and ablest of all the Northmen who had ever landed in England, is now at
last fairly in Alfred's power. At Reading, Wareham, Exeter, he had
always held a fortified camp, on a river easily navigable by the Danish
war-ships, where he might look for speedy succor or whence at the worst
he might hope to escape to the sea. But now he, with the remains of his
army, is shut up in an inland fort with no ships on the Avon, the
nearest river, even if they could cut their way out and reach it, and no
hopes of reinforcements overland. Halfdene is the nearest viking who
might be called to the rescue, and he, in Northumbria, is far too
distant. It is a matter of a few days only, for food runs short at once
in the besieged camp. In former years, or against any other enemy,
Guthrum would probably have preferred to sally out and cut his way
through the Saxon lines, or die sword in hand as a son of Odin should.
Whether it were that the wild spirit in him is thoroughly broken for the
time by the unexpected defeat at Ethandune, or that long residence in a
Christian land and contact with Christian subjects have shaken his faith
in his own gods, or that he has learned to measure and appreciate the
strength and nobleness of the man he had so often deceived, at any rate
for the time Guthrum is subdued. At the end of fourteen days he sends to
Alfred, suing humbly for terms of any kind; offering on the part of the
army as many hostages as may be required, without asking for any in
return; once again giving solemn pledges to quit Wessex for good; and,
above all, declaring his own readiness to receive baptism. If it had not
been for the last proposal, we may doubt whether even Alfred would have
allowed the ruthless foes with whom he and his people had fought so
often, and with such varying success, to escape now. Over and over again
they had sworn to him, and broken their oaths the moment it suited their
purpose; had given hostages, and left them to their fate. In all English
kingdoms they had now for ten years been destroying and pillaging the
houses of God and slaying even women and children. They had driven his
sister's husband from the throne of Mercia, and had grievously tortured
the martyr Edmund. If ever foe deserved no mercy, Guthrum and his army
were the men.
When David smote the children of Moab, he "measured them with a line,
casting them down to the ground; even with two lines measured he to put
to death, and with one full line to keep alive." When he took Rabbah of
the children of Ammon, "he brought forth the people that were therein,
and put them under saws and under harrows of iron, and under axes of
iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln." That was the old
Hebrew method, even under King David, and in the ninth century
Christianity had as yet done little to soften the old heathen custom of
"woe to the vanquished." Charlemagne's proselytizing campaigns had been
as merciless as Mahomet's. But there is about this English King a divine
patience, the rarest of all virtues in those who are set in high places.
He accepts Guthrum's proffered terms at once, rejoicing over the chance
of adding these fierce heathen warriors to the church of his Master, by
an act of mercy which even they must feel. And so the remnant of the
army are allowed to march out of their fortified camp, and to recross
the Avon into Mercia, not quite five months after the day of their
winter attack and the seizing of Chippenham. The northern army went away
to Cirencester, where they stayed over the winter, and then returning
into East Anglia settled down there, and Alfred and Wessex hear no more
of them. Never was triumph more complete or better deserved; and in all
history there is no instance of more noble use of victory than this. The
West Saxon army was not at once disbanded. Alfred led them back to
Athelney, where he had left his wife and children; and while they are
there, seven weeks after the surrender, Guthrum and thirty of the
bravest of his followers arrive to make good their pledge.
The ceremony of baptism was performed at Wedmore, a royal residence
which had probably escaped the fate of Chippenham, and still contained a
church. Here Guthrum and his thirty nobles were sworn in, the soldiers
of a greater King than Woden, and the white linen cloth, the sign of
their new faith, was bound round their heads. Alfred himself was
godfather to the viking, giving him the Christian name of Athelstan; and
the chrism-loosing, or unbinding of the sacramental cloths, was
performed on the eighth day by Ethelnoth, the faithful alderman of
Somersetshire. After the religious ceremony there still remained the
task of settling the terms upon which the victors and vanquished were
hereafter to live together side by side in the same island; for Alfred
had the wisdom, even in his enemy's humiliation, to accept the
accomplished fact, and to acknowledge East Anglia as a Danish kingdom.
