ALFRED AT PEACE.
The fourteen years which followed the Peace of Wedmore (878 to 892)
were, as has been said, in the main years of peace, and may be
considered to justify the heading of this chapter; yet that peace
was not all unbroken, nor was Alfred’s Danish godson always a placid
and peaceful Christian. There were still some slight heavings of the
barbarian sea, which must be shortly described before we turn to the
much more interesting subject of Alfred’s peaceful labours. The main
condition of the Peace of Wedmore was that the Danes should evacuate
Wessex. The agreement that the Watling Street should be the boundary
between the two nations cannot be stated to have been one of the
conditions of the peace now concluded. We have, in fact, no accurate
information as to the territorial arrangements of 878. The extremely
interesting document called _Aelfredes and Guthrumes Frith_ (the peace
of Alfred and Guthrum) must belong to some later year than the meeting
at Wedmore, and the course of the history seems to justify us in
assigning it to the year 885 or thereabouts.[136]
After Guthrum and his men had lingered for some time in the
neighbourhood of Cirencester, they marched across England to East
Anglia (879), and made a permanent settlement there, “occupying and
dividing the land”. This probably means that they exchanged the
destructive excitement of the life of the viking for the peaceful
existence of the husbandman. But when, five years later, in 884, a
division of “the army” which had been ravaging Gaul came to Kent and
besieged Rochester, the sight of their fellow-countrymen, harrying on
the other side of the Thames estuary, seems to have been too much
for Danish self-control. Guthrum “broke peace with King Alfred,” and
probably sent some of his men to help in the siege. Alfred, however,
set to work to besiege the besiegers, who had “wrought another fastness
round themselves,” and in the end forced them to abandon their
enterprise, leave their horses as the prize of victory, and depart over
seas. He then proceeded to chastise the East Anglian Danes for their
breach of faith, sending a fleet against them from Kent which won a
signal victory. Notwithstanding a subsequent defeat, his operations
must have been on the whole successful, for he rescued London from the
Danish yoke and concluded, probably in 885, that treaty with Guthrum
which as before said is still extant, bearing the title of Alfred’s and
Guthrum’s _frith_.
If the provisions of Wedmore had made the Watling Street the boundary
between the two nationalities, which is doubtful, the treaty now
concluded was certainly more favourable to the English. It went from
the Thames northwards “up the Lea to its source, then straight on to
Bedford, and then up along the Ouse to the Watling Street,” which
throughout a large part of its further course became practically the
boundary of the two nations. This line gave to the English king London,
previously abandoned to the Danes, and with London the region round it
north of the Thames and west of the Lea, which had previously formed
part of the kingdom of Essex, but which now, perhaps, received a
special organisation of its own, and the name that it has since borne
for ten centuries, Middlesex. It also gave to Alfred the larger and
fairer half of Mercia, being in fact all that portion of the midland
counties which lies south and west of the London and North Western
Railway,[137] together with half of Hertfordshire and two-thirds of
Bedfordshire. But then, on the other hand, it is true that the rest of
Mercia, East Anglia, Essex (mutilated) and Northumbria were practically
handed over to the Danes, either as personal rulers or as over-lords.
This surrender has often been treated as a wise and politic act of
self-sacrifice on Alfred’s part, a view which was the natural result
of the historical teaching which spoke of Egbert and his descendants as
unquestioned monarchs of all Anglo-Saxon Britain. Now, however, that we
see what a precarious and shadowy thing was the supremacy of the ninth
century Kings of Wessex over northern and midland England, a supremacy
which under a feeble king like Ethelwulf perhaps almost vanished into
nothingness, we can see that the settlement which generally (though
incorrectly) goes by the name of the Peace of Wedmore was not so great
a sacrifice on Alfred’s part as we used to imagine. Bitter doubtless it
was to Alfred as to every patriotic heart among the “Angel-cyn” to see
the Dane so firmly rooted in the north and east of England, but that
was the actual position of affairs, and he, as a statesman, was bound
to recognise it. On the other hand, the larger half of Mercia now came
under Alfred’s personal rule and was irrevocably joined to his realm,
and this great new kingdom was now preparing to enter the lists against
the Scandinavian invaders with a fairer prospect of success than could
ever have been entertained by the disunited, mutually suspicious states
of the “Heptarchy”. As has been already pointed out, the Dane was the
real though involuntary creator of a united England.
