Part 2
This yearly invasion of the Danes lasted for twenty years. They always made straight for the nearest monasteries, which they sacked: there were not many towns in Saxon England; but there were some—Canterbury, London, Southampton, York—they attacked these, seized, plundered, and left them in ruins. For twenty years they came every year: sometimes we hear of a victory over them: but still they came again: there was never a victory so decisive as to keep them from returning in ever-increasing numbers. Then they began to stay in the country: they left off going home in the autumn: they established themselves in winter quarters, first on Sheppey Island, then on the Isle of Thanet: then in Norfolk. Then they went farther afield. In a word, they overran and conquered East Anglia: then the Kingdom of Northumbria: then that of Mercia: then the united Kingdoms of Wessex and Kent. It was at this crisis, when all the power of the Danes was brought to bear against Wessex and Kent, Alfred succeeded to the throne. His father and his four brothers, kings one after the other, had spent their lives in vainly beating back hordes of the Danes, who returned year after year. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes the best of occasional victories, but the fact remains that every year the invaders became stronger and the defenders became weaker. The King of Mercia at last gave up the struggle and went to Rome, to adopt the religious life, leaving his wife behind. Alfred might have done the same thing, and it would not have been imputed unto him for cowardice, but for godliness.
Happily for England he did not. The Danes had seized Chippenham, in Wiltshire, and made that place their stronghold and headquarters. From Chippenham they sent out their light troops, moving rapidly here and there, devastating and murdering. For nine long years, growing every year weaker, Alfred fought them: in one year he fought nine battles. At the end of that time he found himself deserted, save for a few faithful followers: his country prostrate: everything in the hands of the enemy: his cause lost, and apparently no loop-hole or glimmer of hope left of recovery. No darker or more gloomy time ever fell upon this country. Everywhere the churches and the monasteries were pillaged and destroyed. All those—bishops, priests, monks, and nuns—who could get away had fled, carrying with them such of their treasures as they could convey. The towns were in ruins: the farms were deserted: the people had lost hope and heart: they bowed their heads and entered into slavery: their religion was destroyed with the flight or the murder of their priests. Their arts, their learning, their civilisation, all that they had once possessed, were destroyed in those nine years’ warfare: destroyed and gone—it seemed for ever. And the king, with his wife and her sister, and his children, and the few who still remained with him, had taken refuge on a little hill rising out of a broad marsh, whither the enemy could not follow him.
In the after years Alfred was fond of talking over this time of desolation: he would recall the visions that came to him, and not only to him but to his wife as well: they both saw visions of consolation and of promise. Saint Cuthbert himself stood beside his bed and comforted him with promise of victory and honour. We can very well believe the vision. To Alfred: to his wife: the aid of the Saints was a thing to be invoked and to be looked for. Did they not pray daily for the help of the Saints? And who should aid the Saxons in their trouble but their greatest Saint—Cuthbert himself? In the sleep or the waking of night, what more natural than that Alfred should imagine that he saw and spoke with the Saint himself? To those who drive or walk across the dreary level of Sedgemoor, now drained by its deep dykes, and dotted with its village churches, there rises on the right hand the low hill of Athelney. One can realise, looking upon this hill across the flat land, which was once covered with bogs and quagmires, and reeds bending before the wind, how complete was the defeat of the king: how complete the victory of the Danes; which should drive Alfred to seek such a refuge. The Danish Conquest, like the Norman Conquest two hundred years later, seemed an achievement accomplished. No further opposition: no one asked what had become of Alfred—he had run away to Rome: he had gone into a monastery, perhaps: everywhere the Danes all over the country reported submission and the acceptance of their rule. And the old gods had come back again, Woden, and Thor, and Friga, and the rest: and again the fires flamed upon the high places, and the children were passed through them, and all the Christian saints had fled.
Alfred remained inactive during the whole long winter. It was the rule of the old Kriegs Spiel, the war game of that time, that the armies should not go forth to fight in winter. The men would have refused to go out in the cold season. In fact, they could not. The country was covered with uncleared forests: the roads in winter were deep tracks of mud: it was impossible for the men to sleep on the cold, wet ground. The delay suited Alfred: he wanted time to organise a rising in force: he sent messengers to the Somersetshire people, among whom, in winter quarters, were lying few or none of the Danish conquerors: he bade them make ready for the spring: he ordered those of the thanes who were still left to come to him at Athelney: and in May, when the spring arrived, Alfred appeared once more as one risen from the dead: once more he raised the Wessex standard of the Golden Dragon: once more the people, taking renewed courage, flocked together: as he marched along they joined him, the fugitives from the woods and those who had been made slaves in their own farms, and swelled his force.
