between his sons and the nobles for the good of his soul. Further, for
the benefit of his soul, which from the first flower of his youth he had
studied in all things to promote, he directed that in all his hereditary
dominions one poor man for each ten hides of land, either a native or a
foreigner,[2] should be provided with meat, drink, and clothing, by his
successors, even to the day of judgment. And the curiously significant
condition is imported, “if the country should continue to be inhabited
by men and cattle, and not become deserted”: to such an extent had the
ravages of the Danish pirates gone. Also, and still for the good of his
soul, three hundred mancuses[3] were to go to Rome. Their destination
explains to us the religious attraction which drew men in his time to
the old capital of the Western world. The journey was dangerous;[4]
it was also expensive.[5] King Canute spoke very strongly about this
in his time. He thanked God that he had been able to visit the holy
Apostles Peter and Paul. That was the aspect in which the purpose of
the pilgrimage to Rome presented itself to his mind, it was to visit
the tombs of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul.[6] But having thanked
God for his visit, he proceeded to complain of the heavy demands upon
“my archbishops” when according to custom they visited the holy see to
receive the pall. “I complained in the presence of the lord Pope, and
said I was much displeased on account of the immense sums of money which
were demanded of them”; it was decreed that this should cease. In like
manner he settled with the emperor and with the Frank king that the
severity of the taxes by the way should be relaxed. In 688 and 728, two
of Alfred’s predecessors, Cædwalla and Ina, kings of Wessex, wishing to
visit Rome, resigned their kingdom to carry out their wish. Bede tells us
precisely what their purpose was. It was that they might visit the tombs
of the blessed Apostles. Ethelwulf, too, makes his object clear in his
will. One hundred mancuses were to go to Rome in honour of St. Peter,
specially to buy oil for filling all the lamps of his apostolic church
on Easter Eve and at cock-crow; also, one hundred mancuses in honour of
St. Paul, for the same purpose of providing oil for the Church of St.
Paul the Apostle, to fill the lamps on Easter Eve and at cock-crow; and
one hundred mancuses for the universal apostolic pontiff. William of
Malmesbury states that these were to be annual gifts, but that is not
supported by Asser, from whom William takes his account.
It is interesting to note the agreement of these gifts with the facts of
the time. In 847 the Saracens had attacked Rome. The great basilicas of
St. Peter and St. Paul were suburban churches, outside the walls, and
they were plundered and desecrated. We are accustomed to the idea of St.
Paul’s being _fuori le mura_, but St. Peter’s, as we know it, lies in
a district surrounded by walls. This fortified district is called the
Leonine City. It owes its existence and its name to Leo IV., who was Pope
when Ethelwulf sent Alfred to Rome as a boy. A concise account of the
eight years’ papacy of Leo IV. would state that he devoted himself to
building the fortifications of the Leonine City, that St. Peter’s and the
Vatican might no longer be suburban, and to restoring the plundered and
desecrated churches of the two Apostles. Hence Ethelwulf’s gifts to the
two churches and the papal purse. If the dates and periods given by Asser
are correct, Pope Leo died while the Saxon king and prince were in Rome,
and was succeeded by Benedict III. In that case Alfred witnessed in the
autumn of 855 the significant spectacle of an antipope stripping the Pope
of his pontifical robes and ruling for a time in the Lateran.
Under influences such as these Alfred was brought up. His brothers appear
to have been sent out to great men of the kingdom to be educated, but
Alfred was kept always at the king’s court, as the favourite son. He was
specially noted for the attention with which he listened to the Saxon
poems of earlier times, and the care with which he stored them up in an
excellent memory. In after years he spoke of Aldhelm’s English songs and
hymns as the best he knew;[7] and that was saying a great deal, for the
national gift of song, both sacred and secular, was great. It would be
difficult to find in the early records of any nation a sacred song more
touching and beautiful than the stanzas of the “Dream of the Holy Rood,”
incised in early Anglian runes upon the great cross-shaft at Ruthwell,
itself a monument such as no other nation can show. The fuller form of
this great song, embodying the earlier stanzas found on the Ruthwell
cross, was discovered at Vercelli two generations ago, in the Wessex
dialect of Alfred’s time. That Alfred knew by heart this among many other
English songs may be taken as certain. That it made its religious mark on
his mind cannot be doubted.
