Part 5

Alfred’s name is almost the only one in the long roll of our national worthies which awakens no bitter, no jealous thought, which combines the honour of all; Alfred represents at once the ancient monarchy, the army, the navy, the law, the literature, the poetry, the art, the enterprise, the industry, the religion of our race. Neither Welshman, nor Scot, nor Irishman can feel that Alfred’s memory has left the trace of a wound for his national pride. No difference of Church arises to separate any who would join to do Alfred honour. No saint in the Calendar was a more loyal and cherished member of the ancient faith; and yet no Protestant can imagine a purer and more simple follower of the Gospel. Alfred was a victorious warrior whose victories have left no curses behind them: a king whom no man ever charged with a harsh act: a scholar who never became a pedant: a saint who knew no superstition: a hero as bold as Launcelot—as spotless as Galahad.

No people, in ancient or modern times, ever had a hero-founder at once so truly historic, so venerable, and so supremely great. Alfred was more to us than the heroes in antique myths—more than Theseus and Solon were to Athens, or Lycurgus to Sparta, or Romulus and Numa were to Rome—more than St. Stephen was to Hungary, or Pelayo and the Cid to Spain—more than Hugh Capet and Jeanne d’Arc were to France—more than William the Silent was to Holland—nay, almost as much as the Great Charles was to the Franks.

The life-work of the Great Alfred has had a continuity, an organic development, a moral, intellectual, and spiritual majesty which has no parallel or rival amongst rulers in the annals of mankind. He is the father of English History, the founder of English prose. He gave impulse and form to the _English Chronicle_, the oldest national record in modern Europe. He formed himself, or dictated, an organic prose literature, which was kept in current use until the Norman Conquest. His mark as a king is the creative mind—the organising genius. His whole life, as recorded in act and as imagined in his own ideals, has the stamp of supreme insight, practical wisdom, self-control, devotion to duty. His passion for poetry, his love for history, his dignity, his grace, his tenderness, his manly piety—all alike are spontaneous and beautiful—all are in harmony, none are in excess.

ALFRED AS A RELIGIOUS MAN AND AN EDUCATIONALIST

BY THE BISHOP OF BRISTOL

ALFRED AS A RELIGIOUS MAN AND AN EDUCATIONALIST

I

HIS EARLY YEARS

Earliest years—Visits to Rome—Purpose of such visits—His father’s will—His education—Saxon poetry—His mother’s book—His religious interest—His desire for learning—Musical skill—His religious wars—He becomes king.

The original sources of information from which this chapter is drawn are fairly numerous. Asser’s _Life of Alfred_ is of course the chief source; but Alfred’s laws, Alfred’s translations, Alfred’s will, all throw much light on his character as a religious man; and the translations tell us something of his views on education, besides what we learn from the record of his actions.

Alfred’s mother was Osburga; Asser tells us that she was a very religious woman, noble alike in family and by her own disposition. His father Ethelwulf gave him an early training in devotion to the faith of Christ. In the year 853, which Asser declares to have been the fifth year of Alfred’s life—though some say his eleventh year, which would seem more probable—Ethelwulf sent him to Rome with an honourable escort of nobles and commoners. Pope Leo IV. received him, anointed him for king, and adopted him as his spiritual son. This may mean that Alfred was confirmed in Rome; Ethelwerd, a descendant of Alfred, believed that it referred to baptism. Another account states that the Pope anointed him king of the Demetians; but that seems out of the question, as he had four brothers older than himself. The statement may be due to the fact that some years after Alfred became king, the kings and people of that part of Wales made submission to him.[1] Two years later Ethelwulf himself went to Rome, with great honour, and took with him Alfred, because he loved him more than his other sons. A long list of Ethelwulf’s gifts was given by Anastasius in his _Lives of the Popes_; they were very magnificent if the record is true. The father and son remained in Rome for a year. Alfred’s mother was, we must suppose, then dead, for Ethelwulf took a new wife home with him, Judith, the daughter of Charles the Bald.

We have in Ethelwulf’s will an interesting evidence of the impression made upon him by Rome. It is as well to state such of the provisions as have come down to us, for they are in themselves of importance, and they introduce us to important facts of the time; also, we shall then have something with which to compare Alfred’s will when the time comes to deal with it. The provisions show the kind of religious atmosphere in which Alfred was brought up as a young boy.

