this idea that there was one English people,
33:43one gens anglorum.
33:48Here, Alfred is claiming to speak for them.
33:55This alone would make him one of our most remarkable rulers, but it's what follows
34:02that raises him to the ranks of true greatness.
34:06First, Alfred secured his kingdom with a network of forts, burghs.
34:14It's the beginning of English towns.
34:16They were much, much more than merely forts, which is what the written sources would give
34:20us to believe.
34:23They were really designed to develop, and within them, people were doing all sorts of
34:29things.
34:30There were merchants, traders, craftspeople.
34:33So they were really complicated places.
34:36So Alfred is setting out to transform society.
34:40It's hard to believe that he didn't have some vision to that effect, that when he established
34:45these places, they were not urban.
34:47They were not, they wouldn't have looked particularly urban.
34:49It took a long time.
34:52That was part of his vision, to establish a framework within which urbanization could
34:57develop.
34:58Of course, these places were fortified places, but it also meant that they were safe places
35:03within which to transact business.
35:07And of course, you can see that not only within the burghs themselves, but in the way in which
35:11the countryside around the burghs is being exploited and organized.
35:17Burghs must have depended on the countryside.
35:24They had to be supported in some way.
35:28And the whole burgh system, I think, depended on food producers from outside the burghs
35:32sustaining and supporting life in those towns.
35:37That does imply some sort of major reorganization.
35:40How you plough your fields, how you manure your fields, all this sort of stuff, it suggests
35:46intensification.
35:47I don't think we can understand the burghs and what made them work, what made them tick,
35:53without thinking about the rural hinterland and without thinking about the vision that
35:58enabled surplus production in the countryside to sustain the burghs.
36:07So when Asser says that a lot of people didn't like what Alfred was doing, they resisted
36:15these military burdens.
36:17Well, there are military burdens, but clearly the implication is also other sorts of burdens.
36:22If you're going to sustain permanent garrisons, men fighting men who are not going to be farmers,
36:29who are not going to be producing food, you need to organize the countryside in a new
36:33way in order to make that work.
36:36A very demanding boss, I would imagine, wouldn't you?
36:38A bit of a control freak, perhaps, wanting to make sure that he's everywhere at once
36:43and able to oversee what's going on.
36:45A very smart guy, a guy with a vision.
36:52But Alfred's ambitions went beyond Wessex.
36:56His 16-year-old daughter, Æthelflid, had married Æthelred, the Lord of Mercia, and
37:01Alfred was accepted as ruler of both kingdoms, king of the Anglo-Saxons.
37:08And in 886, with his son-in-law, he embarked on his biggest urban project, the restoration
37:15of the Mercian city of Lundenburg.
37:32Alfred occupied, laid out, re-founded, difficult word to translate, yes, London.
37:45It's a key moment in the story of the city.
37:49It's destined to be the richest city in Britain, even by the end of the 10th century.
37:54And the amazing thing is, what Alfred actually did on the ground, can still be seen if you
38:04go down to the Lunden waterfront today.
38:14There, look at that.
38:16This 18th-century map here gives you a fantastic idea, much better than the modern A to Z of
38:24the Anglo-Saxon layout, the re-planning of the city.
38:31This is where the Anglo-Saxons created the, well, the original wharves of London that
38:36we know today.
38:37Billingsgate there, the old fish market.
38:41Billing is an Anglo-Saxon name.
38:44Who Billing was, we don't know.
38:45Maybe a 9th-century mover and shaker.
38:49You can see the line of the Anglo-Saxon lanes coming down, the remains of Anglo-Saxon city
38:55churches there and the Great Fire Monument.
39:00The jetties coming out into the river and a host of ships in the Middle Ages, little
39:05wooden ships ferrying produce across from the continent and back.
39:12All these little lanes coming down to the wharves.
39:16All hallows, Steelyard, Dowgate is Anglo-Saxon, and Queen Hive, the one wharf of the medieval
39:26world that still survives.
39:28Can you see the Shingley Beach running up to the modern buildings?
39:46There's Queen Hive from the landward side, the last Anglo-Saxon wharf of London.
