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Updated: June 3, 2025
He also founded two monasteries; one was for nuns, at Shaftesbury in Dorsetshire, of which he made his own daughter, Aethelgifu, abbess. The other was for monks at Athelney; you can easily see why he should build it there.
Both mother and I were greatly hurt at hearing of this insolence: for we had owned that meadow, from the time of the great Alfred; and even when that good king lay in the Isle of Athelney, he had a Ridd along with him.
Confident of victory the great Danish army beheld the approach of the Saxons. Long accustomed to success, and superior in numbers, they regarded with something like contempt the approach of their foes. In the centre Alfred placed the trained phalanx which had accompanied him from Athelney, in the centre of which waved the Golden Dragon, by whose side he placed himself.
Omer to preside over his new abbey at Winchester; and John, the Old Saxon, was fetched it may be from the Westphalian abbey of Corbey to rule the monastery that Ælfred's gratitude for his deliverance from the Danes raised in the marshes of Athelney. The real work however to be done was done, not by these teachers but by the King himself.
Having obtained the necessary information, he returned to Athelney, which he finally left on the seventh week after Easter, and rode to Egbert's Stone, in the eastern part of Selwood, or the Great Wood. Here he was met by all the neighboring folk of Somersetshire, Wiltshire, and Hampshire, who had not, for fear of the pagans, fled beyond the sea.
Utter gloom now settled down upon the Christian king and people. Athelney, a little island in the marshes of Somersetshire then marshes, now drained and a fruitful plain to which he retired with the few followers left him, has been aptly compared to the mountains of Asturias, which formed the last asylum of Christianity in Spain.
I know this, that many a man who was in Athelney with Alfred was the better therefor all the days of his after life. Men say that there is a steadfast look in the faces of the Athelney thanes, by which they can be well known by those who note the ways of men. The frost lasted till February went out in rain and south winds. And then the Danes began to gather along the southern hills, watching us.
But it was still a trying life at Athelney. Followers came in slowly, and provender and supplies of all kinds are hard to wring from the pagan, and harder still to take from Christian men. One day, while it was yet so cold that the water was still frozen, the King's people had gone out "to get them fish or fowl, or some such purveyance as they sustained themselves withal."
For the hero always defends an island, a thing beleaguered and surrounded, like the Troy of Hector. And the highest and largest humanitarian can only rise to defending the tiny island called the earth. One approaches the island of Athelney along a low long road like an interminable white string stretched across the flats, and lined with those dwarfish trees that are elvish in their very dullness.
I do not think that I can do better than tell you the next happening to Alfred, as it is in the Chronicle, only changing those words which you might not understand. And this they fulfilled. And three weeks after came King Guthrum with thirty of the men that in the host were worthiest, at Aller, that is near Athelney. Thus you see how soon King Alfred's good luck came back to him again.
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