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Alfred the Great Statue, Winchester
This bronze statue of Alfred the Great is located near the city centre of Winchester. While Wessex did not formally have a capital and retained an itinerant (moving) court, Winchester was the town most closely associated with the House of Wessex, hosting the remains of many of its kings. Alfred was buried in Winchester following his death in 899, initially at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, before being moved to the neighbouring New Minster a couple of years after his death and later to nearby Hyde Abbey in 1100.
The statue was commissioned by the Winchester City Corporation and designed by sculptor Hamo Thornycroft. It was unveiled to large crowds in 1901 for the "Alfred Millenary" (1000 years since his death), as it was commonly believed that the king died in 901 rather than the real year, 899. The statue portrays a 15-foot Alfred, with his right hand raised, holding a cross-hilted sword and a shield in his left hand – symbols both of his success in war and protection of the church.
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Original image by Odejea. Uploaded by Cristian Violatti, published on 12 December 2014. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, 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.
