Alfred the Great

Front matter

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■ V

I -A xO^.

Preface

THE justification for adding to the long list of biographies of King Alfred the Great lies in the abiding charm and permanent importance of the subject. No statesman of the past has a better claim to be included in a list of Heroes of the Nations. His life and work have been studied byscholars of many generations. But the subject is still unexhausted and recent years have made considerable additions to our knowledge of it. When, as in the case of the ninth century, contemporary sources are scanty, and of doubtful interpretation, it is specially needful to keep up with the advance, of historical and literary research. Modern scholars, notably Professor Liebermann, Mr. Plummer, and Mr. Stevenson, have illuminated many dark places, but it still remains to bring together the chief results of their labours, in a compact and coherent form. This is what I have attempted in the present work. At the same time it is based directly on such original authorities as are available for the period, and, in particular, on Alfred's own writings.

The principal authorities, contemporary and secondary, which I have most frequently used in writing this book, are indicated in the Bibliography.

vi Preface

To Professor Vinogradoff, Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence in the University of Oxford, to Mr. E. Thurlow Leeds, F.S.A., of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, to Miss Edith Wardale, Ph.D., of St. Hugh's College, Oxford, and to Professor Stenton, of University College, Reading, I offer my grateful thanks for personal help and suggestions. I desire, also, to thank the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, for their kind permission to reproduce from the MS. of Matthew Paris in their library the two drawings of King Alfred.

B. A. L.

Oxford, 1914.

Appendix

Inscriptions on the Monuments to King

Alfred at Athelney and Wantage . . 467

Bibliography ...... 469

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE ALFRED JEWEL IN THE ANGLO-SAXON ART COLLECTION OF THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM,

OXFORD .... Frontispiece ^

Found in 1693 at Newton Park, Somerset. Presented to the Bodleian Library in 171 8 by Thomas Pakner, of Fairfield, Somerset.

THE HORSED VIKINGS . . . . .12

(National Museum, Stockholm.) From Traill's Social England, Vol. I.

THE RING OF ALHSTAN ..... 34 In the Victoria and Albert Museum.

A VIKING SHIP FOUND AT GOKSTAD . . 52 '

From Traill's Social England, Vol. I.

THE STATUE OF ALFRED THE GREAT AT /

Photo, Reveley, Wantage.

By H. S. H. Count Gleichen, 1877.

THE ALFRED JUBILEE MEDAL OF 1 849 ^

OBVERSE AND REVERSE . . . . 92 »^

THE RING OF ETHELSWITH, KING ALFRED's

/ SISTER, WIFE OF BURHRED OF MERCIA . 92 ^

(British Museum.)

y

THE RING OF ETHELWULF (British Museum.) . 92

ix

Illustrations

A MAP OF SOUTHERN BRITAIN IN THE TIME ^

OF KING ALFRED . . . . . IIO ^^

From Plummer's Life and Times of Alfred the Great.

THE WHITE HORSE AT UFFINGTON . . . 120 "^

Photo, Reveley, Wantage.

THE ANGLO-SAXON EARTHWORKS AT WAREHAM I48

Reproduced by permission from "An Intrpduction to the Study of Local History and Antiquities " by John E. Morris and Humfrey Jordan, published by Messrs. George Routledge & Sons, London, and Messrs. E. P. Button & Co., New York.

A ST. EDMUND PENNY . . . . -154

From Keary's Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Coins in

the British Museum, Vol. I, Plate XVII. Memorial Coinage of St. Edmund struck in

East Anglia.

halfden's OR healfdene's coin . . .154

From Keary's Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Coins in the British Museum. Vol. II, Page xxxiv.

HEAD OF JOHANNES SCOTUS ERIGENA OVER THE DOOR OF HALL AT BRASENOSE COLLEGE, OXFORD ...... 154

From Wise's Asser, 1722.

Also figured in Sir John Spelman's ^Ifredi

Magni Vita, 1678, the Latin translation of

The Life of Alfred the Great.

