time arrived for a war of liberation. But on the morrow of victory
Alfred compromised with the Northmen. He despaired, it seems, of their
final expulsion, and thought it better, if possible, to make them
Englishmen and Christians, and, to convert them into a barrier against
their foreign and heathen brethren. We see in this politic moderation at
once a trait of national character and a proof that the exploits of
Alfred are not mythical. By the treaty of Wedmore, the northeastern part
of England became the portion of the Dane, where he was to dwell in
peace with the Saxon people, and in allegiance to their king, but under
his own laws--an arrangement which had nothing strange in it when law
was only the custom of the tribe. As a part of the compact, Guthorm led
over his Northmen from the allegiance of Odin to that of Christ, and was
himself baptized by the Christian name of Athelstan. When religions were
national, or rather tribal, conversions were tribal too. The Northmen of
East Anglia had not so far put off their heathen propensities or their
savage perfidy as to remain perfectly true to their covenant: but, on
the whole, Alfred's policy of compromise and assimilation was
successful. A new section of heathen Teutonism was incorporated into
Christendom, and England absorbed a large Norse population whose
dwelling-place is still marked by the names of places, and perhaps in
some measure by the features and character of the people. In the
fishermen of Whitby, for example, a town with a Danish name, there is a
peculiarity which is probably Scandinavian.
The transaction resembled the cession of Normandy to Rolf and his
followers by the Carlovingian King of France. But the cession of
Normandy marked the dissolution of the Carlovingian monarchy: from the
cession of East Anglia to Guthorm dates a regeneration of the monarchy
of Cerdic.
Alfred had rescued the country. But the country which he had rescued was
a wreck. The Church, the great organ of civilization as well as of
spiritual life, was ruined. The monasteries were in ashes. The monks of
St. Cuthbert were wandering from place to place, with the relics of the
great northern Saint. The worship of Woden seemed on the point of
returning. The clergy had exchanged the missal and censer for the
battle-axe, and had become secularized and brutalized by the conflict.
The learning of the Order was dead. The Latin language, the tongue of
the Church, of literature, of education, was almost extinct. Alfred
himself says that he could not recollect a priest, south of the Thames,
who understood the Latin service or could translate a document from the
Latin when he became king. Political institutions were in an equal state
of disorganization. Spiritual, intellectual, civil life--everything was
to be restored; and Alfred undertook to restore everything. No man in
these days stands alone, or towers in unapproachable superiority above
his fellows. Nor can any man now play all the parts. A division of
labour has taken place in all spheres. The time when the missionaries at
once converted and civilized the forefathers of European Christendom,
when Charlemagne or Alfred was the master spirit in everything, has
passed away, and with it the day of hero-worship, of rational hero-
worship, has departed, at least for the European nations. The more
backward races may still need, and have reason to venerate, a Peter the
Great.
Alfred had to do everything almost with his own hands. He was himself
the inventor of the candle-clock which measured his time, so unspeakably
precious, and of the lantern of transparent horn which protected the
candle-clock against the wind in the tent, or the lodging scarcely more
impervious to the weather than a tent, which in those times sheltered
the head of wandering royalty. Far and wide he sought for men, like a
bee in quest of honey, to condense a somewhat prolix trope of his
biographer. An embassy of bishops, priests and religious laymen, with
great gifts, was sent to the Archbishop of Rheims, within whose diocese
the famous Grimbald resided, to persuade him to allow Grimbald to come
to England, and with difficulty the ambassadors prevailed, Alfred
promising to treat Grimbald with distinguished honour during the rest of
his life. It is touching to see what a price the king set upon a good
and able man. "I was called," says Asser, "from the western extremity of
Wales. I was led to Sussex, and first saw the king in the royal mansion
of Dene. He received me with kindness, and amongst other conversation,
earnestly besought me to devote myself to his service, and to become his
companion. He begged me to give up my preferments beyond the Severn,
promising to bestow on me still richer preferments in their place."
