chapter 7._

ENGLAND: A. D. 836. Accession of the West Saxon king Ethelwulf.

ENGLAND: A. D. 855-880. Conquests and settlements of the Danes. The heroic struggle of Alfred the Great. The "Peace of Wedmore" and the "Danelaw." King Alfred's character and reign.

"The Danish invasions of England ... fall naturally into three periods, each of which finds its parallel in the course of the English Conquest of Britain. ... We first find a period in which the object of the invaders seems to be simple plunder. They land, they harry the country, they fight, if need be, to secure their booty, but whether defeated or victorious, they equally return to their ships, and sail away with what they have gathered. This period includes the time from the first recorded invasion [A. D. 787] till the latter half of the ninth century. Next comes a time in which the object of the Northmen is clearly no longer mere plunder, but settlement. ... In the reign of Æthelwulf the son of Ecgberht it is recorded that the heathen men wintered for the first time in the Isle of Sheppey [A. D. 855]. This marks the transition from the first to the second period of their invasions. ... It was not however till about eleven years from this time that the settlement actually began. Meanwhile the sceptre of the West-Saxons passed from one hand to another. ... Four sons of Æthelwulf reigned in succession, and the reigns of the first three among them [Ethelbald, A. D. 858, Ethelberht, 860, Ethelred, 866] make up together only thirteen years. In the reign of the third of these princes, Æthelred I., the second period of the invasions fairly begins. Five years were spent by the Northmen in ravaging and conquering the tributary Kingdoms. Northumberland, still disputed between rival Kings, fell an easy prey [867-869], and one or two puppet princes did not scruple to receive a tributary crown at the hands of the heathen invaders. They next entered Mercia [868], they seized Nottingham, and the West-Saxon King hastening to the relief of his vassals, was unable to dislodge them from that stronghold. East Anglia was completely conquered [866-870] and its King Eadmund died a martyr. At last the full storm of invasion burst upon Wessex itself [871]. King Æthelred, the first of a long line of West-Saxon hero-Kings, supported by his greater brother Ælfred [Alfred the Great] met the invaders in battle after battle with varied success. He died and Ælfred succeeded, in the thick of the struggle. In this year [871], the last of Æthelred and the first of Ælfred, nine pitched battles, besides smaller engagements, were fought with the heathens on West-Saxon ground. At last peace was made; the Northmen retreated to London, within the Mercian frontier; Wessex was for the moment delivered, but the supremacy won by Ecgberht was lost. For a few years Wessex was subjected to nothing more than temporary incursions, but Northumberland and part of Mercia were systematically occupied by the Northmen, and the land was divided among them. ... At last the Northmen, now settled in a large part of the island, made a second attempt to add Wessex itself to their possessions [878]. For a moment the land seemed conquered; Ælfred himself lay hid in the marshes of Somersetshire; men might well deem that the Empire of Ecgberht and the Kingdom of Cerdic itself, had vanished for ever. But the strong heart of the most renowned of Englishmen, the saint, the scholar, the hero, and the lawgiver, carried his people safely through this most terrible of dangers. Within the same year the Dragon of Wessex was again victorious [at the battle of Ethandun, or Edington], and the Northmen were driven to conclude a peace which Englishmen, fifty years sooner, would have deemed the lowest depth of degradation, but which might now be fairly looked upon as honourable and even as triumphant. By the terms of the Peace of Wedmore the Northmen were to evacuate Wessex and the part of Mercia south-west of Watling-Street; they, or at least their chiefs, were to submit to baptism, and they were to receive the whole land beyond Watling-Street as vassals of the West-Saxon King. ... The exact boundary started from the Thames, along the Lea to its source, then right to Bedford and along the Ouse till it meets Watling-Street, then along Watling-Street to the Welsh border. See Ælfred and Guthrum's Peace,' Thorpe's 'Laws and Institutes,' i. 152. This frontier gives London to the English; but it seems that Ælfred did not obtain full possession of London till 886." {786} The territory thus conceded to the Danes, which included all northeastern England from the Thames to the Tyne, was thenceforth known by the name of the Danelagh or Danelaw, signifying the country subject to the law of the Danes. The Peace of Wedmore ended the second period of the Danish invasions. The third period, which was not opened until a full century later, embraced the actual conquest of the whole of England by a Danish king and its temporary annexation to the dominions of the Danish crown.

