THE LIFE AND TIMES
OF
ALFRED THE GREAT

C. PLUMMER

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH
NEW YORK

THE LIFE AND TIMES
OF
ALFRED THE GREAT

BEING THE FORD LECTURES FOR 1901

BY
CHARLES PLUMMER, M.A.
FELLOW AND CHAPLAIN OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD

WITH AN APPENDIX

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1902

[All rights reserved]

OXFORD
PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
BY HORACE HART, M.A.
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

TO THE
Rev. JOHN EARLE, M.A.
RAWLINSONIAN PROFESSOR OF ANGLO-SAXON
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
THESE LECTURES
ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
BY HIS
FRIEND AND FORMER PUPIL
THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

The present work contains the lectures delivered by me on the Ford foundation in Michaelmas Term, 1901. The lectures are printed substantially as they were delivered, with the exception that certain passages which were shortened or omitted in delivery owing to want of time are now given in full.

In the notes will be found the authorities and arguments on which the conclusions of the text are based. The notes occupy a rather large proportion of the book, because I wished to spare my audience, as far as possible, the discussion of technical details.

I have not thought it necessary to recast the form of the lectures. The personal style of address, naturally employed by a lecturer to his audience, is retained in addressing the larger audience to which I now appeal.

The objects which I have aimed at in the lectures are sufficiently explained at the beginning and end of the lectures themselves, and need not be further enlarged on here.

In many ways the lectures would no doubt have been improved, if I had been able to make use of Mr. Stevenson’s long-expected edition of Asser. On the other hand there may be advantages in the fact that Mr. Stevenson and myself have worked in perfect independence of one another.

I am sorry that I have had to speak unfavourably of some of the recent Alfred literature which has come under my notice. I am a little jealous for the honour of English historical scholarship; and I am more than a little jealous that the greatest name in English history should be considered a theme on which any one may try his prentice hand. It suggests the possibility of adding a new chapter to what I have called ‘that ever-lengthening treatise De casibus illustrium uirorum’ ([p. 178]).

I have, as usual, to thank all the officials of the Clarendon Press, especially my friend Mr. C. E. Doble, for the interest and care which they have bestowed upon the work; and I must also thank the Delegates for so kindly undertaking the publication of it. The help which I have received in reference to various points is acknowledged in the book itself.

For the map I am indebted to the skill of Mr. B. V. Darbishire.

In the Dedication I have tried to express the gratitude which I owe for the friendship and intellectual sympathy of some quarter of a century.

Finally I would record my great obligations to the electors to the Ford Lectureship for the distinguished honour which they did me in appointing me to the post without any solicitation on my part.

Corpus Christi College, Oxford,
March 10, 1902.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AA. SS. = Acta Sanctorum, the great Bollandist Collection.

Ang. Sac. = Anglia Sacra, ed. Wharton.

Ann. Camb. = Annales Cambriae, M. H. B.; R. S.; and (more correctly) in Y Cymmrodor, vol. ix.

Ann. Wint. = Annales Wintonienses, R. S.

Asser. The edition in M. H. B. has been chiefly used, the pages of Wise’s edition being given in brackets; a new edition by Mr. W. H. Stevenson is expected shortly.

Bede. For the Latin Text of the Hist. Eccl. my own edition is referred to; for the Anglo-Saxon Translation Miller’s edition, E. E. T. S., is generally referred to, though Schipper’s edition, Bibliothek d. angelsächsischen Prosa, is occasionally cited.

Birch = Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum.

‘Blostman’ or ‘Blooms’ = Alfred’s translation of the Soliloquies of St. Augustine; for editions see pp. 128, 194.

Boethius, Alfred’s translation of, ed. Sedgefield, with Modern English rendering by the same; both at the Clarendon Press.

Bromton = Chronicon Johannis Bromton in vol. i of Twysden’s Decem Scriptores.

Brut = Brut y Tywysogion, M. H. B.; R. S.; also ed. J. Gwenogfryn Evans in vol. ii of the Red Book of Hergest.

Capgrave = Capgrave’s Chronicle of England, ed. Hingeston, R. S.

C. E., see Green.

Chron., see Sax. Chron.

Cura Pastoralis = Pope Gregory’s treatise on the Pastoral Care; Alfred’s translation, ed. Sweet, E. E. T. S.

Dict. Christ. Biog. = Dictionary of Christian Biography.

Dict. Nat. Biog. = Dictionary of National Biography.

Ducange = Ducange, Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis, 4to, 1884-7.

E. E. T. S. = Early English Text Society.

E. H. S. = English Historical Society.

Essays. For the work quoted by this title, [see p. 6 note].

E. T. = English Translation.

Ethelw. = Ethelwerdi Chronica, ed. M. H. B.

Flor. = Florence of Worcester, ed. Thorpe, E. H. S.; also in M. H. B.

Gaimar = Lestorie des Engles solum Geffrei Gaimar, ed. Martin, 2 vols., R. S.; also in M. H. B.

G. P. = William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, ed. Hamilton, R. S.

G. R. = Gesta Regum, see W. M.

Green, C. E. = J. R. Green, The Conquest of England.

H. E. = Historia Ecclesiastica, see Bede.

H. H. = Henry of Huntingdon, ed. T. Arnold, R. S.

Ingulf = Ingulfi Historia Croylandensis, in Fulman’s Scriptores, vol. i.

K. C. D. = Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus Aeui Saxonici, 6 vols., E. H. S.

Laȝamon = Laȝamon’s Brut, ed. Sir F. Madden, 3 vols., 1847.

Lib. de Hyda = Liber Monasterii de Hyda, ed. Edwards, R. S.

M. H. B. = Monumenta Historica Britannica, vol. i (all published).

Migne, Pat. Lat. = Migne, Patrologia Latina.

Muratori = Muratori, Scriptores Rerum Italicarum.

Orosius, Alfred’s Translation of, ed. Sweet, E. E. T. S.

Pertz = Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, folio series.

R. S. = Rolls Series.

R. W. = Roger of Wendover, ed. Coxe, E. H. S.

Sax. Chron. = Saxon Chronicle; except where otherwise indicated, my own edition is referred to.

S. C. H. = Stubbs’ Constitutional History, cabinet edition, 3 vols., 1874-8.

Schmid, Gesetze = Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, von Dr. Reinhold Schmid, 1858.

S. D. = Simeon of Durham, ed. T. Arnold, R. S. (For the meaning of the symbols S. D.¹ and S. D.², [see p. 32 note].)

Soliloquies, see Blostman.

Thorn = Chronica Gul. Thorn, in Twysden, Decem Scriptores.

W. M. = William of Malmesbury; except where otherwise stated the Gesta Regum is meant; ed. Stubbs, R. S.

Wülker, Grundriss = Grundriss der angelsächsischen Literatur, von R. Wülker, 1885.

KEY TO THE NAMES ON THE MAP

SOUTHERN BRITAIN, to illustrate Alfred’s Campaigns. To face p. 1.

Darbishire & Stanford, Limited. The Oxford Geographical Institute.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALFRED THE GREAT

INTRODUCTORY

In Memoriam W. Stubbs.

§ 1. I trust you will not think it inappropriate if I begin these lectures by paying my humble tribute of reverence and gratitude to the memory of the great historian who, since my appointment to this post of Ford’s Lecturer, has been taken from us. I believe that to him I am very largely indebted for the honour of appearing before you to-day[1]; and if that were so, it would only be of a piece with the many acts of kindness and encouragement which he showed me; encouragement sometimes couched in that humorous form which he loved, and which was occasionally misunderstood by those who had not, like himself, the saving gift of humour. It is not easy to measure the greatness of his loss. He was unquestionably one of the most learned men in Europe; one of the few who could venture to assert an historical negative. If he declared ‘there is no authority for such a view or statement,’ you knew that there was nothing more to be said. But even more wonderful than the extent of his learning was the way in which he could compress it, and bring it all to bear upon the particular point with which he was dealing. I daresay it has happened to you, as it has often happened to myself, to read other books and authorities, and to fancy that one had gained from them fresh facts and views, and then to go back to Stubbs and find that all our new facts and views were there already; only, until we had read more widely ourselves, we had not eyes to see all that was written there.

§ 2. But with all this, history was never to him mere erudition. It was, on the one hand, the record of human experience, a record ‘written for our learning,’ and rich with unheeded lessons; on the other, it was the gradual unfolding to human view of the purposes of God, working themselves out not only in spite of, but often by means of the weakness and waywardness of the human agents. And so he views the characters and the course of history, not, as so many historians do, merely from the outside, but, if I may so speak, from within. The characters of history are no mere puppets, to be dressed in picturesque costumes, and made to strut across the stage of the world; they ‘are men of like passions with’ us, tempted and sinning, and suffering, as we are tempted, sin, and suffer; aspiring and achieving, as we too might aspire and achieve. ‘History,’ he says, ‘cannot be well read as a chess problem, and the man who tries to read it so is not worthy to read it at all[2].’ And so we have in the Prefaces to Hoveden, Benedict of Peterborough, the Itinerarium Ricardi, and Walter of Coventry, those wonderful studies of the characters of Henry II, Richard I, and John, which must always remain as masterpieces of historical portraiture. In the same way the course of history at large is no mere complex of material and mechanical laws; it yields no countenance to that ingenious philosophy which is ‘so apt,’ as he contemptuously says, ‘to show that all things would have been exactly as they are if everything had been diametrically opposite to what it was[3].’ ‘The ebb and flow of the life of nations is seen,’ he says, ‘to depend on higher laws, more general purposes, the guidance of a Higher Hand[4].’ And so we have those wonderful summaries which conclude the second and third volumes of his Constitutional History, the finest specimens I know of historical generalisations controlled by an absolute mastery of all the facts.

§ 3. And here we find the secret of his unfailing hopefulness. The last words of that same second volume must, I think, have dwelt in the hearts of all who have ever read them; where, after speaking of the luxury, the selfishness, the hardness of the fourteenth century, and the lust, the cruelty, the futility of the fifteenth, he concludes: ‘Yet out of it emerges, in spite of all, the truer and brighter day, the season of more general conscious life, higher longings, more forbearing, more sympathetic, purer, riper liberty.’ While those who remember the Commemoration Sermon which he preached at the late Queen’s first jubilee will know that he brought the same wise spirit of hopefulness to the history of our own day. There was much in the tendencies of modern thought and of modern society which, to a man of his strong convictions as a Christian and a Churchman, was justly repugnant. But in his case ‘experience,’ and history, the record of experience, had ‘worked hope.’ Some of us may perhaps remember how in one of his public lectures he himself quoted the Psalmist’s words: ‘I said, It is mine own infirmity: but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most Highest.’

§ 4. It is only of his character as an historian that I have a right to speak to you from this place; but perhaps you will forgive me if, as a Churchman, I just briefly put on record my sense of the loss which the Church of England has suffered in his death; though only the rulers of the Church can fully estimate the value to the Church in these anxious days of that ripe judgement, based on so unique a mastery of the history both of Church and State. We should be false to his own wise spirit of sober hopefulness if we did not trust that others may be raised up in turn to take his place.

With these few words of introduction, I turn to the proper subject of these present lectures.

LECTURE I
THE SOURCES

Character of the present lectures.

