The New Murrey and Blue blog

I can’t say that I am very well up on Alfred the Great. The closest I’ve come to his “history” is the Blowing Stone Blowing Stone on the hill at Kingston Lisle.

The sound it makes can be heard over a long distance, and according to a legend, in 871AD, when the Danish army approached and the Battle of Ashdown was imminent, Alfred had the stone blown to summon his troops who had camped a mile away on White Horse Hill. He won the battle.

Oh, and I learned about the burnt cakes at school, of course. See here and here (from which I have taken the illustration at the top of this article).

He doesn’t often hit the headlines today, and I was surprised when an article from 2014 suddenly turned up ten years late. With the discovery of Richard III’s remains in Leicester, kings’ bones were very much in the news, and it seems that Alfred may have bequeathed us one of his. According to the above Independent article:

“….A fragment of a male human pelvic bone which had lain unappreciated in a cardboard box in a museum store room in Winchester, once the capital of Anglo-Saxon England, has been identified as probably belonging to either King Alfred himself – or to his son King Edward the Elder….”

I haven’t learned anything more about this particular bone, but a new (in 2022) archaeological dig is in progress at the site where it was originally discovered. You can read about it here A video of Neil Oliver’s story of Alfred is available here, and there is a video of Michael Wood narrating the story of Alfred the Great here.

As for the discovery and possible identification of the bone in the museum store room, you can read all about it in various articles from 2014, including here and here. There was also a BBC documentary about the bone. It was broadcast at 9 pm on Tuesday, 21 January 2014 and was presented by Neil Oliver.