In the winter of 877,
the fate of England rested on the shoulders of one man...
MAN SPEAKS IN OLD ENGLISH
..that time the King wandered in great hardship
through the woods and fen fastnesses.
MAN CONTINUES IN OLD ENGLISH
There was no food except what they could find.
MAN CONTINUES IN OLD ENGLISH
All the King had left were his closest retainers,
for most of the English people had submitted to the Vikings.
The old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria
and the East Angles had been destroyed,
Mercia overrun, the monasteries plundered. The people lived in fear.
And that winter, a Viking army attacked the last English kingdom,
Wessex,
and the young King Alfred was forced to take refuge
here in the swamps of Somerset.
All he ruled now, a few acres of marsh.
But this is the moment out of which the chain of events will come
which will lead to the creation of the Kingdom of England.
The process will go through Alfred, his daughter Aethelflaed,
his son Edward and his grandson Athelstan.
They are among the most gifted of all the rulers in British history.
They will shape what we might almost call the deep bone structure
of England, the English state and Englishness itself.
Towns, shires, the monarchy, English law,
the origins of Parliament, English literature.
What an impact they will have on the future
history of the British Isles and of the world.
In their words and in the words of their contemporaries,
this is their story.
The tale of Alfred's wars with the Vikings
and the creation of the Kingdom of England by his children
and grandchildren is one of the great stories of British history.
But it is also a detective story,
for much of the evidence has been destroyed by time and war.
In telling the tale, we will be helped by experts from the world's
greatest Anglo-Saxon archive, the British Library.
Here is Alfred's will, his writings,
his thoughts on life and kingship.
Some of his works are only now being restored by cutting-edge science.
This is what a manuscript looks like when it's...
When it's been through the fire.
It looks like skin that has shrunk up together.
They were kind of in balls because of the fire,
because they had contracted.
Others are totally lost or known only through later copies.
My heart sinks each time you turn a page.
Alfred's biography, written by the Welsh bishop Asser, was destroyed
by fire in the 18th century and only survives in Tudor transcripts.
So here is a copy of Asser's chronicle.
So to piece Alfred's story together,
we will also need to explore burned fragments and later notebooks.
Alfred, King of the Anglo-Saxons.
The precious clues out of which a tale emerges not
just of violence and war, but of vision and creativity in dark times.
It faithfully reproduces the original Anglo-Saxon manuscript.
And the first key story in Alfred's life, Asser says, took place
not in England at all but in Rome.
In 853, when Alfred was about five,
his father, King Aethelwulf of Wessex, sent him to Rome.
IN OLD ENGLISH:
It was to be an inciting incident in his life.
Rome, for Alfred, was more than a pilgrimage.
You feel that it somehow gave him a map for his life.
As a man, he would lay the foundations of the English state,
but the England that Alfred dreamed was not insular.
It was tied to Europe and, above all, inspired by Rome.
By Roman civilisation, Roman Christianity and Latin culture.
In the old English quarter, close to the Vatican,
today's street names hark back to Alfred's day.
Sassia - the Saxons.
Borgo - the burh, the English word for town.
For 500 years, this is where English pilgrims stayed
and it is where Alfred came as a boy.
The highlight of his trip was an audience with the Pope.
Alfred must have walked open-mouthed.
And if you want to get a sense of the splendour that he
actually saw, just come and look inside.
The old Vatican was swept away in the age of Michelangelo,
but this is what it looked like,
the 5th-century church of Santa Maria Maggiore.
Here, in this glittering late-Roman basilica, you can imagine
the pilgrims from faraway Wessex.
Pope Leo blessed Alfred and gave the inquisitive
and impressionable boy the insignia of a Roman consul.
You can imagine the Pope embracing the little boy Alfred,
investing him with the belt of a Roman consul and adopting him
as his spiritual son.
For Alfred, it was an unforgettable moment.
Alfred later claimed the Pope had hallowed him as king.
That was just hindsight...
but he came to see it as a mark of destiny.
