Alfred the Great

[Illustration: KING ALFRED’S JEWEL]

[Illustration: BRITAIN IN TIME OF ALFRED]

Alfred the Great

CONTAINING Chapters on his Life and Times BY MR. FREDERIC HARRISON, THE LORD BISHOP OF BRISTOL PROFESSOR CHARLES OMAN, SIR CLEMENTS MARKHAM THE REV. PROFESSOR EARLE, SIR FREDERICK POLLOCK AND THE REV. W. J. LOFTIE; ALSO CONTAINING AN INTRODUCTION BY SIR WALTER BESANT AND A POEM BY THE POET LAUREATE

Edited, With Preface, By Alfred Bowker Mayor Of Winchester 1897-98

‘_This will I say—that I have sought to live worthily the while I lived, and after my life to leave to the men that come after me a remembering of me in good works._’

London Adam & Charles Black 1899

TO Her Majesty the Queen BY GRACIOUS PERMISSION THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED

The Spotless King

I

Some lights there be within the Heavenly Spheres Yet unrevealed, the interspace so vast: So through the distance of a thousand years Alfred’s full radiance shines on us at last.

II

Star of the spotless fame, from far-off skies Teaching this truth, too long not understood, That only they are worthy who are wise, And none are truly great that are not good.

III

Of valour, virtue, letters, learning, law, Pattern and prince, His name will now abide, Long as of conscience Rulers live in awe, And love of country is their only pride.

IV

But with His name four other names attune, Which from oblivion guardian Song may save; Lone Athelney, victorious Ethandune, Wantage his cradle, Winchester his grave.

Alfred Austin.

Preface

Now that we are fast approaching the one thousandth anniversary of the death of our greatest sovereign of the past—“King Alfred,” whom it is the laudable desire of many of Her Majesty’s subjects and others to commemorate fittingly—this book, which bears the king’s name, and is written in honour of the king, and is intended to present what is known of the king’s achievements and his claim on the gratitude and love of the English-speaking race, would hardly seem to demand a preface.

To some minds, however, this small book, if it appeared without a word of preface, might seem insufficiently comprehensive; it may be well, therefore, to explain shortly the motive for its production. The International Committee organising this Commemoration have considered it very advisable that a publication should be issued with a view to diffusing, as widely as possible, public knowledge of the king’s life and work. This being the sole object, it became essential that the book should not be costly, but within the reach of all. Therefore it was also necessary to restrict its scope; numerous subjects and possible illustrations of interest have been left for a full and complete biography of the great king.

At the same time, it is hoped that the chapters which follow will enable the general reader to create in his own mind a figure, a mind, a history, worthy of the king and equal to the occasion. The general introduction is, in substance, the address delivered in the Guildhall of Winchester by Sir Walter Besant at the first public meeting held to lay the foundation stone of this Commemoration. The names of those who have contributed chapters are a guarantee that the reader is in good hands; the subjects of these chapters show a fairly complete division of the various lines in which Alfred achieved greatness.

Whilst taking this opportunity of placing on record my very cordial thanks to the contributors for their gifts, especially to Sir Walter Besant, and to the Lord Bishop of Winchester for kindly advice, I feel that my thanks alone would indeed be a poor requite; but our readers, of whatever station, whether high or low, by assisting to the best of their ability in the forthcoming Commemoration, which is veritably that of one thousand years of many of our institutions, of our government, and our national existence, will be expressing gratitude and thanks more acceptable than words of mine can convey.

It may seem strange to some readers that by chance no full account is given of Asser’s anecdote of the scene between the king and the herdswoman in the Isle of Athelney, where he took refuge, but as the story is known to all, its omission may perhaps be pardoned; it is certainly not due to any lack of interest in the story, which seems so strikingly to show that at times, maybe when the king was resting or sitting by the fire mending his bows and weapons, he would become absorbed in the one thought foremost in his mind—that of the welfare of his country and people, then sorely harassed and oppressed by the Danes, and so neglected the homely duty that was present.

I have, further, to draw the reader’s attention to the circular at the end of the book, but it is not necessary for me to point out the advisability, or to detail the many praiseworthy reasons, for the erection of memorials to illustrious dead, stimulating and encouraging as they are to succeeding generations, engendering patriotic sentiments, and recalling to us the history of the past by which knowledge is weighed and gained, and that from the lesson we learn almost unwittingly to shape and guide our future steps.

In conclusion, I would express a hope that the following chapters will be read far and wide with as much pleasure and profit as they have been by myself, and that through their agency, and out of public subscription, we may soon see rising in the heart of the capital of Wessex, worthy not of England alone, but of the English-speaking race, a memorial to one who may rightly be regarded as one of the principal founders of the English nation and its language, a pioneer of improvement, liberty, learning and education, and who, though a thousand years have sped, still forms a mighty beacon of all the highest aims and the noblest aspirations that may dominate the hearts of men.

A. B.

_1st May 1899._

Contents

Page

INTRODUCTION, by Sir Walter Besant, F.S.A. 1

ALFRED AS KING, by Frederic Harrison, Hon. Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford 39

ALFRED AS A RELIGIOUS MAN AND AN EDUCATIONALIST, by the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Bristol 69

ALFRED AS A WARRIOR, by Charles Oman, M.A., F.S.A., Fellow of All Souls, Oxford 115

ALFRED AS A GEOGRAPHER, by Sir Clements Markham, K.C.B., President of the Royal Geographical Society 149

ALFRED AS A WRITER, by Rev. John Earle, Professor of Anglo-Saxon, Oxford 169

ENGLISH LAW BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST, by Sir Frederick Pollock, Bart., Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence 207

ALFRED AND THE ARTS, by Rev. W. J. Loftie, F.S.A. 241

Index 259

Introduction

In writing an Introduction to the chapters which follow, I shall not be expected to contribute any new facts to the life of the great king. As for any new facts, the time has long gone by when anything new could be discovered concerning the great king of whom I have to speak. The tale of Alfred is a twice-told tale: but it is a tale that should be always fresh and new, because at every point it concerns every successive generation of English-speaking people. Happily it is not the whole life of Alfred that we have to consider in this place: it is the example of that life: the things that Alfred invented and achieved during that short life for his own generation; things which have lasted to our own day, and still bear fruit and golden sheaves. I should like to proceed at once to those achievements, but it is absolutely necessary first that we should understand some of the conditions of the time: the troubles and the struggles: the overthrow and ruin with which Alfred’s reign began: the apparent hopelessness of the situation changed by the unexpected uprising of one man: and the rapid development of this man as Captain, Conqueror, Administrator, and Teacher. This done, we shall be in a position to receive the King as an example that should abide with the people still, and should still continue to shape the lives and inspire the minds of his race.

In order to prevent long explanations, and to illustrate at the outset some of the conditions of England when Alfred was born into the world, I have caused a small map to be drawn. You will see that the island is divided up into many nations. There is first the Kingdom of Kent, founded by the Jutes, who never extended themselves: then the Kingdom of Wessex or of the West Saxons, who by this time had absorbed the Kingdom of Essex or East Saxons, and of Sussex or South Saxons. The modern counties of Norfolk and Suffolk form the Kingdom of East Anglia—founded by Angles, a people closely allied to Jutes and Saxons: the middle of England is Mercia, the Kingdom of the March or boundary—the Mercians were also Angles. On the north is the Kingdom of Northumbria, also founded by Angles. The West of England is wholly occupied by Strathclyde, Wales, and Cornwall, all kingdoms of the Britons or Welsh who remained still unconquered. In Scotland the Highlands were occupied by the Picts, and a part of the west was peopled by the Scots who crossed over from Ireland. The Angles therefore occupied the middle, the north, and the east; they gave their own name to the whole country—Angle-land or England: the Saxons occupied the south, with the exception of Kent: the Welsh still held nearly the whole of the west: but their territories were separated and cut into three parts. If we look backwards and forwards in history during these centuries we shall find the map of our island constantly changing. But still we may take this map fairly to represent the country as it was in the time of Alfred—eight distinct nations in it: three of them composed of Angles, who were not on that account allies: one containing Jutes: one of Saxons: three of Welsh. These so-called nations shifted their borders continually: they fought their neighbours: they split up and fought each other: there was no coherence or stability among them: some of them adopted Christianity and then relapsed: some of them remained pagans.

These were the tribes or nations in the land.

Let us next consider what manner of men it was over whom Alfred was called upon to rule. In order to get at this knowledge we must inquire of their religion, their laws, and their customs. As for their religion, before they became Christians, it was a fierce and cruel religion, although it was full of imagination, as was to be expected of a people in whose minds the noblest poetry was slumbering. There were Gods who created and invented: Gods who gave life and inspired love: Gods who sent the thunder and the storm: Gods who brought the spring and the sunshine, the fruit, and the harvest. There were evil Gods—the Gods of Death, who killed men: the Gods of Disease, who tortured men: the Gods of the Sea and the River, who drowned men: the Gods of Battle, who struck men with cowardice, and weighed down their hands so that they could not strike. There were humbler deities—spirits of the stream, the woods, and the hills—for the most part hostile to men and malignant, because in certain stages of civilisation the unknown forces of Nature present themselves as personal deities who are always hostile to man—according to the Greek legend, for instance, he who met the great God Pan face to face fell down dead. They believed in raising spirits and in spectres, much as some of us do now: they believed in witches and in witchcraft: in magic and in charms: in love philtres: in divination: in lucky days. In a word, the Anglo-Saxon was full of the superstitions which belonged to his age.

There was, however—I venture to read between the lines—one saving clause. The Anglo-Saxon was not only afraid of the unknown, which caused him to invent malignant deities, but in his mind the God of Creation was stronger than the God of Destruction. There is hope for a people while that belief survives. Long after he became a Christian the Saxon continued to retain his old beliefs under other names: he saw and conversed in imagination with the old deities whom he had forsaken: they spoke to him in the thunder: he saw their forms in the flying cloud, in the splendour of the sunset: he heard their whispers in the woods: they came to him in dreams. Religion, to the Anglo-Saxon, was a thing more real, more present, than it has ever been to any people except the Russian and the Jew. This is perhaps the most important point to be observed in the character of Alfred’s people. They were profoundly influenced by their religion. In the eighth century, when Christianity was spread over the south and the middle of the country, all classes began to long after the religious life as they understood it. Kings and Queens—there were ten Kings and eleven Queens—Princes and Princesses, nobles and freemen—all who could be received, crowded into the monasteries: they were eager for the life of meditation and of prayer: they made the cloisters rich: they filled the monastic houses with gold and silver plate and rich treasure. When the Danish invasion began, the Danes very soon found out that it was the monastery, and not the town, which they should sack: and at the same time the people found out that the full monastery meant the shrunken army. It has been said that the Anglo-Saxon never changes. In this respect at least he has never changed. Through all the changes and chances of a thousand years, wherever he has penetrated, wherever he has settled, he has carried with him the same earnestness and the same reality of religion.

We must also note, next to the earnestness of his religious belief, the freedom of his institutions. The liberties of our race, which have become to us like the very air we breathe, so that we are not even conscious of them, were not wrested by the people from reluctant kings. These liberties had always been with them from the prehistoric times when the family was the unit, and when custom was the only kind of law. Among their primitive customs were the first rude forms of their free institutions. From the Forests of North Germany, from the mouth of the Elbe, not from any king, came the right of free meeting: the right of free speech: the right of free thought: the right of free work.

Next, as a people the Saxons were also fond of music, singing, poetry: the quicker witted Norman despised the Saxon as slow of understanding. Perhaps: but the Saxon proved himself in the long-run far more capable of enthusiasm, of loyalty, of patriotism, of sacrifice, of all those actions and emotions which spring from the imagination and produce forces united and irresistible. Remember that the whole of our literature is Anglo-Saxon; none of it is Norman. There is not one great Norman poet. No Norman literature was produced on this our Anglo-Saxon soil.

The next characteristic of this people is less picturesque. They were obstinate. Now obstinacy, if we think of it, is one of the most useful and valuable qualities that can be planted in the breast of man. It has many names: it is called by its friends firmness: under any name it is the tenacious man who wins in the long-run.

They were essentially an outdoor people: they loved all manner of outdoor sports: all classes were hunters, hawkers, fishers, trappers: the country was full of creatures to hunt: there were in the forests wolves, bears, wild bulls, and stags: they loved the free air of the open hillside: and they hated towns. It was many years after their settlement in this country before they ceased to feel the old terror of the magic which, they thought, could be practised within the walls of a city.

As regards the Anglo-Saxon women, it is pleasant to learn that the very same virtues which are now conspicuous in our own women of the present day were conspicuous in them. She was, as Thomas Wright says, “An attentive housewife: a tender companion: the comforter and consoler of her husband and her family: the virtuous and noble matron.” In all ranks, from the queen to the farmer’s wife, we find the lady of the household attending to her household duties. They were more learned than the men: they could recite and sing the poetry of their native bards: they were skilful in playing the harp: and in embroidery and needlework of all kinds the work of the Anglo-Saxon ladies was in demand all over Western Europe.

The Anglo-Saxon, therefore, had many virtues. He had also, we must confess, his faults, which were conspicuous as well as numerous. He was slothful of mind: he was always ready to sink back to the ancient seclusion of the village and the forest: he was conservative, and thought the old ways would last for ever: he was a great drinker—in drinking, except among the Danes, he had no equal: he would drink for days together almost without stopping: even the priests did not escape the universal vice: they were admonished by the bishops not to say mass unless they were sober: his hospitality consisted chiefly in making the guests drunk. The Saxons, again, have been charged with cruelty—certainly very terrible things were done, but we cannot expect a people to be before their age: it was a cruel age. Frenchman, Norman, Dane, Saxon: all alike were cruel in their punishments: but these things belong to the time. Let us acquit the people of Wessex of more than their share of the average cruelty. The stories told of the Danes, for example, are almost incredible, whether for the cruelty of the torture, or for the endurance of the victim.

When we say that the Anglo-Saxon was a free man, and governed by free laws, we must not imagine him to be a Republican of the nineteenth century. Nor must we conclude that the Anglo-Saxon was a democrat, as we understand democracy. He had his king over him, to begin with: and the king was not elected by the people from among themselves, as the President of a Republic; he succeeded because he belonged to the Royal blood. He was even allowed, long after they were Christians, to be descended from the Gods: the people consented to his succession, but they did not elect him. As king he had very large powers, and these were undefined: men had not yet begun to question the Royal Prerogative: above all, he was their captain: he led the army: he fought with the army.