But, Asser remarks with a severe comment on the neglect in this respect
by his parents, the boy Alfred had no book-learning at all. He was
trained in all bodily exercises, and he especially learned and practised
the art of hunting in all its branches with surprising success; an
art so practical then that Asser believed skill and good fortune in
hunting to be “among the gifts of God, as we have often witnessed.” But
book-learning he had none.
It was his mother who gave him his first taste for book-learning. If
we are to accept the dates and statements of Asser as on the whole
correct, this must have been his step-mother, Judith, though one of the
statements would refer it to Osburga’s time. Alfred was about thirteen
when the event occurred; he remained illiterate, Asser says, till he
was twelve years old or more. Those who take the other view make him
almost four at the time of the following episode. There is no evidence
that Osburga had any learning, though her love for Saxon ballad may be
assumed. Judith, on the other hand, was the daughter of a house which
paid much regard to learning and art. The beautiful Bibles of her father
are in existence still, and we can well understand that she would try to
win the affection of her step-sons by showing them treasures of a kind
new to them. No one who has had the privilege of handling and examining
the books in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris can ever forget the
beauty of the manuscripts which belonged to Charles le Chauve, Judith’s
father. The ivory covers of his Psalter and his Book of the Gospels,
the beauty of the interior of those books, and the fineness of his St.
Denis Bible and his Metz Bible (which is possibly the Bible prepared at
Tours for Charlemagne under the care of Alcuin), abundantly convince us
of the artistic taste of his family. Their evidence could be largely
supplemented from the still-existing manuscripts of Charlemagne, Louis le
Débonnaire, and Lothaire.
His mother, then, one day showed to Alfred and an older brother an
ornamental manuscript of Saxon poems. To tempt them to begin to
learn—again the act of one who had not been responsible for their
ignorance of book-learning—she said she would give the book to the boy
who could first learn to read it. Alfred was delighted with the beauty
of the initial letter. He might well be delighted if it approached the
beauty of the Lindisfarne gospels, wrought a century and a half before,
or the very different style of beauty of the manuscript known as the
Psalter of Athelstane, with its Byzantine type and Teutonic origin, parts
of which Judith may well have seen and handled. The initial letter of
the first Psalm in this Psalter would indeed have been a prize for which
a boy might face the pain of learning to read, even a boy devoted to
hunting.
Alfred spoke first, though the younger. “Will you really give it to the
one who can most quickly understand and recite it before you?” She, glad
and smiling, said, “To him I will give it.” He took it from her hand,
went to his master and read it. When it was read, he brought it back and
recited it. It is not at all improbable that Judith did not know of his
power of memory, and that instead of learning to read it, in our sense
of the word, he got his master to read it over till he knew it by heart
and could point with his finger to the words as he recited them. John
the Deacon, writing in the same century, said that Pope Gregory the
Great (others ascribe it to Gregory III.) invented musical notation as a
_memoria technica_ to remind him of tunes he had learned by ear.
However that might be with Alfred, he had got the taste for written
words, which never left him. He set to work to learn the daily course
of the religious services of the several hours; and then certain of the
psalms; and then a number of prayers. All this collection he had in a
little book which he carried day and night in his bosom. Asser, who
joined him many years later, often saw him use this little book to assist
his prayers, amid all the bustle and business of a king’s life. But still
there is a hint that when this collection was made it was only to him a
representation of what he knew by heart; for Asser says he could not at
that time gratify his most ardent wish to learn liberal art, because, as
Alfred told him, there were then no good readers in all the kingdom of
the West Saxons.[8] Indeed, he confessed to Asser with many lamentations
and inmost sighs of his heart that the greatest of all the difficulties
and impediments of his life had been that when he was young, and had
the capacity for learning, he could not find teachers; and when he was
more advanced in life, he was so harassed by a disease unknown to all
the physicians of the island, as well as by anxieties of sovereignty,
internal and external, and continual invasions of pagans, that there was
no time for reading, even his masters and writers being to some extent
disturbed in their occupations. But yet he never to the end of his life
ceased from the insatiable desire of knowledge.
