They do not perish, but remain. His Witenagemot—Meeting of the Wise—is
our Parliament—it has developed into our many Parliaments. His order
of King, Thane, and Freeman is our order of King, Lords, and Commons.
His theory of education was carried out in some of the towns, and in all
the monasteries and cathedrals: there are schools still existing which
owe their origin to a period before the Norman Conquest. His foundation
of all law upon the Laws of God remains our own: his liberties are our
liberties: his navy is the ancestor of our navy: the literature which
he planted has grown into a goodly tree—the Monarch of the Forest: the
foreign trade that he began is the forerunner of our foreign trade: it
would seem as if there was hardly any point in which we have reason to be
grateful or proud which was not foreseen by this wise king.
To look for the secret of his wisdom is like looking for the secret
of making a great poem or writing a great play: it may be arrived
at and described, but it is not therefore the easier of imitation.
Alfred’s secret is quite simple. _His work was permanent because it was
established on the national character._ It was in order to make this
point clear that I dwelt at length on the character of the people over
whom Alfred ruled. He knew their character, and by instinct, which we
call genius, he gave his people the laws and the education, and the power
of development for which they were fitted. No other laws, no other kind
of government, will enable a people to prosper except those laws to
which they have grown and are adapted. Only those institutions, I repeat,
are permanent which are based on the national character. That was the
secret of King Alfred the law-giver.
It may be asked, what manner of man to look at was this great king? His
biographer, Asser, who knew him well, has not thought fit to tell us. He
only says in words of flattery that Alfred was more comely and gracious
of aspect than his brothers. These brothers, four in number, were all
kings before him, and all died young. Alfred himself was afflicted by a
disease which never left him. It is therefore presumable that there was
some congenital weakness in them all. This was not physical weakness:
whatever the disease, it did not interfere with Alfred’s courage or
his prowess in battle. This is proved by the fact that the Saxon kings
actually fought in person in the forefront of the battle, and on foot.
Alfred, for instance, fought in a dozen battles at least, and always with
the valour that belongs to a strong man. I take him to have been a man
of good stature and of strong build: a man whose appearance was kingly:
who impressed his followers with the gallant and confident carriage of a
brave soldier. But as to his face, or the colour of his hair or eyes, I
can tell nothing. Fair hair he had, I think, and blue eyes: or the more
common type of brown hair and gray eyes. When a king resigns all personal
ambitions and seeks nothing for himself, it seems natural and fitting
that, while his works live after him, he himself should vanish without
leaving so much as a tradition of his face or figure.
From time to time in history—generally in some time of great doubt and
trouble: or in some time when the old ideals are in danger of being
forgotten: or in some time when the nation seems losing the sense of duty
and of responsibility: there appears one, man or woman, who restores
the better spirit of the people by his example: by his preaching: by
his self-sacrifice: by his martyrdom. He is the prophet as priest: the
prophet as king: the prophet as law-giver. There passes in imagination
before us a splendid procession of men and women who have thus restored a
nation or raised the fallen ideals. Among them we recognise many faces:
there are Savonarola: Francis of Assisi: Joan of Arc: our own Queen
Elizabeth, greatest and strongest of all women: the Czar Peter. But the
greatest figure of them all—the most noble—the most god-like—is that of
the ninth-century Alfred, king of that little country which you have upon
your map. There is none like Alfred in the whole page of history: none
with a record altogether so blameless: none so wise: none so human.
We have allowed the memory of him to be too much forgotten: only here
and there a historian—such as Freeman or Green—lifts up his voice and
proclaims aloud that he has no words with which to speak adequately of
this great Englishman. Perhaps the noble lines of Tennyson, written for
another prince whose memory is dear to us all, may be referred to Alfred:
Who reverenced his conscience as his king;
Whose glory was, redressing human wrong;
Who spake no slander, no, nor listen’d to it;
Who loved one only and who clave to her—
We know him now: we see him as he moved:
How modest, kindly, all-accomplish’d, wise,
With what sublime repression of himself;
Not making his high place the lawless perch
Of wing’d ambitions, nor a vantage-ground
For pleasure; but thro’ all this tract of years
Wearing the white flower of a blameless life.