_E. A. Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest of England, chapter 2, with foot-note._

"Now that peace was restored, and the Danes driven out of his domains, it remained to be seen whether Alfred was as good a ruler as he was a soldier. ... What did he see? The towns, even London itself, pillaged, ruined, or burnt down; the monasteries destroyed; the people wild and lawless; ignorance, roughness, insecurity everywhere. It is almost incredible with what a brave heart he set himself to repair all this; how his great and noble aims were still before him; how hard he strove, and how much he achieved. First of all he seems to have sought for helpers. Like most clever men, he was good at reading characters. He soon saw who would be true, brave, wise friends, and he collected these around him. Some of them he fetched from over the sea, from France and Germany; our friend Asser from Wales, or, as he calls his country, 'Western Britain,' while England, he calls 'Saxony.' He says he first saw Alfred 'in a royal vill, which is called Dene' in Sussex. 'He received me with kindness, and asked me eagerly to devote myself to his service, and become his friend; to leave everything which I possessed on the left or western bank of the Severn, and promised that he would give more than an equivalent for it in his own dominions. I replied that I could not rashly and incautiously promise such things; for it seemed to be unjust that I should leave those sacred places in which I had been bred, educated, crowned, and ordained for the sake of any earthly honour and power, unless upon compulsion. Upon this he said, "If you cannot accede to this, at least let me have your service in part; spend six months of the year with me here, and the other six months in Britain."' And to this after a time Asser consented. What were the principal things he turned his mind to after providing for the defence of his kingdom, and collecting his friends and counsellors about him? Law--justice--religion--education. He collected and studied the old laws of his nation; what he thought good he kept, what he disapproved he left out. He added others, especially the ten commandments and some other parts of the law of Moses. Then he laid them all before his Witan, or wise men, and with their approval published them. ... The state of justice in England was dreadful at this time. ... Alfred's way of curing this was by inquiring into all cases, as far as he possibly could, himself; and Asser says he did this 'especially for the sake of the poor, to whose interest, day and night, he ever was wonderfully attentive; for in the whole kingdom the poor, besides him, had few or no protectors.' ... When he found that the judges had made mistakes through ignorance, he rebuked them, and told them they must either grow wiser or give up their posts; and soon the old earls and other judges, who had been unlearned from their cradles, began to study diligently. ... For reviving and spreading religion among his people he used the best means that he knew of; that is, he founded new monasteries and restored old ones, and did his utmost to get good bishops and clergymen. For his own part, he strove to practise in all ways what he taught to others. ... Education was in a still worse condition than everything else. ... All the schools had been broken up. Alfred says that when he began to reign there were very few clergymen south of the Humber who could even understand the Prayer-book. (That was still in Latin, as the Roman missionaries had brought it.) And south of the Thames he could not remember one. His first care was to get better-educated clergy and bishops. And next to get the laymen taught also. ... He founded monasteries and schools, and restored the old ones which had been ruined. He had a school in his court for his own children and the children of his nobles. But at the very outset a most serious difficulty confronted Alfred. Where was he to get books? At this time, as far as we can judge, there can only have been one, or at most two books in the English language--the long poem of Cædmon about the creation of the world, &c., and the poem of Beowulf about warriors and fiery dragons. There were many English ballads and songs, but whether these were written down I do not know. There was no book of history, not even English history; no book of geography, no religious books, no philosophy. Bede, who had written so many books, had written them all in Latin. ... So when they had a time of 'stillness' the king and his learned friends set to work and translated books into English; and Alfred, who was as modest and candid as he was wise, put into the preface of one of his translations that he hoped, if anyone knew Latin better than he did, that he would not blame him, for he could but do according to his ability. ... Beside all this, he had a great many other occupations. Asser, who often lived with him for months at a time, gives us an account of his busy life. Notwithstanding his infirmities and other hindrances, 'he continued to carry on the government, and to exercise hunting in all its branches; to teach his workers in gold and artificers of all kinds, his falconers, hawkers, and dog-keepers; to build houses, majestic and good, beyond all the precedents of his ancestors, by his new mechanical inventions; to recite the Saxon books (Asser, being a Welshman, always calls the English, Saxon), and especially to learn by heart the Saxon poems, and to make others learn them; he never desisted from studying most diligently to the best of his ability; he attended the mass and other daily services of religion; he was frequent in psalm-singing and prayer; ... he bestowed alms and largesses on both natives and foreigners of all countries; he was affable and pleasant to all, and curiously eager to investigate things unknown.'"

