Alfred the Great is the only English monarch who carries the epithet — and he earned it under conditions almost no successor ever faced. Born around 849 as the youngest of five royal brothers, he became King of Wessex in 871, by which point a Viking "Great Heathen Army" had already overrun Northumbria, East Anglia, and most of Mercia. By the spring of 878, Wessex was the last surviving Anglo-Saxon kingdom in England and Alfred was hiding in the Somerset marshes with a handful of loyalists. He came back, won the Battle of Edington that May, and forced the Danish leader Guthrum to accept baptism and a partition treaty that held the line. He spent the rest of his reign fortifying English towns into the defensive network of burhs, founding what would become the Royal Navy, restoring law and the Church, and personally promoting the translation of major Latin works into Old English so his subjects could read them. He died in 899. A century later, his descendants ruled a unified England.

This figure depicts Alfred at the height of his kingship — crowned, in mail armor over a green tunic, red cloak across his shoulders, sword raised and round shield at his side. The pose is the iconography of the medieval warrior-king, and works for either a battlefield vignette (Edington, the long Viking wars) or as a standalone display piece. He sits in the W. Britain Museum Collection of named historical individuals, and pairs naturally with W. Britain's Emperor Charlemagne for an early-medieval kings display covering both the Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon traditions.

1/30 scale (60mm), matte-painted, single figure boxed. Catalog number 10201. As with the rest of the W. Britain modern range, the painting is photographic-quality detail intended to read well in dioramas and display cases.