THE ISLE OF ATHELNEY . . . . 162

From a drawing by Alfred A. Clarke in The Alfred Jewel, by Rev. John Earle.

Illustrations xi

FACING

PAGE

KING Alfred's fort, or boroughmump,

BOROUGHBRIDGE, NEAR ATHELNEY, SHOW- ING LINES OF FORTIFICATION . . . 170

Photo, Dawkes & Partridge.

THE WHITE HORSE ON BRATTON HILL, NEAR

WESTBURY, WILTS . . , . . I76

THE ANGLO-SAXON FONT AT ALLER, SOMERSET 1 78

From Snell's Memorials of Old Somerset.

MAP OF THE SUGGESTED WILTS AND SOMERSET

EDINGTON CAMPAIGNS . . . . I96

From the Saga Book of the Viking Club.

Alfred's tower, stourton .... 220

From CoUinson's Somerset, Vol. II, pp. 264-265. Built by Henry Hoare, about 1722, near the probable site of "Egbert's Stone."

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH, BRADFORD-ON-

AVON — (exterior) .... 232

anglo-saxon church, bradford-on-avon —

ANGEL IN THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH, BRADFORD- ON-AVON ...... 260

Photo, Wilkinson, Trowbridge.

GREENSTEAD CHURCH, ESSEX, AS IT WAS IN 1 748 278

From Traill's Social England, Vol. I. Attributed to nth century.

xii Illustrations

A PAGE OF THE CODEX AUREUS, WITH ANGLO- SAXON INSCRIPTIONS IN THE MARGIN . 298

From'Westwood's Facsimiles of Min. and Ornaments 0/ Anglo-Saxon and Irish MSS. Plate II.

THE WALLINGFORD SWORD SHOWING SYMBOLS

OF FOUR EVANGELISTS .... 3OO In the Anglo-Saxon Art Collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

THE ALFRED JEWEL IN THE ANGLO-SAXON ART COLLECTION OF THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, OXFORD ...... 304

THE ROACHSMITH " OUCHE " OR BROOCH. . 306

From ArchcBologia, Vol. XXIX, Plate X, p. 70.

THE MINSTER LOVEL JEWEL (fULL SIZE) . 306

In the Anglo-Saxon Art Collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

SPECIMENS OF IRISH AND ANGLO-SAXON METAL

From Notes and Examples of Late Anglo-Saxon Metal Work, by E. Thurlow Leeds, B.A., F.S.A.

By Courtesy of the Editor of The Annals of ArchcBology and Anthropology.

From Keary's Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Coins in the British Museum. Vol. II, Plate V, Nos. 3.8, II.

From Keary's Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Coins in the British Museum. Vol. II, Plate IV, Nos. 7, 8, 13.

Illustrations xiii

FACING

PAGE

A PAGE OF THE MS. OF THE " PARKER " ANGLO- SAXON CHRONICLE ..... 332

From MS. 173 in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

A PAGE OF THE MS. OF THE " PARKER " ANGLO- SAXON CHRONICLE ..... 334

From MS. 173 in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

a page from the " worcester " ms. of Alfred's "pastoral care" in the bodleian library, oxford . . . 344

From Skeat's Twelve Facsimiles of Old English Manuscripts.

A PAGE FROM THE OLDEST MS. OF KING ALFRED'S

By courtesy of the New Palasographical Society. Library of Lord ToUemache, Helmingham Hall,

Suffolk. Probably late 9th or early loth

century.

COINS. CNUT (gUTHRED) AND SIEFRED . . 368

From Keary's Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Coins in the British Museum. Vol. I, Plate XXV, No. 13.

From Keary's Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Coins in the British Museum.

Vol. II, Plate VI, Nos. i and 18. Plate V, No. 13.

THE STATUE OF ALFRED THE GREAT AT WIN- CHESTER ...... 414

By Hamo Thornycroft, R. A.

xiv Illustrations

THE ALFRED MEDAL OF I9OI. OBVERSE AND

From Bowker's Millenary of King Alfred.