Alfred's personality, like all personalities,
it was formed in his childhood.
And I think there are two things that I would stress
particularly about his childhood
which I think were formative.
One was... Not just one, but two visits to Rome,
which he made with his father.
The other was on his way back from Rome.
His father remarried,
a Frankish princess, a Carolingian princess.
Alfred at this point was eight, and she was 12.
The relationship between those two,
although it only lasted for four or five years,
must have been a close one...
..because they were at the court and they both had a very strong
sense of belonging to a dynasty, of embodying a dynasty.
She was the great granddaughter of Charlemagne, and he was
the youngest son of a king whose dynasty went back far beyond that
of the Carolingians.
The young boy grew up in a world torn by war.
The old patchwork of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the Northumbrians
and Mercians, West Saxons
and East Angles had already been shaken by Viking attacks
and in Alfred's youth, the map of England began to change for ever.
The story of the Viking wars is told in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
There are several different versions, but the key one
was written in Alfred's reign and maybe under his direction.
It is now in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,
after the British Library,
the greatest collection of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.
Here, saved from the vandalism of the Reformation, are the records
of our medieval ancestors' efforts to make a Christian civilisation
in savage times.
And among them is the single most important source
for English history.
Compiled in the 890s, early 890s,
probably in the court of Alfred the Great,
and it takes us through
English history, the peoples of Anglo-Saxon England,
at first in quite short notes and then much more detailed accounts,
coming into the present day and the Viking wars.
This fateful sense of the momentum of events.
Take this, 855...
HE SPEAKS IN OLD ENGLISH
The first time that the heathens, the Viking armies,
actually spent the whole winter in England -
that's a landmark -
and very soon, of course, those ancient kingdoms - the Northumbrians
and the East Angles - would be destroyed,
their royal families exterminated.
Mercia would be dismembered.
Wessex very soon would stand alone.
And that is the theme of the narrative, really.
It's almost as if the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
this version of it, has been produced to be disseminated to show
the pupils of England that they have
a common history and a common destiny,
and that resistance against the Vikings is the way forward.
And, of course, that the West Saxon kings, Alfred and his line,
will be the true inheritors of that history.
Late in 870, the King of the East Angles was defeated
and killed by the Danes.
The scene was set for a full-scale attack on Wessex.
The date the Vikings chose was the middle of the Christmas holidays.
The Vikings studied the Christian calendar.
They often make their big attacks on church festivals,
and Christmas was a favourite.
They came here late December to construct a typical Viking base
between the two rivers, protected on all sides.
Reading will be the centre for their attack on Wessex itself.
It was the beginning of a deadly game of cat and mouse.
On January 1st, the English defeated a Viking probe west of Reading.
On January 4th, King Aethelred and his brother Alfred launched
a frontal attack on the Reading defences, but were defeated.
Driven across the Thames at Twyford, they regrouped to the west.
And there on January 8th,
the Viking army attacked them,
on Ashdown.
The site of the Battle of Ashdown has never been found, but it
must have been on the main east-west route, the Great Ridgeway.
According to Bishop Asser,
the heaviest fighting was around a single thorn tree
and that must be the local meeting place known later
as the Naked Thorn.
Up on the Ridgeway where five tracks met,
Alfred himself later told the tale to Bishop Asser
with a vivid insight into his character.
So the English army would have camped in front of us
the previous night on these fields.
And early in the morning, the Danish army comes on that ridge,
over the horizon in full battle array, in two great divisions.
But at this moment, Aethelred is still in his tent
performing the morning Mass with his priests
and he refuses to come out until the rituals are complete.
For Alfred, though, this is a critical moment.
"We either retreat or we go forward," and Asser says,
"Then, without any hesitation,
"Alfred gave the order for the attack."
And he went for the Viking army like a wild boar.
Eventually, the Viking line was broken.
"Their bodies were strewn all over the breadth of Ashdown,"
says the Chronicle, "and we chased them back to Reading."
Alfred would remember the dramatic events of this year
as his year of battles.