Ethelwulf ordered that the money he left behind him should be divided between his sons and the nobles for the good of his soul. Further, for the benefit of his soul, which from the first flower of his youth he had studied in all things to promote, he directed that in all his hereditary dominions one poor man for each ten hides of land, either a native or a foreigner,[2] should be provided with meat, drink, and clothing, by his successors, even to the day of judgment. And the curiously significant condition is imported, “if the country should continue to be inhabited by men and cattle, and not become deserted”: to such an extent had the ravages of the Danish pirates gone. Also, and still for the good of his soul, three hundred mancuses[3] were to go to Rome. Their destination explains to us the religious attraction which drew men in his time to the old capital of the Western world. The journey was dangerous;[4] it was also expensive.[5] King Canute spoke very strongly about this in his time. He thanked God that he had been able to visit the holy Apostles Peter and Paul. That was the aspect in which the purpose of the pilgrimage to Rome presented itself to his mind, it was to visit the tombs of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul.[6] But having thanked God for his visit, he proceeded to complain of the heavy demands upon “my archbishops” when according to custom they visited the holy see to receive the pall. “I complained in the presence of the lord Pope, and said I was much displeased on account of the immense sums of money which were demanded of them”; it was decreed that this should cease. In like manner he settled with the emperor and with the Frank king that the severity of the taxes by the way should be relaxed. In 688 and 728, two of Alfred’s predecessors, Cædwalla and Ina, kings of Wessex, wishing to visit Rome, resigned their kingdom to carry out their wish. Bede tells us precisely what their purpose was. It was that they might visit the tombs of the blessed Apostles. Ethelwulf, too, makes his object clear in his will. One hundred mancuses were to go to Rome in honour of St. Peter, specially to buy oil for filling all the lamps of his apostolic church on Easter Eve and at cock-crow; also, one hundred mancuses in honour of St. Paul, for the same purpose of providing oil for the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, to fill the lamps on Easter Eve and at cock-crow; and one hundred mancuses for the universal apostolic pontiff. William of Malmesbury states that these were to be annual gifts, but that is not supported by Asser, from whom William takes his account.

It is interesting to note the agreement of these gifts with the facts of the time. In 847 the Saracens had attacked Rome. The great basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul were suburban churches, outside the walls, and they were plundered and desecrated. We are accustomed to the idea of St. Paul’s being _fuori le mura_, but St. Peter’s, as we know it, lies in a district surrounded by walls. This fortified district is called the Leonine City. It owes its existence and its name to Leo IV., who was Pope when Ethelwulf sent Alfred to Rome as a boy. A concise account of the eight years’ papacy of Leo IV. would state that he devoted himself to building the fortifications of the Leonine City, that St. Peter’s and the Vatican might no longer be suburban, and to restoring the plundered and desecrated churches of the two Apostles. Hence Ethelwulf’s gifts to the two churches and the papal purse. If the dates and periods given by Asser are correct, Pope Leo died while the Saxon king and prince were in Rome, and was succeeded by Benedict III. In that case Alfred witnessed in the autumn of 855 the significant spectacle of an antipope stripping the Pope of his pontifical robes and ruling for a time in the Lateran.

Under influences such as these Alfred was brought up. His brothers appear to have been sent out to great men of the kingdom to be educated, but Alfred was kept always at the king’s court, as the favourite son. He was specially noted for the attention with which he listened to the Saxon poems of earlier times, and the care with which he stored them up in an excellent memory. In after years he spoke of Aldhelm’s English songs and hymns as the best he knew;[7] and that was saying a great deal, for the national gift of song, both sacred and secular, was great. It would be difficult to find in the early records of any nation a sacred song more touching and beautiful than the stanzas of the “Dream of the Holy Rood,” incised in early Anglian runes upon the great cross-shaft at Ruthwell, itself a monument such as no other nation can show. The fuller form of this great song, embodying the earlier stanzas found on the Ruthwell cross, was discovered at Vercelli two generations ago, in the Wessex dialect of Alfred’s time. That Alfred knew by heart this among many other English songs may be taken as certain. That it made its religious mark on his mind cannot be doubted.

But, Asser remarks with a severe comment on the neglect in this respect by his parents, the boy Alfred had no book-learning at all. He was trained in all bodily exercises, and he especially learned and practised the art of hunting in all its branches with surprising success; an art so practical then that Asser believed skill and good fortune in hunting to be “among the gifts of God, as we have often witnessed.” But book-learning he had none.