Asser makes no reference to his traditional skill as a harpist and
minstrel. Probably it was a matter of course. Two hundred years before,
Cædmon, in Northumbria, had fled the festive society of his labouring
fellows, because he alone of them, when the harp was passed to him in
turn, could not sing; and the sense of isolation in this respect wrought
so strongly in his mind that in the dreams of the night he created song,
and next morning he remembered the dignified and stately creation.
Aldhelm was singing in Wessex in Cædmon’s time, sitting on the parapet
of Malmesbury bridge, and beguiling people to sacred thought by the
attraction of his secular lays.[9] We have no examples still surviving of
English musical notation of Alfred’s time; but many examples exist of the
next century, as, for instance, the manuscript written in Wessex about
eighty years after Alfred’s death for Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester,
which includes the kyrie _Rex Splendens_, composed by Dunstan, who was
born in 925. There can practically be little doubt that Alfred had a
similar notation, consisting of very rudimentary musical notes, with
guide-letters showing time and expression. It was, however, the century
after his death that saw the great development of this principle in
England. Up to that time the tradition of the plain-song introduced by
Augustine had been handed down from ear to ear. The chief use of our
musical notation was to guard against the loss or serious variation of
the traditional plain-song and the more complicated additions made by
Dunstan and other skilled musicians. The Wessex churchmen learned their
rugged plain-song so well, that after the Norman Conquest the monks of
Glastonbury suffered death at the hands of the Norman soldiers rather
than abandon their insular use for the lighter graces of the plain-song
of William of Fescamp.
Alfred’s warfare against the Danes began before he was king. It was
in his eyes much more than a warfare against violent invaders of his
territory; it was to him, above all, a religious war. That the enemy
were pagans, and that part of their aim was to obliterate Christianity,
that was his chief stimulus. To the Danes also it was a religious war.
The Angles and Saxons and Jutes, whose lands they pillaged, were their
own very distant cousins; they had in times past worshipped the same
deities whom now the Danes worshipped. To the Danes they were renegades
from the one religion which the Danes held for truth. Asser knew well the
king’s feeling on this subject. He describes at some length the series of
battles which brought Alfred into prominence, and he describes them from
information received from Alfred. He never describes the combatants as
English and Danes; he always speaks of them as Christians and pagans.
The first instance we have of the bent of Alfred’s mind after he came
to maturity occurs in connection with this feeling on his part that
to fight the Danes was a religious work. In 871, just before he came
to the throne, the pagan army fought against the Earl of Berkshire at
Englefield, and the Christians gained the victory. Four days later,
Alfred and his brother King Ethelred attacked the pagans at Reading,
where they had strong fortifications. They cut to pieces such of the
pagans as they found outside the fortifications; but the main body of
the pagans sallied forth, and the Christians fled. Four days after, the
pagan army was on strong ground at Æscesdun, the hill of the ash, and the
Christians, in shame and indignation, roused by the calamity at Reading,
determined to attack them under Ethelred and Alfred.
Ethelred was a religious man, as Alfred was, but his religion took
practically a different form. The king prepared for the fight by hearing
mass, and the army waited for him. The pagans did not wait. Time pressed.
Alfred, who was second in command, became very anxious. The king, who
commanded the force arrayed against the pagan king, was still set in
prayer. He declared he would not depart, alive, till the priest had done,
nor leave the divine service. Alfred was to deal with the two pagan
jarls; he must either retreat or charge without waiting for his brother.
Relying on the divine counsels he charged, and after a long and severe
fight, in which many of the leading pagans were killed, the Christians
won the day. They strewed the whole plain of Æscesdun with pagans,
slaughtered in their flight. Alfred himself, it should be observed, was
from childhood a frequent visitor of holy places, for the sake of prayer
and almsgiving. It was certainly not from any disregard of prayer or of
God’s house and the public worship of God that he fought while Ethelred
heard mass.
That same year, after another great fight at Basing in which the pagans
got the victory, Alfred became king on the death of his brother;
Ethelred’s son Ethelwold being too young to reign. A month later the
pagans defeated him at Wilton. Eight pitched battles in one year, besides
endless skirmishes by night and day in which Alfred and his chief men
were engaged without rest or cessation against the pagans: that is
Asser’s summary of the year which saw Alfred mount the throne of the West
Saxons.
The same note of a religious war is struck in the campaign in which
Alfred finally triumphed. He issued forth from his stronghold in
the marsh of Athelney to make frequent assaults upon the pagans.
