I'm writing a research paper (Sophomore in College) about Alfred the Great. I decided to argue that Alfred tried to create a code that would best unify the Anglo-Saxon people (or, at least, the ones that were in lands that he held after fighting the Vikings), both against external and internal threats.
I've been writing the rough draft (which is due Monday), and I'm starting to wonder if my argument is anywhere near feasible. While I'm finding some support for my claim (Alfred chose laws from the lands that he ruled over as well as ones from Wessex, for instance), at the same time, I'm not sure if I can argue that Alfred's experiences, both in fighting the Viking invaders throughout the 860s and onwards, and in recovering from the events of 878 where he was betrayed by one of his court and forced to flee, were guiding him when making the code.
Help?
First a specific answer, and then a more general observation for anyone else who might be reading this:
I think your argument works, but it sounds like your focus has drifted too much onto what Alfred's life can tell us about the laws, when you'd make a stronger case looking at what the laws themselves tell us about Alfred's concerns.
Look at the new laws Alfred adds to Ine's code: what do they focus on? For example, Alfred adds new laws about when it is and isn't lawful to start a feud. Why does he add new laws, what priorities do these laws reflect, and might they reveal something about the context in which he was issuing them?
What order are the laws in? Does this order reflect priorities? What kinds of laws are grouped together, which come first, which stand out because of the way the document is structured? Which laws were issued first? And does this suggest that some things - rooting the new laws in older tradition, or emphasizing the interests of the church against violence, for example - are seen as especially important to Alfred?
What kinds of things mentioned in other contemporary codes (like Charlemagne's) aren't being included in Alfred's, and do these omissions suggest different priorities?
I think that if you ask these sorts of questions, focusing closely on what is and isn't communicated in the laws themselves, you can absolutely defend your thesis and write an excellent paper.
The big challenge with a paper like you're writing is that there's a temptation to go toward context too quickly to help you interpret the texts, before you've fully analyzed the texts themselves. Alfred's life and political fears/ambitions absolutely influenced his law making (laws always reflect their social context), but in order to see how you first have to answer a few important questions about the laws themselves: what agenda do they reveal? What concerns do they express? How are they steuctured? What is being said between thenlines? What is *not *being said (and is that significant)?
You can only effectively contextualize a primary source like a law code in its surrounding historical events after you've fully explained the arguments inside the text, its internal steucture, and the priorities it conveys. If you try to start with the surrounding events, you'll end up cherry picking laws that seem relevant, which is both sloppy scholarship and - in this case especially - potentially more difficult (because Alfred doesn't explicitly discuss historical events in his law codes - you have to look at the concerns buried inside the text to start fitting the pieces together).