It is worth our while to notice the language of the great _frith_
which thus settled the boundary of the two races. It professes to be
concluded “between Alfred, king, and Guthrum, king, and all the _witan_
of the English kinship, and all the folk that is in East Anglia, for
themselves and for their offspring”. “If any man be slain, as we hold
all equally dear, both Englishmen and Danes, the penalty shall be eight
half-marks of pure gold,[138] but if he be a _ceorl_ or freed-man on
_gafol_ [rented] land, the penalty shall be 200 scillings.” “And we all
agreed on this day when men swore their [mutual] oaths that neither
bond nor free shall fare unto the [Danish] army without leave, nor
shall any one of them come to us. Should it happen that one of them
wishes to have business with us, or one of us with them, in respect of
land or cattle, that is to be permitted only on condition of his giving
hostages for the observance of the peace and as a testimony that he
has a clean back,” in other words, that his past record is that of a
peaceable neighbour.
Evidently the continuance of friendly relations between the two races,
parted only by two small streams and the old Roman road, was felt to be
precarious, and both rulers agreed that the less they mingled with one
another the better.
* * * * *
It is pleasant to turn from the monotonous story of the conflict with
the Danes to the subject of Alfred’s family life. In 868, three years
before “the year of battles” and his own accession to the throne, he
married a noble Mercian lady named Ealhswith, daughter of Ethelred,
ealdorman of the Gaini(?), and descended on her mother’s side from the
royal family of Mercia. By this lady (who survived him three years)
Alfred had five children who grew up. The eldest, Ethelfled, when
little more than a child, was given in marriage to Ethelred, ealdorman
of the Mercians, and became, after her father’s death, a personage of
great importance, ruling her mother’s country with spirit and success
under the proud title of “Lady of the Mercians”. The next child,
Edward, who was eventually his father’s successor, had for his especial
companion his sister Elfrida. “When he was not hunting or engaged in
other manly exercises, he was with her learning the psalter or books
of Saxon poetry, showing affability and gentleness towards all, both
natives and foreigners, and ever in complete subjection to his father.”
In after life the two playmates were widely separated. The boy became
Edward the Elder, one of the greatest of English kings; the girl was
sent across the seas to become the wife of Baldwin II. of Flanders, son
of Judith of France, and her husband the handsome forester. After more
than two centuries the brother and sister playmates were once more to
meet in the persons of their progeny, when Elfrida’s descendant Henry
Beauclerk, son of Matilda of Flanders, married Matilda of Scotland,
descended in the seventh degree from Edward the Elder. Of the two
other children of Alfred, we know only that Ethelgiva was early
dedicated to the monastic life, becoming Abbess of Shaftesbury; and
that Ethelweard, the youngest of the family, was a pupil in a court
school founded by his father, probably in imitation of the similar
institutions founded by Charlemagne, in which the sons of the nobility
and some others were taught to read books both Latin and Anglo-Saxon,
and also learned to write. Ethelweard (who must not be confounded with
his kinsman of the same name, author of a chronicle) seems to have
specially profited by this training, and was probably the most learned
member of his family.
An obscure statement of Asser’s with reference to Alfred’s marriage
reveals to us the fact that the great king’s life was in some
mysterious way one long battle with disease. From early boyhood he
suffered from some malady which caused him grievous pain. In his
twentieth year, just about the time of his marriage, this malady left
him, but was succeeded by another which caused him at intervals yet
sharper pain, and always kept him in terror of its recurrence. This
affliction endured from his twentieth till his forty-fifth year, if not
longer.[139] These hints, obscure as they are, heighten our admiration
of the heroic spirit with which Alfred, often suffering from acute
bodily pain, with the ever-present fear of attacks either by disease or
by the Danes, set himself to fulfil his duties towards his subjects in
the wide and comprehensive sense in which he understood them. Of his
wisely planned and efficient schemes for the defence of his realm from
hostile invasion something will be said in the next chapter. We are
now concerned with his earnest endeavours to dispel the intellectual
darkness which brooded over his country, yet of which only the king
himself and a few chosen friends were fully conscious.
It is clear that in the course of the century which elapsed between the
death of Bede and the birth of Alfred, the intellect of England had
suffered a terrible relapse into ignorance and barbarism. It was not
the inroads of the Northmen alone which had brought about this result,
though, of course, the ruin of so many Northumbrian monasteries and the
destruction of so many manuscripts were influences unfavourable to the
cause of learning. But independently of Scandinavian ravages, England
herself was becoming barbarised. In Northumbria the beacon light of
Christianity and culture, which had once shone so brightly, was
quenched in the blood of her kings, murdered and murderers. In Mercia
there was a little more interest in literary pursuits, but apparently
there only; East Anglia and Wessex were intellectually dead. As Alfred
himself says, in the preface to his translation of Pope Gregory’s
_Regula Pastoralis_: “Even before all this burning and ravaging [by
the Danes in the reigns of Ethelwulf and his sons], when the churches
were still filled with books and sacred vessels, and God’s servants
abounded, yet they knew very little of the contents of their books,
because they were not written in their own idiom”. “Formerly men came
from beyond our borders, seeking wisdom in our own land; now, if we
are to have it at all, we must look for it abroad. So great was the
decay of learning among Englishmen that there were very few on this
side Humber, and I ween not many north of it, who could understand the
ritual [of Mass] or translate a letter from Latin into English. No,
I cannot remember one such, south of the Thames, when I came to the
throne.”
To help him in the arduous task of once more bringing the English race
under the influence of literary culture, nay, rather to teach him who
yearned to be the teacher of his people, Alfred sought the aid of
learned ecclesiastics beyond his own borders. With much earnestness he
invited the Welshman Asser, his future biographer, to repair to his
court. From Mercia he imported Plegmund, who became in 890 archbishop
of Canterbury, and Werferth, who eventually returned to the midlands as
bishop of Worcester. From St. Omer came Grimbald, who was consecrated
abbot of the new minster founded by Alfred at Winchester; and from
the lands near the mouth of the Elbe came John the Old Saxon, whose
ancestors had probably fought hard for heathenism against Charlemagne,
but who was himself a learned ecclesiastic. He helped Alfred much
in his literary work, and was made by him abbot of his monastery at
Athelney; an uneasy post, for two of his monks contrived a villainous
plot against his life and his reputation, but were foiled by the
vigorous resistance made by the stalwart Old Saxon, who had been a
warrior in his youth, when the would-be murderers set upon him by night
in the lonely convent church.
These were the chief of Alfred’s literary assistants, and with their
help he enriched his people with translations of some of the most
highly prized works which the dying Roman world had bequeathed to
Teutonic Europe.
1. The passage quoted above concerning the decay of learning in
England comes from the king’s translation of Pope Gregory’s _Regula
Pastoralis_, or as Alfred calls it his _Herd-book_. In this book
the great pope to whom England was so largely indebted for her
Christianity, gave many excellent hints as to the character, duties
and special temptations of the Christian pastor. In his preface, King
Alfred explained the reasons which had moved him to undertake the
work of a translator. He marvelled that none of the good and wise men
who had been in England before him had anticipated him in the work,
but concluded that this was because they expected that learning would
flourish yet more instead of decaying, and that another generation
would be so familiar with Latin as to need no translations. Then on
the other hand he remembered how the Old Testament itself had been
translated from the Hebrew, first into Greek and then into Latin, and
from thence, at any rate in part, into the languages of the other
Christian nations of Europe; and on this precedent he resolved to act.
“For it seems to me desirable,” he said, “that we should turn some of
the books which all men ought to know into that language which we can
all understand, and so bring it to pass (as we certainly may do if we
only have rest from our enemies) that all the free youth of England,
sons of men of substance, shall devote themselves to learning in their
early years before they are fit for other occupations; that they shall
first learn to read English writing, and then if they are still willing
to continue as pupils and desire to rise to the higher ranks of the
state, that they shall be taught the Latin language.”
The king then proceeds to describe his mode of translation: “sometimes
word for word and sometimes meaning for meaning; as I learned the sense
from Plegmund, mine archbishop, and Asser, my bishop, and Grimbald and
John my mass-priests”. He describes the measures which he has taken to
supply every see in his kingdom with a copy of the book, enriched with
an _aestel_ (clasp or book-marker?) worth 300 scillings, and commands
in God’s name that no man shall take the _aestel_ from the book or the
book from the minster. “Thank God! we have now abundance of learned
bishops, but we know not how long this may continue; and I therefore
ordain that each book be always kept in the place to which now I send
it, unless the bishop himself desire to borrow it, or give a written
order for its loan to another.”
