Alfred the Great

In 1693 a plow turned up a small jewel of gold, rock crystal and enamel in a field at North Petherton, in Somerset, a few miles from Athelney. It carries an Old English inscription, AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN, "Alfred ordered me to be made." It was probably the handle of an aestel, a pointer used in reading. It is now in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum.

Alfred was born at Wantage in 848 or 849. Asser, a Welsh churchman who wrote his life, gives 849, but a list of kings made in Alfred's reign, which says he was 23 when he became king in 871, points to 848, as the historian Charles Plummer argued. He was the youngest son of King Æthelwulf of Wessex, the West Saxon kingdom in southern England, and followed three elder brothers as king. In January 878 a Danish army under Guthrum surprised him at Chippenham, and he withdrew to a fort at Athelney. That May he gathered the men of Somerset, Wiltshire and part of Hampshire and defeated the Danes at Edington. Guthrum agreed to be baptized, and Alfred stood as his godfather. He later built fortified towns, called burhs. He died on October 26, 899; some older historians put it in 900.

In the preface to his English version of Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care, he wrote that when he became king hardly a priest south of the Humber knew Latin. He hoped that freeborn young men who could afford it would learn to read English, and those meant for higher office, Latin. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was first put together in Wessex in his reign. Many scholars still credit Alfred himself with the Pastoral Care, Boethius, Augustine's Soliloquies and the first fifty Psalms, with Orosius's world history, Bede and Gregory's Dialogues done at his order. Malcolm Godden has argued that only Gregory's Pastoral Care and Dialogues can be firmly tied to Alfred's project, and that no trace survives of the schools the preface hoped for.

In the library, A voyage to the north: Ohthere and Wulfstan tell King Alfred begins "Ohthere told his lord, King Alfred," words that Plummer called the only direct sign inside the Old English Orosius of who made it. A year in a sentence: entries from the Chronicle includes the entry for 891, in which three Irishmen come to King Alfred in a boat with no one to row or steer it.