Delanceyplace.com 12/23/08--Alfred the Great

In today's excerpt--in one of the Britain's foundational myths, Alfred the Great (849-899) burns a cake:

"The story of Alfred the Great burning the cakes has been recounted in dozens of different forms for over a thousand years. Alfred, king of Wessex--who had been fighting the Vikings all his short life, who had watched his father and brothers worn out by the struggle, seen his kinsmen die, his royal counterparts in the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria driven out or martyred and horribly butchered--was on the run.

"On or about Twelfth Night 878 the Viking army had pounced in a lightning attack on the town of Chippenham, where Alfred and his court were wintering. The West Saxons were taken completely by surprise; there was supposed to be a truce with the enemy, and anyway winter campaigning was unknown. Perhaps the members of Alfred's household were in their cups or suffering the effects of the feasting so memorably described in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Barely managing to escape with his family and a tiny retinue, Alfred holed up in what the annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in a rare rhetorical grace-note, memorably call the 'fen-fastnesses' of the Somerset marshes.

"The last independent English king appeared down and Out: 878, rather than 1066, might have been remembered as the death year of Anglo-Saxon England. But from a small marsh island called Athelney, Alfred would rebuild his fight-in-forces and retake his kingdom, after defeating his enemy at the Battle of Edington, in a victory that at last allowed him to impose enduring restrictions on the Vikings. Before this reversal of fortune, however, he had to suffer the ultimate humiliation. Taking refuge in a cowherd's hovel, alone, with no indication of his identity, Alfred was asked to watch the cakes baking in the ashes of the wife's fire. In his A Child's History of England (1851-3) Charles Dickens goes on with a typical version of the story:

" 'Being at work on his bow and arrows, with which he hoped to punish the false Danes when a brighter time should come, and thinking deeply of his poor unhappy subjects whom the Danes chased through the land, his noble mind forgot the cakes, and they were burnt. 'What!' said the cowherd's wife, ... 'you will be ready enough to eat them by-and-by, and yet you cannot watch them, idle dog?' ' ...

"Perhaps in part because of the influence of the story of Alfred and the cakes, the incognito sovereign crops up surprisingly often in stories of English history, from Richard the Lionheart returning from the crusades to Queen Victoria going among her people. The point that the ruler must be unrecognised seems to have been subsumed into the idea that there is some intrinsic merit in merely sharing, however briefly, the daily life of the common people."

David Horspool, King Alfred, Harvard, Copyright 2006 by David Horspool, pp. 1-2, 82