2. In order that his subjects might have some knowledge of the history
of that great and splendid Roman past which lay in ruins behind
them, Alfred, always with the help of his ecclesiastic friends,
translated the seven books of the _History of Paulus Orosius against
the Pagans_. The selection was in many respects an excellent one, for
Orosius, a Spanish ecclesiastic of the fifth century and a friend of
St. Augustine, has here set forth, in a concise manner and fairly
interesting style, all that his contemporaries knew of the history
of the world from the building of Babylon to Alaric’s capture of
Rome. He was credulous and inaccurate, and his work, except for the
events of his own age, has no scientific value, but as a manual of
ancient history for the young Anglo-Saxon nobleman it could hardly
have been surpassed. Both Alfred, however, and his readers must have
been somewhat unnecessarily depressed by its perusal; for as the book
had a polemical bearing, _adversus Paganos_, and was intended to show
that the calamities which were befalling the Roman empire in the fifth
century were not due to its adoption of the Christian faith, its author
was naturally led to exaggerate the misery of the world in preceding
ages. While enumerating, therefore, all the murders, pestilences and
earthquakes of which he could find mention in the 5,617 years that had
elapsed since the creation of the world, he omits to notice the long
interspaces of quiet happiness which there had been in some ages and
some countries of the world, and he has no praise for the progress
which Humanity had made in some departments of life from Sardanapalus
to Constantine.
King Alfred and his teachers were evidently sometimes at a loss to
understand the meaning of their author, and it is amusing to see the
ingenious arts by which in such cases they evaded the difficulty. They
decided, no doubt wisely, that the unabridged history would be too long
for their Saxon students, and therefore practised severe compression.
Unfortunately for us this compression applies much more to the later
portions of the history, where Orosius’s testimony is valuable, and
where his translators might have added something of importance, than
to the earlier books where neither he nor they have anything to say
that we care to hear. The long account of Cæsar’s campaign in Gaul is
reduced within the limits of a single sentence, and even the story of
his British campaigns is shortened, though here we derive from the
translation the fact that in Alfred’s opinion the site of Cæsar’s third
battle was “near the river that is called Thames, near the ford that is
called Wallingford”.
Incomparably the most interesting, however, of Alfred’s interpolations
is made at the very beginning of the history, in the long geographical
description which Orosius thought it his duty to prefix to his work.
In translating this chapter the king has allowed himself very great
freedom and sometimes has not improved upon his author; as when
he volunteers a statement, borrowed doubtless from some classical
geographer, that Scotland (by which, of course, he means Ireland) lies
over against the Wendel Sea (or Mediterranean) at its western end.
But when he comes to speak of the Teutonic and Scandinavian lands, he
breaks quite away from Orosius and gives us a detailed ethnological
description of Northern Europe, which, though in some of its details
not easy of interpretation, is far more valuable than the meagre
Orosian sentences for which it is exchanged. And then, suddenly,
without any pretence of following his author’s guidance, he introduces
the weather-beaten forms of two Norwegian pilots, Ohthere and Wulfstan,
and imparts to his subjects and to posterity the information which they
had given him as to their voyages in the North Sea and the Baltic.
Of these two men Ohthere, “who dwelt northmost of all the Northmen,”
was the most adventurous. He told how he had sailed northward as far as
any of the whale-hunters go, keeping the waste land on his right and
the wide sea on his left hand. Then, leaving even the whalers behind,
he had sailed northward for three days more, at the end of which time
he found the coast turning suddenly to the east and then to the south.
After this he had anchored his ship at the mouth of a great river. In
other words, this bold seaman had doubled the North Cape, entered the
White Sea, and probably cast anchor at the mouth of the river Dwina,
somewhere near the site of the modern Archangel. The conversation of
this old salt concerning the whales and walruses of the Polar Sea, the
Fins and their reindeer, their accumulated skins of martens and bears,
and feathers of sea-birds, which constituted the sole wealth of those
desolate regions, evidently made a deep impression on the mind of “his
lord King Alfred”. Though we may be inclined to smile at the naïve
literary device which introduced all these details into the history of
a Spanish presbyter who lived some five centuries earlier, we must be
grateful to the king who preserved for us this record of the exploits
of the Franklins and the Nansens of that long-vanished age.
3. It was not, however, only the history of the Biblical and classical
ages which Alfred desired to render accessible to his people. He knew
that the deeds of their own forefathers since they had entered the
land of Britain, were worthy of their remembrance, and he rightly
judged that the great struggle with the Danes, in which he was himself
engaged, would soon be History, as memorable as anything that was
recorded in the pages of Orosius. With this view, as Geoffrey Gaimar,
a historian of the twelfth century, says, “He caused to be written an
English book of adventures and of laws of the land and of the kings
who made war”. In other words, Alfred’s orders brought into being the
_Saxon Chronicle_. As its latest editor[140] says: “The popular answer
is in this case the right one. The Chronicle is the work of Alfred the
Great. The idea of a national chronicle, as opposed to merely local
annals, was his, and that this idea was realised under his direction
and supervision, I most firmly believe. And we may, I think, safely
place in the forefront of the Chronicle the inscription which encircles
Alfred’s jewel [found at Athelney in 1693 and now in the Ashmolean
Museum at Oxford], AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN, ‘Alfred ordered me to be
made’.”