Nine major battles, countless forays
and expeditions, he remembered later, through which the untested
young warrior would emerge not only as King but as a born leader.
That April, King Aethelred died.
All four of Alfred's brothers were gone and at 22, he became King.
There will more battles that year.
The people were worn out by the constant fighting.
Wracked by ill-health, it was long odds on Alfred even staying alive.
He could only pay the Vikings off and buy time.
But in Northumbria and the East Midlands, Alfred's world
was about to change dramatically.
The Great Heathen Army had divided into three
and the main force moved to Repton in Derbyshire.
Great view from up here of the landscape of Repton.
You can see the River Trent over there in the middle distance
and the old track of the Trent right down there behind the trees.
It was here that the Viking great army - the mycel here,
as the Anglo-Saxons called it - came in the winter of 873 to 874.
And they dug a great defensive earthwork round their camp here,
anchored on the river at both ends, with the church here
in the middle of the defences.
Then the Chronicle says they shared out the land
and began to plough and make a living.
And still today, their names - Sloegr the Sly, Blood the Blade -
can be read on our village signs.
Vikings putting down roots,
staking their claim to their part of England.
The news of those developments in the Midlands and East Anglia
and Northumbria, the idea that the Great Heathen Army were actually
taking the land, settling, beginning to plough,
forming there own kingdoms, must have been deeply disturbing.
The whole geopolitical map, if I can put it that way,
of Anglo-Saxon England was shifting, maybe permanently,
before their eyes.
Then the remaining section of The Great Army turned on Wessex.
Caught off guard, Alfred fled into the marshes of Somerset.
There, in the freezing New Year of 878,
he survived by hit-and-run raids,
always moving from place to place in a landscape
he'd known from his youth.
Here, at least, he would be safe.
Our most famous story about him comes from this time,
how he stayed with a peasant woman and burned the bread in her oven,
her cakes.
It's a fable, perhaps, but easy to imagine in a guerrilla war,
when the resistance depended for food on the local people.
People used to eat all the birds - the ducks, the swans.
So those stories that they didn't have much to eat are probably true?
If you caught a duck, you would be well fed, yes. Yes.
It's catching it as well, really!
Cos they can fly a lot faster than you can walk through this.
Be a harsh life to live out here, I think,
if you didn't have a home to go to. Yeah.
And the water supply? What would the water be like here?
It's not pleasant. It's black most of the time.
You'd probably boil it to drink it.
Yes, you don't want to be falling in it, either,
because it's wet and sticky and muddy and deep.
But there is one story about that time that emerged
within living memory.
One day, Alfred, here in the woods, met a wandering hermit,
a poor pilgrim, and Alfred shared with him
the tiny amount of food that he'd got left.
And the pilgrim blessed him and then went on his way.
And that afternoon,
Alfred and his men made an almost miraculous catch of fish
in one of the lakes here, so for the first time in days, they ate well.
# If maidens could sing
# Like lark birds...#
That night, the pilgrim appeared to Alfred in his dreams.
It's St Cuthbert himself. He told Alfred, "Don't lose courage.
"You will triumph in the end,
"and your descendants will be rulers of all England."
# ..Would hide in the bushes...#
In such divinely-sent dreams, medieval people saw the future.
And from that moment, Alfred began to create his own myth of destiny.
In the spring, Alfred's fight back began.
Around Easter, 23rd of March,
they built a fort on an island in the marshes,
a place called Athelney.
From up here on Lyng church, you can
really get an idea of the layout of the land in 878.
Surrounded by marshes, of course, and the burh itself,
the fortress over here.
You're looking down on the Alfredian burh of Lyng.
If you just look to the end of the village there, you can see
the causeway snaking out past that last house.
That's where Alfred's fortress of Athelney was,
joined to the fortress of Lyng by a causeway or a bridge.
This is the place from where Alfred launched the salvation of Wessex
and, if it's not too dramatic to say so, of England.
According to Asser, Athelney was surrounded by swamp on every side.
