l/j^ 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UHWERSITY OF CALlFQRMLft 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 > 
 
 ^ 
 
 ICjol 
 
 ALFRED THE GREAT
 
 
 ^'Pi'-AY^'^rK.'^t 
 
 KlXCr ALFRED THE CREAT. 
 
 This example uf ihe UadiliDnal pcjrtrail is taken from the eni^raving 
 by Burghers in Spehnan's 1678 Life of the King. The original 
 "ancient picture in the College called University'" at Oxford 
 cannot now be traced. The only portraits of the king having any 
 authenticity are the rough images on the coins of his reign (see 
 p. 124 and illustrations), but this traditional effigy, like the very 
 spelling of the name '' Alfred," is too familiar to be dispensed with.
 
 Alfred the Great 
 
 H Sf^etcb an& Seven Stu&iea 
 
 BY 
 
 WARWICK ELDRAPEZR, M.A. 
 
 (late scholar of university college, oxford) 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND A MAP 
 
 AND 
 
 A PREFACE BY THE RIGHT REV. J. PERCIVAL, D.D. 
 BISHOP OF HEREFORD 
 
 "iECOXD EDITIOX, REVISED 
 
 LONDON 
 ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C 
 
 1901


 
 ku.:i Sy-Y 
 
 \ f
 
 NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION 
 
 THIS Sketch of Alfred's career is an attempt to 
 portray the saHent features of his reign, and 
 to suggest its place and value in our national story. 
 It does not pretend to refer to all the events and 
 incidents which history has recorded, and legend 
 added to history. It is intended to serve a different 
 purpose from that of the more critical Studies which 
 follow, but it contains no statement of fact which has 
 not been tried by the same tests as those there 
 employed. 
 
 Special pains have been taken with regard to the 
 illustrations included in this volume. In these the 
 reader may trust according to their kind. On the one 
 hand there are figures of an archaeological or anti- 
 quarian interest, many of which are reproduced for 
 the first time. On the other hand it has seemed well 
 to add copies of pictures which, if fanciful, yet assist 
 the imagination to conceive the life and times which 
 they illustrate. 
 
 The author owes and offers his cordial thanks for 
 assistance on small points of detail to Mr. C. W. 
 Moule, M.A., Librarian of Corpus Christi College, 
 Cambridge ; Mr. Reginald A. Smith, of the British 
 Museum ; Mr. Alfred Bowker, Mayor of Winchester 
 and Hon. Sec. of the King Alfred National Com-
 
 Vlll ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 iiienioration ; and Mr. N. C. H. Xisbett, also of Win- 
 chester. Especial thanks are due to Mr. Elliot Stock 
 for his kindly interest in the publication of this work, 
 and to the author's former Headmaster at Rugby, 
 Bishop Percival, whose Preface gives a seal to his 
 claim upon a pupil's enduring gratitude. 
 
 \V. H. D. 
 March, 1901. 
 
 NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION 
 
 In the favourable reception of this work, some 
 critics have obliged me by detecting a few points 
 which have had revision in this edition. The only 
 alteration to which I need here draw attention is in 
 the account of " Folc-land " at page 37. 
 
 My use of what I have frankly called " fanciful " 
 pictures among the other illustrations has been criti- 
 cised by a few. I deliberately retain them in the 
 conviction that more is gained from them in the way 
 of assisting the historical imagination than is hurtful 
 by reason of a few archaisms in armour and dress, 
 which I have tried to correct by the drawings oppo- 
 site page 34. 
 
 My single purpose is, by accurate information, to 
 spread the feeling that (as a friend puts it to me) 
 " England, more than any other country, has a real 
 hero at the beginning of her history." 
 
 \V. H. D. 
 jfiiiie, 1901.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 AS a former Headmaster, I am glad to have the 
 opportunity of commending this book on 
 Alfred the Great to the consideration of school- 
 masters and schoolmistresses, and also to parents. 
 
 It contains what our best historical authorities 
 consider a true presentment of the great King and 
 his work ; and it has, moreover, the additional recom- 
 mendation of being written in a style which is inte- 
 resting and pleasant to read. 
 
 In our English education we can hardly be said 
 to have made sufficient use of the biographies of 
 great and good men ; and it may even be doubted 
 whether we have fully realised the value to a people 
 of heroes like Alfred, who so attractively represent 
 the noblest elements of character. 
 
 We quote with approval and re-echo the saying : 
 " Let me make the ballads of a nation, and I care 
 not who makes the laws ; " but we might say with 
 even greater fitness and significance : " Let us only 
 have highly gifted and stainless heroes whose charac- 
 ters may touch the imagination of our children and 
 stir them to fine issues, and many other things in 
 education sink to a secondary place."
 
 X PREFACE 
 
 Thus the memory of such a King as Alfred is a 
 possession of great price for all generations. 
 
 " The greatest gift a hero leaves his race 
 Is to have been a hero ; " 
 
 and so 
 
 " To leave his spirit in his children's breasts." 
 
 As these lines are leaving my hands the sad news 
 is being flashed round the globe that our Queen has 
 just passed away. 
 
 " The shadow of her loss draws hke eclipse 
 Darkening the world ; " 
 
 and another royal name is added to the list of 
 those that enrich our life with uplifting and sacred 
 memories. 
 
 So after long years we lose the sovereign who will 
 be known in future generations as one of the best 
 beloved of all the monarchs of our race ; and it may 
 well be counted as part of the good fortune of the 
 English people that at the end of a thousand years, 
 during which the great name of Alfred has been an 
 inspiration and an ideal, there should be added to 
 our wealth this name of the good and great Queen to 
 be, as the Laureate said of her Consort, a name 
 
 " Beyond all titles, 
 A household name, thereafter, through all times." 
 
 J. HEREFORD. 
 Januaiy 22, iqoi.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface . . . . . . ix 
 
 Sketch of the Life and Reign of Alfred i 
 Studies: — 
 
 1 . Asser's Life of Alfred . . -25 
 
 2. Alfred's Legislation . . . 31 
 
 3. Alfred's Local Government . . 36 
 
 4. Alfred as Man of Letters . . 44 
 
 5. The Oxford Myth . . . -91 
 
 6. The Vale of the White Horse . . 96 
 
 7. Alfred's Burial Place . . .101 
 
 Notes :— 
 
 (i) Alfred's Jewel . . . -113 
 
 (ii) Alfred's Ships . . . 115 
 
 (iii) Alfred's Rebuilding of London . • n? 
 
 (iv) Places mentioned in Alfred's Will . 118 
 
 Materials for the History of Alfred . 121 
 
 Bibliography . . . . -137 
 
 Index ...... 142
 
 J- 
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Portrait of Alfred . 
 
 Alfred the King 
 
 Alfred Before Pope Leo IV. 
 
 4. Alfred and his Parents 
 
 5. Alfred and the Cakes 
 
 6. Athelney in Somerset 
 
 7. Map of England after 878 a.d. 
 
 8. Alfred's Charity . 
 
 9. Opening of Asser's " Life " . 
 
 10. Relics of Alfred's Time . 
 
 11. Manuscript of Alfred's Time 
 
 12. The White Horse of Ashdown . 
 
 13. Gateway of Hyde Abbey, Winchester At p. 100 
 
 14. Wolvesey Palace, Winchester . To face p. 103 
 
 15. Plan of Hyde Abbey, Winchester . At p. 109 
 
 16. Remains of Hyde Abbey . „ in 
 
 17. Alfred's Jewel . . To face p. 113 
 
 18. Rings; Coin; Athelney Church ,, 124 
 
 19. XHL Century Portrait of Alfred ,, 130 
 
 Frontisp 
 
 iece 
 
 Atp. 
 
 xiv 
 
 To face p 
 
 I 
 
 
 4 
 
 
 8 
 
 
 13 
 
 
 16 
 
 
 21 
 
 
 27 
 
 
 34 
 
 
 50 
 
 
 98
 
 ALFREDTHEKING 
 
 {By permission j'roin the large Fitzroy 
 
 Picture by C. M. GERE, published 
 
 by Messrs. G. Bell &= Soxs)
 
 ' Behold a pupil of the monkish gown, 
 The pious Alfred, King to Justice dear I 
 Lord of the harp and liberating spear ; 
 Mirror of Princes ! Indigent Renown 
 Might range the starry ether for a crown 
 Equal to his deserts, who, like the year, 
 Pours forth his bounty, like the day doth cheer, 
 And awes like night with merry-tempered frown. 
 Ease from this noble miser of his time 
 No moment steals ; pain narrows not his cares. 
 Though small his kingdom as a spark or gem, 
 Of Alfred boasts remote Jerusalem, 
 And Christian India, through her wide-spread clime. 
 In sacred converse gifts with Alfred shares," 
 
 Wordsworth.
 
 I'RIXCE ALFRED BEFORE POPE LEO IV. 
 
 {From Sh)w's en i^raviiig, published ill 1794, of the painting by 
 R. West all. \
 
 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 A SKETCH OF THE LIFE AND REIGN OF ALFRED 
 
 " Alfred is a national hero on many grounds ; not only is he 
 surrounded with a halo of romance, but his character is free 
 from stain. He is a type of the consolidation of the English 
 Kingdom ; he is famous as a warrior, a statesman, and a legis- 
 lator — but, more than all this, he was a man who united 
 practical capacity with lofty aspirations for the moral well- 
 being of his people." — Bishop CrcigJitoii. 
 
 A 
 
 LFRED THE GREAT was born at Wantage, 
 in Berkshire, in 849. He died, as is generally 
 believed, in 901. For ten centuries, as the fine flower 
 of his race, he has had the praise of all Anglo-Saxons 
 and even of the envious world be}'ond. Mankind is 
 always ready to honour the heroes of theGreek, Hebrew^ 
 and Roman civilisations, and it is one of the accidents 
 of culture and history that the detailed career of the 
 greatest English King, reigning in far less remote 
 times, is little known to the mass of the English- 
 speaking people. At our schools Flngiish history 
 often begins from the Norman Conquest, when 
 England ceased to be purely English. The usual 
 impression of Alfred is a simple one, being that of 
 a prince in a remote time, a stout fighter against 
 
 2
 
 England a 
 thousand 
 years ago. 
 
 2 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 Danish invaders, a man of noble character. The 
 impression, sharpened with one or two anecdotes, 
 is entirely correct. But there is abundant material 
 for filling" in the portrait so as to show a " Happy 
 Warrior" indeed, such as the great Greek philosopher 
 called " a four-square man." 
 
 The very time of his birth witnessed, upon the 
 continent of Europe, the final division of the Empire 
 of Charlemagne. This meant that throughout Alfred's 
 lifetime England practically had no European or 
 foreign relations ; the national drama was confined 
 to the stasfe at home. It was over four centuries 
 since the Romans had left England, bequeathing 
 not only something of their forms of government, 
 but also the wonderful system of high-roads which 
 even to-day suggest what a boon they were to a 
 country covered with forest and marsh, and other- 
 wise without means of communication. It was just 
 four centuries since the British population had been 
 joined by the first Saxon settlers from Jutland. It 
 was nearly three centuries (the space of time dividing 
 Queen Elizabeth from Queen Victoria) since the 
 introduction of Christianity into England by Au- 
 gustine ; and the humanising influence of the new 
 and vigorous religion may be guessed from the fact 
 that two hundred years before Alfred there were 
 seventeen sees of bishops in the country. 
 
 Therefore long before King Alfred's day there was 
 a busy and fairly prosperous life in England. The 
 different kingdoms which divided the country main- 
 tained, as it seems, a balance of power by which 
 considerable development in society was rendered
 
 THE LIFE AND REIGN OF ALFRED 3 
 
 possible. But in the eighth century trouble fell 
 upon the land. Disturbed by the civilising advances 
 of Christianity and feudalism, the wild folk of Den- i 
 mark swooped upon the shores of Iceland and the - 
 whole of Britain. Hungry rather for plunder than 
 for conquest, they first landed on English soil in 
 j'^j. In 851, when Alfred was a child of two, they 
 first wintered in England, at the mouth of the 
 Thames. The fact is significant, for it means that 
 after harrying the land with fire and sword for over 
 sixty years, they had gained such a foothold that 
 they could remain even when the fighting season was 
 over. Life and property became insecure ; chaos 
 everywhere begot despair. Through the first half 
 of the ninth century the kingdoms of England were 
 too unfriendly or too broken to unite in the common 
 peril. We hear little more of Northumbria than of 
 wild Wales or wilder Scotland. Mercia (the Mid- 
 lands) and Wessex met by the border-line of the 
 Berkshire Downs ; East Anglia, with even Essex, 
 Kent, and Sussex, wavered in allegiance. The 
 Danes, indeed, do not seem to have had such am- 
 bitious designs as the Persians of King Darius ; but 
 otherwise, in the menace of barbarian invasion and 
 in desperate disunion of the country threatened, the 
 case of England closely resembled that of Greece 
 fourteen centuries before. That England, in Ash- 
 down, Ethandune, and Southampton Water had her 
 Marathon and Salamis, and that "wooden walls" 
 again went far to save the situation, were facts 
 largely due now to the lead of Wessex, as of Athens 
 in the olden time. It was Alfred who showed the 
 
 The kin.ii- 
 doms of 
 Eni^lancl.
 
 4 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 military prowess of Miltiades and the high states- 
 manship of Themistocles. The greater marvel is 
 that he found time to display, to a degree, the 
 humanity and wisdom of a Pericles. 
 
 In this brief sketch of the salient features of his life, 
 we cannot linger over the earlier years. It is enough 
 to say that, after the death of their aged father yEthel- 
 wulf in 855, no less than three elder brothers of Alfred, 
 Kings of Wessex before him, died in the troubled 
 times before 871. Of Alfred's youth we learn a few 
 incidents. When he was a mere child he was taken 
 across Europe to Rome, lately delivered from the 
 Saracens by Pope Leo IV. It is probable that he 
 stayed there two years or more under the special 
 patronage of the aged Pontiff, at whose hands he first 
 received the rite of Confirmation. The onh- other 
 story of his childhood which is entitled to credit 
 relates how, in competition with his older brothers, 
 he won a prize for repetition from a manuscript book 
 the illuminations of which had first attracted him.^ 
 His instructress appears to have been his step-mother 
 Judith, a princess of P^landers onl}^ seven \'ears older 
 than himself, for death had robbed Alfred of his 
 mother's care before his sixth year. 
 
 We have a word-picture of Alfred's \'outh from the 
 pen of his friend and biographer - : — 
 
 " Beloved was he, by both father and mother alike, 
 with a great affection, beyond all his brothers; yea, 
 the very darling of all. It was in the king's court 
 that he was brought up. As he grew, both in child- 
 
 ' See below, p. 50. 
 
 ' Asser, as to whose " Life of Alfred " see p. 25.
 
 
 ^^^Hji^ '; 5^*^^^^^^B 
 
 ■ 
 
 *Vj 
 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 
 u 
 
 
 Wk, < ^ 
 
 m 
 
 ALKKEI) AM) HIS I'AREXTS. 
 
 [Front a paiiititig by R. West all.)
 
 THE LIFE AND REIGN OF ALFRED 5 
 
 hood and boyhood, so showed he ever fairer than his 
 brethren, and, in looks and words and ways, the lovc- 
 somest. Above all, from his very cradle and through 
 all the distractions of this present life, his own noble 
 temper and his high birth also bred in him a longing 
 after wisdom. But the pity was that through the un- 
 worthy carelessness of his parents and upbringers, he 
 remained, even unto his tv/elfth year or more, unable 
 so much as to say his letters. Yet learnt he by heart 
 many a Saxon lay, for day and night he would hear 
 them repeated by others, and no dull listener was he. 
 He was a keen huntsman, too, ever at work in wood- 
 craft and to good purpose. He was peerless in the 
 hunting field, ever the first and the liveliest ; in this, 
 as in all else, supremely gifted by God. And this we 
 have ourselves often observed." 
 
 In his twentieth year (868) Alfred wed the lady ^^l^^^^^^ 
 yEthelswitha, daughter of a Mercian chieftain, so 
 winning a faithful consort to share his jo}\s and 
 adversities. 
 
 Three years later his public work began. In 871, 
 having secured their hold in East Anglia, the Danes 
 poured into Wessex the first of those three waves of 
 invasion which it was Alfred's great achievement 
 successively to repulse. His biographer and later 
 chroniclers supply much information about his various 
 campaigns and engagements which deserve careful 
 study. In every sense he was a leader in warfare, a 
 prince of fighters. His defence and organisation of 
 his fatherland, of which we have the clearest account, 
 are admirable both in themselves and because they 
 were the necessary preparation for his wonderful
 
 D ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 labours in peaceful progress and reform. The battle- 
 field was his place of coronation, for the year in which 
 " so soon as ever his brother was dead, he took up 
 the sway of the whole kingdom, by the grant of God 
 and with the whole goodwill of the entire people," 
 was this year of eight terrible battles. Through 
 Berkshire and Wiltshire the patriots and the invaders 
 waged their warfare until, from sheer weariness, an 
 Battle of armistice was struck. But the year shines in En^-lish 
 
 .\^^cll)^\ n. J o 
 
 annals for the victory which }'oung Alfred caught at 
 Ashdown. There, on the ridge of downs above the 
 slope where, perhaps for centuries before and certainly 
 for ten centuries since, the White Horse of W^essex 
 has gleamed white against the turf, Alfred's dash and 
 valour won the da\'. Impatient of his brother's delay 
 in religious ceremonies, and desperate lest a chance 
 should be missed, he flung himself and his men on the 
 Danes above him. Round " a lone thorn-tree and a 
 low, which (says Asser) we ourselves have seen," the 
 fight swayed until the Danes, having lost a king, five 
 jarls, and many thousands, confessed defeat by flight. 
 The triumph was by no means final, but its moral 
 effect must have been immense. The Danish tide 
 was stemmed and the honour was Alfred's before he 
 was king. The site, which an odd coincidence 
 associates with the legend of St. George and the 
 Dragon, is therefore famous as the scene of this 
 prince's propitious entrance upon his great career.' 
 But peace was quickly broken. Having subdued 
 Mercia and Northumbria and harried even the Picts 
 and Strathclyde folk of the far north, the irrepressible 
 ' Sec "The Vale of White Horse," p. 96.
 
 Alfred's 
 Navy. 
 
 THE LIhE AXD REIGN OE ALERED / 
 
 Danes in 875 again threatened Alfred's kingdom by 
 wintering at Cambridge. The year might be other- 
 wise ignored but that in it, as Asser tells us — " King 
 Alfred, in a ship fight on the sea, engaged six 
 heathen ships ; and he took one of them, but the rest 
 slipped away and fled." 
 
 Often afterwards he fought these sea-fights, gradually 
 improving his ships and so taking a leaf out of the 
 book of the invading pirates themselves. It is because 
 Alfred, first of the princes of England, thus appre- 
 ciated the value of sea-power to his country, and in 
 spite of subsequent breaks in her sea-history, that we 
 are entitled to speak of him, in a very real sense, as 
 the Founder of the British Navy., It is in tribute, 
 accurate if accidental, to his fame that a m.odern lay 
 sings — 
 
 " We have fed our sea for a thousand years, 
 And she ealls us still unfed ; 
 For there's never a wave of all her waves 
 But marks our English dead." 
 
 In 877 Alfred made both barks and long-keeled 
 craft all round his coast, putting adventurers upon 
 them to keep " the wa}-s of the sea." While he him- 
 self hastened to Exeter where he besieged the Danes, 
 he bade his seamen to suffer no supplies to reach the 
 enemy ; good fortune helped them further, for at 
 Swanage the Danish fleet of 120 ships, laden with 
 wave-tossed and ship-worn men, was shattered and 
 sunk. 
 
 The year 878 is memorable for one of the best Alfred at 
 known incidents of Alfred's life. The English cause '''"^^' 
 had become so desperate that Alfred, with a few of
 
 Rattle of 
 Ethandune, 
 
 8 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 his lords and fighting-men and presumably his family, 
 dwelt solitary in the woods and fens of Somerset. ^ 
 He was there, probably, from the end of the fighting- 
 season of Zjy until the seventh week after Easter in 
 878, and during the latter part of that period made 
 his stronghold at Athelney by the confluence of the 
 rivers Tone and Parrett.^ As if to make a last throw 
 he at length emerged from his hiding-place, to the 
 immense joy of the whole folk of Somerset, Wilts, 
 and Hampshire. Asser tells us that he rode first to 
 Egbert's Stone, east of Selwood ; thence to a camp 
 near Westbury ; and then at Ethandune (probably 
 Edington, in W^iltshire) — 
 
 " against the whole Heathen host he set his thick 
 shield-wall and fought a deadly fight. Keenly and 
 long it lasted, until by favour of heaven he at last got 
 the victory. He laid low the Heathen with a great 
 slaughter, and followed hard upon their flight, with 
 blow on blow, even to their stronghold. . . . There he 
 took all, men, horses, and herds. . . . After 14 days, 
 the Heathen, being hungry, cold, and terror- 
 stricken in extreme despair, begged for peace on the 
 terms that the king should name and take from 
 them such hostages as he pleased, giving them none 
 
 ' To this sojourn is assigned the well-known story of Alfred 
 neglecting the baked cakes and being scolded by the farmer's 
 wife. It lias crept into Asser's Life, but dates probably from 
 early in the eleventh century and certainly from the twelfth 
 century. Old and popular, may it long remain in our history 
 books ! 
 
 - At Athelney in 1693 (long before commercial rascals began 
 to manufacture antiquities for credulous customers) there was 
 found Alfred's Jewel, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. 
 It is surely the most precious personal relic of English history. 
 [See note at p. 113.]
 
 '-joe/
 
 THE LIFE AND REIGN OF ALFRED 9 
 
 in return. Never before had they made peace with 
 any one after this sort." 
 
 The victory, moreover, was followed by another conversion 
 
 -^ ' ^ of Giithrum 
 
 and more personal conquest. At Aller, near 
 Athelney, the Danish chieftain Guthrum was re- 
 ceived by Alfred himself into the Christian faith, 
 in which he was a little later confirmed at Wedmore. 
 This triumph and the treaty which was its sequel 
 form one of the most notable events of British 
 history. They were the achievement of Alfred in 
 his thirtieth year. 
 
 The Peace of Wedmore had far-reaching results. Peace of 
 
 ^ Wedmore 
 
 In the first place it bound the conscience of Guthrum, 878. 
 at that time the most potent Dane ; he never after- 
 wards broke his word with Alfred. Secondly, the 
 Peace was of great political importance, for Alfred 
 secured a treaty which went far to meet his endeavour 
 to obtain a permanent understanding with the Danes. 
 He bound them to evacuate not only Wessex, but 
 half of Mercia also. The limits to the north and 
 east of which they might develop their own laws and 
 customs were the River Lea, from its mouth to its 
 source, then " right to Bedford " and along the Ouse 
 to the old Roman Watling Street, wdiich ran, as it 
 still runs, straight from London to Chester. But 
 even in their own " Danelagh " they were to preserve 
 equal justice between Englishman and Dane ; and, 
 above all, the suzerainty of the Wessex King, as lord 
 paramount, was everywhere to be recognised. This 
 increase in Alfred's kingship was a necessary result 
 as it was the just reward of his services to England. 
 The year marks the beginning of the personal
 
 Alfred's 
 
 domestic 
 
 reforms. 
 
 10 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 monarch}' ot English history. The royal lines of 
 ]\Iercia, East Anglia, and Xorthumbria had become 
 extinct ; henceforth there was one sovereign, " over- 
 lord " of all, the subsidiar\' districts beins: assigned to 
 the care of Aldermen. 
 
 The Danish serpent was indeed so scotched that 
 for nearly fifteen years Alfred was able to devote his 
 restless energ}^ to setting in order the household 
 w^iich he had rescued from chaos. If it is true 
 that 
 
 "Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war," 
 
 he was a noble victor elsewhere than on the field of 
 battle. It is really his achievements in government, 
 in arm}' atid nav}- reform, and in education which, 
 apart from the nobilitv of his character, have led 
 posterity to call him "the Great." In government 
 he \vas so far from abusing the new powers with 
 which the kingship was endowed,^ that (\W(t Augustus 
 of old at Rome) he did not appear to countenance 
 the change in the centre of control which in reality 
 took place. In this sketch it is not proposed to 
 describe the use of the Great Council and the 
 immensel}' important revolution in local government 
 which appear in his reign. It has, indeed, to be 
 admitted that he was even premature in some of his 
 political ideas, as also in the notions of education 
 which he very clearly formulated. There are few 
 
 ' Really, as we have seen, from 878 ; but it was only after 
 885 that the contemporary authorities call him " King of the 
 Anglo-Saxons," instead of " King of the West Saxons."
 
 THE LIFE AND REIGN OF ALFRED II 
 
 reflections which so chasten the modern mind or so 
 well illuminate the slow continuity of the human 
 race as the recognition of the fact that a thousand 
 years ago Alfred had fixed political conceptions and 
 ideals, to grasp which is still essential for the redress 
 of modern wrongs. 
 
 Without, then, entering here in detail into his 
 reforms, some of which are examined in later pages 
 of this volume,! we may suggest them in outline. 
 
 As a militar}' reformer it is clear that he attacked relom? 
 defects in the army the moment it was released from 
 the actual struggle with the Danes. His fighting 
 men lacked not valour but organisation. The early 
 victories of his reign were snatched by the dash of 
 desperate patriots ; the later campaigns were fought 
 by regular battalions, not, perhaps, instructed in the 
 rules of warfare, but serving upon a systematic plan. 
 For between 878 and 893 Alfred arranged that the 
 "fyrd" or fighting strength of his people should be 
 so mobilised that while one half stayed at home to 
 till the land, the other half should serve in the field. 
 We have seen how he initiated the English navy, 
 which, if not permanent from his time, played an 
 essential part in the repulse of the Danes. Apart 
 from the successes of his own reign, this wise and 
 thorough treatment of army and navy gave splendid 
 instruments to his successors for the protection of 
 England. 
 
 As a law-giver he consolidated a selection of Laws, 
 previous laws, without adding much of his own. By 
 pruning away the withered and obsolete, and by 
 ' See especially the " Studies " beginning at p. 31.
 
 Government. 
 
 Church 
 reform. 
 
 12 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 careful treatment of the healthy ramifications of 
 " the code of dooms," he won a place among the 
 great English legislators. English law has ever 
 slowly matured, and in Alfred's time it bore good 
 fruit. 
 
 In the administration of his country this just and 
 far-sighted ruler taught his subjects the elements at 
 least of the lesson of self-government. In redividing 
 the people and ordaining numerous assemblies, he 
 exhibited the benefits of local " home rule." It is the 
 fact that by his invention of the shires he anticipated 
 the principles of the County Council legislation of 
 ten centuries later ; and it appears that Mercia and 
 afterwards Northumbria came to be remodelled after 
 the likeness of Wessex. 
 
 As Church-reformer Alfred evidently relaid the 
 foundations of the great monastic s)'stem which, in 
 the tenth and eleventh centuries, became the potent 
 and prosperous state-agency of religion and education. 
 In 596 Augustine had brought Christianity to 
 England, preaching to the warriors of the north : 
 " Be kind, worship the God of the weak who, unlike 
 Woden, will reward thee not for thy valour but for 
 thy mercy." Onl\' a century later no less than seven- 
 teen bishoprics, as has been already mentioned, bore 
 witness to the growth of the Church. But its work 
 was all undone by the fire and pillage of the two 
 centuries of warfare which ensued. As prince and 
 as private benefactor Alfred restored its buildings 
 and its power, and so followed into practice one of 
 his golden sayings that '' money is precious when it 
 has been transferred to others ; with the use of giving
 
 ATHEI.NEV 
 
 IN SOMERSET. 
 
 p,.,^'^!^,'*^*^ The junction of the 
 
 ' ■'^'T I Parrelt and the 
 
 »m'^ V --'•-:;' Tone 
 
 #^1 iiiE
 
 THE LIFE AXD REIGN OF ALFRED 1 3 
 
 it ceases to be possessed." Aided by his archbishop, 
 Plegmund, he founded and endowed abbeys at Win- 
 chester, Athehiey, and Shaftesbury. If their timbers 
 and stones are gone, the remenabrance of them awakes 
 praise for Alfred's piety and service of his God, 
 
 Closely connected with his Church-reform was AUred 
 
 , . , , ... student and 
 
 Alfreds supremely mterestmg labour m literature educator of 
 and education.^ He was indeed a happy warrior 
 who could lay down his arms to become a humble 
 student. Among the varied calls of public affairs he 
 sought and read the best books available in his day, 
 and at once, with that sure rapidity which charac- 
 terised the busy duration of his too short life, he had 
 them translated for the benefit of his people. Where 
 before only a few might read in Latin books, now the 
 liberal sagacity of their King provided his people with 
 a new kingdom — the regions of the past and the 
 realms of human imagination. He expressly de- 
 sired every English youth to be able to read in his 
 mother-tongue. It was a blow struck swiftly and 
 nobly at the powers of ignorance and darkness, and 
 was perhaps the greatest of Alfred's achievements. 
 
