direct ministers of the sovereign, personally responsible to him, and
subject in certain cases to his final appeal. His biographer tells us
that he keenly revised unjust judgments, and tradition exaggerated this
into a preposterous legend. He caused a collection of the old laws to be
compiled—carefully resisting any general new legislation, or the fusion
of the Wessex, Mercian, and Kentish customs into a symmetrical code. His
laws were a compilation, with selection of what was approved best, and
rejection of what was condemned as obsolete or mischievous. In the spirit
of conservative amendment which marks his whole career, he is careful to
tell us that he “durst not venture to set down much of his own.” He was
content with partial revision and excision, under the advice of his Witan.
The combination in a code of Saxon, Anglian, and Kentish “dooms” gave a
certain stimulus towards national union in a larger aggregate. But a much
more powerful cause unexpectedly emerged out of the Danish invasions.
By these savage shocks the royal houses that had ruled in Mercia, in
East Anglia, in Northumbria, were not only overthrown, but were extinct.
Alfred remained the one victorious king of the race of Cerdic, the
legitimate sovereign of Wessex and Kent, the natural source of kingly
authority wherever Danes were not in possession of rule. Having won
back the western half of Mercia by the Peace of Wedmore, Alfred became
its king by silent consent of its Anglian people. He did not fuse West
Mercia with Wessex; he was not formally installed or crowned. He made
Ethelred, the husband of his daughter Ethelfleda, alderman, and himself
exercised the functions of king, with a separate Mercian administration
and Witan. By this wise and tentative system of dual monarchy, Alfred was
firmly seated the undisputed sovereign of Southern England from the mouth
of the Thames to the Exe, ruling by his son-in-law all Central England
west of Watling Street from the Severn to the Ribble. He thus became, but
a few years after his romantic sortie from Athelney, the most powerful
ruler holding the widest single realm within our island. This effected
a practical supremacy over the main part of England proper, except for
the Danes in the east. And he thus made it possible that there should
be a true English kingdom, of which his son Edward, and his grandson
Athelstan, were formally recognised as sovereigns.
More than once after the settlement effected at Wedmore and the years
of peace it brought, Alfred had to meet formidable enemies both by sea
and land. But fierce as these campaigns were, they did not imply such
incessant warfare, such desperate crises, as had made the first ten years
of his early manhood one long battle for life and home. Alfred was now at
least as well able to defend his country from the Scandinavian invaders
as were the rulers of France and Germany, on whom the storm burst
whenever the Northmen had been checked in England.
Six years after the Peace of Wedmore Alfred had to meet again a force
of Danes which had pushed up the Thames, and to chastise the East
Anglians who had violated the Treaty by a fresh outbreak. A new treaty
with Guthrum gave Alfred possession of London and adjacent parts of
Middlesex, which were finally rescued from the Danes, and annexed to
English Mercia under its alderman, Ethelred, Alfred’s son-in-law. Again,
in the twenty-third year of Alfred’s reign a new body of Vikings from
Norway descended on to Wessex and were joined by a second rising of the
Anglian Danes. For more than two years the war was continued over a large
part of England—from the Thames and its affluents across to the Severn;
from Exeter northwards to Chester. By a series of vigorous and skilful
campaigns, in concerted strategy of armies and fleets, the king, his son
and his son-in-law, defeated this formidable combination, captured the
entire Danish fleet, overawed the Britons of Wales and Cornwall, forced
the East Anglian Danes to keep within their own reserves, and drove the
northern freebooters across the Channel. Once again, in the last years of
his reign, Alfred had to meet a new invasion of pirates at sea, who were
defeated in a series of fierce and bloody encounters. These are the last
recorded campaigns of the king, who from his boyhood, for nearly thirty
years, had been continually in arms; but, by obstinate wars and sagacious
policy, he had tamed the savage Norsemen, and at length transmitted to
his descendants a kingdom doubled and trebled in extent and greatly
increased in culture and strength.
