The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great

by Benjamin R. Merkle

  After this lengthy preface, which underlined the king’s deep conviction that justice had been passed down from God to men and that it was the duty of law-givers to study Scripture, history, and the counsel of other men as they made their legislative decrees, Alfred finally listed his collection of one hundred twenty laws. (It is suspected that the total number of one hundred twenty laws was chosen to equal the age of Moses at his death, acknowledging once 200 more the biblical foundation for Alfred’s law code.) In this domboc, more than half of these decrees were actually collected from the law codes of previous Anglo-Saxon kings, primarily Ine, king of Wessex from AD 688 and AD 726. Alfred and his witan composed only the first forty three of the one hundred twenty laws.

  Thus it would seem that the publication of Alfred’s domboc signified great continuity with the legal traditions of the king’s predecessors. In actuality, this legal code constituted another of the king’s great innovations. The novelty of the king’s approach toward legal theory is often cited as one of the premiere justifications for the king’s unique sobriquet: “the Great.” By arguing throughout his preface that justice must be an eternal principle, handed down through both Scripture and the legal codes of the land, Alfred established the framework for what would later be known as “common law,” the foundation for the legal system of England for the following millennia, as well as for the legal systems of the former colonies of the British empire—including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Pakistan. Alfred was the first Saxon king to give such thought to the enduring nature of law. Ironically, it was just this innovation, this conscious attempt to understand the real source of all law, that drove the king to look for the precepts of his domboc that could reassure the king that his own legislation was consistent with the principles of justice that had been passed on by the healing Christ to the men of Middle-Earth.

  When the king of Wessex turned to listing the actual laws of the domboc, he began with the commandment he considered to be “most necessary” for every Anglo-Saxon man to keep, a law that proved to be fundamental to the preservation of English society: Alfred insisted that every Anglo-Saxon man keep his oaths and pledges. Instead of a prohibition of murder, treason, or some other heinous crime, the king saw oath-breaking as the greatest threat to the endurance of his kingdom. Although this prioritization of the keeping of oaths may seem strange to the modern mind, to the Anglo-Saxon it was clear that keeping one’s word stood at the foundation of a civilized society.

  To understand the significance of oath-keeping to the king of Wessex, one need only think back on the many times when the integrity and strength of Alfred’s shieldwall during the crushing combat depended on the faithfulness of the oaths that his thegns had pledged during those less-dangerous moments of feasting and boasting in the mead hall. Similarly, one can remember the habitual treachery of the pagan Vikings, whose unctuous pledges of peace were disregarded by the Danes within hours of making the pledge. It seemed to Alfred that oath-keeping truly was the virtue that most clearly distinguished a Christian nation from a pagan nation.

  The significance of a man being faithful to his word was not just apparent in confrontations with other nations; it was essential for preserving domestic peace as well. In the courts of Alfred’s day, guilt or innocence was not determined by the presentation of evidence and witnesses. Instead, the accused needed only to produce a certain number of “oath-helpers,” men willing to swear alongside the defendant that he was innocent of the charges brought against him. This may seem naïve, since it would seem easy for a guilty man to find several friends to come and swear an oath to his innocence. By giving so much weight to truthfulness in oath-making, however, Alfred helped to ensure that no man could break his oath without dire consequences. If a man was found to have sworn falsely, he would be ostracized from society, losing his right to weapons, to property, and even to testify to his own innocence in court. Thus, the men of Alfred’s day took great care to ensure that they did not make careless oaths or pledges.

  After his exhortations toward oath-keeping and his prescriptions of penalties for the oath-breakers, the king turned his legislative attentions to another pressing issue that constantly threatened to disrupt the domestic peace of any ninth-century Anglo-Saxon community: the thorny problem of revenge killings. Again, to the modern ear, this may sound like a rather obscure and arbitrary category of criminal activity to attract such focused attention from the king’s new domboc. However, the problem of protracted and bloody feuds had long plagued the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, a gruesome holdover from their own pagan ancestral customs.

  Reaching back centuries into the dark old Germanic origins of the Anglo-Saxon tribes, the English people had long assumed that the only reasonable way to ensure the safety of one’s own kith and kin was to wage an endlessly escalating campaign of vengeance for any harm done to one’s friends and family. Before the coming of Christianity to the Anglo-Saxon tribes at the end of the sixth century, if a young man’s father or brother was killed in a fight, it became desperately urgent that the young warrior seek out the murderer and hack out revenge for his family name, or die trying. Only an unloving and ungrateful son could watch his father slain by another without vowing then and there to dedicate all his energies to seeking out and slaughtering the killer of his kinsman. This obligation extended not only to the fathers, brothers, and sons of the dead, it also passed through the web of lord–thegn relationships.

  The bold oaths proclaimed in the raucous mead halls to stand by the lord in the place of slaughter, refusing to leave his side no matter how great the cost, were always accompanied by the additional boast that, if the lord should be struck down in combat, the faithful thegn would commit his sword and his own life to finding vengeance for his fallen lord. Additionally, the obligation to find revenge was mutually binding between the thegn and his master, meaning that the lord was also obligated to seek vengeance for his slaughtered thegns.