4. In further pursuance of the same plan a translation of Bede’s
_Ecclesiastical History_ from Latin into Anglo-Saxon was made, as
we have reason to believe, either by Alfred’s own hand or under his
immediate supervision. As this book had become a kind of classic among
churchmen, Alfred allowed himself here less liberty than in some of
his other translations. Some letters, epitaphs and similar documents
are omitted, and there is an almost complete erasure of the chapters
relating to the wearisome Paschal controversy. In other respects the
king’s translation seems to be a fairly accurate reproduction of the
original work.
5. Last, and in some ways most interesting of all the literary labours
of Alfred, comes his translation of the _Consolation of Philosophy by
Boethius_. This is a book which, after enjoying during the early Middle
Ages a popularity perhaps somewhat greater than its merits, has fallen
since the revival of learning into much less deserved oblivion. In it
Boethius, a Roman nobleman who was cast into prison and eventually
executed by order of the Gothic king Theodoric, sets forth the comfort
which came to him in his wearisome imprisonment by meditations
on Divine Philosophy. The problem which perplexed him and which
Philosophy, the spiritual companion of his solitude, sought to solve,
was the world-old one, “Why do the wicked flourish and why are the
righteous afflicted?” Strange to say, though Boethius was a Christian,
and was even in a certain sense a martyr for the Catholic faith, the
Christian solution of the problem is kept almost entirely out of sight,
and the answers suggested are such as might have been given by Socrates
or Epictetus. Boethius believes in a Divine Ruler of the universe,
and the general tendency of the book is towards the strengthening of
belief, but it is belief rather of a theistic than of a definitely
Christian type. However with all its defects and all its strange
silences, the book was one which had a great attraction for many of
the noblest minds of a bewildered Europe, and not least for the great
West Saxon king, who, struggling against the depressing influences of
disease, and ever dreading a fresh outburst of the Danish volcano,
felt that he, too, like the author, had much need of “the Consolation
of Philosophy”. In his other translations he had been working for his
people; in this, which was probably executed towards the close of his
reign, he was, perhaps, working rather for himself, for the solace and
fortification of his own troubled spirit.
We have seen that Alfred did not take a slavish view of the duties
of a translator; and in his _Boethius_ he is more lordly than ever,
omitting, adding, altering with a sublime contempt for mere verbal
accuracy. It is, however, these very changes which make the book
so precious to a student of Alfred’s own character. We see therein
what were the thoughts which were most akin to his nature; we learn
something of the secret springs of his actions; we can almost listen
to the conversations which he held with his bishops and thegns in the
great wooden palace at Winchester.
In the first place, he gives to the whole inquiry a more religious turn
than he found in the original. For “Nature” he substitutes “God”; he
sometimes introduces the name of Christ; he speaks of the Judgment-day,
and his language has throughout that distinctly religious tone which is
so strangely absent from the meditations of Boethius. He takes us into
his royal council and tells us the principles upon which he has sought
to administer the state, using for his instruments three sorts of
ministers, men of prayer, men of war, and men of work, for all of whom
suitable maintenance must be found out of the land. He expands a slight
sentence of Boethius in praise of friendship into a noble passage, in
which he declares that true friendship is not an earthly but a heavenly
blessing; that all other objects of desire in this world are sought
after in obedience to some selfish motive, but a true friend we love
for love’s own sake and because of our trust in his truth, hoping for
no other return. “Nature joins friends together and unites them with an
inseparable love, whereas by our worldly goods and the wealth of this
life we more often make foes than friends.”[141]
Boethius puts into the mouth of Philosophy some words deprecatory of
too great regard for noble birth; but Alfred says boldly on his own
account that “true high birth is that of the mind not of the flesh,” a
memorable utterance in the mouth of the man whose lineage “went unto
Cerdic” and who according to the songs of Saxon bards was descended
from Woden. There are also in this most interesting translation many
passages which show Alfred’s keen perception of the beauties of Nature,
his unfailing interest in geography, and his knowledge of Saxon
folk-lore (as illustrated by his allusion to the bones of Weland the
Smith), besides some which reveal his naïve ignorance of well-known
facts of ancient history, as when he describes the _sella curulis_ as a
kind of carriage, or when he tells us that Cassius was another name for
Brutus. One sees with pleasure that the wise king had a certain gift
of humour, and that he could at times be even sarcastic. He alone,
not his author, is responsible for the following remark attributed to
Philosophy: “Two things honour and power can do, if they fall into the
hands of a fool: they can cause him to be respected and even revered by
other fools”. Whosoever would get at the heart of this great man, the
true founder of the English kingdom, and discover his inmost thoughts,
should carefully study Alfred’s translation of Boethius, and observe
where he neglects and where he reinforces from his own experience the
maxims and arguments of the Roman statesman.