In a word, the Anglo-Saxon of the ninth century was in essentials very much like his descendant of the present day. He was religious: he was a lover of order: he was a good fighting man: he was fond of outdoor sports and occupations: he was tenacious of his freedom: he was imaginative, poetical, and dreamy: he was fond of music: he was still full of the old traditions and superstitions which ruled his life, long after he had become a Christian. This is a general summary of his character. In one virtue he was as yet wanting. We must not expect in him what we call the national and patriotic sentiment. The man of Wessex was the enemy of the man of Mercia: the north stood aloof from the south: there was no England or Britain: there was only a large island divided among eight nations, or ten nations, or five nations, according to the year of the Lord: some of them spoke the same tongue: all the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons had similar institutions: nevertheless they were enemies. You remember, two hundred years later on, how London accepted the rule, first, of Cnut the Dane: and, next, of William the Norman. Both of them were what we should call foreigners. There was no such feeling then. To the Londoner it mattered little whether his king was Mercian, Northumbrian, Saxon, Jute, Dane, or Norman. London received kings from all these people. There was not yet any feeling existing for the country as a whole. It was part of the work of Alfred, unseen and unsuspected, to make it possible to weld the different nations into one: to create little by little the love of country in place of the old loyalty to the tribe.

Let us concede that Alfred fought, not for England, but for Wessex. In doing so, it is true, he fought for all England, but perhaps without his knowledge. In the same way David fought first for his own little country—for Judea—and made it possible for his successor to create one great country, of which Judea was the centre.

I have lingered a long time over the character of the people whom Alfred was called upon to rule. Without this knowledge it is impossible to understand what the king did and why he did it, and in what respects his work is so truly remarkable and wonderful. Let us now pass on to the history itself, and first, naturally, to the invasions of the Danes.

It was in the year 832—seventeen years before the birth of Alfred—that the Danes first made their appearance on these shores. Their incursions began and continued exactly in the same way as those of the Saxons themselves 400 years before. They came over in their ships: they found the north seas without defence: they found no fleets guarding the island from the pirates, as of old: the people, ready to believe that things would go on for ever unaltered, had actually abandoned their ships; had lost the art of ship-building; and were no longer accustomed to the sea. The Danish fleet swooped down upon the coast: harried the country: murdered the people: sacked the monasteries and the churches, and went away again. They found the coast, like the seas, defenceless: the monastic houses had drained the country of the fighting nobles: the warlike spirit of the people was wasting itself in petty tribal wars. The Danes, until the old spirit returned, were far more than a match for the Saxons. They appeared suddenly, without warning, now on the coast of Kent: now on that of Dorsetshire: now at the mouth of the Parret, in Somerset: now up the Thames: now at Southampton: they came in fleets of a hundred and fifty ships, carrying each sixty or seventy warriors: an army greater than anything that could be hastily got together against them: by the time that an army was collected the Danes had gone, leaving ruined churches: villages destroyed by fire: monasteries pillaged of their treasures: and murdered monks lying beside the scattered relics, which could not protect them. The Danes, their foray over, had gone off, bearing their treasures with them, to their own country. Next year they landed again: but on another part of the island.

This yearly invasion of the Danes lasted for twenty years. They always made straight for the nearest monasteries, which they sacked: there were not many towns in Saxon England; but there were some—Canterbury, London, Southampton, York—they attacked these, seized, plundered, and left them in ruins. For twenty years they came every year: sometimes we hear of a victory over them: but still they came again: there was never a victory so decisive as to keep them from returning in ever-increasing numbers. Then they began to stay in the country: they left off going home in the autumn: they established themselves in winter quarters, first on Sheppey Island, then on the Isle of Thanet: then in Norfolk. Then they went farther afield. In a word, they overran and conquered East Anglia: then the Kingdom of Northumbria: then that of Mercia: then the united Kingdoms of Wessex and Kent. It was at this crisis, when all the power of the Danes was brought to bear against Wessex and Kent, Alfred succeeded to the throne. His father and his four brothers, kings one after the other, had spent their lives in vainly beating back hordes of the Danes, who returned year after year. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes the best of occasional victories, but the fact remains that every year the invaders became stronger and the defenders became weaker. The King of Mercia at last gave up the struggle and went to Rome, to adopt the religious life, leaving his wife behind. Alfred might have done the same thing, and it would not have been imputed unto him for cowardice, but for godliness.

Happily for England he did not. The Danes had seized Chippenham, in Wiltshire, and made that place their stronghold and headquarters. From Chippenham they sent out their light troops, moving rapidly here and there, devastating and murdering. For nine long years, growing every year weaker, Alfred fought them: in one year he fought nine battles. At the end of that time he found himself deserted, save for a few faithful followers: his country prostrate: everything in the hands of the enemy: his cause lost, and apparently no loop-hole or glimmer of hope left of recovery. No darker or more gloomy time ever fell upon this country. Everywhere the churches and the monasteries were pillaged and destroyed. All those—bishops, priests, monks, and nuns—who could get away had fled, carrying with them such of their treasures as they could convey. The towns were in ruins: the farms were deserted: the people had lost hope and heart: they bowed their heads and entered into slavery: their religion was destroyed with the flight or the murder of their priests. Their arts, their learning, their civilisation, all that they had once possessed, were destroyed in those nine years’ warfare: destroyed and gone—it seemed for ever. And the king, with his wife and her sister, and his children, and the few who still remained with him, had taken refuge on a little hill rising out of a broad marsh, whither the enemy could not follow him.

In the after years Alfred was fond of talking over this time of desolation: he would recall the visions that came to him, and not only to him but to his wife as well: they both saw visions of consolation and of promise. Saint Cuthbert himself stood beside his bed and comforted him with promise of victory and honour. We can very well believe the vision. To Alfred: to his wife: the aid of the Saints was a thing to be invoked and to be looked for. Did they not pray daily for the help of the Saints? And who should aid the Saxons in their trouble but their greatest Saint—Cuthbert himself? In the sleep or the waking of night, what more natural than that Alfred should imagine that he saw and spoke with the Saint himself? To those who drive or walk across the dreary level of Sedgemoor, now drained by its deep dykes, and dotted with its village churches, there rises on the right hand the low hill of Athelney. One can realise, looking upon this hill across the flat land, which was once covered with bogs and quagmires, and reeds bending before the wind, how complete was the defeat of the king: how complete the victory of the Danes; which should drive Alfred to seek such a refuge. The Danish Conquest, like the Norman Conquest two hundred years later, seemed an achievement accomplished. No further opposition: no one asked what had become of Alfred—he had run away to Rome: he had gone into a monastery, perhaps: everywhere the Danes all over the country reported submission and the acceptance of their rule. And the old gods had come back again, Woden, and Thor, and Friga, and the rest: and again the fires flamed upon the high places, and the children were passed through them, and all the Christian saints had fled.

Alfred remained inactive during the whole long winter. It was the rule of the old Kriegs Spiel, the war game of that time, that the armies should not go forth to fight in winter. The men would have refused to go out in the cold season. In fact, they could not. The country was covered with uncleared forests: the roads in winter were deep tracks of mud: it was impossible for the men to sleep on the cold, wet ground. The delay suited Alfred: he wanted time to organise a rising in force: he sent messengers to the Somersetshire people, among whom, in winter quarters, were lying few or none of the Danish conquerors: he bade them make ready for the spring: he ordered those of the thanes who were still left to come to him at Athelney: and in May, when the spring arrived, Alfred appeared once more as one risen from the dead: once more he raised the Wessex standard of the Golden Dragon: once more the people, taking renewed courage, flocked together: as he marched along they joined him, the fugitives from the woods and those who had been made slaves in their own farms, and swelled his force.

What follows is like a dream. Or it is like the uprising of the French under Joan of Arc. There had been nine years of continuous defeat. The people had lost heart: they had apparently given in. Yet, on the reappearance of their king, they sprang to arms once more: they followed him with one consent, and on the first encounter with the Danes they inflicted upon them a defeat so crushing that they never rallied again. In one battle, on one field, the country was recovered. In a single fortnight after this battle the Danes were turned out of Wessex. Alfred had recovered the whole of his own country, and acquired in addition a large part of Mercia.

It is significant to read that the Danish chieftain became a Christian, and was baptized. Do you suppose that he weighed the arguments and listened to the history and the doctrines of the new religion? Not at all. He perceived—this logical pagan—that King Alfred’s Gods had shown their superiority over his own in a manner so unexpected, so amazing, and so decisive, that he hesitated no longer. He acknowledged that superiority; he was baptized, and he never afterwards relapsed.

Alfred had got back his kingdom. It remained for him to recover it in a fuller and a larger sense: to restore its former prosperity and its ancient strength.

He began by recognising the separate rights of the Mercians. He would not call himself King of Mercia. He placed his son-in-law Ethelred as Earl of Mercia, and because London was at that time considered a Mercian city, Ethelred took up his residence there as soon as the Danes had gone out. The condition of London was as desolate and as ruinous as that of the whole country. The walls were falling down: there was no trade: there were no ships in the river: no merchandise on the wharves: there were no people in the streets, save the Danish soldiers and the slaves who worked for them. Alfred restored the walls: rebuilt the gates: brought back trade and merchants: repaired the Bridge, and made London once more the most important city of his kingdom: its strongest defence: its most valuable possession. This was, in fact, the third foundation of London. If Alfred had failed to understand the importance of London—that great port, happily placed, not on the coast open to attack, but a long way up a tidal river, in the very heart of the country—a place easy of access from every part of the kingdom—a port convenient for every kind of trade, whether from the Baltic or the Mediterranean—the whole of the commercial history of England would have been changed, the island might have remained what it had been for centuries before the Roman Conquest, a place which exported iron, tin, skins, wool, and slaves, and imported for the most part weapons to kill each other with.

Alfred gave us London. The lesson of ten years’ fighting taught Alfred what the Saxons had never before understood, the value of walled cities in the case of invasion. He saw—he was the first to perceive—how superior numbers may be rendered of no avail when they fling themselves against strong walls. The next Danish invaders found themselves stopped on their way up the Thames by a city fortified by a strong wall which the enemy could neither knock down nor climb over: and manned by citizens made doubly courageous by the safety and the strength of their ramparts. Six separate sieges were endured by London during the second invasion of the Danes: six separate times the enemy had to raise the siege and to go elsewhere, leaving London unconquered. Other walled towns were added—Winchester, York, Exeter, and Canterbury—but the first was London, whose fallen Roman wall, of which only the hard core of cement remained, Alfred rebuilt and faced again with stone.

Alfred, I repeat, gave us London. This was a great service which he rendered to the safety of the country. But there was still a greater service. The Saxon had quite forgotten the seamanship in which he had formerly known no master and no equal. Alfred saw that for the sake of safety there must be a first line of defence before the coast could be reached. England could only be invaded in ships, and by those who had the command of the seas. Therefore, he created a navy: he built ships longer, heavier, swifter than those of the Danes, and he sent these ships out to meet the Danes on what they supposed to be their own element. They went out: they met the Danes: they defeated them: and before long the Saxons had afloat a fleet of a hundred ships to hold the mastery of the Channel. The history of the English navy is chequered: there have been periods when its pretensions were low and its achievements humble: but since the days of Alfred the conviction has never been lost that the safety of England lies in her command of the sea. Fortresses and walled cities are useful: it is a very great achievement to have given them to the country: London alone, restored by Alfred, was the nation’s stronghold, the nation’s treasure house, a city full of wealth, filled with valiant citizens, unconquered and defiant: that was a very great gift to the country: but it was a greater achievement still to have given to the country a fleet which was ready to meet the enemy before they had time to land, and to give them most excellent reasons why they should not land: to make the people understand that above all things, and before all, it was necessary for all time to keep the mastery of the seas.

Remember, therefore, that Alfred, thus, gave us the command of the seas.

As Rudyard Kipling, our patriot poet, says:

We have fed our seas for a thousand years, And she calls us, still unfed, Though there’s never a wave of all her waves But marks our English dead.

“Never a wave of all her waves”—and it was Alfred who first sent out the English blood to redden those waves in defence of hearth and home.

Now, there can be no doubt that if he had advanced upon the great defeat of the Danes he might have recovered the whole of the country and become not only its overlord, as his grandfather Egbert had been before him, but its king. No doubt he was tempted: to a successful commander more successes always lie before him waiting to be snatched. This dream of conquest he renounced. He sat down with what he had—the old kingdom of his forefathers, strengthened by his new fleet: by the stronghold of London: and by the restored courage and self-respect of his people. The dream of conquest was a dream of personal ambition: he put it aside. It was part of that renunciation of self which belongs to the whole of his career. The historian Green has pointed out that Alfred “is the only instance in the history of Christendom of a ruler who put aside every personal aim or ambition in order to devote himself wholly to the welfare of those whom he ruled.”

We have considered Alfred as a captain, a conqueror, and the founder of our navy. We will now consider him in the capacity of king, administrator, and law-giver.

I do not claim for Alfred that he was the creator of the English law. His glory consists mainly in his adaptation of the old order to the new: he took all that was left of the shattered past and moulded it anew, with additions to suit the new situation, and for the most part on the same lines. You will ask, perhaps, how much of the honour due to Alfred’s achievements should be given to his ministers and how much to himself? Assign to his officers all the credit possible, all that belongs to the faithful discharge of duty: still the initiative, the design of the whole of the past, is absolutely due to Alfred himself. He must not be considered as a modern king—the modern king reigns while the people rule: he was the king who ruled: his will ruled the land: he had his Parliament: his Meeting of the Wise: but his will ruled them: he appointed his earls or aldermen: his will ruled them: he had his bishops: his will ruled them. From the time when he began to address himself to the organisation of a strong nation—that is to say, from the time when the Dane was baptized, his will ruled supreme. No law existed then to limit the king’s prerogative. The king was imperator, commander of the army, and every man in the country was his soldier.

Among the monuments of his reign there stands out pre-eminent his code of laws. He did not, I say, originate or invent his code. He simply took the old code and rewrote it, with additions and alterations to suit the altered conditions of the time. He understood, in fact, the great truth, which law-makers hardly ever grasp, that successful institutions must be _the outcome of national character_. Now, the laws and customs of these nations—Saxons, Angles, and Jutes—were similar, but there were differences. They had grown with the people, and were the outcome of the national character. Alfred took over as the foundation of his work for Wessex the code compiled for the West Saxons by his ancestor, King Ina: for Mercia, that compiled by Offa, King of Mercia: for the Jutes, that compiled by Ethelbert, King of Kent. In his work two main principles guided the law-giver: first, that justice should be provided for every one, high and low, rich and poor: next, that the Christian religion should be recognised as containing the Law of God: which must be the basis of all laws. Both these principles were especially necessary to be observed at this time. The devastation of the long wars had caused justice to be neglected: and the destruction of the churches, and the murder or flight of the clergy, had caused the people to relapse into their old superstitions.

