Both the question, and a previous answer on this thread, omit a fairly significant bit of context. The story of Alfred burning the cakes doesn't come out of a period in which there was a "Kingdom of England" (Alfred ruled over Wessex, the southern part of the modern state). It comes before the unification of an "English" polity under his grandson Athelstan, and the best part of 200 years before the introduction of Norman-style "feudalism" and any concept of "liege lords". It dates to a period in which Alfred himself was only one of several rulers who competed for power within the borders of present-day England, and was far from being the most successful.

In fact, the legend of the burning of the cakes relates to the least successful period of Alfred's career, and the one in which he mustered the least power and would have appeared, and been, least terrible to the people of Wessex. It dates to c.877, after the ravaging "Great Heathen Army," led by the Viking warlords Guthrum and Hálfdan, had forced itself west from its base in Cambridge, subdued Mercia and begun the process of subjugating and settling Wessex itself. During this period, Alfred was reduced to the position of fighting a guerrilla campaign with the help of a relatively small group of remaining loyalists from a base in the marshes of Somerset. In the legend of the burning of the cakes, which ultimately derives from the C10th Life of St Neot, he appeared at the door of a local swineherd in disguise, and alone; he was preoccupied with contemplating some verses from the Bible that offered him guidance – that, in most versions of the story, is the reason why he became so distracted from his domestic tasks. Moreover, his true identity as king was never known to his hosts, and he submitted humbly to being chastised by the swineherd's wife for his failure to manage the cooking process – this was, of course, for the original writer, a necessary part of his proving himself worthy of God's aid in the next stage of his royal career:

Now it happened by chance one day, when the swineherd was leading his flock to their usual pastures, that the king remained alone at home with he swineherd's wife. The wife, concerned for her husband's return, had entrusted some kneaded flour to... the oven. As is the custom among countrywomen, she was intent on other domestic occupations, until, when she sought the bread, she saw it burning from the other side of the room. She immediately grew angry and said to the king (unknown to her as such): 'Look here, man. You hesitate to turn the loaves which you see to be burning. Yet you're quite happy to eat them when they come warm from the oven!'

Most crucially, Alfred supposedly did all this before his great victory over the invaders at Edington in 878, and hence before he had conclusively demonstrated his right to rule over the West Saxons. The Alfred of 877 was still a king, but certainly not to all of his people; he faced challenges to his legitimacy, and it's been suggested that, immediately prior to this period, he may have narrowly survived a coup – an attempt to remove him in favour of a more able ruler. The whole point of the story is to acknowledge this, while still setting out the reasons why God ultimately chose to favour him and restore him to power.

It's all a legend of course, but if the chronicles of the time are correct in reporting Alfred's retreat to the Somerset wetlands, a necessary corollary would be that the local Saxon people would have been well aware that he was there because he had been defeated, that he had been shorn of a good deal of his power, and that his ultimate victory was very far from assured. They might, nonetheless, have felt loyal to him; they undoubtedly would have shown deference to him, had they known who he was. But the Alfred whom they would have encountered at this stage of his career would have born very little resemblance to the secure post-1066 feudal king-of-all-England envisaged elsewhere in this thread.

Sources

Joanne Parker, 'England's darling': the Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (2007)

Patrick Wormald, "Alfred the Great," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography