What’s in a Name? Tracing the Origins of Alfred’s ‘the Great’

Abstract

Abstract King Alfred (r. 871–99) is the only native-born English ruler to have gained the byname ‘the Great’. This was not a contemporary sobriquet, but is often considered to have been bestowed in the Elizabethan era by Reformation scholars who increasingly cast Alfred in the role of the founder of the English nation. The acknowledged exception is a reference to Alfred as Rex Alfredus magnus (King Alfred the Great) in a marginal annotation in Matthew Paris’s early thirteenth-century text, Deeds of the Abbots of St Albans Monastery. This medieval attestation of Alfred’s sobriquet is, however, less isolated than has been previously thought. Drawing on a variety of medieval English and Old Norse-Icelandic texts, this article identifies twenty-five examples of Alfred being called ‘the Great’, twenty-three of which have previously gone unremarked. In so doing, it argues for a widespread tradition of Alfred as ‘the Great’, the first sole ruler of all England, from at least the thirteenth century.