Asser said that he was unwilling to quit, merely for worldly honour, the
country in which he had been brought up and ordained. "At least,"
replied the king, "give me half your time. Pass six months of the year
with me and the rest in Wales." Asser still hesitated. The king repeated
his solicitations, and Asser promised to return within half a year; the
time was fixed for his visit, and on the fourth day of their interview
he left the king and went home.
In order to restore civilization, it was necessary above all things to
reform the Church. "I have often thought," says Alfred, "what wise men
there were once among the English people, both clergy and laymen, and
what blessed times those were when the people were governed by kings who
obeyed God and His gospels, and how they maintained peace, virtue and
good order at home, and even extended them beyond their own country; how
they prospered in battle as well as in wisdom, and how zealous the
clergy were in teaching and learning, and in all their sacred duties;
and how people came hither from foreign countries to seek for
instruction, whereas now, when we desire it, we can only obtain it from
abroad." It is clear that the king, unlike the literary devotees of
Scandinavian paganism, looked upon Christianity as the root of the
greatness, and even of the military force, of the nation.
In order to restore the Church again, it was necessary above all things
to refound the monasteries. Afterwards--society having become settled,
religion being established, and the Church herself having acquired fatal
wealth--these brotherhoods sank into torpor and corruption; but while
the Church was still a missionary in a spiritual and material
wilderness, waging a death struggle with heathenism and barbarism, they
were the indispensable engines of the holy war. The re-foundation of
monasteries, therefore, was one of Alfred's first cares; and he did not
fail, in token of his pious gratitude, to build at Athelney a house of
God which was far holier than the memorial abbey afterwards built by the
Norman Conqueror at Battle. The revival of monasticism among the
English, however, was probably no easy task, for their domestic and
somewhat material nature never was well suited to monastic life. The
monastery schools, the germs, as has been already said, of our modern
universities and colleges, were the King's main organs in restoring
education; but he had also a school in his palace for the children of
the nobility and the royal household. It was not only clerical education
that he desired to promote. His wish was "that all the free-born youth
of his people, who possessed the means, might persevere in learning so
long as they had no other work to occupy them, until they could
perfectly read the English scriptures; while such as desired to devote
themselves to the service of the Church might be taught Latin." No doubt
the wish was most imperfectly fulfilled, but still it was a noble wish.
We are told the King himself was often present at the instruction of the
children in the palace school. A pleasant calm after the storms of
battle with the Dane!
Oxford (Ousen-ford, the ford of the Ouse) was already a royal city; and
it may be conjectured that, amidst the general restoration of learning
under Alfred, a school of some sort would be opened there. This is the
only particle of historical foundation for the academic legend which
gave rise to the recent celebration. Oxford was desolated by the Norman
Conquest, and anything that remained of the educational institution of
Alfred was in all probability swept away.
Another measure, indispensable to the civilizer as well as to the church
reformer in those days, was to restore the intercourse with Rome, and
through her with continental Christendom, which had been interrupted by
the troubles. The Pope, upon Alfred's accession, had sent him gifts and
a piece of the Holy Cross. Alfred sent embassies to the Pope, and made a
voluntary annual offering, to obtain favourable treatment for his
subjects at Rome. But, adopted child of Rome, and naturally attached to
her as the centre of ecclesiastical order and its civilizing influences
though he was, and much as he was surrounded by ecclesiastical friends
and ministers, we trace in him no ultramontanism, no servile submission
to priests. The English Church, so far as we can see, remains national,
and the English King remains its head.
Not only with Latin but with Eastern Christendom, Alfred, if we may
trust the contemporary Saxon chronicles, opened communication. As
Charlemagne, in the spirit partly perhaps of piety, partly of ambition,
had sent an embassy with proofs of his grandeur to the Caliph of Bagdad;
as Louis XIV., in the spirit of mere ambition, delighted to receive an
embassy from Siam; so Alfred, in a spirit of piety unmixed, sent
ambassadors to the traditional Church of St. Thomas in India: and the
ambassadors returned, we are told, with perfumes and precious stones as
the memorials of their journey, which were long preserved in the
churches. "This was the first intercourse," remarks Pauli, "that took
place between England and Hindostan."