England had been rescued from barbarism by the heroism of Alfred and his
aptitude for war. But it is his genius as a creative statesman which
left permanent effects on the history of England and made him one of the
principal founders of the greatness of our country. His conversion and
settlement of Guthrum’s Danes in East Anglia, his generous forbearance
and his repeated treaties with them in spite of their faithless conduct,
led to the ultimate amalgamation of Dane, Angle, and Saxon, which
created the compound English race. A less sagacious victor would have
sought to clear his country of Norsemen, and would undoubtedly have been
overwhelmed by successive invasions himself. Alfred’s whole career shows
a conscious purpose to break with the tribal and local isolation of the
West Saxon, to attach Wessex with Mercia, to civilise Dane and Briton,
and to bring England into closer union with the religious and political
system of Europe.
Alfred’s restoration of London was the stroke of a true statesman.
The city had been stormed by the Norsemen in 851, and since then had
been desolate and almost deserted, save when occupied by the Danes as
winter-quarters, as it was in 872. Within the Danish power it remained
until 886, the year of Alfred’s second treaty with Guthrum. By that it
was ceded to him with the adjacent part of Middlesex. The king rebuilt
its walls and repeopled it, and added it to Mercia, from which it was not
again separated. The military and political genius of Alfred and his long
experience of war with the Danes had seized on the immense importance
of a restored London, carved out of Danish East Anglia, with power to
block all incursions up the Thames and its various tributary rivers. The
restoration of London by the King of Wessex was thus an epoch in the
history, not only of the city itself, but of the country of which it was
destined by nature to be the capital.
Alfred had been at this date fifteen years on the throne, and the whole
aspect of affairs was changed. When he began to reign heathen barbarians
were masters of the Eastern, Central, and Northern parts of England, and
threatened to break up Wessex. They swept round all coasts, and pushed
up the rivers, plundering, burning, raiding, and slaughtering. Now, they
were shut up in East Anglia, outwardly christianised, bound by formal
treaties of peace, confronted at sea by strong fleets, and gradually
submitting to the moral force of superior civilisation. As Goths and
Franks were overawed by the Roman empire they conquered, so Vikings and
Danes gradually recognised the higher organisation of Wessex. Alfred at
last ruled over a compact realm stretching from the Channel up to the
Ribble, with fortresses in such places as Rochester, London, Exeter, and
Chester. Lastly, in a rebuilt London, he was master of the Thames, with a
powerful base on the Danish side of the great river.
As Alfred, we are told, was at Rome in his sixth year, and had
subsequently been with his father at the Court of Charles the Bald, whose
daughter Judith became the boy’s step-mother, the young king must have
been impressed by his memories of foreign lands. His yearly embassies
with offerings to the Pope, and the restoration of the Saxon College at
Rome, bear witness to his close relations with the See. He married his
own daughter, Elfrida, to Baldwin II., Count of Flanders, son of the same
Judith, and ancestor of Matilda, wife of the Conqueror. This brought
about a connection between England and Flanders, both so much threatened
by Northmen invaders.
With the Britons of Cornwall and Wales Alfred’s policy showed the same
moderation, sagacity, and practical skill. They were not dangerous
unless united and in active combination with Danes. By the creation of
English Mercia, he effectively cut them off from East Anglia; and his
whole policy was directed to detach them by separate tribes and to win
them into peaceful union with his own people. He had to fight them in
groups from time to time, but he never attempted to conquer or annex
them in the mass. And after the failure of the house of Roderick, of
North Wales, Alfred secured a recognised supremacy over both North and
South Welsh. His wise, firm, and victorious government impressed the
smaller and more backward tribes on all sides; so that, without demanding
any formal subjection, his paramount authority was recognised over the
island, whilst his sphere of influence was extended to Northumbrians and
Scots. The defence and reorganisation of Wessex had founded a sentiment
of national unity, which was ultimately to be consolidated in a formal
kingdom of all England. He made Wessex an organic, civilised, and
progressive kingdom, and created it as the type which England was to
follow.
