My Day Out, by Sue Purkiss

A few years ago, I wrote a book about Alfred the Great, called Warrior King. A few days ago, I had the great privilege of reading from it on the Island of Athelney - the secret place in the marshes of Somerset, where in 878 Alfred hid from Guthrum and his Danish army. I had an audience of experts: the Badger class from North Newton Primary School.

And I do mean experts. When I'd gone into their classroom earlier, I'd seen that the walls were covered with information about the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings. There were maps, there were pictures of warriors, there was information about what they wore, and there were stories. On the whiteboard was an Anglo-Saxon riddle which the children were trying to solve, and at the back of the room was a welcoming sign saying Waes hael, Sue Purkiss! When the teacher, Simon Day, took the register, he said 'Gode morgen, Jess/Josh/whatever' - and the children answered 'Gode Morgen' right back, without batting an eyelid. They were all thoroughly engaged - immersed even - in the period.

They had been reading Warrior King together, and when they'd realised that I lived quite close, they'd got in touch and asked if I would like to come and talk to them about writing the book, and then go with them to Athelney.

Would I!

Athelney was where the book began. It's a magical landscape, where history touched by myth is almost palpable, and it was such a pleasure to share it with the Badgers, their teacher Simon, and their two teaching assistants, Vicky and Claire. They were all so enthusiastic; there wasn't a great deal I could tell them, because they already knew so much.

Here are the Badgers climbing up towards Alfred's monument, which was erected in Victorian times. The farmer had kindly cleaned the inscription, and moved the cows which would usually have been in possession. In Alfred's time the long green mound would have been higher: the land has settled, partly because of the weight of the monastery which the king caused to be built in celebration of his victory over Guthrum. (If he'd lost, would we all be speaking Danish now? Certainly the course of history would have been different. All the other English kingdoms had been overrun: Alfred was the last man - just about - standing.)

We looked out towards nearby Burrow Mump, one of the conical hills which rear up above the levels: another is Glastonbury Tor, visible in the distance. Simon told the children to write notes about what they were seeing, hearing, smelling; they discussed whether there was anything that would touch them, or that they could taste, and they agreed that they could feel the touch of a cool soft wind, and wondered whether the Mump would have been used as a lookout post; they decided it almost certainly would have been.

Then we moved across to the other end of the mound, where, some years before, the Time Team had uncovered stones which had been burnt at temperatures which would only have been reached in the heat of a blacksmith's forge; this must have been where weapons were forged for the decisive Battle of Edington. They also found a knife there - the Badgers reminded me it was properly called a seax - made of steel, which was an expensive, high status metal made only for extremely high-ranking leaders.

So this was where Alfred's camp had been: and this was where I read from Warrior King. Marvellous!

After this, we went on to climb Burrow Mump (small but quite steep), and had lunch beside the ruined church which was given to the National Trust by the landowner after the Second World War, to serve as a memorial to local people who had been killed.

Then Simon got the children to look round at the countryside spread out for miles below us: vivid green fields intersected by willow-edged rhynes (ditches), leading to low hills on the horizon. He pushed them to describe exactly what they were seeing, and to use alliteration and kennings (descriptive phrases such as peace-giver, for a king, or death-singer, for a sword), just as the Saxons would have done.

Here are Simon, Vicky and Claire - inspirational teachers and teaching assistants. It was a privilege to see them at work; it was education as it should be: vibrant, creative, magical.

Thanks to them for inviting me - and to the Badgers, Waes hael!

And just as a postscript - here's a picture taken not far from Burrow Mump during the floods almost three years ago. Perhaps this was more how it looked in Alfred's time: mysterious, haunting - and very, very wet.

The Alfred Jewel comes home: Sue Purkiss

The Alfred Jewel

There is great excitement in Somerset at the moment (no, it's true; in the hills and on the levels, they speak of little else!) because for just one month, a great treasure has come home. It's the Alfred Jewel, and it must be one of the most exquisite works of art ever to have been found in a field after having been lost for centuries.

