Even scholars have to learn to live with a historical phenomenon like King Alfred of the West Saxons (871–99), and of more besides. Some modern scholars find this more uncomfortable than their predecessors. What follows is by way of personal (perhaps over-personal) reflection of what I have come, over half a lifetime of teaching and reading, to think about this extraordinary man. It is also my chance to expand a bit on the entry for King Alfred in the New Dictionary of (British) National Biography that it was my awesome responsibility to compose. And perhaps, anyway for the time being, this piece may prove somewhat more accessible than that one.

‘Life’, observed the great Tom Lehrer, ‘is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.’ The same goes for King Alfred. The prodigious Alfred bibliography testifies not just to the esteem in which he has been held by Englishmen (and not by them alone), but also to the rich variety of angles from which his story has been viewed. His chameleon-like image has now been reviewed with what one can only call superabundant learning by Simon Keynes. What it amounts to is that Alfred takes on the colouring of his encomiasts’ backgrounds. The process falls broadly into five or six phases. It began in his own milieu: with his biography, and within a century or so, with Æthelweard and (yes) Byrhtferth. The early-twelfth century historians, notably William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester, added or highlighted their own pigments. I shall suggest before I end that the special emphasis of these authorities on the king's learning is anything but misplaced. It was in the second phase, the later Middle Ages, that Alfred's image truly took off from the terra firma of historical reality. In an era when monarchs founded colleges as never before or since, Oxford first showed that special commitment to the king's memory which it largely retained into the twentieth century. In particular, University College (Bill Clinton's alma mater) claimed an Alfredian foundation as early as c. 1380 and as late as 1872, identified by the fellows as a ‘millenary’ to be celebrated with a slap-up feast. Third, in the 1560s Matthew Parker, founder of the Church of England, made of Alfred a champion of Anglophone worship.