ALFRED THE GREAT. - King of England, son of Ethelwulf and Osburga, b. at Wanading, in Berkshire, in 849, d. 28 Oct. 901. As an adolescent, he went several times to Rome to the Pope. He was elected after the death of his brother Ethelred in 871. From the very first year of his reign he had to fight against the pagan Danes: having defeated them after various vicissitudes at Aeshendune, he consented to grant their lives to King Guthrum and the other principal chiefs, provided they converted to Catholicism. By the peace treaty of Wedmore, concluded shortly afterward, the Danes remained masters of the East and North of England, and A. was able to reign over the lands situated to the south. In 893 he was attacked again by the Danes, whom he succeeded in driving back from London and definitively defeating only three years later.
Great was the work carried out by A. within his kingdom, both in the military sphere and in the cultural one. He transformed the army, obliging the holders of a certain amount of land to perform military service; he gave great development to the recently created fleet; he promulgated a code of laws; he founded schools and monasteries; he gave orders to begin an Anglo-Saxon chronicle in which the principal events of each year were to be listed. He himself translated from Latin Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, Orosius's Historia adversus paganos, Boethius's De consolatione Philosophiae and Pope Gregory's Regula Pastoralis, of which he sent a copy to each bishop of his kingdom. Translations of psalms, of fragments of Holy Scripture and a collection of proverbs are also attributed to A.
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Emma Santovito