The famous story of king Alfred burning the cakes in the humble kitchen of the country wife is first recorded in Latin in the first Life of St. Neot, written in the eleventh century, before the Norman Conquest. It is interesting in containing not only a Biblical reference, but also a reference to Juvenal’s seventh satire.Here the original version of this literary vignette is compared with a briefer post-Conquest version in the Annals of St. Neot’s and an expanded version from the thirteenth century, from the Chronicle of John of Wallingford, which preserves the reference to Juvenaland the Biblical reference used in the original but adds other references.