Why Was King Alfred The Great Important

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In the early days of England, King Alfred the Great was very important to the history of England. There are many reasons why. The most considerable reasons for his importance are first, he ruled as a wise king and made sure that England was well kept, this move attesting to Alfred’s wisdom in tending to longer-lasting goals. Alfred the Great made systems of law and courts, which helped the country grow and prosper. However, most importantly, he fought against pagan Danish invaders, with great courage and leadership, and kept the Catholic faith alive in early England. To do this, Alfred the Great united the tribes that dwelled therein to band together to fight the common enemy that characterized England for the 1st time as one nation. The…show more content…
In the late 880s or early 890s, Alfred issued a long domboc or law code, consisting of his own laws followed by a code issued by his late seventh-century predecessor King Ine of Wessex. Together these laws were arranged into 120 chapters. In his introduction, Alfred explains that he gathered together the laws he found in many synod-books and ordered to be written many of the ones that his forefathers observed. Alfred singled out in particular the laws that he found in the days of Ine, his kinsman, or Offa, king of the Mercians, or King Æthelbert of Kent, who first among the English people received baptism. He appended rather than integrated the laws of Ine into his code, and although he included, as had Æthelbert, a scale of payments in compensation for injuries to various body parts, the two injury tariffs are not aligned. Offa is not known to have issued a law code, leading historian Patrick Wormald to speculate that Alfred had in mind the legatine capitulary of 786 that was presented to Offa by two papal legates. About a fifth of the law code is taken up by Alfred's introduction, which includes translations into English of the Decalogue, a few chapters from the Book of Exodus, and the "Apostolic Letter" from Acts of the

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