§ 5. When the electors to the Ford Lectureship did me the great honour of offering me the lectureship, coupled with the informal suggestion that the present set of lectures might appropriately be devoted to some subject connected with King Alfred, I warned them, in the letter in which I accepted both the offer and the suggestion, that it was unlikely that on such a well-worked period of English history I should be able to offer anything very new or original. That warning I must now repeat to you. If in the course of our labours I can remove some of the difficulties and confusions which have gathered round the subject, and put in a clearer light some points which have been imperfectly apprehended, that will be all that I can aspire to. For the rest I must be content to put in my own words, and arrange in my own way, what has been previously written by others or by myself; and these lectures may rank as Prolegomena, in the sense in which the late Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, remarked that Dean Alford seemed to have used that word in his edition of the Greek Testament, viz. ‘things that have been said before.’

Prevalence of uncritical statements about Alfred.

§ 6. But if I cannot tell you much that is very new, I hope that what I shall tell you may be approximately true. I shall not tell you, as a recent writer has done, that ‘by his invention of the shires [Alfred] anticipated the principles of the County Council legislation of ten centuries later[5].’ For, in the first place, Alfred did not ‘invent the shires’; and secondly, if I may quote a letter of my friend the Rev. C. S. Taylor, whose papers on Anglo-Saxon topography and archaeology[6] are well known to and appreciated by historical students, it ‘is surely a mistake to make Alfred, as some folks seem to do, into a kind of ninth century incarnation of a combined School Board and County Council.’ Yes, it is surely a mistake; and no less surely is it a mistake to make him into a nineteenth century radical with a touch of the nonconformist conscience[7]; or a Broad-Churchman with agnostic proclivities[8]. Nor shall I, with another recent writer, revive old Dr. Whitaker’s theory that St. Neot was an elder brother of Alfred, identical with the somewhat shadowy Athelstan who was under-king of Kent at any rate from 841 to 851[9]. For, firstly, it is very doubtful whether Athelstan was really Alfred’s brother, and not rather his uncle[10]; and secondly, as we shall see later on, St. Neot is an even more shadowy person than the under-king with whom Dr. Whitaker and Mr. Edward Conybeare would identify him; so shadowy indeed, as almost to justify an attitude of scepticism towards him as complete as that which Betsy Prig ultimately came to adopt towards the oft-quoted Mrs. Harris:—‘I don’t believe there never was no such person.’ I shall not repeat William of Malmesbury’s confusion of John the Old Saxon with John Scotus Erigena[11], and of Sighelm, Alfred’s messenger, with Sighelm, bishop of Sherborne in the following century[12]; or Henry of Huntingdon’s assertion[13] that Æthelwulf before his accession was bishop of Winchester. I shall not speak of an ‘Earl of Berkshire’ in the ninth century, nor tell you that Alfred’s Jewel is in the Bodleian[14], or that ‘the Danes made their first appearance on these shores in 832[15].’ Nor shall I tell you that ‘Alfred supplied chapter-headings and prefixed tables of contents to each of his authors, an improvement hitherto unheard of in literary work, which, simple as it seems now to us, betokened in its first conception no small literary genius[16]’; for I happen to have had better opportunities than most people of knowing that, in the case of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the chapter-headings were there long before Alfred undertook the work of translation. The same is true of Pope Gregory’s Dialogues, and of his Pastoral Care. The only works to which the above remarks could apply would be the Boethius and the Orosius translations; and even there we cannot be sure that the Latin MSS. used by Alfred had no chapter-headings; certainly the St. Gallen and Donaueschingen MSS. of Orosius have capitula[17], though, owing to the free way in which Alfred dealt with the Orosius, the Latin and Anglo-Saxon capitula do not correspond very closely. And the same is true of some Boethius MSS.[18] It is in truth a little disheartening to have all these old confusions and myths trotted out once more at this time of day as if they were genuine history. The fact is that there has been, if I may borrow a phrase from the Stock Exchange, a ‘boom’ in things Alfredian lately; and the literary speculator has rushed in to make his profit. Along with a few persons who are real authorities on the subjects with which they deal, eminent men in other departments of literature and life are engaged to play the parts which the ducal chairman and the aristocratic director play in the floatation of a company. They may not know very much about the business in hand, but their names look well on a prospectus. The result is not very creditable to English scholarship.

English learning non-professional.

§ 7. I would not be understood as wishing to confine the writing of English history to a small body of experts. It is one of the great characteristics of English learning that it has never been the monopoly of a professional or professorial caste, as in Germany, but has been contributed to by men of every, and of no profession. To this fact it owes many of its best qualities—its sanity and common sense, its freedom from fads and far-fetched fancies, its freshness and contact with reality—qualities in which German learning, in spite of its extraordinary depth and solidity, is sometimes conspicuously wanting.

Qualities required for writing English history.

Still the fact remains, that to write on any period of early English history requires something more than the power of construing the Latin Chroniclers in the light of classical Latin, and of spelling out the Saxon Chronicle with the aid of a translation[19]. It needs some knowledge of the general lie of English history, and of the main line of development of English institutions; it needs some grasp of the relations of England to the Continent during the period in question, some power of weighing and comparing different kinds of historical evidence, some acquaintance with the existing literature on the subject[20]. It must be confessed that in many of the recent writings on King Alfred we look for these requirements in vain.

Need for a critical survey of the sources.

§ 8. But, seeing that so many uncritical statements on the subject of King Alfred are abroad, it is all the more imperative that we should begin our work with a critical survey of the materials at our disposal. We shall find them in many respects disappointingly scanty and incomplete. But we must look that fact full in the face, and must not allow ourselves to supply the defects of the evidence by the luxuriance of a riotous imagination. The growth of legend is largely due to the unwillingness of men to acquiesce in inevitable ignorance, especially in the case of historical characters like Alfred, whom we rightly desire to honour and to love.

Alfred’s own works.

§ 9. The first place in our list of authorities for the life of Alfred must be given to his own literary works. It is true that the evidence which they furnish is mostly indirect, but it is, for that very reason, all the more secure. It might be thought that the fact that these works consist almost entirely of translations would prevent them from throwing much light on the life and character of their author. In reality the contrary is the truth.

Their evidence largely indirect; but also direct.

It was very acutely remarked by Jaffé[21] that if, as Ranke alleged, the fact that Einhard’s Life of Charles the Great is obviously modelled on Suetonius’ Life of Augustus detracts somewhat from its value as an original portrait, on the other hand the careful way in which Einhard alters those phrases of his model which were not strictly applicable to his own hero, brings out many a fine shade in Charles’ character of which we should otherwise have been ignorant. In the same way, the manner in which Alfred deals with the works which he translated reveals as much of his mind as an original work could do. And this is not merely the case with works like the Orosius, the Boethius, and the Soliloquies of St. Augustine, in which he allowed himself a large freedom in the way of adaptation and addition. Even in the Cura Pastoralis, in which he keeps extremely close to his original, there are little touches which seem to give us glimpses into the king’s inmost soul[22].

And sometimes the evidence is not indirect but direct. The well-known and oft-quoted Preface to the Cura Pastoralis is an historical document of the first importance; and, as a revelation of the author’s mind, it holds, as Professor Earle has said[23], the first place. Next to this would come the Preface to his Laws, which, for the purposes of this section, may be included among his literary works, and the mutilated preface to the translation of the Soliloquies of St. Augustine. On all these literary works I shall have much to say later on[24]; I only mention them here in their character of historical authorities.

The Saxon Chronicle.

§ 10. The next place in our list of authorities belongs on every ground to the Saxon Chronicle. Of the relation of Alfred to the Chronicle I may also have something to say subsequently[25]. But I have elsewhere[26] given my reasons for believing that the idea of a national chronicle, as opposed to local annals, was due to the inspiration of Alfred, and was carried out under his supervision; and I have said that ‘I can well fancy that he may have dictated some of the later annals which describe his own wars.’ For the former view the high authority of the late bishop of Oxford[27] may be quoted, while as to the second point Professor Earle writes[28]: ‘I never can read the annals of 893-897 without seeming to hear the voice of King Alfred.’ My friend Sir Henry Howorth indeed has a very low opinion of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; and as regards the early part of the Chronicle I am entirely at one with Sir Henry Howorth. I have more than once[29] recorded my conviction of the futility of the attempts of Dr. Guest, Mr. Freeman, and Mr. Green, to base an historical account of the Saxon Conquest of Britain on the unsubstantial dreamwork of traditions embodied in the earlier entries of the Chronicle. But Sir Henry Howorth seems to me to carry his scepticism down to an unduly late period. Anyhow, for the period covered by the public activity of Alfred, 868-901, the Chronicle is as nearly contemporary with the events which it records as any written history is likely to be.

Meagreness of the Chronicle.

But granting that the Chronicle is, for this period, trustworthy as far as it goes; it must be confessed that it is often disappointingly meagre. Of the thirty-four years 868-901, three are entirely vacant[30]. Eight have merely brief entries of a line or two recording the movements of the Danish army or here; and of these eight entries the last three have nothing to do with England, being concerned with the doings of the here on the Continent[31]. Two other very brief entries deal with the sending of couriers to Rome, and with certain obits[32]. The date of Alfred’s death is barely (and probably wrongly) recorded[33]; not a word as to its place or circumstances. And there is a singular dearth of any note of panegyric like that which meets us in the records, meagre as they are, of the reigns of Athelstan, Edmund, and Edgar[34]. In regard to the doings of Alfred this may be due to the influence of Alfred himself; but on the occasion of his death one might have expected, if not the worthy tributes which Ethelwerd and Florence insert at that point[35], at least some recognition of the work which he did. But there is nothing beyond the rather cold statement that ‘he was king over the whole Anglekin, except that part which was under the power of the Danes.’ One would fain hope that this reticence was due to the feeling so finely expressed by Hallam where he speaks of Sir Thomas More as one ‘whose name can ask no epithet[36].’ But I do not think it was; and I rather doubt whether Alfred’s greatness was fully appreciated in his own day, except by one or two of those in his immediate neighbourhood.

Charters not numerous.

§ 11. In charters, which often supplement so usefully the deficiencies of formal histories, the reign of Alfred is far from rich. The time, indeed, was not favourable to the preservation of documents. Of the destruction of title deeds owing to the troubles of the time we have a striking and pathetic instance[37]:—Burgred, king of Mercia, had, for a consideration, granted land to a man named Cered, with remainder to his wife after his death. In course of time Cered died, and his widow Werthryth desired to go to Rome, and to dispose of the land to her husband’s kinsman, Cuthwulf. The charter of the original grant to Cered had however been carried off by the Danes; and Werthryth consequently could not prove her title. She accordingly appeared before a Mercian Witenagemót held under Æthelred, Alfred’s son-in-law, as ealdorman of Mercia, and made oath to this effect. Whereupon Æthelred and the Witan allowed a new charter to be made out securing the land to Cuthwulf.

And the strong-handed took advantage of this confusion to annex the property of their neighbours. Thus in 896 Æthelred of Mercia, with Alfred’s permission, held a Witenagemót at Gloucester, in order ‘to right many men both clerical and lay in respect of lands and other things [wrongfully] withheld from them’; a measure no doubt necessitated by the great campaign of 892-895. Here Werferth, bishop of Worcester, complained that he had been robbed of woods at Woodchester, which had belonged to his see ever since the days of Æthelbald of Mercia[38]. If this was the experience of a powerful bishop, a special friend of the king himself, we may imagine the dangers to which lesser men were exposed. Fortunately among the documents which have been preserved is Alfred’s own will, a most interesting relic, on which something will be said later[39].

Asser’s work. Suspicious points. The work consists of two parts, (a) annalistic, (b) biographical. Crude arrangement.

