Why Was the Life of King Alfred Written at Ramsey in c. AD 1000?

Abstract

The Danish conquest of northern and eastern England had a particularly devastating effect on organised Christianity in East Anglia and the southern Danelaw. Even in Northumbria where the bishoprics at York and Lindisfarne managed eventually to negotiate a way through the Viking mayhem, other historic sees at Hexham and Whithorn were not so fortunate. In the southern Danelaw, the collapse of Christian organisation was more marked. Episcopal succession at Lindsey, Leicester, Dunwich and Elham was either disrupted or destroyed, while early English monasticism in the region was virtually wiped out. Eastern England had been trampled underfoot for fourteen years by the Great Army of Danes in the 860s and 870s. It had been colonised by settlers from Scandinavia in the later ninth and early tenth centuries, and had been regularly fought over by West Saxon and Norse kings of Dublin and York throughout the first half of the tenth century.¹ At the time when the West Saxon ruler, Eadred, succeeded the last Danish king of York in 954, many parts of the southern Danelaw must by then have reverted to being a pagan society. Such a region was in need of evangelisation — as far as its new ruling class was concerned - on a scale which was comparable with that of Francia in the time of Clovis.