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Alfred the Great Statue, Shaftesbury Abbey
This statue of Alfred was designed by artist Andrew DuMont in 1984 for a school named after the king, but relocated to the gardens of the ruined Shaftesbury Abbey, Dorset, in 2004
Alfred founded Shaftesbury Abbey in 888, the first religious house in England exclusively for women (nunneries were traditionally attached to monasteries), and appointed his daughter, Aethelgifu, as its abbess. This was common practice for Anglo-Saxon princesses, as their career options were primarily limited to marrying their father’s allies or leading a nunnery.
Founding the abbey helped promote Alfred's reputation for piety and generosity toward the church. According to one of his bishops, Asser, who wrote The Life of King Alfred, the king donated one-eighth of the royal revenues to the Athelney and Shaftesbury.
Shaftesbury Abbey became one of the wealthiest and most esteemed nunneries in England, and it even housed the remains of Alfred’s great-great-grandson, King Edward the Martyr (reign 975-978). Yet, Shaftesbury fell to Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, with only its ground foundations remaining today.
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Original image by Seth Whales. Uploaded by Michael McComb, published on 26 June 2025. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon a work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. When republishing on the web a hyperlink back to the original content source URL must be included. Please note that content linked from this page may have different licensing terms.
