The Anglo-Saxon Alfred (849-899), sometimes called Alfred the Great, was king of Wessex from 871 to 899. He successfully halted the advance of Danish armies seeking to conquer the English, and he stimulated a revival of learning among his war-ravaged people.

The Anglo-Saxons were a group of Germanic tribes who had migrated to the island of Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries and had wrested control of what is now England from the native Britons. After their conversion to Christianity in the 7th century, they absorbed much Latin culture, which blended with their Germanic traditions to form a distinctive civilization and increasingly stable political and social institutions. The process of reducing the many Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to a unified nation under a centralized monarchy was still in its early stages when the Danes, another Germanic nation far more warlike than the Anglo-Saxons had become, began raiding the English coast in...