"You can't reach it," he said,
"except by punts, or along the causeway from Lyng."
Do you see Lyng church over there?
A small hill, Athelney, maybe four or 500 yards long.
Alfred's fort, probably, at that end,
where there were the remains of Iron-Age defences - ditches, mounds
and the monastery he built
in thanksgiving for his victory on this spot,
where they built the monument a couple of hundred years ago.
But it was from here that Bishop Asser says Alfred was able then,
after Easter, to mount his attacks against the pagan army.
Archaeology here has turned up a few details of what was happening then,
especially slag from furnaces.
Alfred and his warriors were, perhaps,
day and night forging weapons, ready for the coming climax to the war.
A Saxon sword would have three-twist left hand,
and three-twist right hand.
Sword blades, spears, chain mail.
War gear good enough to take on battle-hardened Vikings.
Come on! Good boy!
Oh, it's rather magical, isn't it?
' "It was as if he'd risen from the dead," said Asser. '
This is the main track, which we're about to start...
'They made their last camp at Iley Oak near Warminster,
'protected by an old earthwork.'
According to the map, my guess is it's not that much further,
is that right? No, next turn. Next turn left.
'Jenny and Mike Dunford know the site.
'And here it is...'
It's so unexpected, isn't it? Really weird.
'..hidden in a plantation of monkey puzzle trees.'
Oh, look. There's a ditch here. This is what we were referring to.
Just look at this. Is this the mound that you were talking...?
It is, exactly, yes. A circular earthwork. Can you see it?
It curves round there.
This is exactly where the famous oak tree was.
'Here they prepared themselves for battle...'
That's great.
The last survivor of the oaks... Looks like it. ..of Iley Wood.
'..confessing their sins, praying before the holy relics
'carried by Alfred's Mass priests.'
Runs all the way round.
'And then they took their last instructions from the King
'and his marshal, Edgewolf.'
That's brilliant, yeah.
Excellent. The highest point looks over here.
It always pays to go on the ground, doesn't it?
'Perhaps they stood to arms all night, ready to move before dawn.
'Maybe 3,000 or 4,000 men with their horses.'
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Asser both say this was
the place that they spent that last night,
and then at dawn, they rose and they went to a place called Edington.
HORSES GALLOP AND WHINNY
Alfred's scouts had reported that the main Viking army
under King Guthrum had moved to Edington, under Salisbury Plain.
And there, at first light, he attacked them.
There was a royal estate down there,
an Anglo-Saxon royal estate, with a great wooden hall, stables,
barns, outbuildings, maybe even flocks of sheep, as there still are.
That's why Guthrum and the Danes had made this their
forward base in the campaign.
Alfred brings his forces under the escarpment of the plain there
and makes his attack across these fields,
along the line of those telegraph poles running out into the field.
Asser says Alfred fought the battle atrociously, ferociously.
Nothing romantic about these Viking Age battles.
It was brutal stuff - toe to toe, eyeball to eyeball,
stabbing and slashing.
And Asser says Alfred had to hang in there tenaciously,
persevering for a long time before, with God's will, he won the victory,
and there destroyed the pagan army with great slaughter.
Alfred pursued the survivors back to Chippenham.
And two weeks later, they surrendered.
And then Alfred started what can only be called the peace process.
About 15th June, King Guthrum and 30 of the best men of his army
came here to meet King Alfred at Aller,
and received Christian baptism.
Asser says something very interesting about this.
He says that King Alfred had been moved by fellow feeling,
by compassion for his enemies, as he always was.
Guthrum was received from the font by Alfred as his foster son
and, with that moment, the relations between the Vikings
and the English took a whole new path.
What, to me, is interesting about the Vikings,
as they're usually called, is that they're so often portrayed
as violent and aggressive and destructive.
All those aspects were true, which isn't to say
that the West Saxons themselves weren't pretty violent
and destructive on occasion,
but what the Scandinavians wanted was to buy into European culture.
Very soon, they began to settle, and they needed to integrate.
