The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great by Benjamin R. Merkle Page B

and much drinking of wassail. 1 It was a night of feasting and gift giving. It was to be celebrated by king and by peasant; no one was to be excluded. It was a night when, as a result of the Wessex merrymaking, the fortifications of Chippenham were left virtually unguarded, a moment well chosen by Guthrum.
    Caught by surprise and possessing a force too small to withstand a full Viking raiding army,the citizens of Chippenham were easily overrun. The astonished Alfred was forced to retreat from Chippenham with his family and bodyguards to the countryside of Wiltshire until he could summon the fyrds and face Guthrum in combat.
    But Guthrum moved too quickly. After seizing Chippenham, the Vikings convinced the ealdorman of Wiltshire, Ealdorman Wulfhere, to break his allegiance to Alfred and pledge his loyalty to Guthrum. Once Wulfhere had gone over to Guthrum, Alfred was cut off from the ordinary means of summoning the Wiltshire fyrd to battle, leaving Alfred defenseless.
    Many other nobles of Wessex immediately sensed the impending annihilation of the last Saxon kingdom, so they followed the opportunistic example of Wulfhere, betraying their king and taking oaths of submission to Guthrum. Others, sensing the impossibility of the situation, took their cue from Burgred, the Mercian king, and fled to the European continent for refuge. It seemed inevitable that Wiltshire, Somerset, and Hampshire would soon be ravaged by the Viking raiders. The leadership of Wessex was in total disarray, leaving Alfred without any of the necessary means of communication to summon the fyrds of Wessex. Guthrum, without even fighting one pitched battle, had become the effective ruler of Wessex. And Alfred was forced to take his small group of faithful followers much deeper into hiding until a plan for striking back could be formed.

    The following days would be the darkest Alfred would face, the true low point of his reign. Descriptions of Alfred during this time always emphasize the desperate solitude suffered by the king during these lonely months. He had been driven from his throne and betrayed by a number of his trusted friends. Those friends who had remained loyal in their friendship had become inaccessible to the wandering outcast king. Cut off from his throne, his court, and his armies, Alfred, betrayed and abandoned, wandered in the moors, wastelands, and fens of Wessex, moving into the marshes and woods of Somerset.
    Refusing to abandon his kingdom, Alfred selected an ideal location from which he could continue to wage a campaign of guerrilla warfare resistance against Guthrum until Alfred had the opportunity to raise an army to face the Viking in all-out battle. Although these were easily the darkest days in Alfred’s life, they also were to become the most famous. The stories of his persevering against the Vikings transformed King Alfred into Alfred the Great.
    The story falls into a category that the modern ear can easily recognize and appreciate. From the legends of Robin Hood hiding out with his band of merry men in Sherwood Forest to the tales of men fighting in the underground French resistance during World War II, the modern listener has been well trained to be moved by the courageous nobility of continuing a campaign of resistance long after being driven into hiding. The seeming despair of a life of defiant resistance, while being hunted in one’s homeland, captures the imagination and takes on a romantic hue. But this was not a category of story that the Anglo-Saxon ear was accustomed to hearing. To his contemporaries, Alfred’s plight was an unqualified tragedy, utterly devoid of romanticism.

    Understanding the weight of Alfred’s plight requires a bit of knowledge concerning the ideals of the Anglo-Saxon society: the king sat enthroned, not on a gaudy gold contraption that signaled the distance between his subjects and him, but on the mead bench, pushed up to a long table, surrounded on all sides by his faithful warriors, the