Part 4

The crisis was indeed the gravest to which our country has ever been exposed. The Danish host was now a large and disciplined army bent on conquering and settling new lands, and already masters of the island from the Severn to the Tees. They were the fiercest and rudest of the tribes which had broken into Europe; Heathens, full of hatred and scorn for the religion, culture, arts, and civilisation of Christendom. With a real genius for war, both by sea and land, fired with the thirst of glory and adventure, they were better armed, more mobile, more martially organised than Saxon, Angle, or Jute. Short of a miracle their ultimate triumph over the whole island seemed certain. Had it been achieved, the civilisation of England would have been retarded for ages. Christianity, learning, arts, and legislation, which had progressed for two centuries, would have been stamped out, and our island would have been the seat of a barbarous and heathen horde. From the nature of their island conquest and their own mastery of the seas, they could not have been absorbed in Christendom so rapidly as were the Normans of France, or the Danubian tribes of Germany. They might have resisted for centuries both conversion and conquest from Europe. Nay more, from the supreme opportunities afforded by our island and all its resources as a basis for an imperial race, it is too probable that the heathen Danes, once firmly seated in the whole of Britain, might have proved the lasting scourge of Europe itself. From this tremendous peril, England and Europe were saved by the genius of our Saxon hero.

In the Easter of that year, 878, the _Chronicle_ relates, “Alfred, with a little band, wrought a fortress at Athelney, and from that work warred on the army, with that portion of the men of Somerset that was nearest.” Athelney was a bit of firm ground in the morasses formed by the Parret and the Tone in Somersetshire. There, for a few months, the king organised a new army, drawn from Somerset and Wilts and such Hants men as were left. In May he suddenly dashed out of the wood of Selwood: “his Wessex men were rejoiced to see him”: he fought a great fight against the whole “army” at Ethandune, near Westbury, put them to flight and drove them to their camp, where, after fourteen days of siege, he forced the Danes to surrender. It was a crushing victory—the turning-point in the life of Alfred—in the life of England.

The importance of it was this. A part of the beaten host sailed away over seas. But the rest, under their king, Guthrum, agreed to accept Christian baptism, to withdraw out of Wessex and the western half of Mercia, and to settle peaceably in East Anglia, north of Thames. Guthrum, with thirty of his chiefs, came to Alfred’s stronghold, received at his baptism the Saxon name of Athelstan from his victor and god-father, remained twelve days with the king and gave large presents. By the Peace of Wedmore, 878, Wessex and West England were saved, and the ultimate incorporation of the Danes with Christendom was secured. At first sight and in strict form, Alfred had surrendered Eastern England to the conqueror. The Treaty was not honestly observed by the Danes, and Guthrum and his warriors again became enemies. But the core of England was saved; the amalgamation of Dane and Saxon was founded in principle and in distant effect. And the Peace of Wedmore was a stroke of genius more daring and more far-reaching in result than the splendid victory of Ethandune by which it had been won.

Leaving the Danes for the present undisturbed in all Eastern England between Thames and Tees, Alfred occupied himself with restoring his shattered and desolated Kingdom of Wessex. His treasury was empty, the towns were in ruins, and civil government paralysed. He built forts, abbeys, and schools; repeopled and stocked waste districts; and set to work to establish something like a standing military force to meet the regular “army” of Danes. Hitherto Alfred had commanded loose levies of half-armed men, who by custom disbanded after two months’ service. This had enabled small but organised bands of Danes to overrun England, and to win practical successes even when beaten by numbers in the fields. Alfred, like William of Normandy in the eleventh, like Cromwell in the seventeenth century, saw, even so early as the ninth century, that victory belonged not to numbers but to regular armies. He organised what was at least a permanent local militia, with definite quotas of levies and an alternate system of reserves, besides the garrisons of fortified places. He rebuilt the broken fortresses, exercised his men in entrenchments, and adapted from the Danes their military arts.

But his eye of genius foresaw that the country was not safe whilst the invaders had command of the seas. Thus he organised a fleet, and assessed the ports and maritime districts to support it. He himself ultimately designed a class of ship, longer and swifter than those in use, though at first he had to man his navy with mercenary Frisians and sea-rovers. Towards the close of his reign, and in that of his son and grandson, a genuine English navy asserted its command of the Channel, which two centuries later his feeble successors lost again.

He then turned to reorganise the system of justice, making the judges the direct ministers of the sovereign, personally responsible to him, and subject in certain cases to his final appeal. His biographer tells us that he keenly revised unjust judgments, and tradition exaggerated this into a preposterous legend. He caused a collection of the old laws to be compiled—carefully resisting any general new legislation, or the fusion of the Wessex, Mercian, and Kentish customs into a symmetrical code. His laws were a compilation, with selection of what was approved best, and rejection of what was condemned as obsolete or mischievous. In the spirit of conservative amendment which marks his whole career, he is careful to tell us that he “durst not venture to set down much of his own.” He was content with partial revision and excision, under the advice of his Witan.