The best way was conversion,
adopting all the characteristics of Christian culture,
which is really about organising your life -
your personal life and your social life -
about the rules that Christianity preached.
Alfred honours Guthrum.
That's laying a template for how he thinks relations with
the Vikings would go? Yes.
The baptism literally integrated the Danish warlord chief
Guthrum into the family of Alfred, because Alfred was his godfather.
For 12 nights, the Chronicle says,
the King feasted Guthrum and his 30 worthiest men,
and he greatly honoured them and gave them rich gifts.
It's an extraordinary way to end what had been a savagely fought war
in which the very existence of the Kingdom of Wessex
had hung in the balance,
but it's going to be typical of the way Alfred operates.
It's his idea of politics, of peacemaking with this enemy,
who he knows by now will not go away in English history.
And in 886, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
amid all the detail of the campaigns, has a line that it would
be very easy to miss, but which is very significant in the story.
And it's this.
"Eal Angelcynn" -
all the English people acknowledged Alfred as their king,
except those who were still under the rule of the Danes
in the north and the east.
Angelcynn - the English kin.
Long ago, Bede had given the Anglo-Saxons this idea
that there was one English people, one "gens Anglorum".
Here, Alfred is claiming to speak for them.
This alone would make him one of our most remarkable rulers,
but it's what follows that raises him to the ranks of true greatness.
First, Alfred secured his kingdom with a network of forts - "burhs".
It's the beginning of English towns.
They were much, much more than merely forts, which is what
the written sources would give us to believe.
They were really designed to develop, and, within them,
people were doing all sorts of things.
There were merchants, traders, craftspeople.
So they were really complicated places.
So Alfred is setting out to transform society?
It's hard to believe that he didn't have
some vision to that effect,
that when he established these places, they were not urban,
they wouldn't have looked particularly urban.
It took a long time.
That was part of his vision,
to establish a framework within which urbanisation could develop.
Of course, these places were fortified places, but it also
meant that they were safe places within which to transact business.
And, of course, you can see that not only within the burhs themselves,
but in the way in which the countryside around the burhs
is being exploited and organised.
Burhs must have depended on the countryside.
They had to be supported in some way.
And the whole burghal system, I think, depended on food producers
from outside the burhs sustaining and supporting life in those towns.
That does imply some sort of major reorganisation.
How you plough your fields, how you manure your fields,
all this sort of stuff.
It suggests intensification.
I don't think we can understand the burhs and what made them work,
what made them tick, without thinking about the rural hinterland,
and without thinking about the vision that enabled surplus production
in the countryside to sustain the burhs.
So when Asser says a lot of people didn't like what Alfred was doing,
they resisted these military burdens?
Well, they are military burdens but, clearly,
the implication is also other sorts of burdens.
If you're going to sustain permanent garrisons -
men, fighting men, who are not going to be farmers,
who are not going to be producing food -
you need to organise the countryside
in a new way in order to make that work.
A very demanding boss, I would imagine!
A bit of a control freak, perhaps, and wanting to make sure
that he's everywhere at once and able to oversee what's going on.
A very smart guy, a guy with a vision.
But Alfred's ambitions went beyond Wessex.
His 16-year-old daughter Aethelflaed had married Aethelred,
the Lord of Murcia,
and Alfred was accepted as ruler of both kingdoms -
King of the Anglo-Saxons.
And in 886, with his son-in-law,
he embarked on his biggest urban project -
the restoration of the Mercian city of Lundenburh.
Alfred occupied,
laid out,
refounded - a difficult word to translate -
London.
It's a key moment in the story of the city.
It's destined to be the richest city in Britain,
even by the end of the 10th century.
And the amazing thing is, what Alfred actually did on the ground
can still be seen if you go down to the London waterfront today.
There, look at that!
This 18th-century map here gives you a fantastic idea, much better than
the modern A to Z, of the Anglo-Saxon layout,
the replanning of the city.
This is where the Anglo-Saxons created the, well,
the original wharves of London that we know today.