It was the same idea of bringing England into the European world which
suggested Alfred’s very remarkable series of distant voyages and
missions. The characteristic account of the discoveries of Ohthere and
Wulfstan round the North Cape and in the Baltic, which Alfred inserts
into his translation of _Orosius_, testifies to the king’s strong
interest in the geography and ethnography of Europe. The expedition which
he despatched to India, it is said, in 883, to the shrines of St. Thomas
and St. Bartholomew, in accordance with his vow when he recovered London
from the Danes, was a really extraordinary feat for that age; and, though
some of the MSS. read _Judea_ for _India_, it is thought that the mission
was really sent to Christian churches then known to exist in India. Asser
relates that the king received letters and presents from the patriarch of
Jerusalem; a tale which the later writers considerably embellish. A deep
impression was left by Alfred’s zeal to extend his foreign relations with
distant lands.
His policy of calling in men of learning, teachers, ecclesiastics, and
seamen from countries outside his own, is more fully recorded. Asser,
the learned and excellent monk of St. David’s, was brought out of Wales
and pressed into the service of the king, whose friend, counsellor,
and biographer he became. Plegmund was brought out of Mercia and made
Archbishop of Canterbury; another Mercian, Werfrith, Bishop of Worcester,
was the constant adviser of the king, both in literary and in state
affairs. Grimbald was brought from the monastery of St. Omer; and John,
of Saxony, from the monastery of Corbey. With these came learned monks to
organise the new abbeys and schools which Alfred founded. He encouraged
foreign traders, and summoned artists and craftsmen from the Continent to
direct his buildings and arts. Until his Saxons had learned seamanship,
he engaged Frisians to man his ships, and took into his service
adventurous Vikings such as Ohthere and Wulfstan.
Alfred has left us his own conception of what a king should be: and no
preacher or moralist has ever drawn the portrait in grander lines:—
Power is never a good, unless he be good that has it; so it is
the good of the man, not of the power. If power be goodness,
therefore is it that no man by his dominion can come to the
virtues, and to merit; but by his virtues and merit he comes to
dominion and power. Thus no man is better for his power; but if
he be good, it is from his virtues that he is good. From his
virtues he becomes worthy of power, if he be worthy of it....
By wisdom you may come to power, though you should not desire
the power. You need not be solicitous about power, nor strive
after it. If you be wise and good, it will follow you, though
you should not wish it.
Ah! Wise One, thou knowest that greed and the possession of
this earthly power never were pleasing to me, nor did I ever
greatly desire this earthly kingdom—save that I desired tools
and materials to do the work that it was commanded me to do.
This was that I might guide and wield wisely the authority
committed to me. Why! thou knowest that no man may understand
any craft or wield any power, unless he have tools and
materials. Every craft has its proper tools. But the tools
that a king needs to rule are these: to have his land fully
peopled; to have priestmen, and soldiermen, and workmen. Yea!
thou knowest that without these tools no king can put forth
his capacity to rule.... It was for this I desired materials
to govern with, that my ability to rule might not be forgotten
and hidden away. For every faculty and authority is apt to grow
obsolete and ignored, if it be without wisdom; and that which
is done in unwisdom can never be reckoned as skill. _This will
I say—that I have sought to live worthily the while I lived,
and after my life to leave to the men that come after me a
remembering of me in good works._
... Ah! my soul, one evil is stoutly to be shunned. It is that
which most constantly and grievously deceives all those who
have a nature of distinction, but who have not attained to full
command of their powers. This is the desire of false glory and
of unrighteous power, and of immoderate fame of good deeds
above all other people. For many men desire power that they may
have fame, though they be unworthy, for even the most depraved
desire it also. But he that will investigate this fame wisely
and earnestly, will perceive how little it is, how precarious,
how frail, how bereft it is of all that is good.