What follows is like a dream. Or it is like the uprising of the French under Joan of Arc. There had been nine years of continuous defeat. The people had lost heart: they had apparently given in. Yet, on the reappearance of their king, they sprang to arms once more: they followed him with one consent, and on the first encounter with the Danes they inflicted upon them a defeat so crushing that they never rallied again. In one battle, on one field, the country was recovered. In a single fortnight after this battle the Danes were turned out of Wessex. Alfred had recovered the whole of his own country, and acquired in addition a large part of Mercia.
It is significant to read that the Danish chieftain became a Christian, and was baptized. Do you suppose that he weighed the arguments and listened to the history and the doctrines of the new religion? Not at all. He perceived—this logical pagan—that King Alfred’s Gods had shown their superiority over his own in a manner so unexpected, so amazing, and so decisive, that he hesitated no longer. He acknowledged that superiority; he was baptized, and he never afterwards relapsed.
Alfred had got back his kingdom. It remained for him to recover it in a fuller and a larger sense: to restore its former prosperity and its ancient strength.
He began by recognising the separate rights of the Mercians. He would not call himself King of Mercia. He placed his son-in-law Ethelred as Earl of Mercia, and because London was at that time considered a Mercian city, Ethelred took up his residence there as soon as the Danes had gone out. The condition of London was as desolate and as ruinous as that of the whole country. The walls were falling down: there was no trade: there were no ships in the river: no merchandise on the wharves: there were no people in the streets, save the Danish soldiers and the slaves who worked for them. Alfred restored the walls: rebuilt the gates: brought back trade and merchants: repaired the Bridge, and made London once more the most important city of his kingdom: its strongest defence: its most valuable possession. This was, in fact, the third foundation of London. If Alfred had failed to understand the importance of London—that great port, happily placed, not on the coast open to attack, but a long way up a tidal river, in the very heart of the country—a place easy of access from every part of the kingdom—a port convenient for every kind of trade, whether from the Baltic or the Mediterranean—the whole of the commercial history of England would have been changed, the island might have remained what it had been for centuries before the Roman Conquest, a place which exported iron, tin, skins, wool, and slaves, and imported for the most part weapons to kill each other with.
Alfred gave us London. The lesson of ten years’ fighting taught Alfred what the Saxons had never before understood, the value of walled cities in the case of invasion. He saw—he was the first to perceive—how superior numbers may be rendered of no avail when they fling themselves against strong walls. The next Danish invaders found themselves stopped on their way up the Thames by a city fortified by a strong wall which the enemy could neither knock down nor climb over: and manned by citizens made doubly courageous by the safety and the strength of their ramparts. Six separate sieges were endured by London during the second invasion of the Danes: six separate times the enemy had to raise the siege and to go elsewhere, leaving London unconquered. Other walled towns were added—Winchester, York, Exeter, and Canterbury—but the first was London, whose fallen Roman wall, of which only the hard core of cement remained, Alfred rebuilt and faced again with stone.
Alfred, I repeat, gave us London. This was a great service which he rendered to the safety of the country. But there was still a greater service. The Saxon had quite forgotten the seamanship in which he had formerly known no master and no equal. Alfred saw that for the sake of safety there must be a first line of defence before the coast could be reached. England could only be invaded in ships, and by those who had the command of the seas. Therefore, he created a navy: he built ships longer, heavier, swifter than those of the Danes, and he sent these ships out to meet the Danes on what they supposed to be their own element. They went out: they met the Danes: they defeated them: and before long the Saxons had afloat a fleet of a hundred ships to hold the mastery of the Channel. The history of the English navy is chequered: there have been periods when its pretensions were low and its achievements humble: but since the days of Alfred the conviction has never been lost that the safety of England lies in her command of the sea. Fortresses and walled cities are useful: it is a very great achievement to have given them to the country: London alone, restored by Alfred, was the nation’s stronghold, the nation’s treasure house, a city full of wealth, filled with valiant citizens, unconquered and defiant: that was a very great gift to the country: but it was a greater achievement still to have given to the country a fleet which was ready to meet the enemy before they had time to land, and to give them most excellent reasons why they should not land: to make the people understand that above all things, and before all, it was necessary for all time to keep the mastery of the seas.