The Witenagemot had been summoned to Wedmore, and was sitting there, and
with their advice the treaty was then made, from which, according to
some historians, English history begins.
We have still the text of the two documents which together contain
Alfred and Guthrum's peace, or the treaty of Wedmore; the first and
shorter being probably the articles hastily agreed on before the
capitulation of the Danish army at Chippenham; the latter the final
terms settled between Alfred and his witan, and Guthrum and his thirty
nobles, after mature deliberation and conference at Wedmore, but not
formally executed until some years later.
The shorter one, that made at the capitulation, runs as follows:
"ALFRED AND GUTHRUM'S PEACE.--This is the peace that King Alfred and
King Guthrum, and the witan of all the English nation, and all the
people that are in East Anglia have all ordained, and with oaths
confirmed, for themselves and their descendants, as well for born as
unborn, who reck of God's mercy or of ours.
"First, concerning our land boundaries. These are upon the Thames, and
then upon the Lea, and along the Lea unto its source, then straight to
Bedford, then up the Ouse to Watling Street.
"Then there is this: if a man be slain we reckon all equally dear,
English and Dane, at eight half marks of pure gold, except the churl who
dwells on gavel land and their leisings, they are also equally dear at
two hundred shillings. And if a king's thane be accused of manslaughter,
if he desire to clear himself, let him do so before twelve king's
thanes. If any man accuse a man who is of less degree than king's thane,
let him clear himself with eleven of his equals and one king's thane.
And so in every suit which be for more than four mancuses; and if he
dare not, let him pay for it threefold, as it may be valued.
"_Of Warrantors_.--And that every man know his warrantor, for men, and
for horses, and for oxen.
"And we all ordained, on that day that the oaths were sworn, that
neither bondman nor freeman might go to the army without leave, nor any
of them to us. But if it happen that any of them from necessity will
have traffic with us, or we with them, for cattle or goods, that is to
be allowed on this wise: that hostages be given in pledge of peace, and
as evidence whereby it may be known that the party has a clean book."
By the treaty Alfred is thus established as King of the whole of England
south of the Thames; of all the old kingdom of Essex south of the Lea,
including London, Hertford, and St. Albans; of the whole of the great
kingdom of Mercia, which lay to the west of Watling Street, and of so
much to the east as lay south of the Ouse. That he should have regained
so much proves the straits to which he had brought the northern army,
who would have to give up all their new settlements round Gloster. That
he should have resigned so much of the kingdom which had acknowledged
his grandfather, father, and brothers as overlords proves how formidable
his foe still was, even in defeat, and how thoroughly the northeastern
parts of the island had by this time been settled by the Danes.
The remainder of the short treaty would seem simply to be provisional,
and intended to settle the relations between Alfred's subjects and the
army while it remained within the limits of the new Saxon kingdom. Many
of the soldiers would have to break up their homes in Glostershire; and,
with this view, the halt at Cirencester is allowed, where, as we have
already heard, they rest until the winter. While they remain in the
Saxon kingdom there is to be no distinction between Saxon and Dane. The
were-gild, or life-ransom, is to be the same in each case for men of
like rank; and all suits for more than four mancuses (about twenty-four
shillings) are to be tried by a jury of peers of the accused. On the
other hand, only necessary communications are to be allowed between the
northern army and the people; and where there must be trading, fair and
peaceful dealing is to be insured by the giving of hostages. This last
provision, and the clause declaring that each man shall know his
warrantor, inserted in a five-clause treaty, where nothing but what the
contracting parties must hold to be of the very first importance would
find place, are another curious proof of the care with which our
ancestors, and all Germanic tribes, guarded against social
isolation--the doctrine that one man has nothing to do with another--a
doctrine which the great body of their descendants, under the leading of
Schultze, Delitzsch, and others, seem likely to repudiate with equal
emphasis in these latter days, both in Germany and England.
