I have one more can dance those history it it's another takeover today i'm handing the reins of the pod over to our sister podcast how am i history the reason i'm doing that is because it features the brilliant Justin polar is a great friend a great scholar and just a he's like an international man of history this guy in this episode we're gonna find out all about Alfred the great we're gonna work out how am i burnt his cakes actually probably mostly the why how is presumably exposed to too much heat if you like this episode please search for how and why history wherever you get your pot

podcast subscribe rate all that stuff coming up this Friday how and why delves into the South African bore war if you like this one there are 30 more episodes to enjoy if you subscribe to history hit TV we've also launched the world wars podcast the podcast coming thick and fast everyone that brings together all of history hits world wars podcasts for five years worth of world wars content and there are new shows every week that's from professor James Rogers in the meantime let's find out how and why king Alfred

burn those cakes ever since his reign in the ninth century Alfred the great has been fated as one of the most accomplished of our kings a learned and religious man who encourage

education Alfred defended his lands against Viking invaders in the same year Alfred king of the Anglo-Saxons after the burning of cities and the slaughter of peoples

honorably restored the city of London and made it habitable and he entrusted its defense to Ethelrede Elderman of the Mercians and all the angles and

Saxons who had before been widely scattered were who were not in captivity with the pagans voluntarily turned to the king and placed themselves under his rule a tribute commissioned by Alfred the great from Bishop Assa that inevitably

emphasized his positive achievements but how did Alfred king of Wessex become Alfred the great how effective was he in fighting the Vikings and why did he burn those cakes I'm Rob Weinberg and to answer the

big questions about this unforgettable king unjoined by the historian Justin Pollard author of Alfred the great the man who made England

this is how and why history

Justin thank you very much for joining me oh absolute pleasure why was Alfred king of Wessex known as Alfred the great

well it's a very good question because during his lifetime he wasn't known as Alfred the great at all in fact he doesn't really become Alfred the great until really the Tudor period so he was known as a very good king during his lifetime

but it's after his death really the later chroniclers like William and Ma'am's bride and Jeffrey Gamer hold him up as sort of like a mirror of monarchy how a good king should be

and during the Tudor period he gains this epithet the only king we have who gains this epithet the great Henry the eight thing Henry the eight did try to get people to call him great Harry but that never caught on but with Alfred the terminology has stuck that has a lot to do with who Alfred was what he actually did but also has to do with what he became associated with later

the medieval period with being a great king a mirror of monarchy and in the 19th century he becomes associated with being sort of the founder of the British Empire which is not something he would recognize in the slightest and as such having a great king as the founder of the British mission to civilize the world the title is sort of reinforced then

first of all where was Wessex and what do we know about Alfred's early life Wessex was a kingdom up until Alfred's day there was no kingdom of England England was actually made up of lots of little kingdoms some large some small

Wessex which is in the south was one of the larger of the kingdoms it was Wiltshire Hampshire Somerset Dorset Devon that sort of area there was Mercer in the Midlands there was Northumbria East Anglia in the Far East

then Essex Kenton Sussex and they formed what was called the Heptarky there were seven nations they all had their own king they were elected so there were a group of nobles who chose each generation from a group of families a king for each

and one of those would normally be sort of the top king the premise into Paris and they were known as the Bretwolder so offer in Mercer was a Bretwolder

Red World in East Anglia was a Bretwolder and so Wessex was just one of those kingdoms an important kingdom because it's in the south so it faced across the channel to

Frankia but it was just a local kingdom and it's only then over through Alfred's life and then beyond to pick into life his grandchildren when that slowly expands and becomes consolidated into what we would know as England today

in terms of the boyhood of Alfred but we do have a bit of information strangely it's very unusual to get much about these early medieval kings of tall because we tend to have

entries for them just in chronicles which literally you should have a line per year saying in this year king what not died or someone was born or there was a battle

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