Telegraph readers are clearly a bunch of historical illiterates, since Alfred the Great didn't even get a single percent of this vote for greatest British monarch. Has Brenda ever defeated a single Dane, I ask you? It's right there in his name! She wouldn't even be a good card in the Top Trumps set (ratings: Weight, Height, Wives Executed, Nobles Imprisoned, Foreigners Killed, Parliaments Dissolved, and Miles Per Hour.)
Globally, I think King Sejong would probably top all the polls, not only on merit but because Koreans can swamp online surveys like nobody's business. Partially because of the widespread literacy and love of technological innovation begun by King Sejong, so there you go.
Having lived most of my life near Glastonbury and being filled to the bloody back gills with bloody Arthur and general airy-fairy pseudo mystical Glastafarianism, could I just say that our real king - as you say Alfred - lived a few miles down the road in a mud hut on the mud island of Athelney and - despite the hen-pecking of farmers wives like out of a Nell Leyshon play - managed in moments of quiet to work out the basics of England - law, democracy, learning and literacy, the navy and a working Christianity - and no one ever takes the least bloody notice of the greatest Englishman of them all and his weed overgrown monument is a bloody disgrace.
If ever we need Alfred's justice its now!
Posted by: johnf | June 03, 2012 at 12:24 PM
Of course he'd never have got anywhere on Celebrity Chef so was really pretty useless, but his attitude towards bankers - Off With their Heads - was admirable.
Posted by: johnf | June 03, 2012 at 12:32 PM
They named a uni after him. That's not a bad testament.
Posted by: john b | June 03, 2012 at 01:58 PM
work out the basics of England
Import the Carolingian model lock, stock and block, that is. Admittedly that model owed a fair amount to an Englishman, Alcuin, but he was Northumbrian, not West Saxon.
Posted by: chris y | June 03, 2012 at 04:58 PM
I had Hangul explained to me by a couple of enthusiastic young Korean robotics students who'd developed a neat educational toy based on building blocks in the shape of the letters (the clever bit being that each correct combination of the blocks then formed the appropriate sounds).
On understanding the explanation, my mouth formed an 'O'. The system is so rational that you begin to wonder if it was given to us by a friendly alien Culture.
(Magyar and Finnish, on the other hand, are widely suspected to be creoles that arose from an episode of quite incomprehensible alien contact.)
So - hail Sejong!
Posted by: Ken MacLeod | June 03, 2012 at 06:32 PM
Not hail The Hall of Worthies?
Posted by: skidmarx | June 03, 2012 at 11:26 PM
Ken: as Enrico Fermi explained when someone asked him where all the aliens were, "They are already among us! But they call themselves Hungarians."
Posted by: ajay | June 04, 2012 at 12:40 AM