 A peculiar interest attaches to his patronaq-e of the Alfred as 
 
 ^ . . patron of 
 
 handicrafts, because a few relics directly attributable handicraft. 
 to Alfred's time have survived to our own. We 
 should have had many more if his subjects, being 
 Christians, had been buried, after the fashion of their 
 pagan forefathers and neighbours, with man}- objects 
 of their daily life. As it is, we know with what kind 
 of weapons they fought and with what coins they 
 bought in the markets. Above all, objects like 
 ' This subject receives special treatment in the Study at p. 44.
 
 14 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 Alfred's jewel, the finger-rings of his father and 
 sister, and numerous crosses and brooches preserved 
 in our museums, bear witness to the interest which 
 Asser tells us that Alfred took " in his workers in 
 gold and artificers of all kinds." 
 
 With reforms, therefore, in army and nav)', in 
 Church and local government, and with law-making 
 and the patronage of art and letters, Alfred the 
 Great occupied the precious years of peace. The 
 studies contained in this volume deal with certain 
 of these reforms in detail. In this present sketch 
 of his reign there is yet to be told, before arriving 
 at the end, the story of the third wave of Danish 
 invasion. 
 The return In 893, thc fort}-fourth }'ear of his age and the 
 
 Danes. tweuty-sccoud of his reign, Alfred had given some 
 
 kind of system to his army. His warriors, too, were 
 doubtless filled with the inspiration of a prince who, 
 after leading them in more desperate times, had con- 
 firmed to his people the securit}' of their lives and 
 homes. But the enemy also showed a greater system 
 and scale in their attack than ever before. According 
 to the Saxon Chronicle they brought a fleet of 
 250 ships, which landed their troops in Kent, 
 some at Appledore on the border of the great 
 Andred Wood, others on the shores of the Thames, 
 where IMilton was fortified on the south bank and 
 Benfleet on the north. After length}' preparation, 
 the Danes opened the campaign in 894 by ravaging 
 Hampshire and Berkshire. The Northumbrians and 
 East Anglians, in spite of their hostages and oaths 
 given to Alfred, became rapidly disaffected. He
 
 THE LIFE AND REIGN OF ALFRED I 5 
 
 himself, in accordance with his new system, had 
 reserves left for the defence of the towns, and a great 
 part of his fighting men were engaged in attending 
 to the crops. When once the warfare began with 
 the northward move of the Danes, he struck his The battle 
 blow ; at Farnham, in Surrey, he inflicted a severe 
 defeat and recaptured a quantity of booty. Many 
 Danes were lost by drowning in their flight across 
 the river into Essex ; those who reached the Colne 
 valley encamped on an island lying in that river. 
 Alfred himself was hastily drawn off b}- the arrival 
 of a large Danish fleet in Exeter and Devon. We 
 are told nothing of his manoeuvres in those parts, but 
 with the forethought of good generalship he had 
 luckih' left behind him in Essex a force which, 
 strengthened by the people of London and led by 
 .-Ethelred, ealdorman of Mercia, was summoned to 
 Benfleet. There Hasten's Fort had been suddenly 
 occupied by Danes from the camps at Appledore 
 and Milton. The men of Wessex carried the fort 
 by storm ; the enemy were stoutly beaten, and much 
 booty of gold and silver, horses and garments taken 
 from them. By Alfred's orders, the wife and two 
 children of Hasten, who had been captured, were 
 generously restored to him. The Danes who escaped 
 from this encounter made a stronghold at Shoebury, 
 from which, it is said, they proceeded up the Thames 
 and across country to Buttington-on-Severn, a posi- 
 tion from which they were forced by assault and 
 famine to retire once again into Essex, where all who 
 were in that region wintered on Mersea Lsland in the 
 Blackwater. Yet another pagan force appears to 
 
 The fort at 
 Bcnrteet.
 
 Rrse on the 
 Kiver Lea. 
 
 1 6 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 have worked as kw north as Chester, whither they 
 were pursued by EngHsh who cut off their supphes. 
 The winter season must indeed have been welcome 
 to either army after these months of stubborn and 
 widespread fighting", which make the campaign one 
 of the most notable in the military annals of our 
 history. 
 
 In the following year, 895, the Danish force, which 
 had wintered at Chester, appears to have passed 
 from that town into North Wales and, at the end of 
 a campaign of which we know nothing, to have found 
 its wa}' back to the quarters on Mersea Island. 
 Another force, returning from Exeter, was severely 
 handled by the South-Saxons at Chichester. The 
 outcome, if not the purpose, of this concentration in 
 the region of the Essex rivers was a move of which 
 we ha\e some interesting details. Earl}' in the winter 
 of 895-6, the Danes took their ships from the Black- 
 water up the Thames as far as the River Lea, which 
 they then navigated to a point twenty miles above 
 London where they fortified a camp. They were 
 there, however, entrapped b}' the English, who fol- 
 lowed them and, by a clever deviation of the main 
 stream into a number of shallow channels, forced 
 them to abandon their ships. ^ It has been noted that 
 this tactic may have been suggested to Alfred's 
 receptive mind by the account in Orosius of the ruse 
 whereby Cyrus diverted the waters of the G}'ndes 
 and Euphrates above Babylon. Many of the Danish 
 ships were destroyed, the better ones being brought 
 to London ; while the enemy themselves, thus 
 ' See Note II. at p. 115.
 
 MAI' OF EN(iLAM) IN THK REION OF ALFRED.
 
 THE LIFE, AND REIGN OF ALP RED I/ 
 
 seriously crippled, moved away to Bridgnorth in the 
 valley of the Severn. Thus the strenuous campaign 
 of three years was ended, and London which, recently 
 refounded,! seems to have been the chief objective of 
 the Danes, was saved. The Saxon Chronicle records, 
 with a feeling unusual in its narrative, that the 
 English, though triumphant, had suffered sorely by 
 the mortality among cattle and men ; the names of 
 many eminent men, who had doubtless helped Alfred 
 in the restoration of his kingdom, are given in the 
 tale of loss. 
 
 Alfred had not, indeed, wholly rid the island of the 
 scourge. In 897 the south coast was ravaged by a 
 Danish fleet, to meet which Alfred had ships built of 
 a new and laro-er type ; as a result, twenty ships with ^/'v:lI 
 
 t> y r > ' J i. victory by 
 
 their crews were beaten in that >'ear, and we read in spithead. 
 particular of an engagement inside the Isle of Wight, 
 when the crews of two vessels, which were driven on 
 shore at an ebb of the tide, were captured and taken 
 to Winchester, where Alfred had them hanged for 
 the pirates that they were. This is the last that is 
 told of Danish troubles for some few years. We 
 learn, upon doubtful authority,, that about this time 
 Alfred first planted a colony of the Danes, to whom 
 he granted equal rights with his own native subjects. 
 At least, the resistance to Danish invasion was an 
 accomplished fact ; England was still to be vexed for 
 more than a century by such foreign assaults, but 
 Alfred's defence and administration of his fatherland 
 made the immediate repetition of serious jeopardy 
 impossible. His effective consolidation of his king- 
 • See Note III. at p. 117. 

 
 i8 
 
 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 Consolida- 
 tion of 
 England. 
 
 Alfred's 
 death. 
 
 Alfred's 
 familv. 
 
 dom, although rapid and curtailed (so far as he 
 himself was concerned) by his premature death, had 
 the natural result of closely binding the different 
 elements of which it was composed. Anglo-Saxon, 
 Anglo-Dane, and Dano-Saxon became the members 
 of an organised community ; and the rapidity with 
 which, after Alfred's death, those who had been 
 piratical vikings became skilful moneyers and accom- 
 plished dignitaries of church and state, is a striking 
 testimony to the value of his work. 
 
 Natural life now ended for this great being whose 
 example and works are everlasting. The traditional 
 date of his death is the 26th of October, 901, and he 
 was buried at Winchester.^ It was impossible for his 
 countrymen to foresee to what extent the rescue of 
 England from the Danish peril was complete ; nor 
 can we believe that they realised the fruits of his 
 fertile ideas and manifold energy. But at the 
 moment of his death there must have been those who 
 were mindful of the ideal character portra}^ed in the 
 " Pastoral Care of Gregory," which their dear King 
 had himself held in high repute — " He held his body 
 clean from sinful pleasures ; he was strong in the 
 strength of abstinence, filled with the sweetmeats of 
 learning, patient in troublesome things and in every 
 weariness, humble in forbearance, active and bold so 
 as to have power, courteous, austere and strict for 
 righteousness." 
 
 Dying at the age of little over fifty \ears, he left 
 his wife and children surviving him. ^-Ethelswitha 
 herself, a loving and faithful consort through all the 
 ' See p. loi.
 
 THE LIFE AND REIGN OF ALFRED IQ 
 
 troubled and triumphant years, died about 905. In 
 his will, as if by a thought of loving honour, Alfred 
 had bequeathed to her the two manors of Wantage, 
 where he w^as born, and of Ethandune, where he 
 fought his greatest fight. She herself had, in his 
 lifetime, founded a nunnery at Winchester whither 
 she might retire in the sad event of widowhood. Her 
 memory is slight but gracious. 
 
 Of their children, /Ethelflaed, the eldest, was 
 married to /Ethelred, ealdorman of Mercia, and many 
 documents show that she took a part in public affairs. 
 She survived her husband and died in 919, leaving no 
 descendants. 
 
 Edward, the elder son, reigned after his father, until 
 his death in 925. By his w^ars against the Danes, he 
 extended his own kingdom as far as the Humber and 
 brought the whole island under vassalage ; for besides 
 the princes of Wales and Northumberland, those of 
 Scotland and Strathclyde submitted to his rule. His 
 reign therefore marks an important stage in the 
 history of Britain, when she was first exchanging the 
 condition of division into rival kingdoms for a state 
 of national unity. A wise judge has said that " it is 
 only the unequalled glory of his father which has 
 condemned this prince, one of the greatest rulers that 
 England ever beheld, to a smaller degree of popular 
 fame than he deserves." 
 
 /Ethclgeofu, the second daughter, was never 
 married, and entered the nunnery at Shaftesbur}', 
 toundcd 1))' her father, where she died and was 
 buried. 
 
 /Elfthryth, the third daughter, w\as married to
 
 20 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 Baldwin the Second, Count of Flanders ; she died in 
 929, and was buried in the monastery of St. Peter 
 at Ghent. From their son Arnulph was descended 
 Matilda, the wife of William of Normandy, Conqueror 
 of England. 
 
 yEthelweard, the )'oungest child of Alfred and 
 , yEthelswitha, was born about 880, after the sojourn 
 at Athelney ; he died in October, 922, and was 
 buried at Winchester. He is said to have lived a 
 student life, and legend afterwards connected him 
 with Oxford. 
 
 There is a story that Alfred once gave to his little 
 
 grandson Athelstan, the son of Edward, a purple 
 
 mantle, a jewelled girdle, and a Saxon sword in a 
 
 gold scabbard. 
 
 Alfreds Sucli, in the outlines of a sketch, some shadincf of 
 
 character. ■^ 
 
 which is given in later pages, was King Alfred the 
 Great. He was great not only because of what he 
 did, but by what he was ; for no barb of slander or 
 of malice has been able to pierce the armour of his 
 virtuous manliness. It has been wisely said that 
 " individuals are important in history in proportion, 
 not to their intrinsic merit, but to their relation to the 
 State." Tried even b\^ this test, apart from his 
 personal qualities, Alfred stands great indeed. The 
 forefather of the Anglo-Saxon race, which has since 
 found empires undreamed of in even his philosophy, 
 he is a pattern to which any Briton or American may 
 well revert. It is by the study of his strong and 
 sober character, exhibited in the phenomena of his 
 time, that we can make a high use of this particular 
 chapter of history, and so not merely gratify our
 
 THE LIFE AXD REIGN OF ALFRED 21 
 
 curiosity about the past, but modify our view of the 
 present and our forecast of the future. 
 
 An estimate of the character of x^lfred fitly includes of'pScrUy, 
 the judc^ments passed upon him by the earl}- writers 
 of our history ; the eloquence of their tribute must 
 have been inspired by the traditional glor)- which 
 attached to his name, but they had abundant material, 
 however adorned by fancy and legend, on which to 
 base their unanimous verdict of admirati(^n and 
 praise. 
 
 The Annals speak of " Alfred, truly so called, a 
 man most strenuous in all things in battle, and the 
 noble king oi the West-Saxons, but prudent and 
 religious and most wise." 
 
 Of the three annalists of the eleventh century, 
 Florence of Worcester praises that " famous, warlike, 
 victorious prince ; the zealous protector of widows, 
 pupils, orphans, and poor ; skilled in the Saxon 
 poets ; dear to his own race, affable and liberal to 
 all ; endued with prudence, fortitude, justice, and tem- 
 perance ; most patient under the infirmity which he 
 daily suffered ; a most discreet inquisitor in executing 
 justice; vigilant and devoted in the service of God." 
 
 Ethelwerd, proudly claiming to be descended from 
 Alfred's brother /Ethered, calls his great ancestor 
 ''that immoveable pillar of the Western -Saxons, that 
 man full of justice, bold in arms, learned in speech, 
 and, above all other things, imbued with divine 
 wisdom." 
 
 Henry of Huntingdon breaks into verse, the 
 worthier manner of praising Alfred's " inborn 
 nobility."
 
 22 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 Posterity has been generous, and ever will be, in 
 extolling this greatest of princes. " A good life hath 
 few years, but a good name endureth for ever." The 
 substance of mediaeval testimon)' is given, after many 
 centuries, in the eloquent estimates of Gibbon and 
 Hume. The former says: — 
 
 " Amidst the deepest darkness of barbarism the 
 virtues of an Antoninus, the learning and valour of a 
 Caesar, and the legislative spirit of a Lycurgus were 
 manifested in this patriotic king." ^ 
 
 Hume, speaking of Alfred as " the Founder of the 
 
 Enirlish Monarch 
 
 }', says 
 
 " The merit of this prince, both in private and 
 public life, ma}^ with advantage be set in opposition 
 to that of an}^ monarch or citizen which the annals of 
 any age or any nation can present to us : he seems 
 indeed to be the model of that perfect character, 
 which, under the denomination of a sage or wise man, 
 philosophers have been fond of delineating, rather as 
 a fiction of their imagination than in hopes of ever 
 seeing it really existing. . . . Fortune alone, by 
 throwing him into that barbarous age, deprived 
 him of historians worthy to transmit his fame to 
 posterity : and we wish to see him delineated in 
 more lively colours, and with more particular strokes, 
 that we may at least perceive some of those small 
 specks and blemishes, from which, as a man, it is 
 impossible he could be entirely exempted." 
 
 Comte, again, in his " System of Positive Polity," 
 makes Alfred preside over the first week devoted to 
 Feudal Civilisation, the week which includes the 
 ' Gibbon, "Miscellaneous Works" (1814), vol. iii,
 
 THE LIFE AND REIGN OF ALFRED 23 
 
 defenders of Christendom against infidel invaders ; 
 he is taken as a type, endowed with higher personal 
 qualities than the great Charles himself, of the princes 
 who introduced the nomad Polytheists of the East 
 and North of Europe into the European system. 
 
 Alfred has borne comparison with the historical 
 heroes of every age and clime. Their proximity in 
 the point of time lends a real interest to the contrast 
 between him and Charles the Great. In public work 
 we find both attacking the same task of courageous 
 and persistent resistance to barbarian invaders, both 
 anxious to impose terms of suzerainty on powerful 
 independent chiefs, both endeavouring to civilise 
 native subjects and resident aliens alike, to give them 
 order and union, the benefits of learning and the 
 advantages of church-control. But Charles, unlike 
 Alfred, was unable to inspire subordinate trustfulness 
 in the superior nobility of his empire ; unnatural 
 animosities and a disregard of solemn compacts were 
 the canker of Frankish politics. Charles, great as he 
 was in his impress upon history, himself showed in 
 public and private life the want of moral principle 
 which ruined his dynast\\ Alfred shines purely in 
 the light oi his moral and intellectual qualities ; 
 sweetness and strength were in his personalit)'. His 
 kingdom was circumscribed, and he was content to 
 keep it so, blind to the glamour of aggrandisement. 
 Even if England was no more part of the European 
 system at the end than at the opening of his reign, 
 yet Alfred was a splendid pioneer in the evolution of 
 the liberties of Europe ; at home, upon his own 
 island, his institutions formed one of the most
 
 24 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 important stages in the political progress of the 
 Anglo-Saxon race. He is incomparable not onl)- 
 because he was warrior and scholar, patriot and 
 saint, legislator and craftsman and great in every 
 role, but because he carried no virtue to either excess, 
 and ever pursued a golden mean. The glory of his 
 versatility was not its success, but its harmon\' ; the 
 secret of the fulness of his character lay in the pro- 
 portions with which he filled it, in his serene economy 
 of the energies with which he was gifted. The proud 
 words of our two modern historians will always ex- 
 press xA^lfred's fame, in declaring that he was " the 
 noblest as he was the most complete embodiment of 
 all that is great, all that is loveable, in the English 
 temper," and " the most perfect character in history."
 
 ASSER'S LIFE OF ALFRED 
 
 THE Latin biography of King Alfred the Great 
 by Asser of St. David's gives us most of what 
 we know about the hero ; but it has long been the 
 subject of a keen controversy, which cannot yet be 
 said to be closed. The value of its information is 
 such that the question of its authenticity is a literary 
 problem of the first order. Since the attack of T. 
 Wright in 1842 {Ai-chceologia, xxix. 192), there have 
 been scholars who have ranged themselves on the one 
 side or the other ; in March, 1 898, a learned but inaccu- 
 rate criticism, written from the ultra-sceptical stand- 
 point, appeared in the columns of TJie Tiuies,^ and was 
 met by a brief reply from Sir F. Pollock, who expressed 
 his judgment that "the only safe general conclusion 
 would seem to be that we have in the Asserian Life 
 of Alfred a genuine original, more or less overlaid 
 with additions whose date is still uncertain, not 
 counting the much later apocryphal passages which 
 all recent critics have rejected." With this opinion 
 another eminent judge in this literary Court of 
 
 ' The Ti)ites, March 17 and 26, 1898. 
 25
 
 20 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 Appeal shortly afterwards concurred ; Professor York 
 Powell ^ has spoken of the biography as " a contem- 
 porary memoir the authority of which in essentials 
 there is, I think, no reason to doubt." J. R. Green, 
 besides agreeing on the date of the work, has written 
 that it was ''probabl}^ really Asser's." The hostile 
 opinion is that the biography as a whole is " no less a 
 fabrication " than the admittedly deliberate insertion 
 of Camden concerning the foundation by ^Alfred of 
 Oxford Universit}', and that most probably " some 
 Welshman, wishing to glorify his nation and particu- 
 larly St. David's, seized on this mention of Asser " (a 
 reference in the twelfth-century history of Florence of 
 Worcester), " compounded a Life of Alfred from 
 the Chronicle and Florence of Worcester, together 
 with the Life of St. Xeot, inserting a few imaginary 
 personal stories to give an air of realit}- to the narra- 
 tive, and gave his Life to an uncritical world." 
 
 Now, it is to be admitted that the ingenious con- 
 struction of this attack, like a certain recent essay by 
 a Mr. Bucke in the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, 
 has made it plausible to a degree. But once again 
 the destructive theory is grounded soleh^ upon infer- 
 ences, exhibiting a plentiful play of suggestio falsi 
 and suppressio veri, and lacking the essentials of de- 
 monstration. 
 
 In favour of " Asser," the evidence of MSS. is of 
 high importance. True, we now have no good MS. 
 of this biography ; the oldest to survive to modern 
 times was a Cottonian ^IS. (Otho. A. xii.), but this 
 was' destro3'ed in the lamentably famous fire of 173 1. 
 
 ^ As reported in The Hampshire Chronicle, June 18, 1898.
 
 XI* (s^J^"^-^ 
 
 MS. 
 
 (VDVOt^V DESUDTERlOISlV^v.vrfi/V^avV 
 
 A WTO BOFIMM 
 
 Si (A'f'^^ an^ul (4x:oni5Tmj*e?cmiui/la. 
 
 que Rommar berrpc/rire'ijwepayarahrer 
 uocaruraberrocAlua utib uxtiftabunclaTi 
 
 THE OPENING OF ASSER's LIFE OF ALFRED. 
 
 Facsimile, puhlishcd in Wise's 1722 edition, of the nth centur}- .MS. 
 destroyed in the burning of the Cotton Library in 1731 ; see p. 27.
 
 ASSERS LIFE OF ALFRED 2/ 
 
 By a fortunate chance, however, which seems to be 
 Httle known, its precise nature was not so lost to us 
 as to justify the confidence of a writer in Literature 
 for 20th August, 1898, who triumphantly discredited 
 the writer in TJie Times already quoted on the ground 
 that " it was rash to base a charge upon the character 
 of a MS. which it was impossible the writer should 
 have seen." For F. Wise, of Oxford, in his unusualh' 
 careful 1722 edition of Asser's Life of Alfred, illus- 
 trates his transcript of that MS. with an engraved 
 facsimile of the heading and opening sentences. For 
 this, he says (at p. 137), he was indebted to his friend 
 James Hill, of the Middle Temple, and all credit be 
 to the good man for preserving, in unconscious 
 anticipation, so precious a bit of evidence ! For the 
 early opinion of W'anle}^ who \\'as thus able to assign 
 the MS. to 1000 A.D., is to-day confirmed by the 
 precise skill of experts in paL-eography. It is said that 
 the writing, which is poor, might belong to the tenth 
 century ; but the point is that, at any rate, it does not 
 belong to a twelfth-century fabrication, based on the 
 work of Florence, who died in 11 18. Moreover, 
 Asser omits the records of facts stated by Florence, 
 which are also wanting in the oldest copies of the 
 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ; the identity of other 
 passages is more naturally explained b}' the con- 
 jecture that an author of the twelfth centur}', when 
 fabrication was more likely, copied from an earlier 
 work. When we turn to the internal evidence, the 
 bold anon\-mous critic of The Times declared that it 
 " is alone sufficient to deprive the n'ork of all authority.'' 
 His strongest point appeared to lie in some apparent
 
 28 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 incongruities in "the picture-book story" of Alfred's 
 childhood ; " so absolute the knave " was (if one may 
 be pardoned for borrowing his own quotation), that, 
 rather than understand the tale as it can quite simply 
 and naturally be understood for its slight and pretty 
 worth, he solemnly propounded the following series 
 of propositions : — 
 
 I. " The whole tale is one of a domestic mother 
 with her children round her knee." 
 
 II. "A keen love for Saxon poetry is extremely 
 unlikely in a Prankish Princess aged 13." 
 
 III. {Ergo). " This very story, which perhaps more 
 than any other has made the fame of Asser's bio- 
 graphy (!), is so entirely impossible as to convict the 
 biographer of invention, or to demonstrate that the 
 biography is a fiction." 
 
 Poor Judith, " aged 1 3," the child-bride of a mild old 
 man of over sixt}' ! One might with equal profit 
 labour to prove that she pla}'ed the proverbial step- 
 mother to her pla}'mate step-son Alfred, only six 
 years her junior ! In the face of what is in the 
 biograph}% such meagre criticism scarcely impugns 
 the broad facts that the work contains man}' refer- 
 ences to the actual career of its avowed author Asser, 
 and that Asser, an historical personage, was the 
 intimate friend of Alfred. W^e not only have his 
 death, as Bishop of Sherborne, recorded in the Anglo- 
 Saxon Chronicle under the year 910, but the signa- 
 ture " Asser episcopus" occurs on authetitic documents 
 as late as 903 and 904. It is more reasonable to 
 suppose that his appointment to ecclesiastical work 
 in the West of England, which severed his close
 
 ASSEJ^'S LIFE OF ALFRED 29 
 
 association with xAlfred's personality, was his reason 
 for closing his biography with the year 887, than it is 
 easy to guess why a forger in a later day should have 
 refrained from the natural completion of the reign. 
 The former view is well supported by the writer's 
 own use of the words " and, as I believe, even until 
 his death " ; such a phrase is not natural in a fabrica- 
 tion, and seems to preclude the third alternative, that 
 a continuation beyond 887 has been lost for, us. The 
 " Life " expressly purports to have been written in 
 888, " in the fortieth year " of the King's age. 
 
 Without improper emphasis, we may note passages 
 marked by an unusual and even rare individuality, 
 which go to support the judgment that they were 
 written by a man of elegant taste, inspired by an 
 intimate affection for his theme. One such tribute 
 may be thus rendered : — 
 
 "(Alfred was busy) even as a most provident bee, 
 which at the first dawn of a summer's day soars from 
 its dear hive and with rapid flight steers its way along 
 unknown paths of air ; it settles over the many and 
 various blossoms of grasses, plants and shrubs, and 
 bears away home all that it has found most to its 
 liking." 
 
 Far more critical importance may be attached to 
 the constant addition, improbable almost in the hands 
 of any one but a Welshman like Asser and certainly 
 less likely after the Norman deluge, of Celtic names 
 of places ov^er and above the names in Saxon or 
 Latin {e.g., " flumen quod Britannice dicitur Abon ") ; 
 and it is specially noteworthy that in his account of 
 his own coming to Alfred from Wales, he should go
 
 30 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 out of his way to add to " ad regionem dextraliiim 
 Saxonum " the words " quoe Saxonice Suthseaxum 
 appellatur." 
 
 Shortly, then, the Life of Alfred bearing Asser's 
 name may, in the light of present evidences, be 
 accepted as having the weight of contemporary 
 authority. In a natural anxiety to place credit in so 
 valuable and attractive a work, possessing as it does 
 something of the immortal charm of the portrait of 
 Agricola by Tacitus, we must appreciate the i^\N 
 points of weakness in a proof which is not yet one of 
 demonstration ; but, subject to that, it remains a 
 delightful record of " the most perfect character in 
 history."
 
 II 
 
 ALFREDS LEGISLATION 
 
 THE code of " Dooms " which bears Alfred's 
 name, first edited by Wilkins in his " Leges 
 Anglo-Saxonies" (London, 1721), has been well 
 known since its publication in 1840, by B. Thorpe, in 
 " The Ancient Laws and Institutes of England," where 
 the Anglo-Saxon original is printed, together with a 
 modern version, accompanied by notes, instructive 
 but sometimes inaccurate. A trenchant observation 
 by the learned author of " The History of the Criminal 
 Law of England " justifies the mention of the textual 
 authority for that original as a point of peculiar 
 interest. Stephen (i. 51) remarks that these early 
 codes, from Kentish yEthelberht's (560-616 A.D.) down 
 to Edward's (901-924), are "obviously a compilation 
 made in the time of Henry I., by some private per- 
 son, of the laws then in force, or supposed to be in 
 force, among the English." This judgment, unless 
 equivocal, is decidedly erroneous, for the two best 
 MSS., upon which Thorpe's edition was based, are 
 proved by the modern and exact science of paLxo- 
 graphy to be of a far earlier date. These manuscripts
 
 32 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 are among the treasures of the library of Corpus 
 Christ! College, Cambridge; that numbered 173 is, 
 in the opinion of experts, "the oldest extant copy 
 of /Elfred's laws, second quarter of the tenth century" 
 — i.e., only a generation later than the death of the 
 King himself; while No. 383 (the first and third 
 octavos of which have been misplaced in the binding) 
 is assigned to the middle of the eleventh century. 
 
 It is fair, then, to give credit to the claim of these 
 dooms that they represent the body of law enacted 
 by Alfred in the course of his regeneration of the 
 disordered nation of Wessex, which he had saved from 
 the Danes. They show that in his reign religion and 
 morality received their sanction from established law, 
 and that here at any rate it was not possible to use 
 of his kingdom the words of Tacitus concerning the 
 ancient Germans, that " among them good habits of 
 morality are stronger than good laws elsewhere." 
 We must, however, guard against the idea that this 
 code pretended to be such a constructive and syste- 
 matic statement as are the compilations of an Alfonso 
 the Wise or a Napoleon Buonaparte. If it had been 
 such, it would have been exceptionally foreign to the 
 spirit of all English law. A comparison of the code 
 of Alfred with those of earlier kings shows that he 
 collected and supplemented those of his predecessors; 
 we have his express avowal of this mode of promul- 
 gation : — 
 
 " I then, Alfred King, gathered these together, and 
 bade to write many of those that our foregoers held, 
 those that to me seemed good ; and many of those 
 that seemed not good, I set aside with my wise men's
 
 ALFREDS LEGISLATION 33 
 
 counsel, and in other wise bade to hold them ; for 
 that I durst not venture much of mine own to set in 
 writing, for that it was unknown to me what of this 
 those would like that were after us. But those that 
 I met with either in Ine's days mine kinsman, or in 
 Offa's King of Mercia, or in /Ethelbehrt's that first 
 took baptism in the English race, those that seemed 
 to me the rightest, I have gathered them herein and 
 let alone the others." 
 
 The direct words of this preface suggest the very 
 essentials of growth and elasticity, which have made 
 our law enviable to all the world. " Our laws," sa}^s 
 Bacon, "are mixed as our language; and as our 
 language is so much the richer, the laws are the more 
 complete." Their principle, pleads Alfred himself, is 
 that of Christian morality : — 
 
 " From this one doom a man may think that he 
 should judge every one rightly ; he need keep no 
 other doom-book. Let him take care that he judge 
 to no man what he would not that he should judge 
 to him, if he sought doom over him." 
 