It was his mother who gave him his first taste for book-learning. If we are to accept the dates and statements of Asser as on the whole correct, this must have been his step-mother, Judith, though one of the statements would refer it to Osburga’s time. Alfred was about thirteen when the event occurred; he remained illiterate, Asser says, till he was twelve years old or more. Those who take the other view make him almost four at the time of the following episode. There is no evidence that Osburga had any learning, though her love for Saxon ballad may be assumed. Judith, on the other hand, was the daughter of a house which paid much regard to learning and art. The beautiful Bibles of her father are in existence still, and we can well understand that she would try to win the affection of her step-sons by showing them treasures of a kind new to them. No one who has had the privilege of handling and examining the books in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris can ever forget the beauty of the manuscripts which belonged to Charles le Chauve, Judith’s father. The ivory covers of his Psalter and his Book of the Gospels, the beauty of the interior of those books, and the fineness of his St. Denis Bible and his Metz Bible (which is possibly the Bible prepared at Tours for Charlemagne under the care of Alcuin), abundantly convince us of the artistic taste of his family. Their evidence could be largely supplemented from the still-existing manuscripts of Charlemagne, Louis le Débonnaire, and Lothaire.

His mother, then, one day showed to Alfred and an older brother an ornamental manuscript of Saxon poems. To tempt them to begin to learn—again the act of one who had not been responsible for their ignorance of book-learning—she said she would give the book to the boy who could first learn to read it. Alfred was delighted with the beauty of the initial letter. He might well be delighted if it approached the beauty of the Lindisfarne gospels, wrought a century and a half before, or the very different style of beauty of the manuscript known as the Psalter of Athelstane, with its Byzantine type and Teutonic origin, parts of which Judith may well have seen and handled. The initial letter of the first Psalm in this Psalter would indeed have been a prize for which a boy might face the pain of learning to read, even a boy devoted to hunting.

Alfred spoke first, though the younger. “Will you really give it to the one who can most quickly understand and recite it before you?” She, glad and smiling, said, “To him I will give it.” He took it from her hand, went to his master and read it. When it was read, he brought it back and recited it. It is not at all improbable that Judith did not know of his power of memory, and that instead of learning to read it, in our sense of the word, he got his master to read it over till he knew it by heart and could point with his finger to the words as he recited them. John the Deacon, writing in the same century, said that Pope Gregory the Great (others ascribe it to Gregory III.) invented musical notation as a _memoria technica_ to remind him of tunes he had learned by ear.

However that might be with Alfred, he had got the taste for written words, which never left him. He set to work to learn the daily course of the religious services of the several hours; and then certain of the psalms; and then a number of prayers. All this collection he had in a little book which he carried day and night in his bosom. Asser, who joined him many years later, often saw him use this little book to assist his prayers, amid all the bustle and business of a king’s life. But still there is a hint that when this collection was made it was only to him a representation of what he knew by heart; for Asser says he could not at that time gratify his most ardent wish to learn liberal art, because, as Alfred told him, there were then no good readers in all the kingdom of the West Saxons.[8] Indeed, he confessed to Asser with many lamentations and inmost sighs of his heart that the greatest of all the difficulties and impediments of his life had been that when he was young, and had the capacity for learning, he could not find teachers; and when he was more advanced in life, he was so harassed by a disease unknown to all the physicians of the island, as well as by anxieties of sovereignty, internal and external, and continual invasions of pagans, that there was no time for reading, even his masters and writers being to some extent disturbed in their occupations. But yet he never to the end of his life ceased from the insatiable desire of knowledge.

Asser makes no reference to his traditional skill as a harpist and minstrel. Probably it was a matter of course. Two hundred years before, Cædmon, in Northumbria, had fled the festive society of his labouring fellows, because he alone of them, when the harp was passed to him in turn, could not sing; and the sense of isolation in this respect wrought so strongly in his mind that in the dreams of the night he created song, and next morning he remembered the dignified and stately creation. Aldhelm was singing in Wessex in Cædmon’s time, sitting on the parapet of Malmesbury bridge, and beguiling people to sacred thought by the attraction of his secular lays.[9] We have no examples still surviving of English musical notation of Alfred’s time; but many examples exist of the next century, as, for instance, the manuscript written in Wessex about eighty years after Alfred’s death for Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester, which includes the kyrie _Rex Splendens_, composed by Dunstan, who was born in 925. There can practically be little doubt that Alfred had a similar notation, consisting of very rudimentary musical notes, with guide-letters showing time and expression. It was, however, the century after his death that saw the great development of this principle in England. Up to that time the tradition of the plain-song introduced by Augustine had been handed down from ear to ear. The chief use of our musical notation was to guard against the loss or serious variation of the traditional plain-song and the more complicated additions made by Dunstan and other skilled musicians. The Wessex churchmen learned their rugged plain-song so well, that after the Norman Conquest the monks of Glastonbury suffered death at the hands of the Norman soldiers rather than abandon their insular use for the lighter graces of the plain-song of William of Fescamp.

