Alfred the Great Final

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The English Historical Review, 2024

King Alfred (r. 871–99) is the only native-born English ruler to have gained the byname ‘the Great’. This was not a contemporary sobriquet, but is often considered to have been bestowed in the Elizabethan era by Reformation scholars who increasingly cast Alfred in the role of the founder of the English nation. The acknowledged exception is a reference to Alfred as Rex Alfredus magnus (King Alfred the Great) in a marginal annotation in Matthew Paris’s early thirteenth-century text, Deeds of the Abbots of St Albans Monastery. This medieval attestation of Alfred’s sobriquet is, however, less isolated than has been previously thought. Drawing on a variety of medieval English and Old Norse-Icelandic texts, this article identifies twenty-five examples of Alfred being called ‘the Great’, twenty-three of which have previously gone unremarked. In so doing, it argues for a widespread tradition of Alfred as ‘the Great’, the first sole ruler of all England, from at least the thirteenth century.

2012

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 1996

King Alfred the Great, his Hagiographers and his Cult: A Childhood Remembered [Sample chapter], 2023

In the 19th C Protestant historians expunged hagiography. But for Aelred of Rievaulx history was contained by hagiography. His Cistercian version of the popular fable that the infant Alfred was anointed king by the Pope in Rome embedded Alfred in hagiographic time liberated from chronology: Biblical typology bound what the Pope foresaw in Alfred’s destiny to what Samuel foresaw in David’s. And in 1901 Plummer believed the 853 papal anointing was not, in fact, royal, and that Alfred psychologically misinterpreted it as typologically prefiguring his royal adulthood. By substituting psychological for spiritual understanding, Plummer canonised the Chronicle as prime reliquary for the Protestant cult of the historical Alfred, since its annal for 853 contains this authentic Anglo-Saxon relic of Alfred’s psychology.

Hagiography Beyond Tradition (Series), 2023

This book situates Alfred the Great in his hagiographic context. For 150 years, the fables told in the ninth century about Alfred’s childhood have posed interlocking disciplinary challenges to historians committed to evicting romance from history. Victorian scholars expunged Alfred’s legends, salvaged his historicity, and thus purified his cult. This book frees us from their anti-hagiographic commitments by weaving historical, literary, and biblical hermeneutics into Hagiography Studies. It focusses on the typological functions of three Alfredian fables from the OE Chronicle, Asser’s Vita Ælfredi, and the OE Boethius, analyses the plot common to all three, and critiques the psychological conjecture that Alfred’s childhood memory was their original source. This helps us see how Alfred shaped the curve of his own destiny and engaged in the formation of his own cult.