King Alfred then boldly began his code by reciting the Laws of God. His opening words were: “Thus saith the Lord, ‘I am the Lord thy God.’” That is his keynote. The laws of a people must conform with the Laws of God. If they are contrary to the spirit of these laws they cannot be righteous laws. In order that every one might himself compare his laws with the Laws of God, he prefaced his laws first by the Ten Commandments; after this he quoted at length certain chapters of the Mosaic Law. These chapters he followed by the short epistle in the Acts of the Apostles concerning what should be expected and demanded of Christians. Finally, Alfred adds the precept from St. Matthew, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.”

[Illustration: THE SEASONS—JANUARY TO MARCH

(_Cottonian Library_)]

Some writers have assumed that Alfred required of his subjects by this preamble that they should be governed in all the details of life by the Mosaic Law. This view I cannot accept. Alfred set forth, I think, these laws in order that his own might be compared with them where comparison was possible, and in order to challenge comparison and to give the greater weight to his own laws by showing that they were based in spirit and, _mutatis mutandis_, on the Levitical Law and on the Law of the Gospel.

Moreover, in order to connect the whole system of justice with religion, in order to teach the people in the most efficacious manner possible that the Church desires justice above all things, he added to the sentence of the judge the penance of the Church. This subjection of the law to the Church would seem intolerable to us. At that time it was necessary to make a rude, ignorant, and violent people understand that religion must be more than a creed: that it must have a practical and restraining side; a man who was made to understand that an offence against the law was an offence against the Church which would be punished by the latter as well as by the secular judge, was made for the first time to feel the reality of the Church.

This firm determination to link the Divine Law and the Human Law: this firm reliance on the Divine Law as the foundation of all law: is to me the most characteristic point in the whole of Alfred’s work. The view—the intention—the purpose of King Alfred are summed up, without intention, by the poet whom I have already quoted. The following words of Rudyard Kipling might be the very words of Alfred: they breathe his very spirit—they might be, I say, the very words spoken by Alfred:

Keep ye the law: be swift in all obedience— Clear the land of evil: drive the road and bridge the ford. Make ye sure to each his own That he reap where he hath sown: By the Peace among our Peoples let men know we serve the Lord!

Alfred endeavoured to rebuild the monasteries. He then made the discovery that the old passion for the monastic life was gone: he could get no one to go into them. Forty years of a life and death struggle had killed the desire for the cloister: the people had learned to love action better than seclusion—their ideal was now the soldier, not the monk. A great gain for the people, which never afterwards returned to its ancient love of the Rule and the Hood.

His chief design in rebuilding the monasteries was to restore the schools. The country had fallen so low in learning that there was hardly a single priest who could translate the Church Service into Saxon, or could understand the words he sang. Alfred sent abroad for scholars: he made his Religious House not only a place for the retreat of pious men and women, but also the home—the only possible home—of learning, and the seat of schools. It is long since we have regarded a monastery as a seat of learning, or the proper place for a school. Go back to Alfred’s time and consider what a monastery meant in a land still full of violence: in which morals had been lost: justice trampled down: learning destroyed: no schools or teachers left: the monastery stood as an example and a reminder of self-restraint: peace: and order: a life of industry and such works as the most ignorant must acknowledge to be good: where the poor and the sick were received and cared for: the young were taught: and the old sheltered. It was the Life which the monastery Rule professed; the aim rather than any lower standards accepted by the monks: which made a monastery in that age like a beacon steadily and brightly burning, so that the people had always before their eyes a reminder of the self-governed life. Most of us would be very unwilling to see the monastery again become a necessity of the national life: yet we must admit that in the ninth century Alfred had no more powerful weapon for the maintenance of a religious standard than the monastery.

In the cause of education, indeed, Alfred was before his age, and even before our age. He desired universal education. At his Court he provided instructors for his children and the children of the nobles. They learned to read and write, they studied their own language and its poetry: they learned Latin: and they learned what were called the “liberal sciences,” among them the art of music. But he thought also of the poorer class. “My desire,” he says, “is that all the freeborn youths of my people may persevere in learning until they can perfectly read the English Scriptures.” Unhappily he was unable to carry out this wish. Only in our own days has been at last attempted the dream of the Saxon King—the extension of education to the whole people.

One more aspect of Alfred’s foresight. He endeavoured to remove the separation of his island from the rest of the world: he connected his people with the civilisation of Western Europe by encouraging scholars and men of learning, workers in gold, and craftsmen of all kinds, to come over: he created commercial relations with foreign countries: a merchant who made three voyages to the Mediterranean he ennobled: he sent an embassy every year to Rome: he sent an embassy as far as India: he brought to bear upon the somewhat sluggish minds of his people the imagination and the curiosity which would hereafter engender a spirit of enterprise to which no other nation can offer a parallel.

It was partly with this view that he strongly enforced the connection with Rome. One bond of union the nations of the West should have—a common Faith: and that defined and interpreted for them by the same authority. Had it not been for that central authority the nations would have been divided, rather than drawn towards each other, by a Christianity split up into at least as many sects as there were languages. Imagine the evil, in an ignorant time, of fifty nations, each swearing by its own creed, and every creed different. From this danger Alfred kept his country free.

The last, not the least, of his achievements is that to Alfred we owe the foundations of our literature: the most noble literature that the world has ever seen. He collected and preserved the poetry based on the traditions and legends brought from the German Forests. He himself delighted to hear and to repeat these legends and traditions: the deeds of the mighty warriors who fought with monsters, dragons, wild boars, and huge serpents. He made his children learn their songs: he had them sung in his Court. The tradition goes that he could himself sing them to the music of his own harp. This wild and spontaneous poetry which Alfred preserved is the beginning of our own noble choir of poets. In other words, the foundation of that stately Palace of Literature, built up by our poets and writers for the admiration and instruction and consolation of mankind, was laid by Alfred. Well, but he did more than collect the poetry, he began the prose. Before Alfred there was no Anglo-Saxon prose.

I have already quoted Green’s remark that in everything that Alfred designed or accomplished he put aside every personal aim or ambition in order to devote himself wholly to the welfare of those over whom he ruled. In his capacity as author this remark is specially illustrated. You all know that it is the leading characteristic—or the infirmity—of the poet, author, writer, to consider himself as part of his message. Alfred put himself aside: he presented his works in translations: they were, indeed, translations: but embellished, altered, enriched by his own work thus modestly presented. There is one book, now quite neglected, which for a thousand years profoundly moved the world of Western Europe. It is a book, written in prison by a noble Roman named Boethius, a philosopher, soldier, poet, and mathematician. It is entitled the _Consolation of Philosophy_. Fortunately the author, who wrote it from a prison, had time to finish it before they executed him. This book Alfred translated or imitated. For he filled his translations with his own thoughts and his own judgments. He gives his own theories of government: of the duties of a king: of maintaining the population, and especially the proper proportion of the different classes required to keep the nation in a state of efficiency. Every man in the country is a weapon which may be—and should be—used for the advancement of the general welfare. It is the king’s duty to select the best instruments, and to use them to the best advantage. We even find brief notes of his own thoughts. “This,” says the king, among these notes, “I can now truly say, that so long as I have lived I have striven to live worthily, and after my death to leave my memory to my descendants in good works.”

It is not the part of this Introduction to dwell upon the whole of Alfred’s literary work. It is enough if we recognise that he introduced education and restored learning. In the course of time, innumerable books were attributed to him: it is said that he translated the Psalms. A book of proverbs and sayings is attributed to him—each one begins with the words “Thus said Alfred.” The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and contemporary record of events is said to have been commenced by him. And since it is certain from the life of the king by one of his own Court that he was regarded by all classes of his people with the utmost reverence and respect, I think it is extremely likely that some of his people listened and took down in writing the sayings of the king, so that the book of Alfred’s sayings may be as authentic as the sayings of Dr. Johnson, recorded by his admirer Boswell.

There is next to be observed the permanence of Alfred’s institutions. They do not perish, but remain. His Witenagemot—Meeting of the Wise—is our Parliament—it has developed into our many Parliaments. His order of King, Thane, and Freeman is our order of King, Lords, and Commons. His theory of education was carried out in some of the towns, and in all the monasteries and cathedrals: there are schools still existing which owe their origin to a period before the Norman Conquest. His foundation of all law upon the Laws of God remains our own: his liberties are our liberties: his navy is the ancestor of our navy: the literature which he planted has grown into a goodly tree—the Monarch of the Forest: the foreign trade that he began is the forerunner of our foreign trade: it would seem as if there was hardly any point in which we have reason to be grateful or proud which was not foreseen by this wise king.

To look for the secret of his wisdom is like looking for the secret of making a great poem or writing a great play: it may be arrived at and described, but it is not therefore the easier of imitation. Alfred’s secret is quite simple. _His work was permanent because it was established on the national character._ It was in order to make this point clear that I dwelt at length on the character of the people over whom Alfred ruled. He knew their character, and by instinct, which we call genius, he gave his people the laws and the education, and the power of development for which they were fitted. No other laws, no other kind of government, will enable a people to prosper except those laws to which they have grown and are adapted. Only those institutions, I repeat, are permanent which are based on the national character. That was the secret of King Alfred the law-giver.

It may be asked, what manner of man to look at was this great king? His biographer, Asser, who knew him well, has not thought fit to tell us. He only says in words of flattery that Alfred was more comely and gracious of aspect than his brothers. These brothers, four in number, were all kings before him, and all died young. Alfred himself was afflicted by a disease which never left him. It is therefore presumable that there was some congenital weakness in them all. This was not physical weakness: whatever the disease, it did not interfere with Alfred’s courage or his prowess in battle. This is proved by the fact that the Saxon kings actually fought in person in the forefront of the battle, and on foot. Alfred, for instance, fought in a dozen battles at least, and always with the valour that belongs to a strong man. I take him to have been a man of good stature and of strong build: a man whose appearance was kingly: who impressed his followers with the gallant and confident carriage of a brave soldier. But as to his face, or the colour of his hair or eyes, I can tell nothing. Fair hair he had, I think, and blue eyes: or the more common type of brown hair and gray eyes. When a king resigns all personal ambitions and seeks nothing for himself, it seems natural and fitting that, while his works live after him, he himself should vanish without leaving so much as a tradition of his face or figure.

From time to time in history—generally in some time of great doubt and trouble: or in some time when the old ideals are in danger of being forgotten: or in some time when the nation seems losing the sense of duty and of responsibility: there appears one, man or woman, who restores the better spirit of the people by his example: by his preaching: by his self-sacrifice: by his martyrdom. He is the prophet as priest: the prophet as king: the prophet as law-giver. There passes in imagination before us a splendid procession of men and women who have thus restored a nation or raised the fallen ideals. Among them we recognise many faces: there are Savonarola: Francis of Assisi: Joan of Arc: our own Queen Elizabeth, greatest and strongest of all women: the Czar Peter. But the greatest figure of them all—the most noble—the most god-like—is that of the ninth-century Alfred, king of that little country which you have upon your map. There is none like Alfred in the whole page of history: none with a record altogether so blameless: none so wise: none so human. We have allowed the memory of him to be too much forgotten: only here and there a historian—such as Freeman or Green—lifts up his voice and proclaims aloud that he has no words with which to speak adequately of this great Englishman. Perhaps the noble lines of Tennyson, written for another prince whose memory is dear to us all, may be referred to Alfred:

Who reverenced his conscience as his king; Whose glory was, redressing human wrong; Who spake no slander, no, nor listen’d to it; Who loved one only and who clave to her— We know him now: we see him as he moved: How modest, kindly, all-accomplish’d, wise, With what sublime repression of himself; Not making his high place the lawless perch Of wing’d ambitions, nor a vantage-ground For pleasure; but thro’ all this tract of years Wearing the white flower of a blameless life.

It is the purpose—the wise and patriotic purpose—of certain persons to erect, for these and other reasons, a monument, visible to all, to the memory of King Alfred.

Some of the points which I have recalled in this paper may help to show why such a monument would have been fitting at any time during the last thousand years. There is, however, a special reason which makes the erection of such a monument very necessary—I use the word necessary advisedly—at the present time. In the year 1897—on that memorable day when we were all drunk with the visible glory and the greatness of the Empire—there arose in the minds of many a feeling that we ought to teach the people the meaning of what we saw set forth in that procession—the meaning of our Empire—not only what it is, but how it came—through whose creation—by whose foundation. Now so much is Alfred the Founder that every ship in our Navy might have his name—every school his bust: every Guildhall his statue. He is everywhere. But he is invisible. And the people do not know him. The boys do not learn about him. There is nothing to show him. We want a monument to Alfred, if only to make the people learn and remember the origin of our Empire—if only that his noble example may be kept before us, to stimulate and to inspire and to encourage.

It seems unnecessary to urge that a monument to Alfred must be set up in Winchester, and not in London or in Westminster, or anywhere else. Here lies the dust of the kings his ancestors, and of the kings his successors. Thirty-five of his line made Winchester their capital: twenty were buried in the Cathedral. In this city Alfred received instruction from St. Swithin: the city was already old and venerable when Alfred was a boy. He was buried first in the Cathedral, and afterwards in the Abbey, which he himself founded, hard by. The name of Alfred’s country, well-nigh forgotten, except by scholars, has been revived of late years by a Wessex man—Thomas Hardy. But the name of Alfred’s capital continues in the venerable and historic city of Winchester, which yields to none in England for the monuments and the memories of the past.

I venture, lastly, to express my own personal hope that great as were the achievements of Alfred—the keynote to be struck and to be maintained will be that Alfred is, and will always remain, the typical man of our race—call him Anglo-Saxon, call him American, call him Englishman, call him Australian—the typical man of our race at his best and noblest. I like to think that the face of the Anglo-Saxon at his best and noblest is the face of Alfred. I am quite sure and certain that the mind of the Anglo-Saxon at his best and noblest is the mind of Alfred: that the aspirations, the hopes, the standards of the Anglo-Saxon at his best and noblest are the aspirations, the hopes, the standards of Alfred. He is truly our Leader, our Founder, our King. When our monument takes shape and form let it somehow recognise this great, this cardinal fact. Let it show somehow by the example of Alfred the Anglo-Saxon at his best and noblest—here within the circle of the narrow seas, or across the ocean; wherever King Alfred’s language is spoken; wherever King Alfred’s laws prevail; into whatever fair lands of the wide world King Alfred’s descendants have penetrated.

