King Alfred wrote the book on effective defences against the Viking invasions.
Imagine ascending to the throne of a kingdom besieged, you’re just 22 years of age and have inherited a land on fire, towering pillars of acrid smoke darken the skyline showing where your villages and towns burn at the mercy of armies of seemingly unstoppable warriors, the heavy burden of saving your civilisation from certain annihilation is yours.
Boatloads of these violent longhaired well-groomed pagans who washed far to frequently to be trustworthy (making him question his own hygiene habits), attacked Alfred’s land without warning, pillaging and burning undefended villages and towns across the kingdom, only to vanish before ever Alfred could muster and organise his scattered forces to defend his people.
All the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms but his had fallen, Wessex was all that stood between the Vikings and total victory.
Faced with the impossible, King Alfred formed a devilishly cunning plan, for he would not be the ruler who watched the last light of his people be extinguished. So, Alfred gathered his treasury and did what every naive King had done before him, he paid the Vikings to piss off. But Alfred was neither naive nor stupid, for he knew full well that this Danegeld would buy him a year or two at most, before those metal clad disturbingly well-washed Viking raiders returned.
Alfred recognised that the Vikings were exploiting weaknesses in the military systems of their victims, that given the time required Wessex, Mercia and the Frankish Kingdoms, could all raise and field far larger armies than the Vikings and crush them in a traditional conflict of large-scale battles. What the Vikings were doing is engaging in a new style of warfare, of lightening fast raids that weakened Kingdoms until they paid the Danegeld, or were finally overwhelmed.
King Aflred ordered surveys to map his Kingdom in great detail, assessing the weak points as those on the coast and astride river networks, the Vikings hit where their victims were weakest and preferred to stay near their longboats.
Then he set about reorganising the military system of Wessex, from the ground up, raising taxes and passing laws that all the lords of the land were responsible for building, maintaining and defending a network of heavily fortified settlements known as Burhs.
The genius of Alfred’s military defence lay not in the walled towns, but in the soldiers each lord had to garrison his Burh with, in total approximately 1/4 of the working-age male population of the land became soldiers who garrisoned the Burhs on rotation, remaining ever ready to be called upon at short notice.
Alfred built a network of 33 Burhs in strategically important locations, with none further than a days march apart, meaning the people and wealth of the land could be safeguarded within each regional Burh, and reinforcements were always at hand nearby to react swiftly to Viking raids and invasions.
When the Vikings returned, they found the prosperous Anglo-Saxon Kingdom littered with heavily fortified Burhs, that were extremely difficult to capture and linked by new roads which reinforcing forces could traverse at astounding speed to respond should pillars of smoke blot the sky once more.
Each Burh was built by local craftsmen in varying styles, but fundamentally all were stout and designed to defend the whole local community at short notice.
A fair few Burhs were built alongside rivers and estuaries, guarding bridges that in turn safeguarded these arteries from Viking longboats and encouraged increased trade and prosperity as now merchants could sail straight to market towns conveniently located and linked with the rest of the Kingdom.
This is why King Alfred is known as the Great, because not only did he reverse an almost impossible position saving his very civilisation, but he did so in a manner that helped his people to prosper and his Kingdom to flourish in an age when that should have been the least of his concerns.