The combination in a code of Saxon, Anglian, and Kentish “dooms” gave a certain stimulus towards national union in a larger aggregate. But a much more powerful cause unexpectedly emerged out of the Danish invasions. By these savage shocks the royal houses that had ruled in Mercia, in East Anglia, in Northumbria, were not only overthrown, but were extinct. Alfred remained the one victorious king of the race of Cerdic, the legitimate sovereign of Wessex and Kent, the natural source of kingly authority wherever Danes were not in possession of rule. Having won back the western half of Mercia by the Peace of Wedmore, Alfred became its king by silent consent of its Anglian people. He did not fuse West Mercia with Wessex; he was not formally installed or crowned. He made Ethelred, the husband of his daughter Ethelfleda, alderman, and himself exercised the functions of king, with a separate Mercian administration and Witan. By this wise and tentative system of dual monarchy, Alfred was firmly seated the undisputed sovereign of Southern England from the mouth of the Thames to the Exe, ruling by his son-in-law all Central England west of Watling Street from the Severn to the Ribble. He thus became, but a few years after his romantic sortie from Athelney, the most powerful ruler holding the widest single realm within our island. This effected a practical supremacy over the main part of England proper, except for the Danes in the east. And he thus made it possible that there should be a true English kingdom, of which his son Edward, and his grandson Athelstan, were formally recognised as sovereigns.

More than once after the settlement effected at Wedmore and the years of peace it brought, Alfred had to meet formidable enemies both by sea and land. But fierce as these campaigns were, they did not imply such incessant warfare, such desperate crises, as had made the first ten years of his early manhood one long battle for life and home. Alfred was now at least as well able to defend his country from the Scandinavian invaders as were the rulers of France and Germany, on whom the storm burst whenever the Northmen had been checked in England.

Six years after the Peace of Wedmore Alfred had to meet again a force of Danes which had pushed up the Thames, and to chastise the East Anglians who had violated the Treaty by a fresh outbreak. A new treaty with Guthrum gave Alfred possession of London and adjacent parts of Middlesex, which were finally rescued from the Danes, and annexed to English Mercia under its alderman, Ethelred, Alfred’s son-in-law. Again, in the twenty-third year of Alfred’s reign a new body of Vikings from Norway descended on to Wessex and were joined by a second rising of the Anglian Danes. For more than two years the war was continued over a large part of England—from the Thames and its affluents across to the Severn; from Exeter northwards to Chester. By a series of vigorous and skilful campaigns, in concerted strategy of armies and fleets, the king, his son and his son-in-law, defeated this formidable combination, captured the entire Danish fleet, overawed the Britons of Wales and Cornwall, forced the East Anglian Danes to keep within their own reserves, and drove the northern freebooters across the Channel. Once again, in the last years of his reign, Alfred had to meet a new invasion of pirates at sea, who were defeated in a series of fierce and bloody encounters. These are the last recorded campaigns of the king, who from his boyhood, for nearly thirty years, had been continually in arms; but, by obstinate wars and sagacious policy, he had tamed the savage Norsemen, and at length transmitted to his descendants a kingdom doubled and trebled in extent and greatly increased in culture and strength.

England had been rescued from barbarism by the heroism of Alfred and his aptitude for war. But it is his genius as a creative statesman which left permanent effects on the history of England and made him one of the principal founders of the greatness of our country. His conversion and settlement of Guthrum’s Danes in East Anglia, his generous forbearance and his repeated treaties with them in spite of their faithless conduct, led to the ultimate amalgamation of Dane, Angle, and Saxon, which created the compound English race. A less sagacious victor would have sought to clear his country of Norsemen, and would undoubtedly have been overwhelmed by successive invasions himself. Alfred’s whole career shows a conscious purpose to break with the tribal and local isolation of the West Saxon, to attach Wessex with Mercia, to civilise Dane and Briton, and to bring England into closer union with the religious and political system of Europe.

Alfred’s restoration of London was the stroke of a true statesman. The city had been stormed by the Norsemen in 851, and since then had been desolate and almost deserted, save when occupied by the Danes as winter-quarters, as it was in 872. Within the Danish power it remained until 886, the year of Alfred’s second treaty with Guthrum. By that it was ceded to him with the adjacent part of Middlesex. The king rebuilt its walls and repeopled it, and added it to Mercia, from which it was not again separated. The military and political genius of Alfred and his long experience of war with the Danes had seized on the immense importance of a restored London, carved out of Danish East Anglia, with power to block all incursions up the Thames and its various tributary rivers. The restoration of London by the King of Wessex was thus an epoch in the history, not only of the city itself, but of the country of which it was destined by nature to be the capital.