Walter Besant.

Alfred As King

By Frederic Harrison

Alfred As King

It is a commonplace with historians—and with the historians of many countries and different schools of opinion—that our English Alfred was the only perfect man of action recorded in history; for Aurelius was occasionally too much of the philosopher; Saint Louis usually too much of the saint; Godfrey too much of the Crusader; the great Emperors were not saints at all; and of all more modern heroes we know too much to pretend that they were perfect. Of all the hyperboles of praise there is but one that we can safely justify with the strictest canons of historic research. Of all the names in history there is only our English Alfred whose record is without stain and without weakness—who is equally amongst the greatest of men in genius, in magnanimity, in valour, in moral purity, in intellectual force, in practical wisdom, and in beauty of soul. In his recorded career from infancy to death, we can find no single trait that is not noble and suggestive, nor a single act or word that can be counted as a flaw.

In the history of modern Europe there is nothing which can compare in duration and in organic continuity with the unbroken evolution of our English nation. And now that the royal house of France has passed from the sphere of political realities into that of historic memories, there is no dynasty in Europe which can be named in the same breath with that which has seen a succession of forty-nine sovereigns since Alfred; nor has any King or Cæsar a record of ancestry which can compare with that of the royal Lady who through thirty-two generations traces her lineal descent to the Hero-King of Wessex.

We have long given up the venerable fables which once gathered round the name of Alfred, as round Romulus, or Theseus, King Arthur, or the Cid. Every schoolboy knows that Alfred was not formally King of all England; nor did he introduce trial by jury, or electoral institutions; he did not found the University of Oxford; nor write all the pieces which are attributed to his pen; he was perhaps too practical a man to let his own supper get burnt on the hearth; and too wary a general to go about masquerading with a harp in the enemy’s camp. But the historic Alfred whom we know to-day is a personage more splendid and lifelike than the legendary Alfred ever was. Though much of what our grandsires believed about Alfred is now known to be poetry and pious fraud, the traditional Alfred was quite just in general effect, and modern research has given us a portrait both nobler and more definite than that drawn by the patriotic imagination of a less critical age. Patriotic imagination itself falls far short of scrupulous scholarship when it seeks to draw the likeness of a real hero.

It is true that the field of Alfred’s achievements was relatively small, and the whole scale of his career was modest indeed when compared with that of his imperial compeers. He inherited a kingdom which covered only a few English counties, and at one time his realm was reduced to a smaller area than that of some private landlords of modern times. Beside the great Emperor Charles, or the German Ottos, Henrys, and Fredericks of the Middle Ages, his dominions, his resources, his armies, his battles, his fleets, his administrative machinery, his contemporary glory—all these were almost in miniature—hardly a tithe of theirs. But, we should remember, it is _quality_ not _quantity_ that weighs in the impartial scales of History. True human greatness needs no vast territories as its stage—nor do multitudes add to its power. That which tells in the end is the living seed of the creative mind, the heroic example, the sovereign gift of leadership, the undying inspiration of genius and faith.

Turn to the _Chronicle_ and to Asser’s _Life_, with recent historians and scholars, and mark those miracles of patience, valour, indomitable energy by which the great king rescued from the savage Norsemen the England of our forefathers. Watch him as he returns to the charge after every repulse, rallies his exhausted men, gathers up new armies, plans fresh methods of war, and at last wins for his people prosperity, honour, and peace. The scale of these campaigns was narrow—the armies were small—not indeed weaker than were the Greeks at Thermopylae and Marathon; but the annals of war have nothing grander than the long record of sagacious heroism by which Alfred saved England for the English. Then note the genius with which he saw that the Norsemen must be met on the sea, with which he organised a navy of ships built on a new design of his own. Alfred is not only the forerunner of Marlborough and Wellington, but he was the first to teach the Saxon to be a seaman.

A fine land that had once known prosperity, and even culture, lay utterly ruined and desolate when Alfred undertook the vast task of its restoration—its material, moral, intellectual reform. He said in his Will, “we were all despoiled by the Heathen Folk.” He found the enemy in possession of something like a standing army of disciplined soldiers; and we should note how the _Chronicle_ calls the Norsemen “the army.” He met this by instituting a regular militia with local garrisons and a reserve force capable of systematic war. When Alfred marshals a new campaign we find that the era of wild raids to be met by casual musters of countrymen is a thing of the past. Alfred at last has his “army” too. We are dealing with regular armies capable of sustaining organised campaigns.

A navy needed to be created and not simply reformed. And the safety of the southern shores of England—the first command of the Channel—must be dated from the day when Alfred began the formation of an adequate fleet. It is true that in the absence of competent seamen in Wessex, he had to man his earliest ships with Frisians from over the sea. But in later years he came to have a really English fleet of his own. And it is plain that in a true sense he is the inventor, but not the actual founder, of a national navy: of that sea-power which is the birthright of this island.

When Alfred was chosen king, “almost against his will,” we are told, the prospect was one to appal the stoutest heart. In his boyhood the Northmen had begun to winter in Kent, had taken Canterbury and London by storm, and pushed up the Thames. A few years later they stormed Winchester and ravaged Kent. In the reign of his brother, Ethelred, they stormed York, and invaded Mercia, whose king, Burhred, had married Alfred’s sister. They next laid waste East Anglia, martyred its king, Edmund, and threatened Wessex. The Danes (as they were now known) sailed up the Thames, and formed a camp round Reading. In a fierce battle at Ashdown a victory had been won for the moment by the energy and valour of Alfred; but defeats followed, Surrey was lost, and Ethelred died, it is supposed of his wounds.

The young king of twenty-two came to the throne of his ancestors in a dark hour. The supremacy of Wessex in England, won by his grandfather, Egbert, had vanished. Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and parts of Wessex had been desolated; the abbeys had been sacked, the monks murdered, the churches, schools, and homesteads ruined. The Danish invaders were masters of all Northern, Eastern, and Central England, and the heart of Wessex was open to assault. The young king met them at Wilton with a small force, but after a stubborn fight was beaten off. He was forced to purchase a precarious truce.

In this year, 871, the _Chronicle_ relates (in its grim, laconic style), the [Danish] army came to Reading, and three nights after, the Alderman Ethelwulf fought them. Four nights after this, Ethelred and Alfred led a large force to Reading, and “there was great slaughter on both sides; the Alderman Ethelwulf was slain, and the Danes held possession of the battle place.” “And four nights after, Ethelred and Alfred fought with all the army at Ashdown”; many thousands were slain; “and they were fighting until night.” And fourteen nights after, King Ethelred and Alfred his brother fought against the army at Basing, and there the Danes gained the victory. “And two months after, King Ethelred and Alfred his brother fought against the army at Merton ... and there was great slaughter on each side, but the Danes held possession of the battle place. And after this fight there came a great summer force [of Danes] to Reading. And the Easter after, King Ethelred died. Then Alfred his brother succeeded to the kingdom of the West Saxons, and one month after, with a small force, he fought against all the army at Wilton, but the Danes held possession of the battle place. _And this year nine great battles were fought against the army in the kingdom south of the Thames; besides which Alfred, the king’s brother, and individual aldermen, and king’s thanes, often rode raids on them, which were not reckoned._”

Such were the disasters with which Alfred’s reign began. His fighting-men were exhausted or slaughtered; his kingdom torn from side to side, and its chief towns stormed: the northern, central, and eastern kingdoms had been blotted out. Burhred of Mercia was driven over sea, and Wessex was forced to buy a brief rest with gold. Alfred equipped a few ships and gained some temporary success. But soon after, the Danes with a great fleet swept round the south coast and penetrated into Dorsetshire and Devonshire. Thence passing northwards into Gloucestershire, and reinforced by a new fleet in the Bristol Channel, the Danish host suddenly fell upon Wiltshire. The Saxon defence was broken in pieces. “The [Danish] army harried the West Saxons’ land, and settled there, and drove over sea much of the people, and of the rest the most they harried. _And the people submitted to them, save the King Alfred; and he, with a little band, withdrew to the woods and fastnesses in the moors._”

Alfred seemed utterly ruined. He, the grandson of Egbert overlord of England, the successor on the throne of Wessex of his father and his three brothers, had been king just seven years, and in scores of battles he had been fighting the Danes for ten years. He had seen the three northern kingdoms of Angles broken up and the reigning house in each exterminated. Step by step he had seen Kent, Surrey, and Wessex overrun; assailed by sea and land, from the coast, the rivers, and the Bristol Channel. His own people had been driven across sea, or crushed into submission; and he himself, with a small band of followers, was forced to find shelter in woods and swamps. His lot seemed hopeless, but he alone did not despair.

The crisis was indeed the gravest to which our country has ever been exposed. The Danish host was now a large and disciplined army bent on conquering and settling new lands, and already masters of the island from the Severn to the Tees. They were the fiercest and rudest of the tribes which had broken into Europe; Heathens, full of hatred and scorn for the religion, culture, arts, and civilisation of Christendom. With a real genius for war, both by sea and land, fired with the thirst of glory and adventure, they were better armed, more mobile, more martially organised than Saxon, Angle, or Jute. Short of a miracle their ultimate triumph over the whole island seemed certain. Had it been achieved, the civilisation of England would have been retarded for ages. Christianity, learning, arts, and legislation, which had progressed for two centuries, would have been stamped out, and our island would have been the seat of a barbarous and heathen horde. From the nature of their island conquest and their own mastery of the seas, they could not have been absorbed in Christendom so rapidly as were the Normans of France, or the Danubian tribes of Germany. They might have resisted for centuries both conversion and conquest from Europe. Nay more, from the supreme opportunities afforded by our island and all its resources as a basis for an imperial race, it is too probable that the heathen Danes, once firmly seated in the whole of Britain, might have proved the lasting scourge of Europe itself. From this tremendous peril, England and Europe were saved by the genius of our Saxon hero.

In the Easter of that year, 878, the _Chronicle_ relates, “Alfred, with a little band, wrought a fortress at Athelney, and from that work warred on the army, with that portion of the men of Somerset that was nearest.” Athelney was a bit of firm ground in the morasses formed by the Parret and the Tone in Somersetshire. There, for a few months, the king organised a new army, drawn from Somerset and Wilts and such Hants men as were left. In May he suddenly dashed out of the wood of Selwood: “his Wessex men were rejoiced to see him”: he fought a great fight against the whole “army” at Ethandune, near Westbury, put them to flight and drove them to their camp, where, after fourteen days of siege, he forced the Danes to surrender. It was a crushing victory—the turning-point in the life of Alfred—in the life of England.

The importance of it was this. A part of the beaten host sailed away over seas. But the rest, under their king, Guthrum, agreed to accept Christian baptism, to withdraw out of Wessex and the western half of Mercia, and to settle peaceably in East Anglia, north of Thames. Guthrum, with thirty of his chiefs, came to Alfred’s stronghold, received at his baptism the Saxon name of Athelstan from his victor and god-father, remained twelve days with the king and gave large presents. By the Peace of Wedmore, 878, Wessex and West England were saved, and the ultimate incorporation of the Danes with Christendom was secured. At first sight and in strict form, Alfred had surrendered Eastern England to the conqueror. The Treaty was not honestly observed by the Danes, and Guthrum and his warriors again became enemies. But the core of England was saved; the amalgamation of Dane and Saxon was founded in principle and in distant effect. And the Peace of Wedmore was a stroke of genius more daring and more far-reaching in result than the splendid victory of Ethandune by which it had been won.

Leaving the Danes for the present undisturbed in all Eastern England between Thames and Tees, Alfred occupied himself with restoring his shattered and desolated Kingdom of Wessex. His treasury was empty, the towns were in ruins, and civil government paralysed. He built forts, abbeys, and schools; repeopled and stocked waste districts; and set to work to establish something like a standing military force to meet the regular “army” of Danes. Hitherto Alfred had commanded loose levies of half-armed men, who by custom disbanded after two months’ service. This had enabled small but organised bands of Danes to overrun England, and to win practical successes even when beaten by numbers in the fields. Alfred, like William of Normandy in the eleventh, like Cromwell in the seventeenth century, saw, even so early as the ninth century, that victory belonged not to numbers but to regular armies. He organised what was at least a permanent local militia, with definite quotas of levies and an alternate system of reserves, besides the garrisons of fortified places. He rebuilt the broken fortresses, exercised his men in entrenchments, and adapted from the Danes their military arts.

But his eye of genius foresaw that the country was not safe whilst the invaders had command of the seas. Thus he organised a fleet, and assessed the ports and maritime districts to support it. He himself ultimately designed a class of ship, longer and swifter than those in use, though at first he had to man his navy with mercenary Frisians and sea-rovers. Towards the close of his reign, and in that of his son and grandson, a genuine English navy asserted its command of the Channel, which two centuries later his feeble successors lost again.

He then turned to reorganise the system of justice, making the judges the direct ministers of the sovereign, personally responsible to him, and subject in certain cases to his final appeal. His biographer tells us that he keenly revised unjust judgments, and tradition exaggerated this into a preposterous legend. He caused a collection of the old laws to be compiled—carefully resisting any general new legislation, or the fusion of the Wessex, Mercian, and Kentish customs into a symmetrical code. His laws were a compilation, with selection of what was approved best, and rejection of what was condemned as obsolete or mischievous. In the spirit of conservative amendment which marks his whole career, he is careful to tell us that he “durst not venture to set down much of his own.” He was content with partial revision and excision, under the advice of his Witan.

The combination in a code of Saxon, Anglian, and Kentish “dooms” gave a certain stimulus towards national union in a larger aggregate. But a much more powerful cause unexpectedly emerged out of the Danish invasions. By these savage shocks the royal houses that had ruled in Mercia, in East Anglia, in Northumbria, were not only overthrown, but were extinct. Alfred remained the one victorious king of the race of Cerdic, the legitimate sovereign of Wessex and Kent, the natural source of kingly authority wherever Danes were not in possession of rule. Having won back the western half of Mercia by the Peace of Wedmore, Alfred became its king by silent consent of its Anglian people. He did not fuse West Mercia with Wessex; he was not formally installed or crowned. He made Ethelred, the husband of his daughter Ethelfleda, alderman, and himself exercised the functions of king, with a separate Mercian administration and Witan. By this wise and tentative system of dual monarchy, Alfred was firmly seated the undisputed sovereign of Southern England from the mouth of the Thames to the Exe, ruling by his son-in-law all Central England west of Watling Street from the Severn to the Ribble. He thus became, but a few years after his romantic sortie from Athelney, the most powerful ruler holding the widest single realm within our island. This effected a practical supremacy over the main part of England proper, except for the Danes in the east. And he thus made it possible that there should be a true English kingdom, of which his son Edward, and his grandson Athelstan, were formally recognised as sovereigns.