In the seventh week after Easter, 878, he rode to Ecgbryht’s Stone
(Brixton-Deverill) in the eastern part of the Selwood, or Great Wood,
in British Coit Mawr, and on the third day reached Edington, where he
fought with valour and persistence against the pagans and defeated them
completely, killing all who were not within the earthworks. The survivors
he hemmed in for fourteen days. At the end of that time the pagans were
worn out, and begged for terms of peace. Their leader Guthrum proposed
to become a Christian. It was agreed that those who would be baptized
might settle in England; those who would remain pagan must leave the
island.[10] In the final terms, as in every phrase of Asser’s story, it
stands out as a religious war, and as a great religious victory it ended.
From that time Christian Danes and Christian Saxons could agree.
II
HIS REIGN
His early years as king—Communications with Rome—Education
of his children and others—His own labours—Religious
exercises—Introduction of learned men—Invention of
candle-clocks—Distribution of income—Foundation of
monasteries—Formation of his Manual—Embassies to foreign
parts—Ecclesiastical laws.
In the early and distressful days of Alfred’s reign his position was
almost unbearable. He would not listen to the appeals for help and
protection pressed upon him by his subjects. What was there that he
could do to help and protect them? He was maturing his plans; meanwhile,
he repulsed his subjects, and paid, or seemed to pay, no heed to their
requests. The holy man St. Neot, who was his relation—some say his
father’s brother—often told him that he would suffer great adversity
on this account, but Alfred turned, or seemed to turn, a deaf ear to
the reproofs of the man of God. His sin, Asser tells us, did not go
unpunished; Alfred fell into so great misery that sometimes none of his
subjects knew where he was or what had become of him. If this is true, it
is sufficiently accounted for by his grave anxieties, and the terrible
and mysterious disease which seized him suddenly in the midst of his
marriage feast in 868, three years before his accession, and never left
him free from pain, or the threat of pain, from the twentieth to the
forty-fourth year of his age. But most probably the episode is merely
part of the legendary life of St. Neot, inserted after Asser’s time in
his _Life of Alfred_.
Among other cares of the first ten or eleven years of his reign, he
turned his attention to the English school in Rome, and persuaded Pope
Martin to free it from tribute and tax. This is the Pope who absolved
Bishop Formosus from his excommunication by Pope John VIII. and from
his vow not to return to Rome; a reversal which led to the trial and
condemnation of the dead body of Formosus, mentioned on a later page.
Alfred was now free to devote himself to the restoration of religion and
learning. His own family management was a pattern to all. His youngest
son, Ethelwerd, was sent to the schools which Alfred had by that time
established. Here he was taught in company with the children of almost
all the nobility of the kingdom, and many that were not noble. They
learned to read both Latin and Saxon books, and they learned to write; so
that by the time they were ready to practise the manly arts—hunting and
such pursuits as befitted noblemen—they had become studious and clever
in the liberal arts. His older children had been taught at home, and no
less carefully. They learned the Psalms and read Saxon books, especially
Saxon poems; at the time when Asser wrote, Edward and Ethelswith[11] were
continually in the habit of making use of books.
The king himself led a laborious life. Invasions by pagans, and his
constantly recurring and disabling bodily pain, did not prevent his
carrying on the government with vigour. And he was full of other
occupations. Hunting in all its branches he continued to practise. He
taught his workers of gold,[12] one of whom no doubt had made in the
earlier years of his reign the ornament of gold and enamel found at
Athelney in 1693 and now in the Bodleian, with its legend speaking of
his personal care, _Alfred had me made_. He trained artificers of all
kinds; he trained his falconers, hawkers, and kennel-men. By his own
mechanical inventions he was able to build houses beyond all precedent
of his ancestors. He learned by heart the Saxon poems and made others
learn them; he recited Saxon books; he alone never desisted from studying
most diligently to the best of his ability. He attended mass and the
other daily religious services; he was frequent in singing psalms and in
prayer, at the day hours and the night hours; he went to the churches at
night to pray secretly, unknown to his courtiers. He was in the habit
of hearing the Divine Scriptures read by his own countrymen, or, if it
so happened, in the company of foreigners. His bishops, too, and all
ecclesiastics, his earls and nobles, his officers and friends, were loved
by him with wonderful affection; their sons who were bred up in the royal
household were as dear to him as his own; he had them instructed in all
good morals, and never ceased to teach them letters day and night. And
yet he complained to God, and to all who were admitted to intimacy with
him, that the Almighty had made him ignorant of divine wisdom and of the
liberal arts. He was affable and pleasant to all—that, we may depend
upon it, was the truth, and not that other story of morose repulse of all
who sought him—and he was curiously eager to investigate things unknown.
