Alfred the Great
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Alfred (Old English Ælfræd), by-name the Great (Old English þe Grǣt), also known as the Magnificent (Old English þe Blōdiggrǣt) and the Wet (Old English þe Wǣtt), was king of Wessex from 871 to 874, king of a small waterlogged island from 874 to 885, and high king of England from 885 to 899. He laid the foundations for a unified state by absorbing the East Saxons, Middle Saxons, Mercians, Cornish, West Danes, and Tasmanians into an increasingly misnamed West Saxon Kingdom. He was also a noted scholar and jurist, one heck of a juggler, and a peach of a guy.
Early life[edit | edit source]
The youngest of twelve wicked stepbrothers, all kings, young Alfred the Great spent most of his early life in the royal kitchens, sweeping cinders, talking to spiders, and so on. He was in charge of the cakes and ale, and once when he burnt the cakes and couldn't find enough rats for the ale and had to make do with white mice, his brothers expelled him from the palace; and the young Alfred set out with his meagre possessions in a bundle to seek his fortune.
In the wilds outside metropolitan Glastonbury (then mistakenly in Somerset due to inaccurate Roman cartography), he met a wild-looking creature who introduced himself as "Dane, er, Dan, er, Dandini", curtsied to one he immediately recognized as a prince, and offered him a share of his humble sustenance. Alfred woke up two days later in a strange bed, mildly disoriented and with an inexplicable bruise in his nether regions and wearing someone else's crown. This was taken as an omen. So was the fact that everyone around him was speaking Old Danish, but not as good an omen.
The bedside copy of How to Row a Longboat by Thorsteinn the Left-Footed was also seemingly ominous, but Alfred was a resourceful lad and took the opportunity to steal it. He was immediately caught and sentenced to death by the powerful local king Cnut the Total Badass, son of Claudius the Treacherous. The usual means of execution then was to dump condemned prisoners over the border into neighboring Wessex, where they would undoubtedly be nibbled to death by rats, drowned in swamps, or randomly chosen (as in Alfred's case) as a short-lived and unmemorable king.
Reign[edit | edit source]
Although Alfred the Great's reign is today viewed as spectacularly successful, considered all in all, in his own day he was considered a ridiculous failure, despite his given adjective. This was largely due to the undermining efforts of his royal biographer Asser (a nasty boy who was in the same class as him at school, and who made Alfred's whole week of mandatory schooling a nightmare).
Lake Woebegone days[edit | edit source]
Forced to retreat to an island in the middle of Cornwall's Dozmary Pool (a gloomy lake with no beaches and very little water), Alfred spent his days paddling in a coracle, diving for fish, avoiding the sun, and picking his teeth with travelers's bones. When the Danish rent collectors came a'looking, he retreated under the brackish mud and breathed through a reed.
As his brothers progressively succumbed to a surfeit of Danes, swamps, corsneds etc. (in alphabetical order for the convenience of later English schoolchildren), Alfred came unknowingly closer to the throne, when one day as he was sitting in a tree on the island in the middle of the lake, he descried his old and faithful thegn (or was it his horse?), Dandini, rowing towards him and waving a copy of the previous day's Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
After checking the 2.30 at Winchester (Lady Godiva by a nose, Peeping Tom a distant third), and filling in the fiendishly-difficult crossword (sweven a cross: Dream of the Rood?), he turned to the personals and found he was in luck. The last of the Ethels (Ethelyellow the Impermanent) had died in a hissy-fit brought on by a surfeit of peaches and no ale, and a careful trawl through the Welsh Easter Annals had revealed the existence of a last remaining son of Egfight, one who would learn something to his advantage if he applied to Messrs White and Black, Lawspeakers of Whitby.
After a brief power struggle, Alfred was crowned at Winchester on 1 January 872, with a coronet of Christmas tree tinsel, and in a moving speech penned by Asser entirely in Pig Latin (a language Alfred did not understand all too well), he pledged to conquer his beloved island home, bring peace and mortgages to the inhabitants, and marry a horse (or Dane).
[edit | edit source]
Using his knowledge of seamanship, Alfred turned his attention to the Viking infestation in local waters, and built a fleet of rowing boats, pedalos, sailing ships, brilliantines, yellow submarines, iron-clad kayaks, and so on, all unarmed due to a sudden nosedive in taxation takings.