Remember, therefore, that Alfred, thus, gave us the command of the seas.
As Rudyard Kipling, our patriot poet, says:
We have fed our seas for a thousand years, And she calls us, still unfed, Though there’s never a wave of all her waves But marks our English dead.
“Never a wave of all her waves”—and it was Alfred who first sent out the English blood to redden those waves in defence of hearth and home.
Now, there can be no doubt that if he had advanced upon the great defeat of the Danes he might have recovered the whole of the country and become not only its overlord, as his grandfather Egbert had been before him, but its king. No doubt he was tempted: to a successful commander more successes always lie before him waiting to be snatched. This dream of conquest he renounced. He sat down with what he had—the old kingdom of his forefathers, strengthened by his new fleet: by the stronghold of London: and by the restored courage and self-respect of his people. The dream of conquest was a dream of personal ambition: he put it aside. It was part of that renunciation of self which belongs to the whole of his career. The historian Green has pointed out that Alfred “is the only instance in the history of Christendom of a ruler who put aside every personal aim or ambition in order to devote himself wholly to the welfare of those whom he ruled.”
We have considered Alfred as a captain, a conqueror, and the founder of our navy. We will now consider him in the capacity of king, administrator, and law-giver.
I do not claim for Alfred that he was the creator of the English law. His glory consists mainly in his adaptation of the old order to the new: he took all that was left of the shattered past and moulded it anew, with additions to suit the new situation, and for the most part on the same lines. You will ask, perhaps, how much of the honour due to Alfred’s achievements should be given to his ministers and how much to himself? Assign to his officers all the credit possible, all that belongs to the faithful discharge of duty: still the initiative, the design of the whole of the past, is absolutely due to Alfred himself. He must not be considered as a modern king—the modern king reigns while the people rule: he was the king who ruled: his will ruled the land: he had his Parliament: his Meeting of the Wise: but his will ruled them: he appointed his earls or aldermen: his will ruled them: he had his bishops: his will ruled them. From the time when he began to address himself to the organisation of a strong nation—that is to say, from the time when the Dane was baptized, his will ruled supreme. No law existed then to limit the king’s prerogative. The king was imperator, commander of the army, and every man in the country was his soldier.
Among the monuments of his reign there stands out pre-eminent his code of laws. He did not, I say, originate or invent his code. He simply took the old code and rewrote it, with additions and alterations to suit the altered conditions of the time. He understood, in fact, the great truth, which law-makers hardly ever grasp, that successful institutions must be _the outcome of national character_. Now, the laws and customs of these nations—Saxons, Angles, and Jutes—were similar, but there were differences. They had grown with the people, and were the outcome of the national character. Alfred took over as the foundation of his work for Wessex the code compiled for the West Saxons by his ancestor, King Ina: for Mercia, that compiled by Offa, King of Mercia: for the Jutes, that compiled by Ethelbert, King of Kent. In his work two main principles guided the law-giver: first, that justice should be provided for every one, high and low, rich and poor: next, that the Christian religion should be recognised as containing the Law of God: which must be the basis of all laws. Both these principles were especially necessary to be observed at this time. The devastation of the long wars had caused justice to be neglected: and the destruction of the churches, and the murder or flight of the clergy, had caused the people to relapse into their old superstitions.
King Alfred then boldly began his code by reciting the Laws of God. His opening words were: “Thus saith the Lord, ‘I am the Lord thy God.’” That is his keynote. The laws of a people must conform with the Laws of God. If they are contrary to the spirit of these laws they cannot be righteous laws. In order that every one might himself compare his laws with the Laws of God, he prefaced his laws first by the Ten Commandments; after this he quoted at length certain chapters of the Mosaic Law. These chapters he followed by the short epistle in the Acts of the Apostles concerning what should be expected and demanded of Christians. Finally, Alfred adds the precept from St. Matthew, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.”
[Illustration: THE SEASONS—JANUARY TO MARCH
(_Cottonian Library_)]
Some writers have assumed that Alfred required of his subjects by this preamble that they should be governed in all the details of life by the Mosaic Law. This view I cannot accept. Alfred set forth, I think, these laws in order that his own might be compared with them where comparison was possible, and in order to challenge comparison and to give the greater weight to his own laws by showing that they were based in spirit and, _mutatis mutandis_, on the Levitical Law and on the Law of the Gospel.