40:01In the 880s, when Alfred re-planned the city, as we saw in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it
40:06was called Ethelred's Hive, presumably Alfred's son-in-law, the Earl of Mercia, and it's a
40:13great place to actually see what that re-planning meant.
40:21To build up the trading shore, the Ripa Emptoralis, they did what the Victorians and later generations
40:28did, which is to drive great wooden piles into the beach, you can see there, on which
40:32they erected the jetties.
40:35If you want one place which can stand for the medieval origins of the city of London,
40:41and indeed the origins of London's pre-eminence in our national life from then until now,
40:49it's here.
40:53But for towns and trade to flourish, people not only need security, they must be able
41:03to trust the currency.
41:06The Anglo-Saxon coinage had been debased in the Viking Wars.
41:12So Alfred and his advisers not only had to build towns, they had to plan the economy.
41:20Around about the middle of the 870s, when things are looking very bleak from a military
41:24and political point of view, he changes the coinage quite dramatically.
41:30We go from a very debased coinage, in which each coin contains only about 10% silver,
41:37to one in which they are extremely pure, 90% pure or higher.
41:43He starts off inheriting this system from his brother and the Mercian kings, in which
41:50Alfred too makes lunette pennies.
41:53And these are really a coinage of crisis.
41:56The quality of the silver has dropped dramatically.
42:00These coins contain about 10 or 20% silver each.
42:04So they're trying to eke out a smaller amount of silver and make more and more coins, presumably
42:09to pay more and more men to fight more and more Vikings.
42:13And what does Alfred do in those first years then, Rory?
42:15I mean, does he, you talk about low silver content and all this, does he work to improve
42:20fineness, design, all those sort of things?
42:24He most certainly does, yes.
42:26This is known as the cross and lozenge coinage, very pure.
42:29The design is completely different.
42:31On the obverse, the bust of the king, surrounded by his title, Alfred Rex.
42:37And then on the reverse, we have a beautiful cross, surrounded by the name of the man who
42:43made the coin.
42:44And this was the standard at this time.
42:46Most all of these coins named the man who was responsible for making it.
42:51Respect of the coinage is respect of the king's authority.
42:54So there are very strict regulations against forgery, against adulteration of the coinage.
43:00One of the aims of reforming the coinage was to stop that.
43:03Oh, gosh, you can actually see the, um, you can see the silver almost in that thing.
43:12Yes.
43:13And this is minted in southern England, is it?
43:16It is, almost certainly in London, with a Roman-style monogram that carries, that contains
43:22letters Londonia.
43:23Oh, that is absolutely wonderful, isn't it?
43:27Reminds me of those late Roman coins for Constantinople, when you've got a C-O-N, and this is an L-O-N,
43:32isn't it?
43:33Precisely, yes.
43:34You know.
43:35This is, this is entirely intended to show off Alfred's control of London and its importance
43:40within the kingdom as a whole.
43:53But Alfred's dream went further still.
43:56Though he'd only learned to read and write in middle age, he hoped to rebuild English
44:00culture, or, as he would say, restore wisdom.
44:06Alfred combined a deep spirituality and a high degree of intellectual curiosity with
44:13great practical wisdom.
44:19And designing his own clock was absolutely symptomatic of that.
44:27He was multi-talented and multi-skilled, I think so.
44:30That's why he drew so many different talents to his court.
44:34It was a court of many talents.
44:38Alfred knew that there were scholars on the continent, Carolingian scholars, the world
44:43that his stepmother had come from, and that they were well-versed in Christian Latin texts
44:53and had written commentaries on them to help to explain them to new Christians in a different
44:59kind of setup.
45:02Alfred embarked on a program of translations and contributed very significantly to them
45:08himself.
45:10His experience of interpolating his own interpretations, his own additions to these texts, is a way
45:21into his mind.
45:23I have often thought about what wisdom there was in England, he said, before everything
45:31was ravaged and burnt.
45:35When I became king, education had so completely collapsed that very few people could translate
45:41a letter from Latin into English.
45:46So it seems best to me that we should translate the books which are most needful for all men
45:53to know into the language we can all understand.
45:59I began to translate those books from Latin into English.
46:05With the help of my mass priests and my Bishop Asser, sometimes word for word, sometimes
46:13sense for sense.