To the interval of comparative peace with which we are now dealing
we may probably assign the reorganisation of the royal household.
Apparently service in the palace was conducted on parallel lines with
service in the army, being performed in both cases by men who had
houses of their own to govern and lands of their own to cultivate. The
king, therefore, ordained that the household should be divided into
three portions, each of which should take palace-duty (“night and day,”
says the biographer) for one month, and then, being relieved by another
detachment, return home for two months’ furlough. The same principle of
threefold division prevailed partially in the simple budget of Alfred’s
exchequer. He divided, says Asser, all the revenue which was yearly
collected by his officers into two parts, one of which was devoted
to secular and the other to religious uses. Of the secular portion
one-third was paid to the household, according to their respective
dignities and special services; one-third to the workmen of various
nationalities whom he had gathered about him for his great works of
building and restoration; and one-third to the foreigners--probably for
the most part scholars or professors of some liberal art--who flocked
in great numbers to his court. Of the religious half of his revenue,
one-quarter went to the poor, one-quarter to the two new monasteries
founded by him at Winchester and Athelney, one-quarter to the court
school, and the remainder promiscuously to the various monasteries in
Wessex and Mercia, and the needy churches in Britain and even in Gaul
and Ireland.
One of the most extraordinary of the king’s benefactions, one which we
might well have doubted had it not been vouched for by the contemporary
evidence of the Chronicle, is thus described therein: “And that same
year [883 for 882] Sighelm and Athelstan carried to Rome the alms which
he had vowed to send thither when he was fighting the [Danish] army at
London: and also to India to St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew”. Of the
campaign before London in the course of which this vow was made we have
no more definite information. The sending of alms to Rome is easily
understood, but the mission of West Saxon almoners to “St. Thomas’s
Christians” in India is indeed a marvellous fact if true. Unfortunately
the tendency of modern criticism is somewhat unfavourable to the
genuineness of the entry.[142]
* * * * *
Though we know not the exact year when Alfred’s Dooms were compiled,
this will be the best place for a brief statement of the legislative
work of the great king.
“These are the dooms which Alfred the king chose, in order that no
man should deem them otherwise than according to his will.” Such is
the opening sentence of the laws. Then follows an elaborate table of
contents including Ine’s laws as well as his own; and then, strangely
enough, we have almost the whole of four chapters of the book of Exodus
(xx.-xxiii.), containing the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic code of
civil law in all its archaic simplicity and with all its Draconian
sternness: the principle of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth”; “whosoever doeth this or that he shall surely die,” the keynote
of the whole. Then, however, comes a reference to the mission of “the
Lord’s Son, our God, who is Jesus Christ, who came into the world, not
to destroy the law but to fulfil it, and to increase it with all good
things. With mild-heartedness and humility did He teach.”
Thereupon follows a description of the Council of Jerusalem as given in
the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, and a rehearsal of
its decrees about “abstaining from fornication, from things offered in
sacrifice to idols, from things strangled and from blood”. The acts of
this council end with the Golden Rule (omitted from the manuscripts on
which the Received Text of the New Testament is founded, but inserted
in _Codex Bezae_ and several early authorities), “And that which ye
will that other men should not do to you, do not ye to other men”.
“On this one doom,” says the king, “let each man meditate that he may
judge each one rightly; nor needs he any other law-book. Let him seek
for no other doom upon his neighbour than he would be willing to have
pronounced upon himself.”
But, as Alfred proceeds to show, since the conversion of many nations
to Christianity, synods have been held at which bishops and other
distinguished _witan_ have been present, and these assemblies, for
the sake of the “mild-heartedness” which Christ taught, have commuted
the death-penalty for the offences named in the Mosaic law to money
payments on the scale set forth by them; and such payments may,
therefore, without sin be taken by the secular lords to whom they are
made payable. Only, there is one crime for which no money payment must
be suffered to atone; and that is treason against a man’s rightful
lord, because Almighty God ordained no remission of punishment to those
who despised Himself, nor could His Son give any such remission to the
traitor who delivered Him to death; and He ordered that a man should
love his lord even as himself.
