Alfred the Great

Chapter XXV. Eoeewoed

To the student of old English history, important in many ways was the reign of Alfred the Great (871- 901), for thirty years King of the West Saxons. His era is notable, as all know, for the invasion of Saxon England by the Danes or Norsemen, who, on the death of Egbert, Alfred's grandfather, began to over-run the island, under their rover Vikings or chiefs, issuing from the common German home of the Anglo-Saxon stock. These incursions Alfred repeatedly met and thwarted ; and, to enable himself more effectually to keep the invaders at bay, he got together a formidable naval force and overthrow the successive waves of them that landed and made desolate the kingdom. When he was not occupied in routing those who were long the scourge of the land, the King was to be found restoring the country to order, strengthening its defences, building cities, churches, and monasteries, and otherwise devoting himself to the good of his subjects, making laws for them, and generally improving their intellectual and social condition. He, however, had his reverses as well as his triumphs, as when Guthrum, the Danish leader, defeated his army, he had to seek safety for a time in the legendary and his-

6 FOREWORD.

toric marshes of Athelney; though before long he again collected his forces and routed the Danes at Edington. On another occasion, he surrendered to his foes the kingdom of East Anglia (by the treaty of Wedmore), on condition of the Danes becoming Christians and living on friendly terms with his people. Nor were his years of peace lacking in beneficence, for he not only ruled his kingdom wisely, but did much to advance the arts and promote learning. In this latter respect, his zeal was great for the encouragement of the arts and sciences, so far as these were practically known in his day ; while his own example as a learned scholar and diligent student was helpful and stimulating.

Besides Alfred's renown as a soldier and maker of laws for the maintenance of justice, order, and peace in his kingdom, he is known also as a voluminous contributor to literature, alike through his own writings and through his many scholarly translations from the Latin into the Saxon tongue. This will be seen in the following pages from the interesting chapter which Judge Hughes, the writer of the memoir, has penned on " The King as Author." To-day, it would of course be foolish to appraise more highly than their worth these writings of a great and kingly Englishman; but when the time and circumstances are considered when the literary work of Alfred was produced — the anarchic and illiterate England of the ninth century — their value ought to be rated highly, as indeed they are by scholars, and were so rated by the learned of his own and succeeding ages. Nor are the

FOREWORD. 7

least of the items to his credit what he did as a lawgiver and as a zealous and worthy laborer for Christianity — for in his day not only intellectual, but civil and religious life, had to be awakened or restored, together with reforms in the church, and the uplifting of the national and civilizing forces through education and the inculcation of morals. To these and other features of Alfred's career and character, Mr. Hughes has properly given prominence ; while he has written a most able, sympathetic, and appreciative memoir of the monarch who is at once the glory and the honor of the fair English motherland. " This I can now truly say," was Alfred's own testimony to the rectitude of his life and conduct, " that so long as I have lived I have striven tc live worthily, and after my death to leave my memory to my descendants in good works." " If the King who wrote these words," comments Professor Goldwin Smith, " did not found a university or a polity " (his name, however, is associated with an Oxford College, which, a few years ago, celebrated the thousandth anniversary of its foundation by King Alfred), " he restored and perpetuated the foundations of English institutions, and he left what is almost as valuable as any institution — a great and inspiring example of public duty."

G. Mercer Adam.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

KING ALFRED AS A GEOGRAPHER.

BY SIR CLEMENTS MARKHAM, PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY.

It is a striking and suggestive fact that a ruler who surpassed all others that the world has ever seen in wisdom and insight should have given so high a place to geography. Alfred knew by experience that an acquaintance with the relative positions of places on the earth's surface was the necessary foundation of the kind of knowledge required equally by the statesman, the soldier, and the merchant; and he therefore gave its due place to geography in his grand scheme for the enlightenment of Englishmen. -'In this he was centuries in advance of his age. As was his wont, when he had resolved to bring knowledge on any particular subject within the reach of his people, he diligently sought out the best authority on geography. Ptolemy, Strabo, and Pliny were unknown to his generation, still hidden away in dark repositories and not to be unearthed until the dawn of the Renaissance. In the ninth century the best geographical work was that of Orosius, who had lived in the days of the Emperor Honorius. His work was a summary of the world's history from the creation to the days of Honorius, with a sketch of all that was then known of geography.