THE HEAD OF ALFRED OVER THE DOOR OF THE

HALL OF BRASENOSE COLLEGE, OXFORD . 432

From Wise's Asser, 1722. Also figured in Spelman's ^Ifredi Magni Vita, 1678.

A THIRTEENTH-CENTURY PORTRAIT OF ALFRED 448

From MS. 26 in the Library of Corpus Christi

College, Cambridge.

Matthasi Paris Chronica Maioral, p. 129.

A THIRTEENTH-CENTURY PORTRAIT OF ALFRED 452

From MS. 16 in the Library of Corpus Christi

College, Cambridge.

Matthaei Paris Chronica Maiora II, preliminary

quire iii a.

A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY REPRESENTATION OF

THE STORY OF ALFRED AND THE CAKES . 456

From the Roxburghe Ballads, 1880.

IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF ALFRED . . . 458

From Hearne's Edition of Sir John Spelman's Life of Mlfred the Great, 1709; the first printed edition of the English MS. Drawn and engraved by Burghers.

IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF ALFRED . . . 460

From the Frontispiece in Wise's Asser, 1722. Engraved by Vertue.

THE ARMS OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD . 462

Illustrations xv

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BUST OF ALFRED THE

GREAT IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD 464

Photograph by permission.

Presented in 1771 by Jacob, Viscount Folkestone, in honour of the mythical founder of the College.

Alfred's monument at athelney . . 466

Photo, Dawkes & Partridge. genealogical table . . . . At End

Chapter I Europe Before Alfred The Great

" TN the year of our. Lord's Incarnation 849 light -■• rose out of darkness. Alfred, King of the English, was born in the royal 'vill' [villa regia] which is called Wanetinge [Wantage]."

To later historians, as to the early chronicler who wrote these words, King Alfred has appeared as a phenomenon to be wondered at rather than to be understood, a lonely light shining in the midst of an impenetrable darkness.

The ninth century, the time of the break-up of the Empire of Charles the Great, and of the systematic plunder-raids of the Northmen, is by common consent included among the "Dark Ages " of mediaeval history. Too near to the modem world for the dignity of the classic past, too far removed for the vivid interest of contemporary politics, it presents at first sight little but a drearyvista of civil wars and viking ravages in the realm of action, of childish credulity and gross superstition in the realm of thought. It falls between the heroic period of Chariemagne and the romantic era of the Crusades, before the great days of Empire and Papacy, of monasticism and feudalism, a barren waste of years, in which the figure of Alfred, the perfect king, stands out in brilliant relief against a shadowy background of barbaric ignorance and violence.

Yet when the shadows are faced they flee away, and the darkness grows luminous, a summer night full of vague promise and suggestion and the faint stirrings of life, haunted by memories of the day that is gone, and by dreams of the coming dawn.

The true significance of the Middle Ages lies, indeed, in the very fact of their "middleness." If they were the ancestors of a historic future, they were also the heirs of a "storied past," the inheritors of high traditions, Hellenic, Latin, and Hebraic. Behind them lay the philosophy and art of Greece, the law and imperial statecraft of Rome, the stem monotheism of the Jewish dispensation, with its fervour of militant faith, and its splendid oriental poetry and prophecy.

Mediasval Christendom was built up out of the ruins of older civilisations, and thinkers and writers borrowed their material from Grasco-Latin and Judaic antiquity as naturally as architects and sculptors used the columns and stones of pagan Rome in constructing Christian basilicas. Western learning and Eastern fancy, legend and myth, superstition and mystic devotion, the fascination of the unknown and the dread of the infinite, all went to the making of the subtle atmosphere of thought that softened the harshness of the rude practical activities of mediaeval life.

Nor were these classic and oriental forms the mere dry bones of a dead society. They came to the medieval world filled with living force, moulded and transfigured by Christian idealism. They gained power and meaning from that hope of a future life and that sense of the mystery of the imseen which, however dimly apprehended, served to lift the men and women of the Middle Ages above their material surroundings, to quicken their imagination, and to kindle their awe and wonder. The history of the past became symbolic of a spiritual future. It was a Christian Empire of which St. Augustine wrote, which Charles the Great tried to revive in visible form. St. Augustine's "City of God" was at once "golden Rome, head and glory of the world" {Roma caput mundi, mundi decus, aurea Roma), and "Jerusalem the Golden" {Urhs Sion Aurea), "the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven."