§ 12. We come now to what is the greatest crux in our whole subject, viz. the so-called life of Alfred which bears the name of Asser. It is obvious that if this work is genuine, it is an historical authority of the highest interest and importance. On the other hand, it must be confessed that there are features in it which do excite suspicion. Apart from difficulties of detail, some of which will come up for subsequent consideration, the general form of the work is most extraordinary, and high authorities have pronounced that, in its present shape, it cannot possibly be original[40]. The work is made up, as most students know, of at least two distinct elements. There is a series of annals extending from 851 to 887 inclusive, which are for the most part parallel to the corresponding annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. I deliberately choose a neutral phrase ‘parallel to,’ as I do not wish, at this stage, to prejudge the question whether the Latin or the Saxon annals are the more original. Into this series of annals are inserted, at various points, sections of biographical matter, of which the earliest refer to Æthelwulf and Æthelbald, one refers to Æthelred, and the remainder to Alfred. In some cases these biographical sections are introduced by editorial head-links (if I may borrow a word from the Chaucerian specialists), consisting as a rule of very florid and elaborate metaphors[41]. But the way in which these biographical sections are inserted is so inconsequent and inartistic, that one is sometimes almost inclined to think that the compiler, while keeping his annals (as he could hardly help doing) in chronological order, cut up his biographical matter into strips, put the strips into a hat, and then took them out in any order which chance might dictate; much as a famous Oxford parody supposed the names of successful candidates in certain pass examinations to be determined[42]. It is true that in Florence of Worcester the biographical matter identical with that in Asser is woven much more skilfully into the chronological framework of the story; but, after careful consideration, I do not think that this implies that Florence’s Asser was any better arranged than our own. I attribute the changes to Florence’s own skill and judgement; and Florence had more of both than some of his modern critics are willing to allow.

Excessive self-assertion of the author.

§ 13. Another general ground of suspicion is, if I may so say, psychological; and I may illustrate what I mean by a little personal reminiscence. Some few years ago I was dining in a college not my own, where one of the junior fellows told us a somewhat startling tale, prefacing it with the remark that the incident was unquestionably true, as it had happened to himself. ‘Ah,’ said the senior fellow, with the frankness which is one of the privileges of seniority, ‘whenever a man begins a story in that way, I always know that some bigger lie than usual is going to follow.’ Now it is at least curious that our author so constantly lays stress on the fact that he had himself witnessed some of the most striking of the things which he relates, or at least had heard them from those who had seen them. Thus he had frequently (‘saepissime’) witnessed Alfred’s skill in hunting[43]; he had himself seen the little book containing the daily offices and Psalms and prayers which Alfred always carried about with him[44]; he had with ‘his very own eyes’ often seen Alfred’s maternal grandmother, Eadburh[45]; ‘with his very own eyes’ again he had seen the solitary thorn which marked the site of the battle of Ashdown[46]; he had himself surveyed the site of the fort of Cynwit, and verified its capacities for defence[47]. He gives us to understand that he, with others, had witnessed Alfred’s mysterious attacks of illness[48]; that he had not only seen, but read the letters which Alfred received from the patriarch of Jerusalem[49]; that he had seen in Athelney Monastery the young Dane whom Alfred was educating there in the monastic life[50]. So he had heard from various persons different opinions as to the relative guilt of the parties in the alleged rebellion of Æthelbald[51]; he had conversed with many who had seen Offa’s daughter Eadburh, the Jezebel of Wessex history, in her dishonoured and mendicant old age at Pavia[52]; while the story of her crimes in Wessex, which deprived all her successors of the title of queen, he had heard from Alfred himself[53]. He had heard from eye-witnesses how Æthelred at Ashdown refused to engage till mass was finished[54], and of the military skill of Abbot John the Old Saxon from those who knew him[55]. Now in all these things there is nothing impossible, or even improbable. It is only the constant asseveration which excites suspicion.

Frankish element in Asser; no ground for suspicion.

§ 14. One general objection which has sometimes been brought against our author is, I am convinced, without foundation:—I mean the presence in him of a certain Frankish element. He uses certain Frankish words, vassallus, indiculus (a letter; both these words puzzled the scribes a good deal), comes (in the sense of ealdorman), senior (a lord, seigneur), and possibly others[56]. So too the story how Eadburh ‘put her foot in it,’ if I may use the phrase, with Charles the Great[57], and of her subsequent fate, evidently reflects the gossip of the Carolingian Courts. It is possible that the story of Æthelbald’s incestuous marriage[58] comes from the same source; as, with the exception of Asser, the only contemporary authorities in which it is found are Frankish[59]; so too, perhaps, the judgement on Arnulf’s conduct in deposing Charles the Fat[60], and the more correct form Carloman, as against the Carl of the Chronicle[61]. But when we consider that two at least of Alfred’s principal literary and educational coadjutors, Grimbald and John the Old Saxon, came from different parts of the Carolingian empire, that Æthelwulf married a Frankish wife, stayed some time at the Frankish Court[62], and had, as the epistles of Lupus of Ferrières show, a Frankish secretary[63], that some of these words occur in English charters[64], where likewise they probably bear witness to the influence of Frankish scribes, we shall see that there were plenty of channels through which these Frankish elements might find their way into the biography of an English king. Moreover, if we should come to the conclusion that the book is mediately or immediately the work of Asser, we may be inclined to connect this element in it with a statement quoted by Leland from a lost life of Grimbald[65], that Asser was one of the ambassadors deputed to bring Grimbald to England[66]. The description of Paris also looks as if it might rest on personal knowledge[67].

Detailed objections; the Diocese of Exeter.

§ 15. Of the objections in detail which have been brought against our author, the most important perhaps relates to his statement that Alfred gave him ‘Exeter with the diocese belonging to it both in Cornwall and Saxony,’ i.e. Wessex[68]. Mr. Wright[69] thought that this was conclusive evidence that the work was later than the transference of the united see of Cornwall and Devonshire to Exeter, under Edward the Confessor. I shall show presently that there is evidence, both external and internal, for the existence of our Asser about 975. Meanwhile, I would point out that under the year 875 the Welsh Annals record the drowning of Dumgarth, king of Cornwall[70], though it gives one a little start to realise that there were kings in Cornwall as late as the last quarter of the ninth century[71]; and we know from the Chronicle that in 877 Alfred recovered Exeter from the Danes. Now the state of affairs in South Wales which Asser represents[72] as determining him, at any rate in part, to accept Alfred’s invitation, in the hope of securing his protection for St. David’s, clearly refers to a period 877 × 885. Rotri Mawr is obviously dead, as his sons only are spoken of, and Rotri Mawr was slain in 877; while Howel, son of Rhys, king of Glewissig, is spoken of as alive; and he is probably the Howel who died at Rome in 885[73], having gone there, it is likely, in expiation of a crime, of which the record is preserved in the Book of Llandaff[74]. It seems to me not unlikely that in view of the events of 875 and 877, Alfred may have wished to place the districts round Exeter under episcopal supervision, without necessarily intending to create a definite diocese, and may have thought a Celtic-speaking prelate likely to be more effective than an Englishman[75]; for at this time the Bristol Channel was not either physically or linguistically a serious barrier between the Celts on either side of it.

When did Asser become a bishop?

Whether Asser was already a bishop when he first came to Alfred is difficult to determine. He is often spoken of as bishop of St. David’s. Novis, or Nobis, bishop, or, as Asser in the passage referred to above patriotically calls him, archbishop of St. David’s, died, according to the Welsh Annals, in 873, after a rule of thirty-three years[76]. His immediate successor was Llunwerth or Llwmbert[77]; but when the latter died I have not succeeded in satisfying myself[78].

Mention of Asser in the Cura Pastoralis.

Confirmation of the grant of Exeter to Asser is sometimes sought in the fact that Alfred, in the Preface to the Cura Pastoralis, speaks of Asser as ‘my bishop,’ at a time when Asser cannot have held his later diocese of Sherborne, as one of the copies of Alfred’s Cura Pastoralis was actually addressed to Wulfsige, Asser’s predecessor in that see. But if Asser was bishop of St. David’s when he came to Alfred, I should feel myself precluded from using this argument, for I could not regard it as impossible that Alfred should speak of Asser as ‘my bishop’ in respect of his Welsh bishopric, seeing that Asser expressly says that Hemeid, king of Dyfed, had commended himself to Alfred; or he might be called ‘my bishop’ in regard to the position which he held in Alfred’s service[79].

Argument from the mention of Asser’s illness.

§ 16. Another objection has been based on the passage in which Asser relates how, at the close of his first visit to Alfred, he promised to return in six months’ time, and give a definite answer to the king’s proposals; but on his way home, he says, ‘I was seized in the city of Winchester by a troublesome fever, in which I lay for a year and a week’; until Alfred sent letters to inquire why he had not kept his promise[80]. Now it has been argued that it is quite impossible that Asser should have been for over a year at Winchester without Alfred knowing about it. On the other hand, my late friend, Mr. Park Harrison, who, in spite of his advanced age, kept up his interest in these matters to the very end, called on me only a few weeks before his death, and argued that this same passage showed that Alfred could have had but little to do with Winchester, and therefore it was an impertinence of Winchester to attempt to monopolise the millenary celebration. As a matter of fact both arguments are baseless, and rest on a mistranslation. For in the passage cited, the words ‘in which’ (in qua), refer not to the city of Winchester, but to the fever. It is quite evident, I think, from the context that though it may have been at Winchester that Asser was attacked by the fever, yet he managed somehow to reach St. David’s, and that it was there that Alfred’s letters reached him.

Corruption of the text of Asser, largely due to editors.

§ 17. But before we can judge fairly of the work before us, we must try to do something to rescue the text from the very parlous condition in which it has come down to us. Indeed, with the exception of Ethelwerd’s Chronicle, hardly any work connected with Early English history has been textually so unfortunate as Asser. The only known manuscript of any antiquity perished almost entirely in the great Cottonian fire of 1731; the two existing manuscripts are paper copies of the sixteenth century. For our knowledge of the ancient Cottonian MS. we are dependent mainly on Wise’s edition of 1722; an excellent work for the time at which it was produced, but that it is not scrupulously accurate, according to modern notions, is proved by the fact that, whereas the facsimile given by Wise himself of the beginning of the MS. writes the name of Alfred’s birthplace, Uuanating, the text prints it Wanading. Moreover, the work has been shamefully tampered with by editors. Apart from longer interpolations, of which I shall speak presently, numberless smaller additions have been introduced into the text from the so-called Annals of Asser or of St. Neot[81], a compilation of the eleventh or twelfth century[82], largely based it is true on Asser for the period 851-887, and therefore available, within proper limits, like the works of other authors who have made use of Asser, for purposes of textual criticism; but not to be used, as has been done, for the wholesale depravation of the text. Even the editors of the Monumenta Historica Britannica were content to place these additions in brackets, instead of removing them altogether. Consequently they are often quoted by modern writers as if they were part of the original Asser.

Florence of Worcester’s use of Asser.

Of writers who have made use of Asser the most valuable, for our purposes, is Florence of Worcester. Very often he furnishes us with what is evidently the true reading[83], in one case at least a passage of some length can be recovered from his pages, which has been dropped out of our present text of Asser merely owing to homoioteleuton[84]. But even Florence must be used with caution for textual purposes. For just as his greater skill in composition led him (as we have seen[85]) to rearrange the materials with which Asser furnished him, so his better taste and greater command of Latin led him to revise and prune the language of his author. Moreover, in certain cases, Florence has corrected and supplemented Asser by the direct use of the Saxon Chronicle[86]. It must not therefore always be assumed that because Florence’s reading is better than Asser’s, it is therefore more original. Conversely, though rarely, Asser enables us to correct the text of Florence[87].