Alfred brought high qualifications to the task of translating and editing Orosius. In his boyhood he had twice made journeys to Home, which, as regards dangers and hardships, may be compared to an expedition to Lhasa at the present day. In after life he had become very intimately acquainted with the topography of his native island, from the Humber to the shores of the Channel and from the Severn to the East Anglian coast. As a military tactician, he knew each river, valley, hill-range, and plain; as an administrator, he had examined the capabilities of every district; and, as a naval commander, the harbors and estuaries, the tides and currents were familiar to him. So far as his personal knowledge extended, Alfred was a trained geographer. He was also in a position to increase the information derived from his own personal experiences by diligently collecting materials from those foreigners who frequented his court, and by reading. He had the gift of assimilating the knowledge thus acquired, and he studied most diligently. Above all, he was eager to investigate unknown things for the great end he always had in view, — the good of his people. *-*Alf red's design was to collect the best and most extensive geographical information, without confining himself to the text of Orosius. Thus he commences his geographical work with a very lucid account of the peo-

INTRODUCTORY NOTE. H

pies of central Europe and of their relative positions, which is not the work of Orosius, but was composed by the king himself from his own sources of information. It is the only account from which such details in that age can be derived.

When we consider the ignorance which prevailed in England before Alfred's time, we can form an idea of the immense importance of his geographical labours and of the brightness of the light with which he dispelled outer darkness in the minds of his countrymen. His work was more especially useful in his own time, owing to the intercourse he encouraged with foreign lands and to the frequent missions he despatched and received. Both through his promotion of intercourse with distant lands and through his literary work, our great king enlightened his people by disseminating geographical knowledge. The first to encourage Arctic exploration, the first to point the way to eastern trade by the Baltic, the first to open communication with India, his literary labours in the cause of geography are even more astonishing. There have been literary sovereigns since the days of Timseus of Sicily writing for their own glory or for their own edification or amusement. Alfred alone wrote with the sole object of his people's good; while in his methods, his scientific accuracy, and in his aims he was several centuries in advance of his time. After his death there was a dreary waste of ignorance, with scarcely even a sign of dawn on the distant horizon. A few Englishmen of ability, such as Roger Bacon and Sacrobosco, speculated and wrote on questions de splicer a; but there was no practical geography until Eden and Hakluyt rose up, nearly seven centuries after the death of our great king. Richard Hakluyt was indebted to Alfred for portions of his work, and he resembled his illustrious precursor somewhat in his zeal, his patriotism, and his diligence. . . .Alfred the Great was, in the truest sense of the term, a man of science; and we hail him as one who stands alone and unrivalled, — the founder of the science of geography in England.

THE LIFE

OF

ALFRED THE GREAT.

Chapter I. Of Kings And Kingship

" We come now to the last form of heroism, that which we call ' Kingship/ — The Commander over men; he to whose will our wills are to be subordinated, and loyally surrender themselves and find their welfare in doing so, may be reckoned the most important of great men." " In all sections of English life the God-made king is needed, is pressingly demanded in most, in some cannot longer without peril as of conflagration be dispensed with." So spoke, twenty years ago, the teacher, prophet, seer — call him what you will — who has in many ways moved more deeply than any other the hearts of this generation. Has not the conscience of England responded to the words ? Have not most of us felt that in some shape — not perhaps in that which he preaches — what Mr. Carlyle calls " kingship " is, in fact, our great need ; that without it our modern life, however full for the well-to-do amongst us of all that can interest, stimulate, gratify our intellects, passions, appetites, is a poor and mean thing, ever getting poorer and meaner. Yes, this cry, to which Mr. Carlyle first gave voice in our day, has been going up from all sections of English society these many years, in sad, fierce, or plaintive accents. The poet most profoundly in sympathy with his time calls for

" A strong still man in a blatant land, Whatever you name him what care I, Aristocrat, autocrat, democrat, one Who can rule and dare not lie."

The newest school of philosophy preaches an " organized religion/' an hierarchy of the best and ablest. In an inarticulate way the confession rises from the masses of our people, that they too feel on every side of them the need of wise and strong government — of a will to which their will may loyally submit — before all other needs ; have been groping blindly after it this long while ; begin to know that their daily life is in daily peril for want of it, in this country of limited land, air, and water, and practically unlimited wealth.

But Democracy, — how about Democracy? We had thought a cry for it, and not for kings, God-made or of any other kind, was the characteristic of our time. Certainly kings such as we have seen them have not gained or deserved much reverence of late years, are not likely to be called for with any great earnestness, by those who feel most need of guidance,

OF KINGS AND KINGSHIP. 15

and deliverance, in the midst of the bewildering conditions and surroundings of our time and our life.

