ABSTRACT
Between 869 and 879, viking war bands conquered East Anglia, Northumbria, and Mercia and extinguished their royal houses. By 899, only one native kingdom and royal lineage remained. Wessex survived the onslaught because of the military and political genius of its king, Alfred the Great (871–899). He would leave his son Edward and daughter Æthelflæd the military, financial, and administrative resources not only to defend their patrimonies but to expand their rule over the Scandinavian-controlled territories and kingdoms to the north and east. This, along with the cultural and spiritual renaissance he sponsored, was to be Alfred’s legacy and claim to historical greatness. From Charles Plummer to Simon Keynes, Alfred Smyth, and David Pratt, historians of Anglo-Saxon England have studied extensively Alfred’s contributions to the literary and political foundations of what was to be the English nation. While not neglected, Alfred’s military achievement has largely been told in the form of narrative, and a narrative much influenced by unspoken nineteenth- and twentieth-century assumptions about vikings and the nature of medieval warfare. 1 This is not surprising given how little attention had been paid to early medieval warfare in general before 1972, when Bernard S. Bachrach published Merovingian Military Organization, 481–751, the opening salvo in what has become a truly remarkable corpus of works on Merovingian and Carolingian warfare. My first book, Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England (1988) owed a great intellectual debt to Bernard Bachrach’s pioneering work. 2 It was Bachrach’s insistence upon the Roman foundations for Merovingian military organization and strategy, coupled with Edward Luttwak’s analysis of the grand strategy of the Roman Empire, that led me to conceive of King Alfred’s boroughs and military reorganization of Wessex as constituting a “defense in depth” strategic system. A Festschrift is an occasion to reflect upon the scholarly achievements and influence of a scholar. In my three-decade-long friendship with Bernie Bachrach, we have sometimes disagreed about historical interpretation. I am perhaps less persuaded than he about the imprint of Rome upon Anglo-Saxon military organization and warfare. But we agree that successful early medieval military leaders understood strategy and approached warfare as an intellectual endeavor that required planning, study, and thought. This certainly was no less true for Alfred the Great than for Charlemagne. This paper will offer a brief overview and analysis of Alfred as a military leader and an explanation of why he succeeded where his contemporaries, including the Carolingian Charles the Bald, did not.