Thus, in July, 878, the foundations of the new kingdom of England were
laid, for new it undoubtedly became when the treaty of Wedmore was
signed. The Danish nation, no longer strangers and enemies, are
recognized by the heir of Cerdic as lawful owners of the full half of
England. Having achieved which result, Guthrum and the rest of the new
converts leave the Saxon camp and return to Cirencester at the end of
twelve days, loaded with such gifts as it was still in the power of
their conquerors to bestow: and Alfred was left in peace, to turn to a
greater and more arduous task than any he had yet encountered.
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
Alfred was the noblest as he was the most complete embodiment of all
that is great, all that is lovable, in the English temper. He combined
as no other man has ever combined its practical energy, its patient and
enduring force, its profound sense of duty, the reserve and self-control
that steady in it a wide outlook and a restless daring, its temperance
and fairness, its frank geniality, its sensitiveness to action, its
poetic tenderness, its deep and passionate religion. Religion, indeed,
was the groundwork of Alfred's character. His temper was instinct with
piety. Everywhere throughout his writings that remain to us the name of
God, the thought of God, stir him to outbursts of ecstatic adoration.
But he was no mere saint. He felt none of that scorn of the world about
him which drove the nobler souls of his day to monastery or hermitage.
Vexed as he was by sickness and constant pain, his temper took no touch
of asceticism. His rare geniality, a peculiar elasticity and mobility of
nature, gave color and charm to his life. A sunny frankness and openness
of spirit breathe in the pleasant chat of his books, and what he was in
his books he showed himself in his daily converse. Alfred was in truth
an artist, and both the lights and shadows of his life were those of the
artistic temperament. His love of books, his love of strangers, his
questionings of travellers and scholars, betray an imaginative
restlessness that longs to break out of the narrow world of experience
which hemmed him in. At one time he jots down news of a voyage to the
unknown seas of the north. At another he listens to tidings which his
envoys bring back from the churches of Malabar.
And side by side with this restless outlook of the artistic nature he
showed its tenderness and susceptibility, its vivid apprehension of
unseen danger, its craving for affection, its sensitiveness to wrong. It
was with himself rather than with his reader that he communed as
thoughts of the foe without, of ingratitude and opposition within, broke
the calm pages of Gregory or Boethius.
"Oh, what a happy man was he," he cries once, "that man that had a naked
sword hanging over his head from a single thread; so as to me it always
did!" "Desirest thou power?" he asks at another time. "But thou shalt
never obtain it without sorrows--sorrows from strange folk, and yet
keener sorrows from thine own kindred." "Hardship and sorrow!" he breaks
out again; "not a king but would wish to be without these if he could.
But I know that he cannot!"
The loneliness which breathes in words like these has often begotten in
great rulers a cynical contempt of men and the judgments of men. But
cynicism found no echo in the large and sympathetic temper of Alfred. He
not only longed for the love of his subjects, but for the remembrance of
"generations" to come. Nor did his inner gloom or anxiety check for an
instant his vivid and versatile activity. To the scholars he gathered
round him he seemed the very type of a scholar, snatching every hour he
could find to read or listen to books read to him. The singers of his
court found in him a brother singer, gathering the old songs of his
people to teach them to his children, breaking his renderings from the
Latin with simple verse, solacing himself in hours of depression with
the music of the Psalms.
He passed from court and study to plan buildings and instruct craftsmen
in gold work, to teach even falconers and dog-keepers their business.
But all this versatility and ingenuity was controlled by a cool good
sense. Alfred was a thorough man of business. He was careful of detail,
laborious, methodical. He carried in his bosom a little handbook in
which he noted things as they struck him--now a bit of family genealogy,
now a prayer, now such a story as that of Ealdhelm playing minstrel on
the bridge. Each hour of the day had its appointed task; there was the
same order in the division of his revenue and in the arrangement of his
court.
Wide, however, and various as was the King's temper, its range was less
wonderful than its harmony. Of the narrowness, of the want of
proportion, of the predominance of one quality over another which go
commonly with an intensity of moral purpose Alfred showed not a trace.
Scholar and soldier, artist and man of business, poet and saint, his
character kept that perfect balance which charms us in no other
Englishman save Shakespeare. But full and harmonious as his temper was,
it was the temper of a king. Every power was bent to the work of rule.
His practical energy found scope for itself in the material and
administrative restoration of the wasted land.
His intellectual activity breathed fresh life into education and
literature. His capacity for inspiring trust and affection drew the
hearts of Englishmen to a common centre, and began the upbuilding of a
new England. And all was guided, controlled, ennobled by a single aim.
"So long as I have lived," said the King as life closed about him, "I
have striven to live worthily." Little by little men came to know what
such a life of worthiness meant. Little by little they came to recognize
in Alfred a ruler of higher and nobler stamp than the world had seen.
Never had it seen a king who lived solely for the good of his people.
Never had it seen a ruler who set aside every personal aim to devote
himself solely to the welfare of those whom he ruled. It was this grand
self-mastery that gave him his power over the men about him. Warrior and
conqueror as he was, they saw him set aside at thirty the warrior's
dream of conquest; and the self-renouncement of Wedmore struck the
keynote of his reign. But still more is it this height and singleness of
purpose, this absolute concentration of the noblest faculties to the
noblest aim, that lifts Alfred out of the narrow bounds of Wessex.
If the sphere of his action seems too small to justify the comparison of
him with the few whom the world owns as its greatest men, he rises to
their level in the moral grandeur of his life. And it is this which has
hallowed his memory among his own English people. "I desire," said the
King in some of his latest words, "I desire to leave to the men that
come after me a remembrance of me in good works."
His aim has been more than fulfilled. His memory has come down to us
with a living distinctness through the mists of exaggeration and legend
which time gathered round it. The instinct of the people has clung to
him with a singular affection. The love which he won a thousand years
ago has lingered round his name from that day to this. While every other
name of those earlier times has all but faded from the recollection of
Englishmen, that of Alfred remains familiar to every English child.
The secret of Alfred's government lay in his own vivid energy. He could
hardly have chosen braver or more active helpers than those whom he
employed both in his political and in his educational efforts. The
children whom he trained to rule proved the ablest rulers of their time.
But at the outset of his reign he stood alone, and what work was to be
done was done by the King himself. His first efforts were directed to
the material restoration of his realm. The burnt and wasted country saw
its towns built again, forts erected in positions of danger, new abbeys
founded, the machinery of justice and government restored, the laws
codified and amended. Still more strenuous were Alfred's efforts for its
moral and intellectual restoration. Even in Mercia and Northumbria the
pirate's sword had left few survivors of the schools of Egbert or Bede,
and matters were even worse in Wessex, which had been as yet the most
ignorant of the English kingdoms.
"When I began to reign," said Alfred, "I cannot remember one priest
south of the Thames who could render his service-book into English." For
instructors indeed he could find only a few Mercian prelates and
priests, with one Welsh bishop, Asser.
"Formerly," the King writes bitterly, "men came hither from foreign
lands to seek for instruction, and now when we desire it we can only
obtain it from abroad." But his mind was far from being prisoned within
his own island. He sent a Norwegian shipmaster to explore the White Sea,
and Wulfstan to trace the coast of Esthonia; envoys bore his presents to
the churches of India and Jerusalem, and an annual mission carried
Peter's pence to Rome.
But it was with the Franks that his intercourse was closest, and it was
from them that he drew the scholars to aid him in his work of education.
A scholar named Grimbald came from St. Omer to preside over his new
abbey at Winchester; and John, the old Saxon, was fetched from the abbey
of Corbey to rule a monastery and school that Alfred's gratitude for his
deliverance from the Danes raised in the marshes of Athelney. The real
work, however, to be done was done, not by these teachers, but by the
King himself. Alfred established a school for the young nobles in his
court, and it was to the need of books for these scholars in their own
tongue that we owe his most remarkable literary effort.
He took his books as he found them--they were the popular manuals of his
age--the _Consolation of Boethius_, the _Pastoral_ of Pope Gregory, the
compilation of Orosius, then the one accessible handbook of universal
history, and the history of his own people by Bede. He translated these
works into English, but he was far more than a translator, he was an
editor for the people. Here he omitted, there he expanded. He enriched
Orosius by a sketch of the new geographical discoveries in the north. He
gave a West Saxon form to his selections from Bede. In one place he
stops to explain his theory of government, his wish for a thicker
population, his conception of national welfare as consisting in a due
balance of priest, soldier, and churl. The mention of Nero spurs him to
an outbreak on the abuses of power. The cold providence of Boethius
gives way to an enthusiastic acknowledgment of the goodness of God.
As he writes, his large-hearted nature flings off its royal mantle, and
he talks as a man to men. "Do not blame me," he prays with a charming
simplicity, "if any know Latin better than I, for every man must say
what he says and do what he does according to his ability."
But simple as was his aim, Alfred changed the whole front of our
literature. Before him, England possessed in her own tongue one great
poem and a train of ballads and battle-songs. Prose she had none. The
mighty roll of the prose books that fill her libraries begins with the
translations of Alfred, and above all with the chronicle of his reign.
It seems likely that the King's rendering of Bede's history gave the
first impulse toward the compilation of what is known as the English or
_Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, which was certainly thrown into its present
form during his reign. The meagre lists of the kings of Wessex and the
bishops of Winchester, which had been preserved from older times, were
roughly expanded into a national history by insertions from Bede; but it
is when it reaches the reign of Alfred that the chronicle suddenly
widens into the vigorous narrative, full of life and originality, that
marks the gift of a new power to the English tongue. Varying as it does
from age to age in historic value, it remains the first vernacular
history of any Teutonic people, and, save for the Gothic translations of
Ulfilas, the earliest and most venerable monument of Teutonic prose.
But all this literary activity was only a part of that general
upbuilding of Wessex by which Alfred was preparing for a fresh contest
with the stranger. He knew that the actual winning back of the Danelagh
must be a work of the sword, and through these long years of peace he
was busy with the creation of such a force as might match that of the
Northmen. A fleet grew out of the little squadron which Alfred had been
forced to man with Frisian seamen.
The national _fyrd_ or levy of all freemen at the King's call was
reorganized. It was now divided into two halves, one of which served in
the field while the other guarded its own _burhs_ (burghs or boroughs)
and townships, and served to relieve its fellow when the men's forty
days of service were ended. A more disciplined military force was
provided by subjecting all owners of five hides of land to
"thane-service," a step which recognized the change that had now
substituted the _thegn_ for the _eorl_ and in which we see the beginning
of a feudal system. How effective these measures were was seen when the
new resistance they met on the Continent drove the Northmen to a fresh
attack on Britain.
In 893 a large fleet steered for the Andredsweald, while the sea-king
Hasting entered the Thames. Alfred held both at bay through the year
till the men of the Danelagh rose at their comrades' call. Wessex stood
again front to front with the Northmen. But the King's measures had made
the realm strong enough to set aside its old policy of defence for one
of vigorous attack. His son Edward and his son-in-law Ethelred, whom he
had set as ealdorman[23] over what remained of Mercia, showed themselves
as skilful and active as the King.
[Footnote 23: Primitive of alderman; in this period, a chieftain, lord,
or earl; subsequently, the chief magistrate of a territorial district,
as of a county or province.]
The aim of the Northmen was to rouse again the hostility of the Welsh,
but while Alfred held Exeter against their fleet, Edward and Ethelred
caught their army near the Severn and overthrew it with a vast slaughter
at Buttington. The destruction of their camp on the Lea by the united
English forces ended the war; in 897 Hasting again withdrew across the
Channel, and the Danelagh made peace. It was with the peace he had won
still about him that Alfred died in 901; and warrior as his son Edward
had shown himself, he clung to his father's policy of rest.
HENRY THE FOWLER FOUNDS THE SAXON LINE OF GERMAN KINGS
ORIGIN OF THE GERMAN BURGHERS OR MIDDLE CLASSES
A.D. 911-936
WOLFGANG MENZEL
(The famous treaty of Verdun [843] was the culmination of a series of
civil wars between the descendants of Charlemagne. By it the great
empire which Charlemagne had built up was divided among his three
grandsons, Lothair, Charles the Bald, and Louis. With this treaty the
history of the Franks closes, and Germany and France take their places,
along with Italy, as distinct and separate nations.