King Alfred: His Mother
King Alfred was born in AD 849 to King Æthelwulf and his wife, Osburh. He was the youngest of 4 siblings, 3 brothers and a sister.
Osburh was the daughter of Oslac Whitgarsson. He was a butler to King Æthelwulf. A butler at this time was not the same as today. It was a distinguished member of the royal court and we have records which show he was a witness to a royal charter. This suggested he was an important supporter of the king.
He was a Goth. This meant he was of Danish extraction. We don’t know who Osburh’s mother was.
In Asser’s book, on the life of King Alfred, he mentions that she was descended from two Danish chieftains, Stuf and Wihtgar. They were given the Isle of Wight by a former Anglo-Saxon king, Cerdic, in the early part of the 6th Century. I wonder if the island is named after Wihtgar, so originally it would have been called the Isle of Wihtgar. Though I found no evidence to support my claim.
By the age of 5 years old, his mother had died. It was a tragic event. We only have a single recorded memory of his mother.
Osburh gives a challenge to all her children. She showed them an English poetry book and asked them to memorise and recite it back to her. Whoever did this first, would receive the book as a prize.
Alfred was probably 4 years old at the time of this story. It is recorded that he said to his mother, how he couldn’t believe that she would offer such a beautiful prize. So he took the book to his tutor, who read it to him. In a short period of time, he had memorized the poems. As he was the first to recite them back to her, the book was his.
Though growing up, Alfred was not a great reader and preferred to hunt instead. Asser suggests he didn’t start reading until his ‘twelfth year’.
So I find it extraordinary, a person who was not literate until twelve years old, would become become a man of study. He would go on to translate many books into Old English. We still have these translations today and you can read them online. But then, when we see his mother, who was also clearly an educated woman, with a love of literature, we can see where this desire may have stemmed from.
I would say King Alfred was a theologian and an academic first and a king second. Without this background, I wonder whether he would have had the understanding to address the problems caused by the Great Heathen Army.
The lesson we can learn from this section of Alfred’s life is mothers and fathers have a profound impact on their children. And what they remember of how their parents treated them in their early years, can influence what they do, what they think and how they see themselves.
Even though Osburh died when Alfred was very young, her love of literature was deeply engrained in him.