Determined to advance learning in his kingdom of Wessex, he invited out
of Mercia four very learned men of that nation. They were Werefrith,
Bishop of Worcester, who translated the dialogues of Gregory and Peter
into Saxon; Plegmund, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, the founder
of the Saxon Chronicle; and the priests Ethelstan and Werewulf. Night
and day, whenever there was leisure, one of these four read to him; so
that he possessed a knowledge of every book, though as yet he could not
himself read his books.
Further, he sent to Gaul for teachers, and two especially are named.
These were Grimbald, the provost of St. Omer, a good singer, prominent
in ecclesiastical discipline and good morals, very learned in Holy
Scripture, and John of Corbey, learned in all kinds of literature and
skilled in many arts. Asser, who was of the greatest service to him,
he persuaded to come to him out of South Wales; Asser’s own account
of the bargaining is very quaint. Asser’s principal function was, as
we have seen in the case of the four Mercians, to read to him night
and day whenever there was time. Alfred carried his determination to
have learned men in important places so far that he would rather keep
a bishopric vacant than fill it with an unlearned man. That he had
the income of vacant bishoprics has been made a charge against him.
An examination of the dates of death of bishops in Alfred’s dominions
and the dates of consecration of their successors fails to provide any
serious ground for a charge of this kind.
The story of Alfred’s invention of candles to measure the time is well
known. It is not so well known that his desire to measure time correctly
came from a religious motive. His determination was to give to God half
his time, day and night. So far as the day was concerned, if the sun was
visible the division could be made; but clouds by day baffled him, and at
night there was darkness. Hence the invention of the candles, which were
measured to burn four hours each. Each candle was divided into twelve
equal parts by lines on the surface. The invention of a lantern followed,
for a reason which sets before us the discomforts of life in those times.
The candles did not burn steadily and evenly, for the flame was blown
about by the violence of the wind, which blew day and night without
intermission through the doors and windows of the churches, the fissures
of the divisions, the plankings, the walls, or the sides of the tents.
Alfred made boxes for the lights, with doors of white ox-horn planed so
thin that they were like glass. There are small niches in some of our
churches now, with signs of doors, probably for protecting the lights at
night from the draught.
And as he gave half of his time to God, so he gave half of his income.
Ethelwulf, his father, had released from tribute to the king one-tenth
part of the royal estates,[13] for the glory of God and his own eternal
salvation. Alfred divided his income into two equal parts, for secular
and for ecclesiastical expenditure. The secular half was divided into
three equal parts. The first was for his soldiers and the nobles who
attended at his court and performed divers functions; these latter
were in three sets, each of which performed one month’s service in
each quarter and spent two months at home. The next third went to the
operatives whom he had collected from every nation, of great skill in
every kind of construction; workers in gold are specially mentioned
in another part of Asser’s description. The remaining third went to
foreigners who visited him, whether they asked for money or not. So much
for the secular half of his income.
The second half of each year’s income was all given to God. It was
divided into four parts. The first part was for the poor of all
nations.[14] It was to be discreetly bestowed; for the king said that,
as far as could be, Pope Gregory’s saying should be fulfilled, give
not much to whom you should give little, nor little to whom much, nor
something to whom nothing, nor nothing to whom something. The second was
for the two monasteries which Alfred had specially founded, at Athelney
and Shaftesbury. The third went to his school, which he had studiously
collected together, of many of the nobility of his own kingdom. The
fourth was for all the neighbouring monasteries in all Saxony and Mercia,
and in some years for monasteries in Wales, Cornwall, Gaul, Brittany,
Northumbria, and sometimes Ireland. It is a remarkable fact that in this
large expenditure for religious purposes, the purposes are at most only
indirectly connected with the definitely spiritual work of ministering
the Word of God and the Sacraments to the people at large.