More than once after the settlement effected at Wedmore and the years of peace it brought, Alfred had to meet formidable enemies both by sea and land. But fierce as these campaigns were, they did not imply such incessant warfare, such desperate crises, as had made the first ten years of his early manhood one long battle for life and home. Alfred was now at least as well able to defend his country from the Scandinavian invaders as were the rulers of France and Germany, on whom the storm burst whenever the Northmen had been checked in England.

Six years after the Peace of Wedmore Alfred had to meet again a force of Danes which had pushed up the Thames, and to chastise the East Anglians who had violated the Treaty by a fresh outbreak. A new treaty with Guthrum gave Alfred possession of London and adjacent parts of Middlesex, which were finally rescued from the Danes, and annexed to English Mercia under its alderman, Ethelred, Alfred’s son-in-law. Again, in the twenty-third year of Alfred’s reign a new body of Vikings from Norway descended on to Wessex and were joined by a second rising of the Anglian Danes. For more than two years the war was continued over a large part of England—from the Thames and its affluents across to the Severn; from Exeter northwards to Chester. By a series of vigorous and skilful campaigns, in concerted strategy of armies and fleets, the king, his son and his son-in-law, defeated this formidable combination, captured the entire Danish fleet, overawed the Britons of Wales and Cornwall, forced the East Anglian Danes to keep within their own reserves, and drove the northern freebooters across the Channel. Once again, in the last years of his reign, Alfred had to meet a new invasion of pirates at sea, who were defeated in a series of fierce and bloody encounters. These are the last recorded campaigns of the king, who from his boyhood, for nearly thirty years, had been continually in arms; but, by obstinate wars and sagacious policy, he had tamed the savage Norsemen, and at length transmitted to his descendants a kingdom doubled and trebled in extent and greatly increased in culture and strength.

England had been rescued from barbarism by the heroism of Alfred and his aptitude for war. But it is his genius as a creative statesman which left permanent effects on the history of England and made him one of the principal founders of the greatness of our country. His conversion and settlement of Guthrum’s Danes in East Anglia, his generous forbearance and his repeated treaties with them in spite of their faithless conduct, led to the ultimate amalgamation of Dane, Angle, and Saxon, which created the compound English race. A less sagacious victor would have sought to clear his country of Norsemen, and would undoubtedly have been overwhelmed by successive invasions himself. Alfred’s whole career shows a conscious purpose to break with the tribal and local isolation of the West Saxon, to attach Wessex with Mercia, to civilise Dane and Briton, and to bring England into closer union with the religious and political system of Europe.

Alfred’s restoration of London was the stroke of a true statesman. The city had been stormed by the Norsemen in 851, and since then had been desolate and almost deserted, save when occupied by the Danes as winter-quarters, as it was in 872. Within the Danish power it remained until 886, the year of Alfred’s second treaty with Guthrum. By that it was ceded to him with the adjacent part of Middlesex. The king rebuilt its walls and repeopled it, and added it to Mercia, from which it was not again separated. The military and political genius of Alfred and his long experience of war with the Danes had seized on the immense importance of a restored London, carved out of Danish East Anglia, with power to block all incursions up the Thames and its various tributary rivers. The restoration of London by the King of Wessex was thus an epoch in the history, not only of the city itself, but of the country of which it was destined by nature to be the capital.

Alfred had been at this date fifteen years on the throne, and the whole aspect of affairs was changed. When he began to reign heathen barbarians were masters of the Eastern, Central, and Northern parts of England, and threatened to break up Wessex. They swept round all coasts, and pushed up the rivers, plundering, burning, raiding, and slaughtering. Now, they were shut up in East Anglia, outwardly christianised, bound by formal treaties of peace, confronted at sea by strong fleets, and gradually submitting to the moral force of superior civilisation. As Goths and Franks were overawed by the Roman empire they conquered, so Vikings and Danes gradually recognised the higher organisation of Wessex. Alfred at last ruled over a compact realm stretching from the Channel up to the Ribble, with fortresses in such places as Rochester, London, Exeter, and Chester. Lastly, in a rebuilt London, he was master of the Thames, with a powerful base on the Danish side of the great river.

As Alfred, we are told, was at Rome in his sixth year, and had subsequently been with his father at the Court of Charles the Bald, whose daughter Judith became the boy’s step-mother, the young king must have been impressed by his memories of foreign lands. His yearly embassies with offerings to the Pope, and the restoration of the Saxon College at Rome, bear witness to his close relations with the See. He married his own daughter, Elfrida, to Baldwin II., Count of Flanders, son of the same Judith, and ancestor of Matilda, wife of the Conqueror. This brought about a connection between England and Flanders, both so much threatened by Northmen invaders.

With the Britons of Cornwall and Wales Alfred’s policy showed the same moderation, sagacity, and practical skill. They were not dangerous unless united and in active combination with Danes. By the creation of English Mercia, he effectively cut them off from East Anglia; and his whole policy was directed to detach them by separate tribes and to win them into peaceful union with his own people. He had to fight them in groups from time to time, but he never attempted to conquer or annex them in the mass. And after the failure of the house of Roderick, of North Wales, Alfred secured a recognised supremacy over both North and South Welsh. His wise, firm, and victorious government impressed the smaller and more backward tribes on all sides; so that, without demanding any formal subjection, his paramount authority was recognised over the island, whilst his sphere of influence was extended to Northumbrians and Scots. The defence and reorganisation of Wessex had founded a sentiment of national unity, which was ultimately to be consolidated in a formal kingdom of all England. He made Wessex an organic, civilised, and progressive kingdom, and created it as the type which England was to follow.

It was the same idea of bringing England into the European world which suggested Alfred’s very remarkable series of distant voyages and missions. The characteristic account of the discoveries of Ohthere and Wulfstan round the North Cape and in the Baltic, which Alfred inserts into his translation of _Orosius_, testifies to the king’s strong interest in the geography and ethnography of Europe. The expedition which he despatched to India, it is said, in 883, to the shrines of St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew, in accordance with his vow when he recovered London from the Danes, was a really extraordinary feat for that age; and, though some of the MSS. read _Judea_ for _India_, it is thought that the mission was really sent to Christian churches then known to exist in India. Asser relates that the king received letters and presents from the patriarch of Jerusalem; a tale which the later writers considerably embellish. A deep impression was left by Alfred’s zeal to extend his foreign relations with distant lands.

His policy of calling in men of learning, teachers, ecclesiastics, and seamen from countries outside his own, is more fully recorded. Asser, the learned and excellent monk of St. David’s, was brought out of Wales and pressed into the service of the king, whose friend, counsellor, and biographer he became. Plegmund was brought out of Mercia and made Archbishop of Canterbury; another Mercian, Werfrith, Bishop of Worcester, was the constant adviser of the king, both in literary and in state affairs. Grimbald was brought from the monastery of St. Omer; and John, of Saxony, from the monastery of Corbey. With these came learned monks to organise the new abbeys and schools which Alfred founded. He encouraged foreign traders, and summoned artists and craftsmen from the Continent to direct his buildings and arts. Until his Saxons had learned seamanship, he engaged Frisians to man his ships, and took into his service adventurous Vikings such as Ohthere and Wulfstan.

Alfred has left us his own conception of what a king should be: and no preacher or moralist has ever drawn the portrait in grander lines:—

Power is never a good, unless he be good that has it; so it is the good of the man, not of the power. If power be goodness, therefore is it that no man by his dominion can come to the virtues, and to merit; but by his virtues and merit he comes to dominion and power. Thus no man is better for his power; but if he be good, it is from his virtues that he is good. From his virtues he becomes worthy of power, if he be worthy of it.... By wisdom you may come to power, though you should not desire the power. You need not be solicitous about power, nor strive after it. If you be wise and good, it will follow you, though you should not wish it.

Ah! Wise One, thou knowest that greed and the possession of this earthly power never were pleasing to me, nor did I ever greatly desire this earthly kingdom—save that I desired tools and materials to do the work that it was commanded me to do. This was that I might guide and wield wisely the authority committed to me. Why! thou knowest that no man may understand any craft or wield any power, unless he have tools and materials. Every craft has its proper tools. But the tools that a king needs to rule are these: to have his land fully peopled; to have priestmen, and soldiermen, and workmen. Yea! thou knowest that without these tools no king can put forth his capacity to rule.... It was for this I desired materials to govern with, that my ability to rule might not be forgotten and hidden away. For every faculty and authority is apt to grow obsolete and ignored, if it be without wisdom; and that which is done in unwisdom can never be reckoned as skill. _This will I say—that I have sought to live worthily the while I lived, and after my life to leave to the men that come after me a remembering of me in good works._

... Ah! my soul, one evil is stoutly to be shunned. It is that which most constantly and grievously deceives all those who have a nature of distinction, but who have not attained to full command of their powers. This is the desire of false glory and of unrighteous power, and of immoderate fame of good deeds above all other people. For many men desire power that they may have fame, though they be unworthy, for even the most depraved desire it also. But he that will investigate this fame wisely and earnestly, will perceive how little it is, how precarious, how frail, how bereft it is of all that is good.

Glory of this world! Why do foolish men with a false voice call thee glory? Thou art not so. More men have pomp and glory and worship from the opinion of foolish people, than they have from their own works.

They say a certain king cried: he had a naked sword hanging over his head by a small thread ready at a moment to cut short his life. It was so always to me....

Alfred’s relations to the Church were wholly without a cloud or a blot—alike free from the violence or the impolicy which too often discredited even the noblest sovereigns of his age. From the hour when the child Prince of four was anointed by Pope Leo in Rome, down to the day when the Canons laid his bones in the Old Minster of Winchester, the career of Alfred presents to us the purest type of the normal relations between the temporal and spiritual powers—a type of more wisdom than that of St. Henry or St. Louis, more truly spiritual than that of the Emperors Charles or Otto. To Alfred, Religion, Culture, Intelligence had no local limits. He was essentially European, even cosmopolitan, in his genius. As a boy he had witnessed the inauguration of the new Papal Rome on the Vatican. He had been at the Court of the great Frank King, whose daughter became his step-mother; he had known all that was foremost in the civilisation of the century: he resolved to transplant it to England. His missions were his message to the world that Britain was no longer an _ultima Thule_, but henceforth was to march in the van of Progress. He was, says Freeman, “the spiritual and intellectual leader of his people.”

It is in his own writings that we come to love Alfred best. No ruler of men has left us so pellucid a revelation of his own soul. As in _Meditations_ of Aurelius and the Psalms of David, there is given to men the outpourings of his aspirations and his sorrows. Neither Richelieu, Cromwell, nor William the Silent ever recorded more frankly their problems and their aims. In the authentic writings of Alfred we are in the presence of one who is a teacher as much as a king—who recalls to us Augustine and à-Kempis, or Bunyan and Jeremy Taylor. His _Boethius_ served him as texts whereon he preached to his people profound sermons on the moral and spiritual life. Read his homily on Riches—“that it is better to give than to receive,”—on the true Ruler—“that power is never a good, unless he be good that has it,”—on the uses of Adversity—“no wise man should desire a soft life.” Few men ever had so hard a life—with his mysterious and cruel malady—“his thorn in the flesh” until his early death—with his distracted and ruined kingdom—his ferocious enemies—his never-ending cares. And amidst it all we have the king in his silent study pouring out poetic thoughts upon married love, or friendship, on true happiness, or the inner life, composing pastoral poetry, or casting into English old idylls from Greek epic or myth, ending with some magnificent _Te Deum_ of his own composition.

And with all this spiritual fervour, this literary genius, this passion for culture, how wonderful is the many-sided energy of the man—his skill and delight as a huntsman, his love of ballad, anecdote, and merry tale, his love of all noble art, his zeal as a great builder, his ingenuity in mechanical contrivance, his invention for measuring time, his planning a new type of battleship—his supreme foresight in refounding the desolated city of London. No man ever so perfectly fulfilled the rule—“Without haste, without rest.” “I have desired,” he wrote, “to live worthily while I lived, and after my life to leave to the men that should be after me a remembrance in good works.” And Alfred “the truth-teller”—as an annalist calls him—never uttered words more true.

Alfred’s name is almost the only one in the long roll of our national worthies which awakens no bitter, no jealous thought, which combines the honour of all; Alfred represents at once the ancient monarchy, the army, the navy, the law, the literature, the poetry, the art, the enterprise, the industry, the religion of our race. Neither Welshman, nor Scot, nor Irishman can feel that Alfred’s memory has left the trace of a wound for his national pride. No difference of Church arises to separate any who would join to do Alfred honour. No saint in the Calendar was a more loyal and cherished member of the ancient faith; and yet no Protestant can imagine a purer and more simple follower of the Gospel. Alfred was a victorious warrior whose victories have left no curses behind them: a king whom no man ever charged with a harsh act: a scholar who never became a pedant: a saint who knew no superstition: a hero as bold as Launcelot—as spotless as Galahad.

No people, in ancient or modern times, ever had a hero-founder at once so truly historic, so venerable, and so supremely great. Alfred was more to us than the heroes in antique myths—more than Theseus and Solon were to Athens, or Lycurgus to Sparta, or Romulus and Numa were to Rome—more than St. Stephen was to Hungary, or Pelayo and the Cid to Spain—more than Hugh Capet and Jeanne d’Arc were to France—more than William the Silent was to Holland—nay, almost as much as the Great Charles was to the Franks.

The life-work of the Great Alfred has had a continuity, an organic development, a moral, intellectual, and spiritual majesty which has no parallel or rival amongst rulers in the annals of mankind. He is the father of English History, the founder of English prose. He gave impulse and form to the _English Chronicle_, the oldest national record in modern Europe. He formed himself, or dictated, an organic prose literature, which was kept in current use until the Norman Conquest. His mark as a king is the creative mind—the organising genius. His whole life, as recorded in act and as imagined in his own ideals, has the stamp of supreme insight, practical wisdom, self-control, devotion to duty. His passion for poetry, his love for history, his dignity, his grace, his tenderness, his manly piety—all alike are spontaneous and beautiful—all are in harmony, none are in excess.