These passages give us an interesting glimpse of the mental process
which governed the compilation of Alfred’s law-book. In the same spirit
in which he translated Orosius and Gregory for his subjects’ benefit,
he sets before them what he considers the source of all legislation,
the divine ordinances given amidst the thunders of Sinai. He then shows
how that law was modified by the teaching of Christ; he rehearses the
several points of the decree of the Council of Jerusalem, and thence
glides by an easy transition to that tariff of compensations and fines
(payment of _wergild_ and _wite_) by which, in his day, atonement might
be made for all offences, with the one exception here so emphatically
insisted on, the crime of treason against a man’s natural lord. Of
course, modern historical science cannot concede to Church synods the
credit of this great change, which we believe to have been wrought
possibly through long ages in the forests of Germany--namely, the
change by which the blood feud slowly gave place to the exacted _wer_:
but doubtless Christian ecclesiastics accepted the principle, perhaps
in many instances regulated its application; and King Alfred was so
far right in claiming the authority of the Church for the practice of
money compensation instead of the relentless severity of some of the
ordinances of Exodus. The conclusion of Alfred’s Prologue is important
as indicating what was the legislative competence of the king and how
he shared it with the witan.
“I then, King Alfred, gathered these laws together and caused them
to be written down, selecting many which pleased me from among those
ordained by my predecessors. And many of those which I liked not I
abrogated by the counsel of my Witan, ordaining some different way for
the future. For I did not dare to set down in writing many of my own
suggestions, not knowing how they would be liked by those who should
come after. But whenever I found in the laws passed in the days of my
kinsman Ine, or of Offa, King of Mercia, or of Ethelbert, the first
English convert to Christianity, anything that seemed to me to be most
justly decided, such laws I gathered in and the others I left out.”
Generally speaking, Alfred’s laws differ from those of Ine, and still
more from those of Kentish Ethelbert, in the direction of greater
leniency, the amount of fine payable for injuries to the person being
almost always considerably reduced. This tendency, when we compare
Alfred’s and Ethelbert’s laws, is at first sight obscured by the fact
that the fines imposed by the latter are expressed in terms of the
Kentish scilling, which was worth four times as much as that of Wessex,
but when we have made the necessary correction for this difference, it
comes out very clearly. Thus the fine for cutting off the thumb was in
Ethelbert’s code the equivalent of 80 shillings of Wessex, while under
Alfred it was only 30. For the like injury to the middle finger it was
respectively 32 and 15 shillings; for the “gold” or ring finger, 24 and
17.
This remarkable diminution in the scale of pecuniary punishments was
probably due, not simply to “mild-heartedness” on the part of the king
and his _witan_, but also to the economic effect of the Danish ravages.
So much of the portable wealth of the country had been carried off
from hall and monastery to the homesteads of Scandinavia, that the
value of gold and silver remaining in the land was sensibly increased,
and a fine which was reasonable at the beginning of the eighth
century became exorbitant at the close of the ninth. This abatement
of pecuniary penalty is modified in a singular way in the case of
forest trespass. It may be remembered that by the laws of Ine, a man
going into a forest and felling timber for his own use was liable to
a fine of 30 scillings for each tree so felled, up to three, but that
90 scillings was the maximum penalty. Now, by the laws of Alfred the
penalty for each tree so felled was only 5 scillings, but there was no
maximum. A forest-thief, therefore, who cut down twenty trees would
fare worse under the new law than under the old. One would like to
know what were the developments in English forestry which led to this
singular modification of the law.
Our attention begins to be directed to the public assemblies for
the transaction of business, the local _moots_ which, as we know
from other sources, had judicial as well as administrative duties to
discharge, arranging the levy of men for the _fyrd_ and raising money
for the equipment of ships, as well as settling important questions of
inheritance and disputes about property. It was important that such
meetings should not be disturbed by the brawls of unruly partisans of
the litigants, and accordingly we find it enacted that “if any man
fight before the king’s ealdorman in the _gemot_ (meeting), he shall
pay his _wer_ and _wite_ as the law ordains for any assault that he
may have committed, and in addition shall pay a fine (_wite_) of 120
scillings to the ealdorman”.
