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Hello, the Battle of Eddington in 878 is taken by many historians to be the founding Battle of England.

It's the conflict in which Alfred King of Wessex came back from what seemed an impossible

position to defeat the Vikings and launch a grand project to establish a new entity of Englishness,

what he called the Angle Coon in the south in the island of Britain. How did Alfred manage to

defeat the Vikings when he'd been so thoroughly routed? What motivated his project to fashion

Englishness and without Eddington would there be no England and no global English language?

When me to discuss Alfred and Eddington is Richard Gameson, reader in medieval history of the

University of Kent at Canterbury, Sarah Foote, professor of early medieval history at Sheffield

University and John Hines, professor in the School of Archaeology and History at Cardiff University.

Richard Gameson, can we start with Alfred's early life and how he became King? Because it's

important to understand the understanding of the sort of leader he became. Yes, Alfred was most

unlikely to come to the throne. He was the fifth son of Arthur Wolf of Wessex and as a fifth son

with four elder brothers, his prospects of getting to the throne were obviously small. However,

King's tended to live and reign for short periods of time with the Vikings running around the

country and gradually Alfred's elder brothers died. Circumstances seem to have changed by the

tiny battle. No, they died from natural causes but we know that they struggled hard and indeed

Alfred's immediate brother, the brother elder than him, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles account of him

says that he struggled hard for five years. He reigned gloriously but faced a hard challenge and

then he died. Alfred seems to have been designated heir only by the time we had got to brother four.

At that stage Alfred would have been 15 or 16 and he had some military responsibilities but prior

...