Who Is King Alfred in The Last Kingdom — and What Was He Really Like?

The facts, in one place

• Played by David Dawson.
• First appearance season one (2015).
• Last appearance season three (2018), in which he dies.
• The historical Alfred was born in 849, became king of Wessex in 871, and died in 899. He is buried at Winchester.

A king who wins by building

What makes this Alfred good television is that the series lets him be right and unpleasant at the same time. He is physically frail, socially cold, morally certain, and correct about almost every strategic question in the show — and he is willing to be disliked for it in a way most drama kings are not allowed to be. He does not win by charging anything. He wins by writing things down, taxing people who hate being taxed, and building walls in years when nobody can see the point of a wall.

That is also what the record says. The real Alfred's most consequential reform was the burhs — fortified towns, thirty-three of which appear in the later Burghal Hidage, spaced so that nowhere in the kingdom was more than about twenty miles from a defended place. Asser, writing his life of the king in 893, notes that the nobles baulked at the demands even while agreeing they served the common need, which is a nine-hundred-year-old description of a difficult budget meeting.

The line he is remembered for

He says it in the third episode of the first season, explaining why he wants to know how the Danes actually fight rather than merely how frightening they are: “Fear can be expelled with knowledge.”

It is the whole character in six words, and it is also the show's argument about why this particular king survived when the other three English kingdoms did not. Wessex holds because somebody sat down and studied the problem. It is not a heroic sentence and it was never meant to be one.

The winter that nearly ended England

The series stages it and the Chronicle records it. In January 878 Guthrum's army came into Wessex out of season and drove Alfred into the Somerset marshes; Wessex was the last of the four old English kingdoms still standing, and for several months it was a king, a small following, and a swamp. In May of that year he came back out, gathered an army and beat Guthrum decisively at Edington. Guthrum was then baptised at Aller with Alfred standing as his godfather, took the Christian name Aethelstan, and the two spent twelve days feasting at Wedmore.

That last detail is the one people struggle with, and it is real. Alfred did not destroy his enemy; he converted him, stood surety for him, and threw him a party. Whatever else that was, it was a policy, and it worked for a decade.

What the series changes

Mostly it compresses. Real reigns are made of charters and church appointments and years where nothing happens, and drama cannot use those, so a decade of gradual consolidation becomes a season of arguments in one room. The series also gives Alfred a clearer plan for a united England than the evidence supports — the idea of an England is doing more work in the script than it was doing in the 880s, and his son and grandsons are the ones who actually built it.

What it gets right is the temperament: a man who would rather be respected than liked, who treats governing as a craft, and who is quietly certain that his own discomfort is not an argument against anything. The dates are on the chronicle page.

Common questions

Who plays Alfred in The Last Kingdom?

David Dawson, from the first season in 2015 through to the third. The performance is unusually physical for a part built out of paperwork and diplomacy — the illness is played rather than announced — and the series noticeably has to redistribute its centre of gravity once he is gone.

Which season does Alfred die in?

The third, which was released on Netflix in November 2018. The series never names his illness, and neither does the historical record: the real Alfred's long-running complaint is described by his biographer Asser but has never been securely identified. He hands the kingdom to his son Edward and takes Uhtred into his confidence about the succession before he goes.

How accurate is The Last Kingdom's Alfred?

The shape is right. The real Alfred ruled Wessex from 871 to 899, was driven into the Somerset marshes in the winter of 878 and beat Guthrum at Edington that May, and spent the rest of his reign building — the burhs, of which thirty-three are listed in the Burghal Hidage, placed so that no one in Wessex was more than about twenty miles from a defended place. He was also genuinely bookish, and genuinely ill for much of it.

Where to go next

Uhtred is the other end of every conversation on this page. Brida is what the same century looks like from the other side of it entirely. And if you want to know whether you would have been any use in Alfred's Wessex, the wing's ninth-century quiz puts you in a job rather than on a throne, because almost nobody was on a throne.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan profile of a character from The Last Kingdom — the television series and the novels of Bernard Cornwell it is based on — naming the work, its characters and its facts under nominative fair use. It is a free, unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Carnival Film & Television, Netflix, or Bernard Cornwell and his publishers.

Every word of description here was written for this page, and the historical material comes from the public-domain record. The one quoted line above is short, attributed to the character who says it and the season it comes from, and set inside commentary of our own; no scene, transcript, still, clip, logo or artwork is reproduced anywhere in it. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world and has no connection to the world of The Last Kingdom.