Alfred had been at this date fifteen years on the throne, and the whole aspect of affairs was changed. When he began to reign heathen barbarians were masters of the Eastern, Central, and Northern parts of England, and threatened to break up Wessex. They swept round all coasts, and pushed up the rivers, plundering, burning, raiding, and slaughtering. Now, they were shut up in East Anglia, outwardly christianised, bound by formal treaties of peace, confronted at sea by strong fleets, and gradually submitting to the moral force of superior civilisation. As Goths and Franks were overawed by the Roman empire they conquered, so Vikings and Danes gradually recognised the higher organisation of Wessex. Alfred at last ruled over a compact realm stretching from the Channel up to the Ribble, with fortresses in such places as Rochester, London, Exeter, and Chester. Lastly, in a rebuilt London, he was master of the Thames, with a powerful base on the Danish side of the great river.

As Alfred, we are told, was at Rome in his sixth year, and had subsequently been with his father at the Court of Charles the Bald, whose daughter Judith became the boy’s step-mother, the young king must have been impressed by his memories of foreign lands. His yearly embassies with offerings to the Pope, and the restoration of the Saxon College at Rome, bear witness to his close relations with the See. He married his own daughter, Elfrida, to Baldwin II., Count of Flanders, son of the same Judith, and ancestor of Matilda, wife of the Conqueror. This brought about a connection between England and Flanders, both so much threatened by Northmen invaders.

With the Britons of Cornwall and Wales Alfred’s policy showed the same moderation, sagacity, and practical skill. They were not dangerous unless united and in active combination with Danes. By the creation of English Mercia, he effectively cut them off from East Anglia; and his whole policy was directed to detach them by separate tribes and to win them into peaceful union with his own people. He had to fight them in groups from time to time, but he never attempted to conquer or annex them in the mass. And after the failure of the house of Roderick, of North Wales, Alfred secured a recognised supremacy over both North and South Welsh. His wise, firm, and victorious government impressed the smaller and more backward tribes on all sides; so that, without demanding any formal subjection, his paramount authority was recognised over the island, whilst his sphere of influence was extended to Northumbrians and Scots. The defence and reorganisation of Wessex had founded a sentiment of national unity, which was ultimately to be consolidated in a formal kingdom of all England. He made Wessex an organic, civilised, and progressive kingdom, and created it as the type which England was to follow.

It was the same idea of bringing England into the European world which suggested Alfred’s very remarkable series of distant voyages and missions. The characteristic account of the discoveries of Ohthere and Wulfstan round the North Cape and in the Baltic, which Alfred inserts into his translation of _Orosius_, testifies to the king’s strong interest in the geography and ethnography of Europe. The expedition which he despatched to India, it is said, in 883, to the shrines of St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew, in accordance with his vow when he recovered London from the Danes, was a really extraordinary feat for that age; and, though some of the MSS. read _Judea_ for _India_, it is thought that the mission was really sent to Christian churches then known to exist in India. Asser relates that the king received letters and presents from the patriarch of Jerusalem; a tale which the later writers considerably embellish. A deep impression was left by Alfred’s zeal to extend his foreign relations with distant lands.

His policy of calling in men of learning, teachers, ecclesiastics, and seamen from countries outside his own, is more fully recorded. Asser, the learned and excellent monk of St. David’s, was brought out of Wales and pressed into the service of the king, whose friend, counsellor, and biographer he became. Plegmund was brought out of Mercia and made Archbishop of Canterbury; another Mercian, Werfrith, Bishop of Worcester, was the constant adviser of the king, both in literary and in state affairs. Grimbald was brought from the monastery of St. Omer; and John, of Saxony, from the monastery of Corbey. With these came learned monks to organise the new abbeys and schools which Alfred founded. He encouraged foreign traders, and summoned artists and craftsmen from the Continent to direct his buildings and arts. Until his Saxons had learned seamanship, he engaged Frisians to man his ships, and took into his service adventurous Vikings such as Ohthere and Wulfstan.

Alfred has left us his own conception of what a king should be: and no preacher or moralist has ever drawn the portrait in grander lines:—

Power is never a good, unless he be good that has it; so it is the good of the man, not of the power. If power be goodness, therefore is it that no man by his dominion can come to the virtues, and to merit; but by his virtues and merit he comes to dominion and power. Thus no man is better for his power; but if he be good, it is from his virtues that he is good. From his virtues he becomes worthy of power, if he be worthy of it.... By wisdom you may come to power, though you should not desire the power. You need not be solicitous about power, nor strive after it. If you be wise and good, it will follow you, though you should not wish it.