It is very curious that though Florence shows, by substituting the name Asser for the pronoun of the first person wherever it occurs, that he accepted Asser’s authorship of the work, he should place Asser’s death in 883, while continuing to use his narrative for four years longer.

Of the use of Asser by Simeon of Durham I shall have something to say presently[88].

The Oxford interpolation.

§ 18. Of the longer interpolations alluded to above, the first that must go is, of course, the famous passage about the University of Oxford[89]. This passage is a fine illustration of the remark, made in this place by my brilliant predecessor, Professor Maitland, that the earliest form of inter-university sports seems to have been a competition in lying. The different phases of that competition have been traced by Mr. James Parker in the first two chapters of his Early History of Oxford[90], and need not detain us here. This passage made its first appearance in the text of Asser under Camden’s auspices in 1603. It is much to be regretted that so worthy a name should be connected with so questionable a transaction[91]. I will only add that the use of the one word ‘Diuus’ instead of ‘Sanctus’ stamps the passage as a post-renaissance forgery.

The story of the cakes.

§ 19. The next passage which must go is what I must be pardoned for once more[92] calling the silly story about the cakes, and the yet more silly story of the tyranny and callousness of Alfred in the early days of his reign[93]. I hope to show later[94] how utterly inconsistent both these stories are with the genuine history of the reign. Here I need only say that the passage was introduced into our text by Archbishop Parker from the so-called Annals of Asser. It comes ultimately, as stated in the passage itself, from some life of St. Neot which I have not yet succeeded in identifying.

Interpolation at 877.

§ 20. I have pointed out in another place[95] that the printed text of Asser contains two accounts of the events of the year 877[96]. With the exception of a few words relating to the division of Mercia by the Danes, neither of these versions, according to Wise, existed in the oldest MS. That they were not in Florence’s MS. of Asser seems indicated by the fact, that this is one of the annals in which he resorts directly to the Saxon Chronicle. They therefore must also be expunged. I still, however, retain the conviction that the former of the two versions, though not traceable higher than Roger of Wendover in the thirteenth century, is yet perfectly genuine as history, and furnishes a valuable supplement to the account of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Earlier interpolations. Story of Alfred’s illness.

§ 21. So far our task has been comparatively simple. We have only had to remove what are obviously later accretions. But the question must now be faced whether the text, as we can prove it to have existed about the year 974, had not already suffered from the hand of the interpolator. From this point of view the most suspicious passage is that which describes the mysterious illness with which Alfred is said to have been attacked at his wedding-feast[97]. This passage has already been severely criticised by Pauli[98], though he has not exhausted all the arguments which can be brought against it.

Analysis.

In the first place it is entirely out of position. Though it refers to Alfred’s wedding, which has already been given, probably correctly, under 868, when Alfred was about twenty years old, it is inserted between the events of the year 884[99] and those of 886. The substance of the story is as follows:—During the marriage festivities Alfred was suddenly attacked by an intolerable pain, from which he has suffered, as those who daily see it know, without intermission, from his twentieth to his fortieth year, or longer. No one could trace its origin. Some thought it was ‘fascination,’ that is, the evil eye, due to the applause of the multitude; others, that it was the envy of the devil; others, some strange kind of fever; others, the disease called ‘ficus,’ from which he had suffered from his infancy. Once, when he was hunting in Cornwall, he turned aside to pray in a church, where St. Guerier reposes, and now also St. Neot rests, and entreated that some lighter affliction might be substituted for that from which he was suffering; such, however, as would not be externally apparent, like blindness or leprosy, so as to make him contemptible and incapable of discharging his functions. Shortly afterwards he was divinely healed of the ‘ficus.’ Though, indeed, this very ‘ficus’ had been given him in answer to prayer; for, in the first flower of his youth, before his marriage, feeling the assaults of carnal desire, he would often rise secretly and visit churches and relics of the saints, praying that God would strengthen him by sending him some infirmity, such, however, as would not make him unworthy or incapable in worldly matters. In answer to this prayer he shortly after received the ‘ficus,’ from which he suffered for many years, until it was removed by prayer. But alas, on its removal a worse affliction came upon him at his marriage which lasted from his twentieth to his forty-fifth year without intermission; and even if it leaves him for a single hour, the fear and horror of it never quit him, but render him, as he deems, almost useless in things divine and human.

Inconsistencies in the story. Improbability of the story.

§ 22. It would be difficult to cram more inconsistencies into so short a space. First of all, though the whole point of the story is to show that the wedding-feast disease was different from, and in substitution for, the ‘ficus,’ the writer ineptly says, that some people thought it was the ‘ficus.’ This is inserted in order to introduce the statement that Alfred had suffered from the latter disease ‘from infancy.’ Then, after telling how it was removed by prayer at the Cornish shrine, he adds that this same disease was sent in answer to prayer, when Alfred was ‘in the flower of his youth.’ We can hardly place this period earlier than (say) the seventeenth year (a very different thing from infancy); yet he suffered from it ‘for many years,’ though it had certainly ceased before his marriage in his twentieth year. Again, the condition that the visitation sent should not be disfiguring or incapacitating, is in one place attached to the substituted disease, lower down it is attached to the original trouble. It may be noted that the original disease does fulfil this condition, the substituted one certainly did not, seeing that it rendered Alfred ‘almost useless in things divine and human.’ And yet a main point of the passage is to illustrate the efficacy of Alfred’s prayers. Once more, at the beginning of the passage the substituted disease lasts from Alfred’s twentieth year to rather over his fortieth; towards the close it extends from the same date to his forty-fifth year—a very rapid growth. After all this it seems somewhat tame to remark that leprosy and blindness hardly come under one’s idea of ‘lighter infirmities.’

Possible conflation.

§ 23. In this triumph of ineptitude we may, I think, detect a conflation of two separate traditions; one of which represented Alfred as suffering from infancy from a disease for which in answer to prayer another was substituted; while, according to the other version, the original disease was granted in answer to prayer, and though removed by the same means, only departed to make way for a heavier visitation. But the whole passage is a concoction in the worst hagiological manner, to the source of which we are guided by the mention of St. Neot; for if the legendary Alfred was reformed by the legendary St. Neot, there is no doubt that the historical Alfred has been deformed in an extraordinary degree by the same agency. And in the present instance we may be glad, I think, to free the historical Alfred from the atmosphere of morbid religiosity which taints this whole passage. It may be noted that Florence, with his usual good sense, has entirely recast the incident, so as to remove most of the absurdities above enumerated. Whether the other two passages, which refer to Alfred’s illness[100], are also to be rejected is less easy to say. In one of them the language is very nearly akin to that of the present passage; but that might be due to the compiler having made use of it for his own bad purposes. Personally, I should not be sorry to let all these passages go; for it seems to me quite inconceivable that Alfred could have accomplished what he did under the hourly pressure of incapacitating disease[101]. Still we must distinguish between what is historically doubtful and what is textually suspicious. There are several things in Asser which, as we shall see, come under the former category, though I could not bring them under the latter.

Incorporation in the text of glosses and marginal notes.

§ 24. One source of the corruption of the text of Asser is, I think, to be found in the fact that words and phrases, which were originally interlinear glosses, have become, as often happens, incorporated with the text[102]. In one case the text of Florence seems to show that the gloss has entirely expelled the original reading, at least in the printed copies[103].

In another instance a marginal note by a later scribe has got into the text. As this case is of some importance as bearing on the date of the composition, I must ask your particular attention to it. In the description of Alfred’s visit to the Cornish shrine, already alluded to, the following sentence occurs:—‘Cum … ad quandam ecclesiam … diuertisset, in qua S. Gueryr requiescit, et nunc etiam S. Neotus ibidem pausat, subleuatus est (erat enim sedulus sanctorum locorum uisitator, …) diu in oratione prostratus … Domini misericordiam deprecabatur[104],’ &c. Here the words ‘subleuatus est’ can by no possibility be construed, either with what goes before, or with what follows. Some time before I saw the meaning of them, I had underlined these words in my copy of the Monumenta, and noted on the margin ‘this seems to make nonsense.’ The explanation, I believe, is this:—The original scribe had stated the repose of St. Neot’s remains in his Cornish home as a present fact, ‘ibidem pausat.’ A later scribe notes on the margin ‘subleuatus est,’ ‘he has been taken up’; a word very fitly used of the taking up a saint’s body from the grave in order to place it in some elevated shrine, or translate it to some other abode. A subsequent copyist incorporated the note with the text, which is again a frequent phenomenon[105]. Now the translation of St. Neot to the site which bears his name in Huntingdonshire took place about the year 974[106]. The original text of this passage must therefore be anterior to that date; the marginal note, and a fortiori the MS. on which our present text of Asser rests, must be subsequent to it. If, as I think, the passage in which these words occur is itself an interpolation, the evidence for the genuine text of Asser is thrown yet further back. However, the argument for a text of Asser earlier than 974, derived from the use of the present tense ‘pausat,’ is quite independent both of my explanation of the words ‘subleuatus est,’ and of my views as to the spurious character of the passage in which they occur.

LECTURE II
THE SOURCES (continued)

Further evidence for the text of Asser in the tenth century.

§ 25. We saw in the last lecture that there was good evidence for the existence of our text of Asser, apart from the interpolations made by sixteenth and seventeenth century editors, about the year 975. Another argument pointing the same way is derived from the text of Simeon of Durham.

Simeon of Durham.

In that writer’s Historia Regum there exists a double recension of the Annals 848-951, both of which are, for the years 848-888, largely derived, mediately or immediately, from Asser. The explanation of this curious fact given by Mr. Thomas Arnold in his interesting and able introduction to the edition of Simeon in the Rolls Series, is as follows[107]. The earlier recension is the work of a Cuthbertine monk, writing at Chester-le-Street in the second half of the tenth century, who drew largely on Asser for the reign of Alfred, farcing the text however (to use a liturgical term) with many rhetorical flourishes of his own. When Simeon, at the beginning of the twelfth century, embodied the Cuthbertine’s work in his Historia Regum, his better taste was revolted by these florid insertions, and he rewrote these annals, not wholly discarding his predecessor’s work, but using in addition both the original text of Asser, and also the recent work of Florence of Worcester. (The fact, which can be demonstrated, that Simeon used (1) the original text of Asser; (2) Asser as farced by the Cuthbertine; (3) Asser as revised by Florence, is one which I commend to the notice of students of the synoptic problem[108].) Had Simeon lived to give his work the final revision, he would no doubt have cancelled the earlier version of these annals. As it is, his literary executors embodied both versions; and we may be thankful that they did so, as they have thereby preserved some interesting evidence both literary and historical.

If then Mr. Arnold’s theory is correct, as I believe it to be, we have once more evidence of the existence of a text of Asser before the end of the tenth century. This however, though probable, is only a theory. But, even if it be rejected, the argument of the preceding section remains unaffected.

The palaeographical evidence unimportant.

§ 26. Seeing then that we can trace our Asser text back at least as far as the year 974, the palaeographical question as to the date of Wise’s MS. becomes comparatively unimportant. And it is well that it is so; for the doctors differ to an extraordinary degree. One morning in Bodley I submitted Wise’s facsimile of the beginning of his MS. to three eminent palaeographers of this University. The first was too wary to be caught by my chaff, and refused to give a definite opinion; the second said, ‘Not much later than 950’; the third said, ‘Well, it isn’t later than the twelfth century, but it isn’t very much earlier.’ I believe the general opinion would place it early in the eleventh century, and this fits in well enough with what I have tried to prove above, that it is copied, mediately or immediately, from a MS. which cannot be later than 974.

Conjectural emendation. Alfred’s intercourse with the East.