It is the purpose—the wise and patriotic purpose—of certain persons to
erect, for these and other reasons, a monument, visible to all, to the
memory of King Alfred.
Some of the points which I have recalled in this paper may help to show
why such a monument would have been fitting at any time during the last
thousand years. There is, however, a special reason which makes the
erection of such a monument very necessary—I use the word necessary
advisedly—at the present time. In the year 1897—on that memorable day
when we were all drunk with the visible glory and the greatness of the
Empire—there arose in the minds of many a feeling that we ought to teach
the people the meaning of what we saw set forth in that procession—the
meaning of our Empire—not only what it is, but how it came—through
whose creation—by whose foundation. Now so much is Alfred the Founder
that every ship in our Navy might have his name—every school his bust:
every Guildhall his statue. He is everywhere. But he is invisible. And
the people do not know him. The boys do not learn about him. There is
nothing to show him. We want a monument to Alfred, if only to make the
people learn and remember the origin of our Empire—if only that his
noble example may be kept before us, to stimulate and to inspire and to
encourage.
It seems unnecessary to urge that a monument to Alfred must be set up
in Winchester, and not in London or in Westminster, or anywhere else.
Here lies the dust of the kings his ancestors, and of the kings his
successors. Thirty-five of his line made Winchester their capital: twenty
were buried in the Cathedral. In this city Alfred received instruction
from St. Swithin: the city was already old and venerable when Alfred
was a boy. He was buried first in the Cathedral, and afterwards in the
Abbey, which he himself founded, hard by. The name of Alfred’s country,
well-nigh forgotten, except by scholars, has been revived of late years
by a Wessex man—Thomas Hardy. But the name of Alfred’s capital continues
in the venerable and historic city of Winchester, which yields to none in
England for the monuments and the memories of the past.
I venture, lastly, to express my own personal hope that great as were
the achievements of Alfred—the keynote to be struck and to be maintained
will be that Alfred is, and will always remain, the typical man of our
race—call him Anglo-Saxon, call him American, call him Englishman, call
him Australian—the typical man of our race at his best and noblest. I
like to think that the face of the Anglo-Saxon at his best and noblest
is the face of Alfred. I am quite sure and certain that the mind of the
Anglo-Saxon at his best and noblest is the mind of Alfred: that the
aspirations, the hopes, the standards of the Anglo-Saxon at his best and
noblest are the aspirations, the hopes, the standards of Alfred. He is
truly our Leader, our Founder, our King. When our monument takes shape
and form let it somehow recognise this great, this cardinal fact. Let
it show somehow by the example of Alfred the Anglo-Saxon at his best
and noblest—here within the circle of the narrow seas, or across the
ocean; wherever King Alfred’s language is spoken; wherever King Alfred’s
laws prevail; into whatever fair lands of the wide world King Alfred’s
descendants have penetrated.
WALTER BESANT.
ALFRED AS KING
BY FREDERIC HARRISON
ALFRED AS KING
It is a commonplace with historians—and with the historians of many
countries and different schools of opinion—that our English Alfred was
the only perfect man of action recorded in history; for Aurelius was
occasionally too much of the philosopher; Saint Louis usually too much
of the saint; Godfrey too much of the Crusader; the great Emperors were
not saints at all; and of all more modern heroes we know too much to
pretend that they were perfect. Of all the hyperboles of praise there is
but one that we can safely justify with the strictest canons of historic
research. Of all the names in history there is only our English Alfred
whose record is without stain and without weakness—who is equally amongst
the greatest of men in genius, in magnanimity, in valour, in moral
purity, in intellectual force, in practical wisdom, and in beauty of
soul. In his recorded career from infancy to death, we can find no single
trait that is not noble and suggestive, nor a single act or word that
can be counted as a flaw.
In the history of modern Europe there is nothing which can compare in
duration and in organic continuity with the unbroken evolution of our
English nation. And now that the royal house of France has passed from
the sphere of political realities into that of historic memories, there
is no dynasty in Europe which can be named in the same breath with that
which has seen a succession of forty-nine sovereigns since Alfred; nor
has any King or Cæsar a record of ancestry which can compare with that
of the royal Lady who through thirty-two generations traces her lineal
descent to the Hero-King of Wessex.
