The Ballad of the White Horse

Chesterton usually wrote quickly and did not spend much time revising his work. However, he made an exception for the ballad, subjecting his drafts to much revision over the course of a few years before publication. As he prepared the work, he and his wife Frances drove to the places in England associated with Alfred—the Somerset marshes and then the White Horse on the Berkshire Downs, which is close to where the battle of Ethandune was fought. 

Chesterton had been familiar with the story of Alfred since he was a child, when he read Charles Dickens's A Child's History of England, which contains not only the story of the burning of the cakes but also of Alfred's going incognito to the Danish camp as a minstrel. Chesterton believed—as any reader of the ballad would easily guess—that Christianity was the correct faith and paganism was wrong, and this was the reason that the Christians eventually triumphed. Chesterton also mentions Alfred in his own A Short History of England. The figure he describes is recognizable as the Alfred in the ballad:  

[H]e combined an almost commonplace coolness, and readiness for the ceaseless small bargains and shifting combinations of all that period, with the flaming patience of saints in times of persecution.