§ 27. Something may be done for the text of Asser by cautious conjectural emendation. There are a certain number of obvious blunders in it due to the carelessness of scribes, the ignorance of editors, possibly even to the mistakes of compositors[109]. Most of these are concerned with minor details. There is one correction however, with which I will trouble you, as it relates to a point of some historical interest; and, moreover, converts into a proof of Asser’s accuracy, what might have been used as an argument against him, though I am not aware that it has actually been so used. In the somewhat magniloquent passage in which are described the extensive relations which Alfred cultivated with foreign parts, the following sentence occurs[110]: ‘nam etiam de Hiersolyma Abel patriarcha [v. l. patriarchae] epistolas … illi directas uidimus et legimus.’ The passage as it stands is open to two objections, one historical, the other grammatical. The historical objection is that no one of the name of Abel held the patriarchate of Jerusalem during Alfred’s reign; though our historians go on copying and recopying the name without ever dreaming of verifying the point. The grammatical objection is that the passive participle ‘directas’ cries aloud for a preposition of agency. By the addition of two vowels and the subtraction (if necessary) of another the passage can be brought into harmony both with history and grammar, thus: ‘ab Elia patriarcha.’ Elias III was patriarch of Jerusalem from 879 to 907[111]. In the earlier of the two versions which occur in Simeon of Durham the word ‘Abel’ is printed ‘a Bel[112].’ This does justice to the grammar, but not to the history. In the later version, Simeon himself, following Florence, omits the passage altogether. One would be glad to know whether Florence omitted it because he saw the objections to which it was open.

Evidence of the Leechbook, and of the Anglo-Saxon Martyrology.

I was first put on the track of this correction by the curious passage of the Leechbook printed by Mr. Cockayne in the second volume of his interesting Anglo-Saxon Leechdoms, where the writer, after giving certain medical recipes, says at the end: ‘all this my Lord Elias, patriarch of Jerusalem, bade thus say to King Alfred[113].’ As the MS. from which this is taken is, according to Mr. Cockayne, of the early part of the tenth century[114], we are brought very near indeed to Alfred’s time. Moreover in the Anglo-Saxon Martyrology printed by the same editor in his work called ‘The Shrine; a collection of occasional papers on dry subjects,’ two Eastern saints, martyred in Persia in 341, SS. Milus and Senneus, are commemorated at November 15[115]. These are found in no Western Calendar, and Mr. Cockayne thinks that the knowledge of them must have come to England through Alfred’s intercourse with Elias of Jerusalem. The martyrology, which is unfortunately incomplete, was not improbably drawn up by Alfred’s directions, and cannot be later than his reign, as it mentions St. Oswald’s body as resting at Bardney[116], whence it was translated to Gloucester by Æthelflæd, lady of the Mercians, and her husband Æthelred, not long after Alfred’s death[117].

In one instance, I may remark in passing, the editors have altered Asser’s text for the worse, what the Germans call ‘Verschlimmbesserung.’ It is the passage where Athelney monastery is said to be unapproachable ‘nisi cauticis, aut etiam per unum pontem[118].’ Here ‘cauticis’ has been altered to ‘nauticis.’ But ‘cautica’ is a perfectly good word, and means causeway, chaussée[119], a much better sense than any that can be got out of ‘nauticis[120].’

Evidence of the work as to the author. He was a native of South Wales.

§ 28. But even when all has been done that criticism can do for the restoration and purification of the text, the work still remains a puzzle almost insoluble. What can we make out as to the author? It is clear that he was a Celt from South Wales. This is proved partly by his language and terminology, partly by his knowledge of South Welsh affairs. As to the former point, he has the special Celtic use of the terms ‘right-hand’ and ‘left-hand,’ to express the ideas of south and north. The Celt always faced the east, and named the quarters of the heaven from that point of view. Thus Chippenham is in the left-hand part of Wiltshire[121]. The author’s own home was to the left and west of Severn[122]. The Danes throw up earthworks on the right-hand side of Reading[123]; Sussex is the region of the right-hand Saxons[124]; and, lastly, all the regions of the right-hand part of Britannia belonged to Alfred[125]. This does not, however, exclude the use of the more ordinary words ‘meridianus’ and ‘aquilonaris’ for south and north[126].

Ambiguous use of the term Britannia.

§ 29. The example last cited brings me to another characteristic of the author’s terminology; viz. his ambiguous use of the word Britannia, which sometimes means Britain in the ordinary sense[127], but more often means Wales. Historians have gone wrong through ignoring this distinction. Thus Dr. Pauli[128], in the passage just quoted, takes Britannia in what is to us the ordinary sense. But that all the southern parts of Britain belonged to Alfred is so obvious as not to be worth saying. That all the southern districts of Wales had submitted to Alfred is a new and most interesting fact. And this clearly is the meaning; for the statement is introductory to that sketch of the troubles in South Wales which explains both why the South Welsh princes commended themselves to Alfred, and why the author consented to enter his service. Moreover this use is paralleled again and again in the Book of Llandaff, a primary South Welsh authority. We find there Asser’s very phrase ‘dextralis pars Britanniae’ several times repeated[129]. We have the clergy and people, the inhabitants, the churches, the archbishop, the kings and princes, the kingdom, the islands, ‘Dextralis Britanniae[130].’ To return to Asser:—Æthelwulf reduces ‘Britannia’ under Burgred of Mercia[131]; Offa’s dyke divides Mercia from ‘Britannia[132],’ and finally Asser himself agrees to spend half his time ‘in Britannia’ and half with Alfred ‘in Saxonia[133].’

Use of the terms Saxones and Saxonia. Limitation of the term Saxonia.

§ 30. This brings me to my next point. For our author, as for all branches of the Celtic race, the Germanic tribes settled in Britain bear the common name of Saxons[134]. So much is this the case that he once writes ‘regnum Orientalium Saxonum, quod Saxonice Eastengle dicitur[135].’ This is a mere slip, for in other cases he has ‘Orientales Angli’ quite correctly[136]. But it shows how much more natural the word ‘Saxones’ was to him than the other. So too their language is ‘Saxonica lingua[137],’ as opposed to Welsh, which is ‘Britannicus sermo[138]’; a place bears one name, ‘Saxonice,’ ‘in English[139],’ and another, ‘Britannice,’ ‘in Welsh[140]’; and we hear of the ‘Saxon’ poems which Alfred loved from his boyhood[141], and of the ‘Saxon’ books[142], in which they and other English writings were contained. So too the country of these tribes is ‘Saxonia[143].’ But here it is important to notice the precise limitations under which Asser uses this last term. It is not coextensive with the whole of Germanic Britain. It includes Wessex, Sussex, Kent, Surrey, and Essex. Cornwall is excluded as being Celtic[144]; but Mercia is also excluded[145], and a fortiori, though this is not expressly mentioned, East Anglia and Northumbria[146]. In other words it includes that part of the island which, at the death of Egbert, was under the direct rule of Wessex; or, to borrow Bede’s useful distinction, it connotes the ‘regnum’ as opposed to the ‘imperium[147]’ of the West Saxon house. It is possible that in many cases the term ‘Saxones’ should be understood with a like limitation, for the Mercii, Northanhymbri, and Orientales Angli are generally mentioned separately. But I do not think that this limitation can be carried out quite so rigorously, for instance where Asser speaks of the ‘Schola Saxonum’ at Rome[148], answering to the ‘Angelcynnes scolu’ of the Chronicle. In one case he does expressly distinguish ‘Angli et Saxones[149].’

Alfred ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons.’

§ 31. And in this connexion it is deplorable to remark that for Asser Alfred is always ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons[150]’; but then we must remember that Asser never had the advantage of reading Mr. Freeman’s history of the Norman Conquest, or of attending the lectures of Professor Napier. But, jesting apart, it is important to note that by the use of this title our author intends to mark a real advance in power and dignity on the part of Alfred as compared with his predecessors, none of whom bears any higher style than that of king of the West Saxons[151], and the change of style is justified by the fact that a large number of Mercian Angles became Alfred’s immediate subjects in 878. On the other hand Asser does not exaggerate Alfred’s position, as later Chroniclers do, calling him ‘monarch of the whole of Britain’ and so on[152]. If the heading of the work is genuine, as I am inclined for this very reason to think it is, Alfred is addressed as ‘ruler of all the Christians of the isle of Britain[153].’ In other words the writer recognises exactly the same limitations to Alfred’s power as does the Saxon Chronicle, where it says that, after Alfred’s occupation of London, all the English kin submitted to him, except what was under the thraldom of the Danes[154].

Other Celtic terms.

Another term of Celtic origin is probably to be found in the unique title of ‘secundarius’ given by Asser to Alfred during the reign of Æthelred[155]; but of this I shall have more to say in another lecture; while for ‘graphium’ in the sense of ‘donation’ or ‘written grant,’ the only other authority quoted is from the life of a Welsh saint[156].

Celtic use of the term Germania.

§ 32. Another trace of Celtic influence is to be found, I believe, in the innocent-looking passage where it is said that in 884 an army of pagans from Germany, ‘de Germania,’ invaded the Old or Continental Saxons[157]. It might be thought that this merely refers to the fact that part, at any rate, of the invading army had wintered at Duisburg on the Rhine[158]. But could they be said to be going from Germany when they invaded Saxony? I cannot speak positively as to all the mediaeval uses of the word ‘Germania,’ but one would think that it must include Saxony[159]. But however this may be, the fact remains that Asser nowhere applies the name ‘Germania’ to any part of the Carolingian empire. The people of that empire are Franks[160]. Charles the Great[161], Charles the Bald[162], Charles the Fat[163], Louis the Stammerer[164], Louis, king of Northern France[165], are all kings of the Franks. Carloman, king of Aquitaine and Burgundy, is king of the Western Franks[166]. We hear also of the kingdom or region of the Western Franks[167]. The territory included in the empire as a whole is called Francia[168]. The eastern kingdom is Francia Orientalis[169]. The western territory is sometimes called Gallia[170], and its inhabitants are Gauls[171], or of Gallic race[172]. Charles the Fat, before he gained the western kingdom, is king of the Alamanni[173]. I believe that Germania here means Norway, a meaning which, strange as it may seem, it unquestionably has in the Welsh Annals. Thus at 1036 the Brut y Tywysogion calls Canute king of England, Denmark, and Germania, while at 1056 the title king of Germania is given to Harold Hardrada. In other words, the invaders of Saxony, according to Asser, came from Norway, and not from Denmark, which he calls Danubium[174].

Other Celtic characteristics.

Another very obvious characteristic of the writer is his fondness for giving Welsh equivalents for English names of places[175].

May I add without offence that I think another Celtic trait in our author is a certain largeness of statement? Mons. Henri Martin, a great admirer of the Celts, notes as characteristic of them a certain ‘rebellion against facts[176]’; and there are many things in Asser which we can hardly accept as literally true, though, as I have shown already, and shall have to show again, some of the criticisms directed against him rest on misunderstandings of his words.

Knowledge of South Welsh affairs.

