This is Winchester Cathedral. It rises from the ground where more than eleven centuries ago, Alfred the Great was first laid to rest. In the late ninth century the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms came as close as they ever had to extinction. The great Viking armies had broken the old powers, monasteries lay in ruins, learning had almost ceased, and his people (the Angelcynn) seemed on the point of vanishing. But Alfred didn’t merely hold the line with force of arms. He understood that a people isn’t held by swords alone. He set about the important work of recovery: the restoration of learning, the translation of essential books into the tongue of his people, the founding of schools, and the beginning of a chronicle written in the language of the people themselves. He saw, with unusual clarity, that a people who lose their memory, their language, their inherited wisdom cease to exist long before they are finally conquered. This cathedral stands upon the same ground, a continuous thread between his age and ours. The problem Alfred faced then, faces us again today. Civilisations don’t only fall to invasion. They fall when they no longer care to remember what they are. What he preserved then, we may still lose. And what we lose, a later age may never recover.