The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson
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shooting from his rear end, Alfred came roaring out of those marshes. He forged the Saxons into a ‘fyrd’, or standing army, organising a rota system so that each man would have time to go back to his fields. He changed the whole defensive approach, converting about thirty towns into fortified double-ringed ‘burhs’. In 878 the Saxons clashed decisively with the Danes at Edington.
The armies closed like hoplites, first throwing their spears – between 1.8 and 2.4 metres long. Then it was a grunting, heaving affair of shield-boss against shield-boss; and if you look at the surviving Saxon stabbing swords – slender, evil-looking seaxes and scaramaxes – you can see why the Vikings did not like being at the sharp end. Gudrum the Viking was vanquished, and agreed, rather half-heartedly, to be baptised, with Alfred standing as his proud godfather.
Edington was the turning-point, the moment the Viking threat began to wane. But still the brutes would not entirely go away. In 882 it seems they raided London again, though who or what they were raiding is not clear. Perhaps the sad truth is that the settlement was so beaten up that there was no government to speak of – and yet London remained strategically crucial. It was still at the centre of the web of Roman roads, and if Alfred was to stop the Vikings moving around east and south east England, the simplest thing was to gain control of the crossroads.
In 886 he ‘gesette’ London, says The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He besieged it, or he occupied it, and at any rate there was another conflagration (of whatever dwellings the Vikings had constructed) and a considerable loss of Danish life. A famous hoard of coins, found at Croydon, seems to indicate that now it was the turn of the Vikings to bury their goods and scram. Once he was in possession of the ancient Roman capital, Alfred was able to do as his godfather Leo had done in Rome. All those ideas he had absorbed, as a child-pilgrim, came pouring forth, and in the words of Asser, ‘he restored the city splendidly and made it habitable again.’
He wanted a city with history, and like so many rulers before and since he was filled with the Dream of Rome, the Charlemagne-style desire to assert his own credentials as the heir to the great Roman Christian culture that had once ruled Europe; and so he decreed that the Saxons would overcome their Romano-phobia and move back inside the vast, mouldering pink-and-white walls.
From Cheapside down to the river he took a chunk of the old city, about 300 metres wide and 1000 metres long. He created a grid pattern of streets, still visible at Garlick Hill, Bread Street, Bow Lane and other places. Lundenwic was over, and Lundenburg was born. The old city became the new city, and the new city became the old city – as the name Aldwych (old market) reminds us.
New old London had two ports, at Billingsgate and Queenhithe, and trade began to flourish in the reconstructed wharves. We have turned up Norwegian ragstone hones and querns from Niedermendig in Germany. We have coins from Belgium, Normandy and Scotland, showing that London was recovering its identity as a multinational, multilingual kind of place.
Alfred created the framework for 150 years of stability and growth. Even more important than the physical reconstruction, Alfred’s London embodied a huge new political fact. He put the city in the charge of a Mercian, Ealdorman Aethelred (whose name is supposed to survive in Aldermanbury), and London became the fulcrum and symbol of a new unity between Wessex and Mercia; and Alfred, himself married to a Mercian princess Eahlswith, was no longer just king of Wessex.
He came up with a new title. He was rex Anglosaxonum – king of the Anglo-Saxons, and he referred to his language as Englisc. When he died in 899, full of wealth and honour, he was described as ‘cyng ofer eall Ongelcynn’ – King over all the English – and you can see the modern world’s master-language struggling to emerge from that phrase, like the semi-human features of an Australopithecus.
Alfred left 2,000 pounds of silver in his will, an astonishing sum for the age, and perhaps a sign that the Anglo-Saxons had learned to profit from the defeat of the Vikings and the clearing of the seaways. He also goes down as one of the greatest educators this country has ever had, who used the spread of literacy and Christianity as a weapon against the illiterate Danes.
Alfred was a scholar, who personally translated Augustine, Boethius and the psalms into his own language. He was a law-giver and theorist of government, with his own Domboc of dooms. His Churchillian energy and self-confidence inspired him to redesign the very boats his sailors were using.
There may be some cynical modern historians who will tell you that Alfred’s boats were not much cop, turning out to be rather heavy and sluggish. But he can claim to be the direct creator of an Anglo-Saxon naval supremacy that still exists, somewhat to the irritation of Beijing, in the furthest reaches of the Pacific Ocean.
He invented his own special Alfred clock – so that he could give up precisely half his hours to worshipping the Lord and half to earthly matters. After a great deal of experiment, he ordered his chaplains to gather together blobs of wax equivalent to the weight of seventy-two pennies. This block of wax was then to be divided into six very thin candles, each of them twelve inches long. Alfred had somehow worked out that each candle would burn for exactly four hours, and his plan was to have a permanent supply and burn them continuously, day and night, so that he could mark the exact passage of time.
Alas, the various tents and churches he occupied were so breezy that he found it very hard to keep his Alfred-o-meter going. Hmm, said Alfred, stroking his beard. We need something that lets the light through and keeps the wind off …
So he ordered his carpenters to make a wood-framed box, with side panels of horn so thin as to be translucent – and lo! The King had invented the lantern!
As it happens, modern scholars have struggled to replicate his candle-powered clock. They claim a thin twelve-inch candle burns out much sooner than four hours. That feels like pedantry. This was a man who not only beat back the Vikings and united his country; ships, clocks, lanterns – he had a string of major patents to his name.
So what has happened to us all, that we forget this soldier-scholar-polymath and saviour of his country? There is one statue in the Strand, near the Law Courts, which rightly commemorates his legal contributions – but absolutely nothing to remind Londoners of what he did for the city.
There used to be a plaque at his port of Queenhithe, until it got ‘lost’ by developers, and was only restored at the insistence of the excellent John Clark, lately of the Museum of London. ‘One almost suspects damnatio memoriae,’ says Mr Clark, ‘or collective amnesia.’
Part of the answer may be that Alfred left no obvious physical legacy, no London touchstone. Those Saxon palaces, those churches – not a brick or post of them survives. But we must also face the sad fact that he is in many ways so deeply uncool. There is something about his exhausting Christian virtue, his colossal energy and self-denial, that was probably more appealing to the Victorians than it is to us.
We modern sensualists are puzzled that a man should pray for piles to cure his sexual feelings. ‘Even as the bee must die when she stings in her anger, so must every soul perish after unlawful lust,’ wrote Alfred lugubriously, in an embellishment of his Boethius translation.
Novelists and Hollywood have struggled in vain to inject some sexual zing into his character. We must also accept that for much of the past century he was slightly too Teutonic to be a completely successful national hero. It was perfectly fine, in Queen Victoria’s time, to note the strong connexions between the early English and the Germans. She was married to a German herself. After two world wars, the association had become less popular.
These days, I am afraid, he suffers not so much from being Germanic, but from being history’s ultimate Anglo-Saxon. At the University of Alfred in Alfred, New York, the faculty decided in the 1990s that they would commission a statue of their eponymous figurehead. Alas, the move was instantly controversial, with Dr Linda Mitchell protesting that ‘if the university is claiming a dedication to diversity, it would be foolish to choose a symbol so exclusive and effective in emphasising the dead white male power structure in history.’
Even in Winchester, the capital of Wessex, they have betrayed the memory of the old boy. Between 1928 and 2004 there was a seat of learning called King Alfred’s College. It is now the ‘University of Winchester.’