46:15There we go.
46:25There are annotations which were clearly made in southwestern England or perhaps in Wales.
46:33There are three different hands which have been identified, which are insular hands,
46:38meaning they're, I guess you would say, British hands.
46:43But the one which wrote most of the comments of the three insular hands clearly belonged
46:50to a Welsh scribe, late ninth or early tenth century, so again about the time of King Alfred.
46:58The later scholar specifically says that Asser helped Alfred with his English version
47:04of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.
47:08So here you've got a Welsh hand and Welsh abbreviations.
47:12It's very clearly Welsh, yes.
47:14Well paleography always proceeds by comparing something that you know which is dated and
47:19identified clearly with something that you want to place somewhere.
47:25And in this case, the hand which wrote most of the insular commentary has been very closely
47:31compared with identified and dated hands which we know belong to Welsh scribes.
47:40You can wonder what the audience was for such a commentary.
47:44People who were perhaps learning Latin and who clearly needed this kind of guidance in
47:49order to understand the text.
47:54But Boethius is a sort of unusual text, perhaps, to choose from.
47:58It is rather odd, isn't it?
47:59It's not really an obviously Christian text, for that matter.
48:04The early Middle Ages are often thought of as bad time, a dark time, and it could be
48:09that the sort of dark worldview and the need for a consolation that comes out of this text
48:18and the sort of dark circumstances in which Boethius wrote it for his personal circumstances
48:24resonated with people in this time, which was rather difficult and dark, in fact.
48:37So here's Aser explaining to Alfred the Greek myth of the Furies.
48:43And these goddesses had no respect for any man, for any human,
48:55but punished each according to their deeds and are said to rule men's fate.
49:06In Alfred's life, by now, we've gone beyond matters of war and peace
49:11to the mystery of creative imagination itself.
49:19Augustine, Gregory the Great, Boethius, key texts of the Latin West,
49:26reimagined by the descendants of the barbarians.
49:32How our ancestors loved wisdom, he wrote, and they passed it on to us.
49:39Now we can still make out their footprints, but can we follow their track?
49:49One of the books most needful for people to know, as Alfred put it.
49:56And it's a world history, literally a world history.
50:00I mean, Persian Empire, the Babylonians, Alexander the Great, and the Roman Empire.
50:06But what they add to this account, what you couldn't have got
50:09from the classical historians and geographers, which
50:12is an account of the northern world, the Viking world.
50:20And he gets these from a Norwegian merchant called Ottere.
50:25Ottere said he slavored Alfred Kuinge.
50:29Ottere said he slavored Alfred Kuinge, that he elra northman and northmest bude.
50:39He quath that he bude on some land in northward with the west side.
50:46He deals in skins and hides.
50:51You can imagine Alfred and his courtiers sitting spellbound
50:54as they heard this story of the northern lights,
50:58the world up to the Arctic Circle.
51:15What Alfred did was to import continental scholars,
51:19and from Ireland, also from Wales.
51:24These people rubbed shoulders at court with their secular counterparts
51:31from these same places.
51:33So you can imagine quite significant groups of people in lay life
51:40and in religious life gathered around Alfred.
51:50From that first visit to Rome, he'd always had a vision of a wider world.
51:57A kind of European culture, which was a Christian culture,
52:01but also a deeply classical culture, was being created.
52:08Bishops, the aldermen, and even people below that level, I think,
52:13were being encouraged to read, or listen to, at least,
52:17works in Old English.
52:21And with them, Alfred gave other gifts.
52:25Small-scale, but precious as badges,
52:28signs of a relationship between them and the giver, Alfred.
52:35Hot hat. Brought the jewel.
52:37I have, indeed.
52:39Oh, fantastic. Let's just have a look at this.
52:43Tremendous.
52:47That is gorgeous, isn't it?
52:50Gorgeous. It's got this inscription round it, hasn't it?
52:52Yes.
52:53ALFRED MECH HET YEWIRCAN
52:57Alfred ordered me to be made.
53:00And found close to Athelne.
53:01So this is as personal a piece from his time as you could imagine, isn't it?
53:07And anybody know what the figure is? Do you know?