All nations are inclined to ascribe their primitive institutions to some
national founder, a Lycurgus, a Theseus, a Romulus. It is not necessary
now to prove that Alfred did not found trial by jury, or the frank-
pledge, or that he was not the first who divided the kingdom into
shires, hundreds, or tithings. The part of trial by jury which has been
politically of so much importance, its popular character, as opposed to
arbitrary trial by a royal or imperial officer--that of which the
preservation, amidst the general prevalence of judicial imperialism, has
been the glory of England--was simply Teutonic; so was the frank-pledge,
the rude machinery for preserving law and order by mutual responsibility
in the days before police; so were the hundreds and the tithings,
rudimentary institutions marking the transition from the clan to the
local community or canton. The shires probably marked some stage in the
consolidation of the Saxon settlements; at all events they were ancient
divisions which Alfred can at most only have reconstituted in a revised
form after the anarchy.
He seems, however, to have introduced a real and momentous innovation by
appointing special judges to administer a more regular justice than that
which was administered in the local courts of the earls and bishops, or
even in the national assembly. In this respect he was the imitator,
probably the unconscious imitator, of Charlemagne, and the precursor of
Henry II., the institutor of our Justices in Eyre. The powers and
functions of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, lie at
first enfolded in the same germ, and are alike exercised by the king,
or, as in the case of the ancient republics, by the national assembly.
It is a great step when the special office of the judiciary is separated
from the rest. It is a great step also when uniformity of justice is
introduced. Probably, however, these judges, like the itinerant justices
of Henry II., were administrative as well as judicial officers; or, in
the terms of our modern polity, they were delegates of the Home Office
as well as of the Central Courts of Law.
In his laws, Alfred, with the sobriety and caution on which the
statesmen of his race have prided themselves, renounces the character of
an innovator, fearing, as he says, that his innovations might not be
accepted by those who would come after him. His code, if so inartificial
a document can be dignified with the name, is mainly a compilation from
the laws of his Saxon predecessors. We trace, however, an advance from
the barbarous system of weregeld, or composition for murder and other
crimes as private wrongs, towards a State system of criminal justice. In
totally forbidding composition for blood, and asserting that
indefeasible sanctity of human life which is the essential basis of
civilization, the code of Moses stands contrasted with other primaeval
codes. Alfred, in fact, incorporated an unusually large amount of the
Mosaic and Christian elements, which blend with Germanic customs and the
relics of Roman law, in different proportions, to make up the various
codes of the early Middle Ages, called the Laws of the Barbarians. His
code opens with the Ten Commandments, followed by extracts from Exodus,
containing the Mosaic law respecting the relations between masters and
servants, murder and other crimes, and the observance of holy days, and
the Apostolic Epistle from Acts xv 23-29. Then is added Matthew vii. 12,
"Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."
"By this one Commandment," says Alfred, "a man shall know whether he
does right, and he will then require no other law-book." This is not the
form of a modern Act of Parliament, but legislation in those days was as
much preaching as enactment; it often resembled in character the Royal
Proclamation against Vice and Immorality.
Alfred's laws unquestionably show a tendency to enforce loyalty to the
king, and to enhance the guilt of treason, which, in the case of an
attempt on the king's life, is punished with death and confiscation,
instead of the old composition by payment of the royal weregeld. Hence
he has been accused of imperializing and anti-Teutonic tendencies; he
had even the misfortune to be fixed upon as a prototype by Oxford
advocates of the absolutism of Charles I. There is no ground for the
charge, so far at least as Alfred's legislation or any known measure of
his government is concerned. The kingly power was the great source of
order and justice amidst that anarchy, the sole rallying point and bond
of union for the imperilled nation; to maintain it, and protect from
violence the life of its holder, was the duty of a patriot law-giver:
and as the authority of a Saxon king depended in great measure on his
personal character and position, no doubt the personal authority of
Alfred was exceptionally great. But he continued to govern by the advice
of the national council; and the fundamental principles of the Teutonic
polity remained unimpaired by him, and were transmitted intact to his
successors. His writings breathe a sense of the responsibilities of
rulers and a hatred of tyranny. He did not even attempt to carry further
the incorporation of the subordinate kingdoms with Wessex; but ruled
Mercia as a separate state by the hand of his brother-in-law, and left
it to its own national council or witan. Considering his circumstances,
and the chaos from which his government had emerged, it is wonderful
that he did not centralize more. He was, we repeat, a true Teuton, and
entirely worthy of his place in the Germanic Walhalla.