We have long given up the venerable fables which once gathered round the
name of Alfred, as round Romulus, or Theseus, King Arthur, or the Cid.
Every schoolboy knows that Alfred was not formally King of all England;
nor did he introduce trial by jury, or electoral institutions; he did
not found the University of Oxford; nor write all the pieces which are
attributed to his pen; he was perhaps too practical a man to let his
own supper get burnt on the hearth; and too wary a general to go about
masquerading with a harp in the enemy’s camp. But the historic Alfred
whom we know to-day is a personage more splendid and lifelike than the
legendary Alfred ever was. Though much of what our grandsires believed
about Alfred is now known to be poetry and pious fraud, the traditional
Alfred was quite just in general effect, and modern research has given us
a portrait both nobler and more definite than that drawn by the patriotic
imagination of a less critical age. Patriotic imagination itself falls
far short of scrupulous scholarship when it seeks to draw the likeness of
a real hero.
It is true that the field of Alfred’s achievements was relatively small,
and the whole scale of his career was modest indeed when compared with
that of his imperial compeers. He inherited a kingdom which covered
only a few English counties, and at one time his realm was reduced to a
smaller area than that of some private landlords of modern times. Beside
the great Emperor Charles, or the German Ottos, Henrys, and Fredericks of
the Middle Ages, his dominions, his resources, his armies, his battles,
his fleets, his administrative machinery, his contemporary glory—all
these were almost in miniature—hardly a tithe of theirs. But, we should
remember, it is _quality_ not _quantity_ that weighs in the impartial
scales of History. True human greatness needs no vast territories as its
stage—nor do multitudes add to its power. That which tells in the end is
the living seed of the creative mind, the heroic example, the sovereign
gift of leadership, the undying inspiration of genius and faith.
Turn to the _Chronicle_ and to Asser’s _Life_, with recent historians and
scholars, and mark those miracles of patience, valour, indomitable energy
by which the great king rescued from the savage Norsemen the England
of our forefathers. Watch him as he returns to the charge after every
repulse, rallies his exhausted men, gathers up new armies, plans fresh
methods of war, and at last wins for his people prosperity, honour, and
peace. The scale of these campaigns was narrow—the armies were small—not
indeed weaker than were the Greeks at Thermopylae and Marathon; but the
annals of war have nothing grander than the long record of sagacious
heroism by which Alfred saved England for the English. Then note the
genius with which he saw that the Norsemen must be met on the sea, with
which he organised a navy of ships built on a new design of his own.
Alfred is not only the forerunner of Marlborough and Wellington, but he
was the first to teach the Saxon to be a seaman.
A fine land that had once known prosperity, and even culture, lay
utterly ruined and desolate when Alfred undertook the vast task of its
restoration—its material, moral, intellectual reform. He said in his
Will, “we were all despoiled by the Heathen Folk.” He found the enemy in
possession of something like a standing army of disciplined soldiers; and
we should note how the _Chronicle_ calls the Norsemen “the army.” He met
this by instituting a regular militia with local garrisons and a reserve
force capable of systematic war. When Alfred marshals a new campaign we
find that the era of wild raids to be met by casual musters of countrymen
is a thing of the past. Alfred at last has his “army” too. We are dealing
with regular armies capable of sustaining organised campaigns.
A navy needed to be created and not simply reformed. And the safety of
the southern shores of England—the first command of the Channel—must be
dated from the day when Alfred began the formation of an adequate fleet.
It is true that in the absence of competent seamen in Wessex, he had to
man his earliest ships with Frisians from over the sea. But in later
years he came to have a really English fleet of his own. And it is plain
that in a true sense he is the inventor, but not the actual founder, of a
national navy: of that sea-power which is the birthright of this island.
