ATHELNEY

VERY near the point where the Tone runs into the Parret is a place called Athelney.

It is not a village, or even a hamlet, but lies in the pleasant parish of Lyng.

More than a thousand years ago it got the name it still holds, which means the “ Isle of Nobles

 It is not an island now, but a gentle rising ground, not high enough to be called a hill, surrounded with miles of level moor.

 But once it was one of the green spots upon the fen of which you have heard, though it must have been very small.

 Nobody could get to it except in a boat. But it was there that King Alfred went into hiding with a small band of his most faithful nobles, and so it got its

In this lonely place he was so secure that his people, hearing nothing of him, believed he must have been killed.

 On the island lived a swineherd, who willingly gave shelter to his countrymen in distress, without dreaming that the king was under his roof.

 So here Alfred remained hidden for several weeks, all the while preparing a plan to drive the Danes out of his kingdom.

 It seemed almost hopeless, but he did not give up. He sent the nobles in disguise to one place and another to quietly gather together the scattered Saxons, and to bring him back news of what the enemy was doing.

 You may believe he was very thoughtful and sad.

 The hut of a swineherd in such a place must have been very humble indeed. Most likely it had but one room, name. with a hearth-stone in the middle of the floor, and a hole overhead to let out the smoke. Being on a fen it would have been thatched with sedge, and the floor was only the bare earth trampled hard. The swineherd went away to his pigs. There were no wild animals on so small an island, and the followers of the king caught fish in the rivers and broad lakes. But Alfred, for fear he might be

discovered, remained on the island, and an amusing story if; told of how the king one day got into serious trouble. It was baking-day, and the goodwife of the hut had made her cakes and laid them down on the ashes to be baked. The cakes must have been round and flat, a shape more easily cooked in the days before ovens. They were a bread made of some coarse flour or meal; and the word ban been used in the west of England almost to the pre

Athelney is located between the villages of Burrowbridge and East Lyng in the Sedgemoor district of Somerset, England. The area is known as the Isle of Athelney, because it was once a very low isolated island in the 'very great swampy and impassable marshes' of the Somerset Levels. Much of the Levels are below the level of high tide. They are now drained for agricultural use during the summer, but are regularly flooded in the winter.

Athelney is around 6 miles from North Petherton, where the Alfred Jewel (an Anglo-Saxon ornament dating from the late 9th century) was discovered in 1693.