Moreover, in order to connect the whole system of justice with religion, in order to teach the people in the most efficacious manner possible that the Church desires justice above all things, he added to the sentence of the judge the penance of the Church. This subjection of the law to the Church would seem intolerable to us. At that time it was necessary to make a rude, ignorant, and violent people understand that religion must be more than a creed: that it must have a practical and restraining side; a man who was made to understand that an offence against the law was an offence against the Church which would be punished by the latter as well as by the secular judge, was made for the first time to feel the reality of the Church.
This firm determination to link the Divine Law and the Human Law: this firm reliance on the Divine Law as the foundation of all law: is to me the most characteristic point in the whole of Alfred’s work. The view—the intention—the purpose of King Alfred are summed up, without intention, by the poet whom I have already quoted. The following words of Rudyard Kipling might be the very words of Alfred: they breathe his very spirit—they might be, I say, the very words spoken by Alfred:
Keep ye the law: be swift in all obedience— Clear the land of evil: drive the road and bridge the ford. Make ye sure to each his own That he reap where he hath sown: By the Peace among our Peoples let men know we serve the Lord!
Alfred endeavoured to rebuild the monasteries. He then made the discovery that the old passion for the monastic life was gone: he could get no one to go into them. Forty years of a life and death struggle had killed the desire for the cloister: the people had learned to love action better than seclusion—their ideal was now the soldier, not the monk. A great gain for the people, which never afterwards returned to its ancient love of the Rule and the Hood.
His chief design in rebuilding the monasteries was to restore the schools. The country had fallen so low in learning that there was hardly a single priest who could translate the Church Service into Saxon, or could understand the words he sang. Alfred sent abroad for scholars: he made his Religious House not only a place for the retreat of pious men and women, but also the home—the only possible home—of learning, and the seat of schools. It is long since we have regarded a monastery as a seat of learning, or the proper place for a school. Go back to Alfred’s time and consider what a monastery meant in a land still full of violence: in which morals had been lost: justice trampled down: learning destroyed: no schools or teachers left: the monastery stood as an example and a reminder of self-restraint: peace: and order: a life of industry and such works as the most ignorant must acknowledge to be good: where the poor and the sick were received and cared for: the young were taught: and the old sheltered. It was the Life which the monastery Rule professed; the aim rather than any lower standards accepted by the monks: which made a monastery in that age like a beacon steadily and brightly burning, so that the people had always before their eyes a reminder of the self-governed life. Most of us would be very unwilling to see the monastery again become a necessity of the national life: yet we must admit that in the ninth century Alfred had no more powerful weapon for the maintenance of a religious standard than the monastery.
In the cause of education, indeed, Alfred was before his age, and even before our age. He desired universal education. At his Court he provided instructors for his children and the children of the nobles. They learned to read and write, they studied their own language and its poetry: they learned Latin: and they learned what were called the “liberal sciences,” among them the art of music. But he thought also of the poorer class. “My desire,” he says, “is that all the freeborn youths of my people may persevere in learning until they can perfectly read the English Scriptures.” Unhappily he was unable to carry out this wish. Only in our own days has been at last attempted the dream of the Saxon King—the extension of education to the whole people.
One more aspect of Alfred’s foresight. He endeavoured to remove the separation of his island from the rest of the world: he connected his people with the civilisation of Western Europe by encouraging scholars and men of learning, workers in gold, and craftsmen of all kinds, to come over: he created commercial relations with foreign countries: a merchant who made three voyages to the Mediterranean he ennobled: he sent an embassy every year to Rome: he sent an embassy as far as India: he brought to bear upon the somewhat sluggish minds of his people the imagination and the curiosity which would hereafter engender a spirit of enterprise to which no other nation can offer a parallel.
It was partly with this view that he strongly enforced the connection with Rome. One bond of union the nations of the West should have—a common Faith: and that defined and interpreted for them by the same authority. Had it not been for that central authority the nations would have been divided, rather than drawn towards each other, by a Christianity split up into at least as many sects as there were languages. Imagine the evil, in an ignorant time, of fifty nations, each swearing by its own creed, and every creed different. From this danger Alfred kept his country free.