When Alfred was chosen king, “almost against his will,” we are told, the
prospect was one to appal the stoutest heart. In his boyhood the Northmen
had begun to winter in Kent, had taken Canterbury and London by storm,
and pushed up the Thames. A few years later they stormed Winchester
and ravaged Kent. In the reign of his brother, Ethelred, they stormed
York, and invaded Mercia, whose king, Burhred, had married Alfred’s
sister. They next laid waste East Anglia, martyred its king, Edmund,
and threatened Wessex. The Danes (as they were now known) sailed up the
Thames, and formed a camp round Reading. In a fierce battle at Ashdown a
victory had been won for the moment by the energy and valour of Alfred;
but defeats followed, Surrey was lost, and Ethelred died, it is supposed
of his wounds.
The young king of twenty-two came to the throne of his ancestors in a
dark hour. The supremacy of Wessex in England, won by his grandfather,
Egbert, had vanished. Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and parts
of Wessex had been desolated; the abbeys had been sacked, the monks
murdered, the churches, schools, and homesteads ruined. The Danish
invaders were masters of all Northern, Eastern, and Central England,
and the heart of Wessex was open to assault. The young king met them at
Wilton with a small force, but after a stubborn fight was beaten off. He
was forced to purchase a precarious truce.
In this year, 871, the _Chronicle_ relates (in its grim, laconic style),
the [Danish] army came to Reading, and three nights after, the Alderman
Ethelwulf fought them. Four nights after this, Ethelred and Alfred led
a large force to Reading, and “there was great slaughter on both sides;
the Alderman Ethelwulf was slain, and the Danes held possession of
the battle place.” “And four nights after, Ethelred and Alfred fought
with all the army at Ashdown”; many thousands were slain; “and they
were fighting until night.” And fourteen nights after, King Ethelred
and Alfred his brother fought against the army at Basing, and there
the Danes gained the victory. “And two months after, King Ethelred and
Alfred his brother fought against the army at Merton ... and there was
great slaughter on each side, but the Danes held possession of the battle
place. And after this fight there came a great summer force [of Danes]
to Reading. And the Easter after, King Ethelred died. Then Alfred his
brother succeeded to the kingdom of the West Saxons, and one month after,
with a small force, he fought against all the army at Wilton, but the
Danes held possession of the battle place. _And this year nine great
battles were fought against the army in the kingdom south of the Thames;
besides which Alfred, the king’s brother, and individual aldermen, and
king’s thanes, often rode raids on them, which were not reckoned._”
Such were the disasters with which Alfred’s reign began. His fighting-men
were exhausted or slaughtered; his kingdom torn from side to side, and
its chief towns stormed: the northern, central, and eastern kingdoms had
been blotted out. Burhred of Mercia was driven over sea, and Wessex
was forced to buy a brief rest with gold. Alfred equipped a few ships
and gained some temporary success. But soon after, the Danes with a
great fleet swept round the south coast and penetrated into Dorsetshire
and Devonshire. Thence passing northwards into Gloucestershire, and
reinforced by a new fleet in the Bristol Channel, the Danish host
suddenly fell upon Wiltshire. The Saxon defence was broken in pieces.
“The [Danish] army harried the West Saxons’ land, and settled there, and
drove over sea much of the people, and of the rest the most they harried.
_And the people submitted to them, save the King Alfred; and he, with a
little band, withdrew to the woods and fastnesses in the moors._”
Alfred seemed utterly ruined. He, the grandson of Egbert overlord of
England, the successor on the throne of Wessex of his father and his
three brothers, had been king just seven years, and in scores of battles
he had been fighting the Danes for ten years. He had seen the three
northern kingdoms of Angles broken up and the reigning house in each
exterminated. Step by step he had seen Kent, Surrey, and Wessex overrun;
assailed by sea and land, from the coast, the rivers, and the Bristol
Channel. His own people had been driven across sea, or crushed into
submission; and he himself, with a small band of followers, was forced
to find shelter in woods and swamps. His lot seemed hopeless, but he
alone did not despair.
