A royal estate of the West Saxon kings in the Berkshire downs, named by Asser as the place where Alfred the Great was born in 849, left by Alfred to his wife Ealhswith, and the place where Æthelred the Unready issued the law code known from it as the Wantage Code.
Wantage lies at the foot of the Berkshire downs, beneath the Ridgeway, on a stream whose name is the root of the place-name: Wanating, from a word for waning or dwindling, describing a watercourse that runs low in summer. The area was settled in the Roman period, and by the ninth century it was a royal vill of the West Saxon kings.
A villa regia of this kind was not a palace but an estate: land, rents in kind, a hall and outbuildings, at which the itinerant royal household could stop, hold court and be fed from the produce of the surrounding farms. Wessex was governed from a circuit of such places, and the king was wherever the household happened to be.
Asser, the Welsh bishop who joined Alfred’s household and wrote his life in 893, states that the king was born in 849 in the royal vill called Wanating, in the district called Berrocscire from the wood of Berroc. Alfred was the youngest son of King Æthelwulf and his wife Osburh, and nobody expected him to reign: four elder brothers stood before him, and three of them did rule before him.
Asser is the only source for the place, and he was writing forty years later from what the court remembered, which is the usual condition of early English royal biography rather than a special weakness. The date has been argued over — some have preferred 847 or 848 on the evidence of Alfred’s age at other moments — but 849 is what Asser gives and what is generally accepted.
Alfred did not forget the estate. In the will he drew up in the 880s he left three properties to his wife Ealhswith, and each of them was tied to his own story: Wantage, where he was born; Edington, where he had beaten the Danish army in 878; and Lambourn, near the site of another of his fights. Ealhswith kept all three after his death on 26 October 899.
The pairing of Wantage with Edington is worth noticing. The Battle of Edington was the victory that saved Wessex and led to Guthrum’s baptism, and Alfred set his birthplace beside it in the same bequest — the earliest sign that the association between the king and this particular village was being deliberately kept rather than merely recorded.
About 997 Æthelred the Unready and his councillors met at the royal estate and issued the law now called the Wantage Code, or III Æthelred. It is largely procedural, concerned with the management of disputes, the keeping of the peace and the fines attached to breaking it, and it is written for the Danelaw: it speaks of wapentakes rather than hundreds, uses Scandinavian legal vocabulary, and names the Five Boroughs.
Its most quoted clause requires the twelve leading thegns of each wapentake to swear on relics that they will accuse no innocent man and conceal no guilty one. That is the earliest provision in English law resembling a sworn jury of presentment, and it is the reason a small Berkshire estate keeps a place in legal history. The code survives in Latin translation rather than in the original English, which complicates any close reading of its words.
Domesday Book in 1086 records Wantage as a royal manor worth £61, a substantial valuation that shows the estate had kept its importance through the Conquest. It remained in the king’s hands until Richard I granted it away in 1190 to the Earl of Aumale, and thereafter it descended through lay lords rather than the crown.
Henry III granted a weekly market in 1246, which turned an estate centre into a market town serving the vale and the downland sheep country; markets are still held twice a week in the same square. The parish church of St Peter and St Paul is largely of the thirteenth century, cruciform and built of flint and stone, and keeps seventeen fifteenth-century misericords in its chancel stalls.
The Victorians made the connection visible. In 1877 a statue of Alfred by Count Gleichen — Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a sculptor and naval officer related to Queen Victoria — was set up in the market place, showing the king with an axe and a scroll, the warrior and the lawgiver together. It has stood there ever since and gives the square its character.
Wantage was in Berkshire until the county boundaries were redrawn in 1974 and is now in Oxfordshire, which is why older books and newer ones disagree about where Alfred was born without disagreeing about anything at all.