It's surprisingly small - a mere 6.4 cm long. It consists of an enamelled picture of a man who holds a flowering plant in each hand. This image is set under a piece of rock crystal, which is encased in the most exquisitely chased gold setting. It's shaped like a tear drop, and the apex of this is 'carved' into an animal's head - maybe a boar or a dragon? - in whose jaws is an empty socket. The gold back plate is engraved  with a stylised plant design, while the reverse of the animal head is patterned with overlapping scales.

And very significantly, there is an inscription, worked into the framework in open letterwork. It says: AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN - 'Alfred ordered me to be made.'

The Alfred in question was almost certainly Alfred the Great - so this jewel is a direct link with him. We know this because it was found on the Somerset Levels in 1693, in a field near North Petherton, only a few miles from Athelney, where Alfred fled in 878 from the Viking leader Guthrum - and from which he emerged to fight a decisive battle at Edington. After this, for the rest of his reign Alfred had the upper hand, and so was able to get on with rebuilding Wessex and making life better for his people. He later founded a monastery at Athelney.

No-one knows for certain what the purpose of the jewel was. But that socket looks as if it was made as an attachment to something. Perhaps it was fixed onto a crown - but the smart money is on the theory that this was an aestel - a pointer: used to follow the writing in a book. It is known that Alfred gave copies of Pope Gregory's 9th century best-seller Pastoral Care to bishoprics throughout his kingdom, and that with each book he sent a precious aestel. Perhaps this was the one he gave to Athelney.

Who was the man in the picture? It has been suggested it's Alfred himself. This doesn't seem likely to me. So far as I know, there wasn't a tradition of portraiture at the time - and if you were going to make a portrait, there would be easier media to use than enamel. Perhaps it's a saint - we don't know. More questions: how and when was it lost? How did it survive, under the surface of a field, without harm, for hundreds of years? If it had been found today, the site would have been minutely investigated for clues - but of course none of that happened in the 17th century.

What did happen was that the jewel was given to the University of Oxford in 1718 by the antiquarian Thomas Palmer, the son of Nathaniel, who had been the owner of the land where the jewel was found. Not long after that, it was given to the Ashmolean Museum, and there it's been ever since.

The Ashmolean, which opened in 1683, was the first university museum in the world, and it was built to house the 'Cabinet of Curiosities' of Elias Ashmole. Philippa Gregory has a very interesting account of its founding in her novel Virgin Earth (which, by the way, along with its predecessor, Earthly Joys, is a really excellent read), which concerns the fortunes pf plant collectors and explorers John Tradescant and his son. She suggests that the core of the collection was that of the Tradescants, which had been tricked out of them by Ashmole. Whatever the truth of that - and the Tradescants' collection was certainly the foundation of Ashmole's - the Ashmolean was and is a treasure trove. I went there to see the Alfred Jewel some years ago, when I was researching my novel about Alfred, Warrior King. It took me ages to find it, and eventually I spotted it tucked a way in a dim corner of a crowded display case.

But since then the Ashmolean has been re-fashioned into a glorious space, and the Alfred Jewel, far from being hidden away, is a striking focal point with a display case that sets it off beautifully.

Only not this month, because we've got it - it's only on loan, but for these few weeks, it's home.

I went to see it the other day, and I marvelled over how tiny it is. How on earth could the maker even see to create such exquisite detail? And just to think, that Alfred (I have to admit, I think of him as 'my Alfred') actually held this in his hand! (Because I'm sure he did. He ordered it to be made, so he would certainly have inspected it when it was done.)

Seeing the Jewel was the purpose of my visit, but I can't finish without a word about the Museum of Somerset in Taunton. Like the Ashmolean, it has been recently remodelled, and it's gorgeous. In fact, it's so gorgeous that it deserves more than a skimpy paragraph. So on second thoughts, I'll give it a post of its own next month. When the Alfred Jewel will have left us again, and we will be bereft...

Floods in Somerset - some reflections: Sue Purkiss

A few years ago, I wrote a book about Alfred the Great, called Warrior King. The Vikings launched a surprise attack on Alfred, on Twelfth Night, 878. His army had been stood down for the winter: he had no choice but to flee. He headed for Somerset, for the marshes - he knew the country well because he had hunted there. With him (in my story) was his daughter, Aethelflaed...