 A closer examination of the code itself shows that 
 it opens with an Anglo-Saxon re-enactment of the 
 Mosaic law (Exodus xx.-xxiii., roughly translated). 
 As Stephen has justly remarked, it is hard to decide 
 whether these were " practically more than a kind of 
 denunciation of homicide on religious grounds, or 
 whether they were actually executed as law." At 
 least one notes, among other points, a sincere attempt 
 to enforce the distinction between intentional and 
 unintentional homicide. Of the seventy-seven clauses 
 which contain Alfred's own "dooms," over fifty relate 
 
 4
 
 34 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 to personal injuries of one kind and another ; most 
 of these are borrowed, with sHght changes in the 
 amounts of fines, from the Kentish codes, especially 
 yEthelbehrt's. The rest are mainly taken from Ine, 
 whose agricultural laws, howev^er, are wholly omitted. 
 The word " Dolz-bot " is a term used, meaning com- 
 pensation for the striking or stabbing of a man, and it 
 curiously occurs on the hoop of a silver finger-ring 
 found in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Cambridge- 
 shire (Lord Braybrooke in Essex xA-rch. Soc. Trans., 
 ii. 64). In Doom 23 the word is used in the case of 
 slitting or biting by a dog. Of the dooms dealing 
 with assault, no less than seven deal specialh' with 
 the protection of women, and there are traces of 
 Alfred's cautious but effective treatment of the slave 
 question, whereby he first practicall}' created a decent 
 and respectable middle-class of society. An amusing 
 doom is that concerning " spear carelessness " (36), 
 which enacts that " if a man have a spear over his 
 shoulder and a man stake himself on it, he pay the 
 were (the value of a man according to his station) 
 without the wite (the fine due to King or lord in 
 respect of this offence)." Important dooms deal with 
 the breaking of oaths and pledges (i), stealing in a 
 church (6), lifting cattle (16), confession of debt (22), 
 slander (32), and house-breaking (40). Doom 41, the 
 only one concerning real property, seems to foreshadow 
 a law of entail concerning boc-lands, or estates created 
 by legal process out of the public land, and suggests a 
 final stage in the triumph of pra:i-feudal individualism. 
 As regards the administration of his laws, popular 
 legend errs in attributing to Alfred the invention of
 
 CuMBEBLAfO 
 
 ANTK^UITIES OF THE 9TH CENTURY IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 
 
 These have been specially selected for ihe prcsenl work, there l)eing a 
 ground in each instance for ascribing them to the time (jf Alfred.
 
 ALFREDS LEGISLATIOX 35 
 
 trial by jur\'. Traceable, indeed, in far earlier time, 
 this mode was not really developed until after the 
 Conquest, when it is first mentioned in the Constitu- 
 tions of Clarendon ; it did not fully supersede the trial 
 by duel until Henry III.'s reign. Equally fictitious 
 is the fourteenth-century note in " Eulogium Historia- 
 rum" (iv. 173) that Alfred translated into Anglo-Saxon 
 the laws of "Dunwallo Molmuncius, primus legifer 
 in Anglia " ; and we may regard as apocr\^phal the 
 story of a thirteenth-century writer that " le Roy 
 Alfred fist prendre xliv. justices en un an tout come 
 homicide, par leur faux judgments" (" Miroir des 
 Justices," 296-8). There is every reason to accept 
 the generous tribute of William of Malmesbury that 
 Alfred was " a searcher into the judgments made by 
 his officers, a stern corrector of those wrongly de- 
 livered " ; his rigour and justice were such that, as is 
 said by Richard of Cirencester (iii. 4), and, indeed, 
 said of man\^ another English king, he so restored 
 order in the countr}^ that gold bracelets could be 
 safely hung up by the roadside ! Even if Alfred was 
 no such legislative genius as Edward I., yet he was a 
 worthy exponent of this high function of responsible 
 royalty.
 
 Ill 
 
 ALFRED'S LOCAL GOVERXMEXT 
 
 THE system of local government established by 
 Alfred a thousand }-ears ago bears in idea 
 and even in detail a singular resemblance to that 
 enacted in the England of to-da}- b}- recent statutes. 
 Scholars have discovered trustworthy evidences of 
 what Alfred, as compared with his immediate pre- 
 decessors, did in this as in other particulars. We can 
 clearly understand the condition of his country and 
 his subjects. Neither at the birth nor at the death 
 of Alfred was England a part of the main s}'stem of 
 European politics ; she took no share in the dis- 
 turbing destinies of the empire of Charles the Great. 
 The scene was clear for the evolution of Alfred's 
 drama of reform, and it is part of his fame that he 
 refrained from carrying arms outside her shores. 
 
 His subjects were freemen or slaves. Of the 
 former, many were landless, bound to acknowledge 
 a lord ; the landed freemen were classified (excepting 
 " yEthelings," princes of the royal blood) on a land- 
 basis, the minimum being one hide.^ An "Eorl" 
 
 ' In Aiiglo-Xorman times the normal hide was reckoned at 
 1 20 acres ; see an article by Sir F. Pollock on ''Domesday" 
 in the English Historical Review for April, 1896. 
 
 36
 
 Alfred's local government 37 
 
 possessed forty or more, a " Thegn " five or more, and 
 a " Ceorl " less than five. There were three kinds of 
 slaves : the " theow," or slave simple ; the " esne," or 
 unfree hireling ; and the " wite-theow," or slave in 
 some penal servitude. 
 
 The system of tenure and land division was as 
 follows, Wessex and Mercia (one feature excepted) 
 being regarded as types of the heptarchic kingdoms 
 of England of the ninth century. The ecclesiastical 
 unity alone combined these various kingdoms for 
 military and other emergencies ; it was by the 
 accidental destinies of history that Alfred of Wessex, 
 like most of Egbert's dynasty, exercised a supremacy 
 in such a combination. We may concentrate our 
 attention upon Wessex as a leading but characteristic 
 state, typical of the larger whole. 
 
 Absolute ownership of land in severalty had been 
 long established among the Anglo-Saxons, and by 
 the ninth century was becoming the normal principle 
 of tenure. In " Boc-land " {i.e., possessid) an estate 
 created by legal process out of the public land, we 
 see property held in a manner common to the land 
 tenure of the German, Prankish, Danish, and other 
 European States. " Folc-land," as opposed to " Boc- 
 land," is a term occurring only in a few documents, 
 and then without a clear meaning. It was for long 
 thought to be analogous to the Latin ager publicus, 
 as being " property of the community." But the 
 best view ^ now is that, as even Spelman seems to 
 
 ^ See M. Vinogradoff in English Historical Review (1893), 
 vol. viii., 1-17 ; also " History of English Law," by Pollock 
 and Maitland, vol. i., 38.
 
 38 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 have held, it was land held without written title 
 under customary law. 
 
 It may here be remarked that it is in charters of 
 the eighth century that we first hear of the " fyrd," 
 or military service, which, with the repair of bridges 
 and the maintenance of fortifications, formed the 
 trinoda nccessitas, materially relieving the strain upon 
 the public coffers. 
 
 The local administration of the country thus held 
 was based upon a system entirely analogous to that 
 of early Germany. In the very terms that are used 
 there is the closest relation between the records of 
 Alfred and the " Germania " of Tacitus. The unit of 
 this local division was the "township" (" tun-scipe," 
 " villata," or " vicus "), which in its ecclesiastical form 
 was called a " parish." Some townships were free, 
 others dependent, but all were presided over by a 
 head man called "tun-gerefa" ((/[German "graf"), 
 who in the latter case was nominated by the lord of 
 the land. A township may have had its own " gemot " 
 or assembly, where bye-laws were made, but it is 
 uncertain how far we may press the analogy between 
 it and the early German " mark." A higher form of 
 township was the " Burh," always the residence of a 
 King, magistrate, or prominent noble. So we read of 
 " cyninges tun " in Alfred's laws, while Bede speaks 
 of Lincoln as such in the seventh century, having a 
 " gerefa " as an officer. The official was called " port- 
 gerefa" in such mercantile places as London, Bath, 
 Bodmin, and Canterbury. 
 
 Between these towns and the shires came the 
 Hundred or " Wapentake," the latter term being of
 
 Alfred's local government 39 
 
 uncertain etymology but referring rather to an armed 
 o-atherinc: of freemen than to a local division ; more- 
 over, it must be borne in mind that neither one term 
 nor the other actually occurs in any document before 
 the tenth-century Laws of King Edgar, which also 
 make first mention of " tithing " as a synonym for 
 township. The tradition, apparently dating from the 
 twelfth century, that Alfred set England in order by 
 setting ten families in one tithing and ten tithings in 
 one hundred is clearly unhistorical. None the less, 
 it is highly important to appreciate the nature in the 
 ninth century of a local idea clearly manifested in the 
 tenth, of which there are distinct vestiges in the 
 primitive organisation of the German *' pagus." The 
 probable truth is that in and before Alfred's time 
 each of many districts, varying in size and bounded 
 by natural rivers and hills, contributed a hundred 
 warriors to the host in the hour of national need ; 
 and that out of this custom came a local division 
 which in Edgar's and /Ethelred's days became the 
 basis of special taxation and police regulations ; a 
 monthly " Hundred-gemot," competent to declare 
 folk-right in every suit, came, in the reign of 
 Henry I., to be attended by lords within the hundred 
 or their stewards, the parish priest, the reeve, and 
 the four best men of each township. 
 
 Intermediate divisions between the hundred and 
 shire, which may or may not have begun to be 
 recognised in the time of Alfred, were the " Ridings " 
 of Yorkshire, the " Rapes " of Sussex, and the 
 "Lathes" of Kent. 
 
 In reaching the distribution into " Shires," we come
 
 40 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 to what very possibly was really the addition of 
 Alfred to the land government of England. The 
 term shire or " scir " signifies simply a share of a 
 larger whole, and in former Anglo-Saxon days meant 
 the territorial sphere assigned to an officer or magis- 
 trate. Thus Bede speaks often of the " Bishop's 
 scire," while in Ine's Laws (a.D. 688-725) we have 
 simpl)^ " scir " and " scir-man." A charter of 
 ^-Ethelstan, which, however, is probabh' spurious, 
 speaks of onuics Caiitescyrce thaini, but in the Anglo- 
 Saxon Chronicle (A.D. 851, 860) we find " Hampton- 
 scire, Defnascire, and Bearroscire " appearing side by 
 side with " the Dorsxtas, the W'ilsaetas, and the Sumer- 
 saetas " {cf. the opening of Asser's Life of Alfred, '' in 
 villa regia quaj dicitur W'anading in ilia paga qua^ 
 nominatur Berrocscire").^ Bearing in mind the con- 
 nection of Alfred with these chronicles and the 
 absence of contrary evidence, it seems reasonable to 
 believe that Alfred invented "shires" when coming 
 to terms with Danish Guthrum. Shires do not 
 appear in their ecclesiastical form as archdeaconries 
 until the twelfth century. The shire-officers were an 
 " Ealdorman " and a special " gerefa," called the 
 " sheriff" The " ealdorman," originally elected into 
 the *' Witena-gemot" with the consent of the King 
 and " witan," seems to have held an office which 
 became hereditary even before the introduction of 
 .shires, in relation to which it was quite possible for 
 him to be ealdorman of more than one. But every 
 shire was under an ealdorman, who sat with the 
 sheriff and bishop in the folk-moot, received one-third 
 ' Sec the facsimile opposite p. 27.
 
 Alfred's local government 41 
 
 of the profits of jurisdiction (at any rate, in the time 
 of Edward the Confessor), and, as '' heretoga " or 
 " leader of the host," commanded the mihtary forces. 
 The " sheriff," whose post was referable to but more 
 distinct than the " scir-man " of King Ine, was 
 nominated directly by the King as his steward and 
 judicial president of the shire. It was he who 
 convened the shire- moot, which was chiefly concerned 
 with intercepting appeals ^ to the King in Council. 
 The practice, for which there was foreign analogy, 
 appears to have been that twelve " Thegns " appeared 
 in this court and, on the institution of a kind of grand 
 jury, presented to the sheriff the report of the lesser 
 district. This is a clear distinction between this 
 ^?/^zj-/-German " folc-gemot " of the sheriff and the old 
 state-assembly or " gemot " of the ealdorman ; the 
 former was, in Edward's reign, held monthly, the 
 latter only twice a year. 
 
 In Alfred's reign the " Witena-gemot " or Supreme 
 Council, which was not a purely representative 
 assembly, ceased to be connected with a geographical 
 division. It was attended by the King and his 
 family, his chief courtiers, his bishops and ealdormen, 
 and a number of " witan" or wise men ; it is improbable 
 that in Alfred's time the total number exceeded sixty, 
 although in 934 ninety-one attended a meeting at 
 Winchester. 
 
 The " witan," it has been said, " possessed a 
 consultative voice and a right to consider every 
 
 ' Sir F. Pollock tells me, however, that in his opinion there 
 were no appeals at all, in our modern sense, before the Norman 
 Conquest.
 
 42 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 public act which could be authorised by the King"; 
 this was the corollary of their theoretical power of 
 electing and deposing him, which was actually 
 practised until Alfred's case. It is }'et one more 
 token of his dominant personality that from the day 
 when, as the strong man of the occasion, he assumed 
 the crown amid the clanging of arms, he increased 
 the personal importance of the kingly power. Insen- 
 sibly, but none the less really, the relative importance 
 of the subject decreased, with the growth of popula- 
 tion ; it is true that the first trace of the idea of 
 treason to the King does not appear until the time 
 of Alfred's son, but his own laws give significant 
 indications of the change ; amongst these may be 
 noted the provisions as to the King's bail and protec- 
 tion, his power over life, and the higher assessment of 
 his " wergild," or price payable to his kin on his 
 violent death. Alfred, like Augustus, changed the 
 reality without seeming to change the appearance ; 
 the secret of his success was that he did it for the 
 public good. He was no more a despot than he was 
 a figure-head ; from the day of his accession his officers 
 w^ere the national officers, and, in a theory frequently 
 practised, he required the consent of his " witan " in 
 the exercise of legislative, judicial, and other functions. 
 The preface to his laws (already quoted in the former 
 essay upon Alfred's Legislation) may be taken as an 
 instance of the obedience paid by his forceful indivi- 
 duality in this respect to the dictates of a tactful pru- 
 dence ; its phrases shew that it was with the consent of 
 his chief council that he made additions to the existing 
 body of fol'k-right. The judicial functions of the
 
 Alfred's local government 43 
 
 council, however, were confined to the ultimate 
 hearing of appeals, and it is improbable that it was 
 concerned with taxation before the extraordinary 
 impost of Dane-geld ordered a century later: Alfred 
 most probably consulted with his wise men, as in 
 fact he seems to have done in treating with Guthrum, 
 in deciding a policy of peace or war ; but as leader 
 of the host (as he was also the ultimate judge on 
 appeal) he became, more influentially than any king 
 before him, the privileged representative of the unity 
 and dignity of his nation.
 
 IV 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 
 
 THE devotion of Alfred the Great to the cause 
 of letters ranks high among the many and 
 varied energies of that '' Mirror of Princes." His 
 temporal work in the defence and government of his 
 nation was so thorough and persistent in the face of 
 the severest trials as on its own account to win him 
 enduring fame among the rulers of men. Yet the 
 inner appeal of his indomitable spirit prompted him 
 to labours in the eternal realm of literature. "Books," 
 says Milton, himself one of the few English poets who 
 have lauded Alfred, " do contain a potency of life in 
 them, to be as active as that soul was whose progeny 
 they are " ; and the saying applies with peculiar fit- 
 ness to this phase of Alfred's activity. For even if it 
 be true that we have little work of Alfred stamped 
 with the mark of pure originality, yet his discriminat- 
 ing and industrious translations into the tongue of his 
 own people brought to birth a new power of English 
 progress. In this sense he was the founder of our 
 glorious literature. 
 
 A distinguished French scholar, M. Jusserand, in
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 45 
 
 Speaking of Alfred's place in the history of English 
 letters as that of " the chief promoter of the art of 
 prose," says that " no specimens of French prose have 
 been discovered for the whole time corresponding to 
 the Anglo-Saxon period save one or two short frag- 
 ments. . . . The English country can thus pride 
 itself upon a literature which for antiquity is un- 
 paralleled in Europe^ 
 
 Before entering into a discussion of the several 
 works attributed to Alfred, we may briefly explain 
 the state of literature previous to his time. Poetry 
 had decidedly predominated in the letters of the 
 Anglo-Saxons, and of this the rare fragments assigned 
 to Csedmon (seventh century) and Adhelm (eighth 
 century) are all that remain. For reasons obvious to 
 students of literature, there was no prose. 2 The 
 verses of a Homer and a Hesiod were sung for 
 generations, and even the first Herodotus did not use 
 his mother-tongue ; the monk Bseda or Bede (seventh 
 century), the first English historian, wrote in Latin. 
 Alfred's achievement was that at the end of his 
 strenuous and comparatively brief reign he left to 
 his people the precious legacy of a library of the best 
 books available, for the first time translated into their 
 own language, and edited, in the best sense of the 
 term, by their careful Prince and his advisers.3 
 
 ^ "A Literary History of the English People" (London, 
 
 1895), p. 78. ^ ^, ^ 
 
 = Cf. J. Earle, " English Prose " (London, 1890), pp. 371-375- 
 3 Cf. "Alfred le Grand," p. 164, where G. Giiizot says : "II 
 ouvrit a langiie anglo-saxonne ellememe une ere noiivelle, en 
 faisant penetrer en die les fortes penseeset les notions precises 
 qu'elle ne s'etait point encore habituee a porter. C'est la 
 I'oeuvre originale d'Alfred, le sceau de son genie ; et si on a eu
 
 46 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 It is only reasonable to suppose that Alfred derived 
 constant help from the learned men whom he attracted 
 to his Court, in the production of the versions and 
 works which bear his name. But to admit this is not 
 to confess that he merely played the role of Maecenas 
 as well as the Augustus in his own little empire. 
 Isolated facts of external evidence support the 
 a priori argument that this Prince of a hundred 
 energies, whose inner soul burned with generous 
 sympathies, must have applied the force of his con- 
 trolling genius to this part of the enlightenment of 
 his people. He would, as pupil of his friends, see the 
 riches of the wisdom of learning ; as ruler, as " shep- 
 herd of England," he would discern the uses of giving 
 to his subjects and their children's children intelligible 
 versions of the historical and moral learning so hardly 
 won b}' even himself. Surely Alfred, the stout fighter 
 of the ninth centur\% may have felt the same truth 
 that a great scientist of our own has expressed in 
 noble words : " Give a man the taste for reading and 
 the means for gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of 
 making him a happy man ; unless, indeed, you put 
 into his hands a most perverse selection of books. 
 You place him in contact with the best society in 
 every period of history, with the wisest, the wittiest, 
 the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters 
 
 raisoii, au point de vue de Finstruction et des lettres, d'appeler 
 le regne de Charlemagne une renaissance, il faut appeler celui 
 d'Alfred une metempsychose." It appears to be a fact — 
 remarkable, but true — that during the five succeeding centuries 
 there was scarcely an original Anglo-Saxon or English work 
 produced, with the exception of the Saxon Chronicle : so 
 effectual were the disturbances of wars and the Xorman 
 Conquest.
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS d^J 
 
 which have adorned humanity. You make him a 
 denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. 
 The world has been created for him." Alfred was 
 not a Medici ruling in the midst of a manifold 
 renascence of arts and letters ; he was the defender 
 of a rude and disordered people, the creator of order 
 in that people when successfully defended. He was 
 not, in one sense, an Augustus, building splendidly on 
 foundations of an empire splendidly laid, the well- 
 trained patron of a golden age of letters ; he was the 
 Prince of a little kingdom, confirmed by his energies, 
 which found a noble relief in the pursuit and 
 publication of learning. 
 
 Alfred, then, must be regarded as the president of 
 a band of schplars, grouped in such a company as has 
 now and then appeared in the development of our 
 literature. Of this band Asser stood nearest to the 
 mind of the King, whose biographer he became. The 
 authenticity of Asser's work, and even his very exist- 
 ence, are still the subject of debate ; all that need 
 be recalled here ^ in this argument is that there 
 is good circumstantial evidence of the priority of 
 the earliest known manuscript of Asser's life to the 
 Annals of Florence of Worcester, from which the 
 sceptics say that it is derived — a proof strongly sup- 
 ported by the internal evidence of the peculiar and 
 striking style. Apart from the literary problem, there 
 is abundant good evidence of the career of Asser, who 
 came from St. David's to Alfred's Court, became his 
 confidant and adviser upon terms of the most intimate 
 friendship, and died Bishop of Sherborne in 910. 
 ' See above, p. 25.
 
 4^ ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 Closely connected with him was Grimbald, a Frank, 
 called by Alfred, in a genuine charter of 895, "my 
 dear friend and priest." Asser refers to him in care- 
 fully chosen terms, " a reverend man, a very good 
 singer, most learned in every kind of church-discipline 
 and in holy writ, and adorned with all good manners." 
 It is to this Grimbald that the building of the notable 
 crypt of St. Peter's-in-the-East at Oxford (really 
 Norman work of the earl}^ twelfth century) has long, 
 but falsely, been attributed. 
 
 We are told that Alfred corresponded with Fulco, 
 Bishop of Rheims, in his search for foreign scholars 
 of repute. He recommended Grimbald, ^ and it seems 
 certain that Hincmar, a still more famous Archbishop 
 of the same place, who practically governed France 
 for forty )^ears, and, as a patron of learning, kept up 
 a wide correspondence with the eminent Europeans 
 of his time, sent to Alfred the great scholar Johannes 
 Scotus Erigena. This man had a remarkable career ; 
 an Irishman by birth, he had studied in Athens and 
 Asia ; well versed in philosophy, and in the Greek, 
 Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldaean, and Arabic languages, he 
 became an intimate friend of Charles the Bald, in 
 whose reign he was invited by Hincmar to defend the 
 orthodox faith and the free right of private judgment: 
 his advocacv of the claims of reason ma\' almost be 
 
 ^ At p. 121 of Wise's 1722 edition of Asser is given a copy 
 of a letter addressed by this Fulco to Alfred, copied (as it is 
 there said) "e vetusto Cod. MS. penes V.R. Tho, Ford, A.M., 
 Ecclesice de BaniL'dl in agro Somcrsetensi Vicarium ; & 
 Ecclesiae Wcllensis Prebendarium." It is followed by an 
 extract from Nicol. Harpsfeld, " Hist. Eccl. Ang.," p. 170, saying 
 that the letter was brought to England by Grimbald.
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 49 
 
 said to mark the beginning of the attack on authority.^ 
 Another foreigner whom Alfred, in the woeful lack of 
 English scholars, seems to have employed, was John, 
 surnamed " the Monk," who came to England from 
 the monastery at Corbie, and w\as made by Alfred 
 first Abbot of the monastery at Athelney. A close 
 friend and active lieutenant of Alfred in his early 
 efforts to reconcile Church and State was Plegmund, 
 elected Archbishop of Canterbury in 890, " chosen of 
 God and of all the people." ^ In 891 died Swifneh, 
 reputed to be the best teacher among the Scots, but 
 we have no trace of any relations between him and 
 Alfred. Another prominent Bishop of Alfred's time 
 was Werferth of Worcester, who, as will presently 
 appear, translated the Dialogues of St. Gregory for 
 the King, who contributed a preface. Bishop Alfric, 
 after Alfred's death, is said to have continued the 
 translation of the Bible, with Anglo-Saxon versions 
 of the l^entateuch and Apocrypha. 
 
 With the one or two suggestive exceptions named, 
 we do not know the actual connection between these 
 scholarly assistants of Alfred and the works attributed 
 to him which are presently to be discussed. We are 
 left to conceive the partition of labour between this 
 good company, and we can imagine the sweetness 
 and light of their intellectual comradeship. " As the 
 judge of the people is himself, so are his officers ; and 
 what man the ruler of the city is, such are all they 
 
 ' See "Studies in John the Scot" (London, 1900), by Miss 
 Alice Gardner, who doubts the relation with Alfred. The 
 subject is discussed in R. L. Poole's " Illustrations of the 
 History of Modern Thought" (London, 1884. p. 313). 
 
 = There are many coins bearing the first letters of his name 
 and DoKOVEKXiA (Canterbury).
 
 50 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 that dwell therein." The work of the company may 
 have been cloistered in its doing ; but the scholars 
 doubtless became the willing pupils of their Prince in 
 developing the generous idea of creating a popular 
 national literature.^ 
 
 It is impossible, nor in the case of such literature 
 would it be very necessary, to assign an}^ chronological 
 order to " Alfred's works." They stand by themselves, 
 independent and varied, each self-contained. Of his 
 early taste for letters we have a pleasant symbol in 
 the story told of his early boyhood, which there is no 
 positive reason for doubting : — 
 
 " On a certain day, his mother ^ was showing him 
 and his brother a Saxon book of poetry, which she 
 held in her hand, and said, ' Whichever of you shall 
 the soonest learn this volume shall have it for his 
 own.' Stimulated by these words, or rather by the 
 Divine inspiration, and allured by the beautifully 
 illumined letter at the beginning of the vr Vmie, he 
 spoke before all his brothers, who, though his seniors 
 in age, were not so in grace, and answered, ' Will you 
 really give that book to one of us, that is to say, to 
 him who can first understand and repeat it to }'ou ? ' 
 At this his mother smiled with satisfacti and con- 
 firmed what she had before said. Upon which the 
 boy took the book out of her hand, id went to his 
 master to read it, and in due time brought it to 
 his mother and recited it." 3 
 
 ' John Ross, historian of Warwickshire in the fifteenth 
 century, says of y d in his " Historia Regum AngHae " (edited 
 by Hearne, Oxford, 745, p. 76), " iste rex litteratos intime 
 dilexit, quibus virtuosam vitam novit non deesse." 
 
 - I.e., Juditli, his stepmother, only six years older than 
 himself. 
 
 3 Asser. The manuscripts of Alfred's day are simply

 
 ALFRED AS MAX OF LETTERS 5 I 
 
 Asser relates that, " sad to say, he could not gratify 
 his most ardent wish to learn the liberal arts, because 
 as he said, there were no good readers at that time in 
 all the kingdom of the West Saxons. This he con- 
 fessed, with many lamentations and sighs, to have 
 been one of his greatest difficulties and impediments 
 in this life, namely, that when he was young and had 
 the capacity for learning, he could not find teachers ; 
 but when he was more advanced in life, he was harassed 
 by so many diseases unknown to all the physicians 
 of this island, as well as by internal and external 
 anxieties of sovereignty, and by continual invasions 
 of the pagans, and had his teachers and writers also 
 so much disturbed, that there was no time for reading. 
 But yet among the impediments oi this present life, 
 from infancy up to the present time, and, as I believe, 
 even until his death, he continued to feel the same 
 insatiable desire of knowledge, and still aspires after 
 it." 
 
 Taking this interesting passage as it stands, we 
 must bear in mind that, though Asser's biography 
 ceases with the year 887, probably he did not die 
 until 910. It may be that with his promotion to the 
 See of Sherborne, or other active spheres, he ceased 
 to have intimate connection with Alfred's habits. 
 The King certainly had more leisure in the last years 
 of his career to devote to studies, and could have 
 covered more reading and editing than Asser, from 
 
 written ; the hand is very legible and flowing, especially in 
 old copies of the " Pastoral Care." The initial letters are 
 decorated, but not splendidly ; dragons and distorted faces are 
 drawn with a black pencil round the base (^t the letters, and 
 shaded with red.
 
 52 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 his knowledge of the earher days of multitudinous 
 activities, could have believed possible. On the other 
 hand, the evidence of the well-known passage cited 
 below, which happens to be inserted in Asser's 
 biograph)^ at the \'ear 887 (the thirty-ninth of Alfred's 
 age) goes to show that the King then seriously began 
 his literary studies, which had been before confined 
 to the compilation of his " handboc." We cannot 
 know whether the biography was carried by Asser 
 beyond this year, at which our versions abruptly end, 
 and have no means of finding if this passage has been 
 misplaced. It purports to have been written in 893,^ 
 the year of Alfred's renewal of serious hostilities with 
 the Danes, after some six years of comparative peace ; 
 m the light of the evidence as it stands, we are 
 entitled to assign to this period those beneficent 
 activities in the realm of letters of the inauguration 
 of which Asser gives the following account : — 
 
 '' On a certain day we were both of us sitting in 
 the King's chamber, talking on all kinds of subjects, 
 as usual, and it happened that I read to him a quota- 
 tion out of a certain book. He heard it attentively 
 with both his ears, and addressed me with a thoughtful 
 mind, showing me at the same moment a book which 
 he carried in his bosom, wherein were written the 
 daily courses and psalms and prayers which he had 
 read in his youth, and he commanded me to write 
 the same quotation in that book. Hearing this, and 
 perceiving his ingenuous benevolence and devout 
 desire of studying the words of Divine wisdom, I 
 gave, though in secret, boundless thanks to Almighty 
 ' " The present year, which is his forty-fifth."
 