_M. J. Guest, Lectures on the History of England, lecture 9._

"It is no easy task for anyone who has been studying his [Alfred's] life and works to set reasonable bounds to their reverence, and enthusiasm, for the man. Lest the reader should think my estimate tainted with the proverbial weakness of biographers for their heroes; let them turn to the words in which the earliest, and the last of the English historians of that time, sum up the character of Alfred. {787} Florence of Worcester, writing in the century after his death, speaks of him as 'that famous, warlike, victorious king; the zealous protector of widows, scholars, orphans and the poor; skilled in the Saxon poets; affable and liberal to all; endowed with prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance; most patient under the infirmity which he daily suffered; a most stern inquisitor in executing justice; vigilant and devoted in the service of God.' Mr. Freeman, in his 'History of the Norman Conquest,' has laid down the portrait in bold and lasting colours, in a passage as truthful as it is eloquent, which those who are familiar with it will be glad to meet again, while those who do not know it will be grateful to me for substituting for any poor words of my own. 'Alfred, the unwilling author of these great changes, is the most perfect character in history. He is a singular instance of a prince who has become a hero of romance, who, as such, has had countless imaginary exploits attributed to him, but to whose character romance has done no more than justice, and who appears in exactly the same light in history and in fable. No other man on record has ever so thoroughly united all the virtues both of the ruler and of the private man. In no other man on record were so many virtues disfigured by so little alloy. A saint without superstition, a scholar without ostentation, a warrior all whose wars were fought in the defence of his country, a conqueror whose laurels were never stained by cruelty, a prince never cast down by adversity, never lifted up to insolence in the day of triumph--there is no other name in history to compare with his. Saint Lewis comes nearest to him in the union of a more than monastic piety with the highest civil, military, and domestic virtues. Both of them stand forth in honourable contrast to the abject superstition of some other royal saints, who were so selfishly engaged in the care of their own souls that they refused either to raise up heirs for their throne, or to strike a blow on behalf of their people. But even in Saint Lewis we see a disposition to forsake an immediate sphere of duty for the sake of distant and unprofitable, however pious and glorious, undertakings. The true duties of the King of the French clearly lay in France, and not in Egypt or Tunis. No such charge lies at the door of the great King of the West Saxons. With an inquiring spirit which took in the whole world, for purposes alike of scientific inquiry and of Christian benevolence, Alfred never forgot that his first duty was to his own people. He forestalled our own age in sending expeditions to explore the Northern Ocean, and in sending alms to the distant Churches of India; but he neither forsook his crown, like some of his predecessors, nor neglected his duties, like some of his successors. The virtue of Alfred, like the virtue of Washington, consisted in no marvellous displays of super-human genius, but in the simple, straightforward discharge of the duty of the moment. But Washington, soldier, statesman, and patriot, like Alfred, has no claim to Alfred's further characters of saint and scholar. William the Silent, too, has nothing to set against Alfred's literary merits; and in his career, glorious as it is, there is an element of intrigue and chicanery utterly alien to the noble simplicity of both Alfred and Washington. The same union of zeal for religion and learning with the highest gifts of the warrior and the statesman is found, on a wider field of action, in Charles the Great. But even Charles cannot aspire to the pure glory of Alfred. Amidst all the splendour of conquest and legislation, we cannot be blind to an alloy of personal ambition, of personal vice, to occasional unjust aggressions and occasional acts of cruelty. Among our own later princes, the great Edward alone can bear for a moment the comparison with his glorious ancestor. And, when tried by such a standard, even the great Edward fails. Even in him we do not see the same wonderful union of gifts and virtues which so seldom meet together; we cannot acquit Edward of occasional acts of violence, of occasional recklessness as to means; we cannot attribute to him the pure, simple, almost childlike disinterestedness which marks the character of Alfred.' Let Wordsworth, on behalf of the poets of England, complete the picture:

'Behold a pupil of the monkish gown, The pious Alfred, king to justice dear! Lord of the harp and liberating spear; Mirror of princes! Indigent renown Might range the starry ether for a crown Equal to his deserts, who, like the year, Pours forth his bounty, like the day doth cheer, And awes like night, with mercy-tempered frown. Ease from this noble miser of his time No moment steals; pain narrows not his cares-- Though small his kingdom as a spark or gem, Of Alfred boasts remote Jerusalem, And Christian India, through her widespread clime, In sacred converse gifts with Alfred shares.'"

_Thomas Hughes, Alfred the Great,