Ah! Wise One, thou knowest that greed and the possession of this earthly power never were pleasing to me, nor did I ever greatly desire this earthly kingdom—save that I desired tools and materials to do the work that it was commanded me to do. This was that I might guide and wield wisely the authority committed to me. Why! thou knowest that no man may understand any craft or wield any power, unless he have tools and materials. Every craft has its proper tools. But the tools that a king needs to rule are these: to have his land fully peopled; to have priestmen, and soldiermen, and workmen. Yea! thou knowest that without these tools no king can put forth his capacity to rule.... It was for this I desired materials to govern with, that my ability to rule might not be forgotten and hidden away. For every faculty and authority is apt to grow obsolete and ignored, if it be without wisdom; and that which is done in unwisdom can never be reckoned as skill. _This will I say—that I have sought to live worthily the while I lived, and after my life to leave to the men that come after me a remembering of me in good works._

... Ah! my soul, one evil is stoutly to be shunned. It is that which most constantly and grievously deceives all those who have a nature of distinction, but who have not attained to full command of their powers. This is the desire of false glory and of unrighteous power, and of immoderate fame of good deeds above all other people. For many men desire power that they may have fame, though they be unworthy, for even the most depraved desire it also. But he that will investigate this fame wisely and earnestly, will perceive how little it is, how precarious, how frail, how bereft it is of all that is good.

Glory of this world! Why do foolish men with a false voice call thee glory? Thou art not so. More men have pomp and glory and worship from the opinion of foolish people, than they have from their own works.

They say a certain king cried: he had a naked sword hanging over his head by a small thread ready at a moment to cut short his life. It was so always to me....

Alfred’s relations to the Church were wholly without a cloud or a blot—alike free from the violence or the impolicy which too often discredited even the noblest sovereigns of his age. From the hour when the child Prince of four was anointed by Pope Leo in Rome, down to the day when the Canons laid his bones in the Old Minster of Winchester, the career of Alfred presents to us the purest type of the normal relations between the temporal and spiritual powers—a type of more wisdom than that of St. Henry or St. Louis, more truly spiritual than that of the Emperors Charles or Otto. To Alfred, Religion, Culture, Intelligence had no local limits. He was essentially European, even cosmopolitan, in his genius. As a boy he had witnessed the inauguration of the new Papal Rome on the Vatican. He had been at the Court of the great Frank King, whose daughter became his step-mother; he had known all that was foremost in the civilisation of the century: he resolved to transplant it to England. His missions were his message to the world that Britain was no longer an _ultima Thule_, but henceforth was to march in the van of Progress. He was, says Freeman, “the spiritual and intellectual leader of his people.”

It is in his own writings that we come to love Alfred best. No ruler of men has left us so pellucid a revelation of his own soul. As in _Meditations_ of Aurelius and the Psalms of David, there is given to men the outpourings of his aspirations and his sorrows. Neither Richelieu, Cromwell, nor William the Silent ever recorded more frankly their problems and their aims. In the authentic writings of Alfred we are in the presence of one who is a teacher as much as a king—who recalls to us Augustine and à-Kempis, or Bunyan and Jeremy Taylor. His _Boethius_ served him as texts whereon he preached to his people profound sermons on the moral and spiritual life. Read his homily on Riches—“that it is better to give than to receive,”—on the true Ruler—“that power is never a good, unless he be good that has it,”—on the uses of Adversity—“no wise man should desire a soft life.” Few men ever had so hard a life—with his mysterious and cruel malady—“his thorn in the flesh” until his early death—with his distracted and ruined kingdom—his ferocious enemies—his never-ending cares. And amidst it all we have the king in his silent study pouring out poetic thoughts upon married love, or friendship, on true happiness, or the inner life, composing pastoral poetry, or casting into English old idylls from Greek epic or myth, ending with some magnificent _Te Deum_ of his own composition.

And with all this spiritual fervour, this literary genius, this passion for culture, how wonderful is the many-sided energy of the man—his skill and delight as a huntsman, his love of ballad, anecdote, and merry tale, his love of all noble art, his zeal as a great builder, his ingenuity in mechanical contrivance, his invention for measuring time, his planning a new type of battleship—his supreme foresight in refounding the desolated city of London. No man ever so perfectly fulfilled the rule—“Without haste, without rest.” “I have desired,” he wrote, “to live worthily while I lived, and after my life to leave to the men that should be after me a remembrance in good works.” And Alfred “the truth-teller”—as an annalist calls him—never uttered words more true.