Law 42 in Alfred’s code illustrates in an interesting manner that
gradual transition from the blood-feud to the law-suit which was
perhaps the most important conquest of Teutonic civilisation. By
the various sections of this law it is provided that no man who has
a grievance against another shall fight his foe until he has first
demanded justice of him. That done, however, and justice denied, he
may, if he have a sufficiently strong body of friends to back him,
besiege the defendant for seven days. Should that blockade bring about
a surrender and a disarmament, he must keep his adversary in custody
for thirty days, sending word to his kinship that they may come and
pay the mulct for which the prisoner is liable. What is to happen if
the surrender does not take place at the end of the seven days, or the
payment at the end of the thirty, we are not informed, but it seems
to be implied that the claimant may then fight and even slay his enemy
without guilt. If the plaintiff have not sufficient power to besiege
his foe, he must ride to the ealdorman and demand his aid. Failing
that, he must seek redress of the king, before he takes it upon himself
to fight his foe. Moreover, a man might always fight for his lord or
his kinsman without incurring the penalties of blood-guiltiness, and
so too he could wage “lawful war” with the seducer of his wife, his
sister, or his mother. We see that the ideas of the old blood-feud and
of the so-called “Fist-right” still lingered in the mind even of so
wise and religious a legislator as Alfred. Redress of wrongs by the
action of courts of law might be the ideal, but in the actual Saxon
world private warfare must still be allowed, and all that the king
could hope to accomplish was to confine it within narrow bounds and
regulate its procedure.
On the condition of the servile class, the _theows_ and _esnes_, in
the time of Alfred, not much light is thrown by Alfred’s Doom-book.
We learn, however, that there was already a large class of free-men
working for wages, for whose holidays, amounting in all to about
thirty-six days in the year, the forty-third of Alfred’s laws made
provision. From this enactment the _theows_ and _esnes_ are expressly
excluded, but it is provided that all men in servile condition shall
have the four Wednesdays in the Ember-weeks, on which days they are
graciously permitted to make a present of their labour to any one who
may have helped them in God’s name, or even to work for themselves.
There is also a curious provision (law 20) exempting from liability the
lord of a monk who has received money on deposit which he has failed to
restore. This passage coincides with some others which seem to indicate
that owing to the ruin of the monasteries wrought by the Danes, many of
the monks, in order to keep body and soul together, accepted a servile
position on the estate or in the house of some great landowner.
There are other indications that during the two centuries which had
elapsed since the legislation of Ine, the tendency which was even
then observable, towards the formation of large landed estates and
the lessening of the number of free and independent ceorls, had been
going forward. One cause which probably contributed to this result
was the conversion of Folkland into Bookland: two terms which, after
puzzling a whole generation of English historians, have at last,
it may be hoped, yielded up their secret to the patient research
of a foreign student of our institutions.[143] Folkland, it seems
now safe to say, was “family land held by common right and without
written evidence”.[144] Bookland was, as it is called by a Latin
interpreter,[145] _terra testamentalis_, land over which the owner
had full power of disposition by will, and his right to which rested
on some “book” or written document, not on folk-right and immemorial
custom. A striking illustration of the difference between the two kinds
of property is afforded by the will of a certain ealdorman Alfred who
was a contemporary of his great namesake the king.[146] This nobleman
leaves the bulk of his large property, which is expressly stated to be
bookland, to his widow and “our common bairn” Aldryth: but there is
also a son, probably not born in wedlock, for whom he wishes to make
provision. After leaving him a certain small “bookland” property, he
adds: “If the king will let him have the folkland in addition to this
bookland, then let him have and enjoy it”; if not, the widow is to
convey to him certain other bookland estates. It is argued with much
force that here we have the case of a nobleman owning large properties
which have been conveyed to him by perhaps recent “books,” written
instruments of purchase and sale, royal donations and the like. But he
has inherited also another, probably smaller, property which has been
in his family from time immemorial, is his by folk-right, and is called
folkland. But this property is held subject to certain customary laws
of inheritance, and is perhaps liable to reversion to other members
of the kinship in default of male heirs. The ealdorman hopes for the
king’s intervention on behalf of his son should any difficulty be made
about his succession to the folkland, and, failing that, desires that
the loss shall be made up to him out of the bookland estate, over which
his disposing power is incontestable.
If, as there is reason to believe, the cases of conversion of folkland
into bookland were frequent throughout the later Saxon centuries, if
the slumbering rights of succession of distant members of the kinship
were being barred by “books” granting the land to members of the royal
household, to convents and churches, or simply confirming ordinary
commercial transactions of sale and exchange, it is easy to see that
the class of “twy-hind” ceorls would be sensibly diminished and the
possessions of the “twelf-hynd” man, the thegn or the king’s retainer
visibly increased. All these causes would augment the number of poor
and struggling freemen who, especially in times of war and invasion
during “the clash of mighty opposites,” were glad to sacrifice some
part of their precarious independence by “commending” themselves to the
protection of some powerful landowner.