§ 33. We have next to consider the author’s knowledge of South Welsh affairs. The principal passage is the one already alluded to where Asser describes his motives for entering Alfred’s service[177]. He and his friends hoped thereby to check the mischief inflicted on St. David’s by Hemeid, king of Dyfed, who had on one occasion expelled Archbishop Novis, Asser’s relative, and himself. Alfred was in a position to help, for some time previously all the princes of South Wales had commended themselves to Alfred; Hemeid himself, and Helised ap Teudyr, king of Brecheiniog, owing to the pressure of the sons of Rotri Mawr, king of North Wales; while Howel ap Rhys, king of Glewissig, Brochmail and Fernmail, sons of Mouric, kings of Gwent, took the same step, owing to the pressure of Æthelred of Mercia. Even Anaraut, son of Rotri himself, with his brothers, leaving the friendship of the Northumbrians (by which I take the Northumbrian Danes to be meant) sought the king’s friendship; and after being honourably received by him, and made his godson at confirmation, agreed to stand to him in the same relation of subordination as Æthelred did in Mercia, and was dismissed with rich presents—a scene which almost repeats the submission of Guthrum, and incidentally perhaps supports the view that the defect of which Augustine complained in Welsh baptismal practice, was the omission of the rite of confirmation[178]; while the comparison with Æthelred of Mercia illustrates the semi-royal position of Alfred’s son-in-law[179] at least as forcibly as it illustrates Anaraut’s dependence.

Relations of Wales to Wessex.

§ 34. Many years ago the late Mr. Bradshaw laid stress on the forms of these Welsh names as showing that Asser could not be a late forgery[180]. This argument becomes of less importance in view of the results we have already arrived at as to the date, and of the fact that names of the same type occur in documents later than the latest date which any reasonable critic could propose for Asser[181]. But the whole passage throws a flood of light on the state of Wales, and its relations to the house of Wessex. We see South Wales forced to submit to Wessex by the joint pressure of North Wales and Mercia; while North Wales, which had remained hostile at any rate up to 880, when a battle was fought which was regarded as avenging the slaughter of Rotri Mawr by the Saxons in 877[182], ultimately found it to its interest to seek the shelter of the West Saxon overlord. Thus we see actually going on before our eyes the transition from the state of things under Egbert, when the Celtic population joined eagerly with the Scandinavian invaders in the hope of undoing the work of the Saxon Conquest[183], to a state of things in which they combine with their Saxon rivals against the common foe. It seems to me that such a passage, introduced so incidentally and naturally, could only have been written by a contemporary writer. Moreover all the South Welsh princes, with two exceptions, are mentioned in the Book of Llandaff, several of them occur in the Annals. Hemeid of Dyfed, Asser’s enemy, died in 892 or 891[184]. Howel ap Rhys is probably the Howel who died at Rome in 885[185] whither he had gone, it is not unlikely, in expiation of the crime—a peculiarly foul case of treachery—recited in the Book of Llandaff[186]. His district, Glewissig, is often mentioned in the same authority; it is ‘roughly the district between the lower courses of the Usk and Towy[187].’ Mouric of Gwent and his sons Brochmail and Fernmail also occur frequently[188]. Mouric is probably the one whose death is recorded in 873[189]. The only prince as to whom I can find nothing is Helised ap Teudyr of Brecheiniog. But there is a Teudyr ab Elised, king of Brecheiniog[190], contemporary with Llunwerth or Llwmbert, the successor of Novis in the see of St. David’s, who is not impossibly his father. Of Novis himself I have said enough above ([p. 20]).

Events of 878.

Another place where the author shows his knowledge of South Welsh affairs is in the interesting addition which he makes to the Chronicle under 878, to the effect that the heathen force which besieged Cynwit on the north coast of Devon, had wintered in Dyfed, and massacred many Christians there[191]. Facts like this explain the change of attitude on the part of the Welsh. South Wales also suffered severely in 895[192].

Question as to unity of authorship. Peculiar sense of the word aedificia.

§ 35. I have so far spoken of ‘our author’ in the singular. But the question must now be faced: is the work (apart from actual and possible interpolations) the composition of a single hand? When I first took up this question I rather hoped that the result to be arrived at would be, that the annals were the work of one author, the biographical notes of another, while the florid head-links, of which I spoke before[193], would be the work of the later editor who combined the two documents. This would have been a result dear to the heart of the higher critic. But any such theory, however pretty, will not stand a moment’s examination. Allowing for the difference of subject-matter, the same characteristics appear both in the annalistic and biographical sections. Thus of five instances of the Celtic use of left and right instead of north and south, two occur in the annals and three in the biography; ‘Britannia,’ in the sense of ‘Wales,’ occurs six times in the biography and once in the annals[194]. So there are some not quite common words and expressions, for which the writer has an evident predilection, which are sprinkled about both parts of the work. The details are too dry for reproduction here, and may be safely relegated to the obscurity of a footnote[195]. But one instance is of sufficient general interest to merit discussion. This is the use of the word ‘aedificia’ in the sense of articles of goldsmiths’ work. To this I can produce no parallel from any other writer; but the meaning seems to me practically certain in three instances, and probable in the fourth; and of these four cases one occurs in the annals, and the rest in the biography. The first instance is where Alfred, after Guthrum’s baptism, gives him ‘multa et optima aedificia[196].’ It is clear that Guthrum did not carry away with him edifices, in the ordinary sense of the word. Lappenberg would alter ‘aedificia’ into ‘beneficia[197]’; ‘mit vollem Rechte,’ says Pauli[198]; but this will hardly do in other cases, as we shall see.

The next instance is where Asser says that Alfred ‘by his novel contrivance made “aedificia” more venerable and precious than any of his predecessors[199].’ Here the ordinary meaning is just possible, though the epithet ‘pretiosiora’ and the fact that ‘aurifices et artifices’ are mentioned just before, point decidedly the other way. The third passage speaks of ‘aedificia of gold and silver incomparably wrought under his instructions[200].’ Even the most Celtic imagination cannot suppose that Alfred built edifices, in the ordinary sense, of the precious metals, especially as his own royal halls and chambers are expressly stated to have been of stone and wood[201]. The fourth passage tells how Alfred had workmen who were skilled ‘in omni terreno aedificio[202],’ where the meaning is probably the same. The use of the word in so strange a sense in both parts of the work seems to me a strong proof of unity of authorship. The usage, however, becomes a little less strange if we remember how much of the goldsmith’s art at that time would go to the making of shrines and reliquaries, which really were ‘edifices’ in miniature. The two middle passages which speak of Alfred’s ‘novel contrivance,’ and of his personal instructions to his workmen, are of singular interest in connexion with the Alfred Jewel; and the fact that my friend Professor Earle, who has made a special study of that jewel, agrees with my interpretation of these passages, adds greatly to my confidence in advancing it. Alfred’s love for this kind of art seems to have been hereditary. William of Malmesbury gives an account of a shrine which Æthelwulf had made to contain the bones of St. Aldhelm. ‘The covering is of crystal, whereon the king’s name may be read in letters of gold[203].’ This exactly answers to the character of the Alfred Jewel.

Asser’s style.

§ 36. Of Asser’s style two prominent characteristics are a fondness for long parentheses[204], and a tiresome trick of repeating a word or phrase, sometimes with a slight variation, at intervals, in some cases longer, in others very short[205]. He certainly would have had no chance with the editor who objected to the quotation ‘to the pure all things are pure,’ on the ground that it sinned against the rule of the office that the same word must not be repeated within six lines. Occasionally he seems as if he could not get away from a phrase, but clings to it, as a drowning man clings to a plank; and I think that this feature is due, not to any love for these particular words and phrases, but to a poverty of expression like that which causes the repetitions of an unpractised speaker. These characteristics come out most strongly no doubt in the biographical sections, but they are not wholly absent from the others[206].

Relation of Asser to the Saxon Chronicle. Mistranslation, or misunderstanding.

§ 37. The next question which must be considered is the relation of the Latin Annals of Asser to the corresponding passages of the Saxon Chronicle. Sir Henry Howorth indeed expresses roundly his conviction that Asser wrote (if indeed he would not rather say forged) the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle[207]. This I regard as quite inconceivable. Sir James Ramsay, without going so far as this, records that ‘several’ passages have convinced him that the Latin of Asser is more original than the Saxon of the Chronicle[208]. Unfortunately he does not indicate these passages. My own conviction is unfalteringly the other way. In the first place there is at least one passage in Asser which can only be explained as a mistranslation of the Chronicle. It occurs under 876. Here the Chronicle has a phrase which puzzled all translators of the Chronicle, mediaeval and modern, till it was cleared up by Professor Earle. It runs thus: ‘The mounted force (i.e. of the Danes) stole away from the fyrd and got into Exeter.’ Asser misunderstands this, making it a defeat of a native body of cavalry by the Danes[209]. At 886[210] there seems also to be a mistranslation or misunderstanding, but the text is possibly corrupt, and Florence has not improved it.

‘East-Seaxum.’

Again, such forms as ‘Middel-Seaxum[211],’ ‘East-Seaxum[212],’ ‘Suð-Seaxum[213],’ ‘Eald-Seaxum[214],’ which contain the Saxon dative plural surely imply a Saxon original. It may be noted too that Asser retains the Saxon name of the river Seine, Signe[215], whereas the more classical Florence translates it into the Latin form, Sequana. Phrases again like ‘ipso eodem anno[216]’ for ‘þy ilcan geare,’ and the constantly recurring ‘loco funeris dominati sunt[217]’ for ‘ahton wælstowe geweald,’ ‘superius’ for ‘ufor[218]’ point the same way.

Omission.

Again, Asser accidentally omits the annal 884, which is a very brief one in the Chronicle. Consequently, he mechanically puts the events of 885 under 884.

Chronology.

Lastly, Steenstrup showed by a comparison of the continental Chronicles that the movements of the Danes from 879 to 897 in the Saxon Chronicle (= 878-896) are probably dated a year too late[219]. This is confirmed by the mention of a solar eclipse under 879 at one o’clock of the day. Now in 878 there was a solar eclipse on October 29, at 1.30 p.m. There was a solar eclipse also in 879, on March 26, but this was at 4 p.m. Asser gives the hour of the eclipse as ‘between nones and vespers but nearer to nones[220].’ In other words he has altered the hour of the eclipse given by the Chronicle to suit the wrong numbering of the Annal. The force of these arguments taken together seems to me overwhelming.

Asser’s additions to the Chronicle.

§ 38. But Asser is not content to be a mere translator. He makes considerable additions to the Chronicle, which vary very much in value. Some are pure rhetoric, others are mere inferences from the words of the Chronicle, legitimate enough it may be, but of no higher authority than similar inferences deduced by ourselves. Many consist of interpretations of Saxon names[221], or statements of their Welsh equivalents[222]. A considerable number are geographical glosses explaining the situation of the places mentioned[223]. These three last classes of additions occur only in the Annals, and all three seem to point to an interpreter wishing to make his original clearer to his readers, who are assumed to be unfamiliar with Saxon names and places. Even the situation of London is carefully explained. But other additions, like the one discussed above about the wintering of the Danish fleet in Dyfed[224], are of real value, and evidently rest on authentic information.

Abrupt termination.

§ 39. The abrupt termination of the work after the year 887 has always been a difficulty. If we could trust the statement that the work was written in Alfred’s forty-fifth year, i.e. about 894[225], we might account for this by supposing that the Chronicle, from which the writer borrows so much, had not at that time got much beyond 887. And the work may have been laid aside and never taken up again. Unfortunately this date occurs in one of those suspicious passages about Alfred’s illness, though not in the one most open to suspicion. Or, again, the work may be mutilated.

Asser to be used with caution; but there is a genuine nucleus.