 ALFRr.D AS MAX OF LETTERS 53 
 
 God, who had implanted such a love of wisdom in 
 the King's heart. But I could not find any empty 
 space in that book wherein to write the quotation, 
 for it was already full of various matters ; wherefore 
 I made a little delay, principally that I might stir up 
 the bright intellect of the King to a higher acquaint- 
 ance with the Divine testimonies. Upon his urging 
 me to make haste to write it quickly, I said to him, 
 ' Are you willing that I should write that quotation 
 on some leaf apart ? For it is not certain whether we 
 shall not find one or more other such extracts which 
 will please you ; and if that should so happen, we shall 
 be glad that we have kept them apart.' ' Your plan 
 is good,' said he, and I gladly made haste to get 
 ready a sheet, in the beginning of which I wrote 
 what he bade me ; and on that same day I wrote 
 therein, as I had anticipated, no less than three other 
 quotations which pleased him ; and from that time 
 we daily talked together and found out other quota- 
 tions which pleased him, so that the sheet became 
 full, and deservedly so, according as it is written, 
 ' The just man builds upon a moderate foundation, 
 and by degrees passes to greater things ; ' thus, like 
 a most productive bee, he flew here and there asking 
 questions as he went, until he had with unceasing 
 eagerness collected many various flowers of Divine 
 Scriptures, wherewith he thickly stored the cells of 
 his mind. Now, when that first quotation was copied, 
 he was eager at once to read and to interpret in 
 Saxon, and then to teach others ; even as we read 
 of that happy robber, who recognised his Lord, ay, 
 the Lord of men, as He was hanging on the blessed
 
 54 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 cross, and saluting Him with his bodily eyes only, 
 because elsewhere He was all pierced with nails, 
 cried, ' Lord, remember me when Thou comest into 
 Thy kingdom ! ' ; for it was only at the end of his life 
 that he began to learn the rudiments of the Christian 
 faith." 
 
 It has been said that the literature founded by 
 Alfred was that of Anglo-Saxon prose. Mythical 
 tradition, at once the despair and reward of the 
 student of a great character, has been busy here; 
 but the following account of the various works 
 associated with Alfred's name pretends to be reliable. 
 It is proposed to examine with careful but brief 
 attention to detail three or four of these works, and 
 then to discuss rapidly those less authenticated or 
 less interesting. 
 
 I. The History of Orosius.i 
 
 In selecting this comprehensive histor}- of the 
 world for translation into the Anglo-Saxon tongue, 
 Alfred presented to his people a product of late 
 Roman literature, but a work of much information, 
 and compiled by a remarkable man. Paulus Orosius, 
 like Seneca and other men of letters before him, was 
 a Roman Spaniard. Born at Tarragona in the latter 
 half of the fourth century after Christ, he was educated 
 
 ' The only ancient MS. version is in the Cottonian Library 
 (Brit. Miis.), marked Tiberius B. i. ; it is a beautiful MS. by 
 an illiterate scribe, of not later than the tenth century. An 
 edition was published in 1773 by Daines Barrington and 
 Reinhold Foster. In 1855 the Rev. J. Bosworth, D.D., 
 published a literal English translation, with a facsimile and 
 the Ani^lo-Saxon text.
 
 ALFRED AS MAX OF LETTERS 55 
 
 in Spain, and travelled in Africa, where he became a 
 pupil of the voluminous scholar St. Augustine, Bishop 
 of Hippo Regius. In 415 he was advised by his 
 master to journey into Palestine, and he carried 
 with him a letter of introduction to St. Jerome at 
 Bethlehem, which is still extant.^ The reply of St. 
 Jerome shews that he too was struck by the talents 
 and personality of Orosius, whose errand related to 
 a discussion of the origin of the soul. The young 
 scholar had already been consulted by " beatissimus 
 pater Augustinus " (as he calls him), on the materials 
 for the famous " City of God," written to defend 
 Christian revelation from the indignant attacks of 
 the Romans, who attributed the sacking of Rome 
 by Alaric in 410 to the incursion of Christianity. 
 Orosius's own history, employed by Alfred after a 
 lapse of nearly five centuries as a book of national 
 education, was written as a pendant to the more 
 religious work of St. Augustine, to whom it was 
 dedicated. 
 
 The compendious and catholic nature of the 
 history bears witness to the liberal range of the 
 sympathies of Orosius, who speaks thus of himself: 
 " Inter Romanos, ut dixi, Romanus, inter Christianos 
 Christianus, inter homines homo. Utor temporarie 
 omni terra quasi patria." 2 As an encyclopaedic 
 history the work has a distinct value, in spite of 
 errors and superstitions. The peculiar and charac- 
 
 ' St. Augustine's Works, Letter 165. The reply of St. 
 Jerome is Letter 94 of his Works. 
 
 - I.e., "Among Romans I count myself a Roman, among 
 Christians a Christian, among men their fellow man. I hold 
 as fatherland every country that occasion gives me."
 
 56 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 teristic care devoted to the Anglo-Saxon edition 
 shows that Alfred and his advisers regarded it as 
 an important vehicle of information. It is placed 
 first in the list of works given by William of 
 Malmesbury in the twelfth century, when, speaking 
 of Alfred, he says : " Plurimam partem Romanae 
 bibliothecae Anglorum auribus dedit, opimam pra^- 
 dam peregrinarum mercium civibus usibus con- 
 vectans." ^ One can scarcel)- agree with Dr. Pauli's 
 opinion that the Anglo-Saxon version is " far more 
 interesting in the present day than that of Boethius"; 
 but the following references to the work show how 
 liberal a book of education it must have been. 
 
 As M. Jusserand justly notes, Alfred uses much 
 liberty in dealing with the Latin authors. In a 
 word, he played the editor. A comparison of his 
 version with a Latin text shows the original and 
 bold nature of his treatment.^ Not only were new 
 illustrative clauses and sentences frequently added, 
 but the arrangement of the work is altered ; the 
 main design is kept, the seven books of the original 
 become six, and the dedication and several chapters 
 are omitted. In the opening especially there is 
 much new matter concerning the geography of 
 Europe, which well shows how Alfred enhanced 
 the value of the work for his people. The chapter 
 in Orosius " De diluvio sub Noe " is curiously omitted. 
 
 ' I.e., " He gave a good part of Roman literature to English 
 readers, dedicating to the use of his own subjects the rich 
 spoil of foreign traffic." 
 
 - The reputation of the work is shown by the fact that as 
 early as 1471 it was printed in German}^ "per Johannem 
 Schiiszler," as Havercamp tells us in his quarto edition printed 
 at Ley den in 1767.
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 
 
 D/ 
 
 To the account of the passage of the Red Sea Alfred 
 adds " Geames and Mambres " as the names of the 
 Egyptian magi, clearly variants of the " lammes and 
 Manbres " of Wiclif's version of 1380, and of the 
 " Jannes and Jambres " of our Authorised Version. 
 Alfred moralises, after his own manner and that of 
 Englishmen after him, upon the story of Joseph : 
 
 " It is a wonder that the Egyptians felt so little 
 thanks to Joseph for his having rid them of the 
 famine, that they soon dishonoured his kindred, and 
 made them all their slaves. So also it is still in all 
 the world : if God, for a very long time, grants anyone 
 his will, and He then takes it away for a less time, 
 he soon forgets the good which he had before, and 
 thinks upon the evil which he then hath." 
 
 As to the Greek heroes, Tantalus, Pelops, Dar- 
 danus, Atreus, Thyestes, and CEdipus, we read that 
 "the very stars of heaven fled from their wickedness." 
 The first book closes with a contribution of yet two 
 more dates, odd in their erratic precision, to the 
 chronology of Rome : that Rome was built 4,482 
 years after the beginning of the world, and that 
 Christ was born 710 years after its building. 
 
 The second book, after a slight reference to the 
 creation of the world and man's early sin, embarks 
 upon histories of the Roman, Bab}'lonian and Persian 
 Empires. In the famous story of the repulse of the 
 Persians by the Greeks, a little known and perhaps 
 apocryphal saying of Leonidas, the hero of Ther- 
 mopylae, is preserved ; he cheered his three hundred 
 Spartans to a meal before the fight with the words, 
 " Let us now enjoy this dinner, as those ought who
 
 S^ ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 must take their supper in another world." But the 
 book is chiefly noteworthy for the original insertion 
 by Alfred into the narrative of Orosius of accounts of 
 a Roman triumph, described with some detail, and of 
 the first appointment of a senate, fancifully ascribed 
 to Romulus. It is impossible to find the sources 
 whence this new information was obtained. Hearsay 
 of scholars or the writing of some other Roman 
 author is more probable than the King's memory of 
 his childhood's travel ; but doubtless his earl}' im- 
 pressions of Rome gave an enhanced interest to the 
 study of her histor\\i 
 
 In the third book }'et another insertion concerning 
 Rome is to be noted in an account of the Temple of 
 Janus, which Alfred adds to the narrative of the for- 
 tunes of Alexander of Macedon, called b)- Orosius 
 " ille gurges miseriarum atque atrocissimus turbo 
 totius Orientis." 
 
 It is strange that in the fifth book finto which the 
 fifth and sixth of the original Latin work are com- 
 pressed) Alfred and his advisers should have omitted 
 much of the history of the famous period of the 
 Roman Republic as rendered by Orosius. We have, 
 as it were, items of compensation in a story told of 
 Cato, and in a warning addressed by Julius Caesar to 
 Pompey in Thessaly : " Comrade, comrade, see that 
 thou dost not too long break our agreement and 
 
 ' That Alfred went to Rome in 853, a child of four, is further 
 proved by a letter recently discovered, "written by Leo IV., 
 the reigning Pope in the year 853, and addressed to King 
 -.^thelwulf, the father of Alfred, announcing the safe arrival 
 of the boy" (Professor Earle in "Alfred the Great," 1899, p.
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 59 
 
 fellowship " ; above all — whether from tradition or 
 some chance of early archaeology we cannot say — 
 Alfred contributes a point to our knowledge of 
 Caesar's campaign in Britain in identifying Walling- 
 ford as the place where the third defeat was inflicted 
 on the Britons. 
 
 From the date of the fall of the Republic onwards, 
 the Anglo-Saxon version is a meagre epitome of the 
 work of Orosius. But enough is rendered to show 
 how the early fortunes of Christianity became inter- 
 woven with those of declining Rome, and how soon 
 the subtle influence of religious emotion allowed 
 legend to modify rather than illustrate the course of 
 sober history. We read, as the subjects of Alfred 
 were taught to read, that Tiberius was " forgiving 
 and mild until, upon hearing from Pilate about the 
 miracles and martyrdom of Jesus, he enraged the 
 senate, and so embarked on a tyrannical rule, which 
 ended in his death by poison." 
 
 2. The History of Bede. 
 
 In the version of this first history of England by 
 an Englishman, Alfred used the same treatment as 
 in the translation of Orosius. His care was less to 
 make a literal and verbal rendering than to present 
 to his people a substantially. correct version of the 
 previous history of their land, intelligible in their 
 own tongue. The facts, however, of Bede's own 
 nationality, and that scarcely a century and a half 
 had elapsed since his death, made it less necessary
 
 60 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 for Alfred, with this educational end in view, to insert 
 alterations and additions.^ 
 
 The remote figure of the Venerable Bede of 
 Jarrow {c. 675-735) is well known to students of 
 English history, of which he is the father. It is 
 enough here to say that " The Ecclesiastical History of 
 the English Nation " 2 was his chief legacy to a pos- 
 terity which has ever regarded it as a noble monu- 
 ment of ear]}' scholarship, written with considerable 
 elegance of Latin style, and containing much that is 
 valuable in the compilation of history. That myths 
 are recorded uncritically, that the narrative runs 
 astray in particularities, and that the sense of his- 
 torical perspective is ill-preserved, are the normal 
 incidents of infant literature. 
 
 The history begins with the landing of Julius 
 CsEsar, and is continued to the year 731, about four 
 years prior to Bede's death. In dedicating his work 
 to Keolwulf, King of Northumbria, Bede begs for the 
 intercession of his readers with God as a " meed of 
 their recompence, as I have earnestly toiled to write 
 concerning sundry provinces, or the higher places 
 which I believed mind-worthy and to the inhabitants 
 thank-worthy." He opens with an account of Britain 
 and Ireland, and his tribute to the latter deserves to 
 be quoted : 
 
 ' There are two good MSS. of this version — one at Corpus 
 Christi College, Cambridge (MS. 41), and one in the Cambridge 
 University Library. The Cotton MS. (Otho, B. xi.) has been 
 burnt. 
 
 ~ The first printed edition of Bede's Latin work dates from 
 1474 (by Conrad Fyner, of Esling), and is a book of extreme 
 rarity. Alfred's version, accompanied by the original Latin, 
 was first published b}^ Wheloe at Cambridge, in -1644, and 
 again in 1722 by Canon Smith, of Durham.
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 6 1 
 
 "There snow seldom lies longer than three days, 
 and no man mows hay in summer for winter's cold, 
 nor builds stalls for his cattle, nor is any sneaking or 
 venomous worm seen there, nor may any adder live 
 there ; for adders were brought from Britain in ships, 
 but as soon as they smelt the air of the land they 
 died." 
 
 He records the Roman invasions with some care, 
 and assigns to the year 156 A.D. an important fact in 
 the history of British Christianity, which, if we are 
 to credit the authority of the writer, it is difficult to 
 reconcile with the usual story of the coming of that 
 faith to our shores. Bede says that in that year, 
 when Marcus Antoninus was Emperor and Eleu- 
 therios Bishop of Rome, Lucius, King of Britain, 
 wrote to the latter asking to be made a Christian ; 
 that he received baptism, and " the Britons held that 
 [faith] in mild peace until the time of Diocletian, the 
 evil Emperor." The first bringing of Christianity 
 into Britain is generally placed in the first years of 
 the fourth century {i.e., the last years of Diocletian's 
 reign), as then introduced by merchants and soldiers ;i 
 whereas Bede, followed without note or correction by 
 Alfred and his scholars, assigns the fact to the middle 
 of the second century, for, whichever Emperor is 
 meant, Antoninus Titus Pius ruled from 138 to 161, 
 xAntoninus Marcus Aurelius from 161 to 180.2 There 
 
 ' *Tn 314 three British hishops attended a council held at 
 Aries in Gaul " (S. K. Gardiner, i. 23). 
 
 ^ It is to be noted that tlie writer of the passage in question, 
 whether Bede himself or a later interpolator, is very precise 
 in some dates, c.<^., in saying that " Diocletian had the empire 
 twenty years " (which was so, viz., 285 to 305).
 
 62 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 is a Winchester tradition, unsupported by any 
 archaeological discovery, that about 170 a church 
 was built in that city by the same King Lucius, said 
 to have been a lineal descendant of the British chief 
 Caractacus, who was defeated by Ostorius Scapula in 
 50 A.D. Greater interest attaches to the recent dis- 
 coveries at the Roman cit)^ of Silchester (Calleva). 
 There a building has been laid bare in the east 
 corner, which, belonging to the fourth century, is said 
 to be neither civil basilica nor pagan temple, but is 
 perhaps the earliest Christian edifice in the country.^ 
 In default, however, of additional evidence in support 
 of this or in illustration of the otherwise unknown 
 King Lucius, the interesting question m.ust still 
 remain open. 
 
 Among other events of their earliest annals thus 
 first, made accessible by the careful wisdom of xA.lfred 
 to the laity of his kingdom, are the coming of St. 
 Augustine, the well-known story of " non Angli, sed 
 Angeli," and the divine gift of song to Cctdmon. 
 Ca^dmon enjoys the distinction of being the first- 
 known Anglo-Saxon poet. Some time before the 
 death of the abbess Hilda in 680 he was attached as 
 a neat-herd to her abbey at \Vhitb\'. Bede narrates 
 that, when advanced in years and shrinking from the 
 merry feasting in the holy house, he was one night 
 greeted in a dream by a visitant who bade him sing 
 of the Creation. The unlettered peasant burst at 
 once into song : 
 
 ' See "Archceoloi>ia, " liii., part 2 (1893), pp. 539 //. ; and see 
 an article by Loftns Hrock in " Archa^olo^ia Cantiana," xv. 
 (1883), p. 38.
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 63 
 
 " Now we owe to praise the Warden of heaven's 
 kingdom, the Maker's might, and his mood-thought, 
 the works of the glorious Father ; how of all wonders 
 the eternal Lord installed the beginning. The holy 
 Creator first shaped heaven for a roof to earth's chil- 
 dren ; then the Warden of mankind, Eternal Lord, 
 Almighty Master, afterwards made the earth a fold 
 for men." ^ 
 
 The legend continues that *' the abbess began to 
 cherish and love the grace of God in the man " who 
 had received this boon, and gladly received him into 
 her monastery ; there " all that he learnt by hearing 
 he remembered by himself, and, as a clean beast 
 chewing the cud, converted it into the sweetest verse, 
 and his songs were so winsome to hear, that his 
 teachers themselves wrote and learnt them from his 
 mouth." - 
 
 It is interesting to note a few of the equivalents in 
 the Anglo-Saxon version for the Latin words and 
 phrases of Bede. Oraculuin is rendered " God- 
 spraece" {cf. God-spell); to correspond with aiiiici, 
 priucipes, consiliarii, we have " freondum," " ealdor- 
 mannum," " witum " ; " priests and laymen " are 
 " beshorn " and " lewd " ; ecdesiastica Veritas can be 
 rendered as " kirkly soothfastness " ; and " truth " is 
 
 ' There are MSS. at Ely (?) and Corpus Christi College, 
 Oxon, besides the two at Cambridge already quoted. See 
 Caidmon's "Metrical Paraphrase of Parts of the Holy 
 Scripture," translated by B. Thorpe (1832). 
 
 - A cross has been dedicated to Caedmon's memory on the 
 Abbey hill at Whitby, by the Poet Laureate of 1898. As J. R. 
 Green has said, " the stern grandeur of the spot blends fitly 
 with the thought of the poet who broke its stillness with the 
 first great song that English singci- had wrought since our 
 fathers came to Britain."
 
 64 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 said to be " dear-worther " than all treasures. So 
 pretioso sanguine redeniisti becomes " mid deorwurthum 
 blode alysdest." 
 
 3. BoETHius' Consolation of Philosophy. 
 
 The literary labours of Alfred culminate in his 
 version of this famous work.^ The reputation of the 
 original and his peculiarly interesting treatment of it 
 justify a notice of it which is to be regarded not so 
 much as disproportionate in length as in harmony 
 with the well-balanced care which Alfred devoted to 
 it. It is in his diligent and sympathetic attention to 
 this work that this Prince of a small and scarcely 
 enlightened nation anticipated the scholastic and 
 widely extended culture of the later renascence of 
 learning. In adding a version of the "Consolation" to 
 the histories of Orosius and Bede and the other 
 works in his Anglo-Saxon librar\', Alfred introduced 
 to his people, however prematurely, a treatise wide in 
 its philosophy and deep in introspection. It ranks 
 in nature with the Psalms of the Hebrews and the 
 
 ' There are two MSS. of Alfred's Anglo-Saxon version of 
 Boethius. The inferior MS., entirely in prose, is in the 
 Bodleian Library at Oxford (MS. Bodl. 180, sec. xii.). The 
 better is at the British Museum (MS. Cotton.. Otho, A. vi.), 
 much damaged by the burning of the Cotton Library in 1731 ; 
 it has been most skilfully mended, in 1844. Preyioiisly to this 
 S. Fox published his " King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon Version of the 
 Metres of Boethius" (London, 1835), having used an edition 
 printed at Oxford in 1698 ; but the same author's version of 
 the whole "Consolatio," published at London in 1864, gives the 
 variations of the two collated MSS. According to Wanley 
 (Catal. Lib. MSS., p. 80), another MS. was in the library of 
 Bishop Leofric of Exeter, about the middle of the eleventh 
 century.
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 65 
 
 Reflections of Marcus Aurelius. If it is now less 
 known than either, it once enjoyed a repute which 
 has fallen to the lot of few writers of antiquity. 
 
 It is proposed to speak first of Boethius himself, 
 and of the reputation of his chief work, and then to 
 examine the share of Alfred in handing on its fame. 
 Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was a Roman 
 aristocrat, who was sole Consul in 510 A.D. He 
 adorned his high civil position with the accomplish- 
 ments of music, poetry, oratory and philosophy. His 
 wife, two gifted sons, and a circle of cultured friends 
 gave him domestic happiness, and he enjoyed the 
 favour of Theodoric the Goth, then master of Italy 
 and Rome. About 523 this prosperity came to a 
 hideous end ; he was flung into prison at Pavia, 
 stripped of all ; within a year he was foully done to 
 death. 
 
 Tyranny had been unable to rob its captive of his 
 store of learning and his power of reflection. He 
 employed the months of imprisonment in composing 
 a book which in a sense may be called the " Pilgrim's 
 Progress" of the Middle Ages. The work, as we shall 
 see, was steeped deeply in philosophy and religion ; 
 its consolation and inspiration, if austere and un- 
 emotional, are powers of influence. On the one hand, 
 it was the last great utterance, not only of the learn- 
 ing of Rome, but of that classical world of letters 
 which, created in Greece, is the empire of all sub- 
 sequent thought ; on the other, we note in it traces 
 of quaint notions and personal idioms which show 
 how closely Boethius came to the beginning of medi- 
 aeval literature. His work preserved the wisdom of 
 
 6
 
 66 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 Plato and Aristotle, and its history shows the debt 
 owed to him, through the media of vernacular trans- 
 lations, by the cause of culture in Europe. x^s 
 M. Jusserand says, " No work was more famous in 
 the Middle Ages ; it helped to spread the taste for 
 abstract personages, owing to which so many shadows, 
 men-virtues and men-vices, were to tread the boards 
 of the mediaeval stage, and the strange plays called 
 Moralities were to enjoy a lasting popularity " ; ^ and 
 Gibbon called it " a golden volume not unworthy of 
 the leisure of Plato or Tully, but which claims incom- 
 parable merit from the barbarism of the times and 
 the situation of the author." 
 
 Some idea of this fame of a work which is now 
 seldom spoken of may be gathered from the follow- 
 ing outline, no less than from the fact that the 
 Catalogue of the British Museum Library shows 
 some hundreds of entries under " Boethius " belong- 
 ing to every age and race. The Old English poems 
 of" Beowulf," attributed to the eighth centur\% contain 
 passages which closely echo the reflections in the 
 " Consolation." In the eighth century, Paul the Deacon 
 in his appendices to Eutropius, and in the ninth 
 century Hincmar, the Archbishop of Rheims, both 
 refer to its author as a Catholic philosopher. In the 
 ninth century Alfred made his memorable version 
 into Anglo-Saxon, so that, as Ethelwerd says, writing 
 in the eleventh century, *' the sorrowful book of 
 Boethius seemed, not only to the learned, but even 
 to those who heard it read, as it were brought to life 
 
 ' "A Literary History of the English People" (London, 
 T895), p. 84.
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 6/ 
 
 again." To the early part of the eleventh century 
 belongs the old High-German version by Notker, 
 and the Provencal " Boece." In the thirteenth 
 century we have the Anglo-Norman " Roman de 
 Fortune" of Simun de Fraisne, and the French trans- 
 lation of Jehan de Meun. In the fourteenth there 
 are the French versions of Pierre de Paris (late 
 thirteenth ?), Jehan de Lis, Frere Renaut de Louhans, 
 and another anonymous ; the Italian versions of 
 Alberto della Piagentina and others ; the Greek of 
 Maximus Planudes ; the Spanish of Fra Antonio 
 Ginebreda ; and the English version of Chaucer, 
 besides his references in " Troylus " and other poems. 
 The splendid tribute of this century is voiced 
 by Dante, who places Boethius in Paradise and puts 
 his eulogy into the lips of St. Thomas /\quinas.i 
 In the traditions of the fifteenth century, Boethius 
 becomes wholly a Christian martyr, and, as St. 
 Severin, is put into the Calendar of the Saints. 
 New versions of the "Consolation" appear in England 
 and Germany, the works respectively of John the 
 Chaplain and Peter of Kastl. In the eighteenth 
 century there were published no less than four 
 English versions by Lord Preston, Causton, Ridpath 
 and Duncan. i\fter an interval of nearly a hundred 
 years, a scholarly translation has recently appeared 
 from the pen of H. R. James. 
 
 In turning to the work itself, one dwells upon the 
 thought that it most probably made a peculiar appeal 
 
 ' In Canto X. of the " Paracliso." It is a literary coincidence 
 of some interest that Dante refers in this very passage to the 
 three authors of whose works Alfred published Anglo-Saxon 
 versions, namely, Orosius, Boethius and Bede.
 
 68 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 to the mind of Alfred, and was a potent factor in the 
 development of his character. It was not only in- 
 herently natural that a work of such scope and already 
 notorious should be prized by Alfred as soon as it 
 came under his eager and adventurous intelligence ; 
 but his attentive treatment of it, which is presently 
 to be noticed, proves that in a special sense he en- 
 dorsed what he did not alter or adapt, and so made 
 the work his own. We know little of the inner life 
 of Alfred, beyond what the records of his outward 
 acts supply for lawful imagination ; we can only 
 conceive his wrestlings with the powers of misfortune 
 and despair, whether in public calamities or agonies 
 of the inward spirit. We learn from Asser that 
 Alfred sought relief in prayer made to his Maker, 
 but there is little, almost nothing, which can be added 
 to the actual utterances in tribulation and devotion 
 of those few great souls whose words will ever comfort 
 and inspire humanity. It is in his version of the 
 " Consolation " that we come most closely to this side 
 of Alfred's personality ; this is the work which most 
 of all those that passed through his hands reflects 
 the character which it helped to form. It is on these 
 grounds fitting to describe the range and nature of 
 the work as it came to him, for only thus can we 
 fairly appreciate the modifications which appear in 
 his version. 
 
 The theme of Boethius is the right and power of 
 Philosophy to console those who, conscious of the 
 transient nature of human happiness, remain stead- 
 fast in misfortunes.^ He describes himself as visited 
 
 'The reader is referred to the essay on "Boethius" by Mr.
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 69 
 
 in his gloomy prison by the austere and awful figure 
 of Philosophy, the hem of whose raiment is em- 
 broidered with 11 and 9, the initials of " practical " 
 and " theoretical " wisdom. She claims her right to 
 expel the enervating Muses, reproves his gloomy 
 depression, and promises to cure him of his woe. 
 He recognises the friend and nurse of his early years, 
 and makes his complaint. Philosophy bids him to 
 bare his inmost heart, that he may slowly learn the 
 One Omnipotent God. At this point, with the 
 second book, Philosophy begins her discipline. She 
 states, dogmatically rather than by demonstration, 
 that he has no right to blame Fortune as a fickle 
 mistress. It is true that money, jewels, physical 
 beauties, position, power, even (bitter wormwood for 
 Boethius!) a great name, are all deceitful. There is 
 happiness, but these do not make it ; true happiness 
 lies within the man himself. It is the supreme good, 
 which all humanity, more or less consciously, craves 
 to attain. 
 
 It is thus that Boethius arrives at the exposition of 
 a theistic creed, in which are blended, not so closely 
 that the elements are not separately obvious, the 
 conclusions of the schools of Plato, Aristotle, and 
 the Stoics. Boethius is, indeed, a confirmed eclectic. 
 If his treatise is intensely artificial, if every page 
 smells of the lamp, it is not so much because he 
 shows no spontaneous promptings of a Christian 
 instinct, as that he aims, in a student frame of mind, 
 
 Stewart, published in 1891, for a discussion of the desire and 
 title of Boethius to be called a Christian. His minor works 
 include tracts upon the Trinity, the Catholic Faith, and the 
 Divine Substances.
 
 70 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 at reconciling the views of the intellectual schools. 
 His subject determines his treatment. We see this 
 clearly in his words upon predestination, where he 
 knows nothing (for his present purpose) of " the 
 spiritual body" of the New Testament, but subscribes 
 to the Platonic belief in an immortality of the soul 
 only ; or, again, in his conception of " the God," 
 where he imagines, not "the loving Father," but such 
 a physical parent of the universe as Plato portra\-s in 
 the "Timaius." He knows nothing here of a sinful 
 world redeemed by a Messiah ; evil is to him, as to 
 Plato, a semblance, an unreality, an accident, the 
 fruit of man's inconsistent and disobedient freewill. 
 It is a mistake, so Philosophy teaches, to infer from 
 the fact that the good are often oppressed that evil 
 has a real existence. The wicked miss the grood, for 
 they start with false notions of its nature and ignorant 
 of the wa)' ; they are not really rewarded, for they 
 not only lose good, but their power is only power 
 over evil, which is less than nothing ; they do not 
 really exist, for they violate the law of their nature in 
 disobeying the natural impulse towards good and in 
 acting without order ; they are punished in both the 
 will and the power to work evil, and in the accom- 
 plishment of the same, and the punishment is brought 
 b}- either unexpected ruin or the release of death. 
 