The most striking proof of his multifarious activity of mind, and of the
unlimited extent of the task which his circumstances imposed upon him,
as well as of his thoroughly English character, is his undertaking to
give his people a literature in their own tongue. To do this he had
first to educate himself--to educate himself at an advanced age, after
a life of fierce distraction, and with the reorganization of his
shattered kingdom on his hands. In his boyhood he had got by heart Saxon
lays, vigorous and inspiring, but barbarous; he had learned to read, but
it is thought that he had not learned to write. "As we were one day
sitting in the royal chamber," says Asser, "and were conversing as was
our wont, it chanced that I read him a passage out of a certain book.
After he had listened with fixed attention, and expressed great delight,
he showed me the little book which he always carried about with him, and
in which the daily lessons, psalms and prayers, were written, and begged
me to transcribe that passage into his book." Asser assented, but found
that the book was already full, and proposed to the king to begin
another book, which was soon in its turn filled with extracts. A portion
of the process of Alfred's education is recorded by Asser. "I was
honourably received at the royal mansion, and at that time stayed eight
months in the king's court. I translated and read to him whatever books
he wished which were within our reach; for it was his custom, day and
night, amidst all his afflictions of mind and body, to read books
himself or have them read to him by others." To original composition
Alfred did not aspire; he was content with giving his people a body of
translations of what he deemed the best authors; here again showing his
royal good sense. In the selection of his authors, he showed liberality
and freedom from Roman, ecclesiastical, imperialist, or other bias. On
the one hand he chooses for the benefit of the clergy whom he desired to
reform, the "Pastoral Care" of the good Pope, Gregory the Great, the
author of the mission which had converted England to Christianity; but
on the other hand he chooses the "Consolations of Philosophy," the chief
work of Boethius, the last of the Romans, and the victim of the cruel
jealousy of Theodoric. Of Boethius Hallam says "Last of the classic
writers, in style not impure, though displaying too lavishly that poetic
exuberance which had distinguished the two or three preceding centuries;
in elevation of sentiment equal to any of the philosophers; and mingling
a Christian sanctity with their lessons, he speaks from his prison in
the swan-like tones of dying eloquence. The philosophy which consoled
him in bonds was soon required in the sufferings of a cruel death.
Quenched in his blood, the lamp he had trimmed with a skilful hand gave
no more light; the language of Tully and Virgil soon ceased to be
spoken; and many ages were to pass away before learned diligence
restored its purity, and the union of genius with imitation taught a few
modern writers to 'surpass in eloquence' the Latinity of Boethius."
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English, the highest product of
that memorable burst of Saxon intellect which followed the conversion,
and a work, not untainted by miracle and legend, yet most remarkable for
its historical qualities as well as for its mild and liberal
Christianity, is balanced in the king's series of translations by the
work of Orosius, who wrote of general and secular history, though with a
religious object. In the translation of Orosius, Alfred has inserted a
sketch of the geography of Germany, and the reports of explorations made
by two mariners under his auspices among the natives dwelling on the
coasts of the Baltic and the North Sea--further proof of the variety of
his interests and the reach of his mind.