53:11There's lots of speculation.
53:13Some people say it's Christ.
53:15Right, yeah.
53:16And the figure of wisdom, I've heard,
53:18which would be quite suitable for Alfred, wouldn't it?
53:21Well, yes, he was a scholar.
53:22Do we know what it was used for?
53:24There's a sort of prongy thing for a...
53:26Well, I think it was used as a pointer,
53:30and it would have either had a pointer of ivory or ebony,
53:36and he would use it to point when he was teaching.
53:40Lovely.
53:41But in our window, he's wearing it in his crown.
53:44That's a bit of artistic licence, I think.
53:47So why's the village got this?
53:50Well, it was found in Newton Park.
53:53The original was given to the Ashmolean, of course.
53:56Back then, yeah.
53:57But lovely that East Ling has got...
53:59Oh, we've got a copy.
54:00..has got that, hasn't it?
54:02But we do guard it very jealously.
54:04Look at this lovely...
54:06..floral ornament on the back there.
54:09I think it's wonderful.
54:11We think we're clever.
54:13Yes, yeah, the workmanship's beautiful, isn't it?
54:16Absolutely.
54:17He's giving these books,
54:21which are of the translations that he does,
54:25and, of course, his immense amount of wealth and effort
54:28and skill has gone into the making of the books.
54:31It's a very, very valuable gift, you know.
54:33He's giving these to his main monasteries
54:36and he's giving with them a beautiful,
54:40hostile, jewelled pointer,
54:43which you'd use for following the lines of the manuscript
54:47as you were reading it,
54:49with this personal note on saying,
54:52Alfred ordered me to be made.
54:54This is always a reminder of who gave this book
54:57and its pointer.
54:59And surely he would have given one of these
55:02and there would have been a few of them made
55:05by his goldsmiths at court.
55:07He would have given one of them to Athelny,
55:10which was the monastery that meant most to him.
55:13And by miracle, it was found.
55:17Yes.
55:18And has survived.
55:29Alfred had secured the survival
55:32of his kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons
55:35and he'd bequeathed his successors
55:38a dream of one England.
55:42He was still only in his late 40s,
55:45still wracked by illness,
55:49and he never stopped fighting.
55:52In the 890s, he fought his third war
55:55In the 890s, he fought his third war,
55:58four years of campaigning from Devon to Essex
56:01and up to the Welsh borders.
56:04One battle took place under the Heathrow flight path,
56:08a thorny island.
56:11For the English, war had become a way of life.
56:18This was the hardest time, says the chronicle,
56:21for we were ravaged too by plague
56:24and the best of the king's friends died then.
56:30Swithwulf, Bishop of Rochester.
56:35Chalmond, alderman in Kent.
56:40Edgewulf, the king's marshal.
56:45And I have only named the most distinguished.
56:48The loss of the wartime generation
56:51must have hit Alfred hard.
56:54He wasn't 50 yet, but battered, one imagines,
56:58by life, war, and bad health.
57:01It must have felt time for the next generation to come on.
57:10And at this point, he's still worrying away
57:13on his translation of the Old Testament,
57:16on his translation of the Constellation of Philosophy.
57:19It was obviously a text that meant a great deal to him.
57:22He'd already turned it into prose,
57:25but now he does a version in verse.
57:30And in working on it, he reflected on his own life.
57:36This is what he said.
57:39What I set out to do was to virtuously
57:43and justly administer the authority given to me
57:46and to do it with wisdom,
57:49for without wisdom, nothing is worthwhile.
57:55It's always been my desire to live honourably
57:58and to leave my descendants, my memory, in good works.
58:05For each man, according to the measure of his intelligence,
58:09must speak what he can speak.
58:13And do what he can do.
58:22Next in the story, Alfred's son, Edward the Elder,
58:26and his daughter, the Lady of the Mercians.
58:39The paradise state bed of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York
58:42will be on public display at Auckland Castle, County Durham
58:45from the 7th of August 2013.
58:48For details, go to www.aucklandcastle.org
58:51Next this evening here on BBC4 though,
58:54Peter and Dan Snow explore a 20th century battlefield
58:57on a trip to Stalingrad.
58:59Stay with us.