The crisis was indeed the gravest to which our country has ever been
exposed. The Danish host was now a large and disciplined army bent on
conquering and settling new lands, and already masters of the island
from the Severn to the Tees. They were the fiercest and rudest of the
tribes which had broken into Europe; Heathens, full of hatred and scorn
for the religion, culture, arts, and civilisation of Christendom. With
a real genius for war, both by sea and land, fired with the thirst of
glory and adventure, they were better armed, more mobile, more martially
organised than Saxon, Angle, or Jute. Short of a miracle their ultimate
triumph over the whole island seemed certain. Had it been achieved, the
civilisation of England would have been retarded for ages. Christianity,
learning, arts, and legislation, which had progressed for two centuries,
would have been stamped out, and our island would have been the seat of
a barbarous and heathen horde. From the nature of their island conquest
and their own mastery of the seas, they could not have been absorbed in
Christendom so rapidly as were the Normans of France, or the Danubian
tribes of Germany. They might have resisted for centuries both conversion
and conquest from Europe. Nay more, from the supreme opportunities
afforded by our island and all its resources as a basis for an imperial
race, it is too probable that the heathen Danes, once firmly seated in
the whole of Britain, might have proved the lasting scourge of Europe
itself. From this tremendous peril, England and Europe were saved by the
genius of our Saxon hero.
In the Easter of that year, 878, the _Chronicle_ relates, “Alfred,
with a little band, wrought a fortress at Athelney, and from that work
warred on the army, with that portion of the men of Somerset that was
nearest.” Athelney was a bit of firm ground in the morasses formed by the
Parret and the Tone in Somersetshire. There, for a few months, the king
organised a new army, drawn from Somerset and Wilts and such Hants men
as were left. In May he suddenly dashed out of the wood of Selwood: “his
Wessex men were rejoiced to see him”: he fought a great fight against the
whole “army” at Ethandune, near Westbury, put them to flight and drove
them to their camp, where, after fourteen days of siege, he forced the
Danes to surrender. It was a crushing victory—the turning-point in the
life of Alfred—in the life of England.
The importance of it was this. A part of the beaten host sailed away over
seas. But the rest, under their king, Guthrum, agreed to accept Christian
baptism, to withdraw out of Wessex and the western half of Mercia, and to
settle peaceably in East Anglia, north of Thames. Guthrum, with thirty
of his chiefs, came to Alfred’s stronghold, received at his baptism the
Saxon name of Athelstan from his victor and god-father, remained twelve
days with the king and gave large presents. By the Peace of Wedmore, 878,
Wessex and West England were saved, and the ultimate incorporation of the
Danes with Christendom was secured. At first sight and in strict form,
Alfred had surrendered Eastern England to the conqueror. The Treaty was
not honestly observed by the Danes, and Guthrum and his warriors again
became enemies. But the core of England was saved; the amalgamation of
Dane and Saxon was founded in principle and in distant effect. And the
Peace of Wedmore was a stroke of genius more daring and more far-reaching
in result than the splendid victory of Ethandune by which it had been won.
Leaving the Danes for the present undisturbed in all Eastern England
between Thames and Tees, Alfred occupied himself with restoring his
shattered and desolated Kingdom of Wessex. His treasury was empty, the
towns were in ruins, and civil government paralysed. He built forts,
abbeys, and schools; repeopled and stocked waste districts; and set to
work to establish something like a standing military force to meet the
regular “army” of Danes. Hitherto Alfred had commanded loose levies of
half-armed men, who by custom disbanded after two months’ service. This
had enabled small but organised bands of Danes to overrun England, and
to win practical successes even when beaten by numbers in the fields.
Alfred, like William of Normandy in the eleventh, like Cromwell in the
seventeenth century, saw, even so early as the ninth century, that
victory belonged not to numbers but to regular armies. He organised
what was at least a permanent local militia, with definite quotas of
levies and an alternate system of reserves, besides the garrisons of
fortified places. He rebuilt the broken fortresses, exercised his men in
entrenchments, and adapted from the Danes their military arts.
But his eye of genius foresaw that the country was not safe whilst the
invaders had command of the seas. Thus he organised a fleet, and assessed
the ports and maritime districts to support it. He himself ultimately
designed a class of ship, longer and swifter than those in use, though
at first he had to man his navy with mercenary Frisians and sea-rovers.
Towards the close of his reign, and in that of his son and grandson,
a genuine English navy asserted its command of the Channel, which two
centuries later his feeble successors lost again.