In his prefaces, and in his amplifications and interpolations of the
philosophy of Boethius, Alfred comes before us an independent author,
and shows us something of his own mind on theology, on philosophy, on
government, and generally as to the estate of man. To estimate these
passages rightly, we must put ourselves back into the anarchical and
illiterate England of the ninth century, and imagine a writer, who, if
we could see him, would appear barbarous and grotesque, as would all his
equipments and surroundings, and one who had spent his days in a
desperate struggle with wolfish Danes, seated at his literary work in
his rude Saxon mansion, with his candle-clock protected by the horn
lantern against the wind. The utterances of Alfred will then appear
altogether worthy of his character and his deeds. He always emphasizes
and expands passages which speak either of the responsibilities of
rulers or of the nothingness of earthly power; and the reflections are
pervaded by a pensiveness which reminds us of Marcus Aurelius. The
political world had not much advanced when, six centuries after Alfred,
it arrived at Machiavelli.
There is an especial sadness in the tone of some words respecting the
estate of kings, their intrinsic weakness, disguised only by their royal
trains, the mutual dread that exists between them and those by whom they
are surrounded, the drawn sword that always hangs over their heads, "as
to me it ever did." We seem to catch a glimpse of some trials, and
perhaps errors, not recorded by Asser or the chroniclers.
In his private life Alfred appears to have been an example of conjugal
fidelity and manly purity, while we see no traces of the asceticism
which was revered by the superstition of the age of Edward the
Confessor. His words on the value and the claims of a wife, if not up to
the standard of modern sentiment, are at least instinct with genuine
affection.
The struggle with the Northmen was not over. Their swarms came again, in
the latter part of Alfred's reign, from Germany, whence they had been
repulsed, and from France, which they had exhausted by their ravages.
But the king's generalship foiled them and compelled them to depart.
Seeing where their strength lay, he built a regular fleet to encounter
them on their own element, and he may be called the founder of the Royal
Navy.
His victory was decisive. The English monarchy rose from the ground in
renewed strength, and entered on a fresh lease of greatness. A line of
able kings followed Alfred. His son and successor, Edward, inherited his
vigour. His favourite grandson, Athelstan, smote the Dane and the Scot
together at Brunanburgh, and awoke by his glorious victory the last
echoes of Saxon song. Under Edgar the greatness of the monarchy reached
its highest pitch, and it embraced the whole island under its imperial
ascendancy. At last its hour came; but when Canute founded a Danish
dynasty he and his Danes were Christians.
"This I can now truly say, that so long as I have lived I have striven
to live worthily, and after my death to leave my memory to my
descendants in good works." If the king who wrote those words did not
found a university or a polity, he restored and perpetuated the
foundations of English institutions, and he left what is almost as
valuable as any institution--a great and inspiring example of public
duty.
THE LAST REPUBLICANS OF ROME
"Has humanity such forces at its command wherewith to combat vice and
baseness, that each school of virtue can afford to repel the aid of the
rest, and to maintain that it alone is entitled to the praise of
courage, of goodness, and of resignation?" Such is the rebuke
administered by M. Renan to the Christians who refuse to recognise the
martyrs of Stoicism under the Roman Empire. My eye fell upon the words
when I had just laid down Professor Mommsen's harsh judgment of the last
defenders of the Republic, and they seemed to me applicable to this case
also.
It is needless to say that there has been a curious change of opinion as
to the merits of these men who, a century ago, were political saints of
the Liberal party, but whom in the present day Liberal writers are
emulously striving, with Dante, to thrust down into the nethermost hell.
Dante puts Brutus and Cassius in hell not because he knows the real
history of their acts, or because he is qualified to judge of the moral
and political conditions under which they acted, but simply because he
is a Ghibelin, and they slew the head of the Holy Roman Empire; and the
present change of opinion arises, in the main, not from the discovery of
any new fact, or from the better sifting of those already known, but
from the prevalence of new sentiments--Imperialism of different shades,
Bonapartist or Positivist, and perhaps also hero-worship, which of
course fixes upon Caesar. Positivism and Hero-worship are somewhat
incongruous allies, for Hero-worship is evidently the least scientific,
while Positivism aims at being the most scientific, of all the theories
of history.