Alfred’s warfare against the Danes began before he was king. It was in his eyes much more than a warfare against violent invaders of his territory; it was to him, above all, a religious war. That the enemy were pagans, and that part of their aim was to obliterate Christianity, that was his chief stimulus. To the Danes also it was a religious war. The Angles and Saxons and Jutes, whose lands they pillaged, were their own very distant cousins; they had in times past worshipped the same deities whom now the Danes worshipped. To the Danes they were renegades from the one religion which the Danes held for truth. Asser knew well the king’s feeling on this subject. He describes at some length the series of battles which brought Alfred into prominence, and he describes them from information received from Alfred. He never describes the combatants as English and Danes; he always speaks of them as Christians and pagans.

The first instance we have of the bent of Alfred’s mind after he came to maturity occurs in connection with this feeling on his part that to fight the Danes was a religious work. In 871, just before he came to the throne, the pagan army fought against the Earl of Berkshire at Englefield, and the Christians gained the victory. Four days later, Alfred and his brother King Ethelred attacked the pagans at Reading, where they had strong fortifications. They cut to pieces such of the pagans as they found outside the fortifications; but the main body of the pagans sallied forth, and the Christians fled. Four days after, the pagan army was on strong ground at Æscesdun, the hill of the ash, and the Christians, in shame and indignation, roused by the calamity at Reading, determined to attack them under Ethelred and Alfred.

Ethelred was a religious man, as Alfred was, but his religion took practically a different form. The king prepared for the fight by hearing mass, and the army waited for him. The pagans did not wait. Time pressed. Alfred, who was second in command, became very anxious. The king, who commanded the force arrayed against the pagan king, was still set in prayer. He declared he would not depart, alive, till the priest had done, nor leave the divine service. Alfred was to deal with the two pagan jarls; he must either retreat or charge without waiting for his brother. Relying on the divine counsels he charged, and after a long and severe fight, in which many of the leading pagans were killed, the Christians won the day. They strewed the whole plain of Æscesdun with pagans, slaughtered in their flight. Alfred himself, it should be observed, was from childhood a frequent visitor of holy places, for the sake of prayer and almsgiving. It was certainly not from any disregard of prayer or of God’s house and the public worship of God that he fought while Ethelred heard mass.

That same year, after another great fight at Basing in which the pagans got the victory, Alfred became king on the death of his brother; Ethelred’s son Ethelwold being too young to reign. A month later the pagans defeated him at Wilton. Eight pitched battles in one year, besides endless skirmishes by night and day in which Alfred and his chief men were engaged without rest or cessation against the pagans: that is Asser’s summary of the year which saw Alfred mount the throne of the West Saxons.

The same note of a religious war is struck in the campaign in which Alfred finally triumphed. He issued forth from his stronghold in the marsh of Athelney to make frequent assaults upon the pagans. In the seventh week after Easter, 878, he rode to Ecgbryht’s Stone (Brixton-Deverill) in the eastern part of the Selwood, or Great Wood, in British Coit Mawr, and on the third day reached Edington, where he fought with valour and persistence against the pagans and defeated them completely, killing all who were not within the earthworks. The survivors he hemmed in for fourteen days. At the end of that time the pagans were worn out, and begged for terms of peace. Their leader Guthrum proposed to become a Christian. It was agreed that those who would be baptized might settle in England; those who would remain pagan must leave the island.[10] In the final terms, as in every phrase of Asser’s story, it stands out as a religious war, and as a great religious victory it ended. From that time Christian Danes and Christian Saxons could agree.

II

HIS REIGN

His early years as king—Communications with Rome—Education of his children and others—His own labours—Religious exercises—Introduction of learned men—Invention of candle-clocks—Distribution of income—Foundation of monasteries—Formation of his Manual—Embassies to foreign parts—Ecclesiastical laws.