Alfred As A Religious Man And An Educationalist

By The Bishop Of Bristol

Alfred As A Religious Man And An Educationalist

I

His Early Years

Earliest years—Visits to Rome—Purpose of such visits—His father’s will—His education—Saxon poetry—His mother’s book—His religious interest—His desire for learning—Musical skill—His religious wars—He becomes king.

The original sources of information from which this chapter is drawn are fairly numerous. Asser’s _Life of Alfred_ is of course the chief source; but Alfred’s laws, Alfred’s translations, Alfred’s will, all throw much light on his character as a religious man; and the translations tell us something of his views on education, besides what we learn from the record of his actions.

Alfred’s mother was Osburga; Asser tells us that she was a very religious woman, noble alike in family and by her own disposition. His father Ethelwulf gave him an early training in devotion to the faith of Christ. In the year 853, which Asser declares to have been the fifth year of Alfred’s life—though some say his eleventh year, which would seem more probable—Ethelwulf sent him to Rome with an honourable escort of nobles and commoners. Pope Leo IV. received him, anointed him for king, and adopted him as his spiritual son. This may mean that Alfred was confirmed in Rome; Ethelwerd, a descendant of Alfred, believed that it referred to baptism. Another account states that the Pope anointed him king of the Demetians; but that seems out of the question, as he had four brothers older than himself. The statement may be due to the fact that some years after Alfred became king, the kings and people of that part of Wales made submission to him.[1] Two years later Ethelwulf himself went to Rome, with great honour, and took with him Alfred, because he loved him more than his other sons. A long list of Ethelwulf’s gifts was given by Anastasius in his _Lives of the Popes_; they were very magnificent if the record is true. The father and son remained in Rome for a year. Alfred’s mother was, we must suppose, then dead, for Ethelwulf took a new wife home with him, Judith, the daughter of Charles the Bald.

We have in Ethelwulf’s will an interesting evidence of the impression made upon him by Rome. It is as well to state such of the provisions as have come down to us, for they are in themselves of importance, and they introduce us to important facts of the time; also, we shall then have something with which to compare Alfred’s will when the time comes to deal with it. The provisions show the kind of religious atmosphere in which Alfred was brought up as a young boy.

Ethelwulf ordered that the money he left behind him should be divided between his sons and the nobles for the good of his soul. Further, for the benefit of his soul, which from the first flower of his youth he had studied in all things to promote, he directed that in all his hereditary dominions one poor man for each ten hides of land, either a native or a foreigner,[2] should be provided with meat, drink, and clothing, by his successors, even to the day of judgment. And the curiously significant condition is imported, “if the country should continue to be inhabited by men and cattle, and not become deserted”: to such an extent had the ravages of the Danish pirates gone. Also, and still for the good of his soul, three hundred mancuses[3] were to go to Rome. Their destination explains to us the religious attraction which drew men in his time to the old capital of the Western world. The journey was dangerous;[4] it was also expensive.[5] King Canute spoke very strongly about this in his time. He thanked God that he had been able to visit the holy Apostles Peter and Paul. That was the aspect in which the purpose of the pilgrimage to Rome presented itself to his mind, it was to visit the tombs of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul.[6] But having thanked God for his visit, he proceeded to complain of the heavy demands upon “my archbishops” when according to custom they visited the holy see to receive the pall. “I complained in the presence of the lord Pope, and said I was much displeased on account of the immense sums of money which were demanded of them”; it was decreed that this should cease. In like manner he settled with the emperor and with the Frank king that the severity of the taxes by the way should be relaxed. In 688 and 728, two of Alfred’s predecessors, Cædwalla and Ina, kings of Wessex, wishing to visit Rome, resigned their kingdom to carry out their wish. Bede tells us precisely what their purpose was. It was that they might visit the tombs of the blessed Apostles. Ethelwulf, too, makes his object clear in his will. One hundred mancuses were to go to Rome in honour of St. Peter, specially to buy oil for filling all the lamps of his apostolic church on Easter Eve and at cock-crow; also, one hundred mancuses in honour of St. Paul, for the same purpose of providing oil for the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, to fill the lamps on Easter Eve and at cock-crow; and one hundred mancuses for the universal apostolic pontiff. William of Malmesbury states that these were to be annual gifts, but that is not supported by Asser, from whom William takes his account.

It is interesting to note the agreement of these gifts with the facts of the time. In 847 the Saracens had attacked Rome. The great basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul were suburban churches, outside the walls, and they were plundered and desecrated. We are accustomed to the idea of St. Paul’s being _fuori le mura_, but St. Peter’s, as we know it, lies in a district surrounded by walls. This fortified district is called the Leonine City. It owes its existence and its name to Leo IV., who was Pope when Ethelwulf sent Alfred to Rome as a boy. A concise account of the eight years’ papacy of Leo IV. would state that he devoted himself to building the fortifications of the Leonine City, that St. Peter’s and the Vatican might no longer be suburban, and to restoring the plundered and desecrated churches of the two Apostles. Hence Ethelwulf’s gifts to the two churches and the papal purse. If the dates and periods given by Asser are correct, Pope Leo died while the Saxon king and prince were in Rome, and was succeeded by Benedict III. In that case Alfred witnessed in the autumn of 855 the significant spectacle of an antipope stripping the Pope of his pontifical robes and ruling for a time in the Lateran.

Under influences such as these Alfred was brought up. His brothers appear to have been sent out to great men of the kingdom to be educated, but Alfred was kept always at the king’s court, as the favourite son. He was specially noted for the attention with which he listened to the Saxon poems of earlier times, and the care with which he stored them up in an excellent memory. In after years he spoke of Aldhelm’s English songs and hymns as the best he knew;[7] and that was saying a great deal, for the national gift of song, both sacred and secular, was great. It would be difficult to find in the early records of any nation a sacred song more touching and beautiful than the stanzas of the “Dream of the Holy Rood,” incised in early Anglian runes upon the great cross-shaft at Ruthwell, itself a monument such as no other nation can show. The fuller form of this great song, embodying the earlier stanzas found on the Ruthwell cross, was discovered at Vercelli two generations ago, in the Wessex dialect of Alfred’s time. That Alfred knew by heart this among many other English songs may be taken as certain. That it made its religious mark on his mind cannot be doubted.

But, Asser remarks with a severe comment on the neglect in this respect by his parents, the boy Alfred had no book-learning at all. He was trained in all bodily exercises, and he especially learned and practised the art of hunting in all its branches with surprising success; an art so practical then that Asser believed skill and good fortune in hunting to be “among the gifts of God, as we have often witnessed.” But book-learning he had none.

It was his mother who gave him his first taste for book-learning. If we are to accept the dates and statements of Asser as on the whole correct, this must have been his step-mother, Judith, though one of the statements would refer it to Osburga’s time. Alfred was about thirteen when the event occurred; he remained illiterate, Asser says, till he was twelve years old or more. Those who take the other view make him almost four at the time of the following episode. There is no evidence that Osburga had any learning, though her love for Saxon ballad may be assumed. Judith, on the other hand, was the daughter of a house which paid much regard to learning and art. The beautiful Bibles of her father are in existence still, and we can well understand that she would try to win the affection of her step-sons by showing them treasures of a kind new to them. No one who has had the privilege of handling and examining the books in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris can ever forget the beauty of the manuscripts which belonged to Charles le Chauve, Judith’s father. The ivory covers of his Psalter and his Book of the Gospels, the beauty of the interior of those books, and the fineness of his St. Denis Bible and his Metz Bible (which is possibly the Bible prepared at Tours for Charlemagne under the care of Alcuin), abundantly convince us of the artistic taste of his family. Their evidence could be largely supplemented from the still-existing manuscripts of Charlemagne, Louis le Débonnaire, and Lothaire.

His mother, then, one day showed to Alfred and an older brother an ornamental manuscript of Saxon poems. To tempt them to begin to learn—again the act of one who had not been responsible for their ignorance of book-learning—she said she would give the book to the boy who could first learn to read it. Alfred was delighted with the beauty of the initial letter. He might well be delighted if it approached the beauty of the Lindisfarne gospels, wrought a century and a half before, or the very different style of beauty of the manuscript known as the Psalter of Athelstane, with its Byzantine type and Teutonic origin, parts of which Judith may well have seen and handled. The initial letter of the first Psalm in this Psalter would indeed have been a prize for which a boy might face the pain of learning to read, even a boy devoted to hunting.

Alfred spoke first, though the younger. “Will you really give it to the one who can most quickly understand and recite it before you?” She, glad and smiling, said, “To him I will give it.” He took it from her hand, went to his master and read it. When it was read, he brought it back and recited it. It is not at all improbable that Judith did not know of his power of memory, and that instead of learning to read it, in our sense of the word, he got his master to read it over till he knew it by heart and could point with his finger to the words as he recited them. John the Deacon, writing in the same century, said that Pope Gregory the Great (others ascribe it to Gregory III.) invented musical notation as a _memoria technica_ to remind him of tunes he had learned by ear.

However that might be with Alfred, he had got the taste for written words, which never left him. He set to work to learn the daily course of the religious services of the several hours; and then certain of the psalms; and then a number of prayers. All this collection he had in a little book which he carried day and night in his bosom. Asser, who joined him many years later, often saw him use this little book to assist his prayers, amid all the bustle and business of a king’s life. But still there is a hint that when this collection was made it was only to him a representation of what he knew by heart; for Asser says he could not at that time gratify his most ardent wish to learn liberal art, because, as Alfred told him, there were then no good readers in all the kingdom of the West Saxons.[8] Indeed, he confessed to Asser with many lamentations and inmost sighs of his heart that the greatest of all the difficulties and impediments of his life had been that when he was young, and had the capacity for learning, he could not find teachers; and when he was more advanced in life, he was so harassed by a disease unknown to all the physicians of the island, as well as by anxieties of sovereignty, internal and external, and continual invasions of pagans, that there was no time for reading, even his masters and writers being to some extent disturbed in their occupations. But yet he never to the end of his life ceased from the insatiable desire of knowledge.

Asser makes no reference to his traditional skill as a harpist and minstrel. Probably it was a matter of course. Two hundred years before, Cædmon, in Northumbria, had fled the festive society of his labouring fellows, because he alone of them, when the harp was passed to him in turn, could not sing; and the sense of isolation in this respect wrought so strongly in his mind that in the dreams of the night he created song, and next morning he remembered the dignified and stately creation. Aldhelm was singing in Wessex in Cædmon’s time, sitting on the parapet of Malmesbury bridge, and beguiling people to sacred thought by the attraction of his secular lays.[9] We have no examples still surviving of English musical notation of Alfred’s time; but many examples exist of the next century, as, for instance, the manuscript written in Wessex about eighty years after Alfred’s death for Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester, which includes the kyrie _Rex Splendens_, composed by Dunstan, who was born in 925. There can practically be little doubt that Alfred had a similar notation, consisting of very rudimentary musical notes, with guide-letters showing time and expression. It was, however, the century after his death that saw the great development of this principle in England. Up to that time the tradition of the plain-song introduced by Augustine had been handed down from ear to ear. The chief use of our musical notation was to guard against the loss or serious variation of the traditional plain-song and the more complicated additions made by Dunstan and other skilled musicians. The Wessex churchmen learned their rugged plain-song so well, that after the Norman Conquest the monks of Glastonbury suffered death at the hands of the Norman soldiers rather than abandon their insular use for the lighter graces of the plain-song of William of Fescamp.

Alfred’s warfare against the Danes began before he was king. It was in his eyes much more than a warfare against violent invaders of his territory; it was to him, above all, a religious war. That the enemy were pagans, and that part of their aim was to obliterate Christianity, that was his chief stimulus. To the Danes also it was a religious war. The Angles and Saxons and Jutes, whose lands they pillaged, were their own very distant cousins; they had in times past worshipped the same deities whom now the Danes worshipped. To the Danes they were renegades from the one religion which the Danes held for truth. Asser knew well the king’s feeling on this subject. He describes at some length the series of battles which brought Alfred into prominence, and he describes them from information received from Alfred. He never describes the combatants as English and Danes; he always speaks of them as Christians and pagans.

The first instance we have of the bent of Alfred’s mind after he came to maturity occurs in connection with this feeling on his part that to fight the Danes was a religious work. In 871, just before he came to the throne, the pagan army fought against the Earl of Berkshire at Englefield, and the Christians gained the victory. Four days later, Alfred and his brother King Ethelred attacked the pagans at Reading, where they had strong fortifications. They cut to pieces such of the pagans as they found outside the fortifications; but the main body of the pagans sallied forth, and the Christians fled. Four days after, the pagan army was on strong ground at Æscesdun, the hill of the ash, and the Christians, in shame and indignation, roused by the calamity at Reading, determined to attack them under Ethelred and Alfred.

Ethelred was a religious man, as Alfred was, but his religion took practically a different form. The king prepared for the fight by hearing mass, and the army waited for him. The pagans did not wait. Time pressed. Alfred, who was second in command, became very anxious. The king, who commanded the force arrayed against the pagan king, was still set in prayer. He declared he would not depart, alive, till the priest had done, nor leave the divine service. Alfred was to deal with the two pagan jarls; he must either retreat or charge without waiting for his brother. Relying on the divine counsels he charged, and after a long and severe fight, in which many of the leading pagans were killed, the Christians won the day. They strewed the whole plain of Æscesdun with pagans, slaughtered in their flight. Alfred himself, it should be observed, was from childhood a frequent visitor of holy places, for the sake of prayer and almsgiving. It was certainly not from any disregard of prayer or of God’s house and the public worship of God that he fought while Ethelred heard mass.

That same year, after another great fight at Basing in which the pagans got the victory, Alfred became king on the death of his brother; Ethelred’s son Ethelwold being too young to reign. A month later the pagans defeated him at Wilton. Eight pitched battles in one year, besides endless skirmishes by night and day in which Alfred and his chief men were engaged without rest or cessation against the pagans: that is Asser’s summary of the year which saw Alfred mount the throne of the West Saxons.

