King Alfred in the Court of the Danes by Daniel Maclise
at The Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne. Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums
Key Stage:
KS3 History National Curriculum: Secondary History page 4 Britain 1745 - 1901Overview:
Pupils working in groups study the Maclise painting without being told its title or any explanation of its origin, nor the purported event it illustrates. They have five minutes to compose an agreed account of the story the painting tells and whenabout it may have been painted. Then show the class the videos.
Suggested Classroom Activity
Pupils working in groups study the Maclise painting without being told its title or any explanation of its origin, nor the purported event it illustrates. They have five minutes to compose an agreed account of the story the painting tells and whenabout it may have been painted. After five minutes, the groups share their ideas Download courtofdanes_large.jpgVideo ‘Victorian Saxons’
The class is then shown ‘Victorian Saxons’ following which they have a brief discussion about which group came closest to guessing correctly and why the most common guess is likely to be that it is about an Arthurian theme.Extract from Dickens ‘a child’s History of England’
The class is shown the above extract from Dickens ‘a child’s History of Engalnd’ about King Alfred and the Cakes and asked to plan and execute an evaluation of its historicity using internet searches. Download dickens.pdfDevelopment Activity:
Either as an individual homework, group work in class, or group homework using a learning platform wiki if avail- able, pupils are given a copy of Kipling's Dane-geld poem and asked to use the internet to track down examples of the Dangeld incident being used by politicians in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Learning Objectives:
Pupils examine art and text to gain insights into the way medieval English History was redacted and used during the c19th.
Research, Notes and Links:
Download the lesson plan
The classic book on Victorian Alfredism is Dr Joanne Parker's England Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great ISBN-10: 071907356. Her excellent essay The Dragon and the Raven: Saxons, Danes and the Problem of Defining National Character in Victorian England is freely downloadable as a doc file from the foot of the page at http://hdl.handle.net/10036/4162 . Full text of Dickens A Childs History of England is available in most formats from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/699 or as an easy online read from https://archive.org/stream/childshistoryofe01dickrich page/n7/mode/2up (the passage about Alfred's spying effort is on page 30 and the first British Bake-off Disaster starts on page 28).