 In his conceptions of the universe, of the unreality 
 of accident, and of the practical aim of an ethical 
 system, Boethius reflects his study of Aristotle even 
 more closely than that of Plato. Fate may be flexible, 
 modified for each individual b)' his own exercise of 
 w^ill ; but Fortune is distinct, for while appearing
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 7 1 
 
 capricious to man's limited intelligence, she is really 
 rather to be welcomed as the instrument of God, our 
 good and wise Governor. The function of philosophy 
 is to demonstrate the immutable providence of a God 
 in whom happiness resides, of whom accident cannot 
 be predicated, and who allows mortal men, by a 
 certain hardly-earned participation in that happiness, 
 to attain to a share of divinity. Such a God neither 
 can do evil Himself nor leaves anything to wilful 
 chance. He is the endless order of cause and effect, 
 to which no chance is really an exception, but " the 
 unexi^ected event of an action brought about by a 
 confluence of causes foreign to the object proposed." 
 Such chances, seeming to be the fruit of man's wilful 
 acts, are to be deemed a means of God's chastisement, 
 and are really evidence for rather than against the 
 compatibility of man's freewill with God's foreknow- 
 ledge in a universe where nothing exists without its 
 proper cause. x-\ll fortune, seeming good or ill, is 
 really to be welcomed as coming out of God's bounti- 
 ful purpose. The true way for the man whose prudent 
 desire is to advance towards virtue is the middle way 
 between ill-fortune, which might overwhelm him, and 
 good-fortune, which might undermine. 
 
 Such, in barest summary, is the doctrine which 
 foreign monks brought to the student King of an 
 untutored nation. It would be foolish to imagine 
 that the people could be quickly trained to appreciate 
 what appeals rather to the intellect than to the heart ; 
 but Alfred's earnest forethought saw in the treatise a 
 powerful factor of future education. Even more than 
 in the versions of Orosius and Bede, he took liberties
 
 7^ ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 with the text, and made additions out of the store of 
 his classical reading ; he pours the material into his 
 own moulds. M. Jusserand, indeed, goes so far as to 
 say that " under his pen the vague Christianity of 
 Boethius becomes a naive and superabundant faith. 
 Each episode is moralised ; the affected elegance of 
 the model disappears, and gives place to an almost 
 childlike and yet captivating sincerity." But this 
 estimate, it must be admitted, appears to overstate 
 the case, although only in the degree of its apprecia- 
 tion. A careful study of the original of Boethius 
 (which is not our present theme) rather shows that its 
 philosophic faith is not so Christian in its tone as to 
 be fairly called even " vague." Its reflections and its 
 aspirations alike are as unchristian as are those of 
 the Dialogues of Plato. In the second place, the 
 distinctly Christian shades of reasoning and feeling 
 which appear in Alfred's version are not so deep or 
 so all-pervading as to show that the whole was 
 thoroughly imbued w^ith the new temper. It is as if 
 here and there in the intervals of a philosophy, the 
 full tenour of which he could scarcely appreciate, this 
 earnest Prince of humble scholarship threw a light 
 spray from the fountain of his creed upon some 
 passage or some phrase which grew like a flower 
 of speech. We can readily conceive that the 
 enthusiastic Alfred regretted the lack of spiritual 
 fervour in the cool meditations of Boethius. The 
 measured dialectic of a sage and an abstract person- 
 age has no such human warmth and humour 
 as the Psalms of the Hebrews. Boethius, Roman 
 patrician, the witness of a dying empire, had
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 73 
 
 no such appeal to deliver as Isaiah ; his work was of 
 the student's closet, introspective and almost selfish. 
 To Alfred, thrilled with the anxieties of a kingdom 
 to which he was giving system and vitality, the 
 " Consolatio " must have appeared a strange work ; 
 but he meditated its good things in his wisdom, and 
 gave it out to the teachers of his people, altered, 
 perhaps, by alien notions, but adorned by the reflec- 
 tions of his genius. 
 
 The precise nature of his treatment of the work 
 can be inferred from a few typical references. It is 
 to be noted, in passing, that he substitutes "Wisdom" 
 and " Reason " for the symbolic " Philosophy," while 
 the other partner in the dialogue is styled variously 
 "I," "The Third," and " Boethius." It is in the 
 " Christianisation " of particular phrases that the 
 creed of the translator appears. "The City of Truth" 
 becomes " the heavenly Jerusalem." In the last 
 book " the higher divine essences " are translated 
 " angels." Boethius' simile of the Roman racecourse 
 is capped by the quotation from St. Paul, " All run, 
 but one receiveth the prize." The heaping by the 
 giants of Pelion upon Ossa suggests the Tower of 
 Babel, and the eruption of ^Etna the Deluge. Christ, 
 never mentioned by the Roman sage, is called by the 
 Saxon King " the wise man's harbour of refuge." 
 Finally, the end of the fifth book (which, containing 
 as it does a long and closely argued discussion of the 
 deep problems of freewill and foreknowledge, is very 
 much condensed in the Anglo-Saxon version) is 
 closed by Alfred with a pious prayer to his Maker, 
 whom he beseeches " by His great mercy, and by the
 
 74 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 sign of the Holy Cross, and by the virginity of St. 
 Mary, and by the obedience of St. Michael, and by 
 the love of all the saints and their merits." 
 
 The learning of Alfred is further evinced by various 
 points which he adds as occasion arises. He intro- 
 duces his version to his non-Roman readers by a 
 brief narrative of Boethius' story and his persecution 
 by Theodoric. The latter, together with other 
 despots like Nero, is heartily condemned. Where 
 Boethius cites simply Cicero, Alfred quaintly adds 
 that he was sometimes called Marcus, by others 
 Tullius. When Boethius sings of Homer's hymn to 
 Phoebus " the true sun," Alfred explains that Homer 
 may be considered " the master " of the better-known 
 Roman Vergil. His geographical tastes lead him to 
 comment on the references to /Etna and Circe's 
 Island. In translating the allusions to the myths, 
 Alfred exhibits a display of classical lore which is 
 really surprising, as in the mention of the labours of 
 Hercules, Busiris, the Hydra, Circe and Orpheus. 
 One instance is especially noteworthy : Boethius, 
 chanting the vanity of transient glory, cries : 
 
 " Where arc now the bones of staunch Fabricius r '' 
 Alfred turns it thus : 
 
 " Where are now the bones of the wise smith Weland ? " 
 substituting the name of the Vulcan of Northern 
 mythology, which would be more familiar to his 
 people. It is this Weland whose smithy is still to be 
 visited by the pious in a copse on the Berkshire 
 downs near the White Horse Vale, and is recorded in 
 Sir Walter Scott's " Kenilworth." ' 
 ' See below, p. 98.
 
 ALFRED AS MAM OF LETTERS 75 
 
 It is again impossible to say whether the version is 
 wholly the work of Alfred as it stands. William of 
 Malmesbury says the King made the Anglo-Saxon 
 translation, while xAsser produced a commentary 
 upon the work.^ The original consists of mingled 
 prose and verse, this fashion of composition being 
 called Satura Menippcea, and dating from the time of 
 Cicero. It is a question whether the translation of 
 the metres, which certainly follows the Latin more 
 closely than does the rendering of the prose, dates 
 from Alfred's time. Guillaume Guizot,^ discussing 
 the dispute between Sharon Turner and Martin 
 Tupper (the latter of whom made a careful and dull 
 attempt to render faithfully what he believed to be 
 Alfred's own verse), ascribes it to an obscure writer of 
 the tenth century, and he bases his opinion upon a 
 careful study of the text and of the alliterative and 
 other qualities of Alfred's real prose. " Three times," 
 he says, " Alfred has forgotten to mark the places 
 where the Latin text is in verse by his usual formula. 
 Then Philosophy began to sing.' Three times the 
 poor poet, ignorant of the Latin text, passes on 
 blindly. On the other hand, he versifies the 
 historical sketch of the life of Boethius and the 
 preface by i\lfred. Whenever he has a chance of not 
 understanding what Alfred has written, and of adding 
 a mistake, our unknown friend does not fail to betray 
 himself. When Alfred calls Homer ' the master ' — 
 that is to say, the model — of Vergil, the other boldly 
 
 ^ " Hie (Asscrj sensum libroruni Boetii Dc Coiisolationc 
 planioribus verbis cnodavit, quosrex ipse in Anglicam linguam 
 vertit." 
 
 - "Alfred le Grand," p. 214.
 
 76 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 puts 'the friend of Vergil' — a slight error in chrono- 
 logy! When Alfred calls Ulysses King of Ithaca 
 and Rhaitia, the other puts ' King of Rhaetia and 
 Thrace/ which makes Ulysses entirely dispossessed 
 of his island which he so long searched for and so 
 painfully regained. So that it is not the apocryphal 
 version of this clumsy poet, but the own prose of 
 Alfred, which should be compared with the verses of 
 Boethius." 
 
 The main work is undeniably stamped with Alfred's 
 personality, and the fact adds lustre to the fame of 
 Boethius. The spirit of it well expresses that in 
 which he lived his noble life : 
 
 " Friends come with wealth and again with wealth 
 go away, except very few. . . . The few \\-ho before 
 loved one for affection and for fidelity, these would 
 nevertheless love him, though he were poor. These 
 remain to him." 
 
 And again : 
 
 " Desirest thou power ? But thou shalt never 
 obtain it without sorrows — sorrows from strange folk, 
 and yet keener sorrows from thine own kindred. . . . 
 Hardship and sorrow ! not a king but would wish to 
 be without these if he could. But I know that he 
 cannot ! " 
 
 And then, in a louder note of proud and righteous 
 triumph : 
 
 *' Every craft and every power soon becomes old, 
 and is passed over in silence, if it be without wisdom. 
 . . . This is now especially to be said, that I wished 
 to live honourably whilst I lived, and, after my life.
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS JJ 
 
 to leave to the men who were after me my memory 
 in "-ood works." 
 
 4. Gregory's " Pastoral Care." 
 
 A work to which Alfred attached great importance 
 was the translation of the " Pastoral Care " of Pope 
 Gregory. He had copies of it sent to all his Bishops, 
 and three at least of these are still extant, those of 
 the Bishops of Worcester, Canterbury, and Sherborne.^ 
 Each copy of the treatise was accompanied by a 
 circular letter of the King, prudently recommending 
 the translation of " useful books into the language 
 which we all understand ; so that all the youth of 
 England, but more especially those who are of gentle- 
 kind and at ease in their circumstances, may be 
 grounded in letters, for they cannot profit in any 
 pursuit until they are well able to read English." 2 
 
 These are remarkable words, which with a persua- 
 sive authority of their own seem more than any 
 others that we read to come straight from the pen of 
 Alfred. They are in marked contrast to the involved 
 and sophistical terms of a letter addressed by Char- 
 lemagne in 787, under similar circumstances, to the 
 Bishops of his empire.3 In another passage the King 
 
 ' Anglo-Saxon MSS. preserved in the Bodleian Librar}^ at 
 Oxford, and at Trinity and Corpus Christi Colleges at Cam- 
 bridge. That at Oxford, which belonged to Werferth 
 of Worcester, is written in minuscule of the early tenth 
 century (Hatton MS., 20). The Cotton MS. (Otho., B. ii.), 
 which was burnt in 173 1, was prepared for Hehstan, Bishop 
 of London. 
 
 - Cited by F. Palgrave in his " History of the Anglo-Saxons," 
 1873, p. 170. 
 
 3 C/. G. Guizot, "Alfred le Grand," 1856, p. 159.
 
 yS ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 describes in graphic terms the state of ignorance into 
 which war and apathy had brought his nation : 
 
 "It (knowledge) had fallen into such total decay 
 amoncf the Encflish, that there \\ere ver\' few on the 
 other side of the Humber who understood the com- 
 mon prayers, so as to be able to tell their meaning in 
 English, or who could have translated into that 
 language a Latin passage ; and I ween there were 
 not many on this side of Humber who could do so 
 Indeed, there were so few such, that I do not even 
 recollect one to the south of the Thames, at the time I 
 succeeded to the crown. God Almighty be thanked, 
 there are now some holding Bishoprics who are 
 capable of teaching ! " 
 
 A comparison of the MS. at Oxford with the Latin 
 text shows that the rendering is more faithful than 
 in the cases of the Boethius and Orosius. One 
 hesitates to say whether or not this is an argument 
 for holding that Alfred's share in the " Pastoral Care " 
 was confined to the preface. Certainly this latter, 
 which appears impressed with an individual authen- 
 ticity, suggests that the whole version was the work 
 of the King. It begins : "King Alfred bids greet 
 Bishop Waerferth," and includes this interesting pas- 
 sage : " 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' (Hirdeboc), 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 ]\Iass-priest, and 
 John my Mass-priest."
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS jg 
 
 Alfred's interest in this treatise is so abundantly 
 plain, that a special value attaches to the high-toned 
 and sagacious aphorisms, the perusal and digestion of 
 which doubtless guided him in his public policy and 
 spiritual reflections. 
 
 " Who knows not that the wounds of the mind are 
 more hidden than the wounds of the body?" (Chapter 
 
 1.). 
 
 Does not Marcus Aurelius almost speak to Gregory, 
 and he again to Alfred ? 
 
 " In prosperity a man forgets himself; in affliction 
 he shall bethink himself, though he be unwilling. In 
 a state of security man often omits to do good ; in 
 trouble he often amends the evil that he formerly 
 did "(Chapter III.). 
 
 And again : 
 
 " Often, when a man gives up the awe and the 
 resolution which he by right should have within him 
 his mind allures him to very many an unprofitable 
 work ; ... it is with him as with the man that is 
 busied in a journey with other affairs until that he 
 knows not whither he formerly wished to go ; and he 
 cannot think what is lost to him in the delay with 
 which he mars the time, and how greatly he sins in 
 this " (Chapter IV.). 
 
 Without doubt the wise observations upon the 
 training of fit teachers chiefly induced Alfred to dis- 
 tribute copies of this " Pastoral Care." It insists that 
 the unlearned should not dare to undertake the office 
 of teacher. 
 
 " Very many a man pretends that he is a religious 
 teacher, because he desires to have much of the
 
 8o ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 world's honour. Of them Christ Himself cried out, 
 and thus said : ' They seek that one should greet 
 them the first, and honour them in the market-places 
 and at feasts, they recline foremost at the evening 
 meals, and they seek the chief seats at meetings ' " 
 (Chapter I.). 
 
 Speaking of those who wish to undertake Bishop- 
 hood, the writer says : 
 
 " If he has not yet renounced his own evil habits, 
 how ma)' he leech other men's minds, when he bears 
 man}' open wounds in his own ?" (Chapter IX.). 
 
 5. Dialogues of Pope Gregory. 
 
 The translation of these famous dialogues, filled 
 with miracles and marvellous tales, may have been 
 made by Werferth, then Bishop of Worcester.^ Asser 
 expressly mentions that " by command of the King 
 he made the first translation into the Saxon tongue 
 of the dialogues of Pope Gregory and Peter his 
 disciple, at times giving the sense of the original, 
 with a lucid and very elegant commentary upon it." 
 
 The version, when complete, was introduced by a 
 preface from the hand of Alfred, in which he recorded 
 that he had asked " minum getrywum freondum " to 
 make this translation of the miracles of the saints to 
 strengthen his spirit in adversity. The work affords 
 a good and clear example of the literary labour 
 
 ' Alfred's version exists in three MSS. of the eleventh 
 century — one in the Cotton Library, one at Oxford, one at 
 Cambridge. So Professor Earle in " Anglo-Saxon Literature," 
 1884, p. 193 ff., and in ''Alfred the Great," 1899, where he adds 
 that Herr Hecht was preparing a critical edition.
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS bl 
 
 assigned to his priests by Alfred, and carried out 
 under his auspices.^ 
 
 6. The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan. 
 
 These narratives of Arctic and Baltic exploration, 
 originally communicated to and preserved by King 
 Alfred, well illustrate the geography of his day, and 
 the state of learning in that department of science.^ 
 
 Ohthere had his home in Halgoland, in the 
 northernmost part of Norway, where he seems to 
 have had good possessions of lands and deer. His 
 personal exploration of the regions north of Norway 
 is the earliest on record. He was the first discoverer 
 of the North Cape, after doubling which he entered 
 the White Sea ; thence he sailed south to the port 
 probably of Vestfold, and crossing the Cattegat, and 
 keeping Gotland on his right, passed between Seeland 
 and Moen. He thus reached the land of the 
 Biarmians by the Baltic, frequently mentioned in the 
 Sagas. His account of Iceland, and of the Faroe, 
 Shetland and Orkney Islands is indeed confused ; 
 but, as a rule, his observations shew him to have 
 been very careful and anxious to speak only from his 
 own knowledge, so that the report of his travels to 
 " his lord King Alfred " formed a notable contribution 
 to the physiography of Europe. 
 
 The account mentions three kinds of deer among 
 
 ' Cj. an Anglo-Saxon version of the New Testament, Codex 
 Hattonianus, in the Bodleian Library. 
 
 ^ There are two ancient MSS. — Lauderdale and Cotton. 
 Versions were inserted by the famous geographer Hakluyt in 
 his " Principal Navigations, Voiages, etc., of the EngUsh 
 Nation," 1598. 
 
 7
 
 82 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 the property of Ohthere — wild, tame, and decoy. 
 The last are called " stael hranas," in which we find 
 the original of " stale " (meaning " decoy " generally), 
 as used by Shakespeare in TJie Taming of tJie Shrew. 
 A lively account is gi\en of the slaughter by Ohthere 
 and five others of sixty " horse-whales," or walruses, 
 a feat seriously questioned by some learned scholars ! 
 Alfred's share in these adventures seems to be con- 
 fined to his patronage of Ohthere, who, attracted to 
 the court of the renowned English king, narrated a 
 story which Alfred shrewdly committed to enduring 
 letters. Hakluyt does even Alfred too much honour 
 in asking : 
 
 " Wil it not, in all posteritie, be as great renowne 
 unto our English Nation to have been the first dis- 
 coverers of a sea beyond the North Cape (never 
 certainly known before), and of a convenient passage 
 into the huge Empire of Russia by the bay S. Nicholas 
 and the river of Duina ? " 
 
 The shorter narrative of Wulfstan shows that he was 
 a Dane,^ whose voyages took him to Wisby in Goth- 
 land. It is probable that he made acquaintance with 
 Ohthere in the course of his expedition, and \\ ith him 
 went to England. 
 
 7. Blossom-gatherings from St. Augustine (?). 
 
 This compilation, of the Saxon version of which 
 there is only one MS.,^ has a preface alleged tobeb}^ 
 
 ^ Cf. Forster, " Northern Voyages," p. 69. 
 
 - MS. Cotton (ViteUius, A. 15, sec. xii.). Copy by Junius. 
 It is much torn and very defective, the last mutilated words 
 beini^ : " Here end the Proverbs, selected by King .Alfred, 
 from the books which we call . . ."
 
 ALFRED AS MA'N OF LETTERS 83 
 
 Alfred. The style, indeed, is somewhat similar to 
 that of the preface to the '' Pastoral Care," but such in- 
 ternal evidence as that of the following passage rather 
 points to some other author : 
 
 " Every man wishes, after he has built a cottage on 
 his lord's lease by his help, that he may sometimes 
 rest him therein, and hunt and fowl and fish, and use 
 it in every way to the lease, both on sea and on land, 
 until the time that he can learn bookland and ever- 
 lasting heritage through his lord's mercy." 
 
 The work, indeed, reads suspiciously as if it were 
 an unworthy imitation of the " Consolation " of 
 Boethius. It is in the form of a dialogue between 
 Ratio and Augustinus.^ 
 
 8. Proverbs of Alfred (?). 
 
 The so-called " Proverbs of Alfred," published by 
 Kemble,2 was really an apocryphal work, compiled 
 after the Norman Conquest, and probably in the 
 thirteenth century ; but, even more than the less 
 national poem called the " Brut " of Layamon of 
 Ernley,3 it deserves recognition in an account of the 
 literature of Alfred ; for such compositions prove, as 
 Dr. Pauli says,4 " how much national feeling the 
 English people had retained beneath the Norman 
 
 ' According to Professor Earle (" Alfred the Great," 1899, 
 p. 200), recent scholarship inclines to a behef that this was 
 an actual version on which Alfred was engaged. 
 
 ^ In his "Solomon and Saturn," 1848, p. 226. 
 
 3 Edited by Sir F. Madden, 1848, i. 269. This poem, too, 
 contains the phrase, " Engelondes deorling," and mentions 
 that Alfred "wrat the lagan on Englis." 
 
 •• "Life of Alfred," p. 188.
 
 84 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 rule, that they still had on their lips, and even woven 
 
 into poetry, the treasures of old popular wisdom 
 
 bestowed upon them by their greatest monarch, 
 
 whose memory they held in grateful remembrance." 
 
 In the "Proverbs of Alfred" the good King is the 
 
 hero who presides at Seaford over an assembly of 
 
 Bishops and learned men, earls and knights. The 
 
 description of the company is followed by a series 
 
 of moral aphorisms, each beginning with the words, 
 
 " Thus said x-\lfred." The following extract opens with 
 
 the two memorable titles which generously summarise 
 
 the renown of Alfred : 
 
 "Alfred, 
 Englene herdc, 
 Englene darling, 
 In Enkelonde he was King. 
 Alfred, he was in Enkelonde King, 
 Wei swithe strong and lussum thing ; 
 He was King and cleric, 
 Full wel he louede Godes were ; 
 He was wis on his word, 
 And war on his work ; 
 He was the wisiste mon 
 Thad was in Engelonde on." 
 
 The work also includes a death-bed exhortation 
 addressed by Alfred to his son, which expresses noble 
 sentiments in carefully cho.sen phrases. 
 
 9. A Treatise on Hawking (?). 
 
 Wanley, in his edition of " Asser's Biography," 
 mentions "liber Alured regis de custodiendis accipi- 
 tribus (in Catal. libr. Mss. sed. Christi A. 13 15)." 
 Nothing further seems to be known of this alleged 
 treatise, the notice of which may indeed have been
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 85 
 
 fancifully based on Asser's report of Alfred that " he 
 trained men with falcons and hawks, and hounds, 
 too." 
 
 10. Version of "^sop's Fables" (?). 
 
 We have the barest references to a translation of 
 the "Fables of .^sop," the ascription of which to Alfred 
 is probably false. A Latin manuscript of ^Esop (MS. 
 Mus. Brit, Reg. 15, A. vii.) says: " Deinde rex 
 Angliae Affrus in Anglicam linguam eum transferri 
 pr?ecepit." 
 
 And we learn that a French poetess of the thir- 
 teenth century refers to this translation in her own 
 version. Her name is given by Pauli ^ as Marie de 
 France, by Guizot^ as Clotilde. In the Harleian MS. 
 978, fol. 87b, the reference runs : 
 
 " Li reis Alurez qui miit I'ama 
 Le translata puis en engleis, 
 E ieo I'ai rimee en franceis." ^ 
 
 Guizot eives this as follows : 
 
 " Le roi Alfred qui moult I'aima 
 Le translata puis en Anglez, 
 Et je I'ai rime en Francez." 
 
 It is inherently more probable that Henry I. (of 
 England) was the real translator. Not only is there 
 evidence that Greek was known at his Court, while 
 we never learn that Alfred knew the tongue, but, as 
 
 ^ P. 189. ^ P. 166. 
 
 5 Roquefort, in ii. 34 of his edition, substitutes the name of 
 Henri for Alurez, from another MS.
 
 86 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 Freeman has pointed out,i the embroidery of scenes 
 from ^-Esop on the border of the Bayeux tapestry 
 shews that the fables were popular in Normandy and 
 England in the eleventh century. 
 
 II. The Martian Law (?) 
 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth, made Bishop of St. Asaph 
 in 1 1 52, records in the thirteenth chapter of his very 
 romantic " British History " that Alfred translated a 
 treatise called " The Martian Law," and that this was 
 the work of an accomplished and noble lady named 
 Martia, the wife of Guithelin, a remote King of 
 Britain long before Caesar's invasion. ^ 
 
 This may be the same as what is meant by the 
 " Merchen Lage," or " Laws of the Mercians," men- 
 tioned in the very untrustworthy catalogue of Alfred's 
 works given by Spelman 3 ; but the attribution is 
 confused and not worth examination. 
 
 12. The Handbook. 
 
 Asser tells us, in a well-known passage alread}^ 
 cited, that in about his thirty-ninth year Alfred 
 began a commonplace book. This is afterwards 
 referred to by William of Malmesbury (twelfth 
 century) as " liber manualis, patria lingua 'Jiandbocr 
 The volume, which doubtless was of a small and 
 portable size, appears to have surx'ived for some cen- 
 turies ; but nothing, unluckily, is now known of it. It 
 
 ' Vol. iii., 1876, p. 572. 
 
 ^ "Six Old English Chronicles," London, 1896, p. 132. 
 
 3 In the 1678 edition of his " Vita ^Ifredi," p. 167.
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 8/ 
 
 is thought possible that a copy, or even the original, 
 is referred to in an entry in the catalogue of a 
 Norman monastery of the time of Henry I., which 
 speaks of " Alfredi Regis Liber Anglicus." i 
 
 13. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. 
 
 This account of the literary labours of King Alfred 
 may close with a notice of the famous annals of early 
 English history, with the institution of which it seems 
 that he is fairly to be credited. 
 
 The various manuscripts now extant of these 
 famous Chronicles may be roughly said to carr}' their 
 story from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the 
 eleventh century. In reference to our period, they 
 present, during the two centuries before the Norman 
 Conquest, a simple record of facts which is almost 
 entirely devoid of comment and feeling. Onl}' rarely 
 do we note such an interpolation as the grateful cry 
 uttered in 897 : " Thanks be to God, the x'\rmy (of 
 the Danes) had not utterly broken up the Angle 
 race ! " 
 
 This quality of baldness gives them a peculiar 
 value in the eyes of students both of our English 
 prose-literature and of the reign of Alfred. It seems 
 certain that the yearly record of current events, as 
 opposed to the composition of past traditions and 
 marginal notes in the monastic libraries, began under 
 the auspices of Alfred. It is true that Bede, 150 
 years before, speaks of " monimenta literarum," and, 
 in his prologue, of " priorum maxime scripta " ; but 
 
 ' MS. Bodl., 163, fol. 251.
 
 88 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 it is easier to reconcile such references with the 
 theory that Alfred originated the Anglo-Saxon 
 Chronicles than to infer from such slight evidence 
 that " these Chronicles existed before Alfred, but 
 they were instilled with a new life owing to his 
 influence." ^ The oldest MS. (presently to be re- 
 ferred to) has been assigned to the year 891, in the 
 record of which year the writing of the first original 
 hand ends. An interesting reference to their institu- 
 tion by Alfred is contained in the following words of 
 a French poet of the middle of the twelfth century, 
 namely, Geffroi Gaimar, in his " Estorie des Angles " : 
 
 " II fist escrivere iin livre Engleis, 
 Des aventures e des leis, 
 E de batailles de la terre 
 E des reis ki firent la guere ; 
 E maint livre fist il escrire, 
 U li bon-clerc vont sovent lire ; 
 Deus ait merci de la sue alme, 
 E sainte Alarie, la dame ! " ' 
 
 It is this Gaimar who sa)'s that Alfred ordered a 
 copy of the Saxon Chronicle to be chained up for 
 reference, and the MS. now preserved at Corpus 
 Christi College, Cambridge, may have been the 
 original copy thus fastened to a desk at Wolvesey 
 in Winchester. Wolvesey enjoys the distinction of 
 being by repute the actual birth spot of these famous 
 annals. 
 
 " Under Alfred's fostering care Winchester," says 
 Dean Kitchin,3 " became the home of all the learning 
 and the arts known in that day, and rivalled the 
 
 ' M. Jusserand, "A Literary History of the English People," 
 London, 1895, p. 86. 
 ^ Quoted by G. Guizot, "Alfred le Grand," Paris, 1856, p. 165. 
 3 Kitchin, " Winchester," p. 14.
 
 ALFRED AS MAN OF LETTERS 89 
 
 earlier splendour of the Court of Charles the Great 
 at Aachen. Here it was that the King, with rare 
 genius and foresight, guided and himself took part in 
 the composition of those literary efforts which began 
 the development of the English mind and language." 
 The nature of the MSS. may be briefly recapitu- 
 lated from the learned preface by Thorpe, who 
 published them in parallel columns, together with 
 a careful translation.^ He observes that all bear 
 traces of a common prototype, but No. 6 least 
 resembles the others. 
 
 1. MS. (numbered S. xi.) in the library of Corpus 
 Christi College, Cambridge. It goes from Julius 
 Caesar to 1070. The first original hand ends with 
 the year 891, whence it is continued in various hands. 
 This is most probably in the West-Saxon and not 
 the Mercian dialect. 
 
 2. MS. (numbered Cotton. Tib. A. vi.) in the 
 British Museum, formerly in the monastery of St. 
 Augustine at Canterbur}-. It goes from the Incar- 
 nation to 977, and is written in one hand of the latter 
 part of the tenth century. 
 
 3. MS. (numbered Cotton. Tib. B. i.). It goes 
 from Julius Caesar to 1066, and is written in the 
 same hand to 1046. 
 
 4. MS. (numbered Cotton. Tib. B. iv.), formerly 
 
 kept at Worcester. It goes from the Incarnation 
 
 to 1079, and is written in one hand to 1016. This, 
 
 as also No. 5, is obviously derived, with additions, 
 
 from a copy similar to No. i. 
 
 ' "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," edited by B. Thorpe, being 
 No. 23 of the "Chronicles and Memorials" published under the 
 direction of the Master of the Rolls.
 
