Customer Reviews

Alfred the Great: The King and His England (Phoenix Books)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is outstanding. It draw a vibrant picture of a king whose life is otherwise obscured by the mists of time. Duckett presents a picture of a man who is simultaneously legendary and very human. This book is a wonderful choice for anyone interested in medieval times or the roots of British culture. Duckett's writing style is clean and consice, free of the usual scholarly jargon. It is a must for any student of history, amature or professional.

Eleanor Shipley Duckett's biography is a useful introduction to Alfred the Great, the Wessex monarch who effectively created the kingdom of England. She begins with a description of the politics of ninth-century England, a world of maneuvering between regional kingdoms and invading Viking armies. It was in this dangerous and fluid environment that a young Alfred came of age, watching his father and two elder brothers deal with the threats Wessex faced before gaining the throne at the age of 22. From here her focus is on his struggles against the Danes, though other chapters also address his kingdom, his education, and his years after his many martial triumphs.

While enlightening, the book suffers from an excessive focus on narrative. As readable as Duckett's prose is, Her focus on recounting the chronological development of events too frequently comes at the cost of a clear understanding of Alfred's character and the significance of the developments of his life. Readers wanting to familiarize themselves with the basic details of Alfred's life will find this a useful and enjoyable book, but those seeking a more comprehensive analysis of the great Anglo-Saxon king would be better served by Richard Abels's more recent Alfred the Great: War, Culture and Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England (The Medieval World).

Duckett's biography of King Alfred is an enjoyable and interesting read. We are drawn a picture of Alfred that shows how great a king he was to overcome the Danes from what little he had left. Duckett takes us from when he was a boy to his death with a fluid grace not easily found in biographers and their writings. Additionally, Duckett does well in interpreting the many stories and legends and presenting them in a way to give a real picture of Alfred, one of what really happened and one of what the stories and legends of the time thought of him. Her short commentaries of the travails that befell the Continent at the hands of the Vikings added a lot of insight and perspective as well.

There did seem to be two chapters out of place. King Alfred and His Earlier Translations and Later Translations. Both, it would seem, are important to King Alfred's life since he devoted much of it to translating texts into his native tongue. But analyzing the meaning of the books as well as the lives of those author's whose books Alfred translated did nothing more than take up space and waste time. Granted, it is important and would have been a great appendix, but it didn't seem to fit into the style of biography that Duckett wrote.

I, too, as Duckett mentioned at the end, would have liked to have seen some of Alfred's flaws interspersed with his attributes. But this isn't something that one can find easily, leaving us relying on what is available, notably Asser's rendition of Alfred. That being said I would definitely recommend this biography to everyone. If it weren't for the two chapters on translation I would have rated this a five star.

4 stars.

I chose to read a book about King Arthur followed by one on Alfred the Great. Talk about putting the post Roman period into perspective!

Both books are old ones, Leslie Alcock's Arthur's Britain (1971) and Eleanor Shipley Duckett's Alfred The Great The King and his England (1956). Both are superb, but of the two, Alcock's is the more thorough. Although there are doubtless things which have come to light about the time period of the two, roughly 400-900 A.D., I suspect that the general content of the history of the period is still unchanged by virtue of the lack of any substantially new information.

For Arthur there is still little more than the later medieval legends that we still enjoy hearing to illuminate his character. Whether he was a Romanized Britain serving a local king in the fight against invading Angles, Saxons, Juts and others, or a king as he is described in the later chronicles, we will probably never know. Even whether he was one man or a composite is up for grabs, although Alcock makes no bones about where he stands on this issue. Arthur's significance in his own time was dictated by the needs and interests of the period; his significance in ours is his model of a true and heroic king. These two aspects have little to do with one another.

What Alcock does in lieu of concrete data on Arthur the man, is to define with great clarity the character of his time. Alcock is an archaeologist and it shows, for he brings to life the information produced from habitation and defensive sites in a way that makes silent stones speak. His study of the character of pottery finds, their distribution, source and manufacture through time, suggests that the England of Arthur's time had lost much of its native industry and returned to local cottage industry. The absence of coinage suggests that a money economy had evaporated as the Roman Empire pulled out of the country to defend itself closer to home. The failure of cities suggests that they were no longer needed and that the population wasn't there to require them. The integration of economy, education, elaborate political and judicial structures could no longer be supported and it disappeared. Without the core of Roman establishment to support it, society returned to simpler forms perhaps even declining in numbers

He also points out that the tale of carnage and barbarity that the history of the time portrays may not have been quite the reality of those living then, but more the convention of heroic poetry. Like many archaeologists, he questions the motives of the sources for the period. Little evidence in the form of burned and destroyed layers in settlements suggests to him that the time was as violent as it has been believed to have been. Instead, the movements of continental people into England are envisioned as having been of some long standing, beginning in the time of the Romans as a matter of defense against the same areas of military difficulty that presented William the Conqueror with problems in his time: Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. That the inhabitants of England moved back and forth between the island and the continent is surely suggested by the fact that when prospects arose for adventure and advancement in Europe during the decline of the Empire, the young men of England crossed the channel. That Vortigern was able to encourage continental people to move to England to settle and defend the land suggests that a great deal of exchange was possible. It also suggests that Vortegern felt he could trust these people and that his greatest concern for the safety of his society came from the same sources it had always come, from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Certainly the concept of a national identity in this region was well in the future, and allegiance was more to the person and character of an individual leader than to a set nationality. Even in Alfred's time almost 300 years later, individuals tended to collect at the court of a victorious and virtuous leader.

Alfred on the other hand is an historic figure about whom a fair amount of information is at hand. Professor Duckett does an excellent job of pulling together the events of his reign, making a coherent story of the defense of England against the Danes. Here we make an about face of some note. Instead of being the dreaded pagan outsiders, invaders of the island, and despoilers of British society, the Saxons are seen as the center of society, defenders of the realm, supporters of the faith against the pagan Vikings. In something like three hundred years, the Saxons have become the people of England. That there were battles between Britains and Saxons during Arthur's time is very likely. But there were battles between individual British kings as well. It was an age of struggle between leaders of various groups to see who would serve whom. It was sort of the "wild west" of Europe. By Alfred's time, these issues had largely been settled. The island had been subdivided into kingdoms, whose borders fluctuated with the abilities of the reigning monarchs vis a vis one another, but for the most part, society itself was stable. Enter the Vikings, however, and again things are up for grabs. It seems likely, although Duckett doesn't mention it, that the climate of the period had changed enough to bring about population movements. Certainly the political climate of the northern countries had changed, which she does mention, as Harold Fairhair began to reorganize them into his own large domain. This left a large body of people at lose ends and brought trouble to the shores of both the English isles and to the coasts and fluvial plains of Europe.

Duckett is an historian and classicist. As such she focuses on the written history of the Angles and Saxons. It would have been enjoyable to have had more information about the material remains from the period, a la Alcock, to throw the story of Alfred into greater relief against the background of what remains. One would especially like to have known if the violence and destruction was really as wide spread as suggested and if the people living in Dane held and Saxon held lands were really as distinctive as their national identities suggest. Were they treated any differently by their masters. Did they mix more freely than indicated, etc. This type of information is likely to come from archaeology than from written records, most of which come from biased sources.

Altogether two wonderful books that go a long way toward making a murky period clearer. Read them together.