The same note of a religious war is struck in the campaign in which Alfred finally triumphed. He issued forth from his stronghold in the marsh of Athelney to make frequent assaults upon the pagans. In the seventh week after Easter, 878, he rode to Ecgbryht’s Stone (Brixton-Deverill) in the eastern part of the Selwood, or Great Wood, in British Coit Mawr, and on the third day reached Edington, where he fought with valour and persistence against the pagans and defeated them completely, killing all who were not within the earthworks. The survivors he hemmed in for fourteen days. At the end of that time the pagans were worn out, and begged for terms of peace. Their leader Guthrum proposed to become a Christian. It was agreed that those who would be baptized might settle in England; those who would remain pagan must leave the island.[10] In the final terms, as in every phrase of Asser’s story, it stands out as a religious war, and as a great religious victory it ended. From that time Christian Danes and Christian Saxons could agree.

II

His Reign

His early years as king—Communications with Rome—Education of his children and others—His own labours—Religious exercises—Introduction of learned men—Invention of candle-clocks—Distribution of income—Foundation of monasteries—Formation of his Manual—Embassies to foreign parts—Ecclesiastical laws.

In the early and distressful days of Alfred’s reign his position was almost unbearable. He would not listen to the appeals for help and protection pressed upon him by his subjects. What was there that he could do to help and protect them? He was maturing his plans; meanwhile, he repulsed his subjects, and paid, or seemed to pay, no heed to their requests. The holy man St. Neot, who was his relation—some say his father’s brother—often told him that he would suffer great adversity on this account, but Alfred turned, or seemed to turn, a deaf ear to the reproofs of the man of God. His sin, Asser tells us, did not go unpunished; Alfred fell into so great misery that sometimes none of his subjects knew where he was or what had become of him. If this is true, it is sufficiently accounted for by his grave anxieties, and the terrible and mysterious disease which seized him suddenly in the midst of his marriage feast in 868, three years before his accession, and never left him free from pain, or the threat of pain, from the twentieth to the forty-fourth year of his age. But most probably the episode is merely part of the legendary life of St. Neot, inserted after Asser’s time in his _Life of Alfred_.

Among other cares of the first ten or eleven years of his reign, he turned his attention to the English school in Rome, and persuaded Pope Martin to free it from tribute and tax. This is the Pope who absolved Bishop Formosus from his excommunication by Pope John VIII. and from his vow not to return to Rome; a reversal which led to the trial and condemnation of the dead body of Formosus, mentioned on a later page.

Alfred was now free to devote himself to the restoration of religion and learning. His own family management was a pattern to all. His youngest son, Ethelwerd, was sent to the schools which Alfred had by that time established. Here he was taught in company with the children of almost all the nobility of the kingdom, and many that were not noble. They learned to read both Latin and Saxon books, and they learned to write; so that by the time they were ready to practise the manly arts—hunting and such pursuits as befitted noblemen—they had become studious and clever in the liberal arts. His older children had been taught at home, and no less carefully. They learned the Psalms and read Saxon books, especially Saxon poems; at the time when Asser wrote, Edward and Ethelswith[11] were continually in the habit of making use of books.

The king himself led a laborious life. Invasions by pagans, and his constantly recurring and disabling bodily pain, did not prevent his carrying on the government with vigour. And he was full of other occupations. Hunting in all its branches he continued to practise. He taught his workers of gold,[12] one of whom no doubt had made in the earlier years of his reign the ornament of gold and enamel found at Athelney in 1693 and now in the Bodleian, with its legend speaking of his personal care, _Alfred had me made_. He trained artificers of all kinds; he trained his falconers, hawkers, and kennel-men. By his own mechanical inventions he was able to build houses beyond all precedent of his ancestors. He learned by heart the Saxon poems and made others learn them; he recited Saxon books; he alone never desisted from studying most diligently to the best of his ability. He attended mass and the other daily religious services; he was frequent in singing psalms and in prayer, at the day hours and the night hours; he went to the churches at night to pray secretly, unknown to his courtiers. He was in the habit of hearing the Divine Scriptures read by his own countrymen, or, if it so happened, in the company of foreigners. His bishops, too, and all ecclesiastics, his earls and nobles, his officers and friends, were loved by him with wonderful affection; their sons who were bred up in the royal household were as dear to him as his own; he had them instructed in all good morals, and never ceased to teach them letters day and night. And yet he complained to God, and to all who were admitted to intimacy with him, that the Almighty had made him ignorant of divine wisdom and of the liberal arts. He was affable and pleasant to all—that, we may depend upon it, was the truth, and not that other story of morose repulse of all who sought him—and he was curiously eager to investigate things unknown.

Determined to advance learning in his kingdom of Wessex, he invited out of Mercia four very learned men of that nation. They were Werefrith, Bishop of Worcester, who translated the dialogues of Gregory and Peter into Saxon; Plegmund, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, the founder of the Saxon Chronicle; and the priests Ethelstan and Werewulf. Night and day, whenever there was leisure, one of these four read to him; so that he possessed a knowledge of every book, though as yet he could not himself read his books.

Further, he sent to Gaul for teachers, and two especially are named. These were Grimbald, the provost of St. Omer, a good singer, prominent in ecclesiastical discipline and good morals, very learned in Holy Scripture, and John of Corbey, learned in all kinds of literature and skilled in many arts. Asser, who was of the greatest service to him, he persuaded to come to him out of South Wales; Asser’s own account of the bargaining is very quaint. Asser’s principal function was, as we have seen in the case of the four Mercians, to read to him night and day whenever there was time. Alfred carried his determination to have learned men in important places so far that he would rather keep a bishopric vacant than fill it with an unlearned man. That he had the income of vacant bishoprics has been made a charge against him. An examination of the dates of death of bishops in Alfred’s dominions and the dates of consecration of their successors fails to provide any serious ground for a charge of this kind.

The story of Alfred’s invention of candles to measure the time is well known. It is not so well known that his desire to measure time correctly came from a religious motive. His determination was to give to God half his time, day and night. So far as the day was concerned, if the sun was visible the division could be made; but clouds by day baffled him, and at night there was darkness. Hence the invention of the candles, which were measured to burn four hours each. Each candle was divided into twelve equal parts by lines on the surface. The invention of a lantern followed, for a reason which sets before us the discomforts of life in those times. The candles did not burn steadily and evenly, for the flame was blown about by the violence of the wind, which blew day and night without intermission through the doors and windows of the churches, the fissures of the divisions, the plankings, the walls, or the sides of the tents. Alfred made boxes for the lights, with doors of white ox-horn planed so thin that they were like glass. There are small niches in some of our churches now, with signs of doors, probably for protecting the lights at night from the draught.

And as he gave half of his time to God, so he gave half of his income. Ethelwulf, his father, had released from tribute to the king one-tenth part of the royal estates,[13] for the glory of God and his own eternal salvation. Alfred divided his income into two equal parts, for secular and for ecclesiastical expenditure. The secular half was divided into three equal parts. The first was for his soldiers and the nobles who attended at his court and performed divers functions; these latter were in three sets, each of which performed one month’s service in each quarter and spent two months at home. The next third went to the operatives whom he had collected from every nation, of great skill in every kind of construction; workers in gold are specially mentioned in another part of Asser’s description. The remaining third went to foreigners who visited him, whether they asked for money or not. So much for the secular half of his income.

The second half of each year’s income was all given to God. It was divided into four parts. The first part was for the poor of all nations.[14] It was to be discreetly bestowed; for the king said that, as far as could be, Pope Gregory’s saying should be fulfilled, give not much to whom you should give little, nor little to whom much, nor something to whom nothing, nor nothing to whom something. The second was for the two monasteries which Alfred had specially founded, at Athelney and Shaftesbury. The third went to his school, which he had studiously collected together, of many of the nobility of his own kingdom. The fourth was for all the neighbouring monasteries in all Saxony and Mercia, and in some years for monasteries in Wales, Cornwall, Gaul, Brittany, Northumbria, and sometimes Ireland. It is a remarkable fact that in this large expenditure for religious purposes, the purposes are at most only indirectly connected with the definitely spiritual work of ministering the Word of God and the Sacraments to the people at large.

Asser is not very clear in the sequence of his ideas. But we gather that the king’s desire to found monasteries was due to his own fixed purpose of holy meditation, to which he desired to invite others. But he could not find any one of his own nation, free by birth, who was willing to adopt the monastic life, except some who were mere children, too young to choose between good and evil. The love of the monastic life, once so strong in England, had died out. Asser theorises as to the reasons for this, and he produces two which seem to be mutually destructive: it was either because of the constant invasions by sea and land, or because people abounded in riches of every kind and so despised the monastic life. He had to get an old Saxon to act as Abbot of his new foundation of Athelney; and then some priests and deacons from across the seas; and then, as he had not nearly plenty of inmates, he got as many Gauls as he possibly could, including children, to be reared to the monastic life. Asser had himself seen a lad of pagan birth who was educated there, and who was by no means the hindmost of them all.

The formation of King Alfred’s Manual, which is not known to exist, may best be told something as Asser tells it. He says that it was in 887 or 888 that the king first formed the desire to interpret passages of Scripture to those who did not know Latin.

“We were talking together one day, and I read to him an extract from a certain book. He heard it with both his ears. He brought out his book with the daily courses and psalms and the prayers he had read in his youth, and commanded me to write there the quotation. I turned it over, and found it very nearly full. After some delay I said, had I not better find another sheet on which this might be entered apart; for perhaps some other quotation might occur, and if so we should be glad to have them kept together? ‘Your plan is good,’ he said. So I made haste and got a sheet and wrote the quotation. That same day no less than three other passages pleased him; and from that time we talked daily and wrote such things as pleased him till at last it was full, for he went on unceasingly collecting many flowers of Divine Scriptures. When the first quotation was copied onto the sheet, he at once became anxious to read and interpret it in Saxon, and to teach others. The book grew till it became almost as large as a Psalter. He called it his Manual, because he kept it carefully at hand day and night, and found, as he told me, no small consolation therein.”

It was not to Rome only that Alfred sent messengers and gifts. Asser speaks, with Celtic breadth, of daily embassies sent to foreign nations, from the Tyrrhenian sea to the farthest end of Ireland.[15] The English Chronicle goes further. Alfred vowed, it is said, when they were set against the enemy in London, to send embassies to St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew. The Chronicle, under the year 883, tells us that he sent gifts to India. William of Malmesbury informs us that Sigelm, Bishop of Sherborne, was sent as ambassador with the gifts to St. Thomas, and that he prosperously penetrated into India. Thus, Dean Hook remarks, the first intercourse between England and Hindustan consisted of this interchange of Christian feeling. It is, however, a little curious that Asser never mentions India, nor did Alfred interpolate any mention of his embassy when translating Orosius for his English people. Asser definitely mentions Judea, telling us that he had seen letters to Alfred which came with presents from Abel the Patriarch of Jerusalem. It may be worth mention that other MSS. of the English Chronicle read Iudia and Iudea instead of India. Still, the fact of the journey of Alfred’s messengers to some distant part which then bore the name of India, seems to be accepted on all hands. There is no very violent improbability about it. Christian missionaries from Persia had reached India and China more than three centuries before this, two of them bringing the silk-worm to the Greek empire in Justinian’s reign, about 550. The Egyptian merchant-monk Cosmas wrote his _Christian Topography_ at that date. He found Nestorian Christians in Ceylon and Malabar, but the king and people of Ceylon were still heathens.

Alfred’s Ecclesiastical Laws have a long preface, apparently prepared by himself. It is an interesting piece of argument. First he gives the Ten Commandments in Saxon. Writers inform us that he omits the Second Commandment, in accordance with the evil practice which had already made considerable progress then; but probably these writers did not read to the end, for Alfred’s Tenth Commandment is, “Thou shalt not make to thyself golden gods nor silvern.” Then he points out that our Saviour, Christ, said He came not to break nor forbid these Commandments, but with all good to increase them, and mercy and humility He taught. Then he quotes the decisions of the church at Jerusalem as to the tenderness of the application of the law to the Gentile converts. When the English race became Christian, he proceeds, they held synods of holy bishops and great and wise men. They then ordained, out of that mercy which Christ had taught, that secular lords, by the synod’s leave, might without sin take for almost every misdeed, for the first offence, the money fine ordained by the synod. They then in many synods ordained a fine for many human misdeeds, and in many synod-books they wrote, at one place one doom, at another another.

The one offence to which they dared not assign any mercy, that is, any bot, or money fine, was treason to a lord; because God Almighty adjudged no mercy to those who despised Him, nor did Christ, the Son of God, adjudge any to him who sold Him to death, and He commanded that a lord should be loved as Himself.

This is a very interesting explanation of the Saxon system of money payments for offences of almost every description. It is not altogether unlike in principle to the modern magistrate-law that a dog has his first bite free. That application of the principle found no favour with King Alfred, in whose days dogs were great and dangerous beasts. If a dog tear or bite a man, for the first misdeed, 6s.; for the second, 12s.; for the third, 30s. If the dog do more misdeeds, the owner is to go on paying, or must repudiate the dog.

“These many dooms I, Alfred the king, gathered together; and commanded many to be written of those our forefathers held which to me seemed good; and many of those which seemed to me not good, I rejected them by the counsel of my wise men. I durst not venture to set down much of my own, for it was unknown to me what of it would please those who should come after us.”

Three characteristic dooms may be quoted. “He who steals on Sunday, or at Christmas or Easter, or on Holy Thursday,[16] or on Rogation days,[17] or during Lent, shall pay a twofold bot.” “If a man go to the church, and reveal an offence not revealed, and confess himself in God’s name, be it half forgiven.” For holidays,—“To all freemen, 12 days at Yule, and the day on which Christ overcame the devil, and the commemoration day of St. Gregory, and 7 days before Easter and 7 after, and one day at St. Peter’s tide, and one day at St. Paul’s tide, and in harvest the whole week before St. Mary-mass, and one day at the celebration of All Hallows, and the 4 Wednesdays in Ember weeks,”—forty-two days in all, making, with the addition of Sundays, just a quarter of the whole year.

III

His Translations And His Will

His translations—Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History of the English Race_—_The Pastoral Care_—State of learning in Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria—Ideal of a bishop’s life—Orosius—Boethius—Alfred’s religious opinions—John the Scot—Alfred’s will—Hyde Abbey—State of Rome—Religious references—Religious bequests—Slaves.

The general drift of Alfred’s opinion as to the sort of learning most needed by his people is to be gathered from his choice of books to be put before them in their native language. These were four. For general history, and for history and geography relating to their own race on the continent of Europe, he chose Orosius: for mental study, the _Consolation_ of Boethius: for realisation of the true principles of the life and work of religion, the _Pastoral Care_: for the Church history of the English people, of course the great and priceless book of the Venerable Bede. Of this last we need say nothing. Nor need we dwell upon the fact that Alfred may be said to have created the continuity of early English history by his establishment of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under Plegmund.

