An hilarious story, told in letter form, about King Alfred - he who burnt the cakes, and his battles with the Vikings.

Berwin, son of Egfrith, writes to Wulfric, son of Elred using his miraculous new talent of reading and writing. Berry's spellings leave a lot to be desired and in his hilarious letters he tells a tale of mixups and mayhem when King Alfred hides in his family's cottage but is mistaken for a Dirty Dane - their word for the Vikings. A completely new perspective on why and how those cakes got burned!

Fast and very, very funny from the prize-winning author of The Demon Headmaster and other books.

This book has been graded for interest at 7-9 years.

There are 64 pages in this book. This book was published 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Gillian Cross is perhaps best known for her Demon Headmaster series and its BBC adaptation. She has won many of the most prestigious awards for children's fiction, including the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Children's Book Award and the Smarties Prize. Aidan Chambers is an award-winning children's author and an experienced compiler. He worked for some years as a teacher before deciding to write full time. In 1969 he and his wife Nancy founded The Thimble Press, which publishes Signal, a critical journal devoted to children's literature. His book Postcard from No Man's Land won the Carnegie Medal in 1999. He lives in Gloucestershire. Tim Stevens studied illustration at Camberwell College of Art. He illustrated The Girls in the Velvet Frame (Adele Geras) and Down with the Dirty Danes (Gillian Cross) for HarperCollins. He lives in Suffolk.