 90 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 5. MS. (numbered Bodleian, Laud. 636) at Oxford, 
 formerly at Peterborough. Ft goes from the Incar- 
 nation to 1 1 54, and the hand and ink vary but little 
 to 1 122. It is to be noted that the narrative is very 
 scanty between 891 and 975. 
 
 6. MS. (numbered Cotton. Dom. A. viii.). It goes 
 from the Incarnation to 1056, and is all in a hand 
 of the twelfth century, and again very scanty between 
 891 and 975. 
 
 7. MS. (numbered Cotton. Otho. B, xi. 2). It goes 
 from the Incarnation to looi. There are only three 
 leaves of the Chronicle {^''^^J to 871 A.D.) restored 
 from the damage caused by the fire in the Cotton 
 Library in 1731. 
 
 8. Numbered Cotton. Tib. A. iii., being a single 
 leaf containing a genealogy of the Anglo-Saxon 
 kings from Cerdic to Eadward in 977. The writing 
 is similar to that of No. 2 above. 
 
 From this it will be seen that the manuscript pre- 
 served at Cambridge claims to date from the actual 
 time of Alfred. Its record can be checked from the 
 other MSS., which are to be considered as copies 
 made for various monasteries from earlier originals. 
 The narrative forms the surest basis for the study of 
 Alfred's career, and is a worthy opening to a well- 
 sustained undertaking, of which the French critic 
 already quoted speaks the following words of 
 generous praise : 
 
 " Few monuments are more precious than these 
 old annals, for no people in Europe can pride itself 
 on having chronicles so ancient written in its national 
 language."
 
 V 
 
 THE OXFORD MYTH 
 
 THE best-known story connected with the eckica- 
 tional work of Alfred the Great is concerned 
 with his alleged creation of the University of Oxford 
 and of University College in particular. Although 
 this myth has long since been entirely explained, yet 
 it will always possess a certain historical value as 
 belonging to that sacred praise of legendar}^ fame 
 which Alfred's personality has continuously won. 
 What is not generally known is that it was the subject 
 of keen contentions, long before the famous exposure 
 at a University College banquet some five-and-twenty 
 years ago. The long lease of acceptance which the 
 myth has enjoyed dates at least from the fourteenth 
 century ; and the assertion of Hume that Alfred 
 "founded, at least repaired (!) the University of 
 Oxford, and endowed it with many privileges, 
 revenues, and immunities," still finds its way into 
 uncritical pages. Even at Oxford itself the fiction 
 is piously preserved by the recital of Alfred's name 
 in the " bidding " of the University prayer. 
 
 The details of the story are that St. Neot, by whose 
 
 91
 
 92 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 advice Alfred founded the University, was put at the 
 head of it and himself gave a course of lectures on 
 theolog)^ while Grimbald (a Gaul) dealt with sacred 
 literature, Asser (the Welshman, biographer of Alfred, 
 and Bishop of Sherborne) with rhetoric and grammar, 
 and John (the Saxon abbot of Athelney) with arith- 
 metic, music, and logic. Truly, such an academic 
 course in the ninth century would have been even 
 more wonderful than the actual educational work 
 which ^vas, in substantial histor\', instituted b\' this 
 " Mirror of Princes." But it is the chief of the very 
 few cases where the Nemesis of arch?eolog)' and the 
 sister arts has arisen to undo our belief in this 
 wonderful man. The various credible records dating 
 from Alfred's own da}- contain no hint on which we 
 may ground a doubt as to the far later first founda- 
 tion of " Oxford." In its simplest form, the tale cannot 
 be traced back farther than to the " Pol}xhronicon " 
 of Ralph Higden, who died in 1363. Hearne, the 
 Oxford antiquary, says in his diar}- that " among the 
 testimonies for the antiquit}' of Oxford before King 
 yElfred's time, may be added what Thomas Gulielmus 
 sa}'s in * Chron. Brit.' . . . that ch\'mists dwelt at 
 Oxford before yElfred built a school there." The 
 story is referred to in the fifteenth centur}- in the 
 meagre account of John Capgrave's " Chronicle," and 
 is elaborated by John Ross, the antiquary of War- 
 wickshire, who details the alleged beginning of 
 University College. Stowe, in his "English Chronicle," 
 written near the end of the sixteenth century, says 
 that Alfred " ordained common schooles of divers 
 sciences in Oxenford." The history of the myth here
 
 THE OXFORD MYTH 93 
 
 brings us to one of the famous forgeries of literature. 
 In 1564, on the occasion of a visit of Queen EHzabeth 
 to Cambridge, that University made bold to assert its 
 priority to the rival academy at Oxford ; this claim, 
 forty years later, received the unnecessary and men- 
 dacious opposition of the learned Camden. F^or the 
 passage in Asser's " Life of Alfred" under the year 887, 
 on the authority of which the myth has been more or 
 less accepted during nearly three centuries of English 
 learning, made its first appearance in Camden's 
 " Britannia" in 1600. To that year must be assigned 
 the invention of the picturesque quarrel between the 
 scholars of Grimbald and the older scholars who 
 refused to recognise his discipline. The spuriousness 
 of the insertion is apparent from the internal evidence 
 of the style ; moreover, circumstantial facts demon- 
 strate that the interpolation of it by Camden into his 
 1603 edition of Asser was quite unwarranted. Wise, 
 in his careful and valuable 1722 edition of the Cotton 
 MS. of Asser (dating, as experts hold, from 1000 A.D.^ 
 and lamentably destroyed by the fire of 1731), notes 
 that the passage is brought in from a questionable 
 source, namely, a later MS. in the possession of Mr. 
 Henry Savile, of Bank, in Yorkshire. Now, Usher, 
 in his '^ Antiquities," published at Dublin in 1639, says 
 that this manuscript contains no such paragraph ; and 
 finally Hearne, in editing Sir John Spelman's inac- 
 curate " Life of Alfred " in 1709, remarks that a Mr. 
 Twyne (whose papers are said to be preserved in the 
 Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford) travelled 
 to London in 1622 for the very purpose of taxing 
 ' See above, p. 27.
 
 94 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 the authority of Camden, who indignantly pro- 
 tested that he had taken it from Savile's manu- 
 script, which, on his own admission, dated probably 
 from Richard II. ! 
 
 With regard to the particular claims of University 
 College, which were at once celebrated and dispelled 
 at the ironical banquet, the following explanation is 
 given by the Rev. Hastings Rashdall in his work on 
 the " History of the Mediaeval Universities" : — 
 
 " In 1377 the College became involved in a lawsuit 
 about some newly acquired propert)-. It was to 
 extricate themselves from their legal embarrassments, 
 by procuring the evocation of their cause to the Royal 
 Council Chamber, that the Master and Scholars of 
 University first devised the impudent fiction of a 
 Royal Foundation by Alfred the Great, which has 
 now become part of the Law of England by a decision 
 of the Court of King's Bench." 
 
 It only remains to be said that the earliest authentic 
 written evidence for the existence of Oxford as a 
 place is the mention of it in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 
 under the year 912, when Edward (Alfred's son) took 
 possession of London and Oxford with their lands. 
 Another ray of light is supplied by some coins in 
 what is known as " the Cuerdale find," which includes 
 very many of Alfred ; these bear the word ORSNA- 
 FORDA or OHSNAFORDA. 
 
 We may, then, interpret this interesting myth in 
 one or both of two ways : as one more example of 
 the unscrupulous fabrication by mediaeval clergy of 
 evidence of early title to their possessions, or as yet 
 another tribute to the repute of Alfred. But the
 
 THE OXFORD MYTH 95 
 
 matter itself stands entirely disproved both by the 
 inherent improbability of such a foundation even in 
 his remarkable reign, and by the demonstrable fact 
 that the University of Oxford cannot in any sense be 
 said to date from an earlier time than the twelfth 
 century ; then we have rare glimpses into a scholastic 
 life, while it was in the thirteenth century that the 
 first Colleges of University, Merton, and Balliol 
 received their earliest endowments.
 
 VI 
 
 THE VALE OF THE WHITE HORSE 
 
 ONE of the warmest enthusiasms of the late 
 Judge Hughes was for the White Horse of 
 Berkshire and its associations. After all, was not 
 " Tom Brown " born under the northern slopes of the 
 great downs ? And whether destiny takes a man to 
 an office in London or far over the seas, there is a 
 power in the locality of his birth and of his fathers 
 which compels his affection and interest. Can a youth 
 bred in mid-Kent resist the desire to visit Penshurst 
 and admire the Sidneys ? If his petiates are enshrined 
 at Kenilworth, the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth 
 or the stirring times of Cromwell's " Rapacious 
 Vermin " (as a loyal Church Register dubs them) 
 take on for him a new reality. Tom Hughes was 
 fired by this genius loci, and in his charming tale of 
 " The Scouring of the White Horse " has told the 
 story of the Berkshire revels of 1857, which then 
 accompanied the cleansing of the ancient memorial 
 and which have since, alas ! gone out of fashion, 
 together with so many other old festivals and 
 ceremonies. 
 
 y6
 
 THE VALE OE THE WHITE HORSE 97 
 
 The White Horse has lately been " scoured " again ! 
 Free from all weeds, his chalky flanks gleam brightly 
 on the side of the high ridge of " Ufflngton Castle/' 
 a symbol for ever of Alfred's brilliant victory at 
 Ashdown in 871. 
 
 To the traveller from London the ridge appears on 
 the south, soon after the passing of Didcot. Its line, 
 ten centuries ago, was the frontier between the rival 
 kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, wavering north and 
 south as either pushed its arms forward. It was the 
 last half of the ninth century which chiefly made the 
 vicinity famous, for in 849 Alfred was born at 
 Wantage; in 871 the field of Ashdown was at once 
 his place of victory and of coronation amid the clang 
 of arms ; and in 901 (if specialists will let the date 
 pass !) by his will he left Wantage to his faithful queen. 
 Wantage itself, now a quietly prosperous town, is 
 grouped round a spacious market-place, where Count 
 Gleichen's statue of Alfred, battle-axe and charter 
 in his hands, stands perpetually on guard. Hard by 
 is the church, itself deserving a pilgrimage for its 
 massive but elegant tower-piers and Early English 
 work, in the careful tending of which Wantage 
 masons have taken a praiseworthy pride. There too, 
 in stone and brass that endure longer than their dust, 
 lie many of the famous Fitzwarins ; in particular that 
 knight Ivo, too, whose daughter was wed to Richard ' 
 Whittington, Mayor of London, and whose pious will 
 has been lately found in the Library of Lambeth 
 Palace. North-west of the church lush grass covers 
 the traditional birthplace of x^lfred ; the " bath " or 
 spring to the north that bears his name is but a late
 
 98 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 tribute to his great glory. Wantage is justly proud 
 of two other buildings — one the house where Dr. 
 Butler of " The Analogy " was born ; the other the 
 College, whose old-world front hides the school 
 premises and contains a singularly fine " beak-head " 
 Norman doorway, removed from an older church. 
 But Wantage belongs essentially to Alfred. 
 
 From Wantage, in summer, when the hedges are 
 gay and lively and many-coloured vetches divide 
 the cornfields, you may go pleasantly to the up- 
 land, where the high shoulders of the rolling 
 downs seem to heave against the sky, over which 
 with a motion almost invisible the great clouds 
 are borne like ships with bulging sails. Below 
 the top ridge runs the Roman way of Ichenilde 
 Strete, arrow-straight ; along it, seven to eight 
 hundred feet above sea-level, the broad grassy track, 
 mounded on either side, that Britons must have made 
 long before Alfred's day — work that has defied the 
 snows, rains and worms of Nature, and that man has 
 left alone. Between the two, by a cottage at Kingston 
 Lisle and close to " Tom Brown's " birthplace, is one 
 of Mother Nature's toys for her children — a mass of 
 greywether sandstone that you may blow as a boom- 
 ing horn. 
 
 A mile or two beyond, at the highest point of the 
 ridge, lies the castle or earth-work that takes its name 
 from the '* town of Offa." Yet further westwards is 
 Weland's Smithy, by general repute the best defined 
 neolithic burial-place in Europe ; a table of stone 
 slabs, set in a circle and preserved in a clump of trees, 
 \\'hich Scott has immortalised in " Kenilworth " as the
 
 
 r 
 
 >^^ 
 
 ^, 
 
 c: o 
 
 2 g 
 C '-^ 
 
 I 7 
 
 \\\ 
 
 .'^t. 
 
 X^
 
 THE VALE OF THE WHITE HORSE 99 
 
 Spot where that red-haired urchin P'^hbbertii^ibbet 
 tricked the wayfarer Tressihan. Who shall say when 
 first or when last a sixpence procured the shoeing of 
 horse by the magic farrier? But it is. certain that 
 King Alfred, in one of the translations which he had 
 made for his People's Library, turned the Roman 
 Fabricius into the northern Weland ! 
 
 Alfred ! The name, dear to all Anglo-Saxons as that 
 of the greatest forefather, in wisdom, in prowess, and 
 in moral nobility, of them all, summons the wanderer's 
 steps back to Ashdown. There, to the south of the 
 earth-work, raged the fight which saved England from 
 one hundred years of paganism, even if it was not 
 the English Marathon. /Ethelred (like a Spartan king 
 of old) tarried piousl}' in unpractical prayer. Alfred, 
 young captain of two and twenty, charged up the hill 
 '' like a wild boar," and fighting with his men " for 
 life, loved ones, and fatherland," caught the victory by 
 a lowly thorn-tree. The tree is gone, but not the 
 fame. And as token thereof the men of Wessex have 
 ever since preserved on the northern slope the White 
 Horse, cut to the chalk out of the crisp turf of the 
 downs. In 1171 '' mons /\lbi Equi " was known to 
 the monks of Abingdon. In 1368-9 "la vale de 
 White Horse" was entered on the Close Rolls. Good 
 Leland knew of the Vale " from I know not what 
 shape of a Horse fancied on the side of a whitish 
 Hill." Emblem of Kent and of Hanover, of all Saxons 
 if not of Britons before them, the creature gleams 
 now in a brilliant sunlight, after his re-scouring, as 
 brightly as ever. Just below him you see the round 
 hill whereon St. George slew the dragon, whose blood
 
 lOO 
 
 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 SO seared the soil that grass has never grown there 
 since ! By dear fable and by dearer history the spot 
 is made one in which, between God's sky and earth, 
 it is fit to be proud of one's country, reverent to her 
 saints, and grateful to her heroes. 
 
 .,.#ltn .U|^^f^j 
 
 GATEWAY OF HYDE ABBEY, WIN'CHESTER. 
 {By permission of the Mayor of Winchester.)
 
 VII 
 
 ALFRED'S BURIAL-PLACE 
 
 THE case of Alfred can be no exception to the 
 rule b}' which mankind takes a keen and 
 reverent interest in the burial-places of its great dead. 
 Before the mystery thickens or false notions misplace 
 ignorance, it seems well to sa}' at once what can be 
 said as to the burial-place of Alfred. It is a point of 
 his biography w4iich has escaped the attention of recent 
 writers. 
 
 The very date of his death is now a question. 
 Long tradition has, until recently, given it as 
 "October 28, 901." Both Freeman and J. R. Green 
 are content with this.^ But the point has been 
 carefully examined by Mr. W. H. Stevenson, who is 
 convinced that "October 26, 899," is the reliable 
 date.2 There seems little doubt that that day and 
 month are correct. Three MSS. of the Old-English 
 Chronicle give "six nights before All Saints' Day," 
 
 ' "Dictionary of National Biography," i. 157, and "The 
 Conquest of England," p. 186. It is to he remembered that 
 Asser's fascinating life of his King is not carried down to his 
 death. 
 
 - English Historical Rcvica: (1898), xiii. 71 et seq.
 
 I02 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 and three others " 7 Kal. Novembr." ; other con- 
 temporary records corroborate.^ As to the year, 
 Mr. Stevenson points out that all the MSS. of the 
 Chronicle and some later writers say that Alfred 
 reigned 28 J years, and that the five chief ^ISS. of the 
 Chronicle (including the Parker or Winchester MS., 
 which is " the only one that can claim to go back 
 to Alfred's time ") agree in assigning the death of 
 ^thelred to Easter, 871. The date of October, 899, 
 thus given is declared to be confirmed by a piece 
 of nearly contemporary evidence in the form of 
 a MS.,- rightly pretending to be written in the 
 thirteenth year of Edward (Alfred's successor), and 
 the year of the Incarnation 912. Mr. Stevenson 
 ingeniously explains away the "901," under which 
 the event is entered in the Parker MS., on grounds 
 of palaeography. The la}'man may be forgiven for 
 scarcely feeling grateful for this discovery, but he is 
 bound to admit that Mr. Stevenson seems fairh' 
 to have proved his case. With Dr. Pauli, one would 
 like boldly to say that "only 28J years" is wrong, 
 and that "901" is right, and, at any rate, the duration 
 of his reign is given as " 30 years " in an entry made 
 early in the eleventh century in the " Hyde Register"3 
 — a point which seems to have escaped Mr. Steven- 
 son's notice. 
 
 Alfred, at any rate, died, closing his marvellous 
 reign of strenuous and manifold energies. No 
 authority mentions where he died ; the place was 
 
 ' A writer in the Ailiciicviiui for July 16, 1898, urges 
 "October 25." 
 
 = Cotton 'MS. Vesp. D. xiv. 
 
 3 " New Minster and Hyde Abbey," Birch (1892), p. 95.
 
 ALFREDS BVRtAL-PLACE IO3 
 
 perhaps his home at Wolvesey/ in Winchester, 
 where two years before he had hanged a crew of 
 Danish sea-dogs. We have no hint of the proximate 
 cause of his death by which we might infer that he 
 succumbed to any serious attack of the mysterious 
 malady which had remained a thorn in the flesh 
 to him from the day of his marriage-feast. His 
 bodily frame may well have been exhausted by 
 his labours. 
 
 The Chronicle says nothing as to his burial-place, 
 but most of the remaining authorities agree upon 
 Winchester, and no other place has ever been 
 suggested. His kingdom's capital, where his soul 
 had chiefly laboured, was fitly the resting-place 
 of his mortal remains. The so-called "Annals" say 
 that he was buried " in the church of St. Peter," and 
 " that his tomb is still extant, made of the most 
 precious porphyry marble." William of Malmesbury^ 
 (twelfth century) also relates that he was buried 
 in the episcopal cathedral [i.e., the Old Minster, 
 on the site of the present pile), but that his body was 
 removed later to the New Minster, which stood 
 immediately to the north of the Old, well within the 
 precinct of the present cathedral close. This latter 
 does not seem to have been founded by Alfred, 
 although (according to " Liber dc Hyda," p. 5 1 ) he had 
 bought land for a chapel and dormitor\', and left 
 
 ' Some Saxon stonework in the cast side of the south-east 
 outer walls and slender columns embedded horizontally in the 
 later Norman keep of Wolvesey Palace are, perhaps, the only 
 extant remains of masonry attributable to Alfred, but even 
 this is uncertain. 
 
 -■ Will. xMalm., ii. 124.
 
 104 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 instructions to P^dward to complete the projected 
 monaster)'. It is not mentioned in Alfred's will. 
 V'arious dates are given for the first dedication of 
 it by Edward,^ the earliest being 901 ; the first 
 known Abbot was /Ethelgar (965-983).2 According 
 to the elaborate account in the "Hyde Register" of the 
 building of the New Minster, it was Edward who had 
 the remains of his father solemnly transferred thither 
 from the Old Minster.3 There it rested for two 
 centuries, which saw the tide of Norman invasion. 
 William the Conqueror, indeed, against whom Abbot 
 .Elfwig and the monks of New Minster had striven 
 at Hastings, seized their estates for two years. 
 Under Henry I. serious hostilities seem to have 
 broken out between the two clerical establishments, 
 with the result that in 1121 the faithful few who 
 remained in the New Minster removed themselves 
 and their precious relics to a new home in the 
 Benedictine abbey situate at Hyde, outside the north 
 wall of the city, be}'ond the meads where " Guy, 
 Earl of Warwick, is said to have encountered and 
 conquered Colbraiid the Dafiish Giant." 
 
 H)Tle Abbe)' remained the resting-place of Alfred's 
 relics for many centuries. It is between the bare 
 level sward which marks where New Minster was 
 and the strangel)^-wasted side of H)'de Abbe)' that 
 the pious lover of Alfred's memory must now choose. 
 Without forgetting the vicissitudes through which 
 the relics passed, or the slightness of the reward to 
 
 ' ''New Minster and Hyde Abbey," Birch (1892), p. viii. 
 - Ibid., p. xxvi. 
 ^ Ibid., p. 5.
 
 ALFREDS BURIAL-PLACE IO5 
 
 the visitor of to-day, there is good reason for telHng 
 the tale of Hyde Abbey in this respect. 
 
 From the twelfth to the sixteenth century we may 
 believe that the relics of Alfred remained in the 
 Norman Hyde Abbey, guarded by its priests, and 
 doubtless visited by the faithful disciples of that 
 legendary lore which gradually adorned the history 
 of Alfred, and which is at once the despair and the 
 reward of the student of his fame. Under Henry VH I. 
 the Dissolution threatened the first act of vandalism. 
 In 1538 (when the monastery was valued at ^865 i8s.) 
 the Royal Commissioners reported to Thomas Crom- 
 well as follows : — 
 
 " About three o'clock a.m., we made an end of the 
 shrine here at Winchester. . . . We think the silver 
 thereof will amount to near two thousand marks. . . . 
 We intend both at Hyde and at St. Mary's to sweep 
 away all the rotten bones that be called relics, which 
 we may not omit, lest it should be thought that we 
 came more for the treasure than for avoiding the 
 abominations of idolatry " ! 
 
 It is difficult to reconcile this egregious official 
 utterance with the story told by Thomas Hughes, 
 who does not, however, cite his authority for it,^ that 
 the pious Bishop Fox (who died in 1528) in 1524 
 placed the scattered bones from Hyde, duly labelled, 
 in the six leaden chests which are still preserved in 
 Winchester Cathedral. Turning to Milner's detailed 
 account of these chests and their contents, which 
 
 ' "Alfred the Great," p. 302. Cf. ''Documents relating to 
 Winchester Cathedral in the Seventeenth Century": Hamp- 
 shire Record Society, 1897, pp. 57-74.
 
 lo6 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 were examined just over a century ago, and set again 
 in their places on the arcaded wall of the sanctuary, 
 we find it expressly said that it was the relics of 
 princes and prelates who had been either benefactors 
 of or buried in the cathedral itself, which Bishops de 
 Blois and Fox had in their turns so preserved. Thus, 
 in the first chest from the altar on the north side lie 
 the bones of Alfred's father ; in the middle one on 
 the south side those of his scholar-son Edmund.^ 
 It was at New Minster that these were buried, 
 besides Alfred himself; his wife, yEthelswitha ; their 
 two other sons, ^Ethelward and Edward ; and the 
 latter's son Alfred and two dau^hters.^ 
 
 Milner's research, indeed, discovered this further 
 point : — 
 
 " It is plain that on the destruction of the church, 
 at the time above mentioned (viz., 1538), the tombs 
 of the illustrious dead which it contained, were broken 
 into, since we are assured that two little tables of lead, 
 inseribed with the names of Alfred and his son 
 Edward, were found in the monument which con- 
 tained their remains (Leland, Itin., iii. {^2), 102). 
 What became of these we are not informed ; most 
 likely they were left amongst the ruins, as to show 
 any particular respect to them in the reign we are 
 speaking of would have been equivalent to condemn- 
 ing the suppression of the abbey, which was founded 
 to be their mausoleum." 3 
 
 Probably the respect shown to such pieces of lead 
 
 ' Milncr, •' History of Winchester," ii. 45 d scq. 
 - Ibid., p. 215. 
 ^ Ibid., p. 226.
 
 ALFREDS BURIAL-PLACE \Oj 
 
 would be to sell them or put them in the melting- 
 pot ! But at least the tombs themselves may have 
 escaped destruction ; there is no certain ground for 
 saying that the relics were scattered then by the 
 Commissioners, any more than by the Puritan troops 
 who ransacked the cathedral in 1642. It is just 
 possible (more cannot be said) that the accidents of 
 fortune saved them for even two and a half centuries 
 longer. 
 
 In 1750 T. Warton published a compilation of 
 notes upon "Winchester," in which, at p. 13, he says 
 of Hyde Abbey : — 
 
 " The Church almost fills a large meadow with its 
 Ruins, and appears to have consisted of three lies, 
 and to have been at least 240 Feet long. It was 
 built with Flint cased with Stone. Of the Monastery 
 nothing remains except some Out-buildings towards 
 the Street ; and one Gateway, the Mouldings of 
 which exhibit, on each side, the Head of a King. 
 The same Head occurs on a Wall towards the South. 
 Great Part of the Precinct- Wall is still standinir." 
 
 To this page Warton added the following note, 
 afterwards printed in the appendix to the book by 
 Sir T. Phillips in 1857 : — 
 
 "In 1786 they began a new I^ridewell on the Site 
 of Hyde Abbey Church, when a piece of an Abbatial 
 Crosier was dug up, a Sarcophagus, and Capitals of 
 Pillars, fantastic, like those in Cryptis St. Petri, 
 Oxon., but, when dug up, they appeared to have 
 been worked up into another Building; therefore 
 they belonged to an older Church. {Sec Blue Book.) 
 Tessellated tiles dug up. Annales Waverly, 225, 226."
 
 I08 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 But this is not the only record of this vandal 
 destruction of the ruins for the sake of a county 
 gaol, the result of which, says Milner, was that " mis- 
 creants couch amidst the ashes of our Alfreds and 
 Edwards ; and where once religious silence and con- 
 templation was only interrupted by the bell of 
 regular observance and the chanting of devotion, 
 now alone resound the clank of the captive's chain 
 and the oaths of the profligate." 
 
 Speaking as an e}'e-witness of the scene he con- 
 tinues : — 
 
 " At almost every stroke of the mattock or spade 
 some ancient sepulchre or other was visited, the 
 venerable contents of which were treated with 
 marked indignity." 
 
 In 1/97 a Mr. Henry Howard, of Corby Castle, in 
 Cumberland, then stationed at Winchester with his 
 regiment, had the curiosity to examine the site. He 
 further obtained slight but valuable second-hand 
 information, the results of which he communicated 
 to the Society of Antiquaries.^ His letter, illustrated 
 by the plan reproduced in Fig. A, describes the soil 
 and foundations of the abbey, and enumerates what 
 
 ' " Archasologia " (1798), xiii. 309-312. The plan there 
 given is here reproduced in Fig. a, the key to it being as 
 follows : — A, Inclosure of the Abbey, 2 feet above the level of 
 the valley ; b, "■ Monks' inclosure " ; c, "Abbot's inclosure " ; 
 E, Site of mill ; f, Mill-dam ; G, St. Bartholomew's church ; 
 H, Fish-ponds ; pp, Abbey buildings ; a, Spot where the three 
 stone coffins were found in 1798 "(? of Alfred, ^thelswitha, 
 Edward) ; a — h, 24 yards ; a — m, 14 yards ; dd, Clay paths ; 
 '^, " Many stone coffins " found here ; // " Solid basis of 
 masonry and fragments of small columns of Purbeck marble " ; 
 /), Existing gateway of Abbey ; q, Wall ; luni, Vestiges of 
 buildings ; s, Sacristy, perhaps ; /, y, More stone coffins.
 
 Alfred's burial-pla cr 
 
 109 
 
 had been found, viz., many stone coffins turned into 
 water-troughs, fragments of marble columns by the 
 altar, patens, chalices, rings, Roman urns and sculp- 
 tured corbel-heads ; several of them were drawn by 
 the careful antiquary, John Carter.^ Most of these 
 ^ "Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Painting" {circa 
 1787), vol. ii., p. 19 ct seq.
 
 no ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 are reproduced in Fic^s. r. and c. The first two items 
 in Fig. r. shew the corbel-heads on the north side of 
 the fifteenth-centur\' gatewa}' marked p on Howard's 
 plan, and now the only surviving masonry of the abbe}'. 
 The heads are those referred to by W'arton, as men- 
 tioned above ; they are now almost obliterated. They 
 may be compared with the similar heads built into 
 the wall of the hall of Brasenose College, Oxford, now 
 much defaced, but figured by Vertue in the Wise 
 edition of Asser's " Life of Alfred " (Oxford, 1722), at 
 pp. I and 164. We may plausibly fanc}^ that these 
 heads at H}'de were meant to represent the two 
 great Kings of Wessex, Alfred and his son Edward. 
 Item 6 in Fig. E, together with the stone slab shown 
 at the top of Fig. C, and other rescued fragments, 
 were taken by Howard to his home at Corby. The 
 writer is informed that the stone slab is still pre- 
 served there.i 
 
 At the present time the site of Hyde Abbey is 
 covered partly by a farm3'ard, partly by a road of 
 very new and modest villas, all equally unconscious 
 of the past which they cover, even though the passage 
 leading out of Hyde Street is called " King Alfred 
 Place." Quite recently excavation has produced a 
 most interesting series of elaborate Norman capitals. 
 