Billingsgate, there, the old fish market.
"Billing" is an Anglo-Saxon name. Who Billing was, we don't know.
Maybe a 9th-century mover and shaker.
You can see the line of the Anglo-Saxon lanes coming down,
the names of Anglo-Saxon city churches, there,
and the Great Fire Monument.
The jetties coming out into the river,
and a host of ships in the Middle Ages,
little wooden ships ferrying produce across from the Continent and back.
All these little lanes coming down to the wharves.
All Hallows, Steel Yard, Dowgate, it's Anglo-Saxon.
And Queen Hith -
the one wharf of the medieval world that still survives.
Can you see the shingly beach running up to the modern buildings?
There's Queen Hith from the landward side,
the last Anglo-Saxon wharf of London.
In the 880s, when Alfred replanned the city,
as we saw in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
it was called Aethelred's Hith,
presumably Alfred's son-in-law, the Earl of Mercia.
And, er, it's a great place
to actually see what that replanning meant.
To build up the trading shore - ripa emptoralis -
they did what the Victorians and later generations did,
which is to drive great wooden piles into the beach,
you can see there, on which they erected the jetties.
If you want one place which can stand
for the medieval origins of the city of London,
and indeed the origins of London's pre-eminence in our national life,
from then until now,
it's here.
But for towns and trade to flourish...
..people not only need security...
..they must be able to trust the currency.
And the Anglo-Saxon coinage had been debased in the Viking wars.
So Alfred and his advisers not only had to build towns,
they had to plan the economy.
Around about the middle of the 870s, when things are looking very bleak
from a military and political point of view,
he changes the coinage quite dramatically.
We go from a very debased coinage,
in which each coin contains only about 10% silver,
to one in which they are extremely pure.
90% pure or higher.
He starts off inheriting this system
from his brother and the Mercian kings,
in which Alfred, too, makes lunette pennies
and these are really a coinage of crisis.
The quality of the silver has dropped dramatically.
These coins contain about 10 or 20% silver each,
so they're trying to eke out a smaller amount of silver
and make more and more coins, presumably to pay
more and more men to fight more and more Vikings.
And what does Alfred do in those first years, then, Rory?
I mean, does he...? Talk about low silver content.
Does he work to improve fineness, design, all those sorts of things?
He most certainly does, yes.
This is known as the cross-and-lozenge coinage.
Very pure.
The design is completely different.
On the obverse, the bust of the King surrounded by his title Aelfred Rex.
And then, on the reverse, we have a beautiful cross
surrounded by the name of the man who made the coin.
And this was the standard at this time.
Most all of these coins name the man who was responsible for making it.
METAL TAPS LOUDLY
Respect of the coinage is respect of the King's authority,
so there are very strict regulations against forgery,
against adulteration of the coinage.
One of the aims of reforming the coinage was to stop that.
Oh, gosh, you can actually see the, um...
You can see the silver, almost, in that. Yes.
And this is minted in southern England, is it?
It is, almost certainly in London.
With a Roman-style monogram that carries London...
That has letters LONDONIA.
Oh, that is absolutely wonderful, isn't it?
It reminds me of those late-Roman coins for Constantinople,
when you've got the C-O-N,
and then, this is an L-O-N, isn't it, you know? Precisely, yes.
This is entirely intended to show off Alfred's control of London
and its importance within the kingdom as a whole.
But Alfred's dream went further still.
Though he'd only learnt to read and write in middle age,
he hoped to rebuild English culture
or, as he would say, "restore wisdom".
DAME JINTY NELSON: Alfred combined a deep spirituality
and a high degree of intellectual curiosity
with great practical wisdom.
And designing his own clock was absolutely symptomatic of that.
He was multitalented and multiskilled, I think so.
That's why he drew so many different talents to his court.
It was a court of many talents.
BIG BEN STRIKES
Alfred knew that there were scholars on the Continent,
Carolingian scholars, the world that his stepmother had come from,
and that they were well-versed in Christian Latin texts.