Glory of this world! Why do foolish men with a false voice call
thee glory? Thou art not so. More men have pomp and glory and
worship from the opinion of foolish people, than they have from
their own works.
They say a certain king cried: he had a naked sword hanging
over his head by a small thread ready at a moment to cut short
his life. It was so always to me....
Alfred’s relations to the Church were wholly without a cloud or a
blot—alike free from the violence or the impolicy which too often
discredited even the noblest sovereigns of his age. From the hour when
the child Prince of four was anointed by Pope Leo in Rome, down to the
day when the Canons laid his bones in the Old Minster of Winchester, the
career of Alfred presents to us the purest type of the normal relations
between the temporal and spiritual powers—a type of more wisdom than
that of St. Henry or St. Louis, more truly spiritual than that of the
Emperors Charles or Otto. To Alfred, Religion, Culture, Intelligence had
no local limits. He was essentially European, even cosmopolitan, in his
genius. As a boy he had witnessed the inauguration of the new Papal Rome
on the Vatican. He had been at the Court of the great Frank King, whose
daughter became his step-mother; he had known all that was foremost in
the civilisation of the century: he resolved to transplant it to England.
His missions were his message to the world that Britain was no longer an
_ultima Thule_, but henceforth was to march in the van of Progress. He
was, says Freeman, “the spiritual and intellectual leader of his people.”
It is in his own writings that we come to love Alfred best. No ruler
of men has left us so pellucid a revelation of his own soul. As in
_Meditations_ of Aurelius and the Psalms of David, there is given to men
the outpourings of his aspirations and his sorrows. Neither Richelieu,
Cromwell, nor William the Silent ever recorded more frankly their
problems and their aims. In the authentic writings of Alfred we are in
the presence of one who is a teacher as much as a king—who recalls to
us Augustine and à-Kempis, or Bunyan and Jeremy Taylor. His _Boethius_
served him as texts whereon he preached to his people profound sermons
on the moral and spiritual life. Read his homily on Riches—“that it is
better to give than to receive,”—on the true Ruler—“that power is never a
good, unless he be good that has it,”—on the uses of Adversity—“no wise
man should desire a soft life.” Few men ever had so hard a life—with his
mysterious and cruel malady—“his thorn in the flesh” until his early
death—with his distracted and ruined kingdom—his ferocious enemies—his
never-ending cares. And amidst it all we have the king in his silent
study pouring out poetic thoughts upon married love, or friendship,
on true happiness, or the inner life, composing pastoral poetry, or
casting into English old idylls from Greek epic or myth, ending with some
magnificent _Te Deum_ of his own composition.
And with all this spiritual fervour, this literary genius, this passion
for culture, how wonderful is the many-sided energy of the man—his skill
and delight as a huntsman, his love of ballad, anecdote, and merry tale,
his love of all noble art, his zeal as a great builder, his ingenuity in
mechanical contrivance, his invention for measuring time, his planning a
new type of battleship—his supreme foresight in refounding the desolated
city of London. No man ever so perfectly fulfilled the rule—“Without
haste, without rest.” “I have desired,” he wrote, “to live worthily while
I lived, and after my life to leave to the men that should be after me a
remembrance in good works.” And Alfred “the truth-teller”—as an annalist
calls him—never uttered words more true.
Alfred’s name is almost the only one in the long roll of our national
worthies which awakens no bitter, no jealous thought, which combines the
honour of all; Alfred represents at once the ancient monarchy, the army,
the navy, the law, the literature, the poetry, the art, the enterprise,
the industry, the religion of our race. Neither Welshman, nor Scot, nor
Irishman can feel that Alfred’s memory has left the trace of a wound
for his national pride. No difference of Church arises to separate any
who would join to do Alfred honour. No saint in the Calendar was a more
loyal and cherished member of the ancient faith; and yet no Protestant
can imagine a purer and more simple follower of the Gospel. Alfred was
a victorious warrior whose victories have left no curses behind them:
a king whom no man ever charged with a harsh act: a scholar who never
became a pedant: a saint who knew no superstition: a hero as bold as
Launcelot—as spotless as Galahad.
