Alfred the Great and His Son Defeated the Vikings and Unified England
For centuries after settling in Britain, the Anglo-Saxons had divided their lands into disparate kingdoms, often competing and warring against each other. It took the invading Vikings, who extinguished some of those kingdoms outright and brought the rest to the brink of extinction, to unify the Anglo-Saxons into the single country of England.
That unification was conducted by Alfred the Great (849 – 899) and his successors. Alfred was the youngest son of king Aethelwulf of Wessex, who set up a succession whereby the throne would get inherited by each of his sons, from oldest to youngest. It was a departure from the usual system of primogeniture, where the throne passed from father to son, not from brother to brother. However, Wessex was facing an existential threat from the Vikings, and Aethelwulf’s system sought to prevent a child from inheriting the throne in such a dangerous time.
Accordingly, Aethelwulf was succeeded in turn by Alfred’s elder brothers Aethelbard, then Aethelbert, then Aethelred. In 868, king Aethelred of Wessex and his younger brother Alfred tried, and failed, to keep the Vikings’ “Great Heathen Army” from overrunning the neighboring kingdom of Mercia. By 870, Wessex was the last independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom, when it was attacked by the largest Viking army assembled to date.
King Aethelred and his brother, Alfred led the defending forces in a series of battles with varying outcomes. Victory in an opening skirmish was followed by a severe defeat a few days later, which in turn was followed by a brilliant victory in the Battle of Ashdown, January 8th, 871, in which Alfred played a leading role. Ashdown was followed by two defeats, king Aethelred died soon thereafter, and Alfred finally became king of Wessex.
The new king’s reign commenced inauspiciously, with two defeats. The second defeat in particular, at Milton in May of 871, was a bad one, and it smashed all hopes of driving the Vikings from Wessex by force of arms. Alfred was thus forced to make peace with the invaders, paying them a hefty sum to withdraw from his kingdom – which they did, by the autumn of 871.
The Vikings returned in 876, and Alfred was forced to make a new peace with them, whose terms the invaders soon violated. In 878, the Vikings launched a sudden attack which overran Wessex, and forced Alfred to flee to the marshes of Somerset. He led a guerrilla resistance, before emerging in May of 878 to rally the surviving Wessex forces and lead them to a decisive victory at the Battle of Edington. Alfred then pursued and besieged the Vikings at Chippenham, starved them into surrender, and forced their leader, Guthrum, to convert to Christianity.
In 885, Vikings from East Anglia attacked Kent, but Alfred beat them back, then went on a counteroffensive that captured London. That victory led all Anglo-Saxons not then under Viking rule to accept Alfred as their king – a major step towards the unification of England. London acted as a springboard and base of operations for Alfred’s successor, his son Edward the Elder (reigned 899 – 924). By the end of his reign, Edward had decisively defeated the Vikings, and extended his authority over nearly all of today’s England.