§ 40. On the whole, then, Asser is an authority to be used with criticism and caution; partly because we have always to be alive to the possibility of interpolation, partly because the writer’s Celtic imagination is apt to run away with him. But that there is a nucleus which is the genuine work of a single writer, a South Walian contemporary of Alfred, I feel tolerably sure, and I know no reason why that South Walian contemporary should not be Asser of Menevia. There is a slight confirmation of this view in the quotation which the writer makes from Gregory’s Cura Pastoralis[226], for we know from Alfred’s own mouth that Asser was one of those who helped him in the translation of that work. Another coincidence with Alfred’s preface to the Cura Pastoralis is to be found in the phrase ‘aliquando sensum ex sensu ponens,’ which Asser uses in reference to the translation of Gregory’s Dialogues[227]. Anyhow, as I have shown[228], the work which bears Asser’s name cannot be later than 974, and the attempt to treat it as a forgery of the eleventh or twelfth century must be regarded as having broken down. I may add that I started with a strong prejudice against the authenticity of Asser, so that my conclusions have at any rate been impartially arrived at.

A puzzling work.

§ 41. Still the book remains a puzzle both in form and substance. It was a curious work to offer to Alfred if it contained the scandals about Æthelbald and Judith, and what we must regard as the idealised description of Alfred’s court and administration. I am conscious that I am very far from having solved the problem. I shall be content if I am thought to have contributed something towards a solution, which will perhaps be given before long by Mr. Stevenson. The suggestion of Mr. Macfadyen that the work was drawn up with a view to Alfred’s canonisation[229] may be dismissed at once. People are not canonised in their lifetime.

Lives of saints.

§ 42. In one class of historical literature, which often very usefully supplements more formal histories, the reign of Alfred is singularly barren, I mean the lives of saints. We have nothing like the lives of Dunstan, Oswald, and Æthelwold, which give us so much help towards the end of the next century; or like the lives of Wilfrid and Cuthbert at an earlier period. The times, indeed, were not favourable to the development of saintship of the mediaeval pattern. The monasteries, the chief schools of that type of sanctity, suffered more than any other institutions at the hands of the Danes; and the virtues which the age required were of a more active kind than those which went to make up the mediaeval ideal. The title of saint is indeed given by one authority to Werferth, bishop of Worcester; but this rests, as we shall see, on a misconception; though in truth, as Mr. Taylor has remarked, the conduct of Werferth in accepting the see of Worcester in 872, the very year preceding the expulsion of Burgred, king of Mercia, Alfred’s brother-in-law, by the Danes, was as heroic as that of any Christian missionary[230].

Lives of St. Neot; their mythical character.

§ 43. The only hagiological literature relating to Alfred’s reign consists of the lives of St. Neot. And these are late, and not merely unhistorical, but anti-historical. To them are due some of the prevalent misconceptions as to Alfred’s reign. For this very reason something must be said about them.

Five Lives. The Bodleian Life. The Bollandist Life. The Metrical Life. The Anglo-Saxon Life.

The existing Lives of St. Neot are, as far as I know, five in number, four in Latin, of which three are in prose and one in verse, and one Anglo-Saxon Life. Besides these there is, as we have seen, a fragment of another Latin Life, embodied in the Annals of St. Neot, and thence transferred by Archbishop Parker to the text of Asser[231]. Roger of Wendover’s account of St. Neot[232] seems also to be based on some Life different from any of those mentioned above. Of the Latin Lives that have come down to us the earliest is that contained in MS. Bodley 379, and printed at the end of Whitaker’s Life of St. Neot[233]. It may sufficiently characterise this writer’s style to say that he describes Wessex as the country of ‘the Anglican Saxons who dwell beneath the Zephyr wind[234].’ The next Latin Life is that printed by the Bollandists[235] from a MS. formerly belonging to Bec. It bears within itself clear evidence of being later than the Norman Conquest[236]. This is a very pedantic writer. He talks much of form and matter, genus and species[237], ‘the dry notions of Logicians,’ as one translator of Thomas à Kempis[238] depreciatingly calls them; and is fond of using Greek words like ‘anatole,’ ‘mesembria,’ ‘dysis[239].’ The Metrical Life, printed by Whitaker[240] from a MS. belonging to Magdalen College, Oxford, is clearly based on this, of which also John of Tynemouth’s Life[241] is a mere abridgement. The Anglo-Saxon Life (or rather Homily) is preserved in a Cottonian MS. (Vesp. D. xiv), whence it was printed by the Rev. G. C. Gorham in his History and Antiquities of Eynesbury and St. Neot’s (1824)[242], and more recently by Cockayne[243] and Wülker[244]. As to its date widely different views have been held, based on divergent interpretations of a passage near the end, where the writer contrasts the evils of his own times with the prosperity of Alfred’s later years. Sir T. Duffus Hardy thought that this description pointed to the year 986 as the date of composition[245], while Professor Earle would place it in the eleventh or twelfth century[246]. But the mistake of the writer in making Neot contemporary with Ælfheah of Canterbury is absolutely conclusive against the earlier date[247]. Wülker is inclined to attribute it to Ælfric[248]; but this also is unlikely. It is clearly based on earlier Lives, for the expressions occur: ‘as books say,’ ‘it is told in writings,’ &c.[249] But I do not think it is directly derived from any of the preceding Lives, and, though not ancient, it may be earlier than any of them. It certainly contains one miracle which is not found in any of the others, a very quaint story (probably a folk-tale) of a fox which stole the Saint’s shoe while he was bathing[250].

Analysis of the Lives.

§ 44. These lives cover much the same ground. St. Neot is made the son of Æthelwulf and his wife, granted to their prayers as a reward for their piety[251]. Æthelwulf is represented not incorrectly as king of one of the four English kingdoms, viz. of Wessex with Kent[252], the other three of course being Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria. Of the relations of these kingdoms a very ideal sketch is given. As the Metrical Life says, in verses which are as open to criticism on prosodical as they are on historical grounds:—

‘Suffecit cuique sua pars, nec plura petebat,

Alter in alterius nil sibi iure petit.

Pax stabilis, uita concors, discordia nulla;

Inter eos regnat gratia, liuor abest[253].’

Neot becomes a monk at Glastonbury under Dunstan[254] (who was made abbot of Glastonbury in 946!), and was the special friend of Æthelwold[255] (bishop of Winchester 963!) or of his successor Ælfheah[256]! After this Neot becomes an anchorite in Cornwall, whence he goes to Rome to Pope Marinus[257]. On his return he founds a monastery in Cornwall[258], and now it is that Alfred first hears of him (though according to the pedigree he would be his own brother). Alfred visits him, and Neot rebukes him for his licentiousness and tyranny[259], compelling him, in the words of the Bollandist Life, ‘to tremble at the sulphureous flames of Gehenna’; he prophesies Alfred’s expulsion from the throne, and his ultimate restoration, and then dies[260]. Next comes the invasion of Guthrum. Alfred gives up everything and flies to Athelney; the cakes are duly burnt[261], and then St. Neot appears in a vision and finally leads the English hosts to victory at Ethandun[262].

Absurdity of the story.

§ 45. It would not be necessary to quote this precious stuff, even in outline, were it not that people still continue to treat it as more or less historical. I have already adverted to the strange inconsistency of making Alfred first hear of Neot’s fame after the latter’s return from Rome, although he was his own brother according to the pedigree. This seems to show that the making Neot a son of Æthelwulf was a later development, and not part of the original legend. And, indeed, in the fragment of the Life interpolated in Asser he is no more than Alfred’s ‘cognatus[263],’ which in mediaeval Latin means cousin, or sometimes brother-in-law, like ‘cognato’ in modern Italian[264]. But if St. Neot ever existed, his connexion with the royal house of Wessex has probably as little basis in fact, as the forged Carolingian pedigree which the later Lives of St. Hubert give to that Saint[265]. Another noteworthy point is that the only pope contemporary with Alfred known to these Lives is Marinus[266], though his obscure pontificate only lasted a little over a year (December, 882, to the beginning of 884[267]), and was some time posterior to the death of Neot, who is represented as dying before the campaign of 878[268]. The reason for this prominence is, of course, to be found in the privileges which this pope was said to have granted, at Alfred’s request, to the English School at Rome[269], and still more in the story that he had sent a fragment of the true cross to Alfred[270]. I need hardly say that the idea of Alfred’s early licentiousness, or of his tyranny at the beginning of his reign, is absolutely inconsistent with authentic history. The year 871, when Wessex was at deathgrips with the foe, was not the time, even if Alfred had been the man, for establishing a tyranny. It is pitiable that modern writers should lend even half an ear[271] to these wretched tales, which besmirch the fair fame of our hero king, in order to exalt a phantom saint.

Alfred’s withdrawal to Athelney.

§ 46. But perhaps the worst misconception, and the one which has most injuriously affected English history, is that connected with the withdrawal to Athelney. The Lives represent Alfred on the invasion of Guthrum as becoming not merely a helpless, but a cowardly and criminal fugitive. This view is put most strongly in the Saxon Life, which runs as follows[272]: ‘Then came Guthrum the heathen king with his cruel host first to the eastern part of Saxland (Saxonia).… When King Alfred … learnt that the host … was … so near England, he straightway for fear took to flight, and forsook all his warriors and his captains and all his people, … and crept by hedge and lane, through wood and field, till he … came to Athelney,’ where the cakes are burnt. Now there is no doubt that Wessex was thoroughly surprised by the sudden attack of the Danes at mid-winter, after twelfth-night, 878[273]. And it is possible that in this the Danes were hardly ‘playing the game.’ Military operations were generally suspended in the winter. Chippenham was a ‘villa regia’ as Asser notes; and it looks as if the Danes, with Boer ‘slimness,’ had tried to surprise Alfred in his winter home[274]. Happily they failed in this, and, as Pauli has finely said[275], Alfred’s cause was not hopeless as long as Alfred was alive. For the moment the struggle was converted into a guerilla war. But this is what authentic history has to say about it: ‘Here the host … stole on Chippenham and surprised Wessex, … and most of the people they reduced except the King Alfred[276], and he with a little band made his way with difficulty by wood and swamp; … and then after Easter he with his little band made a fort at Athelney, and from that fort kept fighting against the foe[277],’ until he in his turn surprised the Danes, and forced them to submit. Athelney, in fact, played no small part in the redemption of England.

Later Chroniclers; Ethelwerd.

§ 47. Of later Chroniclers, Ethelwerd, at the end of the next century, bases his work mainly on the Chronicle. But, like Asser, he has good additions here and there; and as he was closely connected with the royal house of Wessex, being descended from Æthelred, Alfred’s brother, and was also highly placed as an ealdorman in Wessex, he may well have had access to authentic sources of information. Unfortunately there is no one who has worked at Ethelwerd, who will not echo Ranke’s sigh: ‘wenn er nur verständlich wäre[278]!’ ‘If only he were intelligible!’ The designation which he gives to himself: ‘Patricius consul Fabius Quaestor Ethelwerdus’ is but too true an index of the puerile pomposity of his style. Something of this unintelligibility is no doubt to be put down to the corruption of the text[279], of which no MS. is known to exist. But if he fails to make us understand his Latin, his blunders in translating the Chronicle show that he had a very imperfect acquaintance with the Saxon language[280]. It is possible that this fact may be due, as Professor York Powell once suggested to me, to his having been brought up on the Continent.

Florence of Worcester.

The careful Florence gives us less help than usual in this reign, because, as we have seen, he borrows so much from Asser. His splendid and inspiring panegyric on Alfred[281] is almost his only serious addition, though a worthy one, to what we learn from Asser and the Chronicle.

Henry of Huntingdon.

Henry of Huntingdon makes no use of Asser, and does little more than reproduce the Chronicle. There is no trace of the use of ancient ballads[282], such as we find in other parts of his history; no survival of personal traditions, like the splendid anecdotes of old Siward a century and a half later, one of which is the ultimate source of Shakespeare’s glorious lines:—

‘Had he his hurts before?’