Some years ago the framework of society went all to pieces over the greater part of Christendom, and the kings just ran away or abdicated, and the people, left pretty much to themselves, in some places made blind work of it. Solvent and well-regulated society caught a glimpse of that same " big black democracy," — the monster, the Frankenstein, as they hold him, at any rate the great undeniable fact of our time, — a glimpse of him moving his huge limbs about, uneasily and blindly. Then, mainly by the help of broken pledges and bayonets, the so-called kings managed to get the gyves put on him again, and to shut him down in his underground prison. That was the sum of their work in the last great European crisis ; not a thankworthy one from the people's point of view. However, society was supposed to be saved, and the " party of order " so called breathed freely. No ; for the 1848 kind of king there is surely no audible demand anywhere.

Here in England in that year we had our 10th of April, and muster of half a million special constables of the comfortable classes, with much jubilation over such muster, and mutual congratulations that we were not as other men, or even as these Frenchmen, Germans, and the like. Taken for what it was worth, let us admit that the jubilations did not lack some sort of justification. The 10th of April muster may be perhaps accepted as a sign that the reverence for the constable's staff has not quite died out yet amongst us. But let no one think that for this reason Democracy is one whit less inevitable in England than on the Continent ; or that its sure and steady advance, and the longing for its coming, which all thoughtful men recognise, however little they may sympathise with them, is the least incompatible with the equally manifest longing for what our people intend by this much-worshipped and much-hated name. For what does Democracy mean to us English in these years ? Simply an equal chance for all ; a fair field for the best men, let them start from where they will, to get to the front ; a clearance out of sham governors, and of unjust privilege, in every department of human affairs. It cannot be too often repeated, that they who suppose the bulk of our people want less government, or fear the man who " can rule and dare not lie," know little of them. Ask any representative of a popular constituency, or other man with the means of judging, what the people are ready for in this direction. He will tell you that, in spite perhaps of all he can say or do, they will go for compulsory education, the organization of labour ( including therein the sharp extinction of able-bodied pauperism, the utilization of public lands, and other reforms of an equally decided character. That for these purposes they desire more government, not less ; will support with enthusiasm measures, the very thought of which takes away the breath and loosens the knees of ordinary politicians ; will rally with loyalty and trustfulness to men who will undertake these things with courage and singleness of purpose.

OF KINGS AND KINGSHIP. If

But admit all this to be so, yet why talk of kings and kingship? Why try to fix our attention on the last kind of persons who are likely to help? Kings have become a caste, sacred or not, as you may happen to hold, but at any rate a markedly separate caste. Is not this a darkening of counsel, a using of terms which do not really express your meaning? Democrats we know: Tribunes of the people we know. When these are true and single-minded, they are the men for the work you are talking of. To do it in any thorough way, in any way which will last, you must have men in real sympathy with the masses.

True. But what if the special function of the king is precisely this of sympathy with the masses ? Our biblical training surely would seem to teach that it is. When all people are to bow before the king all nations to do him service, it is because " he shall deliver the poor when he crieth, the needy also, and him that hath no helper." When the king prays for the judgments and righteousness of God, it is in order that " he may judge Thy people according unto right, and defend the poor." When the king sits in judgment, the reason of his sentence, whether of approval or condemnation, turns upon this same point of sympathy with the poor and weak, — " inasmuch as ye have done it, or not done it, to the least of these my brethren." From one end to the other of the Bible we are face to face with these words, " king " and " kingdom ;" from the first word to the last the same idea of the king's words, the king's functions, runs through history, poem, parable, statute, and binds 2 them together. The king fills at least as large a space in our sacred books as in Mr. Carlyle's ; the writers seem to think him, and his work quite as necessary to the world as Mr. Carlyle does.