The preface to Alfred’s translation into English from the Latin of Pope Gregory’s _Pastoral Care_, a treatise on the life and work of a bishop, gives us so clear an insight into the king’s mind, and such valuable information as to the state of learning in his time, that it deserves to be printed in full. Three of the copies of which the king speaks are in existence, one addressed to Archbishop Plegmund of Canterbury, one to Bishop Wulfsige of Sherborne, and the third to Bishop Werefrith of Worcester.

This Book Is For Worcester

King Alfred greets Bishop Wærferth with loving words and with friendship. I let it be known to thee that it has very often come into my mind, what wise men there formerly were throughout England, both of sacred and secular orders; and how happy times there were then throughout England; and how the kings who had power over the nation in those days obeyed God and his ministers; and they preserved peace, morality, and order at home, and at the same time enlarged their territory abroad; and how they prospered both with war and with wisdom; and also the sacred orders how zealous they were both in teaching and learning, and in all the services they owed to God; and how foreigners came to this land in search of wisdom and instruction, and how we should now have to get teachers from abroad if we were to have them. So general was the decay in England that there were very few on this side of the Humber who could understand their rituals in English, or translate a letter from Latin into English; and I believe that there were not many beyond the Humber. There were so few of them that I cannot remember a single one south of the Thames when I came to the throne. Thanks be to God Almighty that we have any teachers among us now. And therefore I command thee to do as I believe thou art willing, to disengage thyself from worldly matters as often as may be, that thou mayest apply the wisdom which God has given thee wherever thou canst.[18] Consider what punishments would come upon us on account of this world, if we neither loved wisdom ourselves nor suffered other men to obtain it: we should love the name only of Christian, and very few of the virtues. When I considered all this I remembered also how I saw in my own early days, before all had been ravaged and burnt, how the churches throughout the whole of England stood filled with treasures and books, and there was also a great multitude of God’s servants. But they had very little knowledge of the books, for they could not understand anything of them because they were not written in their own language. As if they had said: “Our forefathers, who formerly held these places, loved wisdom, and through it they obtained wealth and bequeathed it to us. In this we can still see their tracks, but we cannot follow them, and therefore we have lost both the wealth and the wisdom, because we would not incline our hearts after their example.” When I remembered all this, I wondered extremely that the good and wise men who were formerly all over England, and had perfectly learnt all the books, did not wish to translate them into their own language. But again I soon answered myself and said: They did not think that men would ever be so careless, and that learning would thus decay; so they abstained from translating, and they hoped that wisdom in this land would increase, and our knowledge of languages. Then I remembered how the law was first known in Hebrew, and again, when the Greeks had learnt it, they translated the whole of it into their own language, and all other books besides. And again, the Romans, when they had learnt it, they translated the whole of it through learned interpreters into their own language. And also all other Christian nations translated parts of it into their own languages. Therefore it seems better to me, if ye think so, for us also to translate some books which are most needful for all men to know into the language which we can all understand. And I would have you do as we very easily can if we have tranquillity enough, that is, set all the youth now in England of free men, who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it, to learn, as long as they are not old enough for other occupations, until they are well able to read English writing. And let those be afterwards taught more in the Latin language who are to continue learning and be promoted to a higher rank. When I remembered how the knowledge of Latin had formerly decayed throughout England, and yet many could read English writing, I began, among other various and manifold troubles of this kingdom, to translate into English the book which is called in Latin _Pastoralis_, and in English _Shepherd’s Book_, sometimes word for word and sometimes according to the sense, as I had learnt it from Plegmund my archbishop, and Asser my bishop, and Grimbold my mass-priest, and John my mass-priest.[19] And when I had learnt it as I could best understand it and as I could most clearly interpret it, I translated it into English; and I will send a copy to every bishopric in my kingdom; and on each there is a [clasp and chain][20] worth fifty mancuses. And I command in God’s name that no man take the [clasp] from the book or the book from the minster. It is uncertain how long there may be such learned bishops as, thanks be to God, there now are nearly everywhere; therefore I wish these books always to remain in their place, unless the bishop wish to take them with him, or they be lent out anywhere, or any one make a copy from them.

Then the book itself is made to speak, as the Cross speaks in the early Anglian Dream of the Holy Rood:—

This message Augustine over the salt sea brought from the south to the islanders, as the Lord’s champion had formerly indited it, the Pope of Rome. The wise Gregorius was versed in many true doctrines through the wisdom of his mind, his hoard of studious thoughts. For he gained over most of mankind to the Guardian of heaven, best of Romans, wisest of men, most gloriously famous. Afterwards King Alfred brought every word of me into English, and sent me to his scribes south and north; ordered more such to be brought to him, that he might send them to his bishops, for some of them needed it, who knew but little Latin.

[Illustration: THE SEASONS—APRIL TO JUNE

(_Cottonian Library_)]

It is not our business here to consider the contents of Pope Gregory’s treatise on the shepherding of the people. But the headings of two or three of the sixty-five chapters will show what the attraction for Alfred’s mind was. The first chapter argues “that unlearned men are not to presume to undertake teaching.” To prevent this was a purpose with Alfred; he faced obloquy, it is said, rather than fill bishoprics with unlearned men. The second chapter forbids even learned men to undertake to teach if they are not ready to live in accordance with their own precepts. The third and fourth chapters no doubt appealed to himself as a secular governor, though they related to spiritual government, “how he who governs must despise all hardships, and how afraid he must be of every luxury,” and “how often the occupations of power and government distract the mind of the ruler.” The sixty-fifth chapter brings the whole to a conclusion with an argument thoroughly after Alfred’s own heart: “When any one has performed all the duties of his pastoral charge, let him then consider and understand his own self, lest either his exemplary life or his successful teaching puff him up.”

In his translation of the history and geography of Orosius he does not interpolate information where we might not unnaturally have expected him to do so. Of his large and valuable interpolations of a geographical character, and in regard to the history of the Teutonic races, mention is no doubt made in another chapter. In the sixth book, to mention two cases where Orosius writes of the times of Constantius and Constantine, and makes references to Britain, he does not speak of Christianity here, and Alfred does not add anything. Orosius speaks of many martyrs under Diocletian, not localising any. Again, Alfred does not add anything. Two quaint phrases the king employs:—“In those days Arius the mass-priest was in error with regard to the right faith”;—“Constantine was the first emperor who ordered churches to be built, and locked up the devil’s houses.”

It is not to be wondered at that Alfred determined to translate into English the _Consolation_ of Boethius, and his interpolations show how dear the book was to his heart and to his reason. King and people alike had gone through much trial and suffering, and such happiness and prosperity as they had was at best very precarious. The book of _Consolation_ which Boethius wrote in the sad days when all his great prosperity had passed from him, and he waited in chains for the last fatal word of the tyrant, was well suited for men and women situated as the English then were. Boethius himself, who was executed in 524, was both a very learned Christian and a deeply-read student of classical philosophy. His Consolations are taken entirely from philosophy, but they have the Christian spirit. They thus supplement the help which the Christian religion gives to those in anxiety, and put into the troubled mind fresh and useful trains of thought. This is probably one main reason for the attraction which the book had in the Middle Ages, and we cannot doubt that Alfred had this in view in giving it to his people. Why he did not at the same time have the New Testament translated into English is not clear, for he himself pointed out, in his Preface to the _Pastoral Care_, that the law was first given in Hebrew, and then necessarily translated into Greek, and Latin, and the languages of the various nations which embraced Christianity. William of Malmesbury tells us that the king did as a matter of fact set about translating the Psalter, but died before the first part was done.

Besides the hint which his translation of Boethius gives, it is on another account probable that Alfred took a broad view of religious questions. If the evidence is to be accepted as sufficient, he was a patron of Johannes Scotus Erigena. John the Scot, that is, as we should now say, the Irishman, had made the Continent too hot to hold him by the breadth of his religious views. He refused to distinguish religion from philosophy, an attitude of mind which may have specially influenced Alfred, who had probably known him as a boy at the court of Charles the Bald, where John acted as tutor to Judith. He had maintained, too, that authority, when it is not confirmed by reason, is of no value. He had made a determined stand against the new and materialistic teaching on the Real Presence, known as transubstantiation. He found a refuge at the court of Alfred. This can scarcely have meant less than that Alfred, to some extent at least, shared his opinions; and if that was so, we see an additional reason for Alfred’s admiration of Boethius, and we have some explanation of the character of the provisions of the will by which the king disposed of his property.

In those days, and in days earlier still, to teach an unpopular opinion was a dangerous thing. Great violence was not unknown in schools of learning. Even in modern times we hear a good deal of the violence of students in Paris and in other universities of the Continent. When Archbishop Theodore came over to England in 664 and began to teach, there were very sharp passages at arms between the teacher and the Irish students who attended his lectures. Aldhelm was a student at Canterbury at the time, and he describes one of these encounters, where the Irish students baited their lecturer, Archbishop though he was. The old student and lecturer of the University of Athens was more than a match for them. “He treated them,” Aldhelm wrote to a friend, “as the truculent boar treats the Molossian hounds. He tore them with the tusk of grammar, and shot them with the deep and sharp syllogisms of chronography, till they cast away their weapons and hurriedly fled to the recesses of their dens.” In Wessex the students went further still. One John—almost certainly not the famous John of whom we are speaking, though mediæval writers took him to be the same—so irritated the students of the great school of Malmesbury, that they set on him with the sharp iron styles of the time, which represented our modern pens, and inflicted wounds of which he died. William of Malmesbury gives the epitaph of this John from a tomb on the left side of the altar at Malmesbury; he is described as the holy sophist John, and is said to have been a martyr. William does not absolutely identify him with Johannes Erigena, but he describes him as Johannes Scottus, and says that he had been at the court of Charles the Bald, and was attracted by the munificence of Alfred. We may fairly say that William believed their John to be the Erigena, and we may almost certainly say that in that belief he was wrong.

John the Erin-born is usually said to have died about 886. There is thus no difficulty on the score of dates in the way of his being at Alfred’s court. He must have been an oldish man, for he was a prominent controversialist as early as 854.

Alfred’s will is on all accounts a document of very great interest. We have noticed already the provisions of his father’s will, so far as they have been preserved for us, and with these we cannot but contrast the corresponding parts of Alfred’s disposition of his property. Many details of the will we must for our present purpose pass by, notwithstanding their general importance: they are no doubt dealt with in another chapter.

Alfred’s will exists in an Anglo-Saxon form and in a Latin form. It is preserved in the Register of Newminster, which Alfred founded at Winchester. This institution was afterwards moved to Hyde. The will was copied into the Register now known as the Register of Hyde Abbey, about the years 1028-1032.

Ethelwulf had bequeathed considerable sums to the Church of St. Peter and the Church of St. Paul at Rome, and to the Pope. Alfred had sent presents to Rome. From 883 to 890 there are four records of West Saxon gifts. But after 890 there is no record, and in Alfred’s will no mention is made of the chief city of the Western world or of the spiritual head of the Church of the West. One explanation may be that at his death the sad period had already begun which makes men of all Christian creeds hang their heads with shame that such things could be. King Alfred’s court was unique among secular courts in its purity and order; the papal court had entered upon one of those phases in its existence where it has stood out prominently among the most impure and disorderly spots on the face of the known earth. It is enough, for any one who knows the meaning of the references, to glance at the table of contents of a Church history for the years 896 and 897:—“Death of Pope Formosus; Pope Boniface VII.; trial and condemnation of the body of Formosus by Pope Stephen VI.; Pope Stephen strangled; Pope Romanus; Pope Theodorus II.; Pope John IX.; Pope Sergius IV.; Marquisate of Tusculum; Theodora and Marozia.” We can well understand that not all Alfred’s reverence for the place where lay the bodies of St. Peter and St. Paul could overcome the effect of a record so grievous as that.

Turning to those parts of Alfred’s will which have a directly religious bearing, it is impossible not to be struck by the obliqueness of the religious references. Of his reliance on divine help and his trust in divine assistance there is no doubt. He clearly regarded these as powers actually at work in the world, and as the one only means by which the actions of those who should follow him might be rightly guided. It is by God’s support that he trusts his will may be carried out. He is king by God’s grace. He has considered of his soul’s health, and of the inheritance which God and his ancestors did give; but he is reserved and allusive where other men of the time were detailed and definite. The air of reserve would almost seem to indicate that the teaching of John the Erin-born, while it had not in the least shaken the confidence of his faith and trust, had seriously indisposed him to speak in confident detail of the relations of man’s service to God’s help. “Let them distribute, for me and for my father and for the friends that he interceded for and I intercede for, 200 pounds; 50 to the mass-priests all over my kingdom, 50 to the poor servants of God, 50 to the distressed poor, 50 to the church where I shall rest.” “And I will that they do restore to the families at Domersham their land-deeds and their liberty to choose any man they will [_i.e._ to continue to live under that lord or to choose another], for me and for Ælflæd [his eldest daughter] and for the friends that she did intercede for and I do intercede for.” “And let them also seek with a living price[21] for my soul’s health so far as may be[22] and as is fitting and as ye to give me shall be disposed.” It has been clearly shown that _on cwicum ceape_ was a recognised phrase for “with live stock.” The reserve of Alfred’s language in this, the most important part of his will in mediæval opinion, is worthy of note. Indeed, the absence of definite words which might have been expected is so marked that in another Latin copy, a very incorrect translation of part of the Anglo-Saxon will, they are added, but curiously enough are connected solely with the restoration of the land-books to the people at Domersham. The freeing of slaves was a religious work. It will be seen that as a religious work Alfred himself regarded it. “I beseech in God’s name and in the name of His Saints that no one of my relations or heirs obstruct the freedom of those whom I have redeemed. The West-Saxon Witan have pronounced it lawful that I may leave them free or bond as I will. But I, for God’s love and for my soul’s advantage, will that they be master of their freedom and of their will; and in the name of the living God I bid that none disturb them, neither by money exaction nor by any manner of means.”

It is a well-known fact that the Church set before men the duty of giving slaves their freedom. Late in the seventh century, Bishop Wilfrith released 250 men and women whom he found attached as slaves to his estate of Selsey; and Archbishop Theodore denied Christian burial to the kidnapper, and prohibited the sale of children by their parents after the age of seven. In the year 816, the a