  Admittedly, in some ways this communal thirst for bloody revenge could be remarkably productive. First, it was certainly a deterrent to some would-be killers when they were struck by the realization that, in giving way to the momentary heat of anger and resorting to murderous violence, a man could arouse the wrath of an entire clan of Saxon warriors, together with the oath-bound lord and thegns. And second, since inclusion in the houses of great noblemen could afford such a tremendous protection by assuring that a man’s death would not go unavenged, it forced young Anglo-Saxon warriors to carefully guard their standing within these great houses, making them zealous to be true to their oaths and scrupulous in their faithfulness to their lord’s commands. A man cast out of the court of his lord, a man with no family or friends to avenge his blood should he be attacked, became completely vulnerable to the cruel medieval world.

  Unsurprisingly, the practice of seeking vengeance for every death, though it may have occasionally dissuaded some warriors from reckless slaughter, still led far too often to an ever-escalating feud, whose final bloody death toll was way out of proportion to the single initial murder that provoked the entire gruesome tragedy. A heated altercation would turn disastrously violent, leaving some poor wretch fatally wounded in the scuffle. His bereaved kinsmen would return later that evening to seek revenge and prove themselves to be true brothers. Of course, the man guilty of the crime would not be easily surrendered by his own faithful friends and family and a second skirmish would erupt, this time leaving dead on both sides. The unquenchable thirst for vengeance would now be rightly claimed by everyone involved, and the violence would continue until the demand for revenge was finally conquered, not by justice or forgiveness but by extermination of entire clans by this insatiable blood thirst.

  Seeing the destructive power of the endlessly escalating blood feuds, Alfred realized that something had to be done to curb them. However, in the Anglo-Saxon world, it was understood that the burden was on the victim or the kinsmen of the victim to take the initiative in seeking justice and recompense. T
he king and his noblemen, though eager to see justice done in the land, normally acted as moderators in these quarrels, not as prosecutors or policemen. Alfred did not want to eliminate entirely the impulse of the Anglo-Saxon men to seek retaliation for the wrongs done to them, since this impulse was the engine that powered the machinery of justice in the early medieval English world. So instead of outlawing the blood feuds entirely, his domboc looked for every opportunity to remove their dangerous potential to escalate into all-out warfare between various clans. Alfred exempted a man who fought to defend his own lord or kinsman in a wrongful attack from incurring a blood feud 205 during the combat. A man who killed another man for committing adultery with his wife was similarly exempt from incurring a blood feud for his bloodshed.

  Of course this only touched on a few of the many possible provocations that might launch a feud. To truly mitigate the bloodlust of the retaliating ethic, the king leaned heavily on the practice of replacing vengeful murder with the payment of wergild. The wergild or “man money” was a set price given for each man according to his rank, which was paid to the victim’s surviving family in recompense for a wrongful death. Thus, if a common freeman was killed in some argument that became violent, his killer could pay two hundred shillings to the surviving family members and avoid entirely the destructive blood feud that would have otherwise inevitably ensued.

  Alfred’s domboc described in detail exactly how the men seeking the recompense of wergild were to go about extracting it. After a wrongful death had occurred, an Anglo-Saxon “posse” would form and search out the accused. If the man was found in the street and, instead of running for safety, he turned to put up a fight, then the posse was free to strike him down in vengeance for his act of murder. If the fugitive turned and fled and was able to make it to his own house or to a consecrated church, then he was not to be touched. The revenge-seeking mob could stay outside for one week, ensuring that the accused did not sneak away. After the seven days, if the man had not come out to fight, then he must surrender his weapons and go peacefully to the house of his enemies, where he would be held for one month while his family gathered the prescribed wergild to make recompense for his crime. If a family felt they did not have the requisite strength to confront the man who had wronged them, they were free to ask their ealdorman to assist. If he refused, then they were welcome to ask the king to intercede on their behalf and lay siege to their enemy until he paid the wergild.

  Of course the wergild legislation, a system of rules and regulations by which a man could seek his revenge, seems almost comical to the modern reader. Sometimes the many strange exceptions to the rules and attempts to anticipate possible difficulties in Alfred’s domboc begin to sound more like the collection of bizarre oral traditions surrounding some longstanding playground game at a local elementary school than a serious early medieval legal code.

  For instance, if a man was besieged in a consecrated church but the clergy needed the space he was occupying for a service, then the clergy were allowed to find another building in which the man could take refuge. However, Alfred added one important proviso—this new building must not have more doors than the church building. Presumably, this was because the party who was guarding the church building would have allocated their men according to the number of possible exits from the church by which the fugitive might take flight. A sudden shift to a building with more doors could have left the besieging band inadequately staffed to guard the new building effectively. One wonders what previous siege-gone-wrong experience Alfred and his witan had in mind when this law was carefully crafted.

  Nevertheless, Alfred’s domboc provided an enduring foundation for justice throughout Wessex and, over subsequent generations, throughout all of England. The practice of exchanging the payment of wergild radically curtailed the mounting violence of the blood feuds and, as wrath and vengeance began to give way to mercy and forgiveness, helped Alfred to deliver his people not just from the bloody assaults of foreign raiders but also from their own vengeful blood thirst.