To those who look on the Hebrew scriptures as mere ancient Asian records, which have been luckilv preserved, and are perhaps as valuable as the Talmud or the Vedas, this peculiarity in them will seem of little moment. To those who believe otherwise — who hold that these same scriptures contain the revelation of God to the family of mankind so far as words can reveal Him — the fact is one which deserves and must claim their most serious thought. If they desire to be honest with themselves, they will not play fast and loose with the words, or the ideas; will rather face them, and grudge no effort to get at what real meaning or force lies for themselves in that which the Bible says as to kings and kingdoms, if indeed any be left for us. As a help in the study we may take this again from the author already quoted: — "The only title wherein I with confidence trace eternity, is that of king. He carries with him an authority from God, or man will never give it him. Can I choose my own king? I can choose my own King Popinjay and play what farce or tragedy I may with him: but he who is to be my ruler, whose will is to be higher than my will, was chosen for me in heaven. Neither except in such obedience to the heavenchosen is freedom so much as conceivable." Words of very startling import these, no doubt; but the longer we who accept the Hebrew scriptures as books of the

OF KINGS AND KINGSHIP. 19

revelation of God think on them, the more we shall find them sober and truthful words. At least that is the belief of the present writer, which belief he hopes to make clearer in the course of this work to those who care to go along with him.

And now for the word " king," for it is well that we should try to understand it before we approach the life of the noblest Englishman who ever bore it. " Cyning, by contraction king," says Mr. Freeman, " is evidently closely connected with the word Cyn, or Kin. The connexion is not without an important meaning. The king is the representative of the race, the embodiment of its national being, the child of his people and not their father." Another eminent scholar, Sir F. Palgrave, derives king from " Cen," a Celtic word signifying the head. " The commander of men," says Mr. Carlyle, " is called Rex, Regulator, Roi: our own name is still better — King, Konning, which means Can-ning, able man." And so the ablest scholars are at issue over the word, which would seem to be too big to be tied down to either definition. Surely, whatever the true etymology may be, the ideas — " representative," " head," " ablest " — do not clash, but would rather seem necessary to one another to bring out the full meaning of the word. " The representative of the race, the embodiment of its national being," must be its " head," should be its " ablest, its best man." At any rate they were gathered up in him whose life we must now try to follow : " England's herdman," " England's darling," " England's comfort," as he is styled by the old chroniclers. A thousand years have passed since Alfred was struggling with the mighty work appointed for him by God in this island. What that work was, how it was done, what portion of it remains to this day, it will be our task and our privilege to consider.

CHAPTEK II.

A THOUSAND YEARS AGO.

" For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing it is past as a watch in the night."

The England upon which the child Alfred first looked out must, however, detain us for a short time. And at the threshold we are met with the fact that the names of his birthplace, Wanating (Wantage) ; of the shire in which it lies, Berroc-shire (Berkshire) ; of the district stretching along the chalk hills above it. Ashdown; of the neighbouring villages, such as Uffington, Ashbury, Kingston-Lisle, Compton, &c, remain unchanged. The England of a thousand years ago was divided throughout into shires, hundreds, tithings, as it remains to this day. Almost as much might until lately have been said of the language. At least the writer, when a boy, has heard an able Anglo-Saxon scholar of that day maintain, that if one of the churls who fought at Ashdown with Alfred could have risen up from his breezy grave under a barrow, and walked down the hill into Uffington, he would have been understood without difficulty by the peasantry. That generation has passed away, and with them much of the racy vernacular which so charmed the Anglo-Saxon antiquary thirty years ago. But let us hear one of the most eminent of contemporary English historians on the general question. " The main divisions of the country," writes Mr. Freeman, " the local names of the vast mass of its towns and villages, were fixed when the Norman came, and have survived with but little change to our own day. . . . He found the English nation occupying substantially the same territory, and already exhibiting in its laws, its language, its national character, the most essential of the features which it still retains.

Into the English nation, which he thus found already formed, his own dynasty and his own followers were gradually absorbed. The conquered did not become Normans, but the conquerors did become Englishmen." Grand, tough, much-enduring old English stock, with all thy imperviousness to ideas, thy Philistinism, afflicting to the children of light in these latter days, thy obdurate, nay pig-headed, reverence for old forms out of which the life has flown, adherence to old ways which have become little better than sloughs of despond, what man is there that can claim to be child of thine whose pulse does not quicken, and heart leap up, at the thought % Who has not at the very bottom of his soul faith in thy future, in thy power to stand fast in this time of revolutions, which is upon and before thee and all nations, as thou hast stood through many a dark day of the Lord in the last thousand years ? But though the divisions of the country, and the names, remain the same, or nearly so, we must not forget the great superficial change which has taken place by the clearance of the forest tracts. These spread, a thousand years ago, over very large districts in all parts of England. In these forests the droves of swine, which formed a considerable portion of the wealth, and whose flesh furnished the staple food of the people, wandered, feeding on acorns and beech-mast. Here, too, the outlaws, who abounded in those unsettled times, found shelter and safety; and they were used alike by Saxon and Dane for ambush and stronghold. Christian monks, escaping from the sack of their abbeys and cathedrals, and carrying hardly-saved relics, fled to them, and often lived in them for years ; and heathen bands, beaten and hard pressed by Alfred or his aldermen, could often foil their pursuers, and lie hidden in their shade, until the Saxon soldiery had gone home to their harvest, or their sowing. The sudden blows which the Danes seem always to have been able to strike in the beginning of their campaigns were made possible by these great tracts of forest, through which they could steal without notice.