Only by realising the theocratic character of mediaeval society, and the strength of religious and ecclesiastical influences, can mediaeval history be understood. The Church was the true worldstate, the kingdom of God upon earth, a kingdom ruled by two powers, the "holy authority of the Popes" and the subordinate, but divinely instituted, authority of Monarchy. The common aims and sympathies of the Christian faith held together jarring tribes and races in some kind of pohtical unity, in the imperium. christianum, Christendom, the community of all Christian people.

Though the phrase "the Ages of Faith" has been used to invest the Middle Ages with an unreal glamour, there can be no doubt that mediaeval society was peculiarly alive to emotional and spiritual appeals, and the importance can hardly be overrated of that chain of events which brought the Western and Northern nations at a critical stage in their development under the sway of the complex religious system of Catholicism.

The marvellous organisation of the Catholic Church, with its two branches. Eastern and Westem, had gathered up into itself the accumulated wisdom of three great civilisations. Jewish and oriental in origin, it absorbed much of what survived of Greek philosophy, of Roman law and political theory, welded this heterogeneous material into a more or less coherent body of Christian theology, and, through the writings of the Fathers, made that theology the common property of the educated world.

This meant that the heathen tribesmen who derived their Christianity from Rome learnt their classical lessons in an ecclesiastical school, with ecclesiastical reservations and expansions, while the sacred books of the Old and New Testament came to them overlaid with a mass of allegorical interpretation which recalls early nineteenth-century methods of Scriptural exposition. But it meant also that they caught a faint reflection of the beauty of Greek thought and the glow of Eastern passion, and that they, the barbarian conquerors of Rome, received those ideas of political unity, of authority and disciplined order, which were among the best fruits of Roman Imperialism. Above all, Latin Christianity, by its very precision and formalism, gave definition to vague yearnings, and laid down clear rules of faith and conduct, a "way of righteousness." It taught the pagan world the virtues of self-control, of mercy and pity, and sacrifice for a cause, and brightened the routine of everyday life by the ceremonies of a stately ritual.

At the same time, the influence of Christianity, great as it was, must not be exaggerated. Behind and beneath the imposing fabric of Catholicism, the older beliefs lingered, as, indeed, they linger still. Christian observances were in many cases the mere setting for pagan rites; primitive superstitions were absorbed into orthodox Catholic doctrine, or sank into the magic and witchcraft which the Church persistently but ineffectually condemned. The northern races, moreover, had their own fine traditions of loyalty and courage, their own delicate artistic feeling, and a rich store of imaginative legend, myth, and folk-song. Christianity assimilated this native culture without destroying it, but not without vitally affecting its development. Arrested in its natural growth, it entered into combination with Christian elements, to form in course of time a new civilisation in the West, which should be neither barbarian nor Roman, neither heathen nor altogether Christian, but truly Catholic in its reconciliation of opposing forces.

A long period of experiment lay between the Empire of the Caesars and its mediaeval successor, the "Roman Empire of the German Nation," and both the dulness and the interest of the ninth century spring from the fact that it falls within this time of transition. It is dull because the men of the ninth century, bound by the spell of the past, did not yet dare to be themselves, and copied where they might have created. Their theories, borrowed from more advanced civilisations, were somewhat forced and artificial. Their ideals had but little bearing on the realities of their daily experience. They were inarticulate, too, unable fitly to express the thoughts that "quivered on their lips," and the difficulty of entering into their inner life is enhanced by the scantiness and poverty of the records they have left.

Yet this immaturity has a charm of its own, for it means infinite possibilities of growth and development. The ninth century, with all its crudity, is interesting for its promise of a great future, for its youthful extravagance and hopefulness, for its strange inconsistencies and eager ambitions, for its curious blending of idealism with materialism. More especially it is interesting for the strength of the theocratic and ecclesiastical factors in the organisation of society, and for the part which they played in secular politics, both in the West and in the East.