 ' This interesting tablet, inscribed " yElfred Rex 881" in 
 characters which are probably of an early Norman date, is 
 mentioned in S. Jefferson's " Histor}' of Carlisle " (1838), p. 391, 
 and is also figured on the plate opposite p. 449 of vol. i. of 
 Milner's work. William of Malmesbury mentions a similar 
 tablet, inscribed " a.d. 880 Alfrcdus Rex fecit hanc Urbem, 
 regni sui 8"," as having been found in his time at Shaftesbury 
 Abbey.
 
 ALFREDS BURIAL-PLACE 
 
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 Q 
 
 
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 J) 
 
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 U 
 
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 CQ 
 
 
 X 
 
 cn 
 
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 ^ 
 
 a: 
 
 Q 
 
 
 Ul 
 
 r 
 
 Ov 
 
 n 
 
 o 
 
 OO 
 
 >- 
 
 
 r-~ 
 
 3: 
 
 NO 
 
 2 
 
 y 
 
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 cr 
 
 oc 
 
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 LU 
 
 CO 
 
 t- 
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 CO 
 LU 
 
 ^ 
 
 V 
 
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 ^
 
 112 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 similar in their remarkable design to those found in 
 the south transept of Winchester Cathedral, and now- 
 deposited in the adjacent Church of St. Bartholomew. 
 At the south-east corner of the same church lies a 
 flat tombstone, long since assigned to Alfred ; but 
 our interest must really centre in the objects recorded 
 by Howard over a century ago, and now, alas ! lost 
 for ever. He mentions that three superior coffins 
 were found by the altar, marked // in Fig. A. The 
 decayed lead-casing of the principal one was sold as 
 old metal for two guineas, and the bones and remains 
 of garments which it contained were lost sight of 
 It is possible — barely possible — that these were the 
 three tombs of Alfred, his Queen /Ethelswitha, and 
 their son Edward. One dares not say more, nor 
 likes to believe less. We know no more certainly 
 that either Bishop Fox of 1524, or the Commissioners 
 of 1538, or the Puritans of 1642, disturbed the dust 
 of England's greatest King. It seems little likeh' 
 that the nameless vandals of 1786 left anything 
 untouched, so that it is possible that the burial-place 
 thus destro}'ed was that of Alfred the Great. Who 
 can now sa}- ?
 
 ALFRED S JEWEL 
 
 (now at Oxford).
 
 Note I 
 
 ALFREDS JEWEL : ALSO AS TO TWO RINGS 
 
 ALFRED'S Jewel Is preserved in the Ashmolean 
 Museum at Oxford. It was found in 1693 ^.t 
 Newton Park, between Athelney and Bridgewater, in 
 Somerset. Its unique interest arises from its inscrip- 
 tion — 
 
 " Alfred ordered me to be made.'' 
 
 Its character is discussed in Hickes' " Thesaurus," 
 i. 144, and " Archaeologia," ii. 72. The jewel (which 
 seems to have been first figured in Wise's 1722 
 edition of Asser at p. 171) is about 2 J inches long and 
 J inch thick, and weighs if ounces. The setting of a 
 sloping edge and flat back is of pure gold ; the former 
 carries in bold letters the words " .ELFRED MEC HEHT 
 GEWYRCAN," the latter an incised pattern of elegant 
 design. At the narrow end of the oval is the emblem 
 of a monster's head whose snout is pierced ; but it 
 was less probably hung thereby on a neck-chain, than 
 fixed upon a light sceptre or wand.^ Upon the front 
 is an enamelled figure enclosed in a thick crystal ; 
 against a blue background the figure wears a green 
 
 ' Professor Earle's handsome volume on " The Alfred 
 Jewel " has been issued from the Clarendon Press since the 
 above was written. The author is unable to accept the manv 
 suggestions as to the original use of the Jewel, including the 
 ingenious notion of Bishop Clifford (1877) that it was one of 
 the "reading markers" sent out by the King with the copies 
 of his version of Gregory's " Pastoral Care." He explains his 
 own view that, like the very similar Minster Lovel Jewel, also 
 preserved at Oxford, it was an ornament by which the helmet 
 could be converted into a crown ; he interprets the enamelled 
 figure as an emblem of public religion, and the incised design 
 as a symbol of private faith, the' work being directly attri- 
 butable to the mind of Alfred himself. 
 
 9 113
 
 114 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 Saxon vest or tunic, with a red belt and scabbard. 
 It is unlikely that this represents St. Neot. It is 
 more probably Christ than Alfred ; He carries two 
 sceptres, the longer signifx'ing the Invisible Church 
 in heaven, the shorter that on earth, and both being 
 topped with blossoms. The jewel has been com- 
 pared by Palgrave with an architectural ornament on 
 the Saxon porch of St. Margaret's at York. 
 
 In London itself may be seen two further personal 
 relics of his family, preserved in the Gold-room of the 
 British Museum. ^ The finger-ring of /Ethelwulf, the 
 father of Alfred, who died in 855, was found in 1780 
 in Hampshire. It is of gold, engraved and inlaid with 
 niello in a symmetrical design, and bears his name in 
 bold characters. The other ring belonged to Alfred's 
 sister, /Ethelswitha, wife of Burgred or Burhred, King 
 of Mercia. It has her name, as Queen, so engraved 
 inside it that a great expert has suggested that she 
 probably offered it at some shrine, and the priests 
 then recorded the name of the royal giver (Proc. 
 S. A. L. 2 S. vi. 305, where it is figured). She herself 
 lies buried at Pavia, having died on the way to Rome. 
 It is of similar make to her father's ring, but bears an 
 effigy and the Greek initials of the " Agnus Dei." It 
 was found by the plough in the West Riding of 
 Yorkshire, between Aberford and Sherburn, in 1870. 
 
 Visitors to the British Museum will find other 
 beautiful relics of Alfred's age in both the Gold Room 
 and the Anglo-Saxon Room ; several of these have 
 been carefully selected for the illustration opposite 
 p. 34 in this volume. 
 
 ' See illustration opposite p. 124.
 
 ALFRED S SHIPS I I 5 
 
 Note II 
 
 ALFRED'S SHIPS. 
 
 It is, as it has been said, substantially true that 
 Alfred founded the English Navy. There was a 
 long period in later centuries through which its 
 power lay dormant, but it was Alfred who, without 
 dreaming of a greater Britain beyond the seas, first 
 perceived and energised that power. Just as he re- 
 modelled the army, so he carried out a reform in 
 ship-building, whereby he kept out the Danes from 
 
 '' this little world, 
 This precious stone set in the silver sea, 
 Which serves it in the office of a wall, 
 Or as a moat defensive to a house, 
 Against the envy of less happier lands." 
 
 Exactly one thousand years before the great Naval 
 Review which celebrated Queen Victoria's Jubilee 
 in 1897, her forefather King Alfred, in the very 
 same waters, employed the nev/ ships of war which 
 he had built. We are told that they were nearly 
 twice as long as the old craft, higher in proportion, 
 and much improved in steadiness and speed ; some 
 had as many as 60 oars. Although Alfred is said to 
 have improved upon the type of vessel, a clear idea 
 of it can safely be taken from the beautiful clinker- 
 built craft discovered at Gokstad in Norway, and 
 now preserved at Christiania ; from the elaborate 
 account of this Viking-ship (published by Nicolaysen 
 at Christiania in 1882) we may here quote the 
 following points: that she was a war-ship with 16 
 pairs of oars and a full complement of about 70 men ;
 
 Il6 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 that the date of the burial of a chieftain within her 
 was about 900 A. I). ; that she has 16 planks in 
 height and 17 frames, and is of the following 
 dimensions : 66 feet on the keel, 78 feet over all, \6\ 
 feet beam amidships, and only 3-9 feet deep from 
 bulwark to keel. It may be mentioned that when 
 such a ship was at sea, additional free-board was 
 given by the shields which were hung along the side 
 {cf. Holberg's " Danemark," c. 13), just as the shallow 
 but sturdy sailing barges or barge-yachts, which may 
 now be seen in the Thames estuary, derive stability 
 from their " lee-boards." 
 
 Mention has been made (p. 16) of the ruse by which, 
 on the River Lea, a Saxon force defeated some Danish 
 crews. As recently as in the summer of 1900, a vessel 
 has been found which, from its nature and position 
 in a marsh of that river near Tottenham and Wal- 
 thamstow, may prove actually to be one of the 
 Danish ships then stranded and abandoned. So far 
 as she has at present been unearthed, she is estimated 
 to measure some 50 feet in length and 9 in beam ; 
 she is clinker-built, and the joints of her planks, like 
 those in the Gokstad vessel, have been caulked with 
 hair. Her timbers, said to be of oak and elm, are 
 riveted with square clinch-nails, burred with a very 
 hard white metal. The wood is, naturally, much 
 decayed, for the ship was found lying bottom 
 upwards under six feet of silt, sand and clay. It 
 is a precious relic of a stirring episode, and most 
 probably gives the type of Alfred's battle-ships.
 
 ALFREDS REBUILDING OF LONDON 11/ 
 
 Note III 
 
 ALFRED'S REBUILDING OF LONDON 
 
 According to Asser it was in 886 that Alfred 
 " handsomel)' restored the city of London and made 
 it habitable/' giving it into the custody of his son-in- 
 law, the ealdorman of Mercia. 
 
 More than eight centuries before, when Boadicea in 
 Suffolk had led the rebellion against the Roman 
 garrisons, London had shared the fame of principal 
 towns with Verulamium (St. Albans) and Camalo- 
 dunum (Colchester). Its position appears to have 
 made it an early prey of the piratical Norseman, but 
 they, as vv^ell as the Anglian natives of Mercia (to 
 which nation the city was subject before Alfred), 
 recognised its importance as a basis of mercantile 
 operations. It became the chief emporium of English 
 commerce and the flourishing residence of foreign 
 merchants. Many traces of the preponderating 
 Danish population still survive, as at Derby, York, 
 Grimsby, Whitby, Hull, and Bristol. For instance, 
 in Southwark (Syd-virke), where the Norwegian king 
 Svend Tveskjaeg threw up "the southern earth- 
 works" to protect trade and where Tooley Street 
 preserves the name of the Norwegian Saint Olave ; 
 in the Strand, west of the river, was settled the parish 
 of St. Clement Danes, the patron-saint of seamen ; 
 and in the present city three other churches are dedi- 
 cated to St. Olave, and one to St. Magnus. It is 
 indeed hard to assign these traces to definite years ; 
 but it is certain that Alfred's restoration of the city 
 followed his repulse of the Danes, and London, as we
 
 Il8 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 can conceive, must have been in a sad state after the 
 warfare. He fortified it, and planted in it a mihtary 
 colony of men, to whom land was given for their 
 maintenance. It thus became a barrier to the passage 
 up the Thames of pirate ships, and soon deserved the 
 title of " capital of Mercia," as the early home of 
 English liberty and the metropolis of wealth and 
 trade. A century later, in 982, it was almost entirely 
 destroyed by fire and rebuilt by Ethelred II.; but 
 such a calamity was an episode only in the growth of 
 that London which, almost effaced in the early }'ears 
 of ^Alfred's reign, was launched b}- him upon its 
 unparalleled career of civic prosperity. 
 
 Note IV 
 
 PLACES MENTIONED IN ALFRED'S WILL 
 
 The will of King Alfred, which is an authentic 
 document, is given in Anglo-Saxon in Pauli's " Life 
 of Alfred," at p. 408. It was executed between 871, 
 when he became king, and 885, when Esne died, who 
 is one of the legatees. 
 
 The following is a list of the places mentioned, by 
 way of devise or otherwise, in this will, and most of 
 these will be found underlined on the map in this 
 volume.^ 
 
 Shire. Name in ]Vill. Presejit Name. 
 
 Berkshire ... Lamburn ... Lambourn. 
 
 „ ... Waneting ... Wantage. 
 
 ' Dene, Langadene, Sutheswyrth, and Suttunc cannot be 
 identified.
 
 PLACES MENTIONED IN ALFRED'S WILL IIQ 
 
 Shire. 
 Cornwall 
 Devonshire 
 
 Dorsetshire 
 
 Essex 
 Hampshire 
 
 Oxfordshire 
 Somersetshire 
 
 Surrey 
 
 Sussex 
 
 N'anie in Will. 
 
 Strsetneat 
 
 Axanmouth 
 
 Brancescumbe ... 
 
 Exanmynsler . . . 
 
 Columtune 
 , ? Deone ... 
 , Gifle 
 
 Liwtune 
 , Mylenburn 
 . vSchireburn 
 , Sturemynster . . . 
 , Whitchurch 
 . ? .Vmbresl)yry ... 
 
 Aweltune 
 
 Cendefer 
 
 Cleare ... 
 
 Crundell 
 
 Domerham 
 . Hyssel)urn 
 
 (and Nether)... 
 . Meone ... 
 . Twyfyrd 
 
 ^Vele\ve 
 
 Wintanceastre ... 
 . ? Beecaulea 
 
 Burnhamme 
 
 Cantuctune 
 . Carumtune 
 
 Ciwtune 
 
 Cruaern ... 
 
 Eaderingtune ... 
 
 Heortigtune 
 
 Wedmor 
 . .E.sceng... 
 
 Felham... 
 
 Godelming 
 
 Gyldeford 
 
 Leodride 
 
 Stening 
 
 Thunresfield ... 
 
 Angmering 
 
 Beading 
 
 Beadinghamme 
 
 Burnham 
 . Cumtune 
 . Dicceling 
 . Ealdingburn ... 
 . Lullingminster 
 . Rytherfield 
 
 Present Name. 
 Stratton. 
 Axmouth. 
 Branscomb. 
 Axminster. 
 Columpton. 
 Down. 
 Gidleigh. 
 Litten. 
 Milbourn. 
 Sherborne. 
 Sturminster. 
 
 Whitchurch Canonicorum. 
 Ambresbury Camp. 
 Aulton. 
 
 Preston or Chilton Candever. 
 King's Clere. 
 Cnnidal. 
 Dummer. 
 
 Hussebourn (and Nether). 
 
 Meon. 
 
 Twvford. 
 
 We'llow. 
 
 Winchester. 
 
 Beckley. 
 
 Burnham. 
 
 Quantoclc. 
 
 Carhampton. 
 
 Chewton. 
 
 Crewkern. 
 
 Adrington. 
 
 Hardington. 
 
 Wedmore. 
 
 Eashing. 
 
 Felpham. 
 
 Godalming. 
 
 Guildford. 
 
 Letherhead. 
 
 Steyning. 
 
 Thunderfield (Reigate). 
 
 xVngmering. 
 
 Beeding. 
 
 Bedingham. 
 
 Burnham. 
 
 Compton. 
 
 Ditcheling. 
 
 Aldingburn. 
 
 Lullington. 
 
 Rotherfield.
 
 I20 
 
 \LFRED THE GREAT 
 
 Shire. 
 
 N'anic in Will. 
 
 Present Name. 
 
 Sussex 
 
 . Suthtune 
 
 Sutton. 
 
 Wiltshire 
 
 . .Ksctune 
 
 .. Ashton. 
 
 5 5 
 
 . Bedewind 
 
 .. Bedwin. 
 
 J5 
 
 Cippenhame 
 . Cylfantune 
 . Cyseldene 
 
 Chippenham. 
 .. Chilhampton 
 .. Chiseldon. 
 
 55 
 5» 
 
 . Ethandune 
 . Pefesigge 
 . Welig ... 
 
 .. Edington. 
 . . Pewsey. 
 .. Willey. 
 
 The text of the Will of Alfred itself can best be 
 found in the Rolls Series edition of " Liber Monas- 
 terii de Hyda" (London, i866), where the Anglo- 
 Saxon, Middle-English, Latin, and Modern Entjlish 
 versions can all be studied, with notes. The " Liber," 
 containing the Anglo-Saxon version of the Will, was 
 found in i86i, in the library of the Earl of Maccles- 
 field, at Shirburn Castle, in Oxfordshire, being an 
 unfinished and illuminated MS. of about 1400 A.D.
 
 MATERIALS FOR THE HISTORY OF 
 ALFRED 
 
 HERE, as elsewhere, the student desiring to 
 discover and iUustrate the true history of a 
 hero of the remote past turns to the shelves of 
 libraries and museums. The literature of our sub- 
 ject, if not voluminous, is fairly copious, but requires 
 careful sifting and examination. Alfred stands among 
 the chief actors in human history who, from their 
 deaths into endless time, earn the rare tribute of fair 
 legends and affectionate invention. Their genius 
 attracts to itself the main events in intellectual and 
 material progress which come near to it in time, and 
 the personality becomes illuminated with the innu- 
 merable points of light which illustrate such ideas. 
 Such praise is of the highest kind, and is at once the 
 despair and the reward of the careful student. 
 
 The written materials here fall into three main 
 classes — contemporary records, mediaeval chronicles, 
 and modern essays. 
 
 A.— Contemporary^ Eccortic?. 
 
 I. Assei-'s Life of Alfred, and 2. The Anglo- Saxo7i 
 Chronicle have already been dealt with ; they are, 
 of course, our chief and best sources of knowledge.
 
 122 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 3. Charters oj Alfred's Reign. — The few genuine 
 " charters " dating from the time of Alfred are among 
 the most authentic memorials which have survived. 
 They have carefully to be distinguished from fabrica- 
 tions pretending to date from the ninth century, which 
 are really the later compositions of monks and others, 
 more anxious than scrupulous in the production of 
 documents of title to their possessions. All are 
 collected, together with references to the original 
 MSS., by Kemble in his monumental work of 
 research entitled " Codex Diplomaticus /Evi Saxonici" 
 (London, 1840),^ where he is at pains to denote those 
 the authenticit}' of which is beyond question. 
 
 " The whole collection," says Kemble, " of /Elfred's 
 charters, a large proportion of which are forgeries, is 
 unaccountably meagre in those points which it might 
 have been expected would have received much illus- 
 tration " ; they merely shed some rays of the light of 
 original authority upon the Court of Alfred and upon 
 the land-customs of his country. 
 
 Three charters, dated 853, 855 and 862 respec- 
 tively, are signed by Alfred as "son of the king." 
 Of these one is a palimpsest in Latin (No. 269) ; of 
 the others which are in Saxon and Latin (Nos. 276 
 and 287), the former bears the unusually full signa- 
 ture " ego Ailfrcd films regis consensi et subscripsiP 
 
 ' Vol. ii., where see introduction, p. vi. ; the numbers quoted 
 in the text in brackets refer to the charters as enumerated in 
 that volume. Nos. 269 and 287 are in the Cotton Library at 
 the British Museum, as also is No. 317, a Stowe MS. ; No. 276 
 is at Rochester ; and Nos. 301 and 324 are at Canterbury. The 
 eleventh-century (early) copy of the Will, No. 314, is a Stowe 
 MS. in the British Museum.
 
 MATERIALS FOR THE HISTORY OF ALFRED 123 
 
 Out of thirteen which are dated within the years of 
 Alfred's kingship, five only can be held to be genuine; 
 of these the following is an epitome :— 
 
 (No. 301, in Saxon). A grant of land at Chertham 
 in 871, being a translation from the Saxon orginal, 
 made towards the end of the twelfth century. 
 
 (No. 310, in Saxon). A grant of sundry lands by 
 Alfred to '' Sceptoniensis ecclesia' ; it seems to include 
 the appointment of " Ayleuam filiam memn . . . cogente 
 infirmitatel' and is dated from 871 to 878. 
 
 (No. 314, in Saxon). This, beginning " Ic yElfred 
 cingc," is the famous will of Alfred. 
 
 (No. 317, in Saxon). A charter, assigned to the 
 years 871-889, beginning " Ic /Elfred dux." 
 
 (No. 324, in Saxon and Latin). A grant of lands 
 at " Fearnleag " to his faithful duke Sigilmus, dated 
 898. This is signed ''ego celfred rex saxonuni lianc 
 memn donationem signo see enicis eonfirinol' and sub- 
 scribed also by a sacerdos, and eleven diiees and 
 ininistri. 
 
 The eight remaining charters,^ all of which, it is to 
 be noticed, are in Latin, are clearly fraudulent deeds 
 of title invented in later centuries, and form an 
 amusing but interesting tribute to the repute of 
 Alfred. Athelney, Frekeham in Suffolk,^ and Apple- 
 ford are among the monastic homes of these pious 
 
 lies. 
 
 It is worthy of remark that not one of these 
 charters, genuine or spurious, is subscribed with the 
 
 ' Nos. 309, 316, 318-322, and 326. t, n- - 
 
 - Also published by Thorpe in -Registrum Roffense 
 (London, 1769), p. 357-
 
 124 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 name of Asser, although his name appears as " i\sser 
 episcopus " in charters of 903 and 904.1 
 
 A contemporary document, second in importance 
 only to Alfred's will, is the Treaty of the Peace of 
 Wedmore, quoted in Stubbs' " Select Charters," at p. 
 63, from Thorpe's " Ancient Laws and Institutes of 
 the Anglo-Saxons." 
 
 4. Coins. — The coins of the Anglo-Saxon mints of 
 Alfred's reign, unlike those of Prankish mints, are 
 almost entirely silver ; in Xorthumbria only does a 
 small copper coin, called a styca, appear to have been 
 struck ; there are also a few gold pieces, of extreme 
 rarity. The penny-piece usually weighs 24 grains, 
 like the Roman half-denarius, which still circulated. 
 We have lists of the authorised numbers and places 
 of moneyers, and learn that amiputation of the hand 
 was the penalty for unauthorised minting. We cannot 
 say for certain whether as early as Alfred's time 
 money was struck in London on the site of the Saxon 
 Pyx Chapel by Westminster Abbey, where the Royal 
 Mint was in later years. 
 
 We look to the coins for contemporary evidence of 
 the features and the nomenclature of Alfred. As to 
 the former we are doomed to disappointment ; excel- 
 lent as is the formation of their letters and careful 
 even the disposition of the design over the field, the 
 moneyers exhibit no skill in the portrait of the king. 
 Their art could show neither the noble t}'pes of Greek 
 coins nor the striking likenesses of individual charac- 
 
 ' Xos. 335 and 337 in Kemble ("Cod. Diplom.,"' vol. ii.). 
 Nos. 331, 332 and 336 are probably spurious, but the mention 
 of Asser is evidence of his early repute.
 
 .>v4^lp^ 
 
 5tLVE>t TEVVY OP ALfRED THE GREA T. 
 "Rw"! LT9LD = Hek^c^iMn. cj Lm^wi . 
 
 a. The Finger-rings of Alfred's father and sister (see p. 114). 
 
 /?. Ground-plan of Alfred's Church at Athelney (see p. 90 of J. C. Wall 
 
 on T/ie Abbeys of Alfred, 1900), and a more detailed conjecture at 
 
 p. 131 of Spelman's Life (folio edition of 1678). 
 c. Coin of Alfred.
 
 MATERIALS FOR THE HISTORY OF ALFRED 1 25 
 
 ters in the Roman. Guizot, indeed, anxious to dis- 
 cover what he can, speaks thus of the representation 
 of Alfred's features : " tantot le nez est prcsque im- 
 perceptible ou retrouse, tantot c'est un nez d'aigle ou 
 meme de cheval. Ici I'ceil s'arrondit ; la il s'allonge ; 
 la il louche ; la il est creve " ! ^ The fact is that the 
 craftsmen of the time were utterly incapable of the 
 beautiful art, which, ten or more centuries before, had 
 adorned the later stages of other worlds. - 
 
 A further point illustrated by the coins is the trade 
 of the age. The fact that a large number of Anglo- 
 Saxon coins have been dug up at the principal trading 
 places in the Baltic is a safe proof of traffic there, the 
 way to which was perhaps opened by the voyages of 
 Ohthere and Wulfstan. The probable reciprocity of 
 
 ^ "Alfred le Grand," p. 187. There are, of course, many 
 examples of the traditional portrait of Alfred. In Sir John 
 Spelmans folio Life of the King (sec Bibliography at p. 137) are 
 two plates engraved by Martin Burghers, which show (i) a por- 
 trait from a iabcUa at Univcrsit}' College, which can scarcely 
 be the queer effigy in the Library inscribed " U.D. Hon : Dom : 
 Skeffington, 1767" ; (2) the two heads of stone inserted above 
 the door of the Rectory at Brasenose College, which were also 
 engraved by Vertue for Wises 1722 edition of Asser and which 
 are now much defaced (one being said to be John Erigena) : 
 (3) a portrait from St. Albans Church ; and (4) two ligures 
 from a stained window in All Souls" Library. It was the above- 
 mentioned Vertue who engraved a larger portrait, surrounded 
 by emblems, of which many copies appear to be extant. 
 Various others have been invented, and bring the tradition 
 down from the illuminations of thirteenth-century MSS. to the 
 statue of the millennial commemoration. It may be said of 
 that figured in Spelmans octavo Life that nothing can be 
 traced in the Bodleian MSS. of the original to which it is 
 ascribed. 
 
 - Cf. a curious Trial-piece of Lead, with a defaced head of 
 Alfred, which was found in St. Pauls Churchyard about 1841, 
 and is preserved in the British Museum : formerly it was in 
 the Roach-Smith collection.
 
 126 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 commerce receives support from the famous " find " 
 made at Cuerdale, in Lancashire, and now deposited 
 in the British Museum, consisting of Arabian coins, 
 eight hundred coins of Alfred, coins of Norwegian 
 and Danish kings and jarls, and silver ornaments 
 similar to those found in Russia and Scandinavia. 
 
 5. Handicraft. — The student of English history- 
 turns with the same delight to the arts and crafts of 
 the Plantagenet and Tudor periods, as does the 
 student of the Greek world to the peerless trophies 
 of the Periclean age. But, if we compare the earlier 
 stages in the evolution of the two nations, we are not 
 so richly rewarded by the relics of Alfred's time as by 
 those of the Homeric kings ; no such treasure as that 
 yielded by Alycena; is forthcoming. The cause may 
 be said to lie between the perturbed condition of the 
 people whom Alfred ruled and the fact that the relics 
 of ]\I)'cenai lay unknown and untouched by the 
 marauders of intervening centuries. 
 
 On the other hand, we possess in national and 
 private collections many objects which can be attri- 
 buted to the time of Alfred, and bear testimony to 
 his patronage of the various crafts. The visitor to 
 the British Museum will find such in both the Gold 
 Room and the Anglo-Saxon Room, in the latter of 
 which the true Christian work must be careful 1}' dis- 
 tinguished from the more numerous relics found in 
 pagan tombs.
 
 MATERIALS FOR THE HISTORY OF ALFRED 127 
 
 By "media,'val chronicles" is meant the collection 
 of historical and other works which has survived to 
 the present da}^, and is contained in manuscripts 
 dating from the time of Alfred to the introduction of 
 printing. The evidence of such authorities is not 
 first-hand, and must be carefully weighed before 
 being accepted for what it is worth. It is abundantly 
 clear that the peculiar reputation of Alfred is the 
 cause of mythical, legendary, and romantic additions 
 to his story. While such additions possess real 
 interest and are a pleasant reward of historical study, 
 it is incumbent on the modern student to reproduce 
 them only with the greatest care and to advise his 
 readers of their source. 
 
 But in addition to the many points, whether 
 fictitious or plausible, which such chronicles con- 
 tribute, they deserve to be searched for what may 
 be called their records of the fame of Alfred. If it 
 is reasonable, as it surely is, to study the high-souled 
 character of this patriotic prince, it follows that we 
 should observe with interest the estimation in which 
 he has been held by our forefathers, of whom he was the 
 ancestor. It is probable that there are and will be 
 few cases where actual history gives so conspicuous 
 an example of the truth that the influence of a noble 
 life is eternal. 
 
 In making the following chronological summary of 
 those media:ival writers who refer to Alfred, the writer 
 has carefully searched, besides other works, the many 
 volumes of " The Chronicles and Aleniorials of Great
 
 128 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 Britain and Ireland," edited, between 1858 and the 
 present time, under the direction of the Master of the 
 Rolls. There are many slight references to Alfred 
 (or " Aluredus," as he is frequently called) which do 
 not deserve quotation ; they occur especially in those 
 lists of benefactors to religious houses which " handled 
 the truth carelessly " in the desire to secure posses- 
 sions. The reader is further referred to the actual 
 authorities for the original Latin of the passages which 
 it has been thought well to translate. 
 
 Eleventh Century. 
 
 Ethelwerd, writing in this century, dedicated his 
 Chronicle, which is again substantially taken from 
 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, to his cousin Matilda, 
 speaking of Alfred as her grandfather's grandfather ; 
 he himself was descended from Alfred's brother 
 Ethelred. His work, written in a barbarous and 
 inflated Latin style, adds nothing noteworthy except 
 another obituary notice of Alfred and a tribute to the 
 translation from Boethius. 
 
 Florence of JVorees/er Abbey, who, however, died 
 as late as 11 18, made a copy with omissions and 
 inaccuracies, of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He 
 adds a careful estimate of Alfred's character to the 
 record of his death. Freeman speaks of him as 
 *' very distinctly not an historian, but a biographer, 
 sometimes a laureate.''
 
 materials for the history of alfred 129 
 
 Twelfth Century. 
 