There were a few great trunk roads, such as Watling Street, which ran from London to Chester, and the Ickenild Way, through Berks, Wilts, and Somersetshire, and highways or tracks connecting villages and towns. These seem to have been numerous and populous; and in them and the monasteries, before Alfred's time, trades had begun to flourish. We even find that there must have been skilful jewellers and weavers in Wessex; witness the vessels in gold and silver-gilt, and silk dresses and hangings, which his father and he carried to Rome as presents to the Pope, and Alfred's jewel, found in 1693 in Newton Park, near Athelney, and now in the Ashmolean Museum. The lands immediately adjoining towns, monasteries, and the houses of aldermen and thegns were well culivated, and produced cereals in abundance, and orchards and vineyards seem to have been much cared for. The state of the country, however, is best summed up by Kemble : — " On the natural clearings of the forest, or on spots prepared by man for his own uses; in valleys bounded by gentle acclivities which poured down fertilizing streams ; or on plains which here and there rose clothed with verdure above surrounding marshes ; slowly, and step by step, the warlike colonists adopted the habits and developed the character of peaceful agriculturists. The towns which had been spared in the first rush of war gradually became deserted and slowly crumbled to the soil, beneath which their ruins are yet found from time to time, or upon which shapeless masses yet remain to mark the sites of a civilization whose bases were not laid deep enough. All over England there soon existed a network of communities, the principle of whose being was separation as regarded each other, the most intimate union as respected the individual members of each. Agricultural not commercial, dispersed not centralized, content within their own limits, and little given to wandering, they relinquished in a great degree the habits and feelings which had united them as military adventurers, and the spirit which had achieved the conquest of an empire was not satisfied with the care of maintaining inviolate a little peaceful plot, sufficient for the cultivation of a few simple households."

Bishop Wilfrid, a century before, had instructed the South Saxons in improved methods of fishing, and they were energetic hunters, so that their tables were well provided with lighter delicacies, though as a people they preferred heavy and strong meats and drinks. Their meals were frequent, at which the boiled and baked meats were handed round to the guests on spits, each helping himself as he had a mind. The heavy feeding was followed by heavy carousings of mead and ale; and, for rich people, wine, and " pigment," a drink made of wine, honey, and spices, and " morat," a drink of mulberry-juice and honey. Harpers and minstrels played and sang while the drinking went on, providing such intellectual food as our fathers cared to take, and jugglers and jesters were ready, with their tumblings of one kind or another, when the guests wearied of the performances of the higher artists.

Song-craft was at this time less cultivated in England, except by professors, than it had been a hundred years before. Then every guest was expected to take his turn, and it would seem to have been somewhat of a disgrace for a man not to be able to sing, or recite some old Teutonic ballad to music. Thus we find in the celebrated story of Csedmon, told in Bede's " Ecclesiastical History," that though he had come to full age he had never learnt any poetry, "and therefore at entertainments, when it had been deemed for the sake of mirth that all in turn should sing to the harp, he would rise for shame from the table when the harp approached him, and go out." The rest of the story is so characteristic of the times that we may well allow Bede to finish it in this place. " One time when he had done this, and left the house of the entertainment, he went to a neat stall of which he had charge for the night, and there set his limbs to rest, and fell asleep. Then a man stood by him in a dream and hailed him by name, and said, ' Csedmon, sing me something. 7 Then answered he, ' I cannot sing anything, and therefore I went out from the entertainment and came hither for that I could not sing.' But the man said, i However, thou canst sing to me.' Cgedmon asked then, ' What shall I sing? ' and the man answered, ' Sing me Creation.' When he had received this answer, then began he at once to sing in praise of God the Creator verses and words which he had never heard. This was the beginning : —

" ' Now let us praise

The keeper of heaven's kingdom,