When she awoke, the snow had stopped again, and veils of wispy dark cloud were flung out against a sky that flared with bands of gold and orange and scarlet. Oddly, the ground seemed at first to be the same colour as the sky, till she blinked and realised that she was in fact looking at a great sheet of water... Treetops stood out above the water, and the surface bristled with spiky dark patches, which she supposed must be reeds.

"This is the summer country," explained Alfred. "Somerset. In the summer, it's land. But it's very low lying, and in the winter, it floods and the hills turn into islands. Mostly you need a boat, but there are a few ways through on foot, and I know them."

He knew them, but the Vikings didn't - and so he was safe. One of those islands was Athelney (the Isle of Princes), which was his refuge; another is the small hill now called Burrow Mump.

This time last year, the news was dominated by images of the flooded Levels. I went down there not long after Christmas - it's about twenty miles from where I live - and took some pictures. There is very often water lying on the fields - it's not unusual not to be able to get to Athelney. For instance, I took this picture several years ago, when I was there researching Alfred's country; this level of inundation is routine.

Water lying near Athelney

However, last year was different. This is what I saw. And this was before the water had risen high enough to flood whole villages.

This is normally a field.

So's this.

The water here was almost over the road, but so far, not quite.

This is Burrow Mump, a small hill with a ruined church on top. Close by is the King Alfred Inn, which became a centre for community action when local people decided that the authorities weren't going to give them the help they needed, so they'd better help themselves.

This was the view from the top of Burrow Mump. The water is almost into the village, but so far, not quite.

So - the levels were very watery in Alfred's time - flooding is not a new phenomenon. The area is below sea level, so it's not surprising that it floods. It has been drained to some extent since the Middle Ages - the monasteries at Athelney, Muchelney and Glastonbury led the way. Then last century, much bigger drainage channels were constructed.

The two main rivers are the Parrett and the Tone, Towards the end of the last century, the management of the rivers and rhynes was rejigged, and they stopped dredging the rivers. The local people were not happy; the new regime seemed to go against what common sense, and years of experience working this very unusual landscape, suggested.

Last year, a system of land management which had apparently worked well for so many years failed. Although the moors had always flooded previously, people's homes had not. There were exceptional factors; unusually high tides forced water up the Parrett till it had to overflow, and there had been so much rain in previous months that the ground was sodden and could not absorb all the excess water. But the people insisted that, had the waterways been properly dredged, the water would have flowed more easily and the disaster would not have occurred. At first the authorities demurred, but now they seem to have changed their minds, and dredging has begun again.

Some of the people who were forced out of their homes have only just been able to return. A few, in despair, sold up at rock-bottom prices. Most didn't. Livelihoods were affected: it's been a very hard year.

I'm no expert, obviously. But it just strikes me that, particularly where you have a difficult and unusual environment which has been worked for centuries - then you really should listen to the people who live there and in particular, those who work the land. They are the keepers. They're in tune with the land, and they know what they're talking about.

Pictures: copyright Sue Purkiss

Myrcna Hlaefdige: by Sue Purkiss

Those of you who regularly read my posts (you there, lurking in the corner - come on, show yourself! Oh, just a shadow. All right then, as you were...) will know that I've already written one or two about Alfred the Great and his wonderful daughter, Aethelflaed. But I make no apology about writing another one this week, because there's a practical reason for it: Michael Wood has a series of three documentaries on at the moment about Alfred and his family, and if you're interested in history, you should watch them - because they're really excellent, and because Alfred is a tremendously significant figure who in recent years has not had nearly as much attention paid to him as he deserves. And this is even more true of Aethelflaed - except that in her case, she's not been getting as much attention as she deserves for centuries, let alone the last few years.

Why are they so important? Well, Alfred, because he was the last English king standing when the Vikings had dispatched the rest of them - either into exile or into the afterlife using a fairly gruesome method known as the blood-eagle.(For more detail, see my book, Warrior King.) Because he turned the tide, laying the foundations for his grandson, Athelstan, to rule the whole of England. Because he fervently believed in the importance of education and culture, collecting learned scholars at his court from all over Europe, and translating important books into English so that more people could actually read them. Because he set in train the creation of towns - burhs - which would form centres for commerce and places of safety for the people. Because he  took London from the Danes and set about rebuilding it.

