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Updated: June 5, 2025
Here Guthrum was baptised at Alfred's insistence after his defeat at Ethandune , and here the Royalists made their last but ineffectual rally after their rout at Langport in 1645. The church stands apart from the village on a knoll rising from the marshes. It contains an ancient font, an effigy of Sir W. Botreaux on the N. side of choir. The internal arrangements of the tower are peculiar.
In all English kingdoms they had now for ten years been destroying and pillaging the houses of God and slaying even women and children. They had driven his sister's husband from the throne of Mercia, and had grievously tortured the martyr Edmund. If ever foe deserved no mercy, Guthrum and his army were the men.
"'Now in gaining the kingdom which has been the right of the Danish kings if tribute paid for conquest in old time means aught at least since the days of Guthrum, if not before, I have used the help of this earl, for Mercia was ours by right, as in the Danelagh. I will not say that his way of helping me has been what one would wish, but in war one uses what weapons one can find.
This, GUTHRUM did. At his baptism, KING ALFRED was his godfather. And GUTHRUM was an honourable chief who well deserved that clemency; for, ever afterwards he was loyal and faithful to the king. The Danes under him were faithful too. They plundered and burned no more, but worked like honest men. They ploughed, and sowed, and reaped, and led good honest English lives.
Presently he said: "I have believed that all the Danes were as much one under Guthrum their king as are my folk under theirs. I cannot see the end of this war." "It will end when Alfred the king is strong enough always to have men in the field to face every leader that will fall on him," Harek said. "What King Ranald says is true.
By observing how hard it is to change our own resentments to feelings of forgiveness and good will, we can the better appreciate Alfred's treatment of Guthrum. Alfred was famed during all his life for the kindness of his heart, and a thousand stories were told in his day of his interpositions to right the wronged, to relieve the distressed, to comfort the afflicted, and to befriend the unhappy.
However this may be, Guthrum gave Alfred a very friendly reception, and the hour of social intercourse and enjoyment which the general and the ballad-singer spent together was only a precursor of the more solid and honest friendship which afterward subsisted between them as allied sovereigns.
In a week I came back to Athelney, and there was good cheer, and all were in the best of heart, for things went well. Messengers came and went across the winding paths from the southern hills, and Ethered met me laughing, and said: "The king has robbed you of your glory, Ranald. He has been into the Danish camp even to the presence of Guthrum himself."
After hard fighting he imposed terms of peace upon the Danish leader Guthrum. England south-west of Watling Street, which ran from London to Chester, was to be Alfred's, the rest to be Danish; and Guthrum succumbed to the pacifying influence of Christianity.
That was the word of all with whom I spoke, and in the end, when it was certain that the Danes meant to stay, and that help from Ethelred was none, East Anglia owned Guthrum as king quietly and with none to say a word against it, so securing a peace that should last. But to this I could not bring myself as yet, because of what I had seen, and that the hand of Ingvar was behind Guthrum.
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