The board of New St. Andrews College meets four times a year. One of the things that we do together is assign a book at each board meeting, and we read it together with a plan to discuss it at the following meeting. It is quite a beneficial exercise, and there is a wide array of books that we have chosen.
At our last meeting, we selected a book written by the president of the college, Ben Merkle. As Ben is my son-in-law, I had read it years ago when it had first come out, but I thought that this presented a great opportunity to read it again. The book is The White Horse King, a life of King Alfred the Great. I really enjoyed it the second time through—enjoying it enough to select it as my book of the month.
Alfred really was an important figure. There is a sense in which he is the father of the common law. There is another sense in which he is the father of education in the English-speaking world. And there is yet another sense in which he represents the best sort of medieval piety. From a Protestant perspective, this was mixed in a goodish bit of superstition, but when you put him alongside another medieval fighter of bad guys, say someone really brutal like Vlad the Impaler, Alfred comes out of the comparison looking like the Archangel Michael. Vlad impaled his thousands, but Alfred—though a fierce warrior—acted like he had some sort of acquaintance with the way of Christ. When he defeated his Viking foe Guthrum, he accepted his surrender—but the terms of the surrender were that Guthrum had to accept Christian baptism, and Alfred was to be his godfather.
This story, and a number of others, are woven into this book. It is really good. By the way, the white horse in the title refers to an ancient carving of a horse on a hill where the Battle of Ashdown was fought. That battle was Alfred’s first time in the shield wall, and if you read the book you will find out what that is as well.