 William of M aline sbury, who was born about 1095, 
 and compiled his " Gesta Regum Anglorum " about 
 1 135, dehberately posed as the successor of the vener- 
 able Bede. His work indeed possesses high qualities. 
 An industrious scholar, clearly anxious to be impar- 
 tial in spite of Norman proclivities, he aspired to 
 making his history a systematic and critical work of 
 art ; he tried to strike the balance between facts and 
 characters, and was familiar not only with the pre- 
 vious annals of his own country, but with many 
 political charters, with foreign annals, and with a 
 wide range of ecclesiastical and classical literature. 
 We can trace his use of Bede's " HistoriaEcclesiastica," 
 of Nennius, of the Peterborough version of the Anglo- 
 Saxon Chronicle, and, amongst many biographies, of 
 Asser's Life of Alfred. In speaking of " the inex- 
 tricable labyrinths of Alfred's labours," he says he 
 can only summarise the confused amount of materials ; 
 he describes the king as being " himself constantly to 
 the fore in every time of stress, terrifying foreigners 
 and invigorating his countrymen by the conspicuous 
 qualities of his valour ; never to be stirred after a 
 defeat, but made more careful by the memory of a 
 repulse, and emboldened by the )'earning to avenge 
 it." He gathers together a store of various facts con- 
 cerning Alfred's institutions and inventions, supple- 
 menting Asser's account ; he confirms the calling of 
 '' Asserio " from St. David's and his appointment to 
 the see of Sherborne ; he gives the list of Alfred's 
 translations as " Orosius, Gregory's Pastoral, Bede's 
 
 10
 
 130 A LI' RED THE GREAT 
 
 Gesta Anglorum, and Boethius' Consolatio," and he 
 mentions his " handbook." It is to be noticed that 
 he admits the legends of St. Cuthbert and St. Martin, 
 and the story of Alfred harping in the Danish camp ; 
 further, he confuses John Scotus Erigena with John 
 the Old Saxon. 
 
 Henry of Huntingdon (archdeacon), who died about 
 1 1 50, has the merit of having preserved many ancient 
 ballads and traditions, but they scarcely illustrate the 
 time of Alfred. His work also was based on the 
 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He gives an epitaph 
 inscribed upon the king's own tomb as follows : — 
 
 Versus. 
 
 Xobilitas innata tibi probitatis honorem, 
 Armipotens Alurede, dedit, probitasque laborem, 
 Perpctuumque labor nomen, cui mixta dolori 
 [Gaudia semper erant, spes semper mixta timori].' 
 Si modo victus erat, ad crastiiia bella parabat ; 
 Si modo victor erat, ad crastina bella pavebat. 
 lam post transactos regni vitcuqiie labores 
 Christus ei sit vera quies sceptrumqiie perenne." 
 
 It is possible that these lines, which clearly could not 
 have been composed in the tenth centur}^ had been 
 inscribed on the tomb in Hyde Abbey before his da}'s. 
 Simeon of DurJiani (monk and precentor) compiled 
 a similar history, which he carried down to the year 
 1 1 29; his Latin style presents a curiously ornate 
 phraseolog}'. 
 
 Thirteenth Century. 
 
 It is in manuscripts of the thirteenth centur\-, pre- 
 served in the British Museum, that we have the 
 
 ' This line has been supplied in the margin of the MS. by 
 the antiquary, Thomas Baker.
 
 This is the earliest extant portrait, except those on the coins ; it 
 occurs in a MS. of the Chronicle of Matthew of Paris carried 
 down to 1225 A.D. (MS. Cotton. Claud. D. vi. s. xiv., Brit. 
 Mtts.) and is coloured more delicately than this process-block 
 can represent.
 
 MATERIALS FOR THE HISTORY OF ALFRED I3I 
 
 earliest portraits of Alfred, the coins excepted ; they 
 cannot, of course, pretend to have any intrinsic value, 
 for they are not of that indifferent but sincere kind of 
 which Carlyle would say that they were " made by a 
 faithful human creature of that face and figure which 
 he saw with his eyes, and which I can never see with 
 mine " ; but they are interesting additions to the 
 records of his praise. In one manuscript (numbered 
 Cotton. Claud. D. vi. s. xiv.), being a copy of the 
 chronicle of Matthew of Paris carried down to 1225, 
 a picture of i\lfred is included in a series of coloured 
 portraits of the Kings of England from Brutus to 
 Henry III. ; the same MS. contains an outlined head 
 in a circle, entitled " Alfred Sapiens." Another MS. 
 of the same date (numbered Cotton. Faust. B. vii. 
 f. 63) is a Genealogy of the Earls of Richmond, and 
 contains an account of" Alured," at the beginning of 
 which is a small portrait. 
 
 "The Annals of Winchester," which carry the story 
 to 1277, contain a notice of Alfred, which is sum- 
 marised in the following sentence : "That kingdom of 
 the English which before his day was in rude and 
 unsettled order, he thoroughly educated and regu- 
 lated." 
 
 Fourteenth Century. 
 
 The lengthy work entitled " Flores Historiarum," 
 which was carried on by various writers down to 
 1307, has been usually ascribed to Matthew of West- 
 minster, whose name appears in one inferior MS. ; he 
 is probably an imaginary person. The various MSS. 
 are descended from the AIS. Chetham (at Manchester,
 
 132 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 6712), which was itself derived from the Corpus 
 Christi College MS. of MattJiew of Paris, or from 
 the MS. Merton (at Eton College), written at the 
 Priory of Merton early in the fourteenth century. 
 The work contains a long account of Alfred, and has 
 clearly drawn upon Asser's life. In two places it 
 throws light upon Alfred's struggle against the 
 Danes. 
 
 Richard of Cirencester {c. 1330-140O; includes a 
 detailed tribute to Alfred in his " Speculum Historian 
 de Gestis Regum Anglian." He carefully examines the 
 question whether the regalia of the Kings of England 
 dated from Alfred or Edward the Confessor ; the 
 common opinion had been that the former had 
 brought a crown from Rome, the gift of his god- 
 father, Pope Leo, but Richard notes that Alfred, a 
 young child, was not then king, and that the regalia, 
 which had been deposited by PZdward at West- 
 minster, are spoken of both by William the Con- 
 queror and by Pope Innocent II. as having been 
 originally given by the later monarch. There are 
 many points in this writer's narrative which go to 
 prove that he possessed a knowledge of antiquity 
 very remarkable for a monk of his time. It is to be 
 noted that Richard places the death of Alfred in 
 900. 
 
 " Eulogium Historiarum," written by a monk of 
 Malmesbury in the fourteenth century, includes 
 another considerable account of Alfred, containing 
 many of the traditional points. He piously mentions 
 that " Alfred never went out of church before the end
 
 MATERIALS FOR THE HISTORY OF ALFRED 1 33 
 
 of the service " ! His notice of Alfred's legislation 
 has been specially referred to. 
 
 Jo/in of Tyneinoiitli, in his " Historia Aurea" (num- 
 bered Bodleian, lib. 21, cap. 117), records an anecdote 
 of King Alfred which, pretty as it is, one hesitates to 
 accept as history. It is given in Dr. Pauli's Life, at 
 p. 164. 
 
 Another illuminated manuscript of this century 
 (numbered Cotton. Claud. D. ii.) contains the Laws 
 of Alfred and the Treaty of Wedmore. Exquisite 
 miniatures are contained in two initial letters, and 
 the arms of University College adorn one page ! 
 
 Fifteenth Century. 
 
 John Capgrave, in his "Chronicle of England," 
 records that " Alured in Ynglond ... be the councelle 
 of Seint Ned, mad an open Scole of divers sciens at 
 Oxenford." 
 
 This legend concerning Oxford is elaborated by 
 John Ross, of Warwickshire (died 1491), in his Latin 
 " Historia Regum Anglise," who specifically asserts 
 that " King Alured or Alfred, well versed in warfare 
 and a second Solomon in wisdom," founded " parva 
 aula Universitatis." 
 
 By the vague term " modern essays " is meant the 
 number of printed works, dealing more or less ex- 
 clusively with Alfred, which date from 1600 to the 
 present time. They are, as a rule, so accessible that
 
 134 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 it is here proposed to refer to them but briefly. A 
 full list will be found in the Biblioc^raphy, at page 137. 
 
 Seventeenth Century. 
 
 The curious little volume called Stowe's " English 
 Chronicles" (a copy of which is in the Inner Temple 
 Library) gives, at page 28, a sketch of Alfred's reign 
 which is typical of the careless history-spinning of 
 this century. 
 
 In 1634 was published "The Life of Alfred or 
 Alured : the first institutor of subordinate Govern- 
 ment in this Kingdome, and Refounder of the 
 University of Oxford. Together with a Parallell 
 of our Soveraigne Lord K. Charles untill this yeare 
 1634. By Robert Powell of Wels, one of the Society 
 of New Inne." The volume includes the following 
 naive inipriinaUw, which ver)^ possibly amused the 
 famous author of " Areopagitica " : •' Perlegi hune 
 Librum, cui Titulus, in quo nihil reperio, quo 
 minus, cum utilitate publica, imprimatur. Tho. 
 Weekes, R.P.D. Episc. Lond. Cap. Domest." 
 
 Another work, equally unreliable with the last, is 
 " The Life of /Elfred the Great, by Sir John Spel- 
 man, Knt," originally published at Oxford in 1678, 
 but re-edited by Hearne in 1709. 
 
 Eighteenth Century. 
 
 Spelman's Life appears to have been the basis for 
 the worthless " Life of Alfred, by Bicknell," pub- 
 lished at London in 1777. 
 
 Previously to this, however, F. Wise had published
 
 MATERIALS FOR THE HISTORY OF ALFRED 135 
 
 from the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, in 1722, his 
 scholarly and careful edition of Asser's Life of 
 Alfred, a work which has already been referred to 
 and w^ill be further mentioned. The book is a rare 
 one, and should be prized by any one who is the 
 lucky owner of a copy. • 
 
 Nineteenth Century. 
 
 In the 19th century the laborious works of Fox, 
 Palgrave, Kemble, Thorpe, and Giles evince the 
 revival of interest in those Anglo-Saxon times, the 
 study of which appears to have been neglected 
 hitherto owing to the classical delights of ancient 
 Greece and Rome. In later years the fascinating 
 volumes of Freeman and J. R. Green provide 
 accounts of Alfred which are regrettably brief. 
 
 The following are the volumes specially devoted 
 to our hero which call for consideration. In 1853 
 appeared the English translation of the German 
 " Life of Alfred the Great," by Dr. R. Pauli, a work 
 of careful scholarship and generous enthusiasm. A 
 small and little known volume by G. Guizot, pub- 
 lished at Paris in 1856, well deserves to be read. 
 The elaborate and rare Jubilee Edition of "The 
 Whole Works of King Alfred the Great" (1858), 
 dedicated to Queen Victoria, comprises many pre- 
 vious publications and is a storehouse of materials, 
 which require, however, to be carefully sifted. 
 Finally, the volume by Judges Hughes called 
 "Alfred the Great," specially inspired by a love of 
 the Berkshire vales and downs, made so familiar
 
 136 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 to all readers of " Tom Brown," and apparently 
 occasioned by reflections upon the grievances of 
 agricultural England, is a work embodying the 
 knowledge of a generation ago, somewhat inac- 
 curate and diffuse, but imbued with the manly 
 spirit of its author. 
 
 There have scarcely been published as yet any 
 volumes concerning Alfred which have derived illus- 
 tration from the evidences of archaeology, the sister- 
 science to history which has recently been so widely 
 developed. To meet this deficiency is one of the 
 special aims of this little volume, and in the critical 
 notices which its first edition received this quality has 
 had the most friendly recognition.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 {X.n.—For tlic MSS. daliiiil fiviii the gtli to the iC^th centuries, the reader is referred 
 to the previous chapter on " Materials.") 
 
 *** The books to be commended, on account of their respective merits, as most 
 reliable and instructive, are marked with an asterisk ( ♦ ). 
 
 Alfrcdi re«is res gestae, lingua Latina seel Uteris Saxonicis. 
 Ed. MaiiJi. Parker. (London, 1574.) 
 
 Siowe's English Chronicles (c 1600). 
 
 The Life of Alfred, or Alured : the first Institutor of Sub- 
 ordinate Government in this Kingdome, and Refounder of the 
 University of Oxford. Together with a Parallell of our 
 Soveraigne Lord, K. Charles untill this yeare, 1634. By Rohcri 
 Powell of Wels, one of the Society of New-Inne. 
 
 Vita ^Ifredi Magni AnglicX^ Regis. Sir y oh 11 Spclman, Kni. 
 (Oxford, 1678, folio.) Of two copies said to be in the library 
 of Univ. Coll. Oxon., one (according to the Catalogue) contains 
 MS. notes ; but the author's search for these has been un- 
 successful. 
 
 Historic-E Britanniccie, Saxonica?, Anglo-Danic:u, Scriptores 
 XV. T. Gale. (Oxford, 1691.) 
 
 Boethi Consolatio Philosophioe Anglo-Saxonice Reddita ab 
 Alfredo. F. Junius and C. Rawlinson. (Oxford, 1698.) 
 
 The Life of Alfred the Great. Sir John Spclman, Kni. 
 (edited by T. Hearne). (Oxford, 1709, octavo.) A copy of 
 this edition in the Bodleian Library has some interesting MS. 
 notes, perhaps by Gough, once the owner. 
 
 Annales Rerum Gestarum ^.Ifredi Magni, auctore Asserio 
 137
 
 13^ ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 Menevensi. F. Wise. (Oxford, 1722.) The original pros- 
 pectus of this is in the Bodleian Library, marked fol. O. 
 663 (1).-:^ 
 
 Life of Alfred the Great. Bickncll. (London, 1777.) 
 
 The Life and Character of Alfred the Great. J. Rylaud. 
 (London, 1784.) 
 
 The Will of King Alfred. Edited bv 0. Manniuii. (Oxford, 
 1788.) 
 
 History of England, b}- Hume and SmoUcit. 21 vols. 
 (London, 1834.) 
 
 King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon Version of the Metres of 
 Boethius. S. Fox. (London, 1835.) 
 
 History of the Anglo-Saxons. F. PaJgravc. (London, 1837.) 
 
 Histor}^ of England. Sharon Turner. 12 vols. (London, 
 1839.) 
 
 Codex Diplomaticus ^vi Saxonici. KenibJe. 6 vols. 
 (London, 1840.) - 
 
 History of England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings. Lappen- 
 berg (translated by Thorpe). 2 vols. (London, 1845.) 
 
 The Life and Times of Alfred the Great. J. A. Giles. 
 (London, 1848.) 
 
 Layamon's Brut. Sir F. Mmhleii. (1848.) 
 
 The Life of Alfred the Great. Dr. R. PaiiJi (translated by 
 B. Thorpe). (^London, 1853.) =•'■ 
 
 Description of Europe by Alfred and the Voyages. Edited 
 by J. Bosiivrth, D.D. (London, 1853.) 
 
 Alfred le Grand. Guillaumc Guizot. (Paris, 1856.) 
 
 The Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland 
 during the Middle Ages, published under the direction of 
 the Master of the Rolls. Various editors. (London. 1858 
 onwards.) =■' 
 
 The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great. Jubilee 
 Edition. Edited by Rev. Dr. G^les. 2 vols. (London, 1858.) 
 
 Alfred the Great. Thomas Hughes. (London, originally 
 1859, republished 1881.) 
 
 King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon Version of Boethius de Consola- 
 tione Philosophine, translated b}- S. Fox, and the ^Metres trans- 
 lated by M. F. Tupper. (London, 1864.) 
 
 King Alfred's Boethius. S. Fox. (London, 1864.) 
 
 Two Saxon Chronicles Parallel. Earle. (London, 1865.)
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 139 
 
 History of the Norman Conquest of England. £. A. 
 Freeman. 6 vols. (Oxford, 1870 ff.) 
 
 Select Charters. Siubbs. (Oxford, 1870.) 
 King Alfred's West-Saxon Version of Gregory's Pastoral 
 Care. H. S-di^eet. (London, 187 1-2.) 
 
 The Constitutional History of England. IV.Sfiibbs. 2 vols. 
 (Oxford, 1875.) ■ 
 
 History of the English People, y. R. Green. 4 vols. 
 (London, 1877.) 
 
 The Peace of Wedmore (a Lecture). J. Earle. (Oxford 
 and London, 1878.) 
 
 The Life of King Alfred the Great. A. G. Knight, S.J. 
 (London, 1880.) 
 
 The Making of England. 'J. R. Green. (London, 1882.) 
 The Conquest of England. J. R. Green. (London, 1883.) 
 King Alfred's West-Saxon Version of Orosins. H. Siceet. 
 (London, 1883.) 
 
 Early English Literature. Bernhard ten Brink. Translated 
 by M. Kennedy. (London, 1883.) 
 
 Anglo-Saxon Literature. J. Earle. (London, 1884.) 
 Alfred's Year of Battles. .S/7;/rav. (English Historical 
 Review, 1886.) 
 English Prose. J. Earle. (London, 1890.) -•■ 
 A Student's History of England. S. A'. Gardiner. 3 vols. 
 (London, 1890.) 
 
 Boethius. H. F. Sieu^ari. (London, 1891.) 
 
 The Legal Code of Alfred the Great. M. H. Turk. (Halle, 
 
 1893.) 
 
 Extracts from Alfred's Orosius. Edited by H. Siceel. 
 
 (Oxford, 1893.) 
 
 A Literary History of the English People, -fusserand. 
 
 (London, 1895.)" 
 
 The Universities of Europe in the Aliddle Ages. Rashdall. 
 3 vols. (Oxford, 1895.) 
 
 History of (Early) EngHsh Law. Polloek and Maitland. 
 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1895.)^'= 
 
 Six Old English Chronicles. Edited by Giles. (Reprmted 
 London, 1896.) 
 
 Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum. U\ G. Searle. (Cambridge, 
 
 1897-)
 
 140 ALFRED THE GREAT 
 
 A Lecture delivered at Birinini^ham bv Frederic Harrison. 
 1897.: 
 
 A Lecture delivered at Winchester by F. York Powell. 
 1898. 
 
 A Lecture delivered at Winchester bv Sir JValier Bcsanf. 
 1898. 
 
 Foundations of England. Sir James Ramsay. (London, 
 1898.) 
 
 Alfred the Great. By different Essayists. Indited by 
 Alfred Bowker. (London, 1899.)- 
 
 Alfred in the Chroniclers. E. Conybearc. (London, 1900.)" 
 
 King Alfred's Version of the Consolations of Boethius. 
 W. J. Sedgefield. (Oxford, 1899.) ■■- 
 
 Modern English Version of the same. W. J. Sedgefield. 
 (Oxford, 1900.) =•' 
 
 Asser's Life of Alfred. W. H. Stevenson. (Oxford, 1900.)- 
 
 The Story of Alfred the Great. Hawkins and Tliornion 
 Sniitli. (London, 1900.) 
 
 Alfred the Great : his Abbeys of Hyde, Athelney, and 
 Shaftesbury. J. C. Wall. (London, 1900.) 
 
 Alfred, the West-Saxon. D. Macfadyen. (London, 1901.) 
 
 The Alfred Jewel. J. Earle. (Oxford, 1901.) " 
 
 Alfred the Great. Warwick H. Draper. (London, 1901.) 
 
 Poetical IVorks on Alfred. 
 
 Alfred, a Masque, j. Thompson and D. Mallet. (London, 
 
 1740.) 
 Alfred the Great, a traged}', in 5 acts. (London, 1753.) 
 Alfred, a Tragedy in 5 acts. y. Home. (London, 1778.) 
 Alfred, an Historical Tragedy in 5 acts. (Sheffield, 1789.) 
 Alfred, an Epic Poem, in 24 books. Bv J. Cottle. (London, 
 
 1800.) 
 Science Revived, or the Vision of Alfred. By Rce. J, 
 
 Sympson. (London, 1802.) 
 
 Alfred the Great, a Drama in 5 acts. (London, 1829.) 
 Alfred the Great, or the Patriot King. A Drama. J. 
 
 Sheridan Knowles. (London, 183 1.) 
 
 Alfred, a Drama in 5 acts, by F. Egerton, Earl of Ellesmere. 
 
 (London, 1840.)
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY I4I 
 
 Alfred. A Patriotic Plav. M. F. Tiippcr. (Westminster, 
 
 Alfred the Great in Athelnay. A Play. Viscount Stratford 
 
 dc Redd iff e. (London, 1876.) 
 
 England's Darling, by Alfred Austin. (London, 1896.) ' 
 Alfred the Great. By Leonard H. Draper. (Rossall School, 
 
 Prize Poem, 1898.) 
 
 * In this work, the Poet Laureate, who conhnes the action 
 of his play to the year 878, flies boldly in the face of history. 
 Alfred's sister, the Queen of Mercia, appears already as a 
 refugee at Pavia ; his wife (and not his daughter) is sent to the 
 Abbey of Shaftesbury ; Athelney is bequeathed to ^thelswitha ; 
 the legend of the harp-playing is connected with the over- 
 throw of Guthrum in a right royal fashion of melodrama ; 
 Edgiva, the heroine, is called the daughter of the scolding 
 dame of Athelney ; and (most astonishing of all) her lover 
 Edward, Alfred's son, plays the manly hero when his father 
 was but 29 years of age and had been wedded barely ten 
 years ! This sober criticism, however, is disarmed by the 
 poet's avowal that he has " not hesitated to antedate those and 
 other incidents of his rule, and, in a word, to compress into a 
 period of a few weeks the most striking events of a life-time." 
 The onl}' gain is one of stirring improbabilities, which please 
 one less than the quiet tributes to the manifold charm of 
 English Nature which are more characteristic of the dis- 
 tinguished author.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Adhelm, 45, 50 (opp.) 
 
 ^^sop's Fables, 85 
 
 ^thelflced, 19 
 
 ^thelings, 36 
 
 .-Ethelred, 15, 19 
 
 iEthelswitha, sister of Alfred, ii-|. 
 
 wife of Alfred, 5, 18, 106, 112 
 .4ithehvulf, 4, 114 
 Alfred, birth, i 
 
 visits Rome, 4, 58 
 
 wins a prize, 4, 28, 50 
 
 youth, 4 
 
 marriage, 5 
 
 as fighter, 5 
 
 as founder of the Xavy, 7, 17, 1 15 
 
 kingship, 9, 42 
 
 domestic reforms, 10 
 
 premature inhis achievements, 10 
 
 military reforms, 11 
 
 legal reforms, 11, 31 scq., 42 
 
 government reforms, 12, 36 scq. 
 
 church reforms, 12 
 
 sayings of, 12, 32, 33, 76, 77, 78, 
 79,80 
 
 as man of letters, 13, 44 scq. 
 
 as educationist, 13 
 
 as patron of handicraft, 13, 126 
 
 compared with Charlemagne 
 
 23,77 
 compared with Augustus, 10, 42 
 " England's Darling," 83 
 
 Alfred's wife, 5, 18, 106, 112 
 children, 19, 106 
 death, 18, 101 
 will, 19, 104 
 burial-place, loi scq. 
 portraits, 124 scq. 
 character, 20, 24, 68, 72 
 Alfric, 49 
 Anglo-Saxon tongue, specimens 
 
 of, 63 
 Annals, the, 21 
 Annals of Winchester, 13 J 
 ! Architecture, vSaxon, 103, 114 
 ; Aristotle, 69 scq. 
 \ Army, Alfred's, ii 
 Ashdown, battle of, 6, 97 
 Asser, 25 scq., 30, 47, 51, 78, 92 
 scq., 129 
 quoted, 4, 6, 7, 8, 14, 29, 48, 50, 
 51, 52, 68 
 Athelney, 8, 13, 48, 92, 123 
 Augustine, 2, 12, 82 
 Augustus, Alfred compared with. 
 10, 42 
 
 Bede, 3S, 40, 45, 59 scq., 129 
 Benfleet, 14, 15 
 Bibliography, 137 
 Boc-land, 37 
 Boethius, 56, 64 scq. 
 
 as an influence on Alfred, 68, 72 
 142
 
 INDEX 
 
 143 
 
 Burh, 38 
 
 Burial-place, Alfred's, loi 
 
 C^^DMOX, 45, 62 
 
 Cakes, story of the, 8 
 
 Camden, 93 
 
 Cap grave, 133 
 
 Ceorls, 37 
 
 Character of Alfred, 20 
 
 Charlemagne, Alfred compared 
 
 with, 23, 77 
 Charters, 122 
 Chronicles, Anglo-Saxon, 87 s.eq., 
 
 129 
 Church, 2, 12, 37 
 Coins, 49, 124 
 Comte on Alfred, 22 
 
 Danelagh, the, 9 
 Danes, 3, 17, 19, 115, n? 
 
 first invasion, 5 
 
 second invasion, 7 
 
 after Peace of Wedmorc, 9 
 
 third invasion, 14 
 Dante, 67 
 
 Dialogues of Pope Gregory, 80 
 Domestic reforms, 10 
 Dooms of Alfred, 33 scq. 
 
 Ealdorman, 40 
 Education, 13, 51 
 Edward, King, 19, 106, no, 112 
 England, a thousand years ago, 2, 
 36 
 
 consolidation of, 18 
 
 and Europe, 2, 23, 36 
 
 her laws, 32 
 " England's Darling," 83 
 Eorls, 36 
 Ethandune, 8, 19 
 Ethelwerd, 21, 128 
 
 Family, 19 
 Farnham, battle of, 15 
 
 Florence of Worcester, 21, 26, 128 
 Folc-land, 37 
 Fyrd, 11, 38 
 
 Gemot, 38, 39, 40 
 
 Geography, 56, 118 
 
 George, Saint, 6, 99 
 
 Germany, 38, 39 
 
 Gibbon on Alfred, 22 
 
 Government, local, 36 scq. 
 
 Greece, crisis of, compared with 
 
 England's, 3, 99 
 Gregory, 18, 77 scq., 80 
 Grimbald, 48, 78, 92 
 Guthrum baptised by Alfred, 9 
 
 Hand-book, Alfred's, 52, 86 
 
 Handicrafts, 13, 126 
 
 Hawking, 84 
 
 Henry of Huntingdon, 21, 130 
 
 Hume on Alfred, 22 
 
 Hundred, 38 
 
 HnxIc Abbey, 102 scq.. 132 
 
 Jewel of Alfred, 8, 113 
 John the Monk, 49, 78, 92 
 Johannes Scotus Erigena, 48 
 John of Tynemouth, 133 
 Judith, step-mother of Alfred, 4, 
 
 28,50 
 Jury, trial by, 35 
 
 Kingdoms of England, the, 3 
 Kingship of Alfred, 9, 42 
 
 Land property, 34, 36 scq. 
 Laws, 12, 31 say., 42 
 Lea, river, 9, 16, 116 
 Literature, 13, 44 scq. 
 London, 15, 16, 17, 38, 117 
 
 Malmesbury, William of, 129 
 
 Manuscript, 50 
 
 " Martian Law," 80
 
 144 
 
 tXDEX 
 
 Mercia, 3, 19 
 Military Reforms, 1 1 
 Milton quoted, 10, 44 
 
 Navy, 7, I/, 115 
 Neot, Saint, 91, 114 
 
 Ohthhre, voyages of, 81, 125 
 Orosius, history of, 54 scq. 
 Oxford and Alfred, 26, 91 scq., 126 
 
 Spelman, 134 
 Spithead, victory at, 1 7 
 Swifneh, 49 
 
 Thegxs, 37 
 
 Township, 38 
 
 Trade, 125 
 
 Travel, 81 
 
 Treaty of Wedmore, 9, 124 
 
 University College, Oxford, 91, 
 94, 125, 137 
 
 " P.ASTORAL Care of Gregory," 18, 
 
 51, n 
 
 Pericles, Alfred compared with, 4 Vale of the White Horse, 6, 96 
 
 Plato, 69 scq. scq. 
 
 Plegmund, 49, 78 Viking-Ship, 115 
 
 Poetry, 45, 50 
 
 Pope Leo IV., 4, 132 Wallixgford, 59 
 
 Portraits of Alfred, 125 1 Wantage, i, 19, 97 scq. 
 
 Proverbs of Alfred, 83 ' Wapentake, 38 
 
 Watling Street, 9 
 
 Relics of Alfred's time, 8, 13, 34, Wedmore, Treaty of, 9, 124 
 
 113, 114, 126 
 Richard of Cirencester, 131 
 Rings, 34, 1 14 
 Rome, Alfred in, 4, 58 
 Ross, 133 
 
 Sayixgs of Alfred, 12, t,2, :■ 
 
 77^ 7^. 79 
 Sea-iights, 7 
 Shaftesbury, 13, 19, no 
 Ships, 16, 17, 115 
 Shires, 12, 39 
 Silchester, 62 
 Simeon of Durham, 130 
 Slaves, 37 
 
 Weland, 74, 98 
 
 Werferth, 49 
 
 Westminster, Matthew of, 131 
 
 \Miite Horse, Vale of the, 6, 96 
 
 scq. 
 William the Conqueror, relation 
 76, to Alfred, 20 
 
 of Malmesburx', 129 
 Winchester, 13, 17, 18, 62, 88, 103 
 
 scq. 
 Wise's edition of Asbcr's Alfred, 
 
 27, no, 134 
 Witan, 40 scq. 
 Wolvesey Palace, 103 
 i Wulfstan, 81, 125 
 
 Elliot Stock, Paternoster Rois.', London.
 
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