And Aethelflaed? As a girl of sixteen, she was married to the considerably older Aethelred, Lord of the Mercians. Mercia had been a great kingdom - one of its kings was Offa, who built the dyke of which parts can still be seen and walked. But when Alfred of Wessex stood fast, the last king of Mercia fled, and now, Mercia was a client kingdom with Alfred as overlord. Initially with her husband, Aethelflaed carried on her father's work in Mercia. She too established burhs and restored ancient towns such as Gloucester and Tamworth. When her husband became ill, she carried on, and when he died, the people chose her as their Myrcna Hlaefdige - Lady of the Mercians; and she fought, sometimes alongside her brother Edward, against the Danes. Sometimes she didn't have to fight: such was her reputation that the Danes of York and Nottingham swore allegiance to her without a battle. She also fostered her brother's first son (though not with his queen), Athelstan - who in his turn became a great king who bound the different kingdoms of England into one.

The programmes are on Tuesdays at 9pm on BBC 4, and are repeated at 10.15 on Thursdays, same channel. Because of Michael Wood's erudition and enthusiasm, they're an absolute delight, and it's a special treat to hear Anglo-Saxon being read aloud so beautifully. If you can't catch the programmes, there's also my book, Warrior King, which is published by Walker as an e-book.

Alfred's also been in the news recently for a different reason - read about it here. In brief, there is some doubt as to where his final resting place is, because his remains are known to have been moved several times. The Bishop of Winchester is coat the moment considering whether to grant permission to a group which wishes to analyse the bones which are said to be his, in the hope of being able to prove their identity one way or another. This comes in the wake of the discovery of Richard 111's skeleton in Leicester.

But old as Richard's bones are, they're younger than Alfred's by centuries. It's very unlikely that a direct descendant of Alfred could be found, to provide DNA - though not, perhaps, impossible. (See another post of mine, about Cheddar man - here.) So although tests could show how old the bones were, and indicate more about the man to whom they belonged, it's not likely that they could prove his identity. So should these bones be disturbed? What do you think?

The Legend That Is... by Sue Purkiss

Last weekend, I visited the tower in the picture. No, it's nothing to do with Rapunzel: it was built in honour of a legendary Dark Age king. I wrote a book about him a few years ago. Much to my delight, it's recently been come out as an ebook, and I'm writing this post partly to celebrate that.

I'm also writing it because I found it recently that Michael Wood has just made a documentary series about this same king, which will be on BBC in the autumn. It feels as if there's something in the air: perhaps the hour of this king is about to come again!

So who was he? Well, here are some clues.

• His name begins with an A. 
• He was a brave fighter and a skillful tactician.
• He gathered about him a cultured Christian court, inviting to it scholars from all over Europe. 
• Legends have gathered around his name.
• He truly cared for the welfare of his people - all of them, not just the rich ones.
• He had a Big Idea - the idea of England and Englishness.
• He had his time of despair in a watery wilderness.
• There are many places in south-west England which are associated with him - the Avalon marshes; Winchester (where a round table hangs in the Castle...);  the area near Wayland's Smithy; and the tower in the picture, which is in the grounds of Stourhead, in Wiltshire.

Have you got it yet? A few more clues...

• He was real. He definitely, incontrovertibly existed. 
• He did not have a helpful wizard called Merlin. (Though in my book, he does have a magic lady called Cerys.)
• His wife was called Eahlswith, not Guinevere.
• If he hadn't, against all odds, emerged from the marshes and conquered the Danes, there's a distinct possibility that we'd now be speaking some form of Danish. (Which would have its advantages - we'd be able to watch Borgen without subtitles!)

So - not Arthur, but Alfred. People often confuse the two - I can't tell you how many times I've been asked about that book I wrote about King Arthur. Don't get me wrong - I'm a great fan of the Arthurian legend. But Alfred was, famously, a great king. He achieved things. He made a difference. Yet now, if you go into most classrooms - or probably most pubs - you're lucky if you find anyone who's heard any more than a garbled story about some badly burnt cakes. I hope that's going to change!