And had written commentaries on them to help to explain them
to new Christians in a different kind of set up.
Alfred embarked on a programme of translations
and contributed very significantly to them himself.
His experience of, er, interpolating his own interpretations,
his own, um, additions to these texts,
is a way into his mind.
"I have often thought about what wisdom there was in England,"
he said, "before everything was ravaged and burnt.
"When I became King, education had so completely collapsed that
"very few people could translate a letter from Latin into English.
"So it seems best to me that we should translate the books
"which are most needful for all men to know
"into the language we can all understand.
"I began to translate those books
"from Latin into English with the help of my Mass priests
"and my bishop Asser,
"sometimes word for word,
"sometimes sense for sense."
THE LAST PART OF ALFRED'S QUOTE IS SPOKEN IN LATIN
There we go.
There are annotations,
which were clearly made in south-western England
or in perhaps in Wales.
There are three different hands which have been identified,
which are insular hands, meaning they're, er...
I guess you would say British hands. Yeah.
But the one which wrote most of the comments of the three insular hands,
er, clearly belonged to a Welsh scribe,
late 9th or early 10th century, so again about the time of King Alfred.
The later scholars specifically says that Asser helped Alfred with
his English version of Boethius' Consolation Of Philosophy. Yes.
So here, you've got a Welsh hand, and Welsh abbreviations...
It's very clearly, yes. They're Welsh, aren't they?
Well, palaeography always proceeds by comparing something that you know,
which is dated and identified clearly,
with something that you want to, er, place somewhere.
And in this case, the hand which wrote most of the insular commentary
has been very closely compared with identified and dated hands
which we know belonged to Welsh scribes.
You can wonder what the audience was for such a commentary.
People who were perhaps learning Latin and who clearly needed
this kind of guidance in order to understand the text.
But Boethius is a sort of unusual text perhaps to have chosen.
It is rather odd, isn't it?
It's not really an obvious, obviously Christian text for that matter.
The early Middle Ages are often thought of as bad time, a dark time,
and it could be that the, er, the sort of dark worldview,
and the need for consolation that comes out of this, this text
and the sort of dark circumstances in which Boethius wrote it,
for personal circumstances,
have resonated with people in this time,
er, which was rather difficult and dark, in fact.
'So here's Asser explaining to Alfred
'the Greek myth of the Furies.'
"Fearful goddesses...
"..and these goddesses had no respect for any man, for any human,
"but punished each according to their deeds
"and are said to rule men's fate."
In Alfred's life, by now, we've gone beyond matters of war and peace
to the mystery of creative imagination itself.
Augustine, Gregory the Great, Boethius,
key texts of the Latin west
re-imagined by the descendants of the barbarians.
"How our ancestors loved wisdom," he wrote,
"and they passed it on to us.
"Now we can still make out their footprints,
"but can we follow their track?"
One of the books most needful for people to know, as Alfred put it.
And it's a world history, literally a world history.
I mean, the Persian Empire, the Babylonians,
Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire.
But what they add to this account, what you couldn't have got
from the classical historians and geographers,
which is an account of the Northern world.
The Viking world.
And he gets these from a Norwegian merchant called Ohthere.
HE BEGINS TO RECITE THE TEXT IN NORWEGIAN
MALE VOICE CONTINUES
He deals in skins and hides.
You can imagine Alfred and his courtiers sitting spellbound
as they heard this story of the northern lights,
the world up to the Arctic Circle.
What Alfred did was to import Continental scholars...
and from Ireland, also from Wales.
These people rubbed shoulders at court
with their secular counterparts from these same places,
so you can imagine quite significant groups of people,
in lay life and in religious life, gathered around Alfred.
From that first visit to Rome,
he'd always had a vision of a wider world.
A kind of European culture, which was a Christian culture,
but also a deeply classical culture, um, was being created.
Bishops, ealdormen,
and even people below that level, I think, were being encouraged
to read or listen to at least works in Old English.
And with them, Alfred gave other gifts.