No people, in ancient or modern times, ever had a hero-founder at once so
truly historic, so venerable, and so supremely great. Alfred was more to
us than the heroes in antique myths—more than Theseus and Solon were to
Athens, or Lycurgus to Sparta, or Romulus and Numa were to Rome—more than
St. Stephen was to Hungary, or Pelayo and the Cid to Spain—more than Hugh
Capet and Jeanne d’Arc were to France—more than William the Silent was to
Holland—nay, almost as much as the Great Charles was to the Franks.
The life-work of the Great Alfred has had a continuity, an organic
development, a moral, intellectual, and spiritual majesty which has no
parallel or rival amongst rulers in the annals of mankind. He is the
father of English History, the founder of English prose. He gave impulse
and form to the _English Chronicle_, the oldest national record in modern
Europe. He formed himself, or dictated, an organic prose literature,
which was kept in current use until the Norman Conquest. His mark as
a king is the creative mind—the organising genius. His whole life, as
recorded in act and as imagined in his own ideals, has the stamp of
supreme insight, practical wisdom, self-control, devotion to duty. His
passion for poetry, his love for history, his dignity, his grace, his
tenderness, his manly piety—all alike are spontaneous and beautiful—all
are in harmony, none are in excess.
ALFRED AS A RELIGIOUS MAN AND AN EDUCATIONALIST
BY THE BISHOP OF BRISTOL
ALFRED AS A RELIGIOUS MAN AND AN EDUCATIONALIST
I
HIS EARLY YEARS
Earliest years—Visits to Rome—Purpose of such visits—His
father’s will—His education—Saxon poetry—His mother’s book—His
religious interest—His desire for learning—Musical skill—His
religious wars—He becomes king.
The original sources of information from which this chapter is drawn are
fairly numerous. Asser’s _Life of Alfred_ is of course the chief source;
but Alfred’s laws, Alfred’s translations, Alfred’s will, all throw much
light on his character as a religious man; and the translations tell
us something of his views on education, besides what we learn from the
record of his actions.
Alfred’s mother was Osburga; Asser tells us that she was a very religious
woman, noble alike in family and by her own disposition. His father
Ethelwulf gave him an early training in devotion to the faith of Christ.
In the year 853, which Asser declares to have been the fifth year of
Alfred’s life—though some say his eleventh year, which would seem more
probable—Ethelwulf sent him to Rome with an honourable escort of nobles
and commoners. Pope Leo IV. received him, anointed him for king, and
adopted him as his spiritual son. This may mean that Alfred was confirmed
in Rome; Ethelwerd, a descendant of Alfred, believed that it referred to
baptism. Another account states that the Pope anointed him king of the
Demetians; but that seems out of the question, as he had four brothers
older than himself. The statement may be due to the fact that some years
after Alfred became king, the kings and people of that part of Wales
made submission to him.[1] Two years later Ethelwulf himself went to
Rome, with great honour, and took with him Alfred, because he loved him
more than his other sons. A long list of Ethelwulf’s gifts was given by
Anastasius in his _Lives of the Popes_; they were very magnificent if the
record is true. The father and son remained in Rome for a year. Alfred’s
mother was, we must suppose, then dead, for Ethelwulf took a new wife
home with him, Judith, the daughter of Charles the Bald.
We have in Ethelwulf’s will an interesting evidence of the impression
made upon him by Rome. It is as well to state such of the provisions as
have come down to us, for they are in themselves of importance, and they
introduce us to important facts of the time; also, we shall then have
something with which to compare Alfred’s will when the time comes to deal
with it. The provisions show the kind of religious atmosphere in which
Alfred was brought up as a young boy.