Finally, here are the words which are carved on the stone tablet set into the front of Alfred's Tower.

Alfred the Great

AD 879 on this summit

Erected his standard against Danish invaders

To Him we owe

The origin of Juries

The Establishment of a Militia

the Creation of a Naval force

Alfred the light of a benighted age

was a Philosopher and a Christian

The Father of his People

The Founder of the English

Monarchy and Liberty.

What a guy!

Detecting the Dark Ages, by Sue Purkiss

At one point when I was researching Warrior King, my book about Alfred the Great, I was trying to nail down his brothers. Not literally, you understand: the Vikings may have gone in for that sort of behaviour, but not me - and anyway they lived (approximately - very approximately) eleven hundred years ago.

Alfred the Great

I was trying to pinpoint how old Alfred was when a particular incident was said to have occurred. Alfred had four older brothers. Their mother had promised a book to the first one of them who could learn how to read it. Alfred couldn't read at all, but he wanted that book: so he persuaded a monk to help him to learn it off by heart - and he got it  The story is told to indicate his determination, a certain degree of cunning, and his love of learning.

But there are all sorts of problems with it. Alfred was born in 849. In 851, his second oldest brother, Aethelbald, (he had four older brothers altogether) was fighting a battle against the Vikings alongside his father. Is it feasible that his mother would have issued such a challenge to a toddler and to grown men - fighting men? Just how old were all these brothers? How did they die? The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is vague about such details. For that matter, when did Alfred's mother die? In 855, when Alfred was six, his father, Aethelwulf, married Judith Martell, a Frankish princess, but the chronicle doesn't tell us when he lost his first wife.

This all seemed rather untidy, and so I got in touch with an academic historian who knew a good deal about Alfred - up until I'd begun researching this book, I had known virtually nothing about him. Alfred's brothers were giving me the runaround, I told her. Could she tell me when, precisely, they were born? No, she couldn't, she said cheerily. My guess was as good as hers. But, she pointed out, as a novelist, that gave me a good deal of freedom. Facts were few and far between, so what could I do but make the rest up?

Just recently I've returned to the Anglo-Saxon world. In Warrior King, Alfred's daughter, Aethelflaed (I called her Fleda for short, and to have one less Aethel-whatnot cluttering up the place) was the viewpoint character for two thirds of the book. It ended with Alfred defeating the Danes, but I knew that in later life, Aethelflaed had married the Lord of the Mercians, and after he died, was chosen by her people to be their leader - in battle as well as at home. She was named Lady of the Mercians, and, with her brother Edward, Alfred's successor as King of Wessex, she carried on Alfred's work; she was clearly a remarkable woman.

Now, I've come back to this part of her life. There's very little about her in the Chronicle, although she's mentioned in the Annals of Ulster as a great and revered queen. After all, she was only a woman - presumably the monks who wrote up the Chronicle weren't very interested in women.

But now I've got hooked on the mystery surrounding the fate of another woman. In the summer of 919, Aethelflaed died. Her daughter, Aelfwynn, succeeded her - but only for a few months. Just before Christmas, the Abingdon version of the Chronicle tells us: ...the daughter of Aethelred, lord of the Mercians, was deprived of all control in Mercia, and was led into Wessex... And that's it. Aelfwynn disappears into the mists of history. The best guess seems to be that she spent the rest of her life in a nunnery.

Aethelfled and Aethelstan

But why? Did her uncle, Edward, think that she wasn't strong enough to hold Mercia against the Danes? Or id she defy him - had she 'gone native', become too Mercian, refused to remain a junior partner to Wessex?

And then again - Edward had sent his oldest (though possibly illegitimate) son, Aethelstan, to Mercia to be brought up at Aethelflaed's court - presumably to bind the two kingdoms even more closely together. So why not marry Aethelstan to Aelfwynne, thus making the bond pretty well indissoluble?

So much room to speculate. And in the end, I suspect that the real reasons for what happened must lie in the characters of the participants in this drama. History books research meticulously a network of cause and effect. What novelists can do is to fill in the vast empty spaces between.