Small-scale, but precious as badges,
signs of a relationship between them and the giver Alfred.
Hi, Pat.
You've brought the jewel. I have, indeed. Great.
Oh, fantastic! Let's just have a look at this.
Tremendous!
That is gorgeous, isn't it?
Gorgeous! It's got this inscription around it, hasn't it? Yes.
HE READS THE INSCRIPTION IN OLD ENGLISH
"Alfred ordered me to be made."
And found close to Athelney, so this is as personal a piece
from his time as you could imagine, isn't it?
And anybody know what the figure is? Do you know?
There's lots of speculation. Really? Some people say it's Christ.
Right, yeah. And the figure of wisdom, I've heard,
which would be quite suitable for Alfred, wouldn't it?
Well, yes, he was a scholar. Do we know what it was used for?
There's a sort of prongy thing for a fitting here, isn't it?
Well, I think it was used as a pointer
and in that it would have either had, um, a pointer of ivory or ebony
and he would use it to point when he was teaching.
Lovely. But in our window, he's wearing it in his crown.
That's a bit of artistic licence, I think.
THEY LAUGH
So why has the village got this?
HE LAUGHS Well, it was found in Newton Park.
The original was given to the Ashmolean, of course, yes.
Back then, yeah. But lovely that East Lyng has... We've got a copy.
..has got that, isn't it? But we do guard it very jealously.
Look at this lovely...
..floral ornament on the back there. I think it's wonderful. Mm-hm.
We think WE'RE clever. HE LAUGHS
Yes, the workmanship's beautiful, isn't it? Absolutely. Yeah.
He's giving these, these books,
which are of the translations that he does,
and, of course, there's an immense amount of wealth
and effort and skill has gone into the making of the books.
So it's a very, very valuable gift, you know.
He's giving these to his main monasteries, er,
and he's giving with them
a beautiful jewelled pointer... Mm-hm. ..which you'd use
for following the lines of the manuscript as you were reading it.
Um, with this personal note on saying,
"Alfred ordered me to be made."
And this is always a reminder of who gave this book and its pointer
and surely he would have given one of these -
and there would've been
a few of them made by his goldsmiths at court -
he would have given one of them to Athelney,
which was the monastery that meant most to him, really,
and, by miracle, it was found... Yes. ..and has survived.
Alfred had secured the survival of his kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons
and he'd bequeathed his successors a dream of one England.
He was still only in his late forties,
still wracked by illness...
..and he never stopped fighting.
In the 890s, he fought his third war.
Four years of campaigning from Devon to Essex
and up to the Welsh borders.
One battle took place under the Heathrow flight path
at Thorney Island.
For the English, war had become a way of life.
"This was the hardest time," says the Chronicle,
"for we were ravaged, too, by plague
"and the best of the King's friends died then.
MALE VOICE RECITES IN OLD ENGLISH "..Swithulf, Bishop of Rochester...
MALE VOICE CONTINUES "..Ceolmund, ealdorman in Kent...
MALE VOICE CONTINUES "..and Edgewolf, the King's marshal.
"And I have only named the most distinguished."
The loss of the wartime generation must have hit Alfred hard.
He wasn't 50 yet, but...
battered, one imagines, by life, war and bad health.
It must have felt time for the next generation to come on.
THEY SING
And at this point, he's still worrying away
on his translation of The Consolation Of Philosophy.
It's obviously a text that meant a great deal to him.
He'd already turned it into prose.
But now he does a version in verse.
CHOIR CONTINUES
'And in working on it, he reflected on his own life.'
This is what he said.
"What I set out to do was to virtuously and justly
"administer the authority given to me
"and to do it with wisdom.
"For, without wisdom, nothing is worthwhile.
"It's always been my desire to live honourably
"and to leave my descendants my memory in good works.
"For each man, according to the measure of his intelligence,
"must speak what he can speak
"and do what he can do."
Next in the story, Alfred's son, Edward the Elder,
and his daughter the Lady of the Mercians.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd