Welcome to the British History Podcast. My name is Jamie and this is episode 239, The

Dying Time. This show is ad-free to remember support and is a way of thanking members for

keeping the show independent. I offer members only content including extra episodes and rough

transcripts. You can get instant access to all the members episodes by signing up for

membership at the British History Podcast.com for only about the price of a latte per month.

And thank you very much to Ellen, Dave and Kelly for signing up already. Today we're going to

cover five or six years and we're going to talk about a fascinating theory that if true,

should color virtually everything we know about the life of Alfred the Great. And that's because the

life of Alfred the Great might not have been written for Alfred. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The story of this era has largely been the story of kings, warriors and scribes. We do our

best to fill in the gaps and remind you of all the unsung everyday heroes who make life possible

and whose thankless work is an intricate part of not just the economic and cultural machinery of

the kingdoms of this era but also an absolutely indispensable part of our history. These unnamed

people form the vast majority of our ancestors. Our family lies in the margins of this story

and our family is enormous, which means that the bulk of history unfortunately lies in the margins

as well. A lot of this show has been an effort at either explaining to you where those blank spots

are and why they exist or doing what we can to fill in some of the gaps. Filling in gaps is my

favorite choice, but since I'm just a narrator that involves relying on the research of experts in

the field and that in turn means that our story has a lot of ifs and has a lot of mystery.

It also means that the research for each episode tends to be painstaking because no matter how much

I read, I always know that there's probably one more article out there, one more treatise that

can shed some nuance on the situation or raise a new question. And these questions are important

...