Sue Purkiss: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ (LP Hartley: The Go-Between)

I’ll bet you recognise this quotation. I was firmly convinced I knew it by heart, and yet when I looked it up in Hartley’s novel I saw that I’d got it wrong. I'd thought it was ‘The past is another country’ (and to be honest, my version still sounds better to me!). Out of curiosity, I looked it up on Google, and found that many others have made the same mistake. I think perhaps it’s been conflated with another familiar quote, from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, which is something like: ‘… but that was in another country, and beside, the wench is dead.’

Whatever – it’s an example of the shivering sands of memory: we think we

know things, but we don’t. But I think perhaps the point I want to make is almost the opposite one: that we actually know more than we think we do about the way things were in the past. Let’s look at the assertion made in the second part of this quotation: ‘they do things differently there.’ Is it true? Did they do things differently in that other country which is the past?

In many ways the answer is outstandingly obvious: of course they did things differently there. They didn’t have mobile phones, for a start. But in terms of how people thought, what they cared about, how they related to each other, what they were afraid of, how they felt about life – in those terms, were they so very different from us?

My first historical novel was Warrior King, and it’s about Alfred the Great. When I go into schools and talk about it, this is the story I tell them about how I came to write it. I needed to check the story of how he burnt the cakes, I say, just for a detail in some other story I was writing (Finnegan’s Cake, since you ask, about a time-travelling dog. Still inexplicably unpublished, still available…) Obviously, the first thing I did was to turn to Google. Then I realised that the location of Alfred’s unfortunate early attempt at Masterchef was Athelney, which is only about forty minutes’ drive from where I live. I thought that Athelney would be to Alfred as Tintagel is to Arthur. At the very least there would be a bakery or a cafe called Alfred the Cake, and an array of books about the only monarch in British history to be called ‘the Great’ – so off I went.

But there were no itsy witsy shops with punning names, no explanatory pamphlets. Just a discreet plaque, an unimpressive Victorian monument – and an astonishingly evocative landscape of water and willows and glittering birds, which could hardly have changed in the eleven hundred odd years since Alfred fled to the Somerset marshes to take shelter from the Vikings.

It’s an extraordinary story. We know what happened – we know that he emerged to defeat the Danes, and then made a peace which lasted long enough for him to create a country which was stronger and safer for his people. But people then didn’t know that this was what was going to happen. He had only a few men with him – ‘a small troop’ as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it. The Vikings had conquered every other part of England apart from Wessex, and with Alfred out of the way they ‘over-rode and occupied the land of Wessex, and drove many of the people across the sea’. Surely no-one would have put money on Alfred’s chances of surviving, let alone managing to gather an army together and emerge from the marshes to defeat the Northmen.But he did. A number of things intrigued me about this. One was the drama of it: this was a real turning point – if Alfred hadn’t managed to pull it off, England would have been ruled entirely by the Danes, and today we’d be living in a different country and speaking a different language. Another was that here was an extraordinary leader – remarkable and unexpected in many ways which I haven’t space here to go into (read the book!) – and yet today, very few people know anything about him. And yet everyone’s heard of Arthur, who didn’t even exist!

But the other thing was – what was he like? What motivated him? (Apart, obviously, from the understandable wish to stay alive.) He was the youngest of five children, four of them boys. He was clever, sensitive and thoughtful. Would he ever have expected that he would become king? It seems unlikely, given his place in the family. Was he prepared for it? What went through his mind during those weeks when he was holed up in the marshes? How did he manage to persuade other people – and himself – that he could defeat Guthrum, despite all appearances? Where were his family, his wife and children, while all this was going on?

And then I wondered about the ordinary people. What effect did the endless series of battles have on them? Did they care about who ruled them, or were they too busy trying to survive to even think about it?

I wanted to explore what life was like for all these people in that other country which is the past.

They were faced with very different situations and dilemmas, but I don’t think they were so very different from us. I think it’s possible to imagine how they felt, what they thought.

But of course, I could be completely wrong. Now, how is it you can you never find a time-travelling dog when you need one…?

Sue Purkiss