  As peace, piety, learning, and the many arts patronized by the king began to flourish under Alfred’s rule, Britain began to experience a new type of golden age of Anglo-Saxon culture. Had Alfred only delivered his people from the plundering Danes whom he defeated at Edington in AD 879, then his contribution would have been significant and worthy of remembrance, but he would not have been worthy of the legendary status that the name King Alfred has acquired over the years. He would not have been King Alfred the Great.

  The king of Wessex distinguished himself from all other English monarchs because, after vanquishing the Vikings at Edington, he set his mind to the task of discovering the true cause of the pagan plague and then gave all his strength to righting these wrongs. The defensive reforms introduced in the Burghal Hideage, the revival of learning throughout Wessex, and the new standard of justice required by the domboc, all testify to Alfred’s tremendous insight in understanding the true flaws in the Anglo-Saxon culture and the comprehensive solution that these flaws required.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Final Test

  And I go riding against the raid,

  And ye know not where I am;

  But ye shall know in a day or year,

  When one green star of grass grows here;

  Chaos has charged you, charger and spear,

  Battle-axe and battering-ram.

  And though skies alter and empires melt,

  This word shall still be true:

  If we would have the horse of old,

  Scour ye the horse anew.

  —FROM G. K. CHESTERTON’S The Ballad of the White Horse

  As Alfred carried out his innovative domestic reforms, he continued to keep an ear tuned to news of the movements of the Danish forces who continued to pillage across the English Channel. The king was certain that at some point in the near future the Viking hordes would again turn their attention to the coasts and river networks of England. The king hoped desperately that his newly constructed defenses would be completed enough to withstand the next onslaught. The attack on Rochester in 885 had proved that Alfred’s defensive strategy was essentially sound, but the Danish force that Alfred’s mounted army had driven away from the newly fortified walls of Rochester had been a relatively small raiding army. Unlike the larger forces that Guthrum had led into Wessex nearly a decade earlier, intent on wholesale conquest and resettlement of the Christian lands, the small fleet that had attacked Rochester had merely been searching for quick plunder and easily coaxed danegeld. Whether the network of burhs and their garrisoned professional troops would be able to withstand a larger, more concerted effort to overthrow Alfred’s government entirely, still remained to be seen.

  That test finally came in 892, when an enormous Viking force, numbering many more than ten thousand and dwarfing the previous invading host commanded by Guthrum, crossed the English Channel and grimly resolved to wrest the wealth of Wessex from the Anglo-Saxons and to topple the power of King Alfred and his newly restored government. This new raiding army was composed of two recently united Viking bands. One portion of the Danish army was composed of the remnants of the same army that had led the failed siege attempt against the city of Rochester in 885. After having been driven off by Alfred, this army had, along with a host of other Viking raiding armies, plagued the people of Europe. The following year, in 886, these armies, now constituting a massive force, laid siege to the great city of Paris. So enormous was the host of pagan Northmen who eagerly traveled to Paris to join in the siege, smelling the plunder profit likely to be shared if the city were to fall, that the length of the Seine River was clogged with dragon-prowed Viking longboats as far as the eye could see. The siege, though it lasted more than a year, never broke through the Parisian defenses. The affair ended in 886 when Emperor Charles the Fat bought peace for the Parisians by promising the Viking armies a total of seven hundred pounds of silver, as well as the privilege of continuing on up the Seine, then further into Francia, where Charle
s allowed them to plunder the province of Burgundy.

  The Danes continued to plunder and raid throughout the European continent until the early spring of 892, when a terrible plague devastated the crops and brought the country into a severe famine. Uninterested in starving alongside Europe’s peasants, a large portion of the Viking army, a full two hundred fifty Danish longboats, turned their attentions again toward England.

  Sailing from Boulogne, the Danish fleet crossed the Channel and rounded the southeastern coast of Kent, turning north up the river Lympne (now known as the river Rother). As the Vikings rowed hard up the river, they encountered a half-completed fortification, which they quickly wiped out, and then settled in at Appledore.

  Following shortly after this first fleet, forming what would become a pincer-like attack on Wessex, was a smaller force led by the legendary Viking chieftain Hastein, a man renown for a long and successful career of plundering the unprotected churches up and down the river systems of the Somme, Loire, and Seine. As the various exploits and adventures of the Viking Hastein passed on into legend, however, the most infamous of his bloody escapades was his Mediterranean voyage during the years 859–862. During this tour, Hastein’s ravaging took an ecumenical turn as the Viking turned briefly from his typically Christian victims and instead plundered and burned the mosques of Muslim-dominated southern Spain, as well as those of North Africa. Then, returning to the plaguing of Christendom, the Dane raided many of the more prominent cities of southern Gaul, working his way along the Mediterranean Sea to Italy.

  Finally, the Viking chieftain attempted what could have been one of the greatest achievements of Danish brigandage on record, the plundering of the great city of Rome. Seeing that the city walls were much too strong to be stormed, Hastein planned a clever ruse that would take advantage of the Christians’ pious gullibility.