a street with about sixty houses in it.
In the words of the Venerable Bede, London was still ‘a mart of many nations resorting to it by land and sea’. In spite of its decline, London at the beginning of the ninth century was still probably the richest and most important place in the country – in a not very hotly contested field. Things were about to get a good deal worse.
There is a sense in which you could say that the Anglo-Saxons had it coming. They were, after all, predators themselves. They were Germans, blond-haired toughs from the plain between the Elbe and the Weser, and they had behaved so aggressively towards the existing population – killing them and kicking them out wherever they could – that the Byzantine historian Procopius got the impression that Britain was actually two countries: a place called Brettania, opposite Spain, and Brettia, a more Germanic place opposite the mouth of the Rhine.
Even during the reign of Alfred the Saxons continued to persecute the Romano–Celtic Britons, driving them west to Wales and Cornwall. Alfred’s maternal grandfather was a royal butler called Oslac, and it was one of Oslac’s boasts that his family had killed all the British they could find in the Isle of Wight.
The Saxons had been merchants of genocide, and in the years before Alfred was born they got their comeuppance. Some say the raiders were driven by a population boom in Denmark, where the habit of polygamy had produced many younger sons of second wives, all casting envious eyes on the sheepfolds of England. Whatever the reasons, the Vikings came to Britain, sailing up the rivers in their sneaky, flat-bottomed craft and disembarking with hideous ululations.
Captured Saxon kings suffered the rite of the ‘blood eagle’, which in its milder version meant carving an eagle on the back; but which properly involved hacking the back ribs from the vertebrae of the still living victim, reaching into the thorax and pulling out the lungs, draping them artistically over the spread ribs so as to form ‘the wings of an eagle’.
They conducted other forms of human sacrifice. They sacked churches because a church, to them, was just another building, if one more likely to contain gold. The desperate kings of Wessex and Mercia tried to bribe them to go away. The Vikings took the gold and swore dreadful oaths that they would go – and ratted on the deal. In 842 it seems from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that there was a raid on London, ‘with a great slaughter’; but the real disaster took place in 851.
A fleet of 350 ships under Rorik sailed up the mouth of the Thames. First they stormed Canterbury. Then they sailed further on, landed on the north bank of the Thames – and Lundenwic was sacked. The women were raped. The men were killed. The blood flowed in rivulets into the Thames.
The man who would one day avenge this disaster was then only three or four. He was growing up in a huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ and prayin’ environment on the estates of royal Wessex. He was the son of Aethelwulf, the son of Egbert, the son of Eahlmund, the son of Eafa, the son of Eoppa, the son of Ingild – in other words, he was a proper Saxon toff.
The only trouble was that his parents had already had four sons – Aethelstan, Aethelbald, Aethelbehrt, Aethelred – and a daughter, called, you guessed it, Aethelswith. Alfred began with the advantage of the snappier name (it seems to mean something like elf-wisdom).
His biographer – a sycophantic monk called Asser – tells us that the young child beat his elder siblings in a poetry-memorising contest. One can imagine the disgust of all the older Aethelkiddies at the sight of this golden-haired Little Lord Fauntleroy, prattling away in front of his beaming mother.
Even more important in his development, Alfred was singled out by father Aethelwulf for a treat. Aethelwulf was in theory a descendant of Woden, lord of the pagan gods, but he was a devout Christian, so God-fearing that shortly after the Battle of Ockley (or Aclea) in 852, he did a most peculiar thing. The Vikings were still circling England – the threat had not gone away – and yet he decided to take the five-year-old child across the sea and over the mountains on a pilgrimage to Rome.
Pope Leo IV welcomed the bearded Saxon in St Peter’s basilica, and while flunkeys discreetly relieved the King of Wessex of his tribute – a four-pound gold crown, an ornamental sword and a purple-dyed tunic embossed with golden keys – the Pope came up with a fitting compliment for his visitor. Aethelwulf was created a consul. The highest office of the Roman republic, which poor old Cicero had flogged his guts out to achieve, was handed out like buttons to this obscure Germanic chieftain; and little Alfred was made the Pope’s godson.
With treatment like that, it is no surprise that the Rome experience seems slightly to have gone to Aethelwulf’s head. Father and son stayed for a whole year, living in the Schola Saxonum – a huddle of Saxon-style huts up against St Peter’s, designed for the use of religious tourists from England – and spending yet more of his country’s cash on doing up Roman churches. Two years later, when Alfred was seven, they came again, on a second pilgrimage.
Not so long ago I took my daughter to Rome, and we walked around the Colosseum, which now appears pretty much as it must have done in Alfred’s time. I looked up at the rain coming down like silver darts past its sooty arches, and thought how much vaster and madder it is than it appears in the photos. Imagine the impact of those buildings on his young mind – the scale of the Roman architecture. The whole of Saxon Southampton – the biggest commercial centre outside London – could have fitted comfortably into the baths of Caracalla.
Of course, much of Rome was as ruined as Roman London. But the impressive thing about little Alfie’s godfather, Pope Leo, was that he was determined to erect Christian structures to rival the pagan relics. He built massive walls around the Vatican and what had once been the Mausoleum of Hadrian, now the Castel’ Sant’Angelo. At the age when a child is most impressionable, Alfred the Great saw the remaking of a city, and understood something that had been all but forgotten in England – the idea of the city itself.
It was an idea the Vikings rejected with violence. They weren’t interested in cities; they were interested in burning them.
In 860 they sacked Winchester, the capital of Wessex, and Alfred came to manhood engaged in an almost continuous struggle with the heathen. His father had died in 858, and one by one his older brothers now proceeded to die, none of them reaching the age of thirty. In 871 a twenty-three-year-old Alfred took the crown in wretched circumstances. The Vikings were out of control, and in 872 part of the Great Heathen Army decided to reoccupy the desolation of London, raping and pillaging anyone who happened still to be knocking around. It looks as if the Viking chief Halfdene even had a coin minted in London, just to show who was boss.
Alfred was driven to paying the Danegeld (not in itself a disgraceful strategy; it is still used, with mixed results, against the Taleban), and found himself eventually harried into the wilds of the Somerset marshes, a fugitive in his own country. There it was that he burned the cakes in the peasant woman’s hearth, and in the words of 1066 And All That, became Alfred the Grate. There too, legend has it, he and a servant disguised themselves in order to spy on the Danish camp.
To a degree that is almost embarrassing to modern taste, he had a Victorian public school spirit, a muscular Christianity, a fervent belief not just in God but that the mind can be trained to overcome the infirmities of the body. As he came of age he was perturbed by his sexual urges, and actually prayed for a disease that would distract him. The Almighty rewarded him with piles so sizeable that after a particularly agonising hunting trip in Cornwall he stopped at a monastery and prayed for another disease.
He then fell victim to a mysterious abdominal pain that afflicted him for the rest of his life, and which has been identified with Crohn’s disease. Later on, when Alfred thought of himself as a G20-style world leader, he wrote to Patriarch Elias of Jerusalem inviting that learned authority to advise him on his intestinal grief. Elias sent back a disgusting series of remedies, including scammony for constipation, gutamon for stitch, spikenard for diarrhoea, tragacanth for corrupt phlegms, petroleum to drink alone for inward tenderness and the ‘white stone’ for all unknown afflictions.
It is not clear if or when Alfred really started to drink petroleum to cure his aching stomach, but most modern doctors agree that if he could survive the Patriarch’s medicine, he could probably survive