The great historian Von Ranke saw the distinguishing characteristics of the ninth century in the contrast between the two monotheistic theocracies, Christendom and Islam, and in their gradual victory over the declining forces of ancient heathendom. In the East, as in the West, a worldstate embodying a creed had arisen, and mediaeval Mohammedanism proved a formidable rival to mediaeval Christianity.

The ceaseless struggle between East and West became, in the Middle Ages, a holy war against the enemies of Christ and his Church, and political quarrels were fought out over ecclesiastical questions. The separation of the Western from the Eastern Empire was intimately connected with the separation of the Latin and Greek churches. Even travel and exploration assumed the religious aspect of pilgrimages to the Holy Land, or to Rome, the "queen of the world," the visible seat and centre of the authority of the Church of the West.

The world itself, to ninth-century eyes, might seem to be divided into Christendom and "Hethenesse." Within the Christian pale were the Empires of the East and West, both claiming to be the orthodox descendants and representatives of the Empire of Constantine the Great. The Eastern or Byzantine Emperors ruled from Constantinople, the "New Rome," over restricted but still extensive territories in Southern Italy and Sicily, in the Balkan Peninsula and the Peloponnesus, and in Asia Minor. Under the supremacy of the newly revived Western Empire were gathered the future kingdoms of France and Burgundy, of Germany and Italy, while England and Ireland, politically isolated, were yet members of the Christian community. Outside that community lay the realm of heathendom, the conquests of Islam, and the still unconquered fastnesses of more primitive beliefs.

Islam, like Christendom, had fallen into two divisions, differing in creed and in politics. The Emirate of Cordova encroached on the boundary of the Western Empire south of the Pyrenees. The Caliphate of Bagdad threatened the Byzantine frontier in Asia Minor and held Jerusalem and the holy places of Syria. Between the two, the Mediterranean Sea swarmed with Saracen pirates, Moslem adventurers and freebooters, who lived by the plunder of Christians.

Beyond the Christian and Mohammedan Empires, again, stretched a fringe of dim, mysterious barbarism, full, to the mediaeval imagination, of dreadful shapes and monstrous creations:

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders.

Fabulous India and "far Cathay," the wild Tartar savagery of the remote North-East, with the mist-enshrouded north-western lands of Slav and Scandinavian paganism, to ultima Thule, and the "sluggish waveless sea which men believe to be the girdle of the earth," contributed their marvels to the store of travellers' tales which gathered about the borders of the known world.

It was from the heathen North that, as the eighth century drew to a close, a new element entered into the political and social life of Western Europe with the beginning of the "Viking Age." When "the first ships of the Danish men" appeared off the coasts of England and Ireland, curiosity and astonishment mingled with the terror which they aroused. The West-Saxon "reeve" (gerefa) whose death at the hands of the Northern pirates the English Chronicle records "knew not what they were. ' ' A later version of the same story makes him take them for merchants. "Never," wrote Alcuin of the sacking of Lindisfame by the Northmen in 793, "could such a voyage have been thought possible." The Irish called the invaders Gain or strangers.

Some four generations later, when the "Viking Age" proper ended with the cession of Normandy to RoUo, the "pirate duke," the "strangers" had become a recognised and important branch of the western family of European nations. At the opening of the tenth century, kings and chiefs of Scandinavian race ruled over Russia and the lo Alfred the Truthteller

greater part of England; Scandinavian colonists lined the shores of the Irish Sea and occupied the islands of the eastern Atlantic from the Hebrides to the Faroes; Scandinavian explorers had passed the Straits of Gibraltar in the South, and had attacked Iceland and discovered Greenland in the far North- West.

