Alfred has been called the “Father and Founder of the British Fleet.” It is customary and dramatic to suppose that Alfred was seized with the whole modern theory of “Sea Power” as a sudden inspiration--that “he recognised that invaders could only be kept off by defeating them on the sea.” This is infinitely more pretty than accurate. To begin with, even at the beginning of the present Twentieth Century it was officially put on record that “while the British fleet could prevent invasion, _it could not guarantee immunity from small raids_ on our great length of coast line.” In Alfred’s day, one mile was more than what twenty are now; messages took as many days to deliver as they now do minutes, and the “raid” was the only kind of over-sea war to be waged. It is altogether chimerical to imagine that Alfred “thought things out” on the lines of a modern naval theorist. In actual fact,[1] what happened was that Alfred engaged in a naval fight in the year 875, somewhere on the South Coast. There is little or no evidence to show where, though near Wareham is the most likely locality. In 877 something perhaps happened to the Danes at Swanage, but the account in Asser is an interpolated one, and even so suggests shipwreck rather than a battle. In 882 (possibly 881) two Danish ships sank: “the rest” (number not recorded) surrendered later on. [Illustration: WARSHIP OF THE TIME OF KING ALFRED.] In 884 occurred the battle of the Stour. Here the Saxon fleet secured a preliminary success, in which thirteen Danish ships were captured. This may or may not have been part of an ambush--at any rate the final result was the annihilation of King Alfred’s fleet. In 896 occurred the alleged naval reform so often alluded to as the “birth of the British Navy”--those ships supposed to have been designed by Alfred, which according to Asser[2] were “full nigh twice as long as the others ... shapen neither like Frisian nor the Danish, but so as it seemed to him that they would be most efficient.” Around these “early Dreadnoughts” much has been weaved, but there is no evidence acceptable to the best modern historians that Alfred really built any such ships--they tend to reject the entire theory. The actual facts of that “naval battle of the Solent” in 897 from which the history of our navy is popularly alleged to date, appear to be as follows: There were nine of King Alfred’s ships, manned by Frisian pirates, who were practically Danes. These nine encountered three Danish vessels in a land-locked harbour--probably Brading--and all of them ran aground, the Danish ships being in the middle between two Saxon divisions. A land fight ensued, till, the tide rising, the Danish ships, which were of lighter draught than the Saxon vessels, floated. The Danes then sailed away, but in doing so two of them were wrecked.