The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great Read Online Free PDF

when the city was packed with the wealth of those who had come to observe the feast, as well as when the city was least prepared to defend itself because the two warring factions were absent from the city. And the city itself, busy with preparing for the feast, was entirely distracted from thinking of its own defenses.
    Undefended, York quickly fell to the Viking attack. Upon hearing the news, Ælle and Osberht, recognizing how dire the situation was, quickly made peace with each other, joined their forces into one large Anglo-Saxon army, and returned to prepare for their own assault on the now Viking-held York. Their attack came several months later, on March 23, Palm Sunday. Initially the battle favored the Northumbrian forces, who broke through the walls of York and engaged the Viking warriors on the narrow streets of the city. But the tide of the battle suddenly turned, and the forces of Ælle and Osberht were cut down both inside the city walls and outside as they fled.
    Though both Ælle and Osberht fell that day, the death of Ælle would be particularly immortalized by later Viking sagas, eager to emphasize the revenge Ragnar’s sons were able to exact from the man who had executed their father. Ivar and Halfdan captured Ælle and ordered him to be ritually sacrificed to the Norse god Odin, the Viking war god who had given the victory to the Norse raiders. The particular method of sacrifice chosen for Ælle was the grisly ceremony of the Blood Eagle. Ælle was held face down on the ground while a sword chopped two gaping holes into the back of his ribcage, one on each side of his spine. Then to the cheers of the Vikings crowded around the floundering victim, his ribs were pulled back and his still-inflating lungs were seized and pulled out through the bloody holes, heaving and gurgling through the last few painful gasps of the shrieking sacrifice. 1

    Shortly after Æthelwulf married Judith, but before the royal family returned to Wessex, Alfred’s brother, Prince Æthelbald, had attempted to usurp the throne. The prince had announced that he refused to let his father back into Wessex and intended to rule as king in his place. Æthelwulf apparently did not take much notice of this attempted coup and returned to Wessex. Æthelbald, his bluff called, was given several shires in the west of Wessex to rule in exchange for his peaceful submission to his father.
    With his mother, Osburh, dead and his father more and more distracted, Alfred found it increasingly easier to slip through the cracks in his father’s courts. Though he maintained the fondness for Anglo-Saxon poetry his mother had instilled in him, far less effort was put into his studies. In fact, it was not until the age of twelve that Alfred learned to read in his native tongue, but he was still not able to understand anything in Latin, the language in which most literary works of the time were available.
    In January 858, within two years of his return home, King Æthelwulf died, leaving the throne to his grasping son Æthelbald. Unfortunately, Æthelbald was not satisfied with just the throne. Shortly after he was made king of Wessex, Æthelbald took his stepmother, the fourteen-year-old Queen Judith, as his wife. Thinking that his marriage to Judith would bring all the Carolingian legitimacy that his father had received from having married the girl, Æthelbald was surprised to find that he had merely invoked disgust and not respect in the hearts of his subjects. Taking his father’s bride for his own wife was a violation of canon law and nature itself. The rash move could have endangered his reign had he not died of disease not long after the wedding. Judith soon returned to her father in West Francia, and the power of Wessex was once again reserved for the spear-side.
    After the death of Æthelbald in AD 860, Æthelberht, the 31 next son in line, took the throne. Æthelberht now ruled over all of Wessex, as well as the northern shire of Berkshire, and the