If from one point of view the viking expeditions recall the pirate raids of the Saracens in the Mediterranean, from another they seem to be a continuation or revival of the tribal migrations of an earlier age. As in the fourth and fifth centuries the dwellers by the North Sea, Angles and Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, went forth to conquer and settle on the coast of Gaul and in the distant province of Roman Britain, so, more than three hundred years later, the warships of Danes and Goths, Norwegians and Swedes, sailed out from the Baltic lands to plunder the kingdoms of the West.

What is really remarkable about the expansion of the Scandinavian peoples in the eighth and ninth centuries is not so much the novelty of the movement as its magnitude, its extent, and its persistence. These Northern adventurers passed down the English Channel, and through the Straits of Gibraltar to the Mediterranean, or struck across the ocean to Scotland and the Western Isles, and so by the Irish Sea to St. George's Channel, or rounded the North Cape and explored the White Sea and the haunts of Finn and Lapp, or followed the "East-way," to Russia or "Gar-

Europe before Alfred ii

dariki," and on to " Micklegarth, " the "great city" of New Rome.

Scandinavia had, indeed, been the home of a seafaring race from the dawn of authentic history, "rich," as Tacitus noted, "in ships, in arms, and in men." The long Hne of broken, island-fringed coast, deeply indented with bays and fiords, the narrow straits and sounds, the dark pine-forests, vast lakes, and rugged, mountains of the interior, had nourished a vigorous population of stalwart dalesmen and hunters, fishermen, sailors, and traders, a stout-hearted, independent people, full of vitality, practical sagacity, and shrewd homely mother- wit. This was the material out of which the perils and hazards of a life of piracy fashioned a type as characteristic as the Elizabethan "seadog," the "sea-king" who "ruled over men, but had no lands," who "never slept beneath sooty roof -beams, and never drank at the ingle-nook." These early buccaneers, like their sixteenth-century descendants, looked westward for their El Dorado, and from their exploits, and the daring ventures and stirring incidents of their roving life, sprang both the "fighting faith " of the " Walhalla " mythology, as distinct from the primitive beliefs of the Germanic races, and the later literature of Eddas and Sagas.

It is partly to the heroic and romantic nature of the viking movement that the difficulty of accounting for it is due. Not only are trustworthy records scanty, but the few that remain have been distorted by terror, or transformed by poetic imagination: the terror that added a clause to the Litany: "From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord, deliver us"; the imagination which produced the viking cradle-song: "My mother said they should buy me a boat and fair oars. . . . And so wend to the haven, and cut down man after man"; or the triumphant death-chant of Ragnar Lodbrok in the serpent-pit: "We hewed with the brand ! I . . . have fought fifty pitched battles and one. . . . Laughing I will die."

With the contemporary English and Prankish chroniclers, the feeling of horror was uppermost. They saw in the incursions of the heathen pirates a judgment of God, a punishment for sin, a fulfilment of prophecy. The vikings were "the evil that was to break forth out of the North," foxes that destroyed the chosen vine, wolves that devoured the fold, waters that flooded the land. Above all, they were "heathen men," "Gentiles," "a pagan folk."

To the Scandinavian poets or saga-tellers, writing after the event, perhaps in the Western Isles, or in the new colony of Iceland, the element of romance was predominant. They emphasised the personal note, and made the early raids, like the later invasions, the work of individual heroes, such half-mythical war-leaders as Ragnar Lodbrok and Ivar the Boneless.

Modem historians, again, have sought to trace the resumption of western migration to economic

THE HORSED VIKINGS

(National Museum, Stockholm)

From Traill's Social Englana, Vol. I.

or political circimistances : — over-population, social unrest, the revolt of a spirited people against the growing restrictions of settled government.

Though there is truth in all these theories, and fate, desire, and necessity may each have had a share in bringing about the viking movement, its immediate cause, as Lappenberg suggested long ago, was probably the Saxon war of Charles the Great, which brought the Danes face to face with the Franks and revealed the riches of Christian civilisation to the Northern plunderers, while the break-up of the Western Empire under Charles the Great's unworthy successors gave them an opportunity of which they were not slow to take advantage. It is at least certain that the first clearly recorded viking raids on the coasts of England, Ireland, and Frisia coincide with that last quarter of the eighth century when the frontier of Christendom was being gradually pushed northwards, and the great King of the Franks was putting the crowning touches to the fabric of empire. In 810 the murder of Godfred, king of the Danes, the protector of the fugitive Saxon chief Widukind, alone prevented a serious war between Franks and Northmen. Charles the Great made peace with Godfred's successor, but the closing years of his life were darkened by fears for the future, and he gave anxious thought to the strengthening of the naval defences of the Empire.