With the Viking menace now confined to Dogger Bank and the German Bight (winds south to south-west), King Alfred turned his attention to expelling the fucking Danes from the motherland. In a series of pitched battles (which he pitched himself) at Dyrham, Mount Badoom, Evesham, and Spion Kop he drove the invaders back to the East Anglian beach resort of North Malden. (Alfred himself drove a converted undercover hay wain called "Bruce".) Here he made a tactical error by falling for a ruse: The leader of the Danish host, Harold Curlyhairs, obtained parley and met Alfred on a bridge over the Budden Brook, and pointed out that their side of the ground was swampy and they needed a hand getting across, as their boots were stuck in the mud. Alfred unselfishly agreed to give them time to get untangled, and offered Harold a brotherly hand, pulling him up onto dry ground. He then extended the courtesy to Harold's deputy, Crazy Katt, and to over three thousand other heavily-armed Danish stormtroopers. (Arithmetic, like Pig Latin, was also one of Alfred's weak subjects.) The Danes then performed their fearsome haka or battle dance, in which they wiggled and giggled to the words of their rousing national anthem ("Nothing wiggles like a Dane, nothing giggles like a Dane, etc..."). Alfred smiled derisively, then turned to his own men to do their national ditty, Cnæs up Moþer Brǣwen, only to find he was alone. The Battle of Malden passed into heroic legend as an exemplar of Anglo-Saxon courage.
Achievements[edit | edit source]
- Military: Alfred unified all the country that did not still belong to the Danes, Mercians, Welsh, Picts, or anyone else, and ruled it with an iron fist in a woollen sock with buttons for eyes. He encouraged the fortification of the major port Southampton, perhaps too enthusiastically, for it was over three hundred years before anyone could enter or leave. The fortifications of Dunwich in East Anglia were also of questionable value, since they caused the entire town to topple into the sea.
- Vultural: Alfred's vultural contributions met with little success. In fact vultures were not successfully introduced into the Somerset fens until the Victorian period. Perhaps you were looking for Cultural? Ooops, my bad.
- Cultural: Alfred encouraged the growth of letters, which is why uncials became majuscules and vice-versa. Until recently it was thought that he had also promoted the dissemination of learning by sending copies of manuscripts to abbeys all over the country, but from the incredible errors in them, it is now thought that these were efforts by Alfred himself to finally master Pig Latin (a school subject he never quite got the hang of), for which reason he was frequently punished by his tutor Alcuin and made to repeat his lines.
- Technological: Alfred also introduced the Christmas tree and toilet paper to the English. The tree was for somewhere to hang surplus tinsel (an old Germanic custom when the mistletoe crop failed), and the paper was after an embarrassing diplomatic incident. Charlemagne, the paramount chief of the Gauls, sent Alfred a long cloak of many colours after learning that he didn't like freezing his arse off when he went to the toilet in the then-fashionable skimpy Swedish cloaks. In his swishy new cloak, he forgot about the length. Thereafter he decreed he would wear disposable paper cloaks and damn the environment. Intermittent warfare dogged Anglo-French relations for the next five hundred years.
- Legal: Alfred reformed the legal system. The crude pagan system of ordeal (being forced to bake cakes on an unlubricated griddle without burning them) was replaced by a tournament of champions called "Alfred Duels". These evolved into the Crown Duels of Norman courts.
Death[edit | edit source]
Alfred the Great's two terms of office came to an end in December 899, but he argued that he was still needed to preserve the nation from traitors, Normans, Danes, snakes, and all that. He convened his witan to confer special emergency powers, prompting Continental travel agents to bring in special longboats to evacuate thousands of stranded tourists. Disguised as one of these, a boat crewed by three old crones sailed into Winchester harbour and enticed Alfred to the dockside on the pretext of selling him fresh clams (a popular vegetable in the harsh Saxon winters). One of them bopped him on the head with an oar and they rowed away with their muffled captive.
Four days later the eccentric elderly hags decided to return Alfred, mildly disoriented, to his hideaway bungalo; and admitted they had made a ghastly mistake ("Well, how could we have known they weren't real Tartar's lips?"). It was Alfred's son, the newly installed king, they were after. Ethelred the Unready was completely unprepared for this, but they bopped him and carried him off anyway. Alfred died peacefully of a surfeit of giggles later that year, and was interred under Platform 3 of the Fosse Way.