The famous tale of the Emperor weeping for the troubles that were coming on his descendants, as he watched the viking pirate-ships in the Mediterranean, embodies a historic truth. Christian imperiaHsm was about to meet pagan tribaHsm in a desperate and prolonged struggle. The ninth century was to be a time of storm and stress which has been compared to the "Doom of the Gods" of Northern prophecy, "an age of axes, an age of swords ... an age of wolves." A new society would eventually emerge from this clash of conflicting forces, even as when the "Doom" had passed, a new earth rose out of the deep, but this was not to be till a century of war and piracy had made the "viking" or "wicing" — a word like "Saracen" of uncertain derivation, but of dread import — a name of terror throughout Western Christendom.

When, in 814, Charles, the " Great and Orthodox Emperor," was laid to rest in the cathedral at Aachen, the reign of Chaos seemed about to return. His son and successor, Louis the Pious, though accomplished and devout, was too weak a man for the heavy task imposed upon him. A pathetic figure, at odds with his own children and out of touch with the tendencies of the time, he drifted helplessly through a shifting scene of change and chance, of rebellion within and invasion from without. Northmen, Slavs, and Saracens beat against the boundaries of the Empire: discontented sons and ambitious vassals stirred up strife at home.

Yet the very dissensions and divisions of actual society served to emphasise the old ideals of peace and unity. It was one of the gravest charges against Louis the Pious that he had failed to carry on the work of his father, the Rex PaciUcus, and had brought shame and distress upon the Empire. Great principles of conduct and government rose like giant shapes out of the general welter and confusion, only to fall back again into darkness. Men clung to the dream of political and religious unity, as they clung to the memory of the golden days of Charles the Great.

The life of Charles had been a concrete manifestation of typical Christian kingship, all the more attractive and comprehensible for its barbaric setting. Henceforth the sovereigns of Western Europe would model themselves, consciously or unconsciously, after this pattern, and in so doing they would carry on a still older tradition. Charles the Great might well stand for the mediaeval conception of the "Happy Emperor" of his favourite book, St. Augustine's City of God, and that description of a Christian monarch, enforced by the authority of Roman jurists and of Fathers of the Church, and popularised by the legendary fame of "Charlemagne," became the ideal of all the best statesmen of the Middle Ages.

St. Augustine had taught that the happiness of the ruler lay in just rule, in the fear of God, and in the love of the heavenly kingdom. He had spiritualised the earthly Rome by linking it with the thought of the "City of God." Later political philosophers laid stress on the official character of the imperial and royal functions, on the duties and obligations that attended empire and kingship, and on the divine origin of those duties, and their intimate connection with the Church and the Catholic faith.

The continuity of ecclesiastical tradition explains the continuity of mediseval political theory. It explains also the growing power and influence of the Church, the representative of a consistent purpose and a definite moral standard in a world of capricious impulses and unrestrained license. Rome was still the symbol of law and order and civilisation for the nations of Western Christendom, but, by an insensible transition, republican and imperial Rome had given place to the city of St. Peter as the goal of their hopes and ambitions. The real strength of the Papacy lay in the spiritual nature of its claim to supremacy, which enabled it to rise superior to the accidents of fortune, even when Rome itself was convulsed by sedition. Leo III., the Pope from whom on Christmas Day, 800, Charles the Great had received the imperial crown, died in 816, discredited, and hated by the Romans, who had risen in rebellion against him. His four immediate successors had short and inglorious reigns, and not till Gregory IV. mounted the papal throne in 827 did the Church find its opportunity in the weakness and disruption of the Empire.