‘Ay, on the front.’

‘Why then, God’s soldier be he!

Had I as many sons as I have hairs,

I would not wish them to a fairer death.’

One picturesque phrase Huntingdon has, where, describing the sudden swoop of the Danes on Chippenham in January, 878, he says that ‘they covered the land like locusts[283].’

Simeon of Durham. Legend of St. Cuthbert.

§ 48. Of the double recension of the annals of this reign in Simeon of Durham I have spoken above. In the second one, which is Simeon’s own, there is very little which is not derived from Florence, Asser, and the Chronicle, except a few notices of northern affairs, taken mainly from his own history of the Church of Durham. The earlier recension also adds little to our authorities, except the writer’s own rhetoric, of which the following specimen from the opening of the battle of Ethandun may suffice[284]:—‘When the most limpid ray of the sun arose, the king and all the glory of his people put on their warlike adornments, that is to say, the threefold breastplate of faith, hope, and love of God. They, rising from the ground, boldly challenged the caitifs[285] to the fight, trusting in the clemency of the Creator, secure and fortified as with a rampart by the presence of their king, whose countenance shone like that of a resplendent angel,’ with more to the same purpose—or want of purpose. In these northern accounts St. Cuthbert plays very much the part which St. Neot plays in southern legend, appearing to Alfred in his distress, and promising him victory[286], a trait adopted also by William of Malmesbury[287]. And with this stream of legend Mr. Freeman[288] ingeniously connects the dedication of the parish church[289] of Wells to St. Cuthbert, a very unusual dedication for a south-country church. Moreover, some of these northern accounts prolong the retreat of Alfred in the marshes of Somerset from three months to three years[290]. We are fast entering the world of legend.

William of Malmesbury.

William of Malmesbury uses both Asser and the Chronicle, though he declines ‘to unravel separately the inextricable labyrinths of Alfred’s labours.’ He adds not only the legend of St. Cuthbert, but also the stories of the golden bracelets, and of Alfred visiting the Danish camp disguised as a minstrel[291]; wandering folk-tales which get attached to more than one historical character. There is no reason to believe that Malmesbury had for Alfred’s reign any historical authority not open to ourselves, as he unquestionably had for that of Athelstan; unless, indeed, he had seen Alfred’s Handbook, of which I shall have more to say later on[292]. He has, however, some very interesting remarks on Alfred’s literary works[293].

Knowledge of early English History declines.

§ 49. After William of Malmesbury men ceased to consult, indeed were unable to consult, the authentic sources of English history[294], and there is nothing to check the growth of legend. We get into a world where cakes are freely burnt, where Alfred is sent to Ireland to be cured (Irish fashion) of an incurable disease by St. Modwenna[295], where he invents tithings, hundreds and shires[296], translates into Saxon the Martian law, originally drawn up by Martia, a wise British queen[297]. Here, too, Alfred rules as monarch of all Britain[298], appoints ‘custodes regni[299],’ yet is considerate enough to abstain from all interference with the Church[300]. Here he founds[301], or better still, reforms, the University of Oxford, to which he sends his son Æthelweard[302], and to which, by an improvement on Asser’s scheme, he devotes a fixed proportion of his revenues[303]. His supreme effort in his mythical realm is marked by the invention of trial by jury[304], and the hanging of forty-four judges in one year for unjust judgements[305]. I think it must be admitted that these achievements were highly creditable to one who, in the same mythical realm, had shown in his early years such licentiousness and tyranny[306].

Origin of some of the myths.

§ 50. In some cases we can trace how the later myth arose; and this furnishes us with an instructive warning as to the danger of listening to the unsupported statements of later chroniclers, as many modern writers are half inclined to do.

Simeon of Durham.

The following is a good instance:—

The Chronicle under 885 tells how Alfred sent a fleet to East Anglia, which defeated a force of sixteen wiking ships at the mouth of the Stour, but on their way home fell in with a superior force of the enemy, and were totally defeated. In the earlier text of Simeon of Durham an elaborate explanation is given of the cause of this defeat[307]; how the English were surprised, an unarmed multitude, when plunged in lazy sleep; so that to them, says the moralising writer, would apply the proverb: ‘many shut their eyes when they ought to see.’ Will it be believed that this elaborate tale, with its attendant moral, has all grown out of a false reading in the parallel account of Asser? He says that the English were attacked ‘cum inde uictrix classis dormiret,’ where ‘dormiret’ is a corruption of ‘domum iret,’ the ‘hamweard wendon’ of the Chronicle[308]. Florence has ‘rediret,’ whether that be his substitution for ‘domum iret,’ or his own correction of the obviously nonsensical ‘dormiret.’ This example is further interesting as showing how early the text of Asser was corrupted. Simeon in his turn is misunderstood by later writers. The Chronicle of Melrose says[309] that in 883 Alfred ‘began to inhabit the devastated provinces of Northumbria.’ This is a misreading of a passage in Simeon[310], in which the nominative to ‘prepared to inhabit’ is ‘exercitus,’ i.e. the Danish army.

Langtoft.

Langtoft says that Æthelred died at Driffield, which shows that he first of all confused him with Aldfrid of Northumbria[311], who reigned just two hundred years earlier; he next goes on to confuse him with his own brother Alfred[312]. As he writes Æthelred’s name ‘Elfred’ the confusion of names is not surprising. We are reminded of Fuller’s quaint protest against the similar confusion in the case of Ceadda (Chad) and Cedd: ‘though it is pleasant for brethren to live together in unity, yet it is not fit by errour that they should be jumbled together in confusion[313].’

Roger of Wendover.

Roger of Wendover says that Alfred sent alms to Jerusalem[314]. The thing in itself is not impossible. But the context in which the statement occurs shows that it rests simply on a false reading in two MSS. of the Saxon Chronicle ‘Iudea’ for ‘Indea[315].’

Liber de Hyda.

Lastly the Liber de Hyda gives Alfred a pedigree which seems to make him a descendant of Offa of Mercia[316]. If this pedigree was the only one which we possessed, we might rack our brains to discover what the connexion was. But on reference to the authorised West-Saxon pedigree we find that the compiler of the Liber de Hyda has simply made a confusion between Offa of Mercia and Eafa, one of the steps in the descent of the royal house of Wessex.

One wonders how many statements, usually accepted as historical, would, if they could be traced to their origin, prove to have no better foundation than these.

Ingulf.

§ 51. Curiously enough, among the statements of later writers, some of those which sound most authentic occur in Ingulf, one of the most notable forgeries of the Middle Ages[317]. It seems to me that the accounts of the ravages of the Danes[318] may rest, at least in their outlines, on genuine local traditions. Other statements, though probably false considered as descriptions of concrete facts, may be true as types of things which must almost certainly have occurred. For instance, when we are told[319] that a monk of Croyland named Tolius, formerly a Mercian soldier of repute, organised military resistance to the Danes, I take the freedom very seriously to doubt the historical existence of any person of that name. But that in the time of their country’s need, more than one world-weary warrior may have come forth from their monastic retreats, to lead their countrymen against the foe, just as two centuries earlier Sigbert, ex-king of the East Angles, had been dragged from the cloister to lead his former subjects against the heathen Penda[320], is more than likely. So when we read how Beornred, king of Mercia, took advantage of the confusion caused by the Danish raids to annex monastic estates[321], how, owing to the ravages of the Danes, and the exactions of their puppet king, Ceolwulf, Croyland became so poor that no one could be found to take the monastic vows there[322], we have every disposition to accept the statements.

It is in Ingulf that Alfred is praised for his devotion to St. Neot and St. Werferth[323]. It is curious to find the very definite connexion of Alfred with the human friend who helped him so much in his literary and other tasks, converted into the shadowy relation of a votary to a saint.

‘A land where all things are forgotten.’ Alfred eclipsed by Edgar. Decline of Alfred’s fame.

§ 52. Where, on the other hand, this growth of legend does not appear in later chroniclers, we seem to come into ‘a land where all things are forgotten.’ And it is, I think, unquestionably true, that Alfred’s fame was in after times largely obscured by that of Edgar. The connexion of the latter with the monastic revival secured him the homage of monastic historians, and his imperial position appealed more to the imagination of posterity than the weightier achievements of Alfred. And then he was three-quarters of a century nearer to their view. It is not unnatural therefore that the laws and homilies of Æthelred’s reign should look back to the reign of Edgar as a golden age[324]; that here in Oxford, in 1018, Canute and his conquered subjects should be reconciled on the basis of Edgar’s law[325]. The one exception is the Anglo-Saxon homily on St. Neot, in which the later years of Alfred are regarded as the golden age[326]. The motive of this is too obvious to be dwelt on. But to show how small a space Alfred occupies in some of the later Chronicles, I may point out that in the Annals of Waverley[327] the only thing mentioned about him is his foundation of the three monasteries of Athelney, Newminster, and Shaftesbury, that in the Annals of Dunstaple[328] the only act recorded of him is the sending of alms to St. Thomas in India; while this is what his reign shrinks to in the pages of Capgrave, the first to apply the English tongue once more to the original writing of history in prose:—

‘In this tyme regned Alured in Ynglond, the fourt son of Adelwold. He began to regn in the ȝere of our Lord 872. This man, be the councelle of St. Ned, mad an open Scole of divers sciens at Oxenford. He had many batailes with Danes; and aftir many conflictes in which he had the wers, at the last he overcam hem; and be his trety Godrus (a nominative inferred from Godrum = Guðrum) here king was baptized, and went hom with his puple. XXVIII ȝere he regned, and deied the servaunt of God[329].’

And so through these dim pages the greatest name in English story moves like the shadow cast by some great luminary in eclipse[330].

LECTURE III
LIFE OF ALFRED PRIOR TO HIS ACCESSION TO THE THRONE

Date of Alfred’s birth.

§ 53. There has been a good deal of discussion as to the date of Alfred’s birth. Asser at the beginning of his work places it in 849. And in the annalistic portions he dates each year, not only by the Incarnation, but by the nativity of Alfred. From 851 to 869 inclusive this latter series (with one exception) is correctly reckoned from Asser’s own date 849; from 870 to 876 the dates are reckoned as if from 850; from 878 to 887 they are reckoned as if from 852. In one case, the annal for 853, the resulting year of Alfred’s nativity is 843. With this single exception all the other errors are accounted for by the accidental repetition of numbers, combined with the occurrence of blank annals which are not allowed for[331]. I have shown elsewhere how the chronology of the Saxon Chronicle is dislocated in various places by similar causes of a purely mechanical nature[332]. It is idle to build anything on this. Sir James Ramsay indeed seizes on the one eccentric annal 853 as giving the true date of Alfred’s birth[333]. But, to say the least, the doctrine of chances is strongly against this. We cannot indeed account for this date by progressive degeneration, but it is simply one of those scribal errors to which numerals are peculiarly liable[334].

The true date is 848.

The best authority for the date of Alfred’s birth has been generally overlooked. This is the genealogical preface prefixed to MS.

of the Chronicle. This is a strictly contemporary document, being drawn up during Alfred’s reign, as is proved by the fact that, though it gives Alfred’s accession, it does not, as in the case of all preceding kings, give the length of his reign. According to this authority Alfred ‘took to the kingdom when there were gone of his age three and twenty winters.’ In other words, Alfred was ‘turned’ twenty-three, as we say, at his accession in 871. This fixes his birth to 848[335]. The place, according to Asser, was Wantage.

Alfred’s first visit to Rome. Question of the Roman unction. Something more than confirmation implied. The consular diadem. Possibly titular royalty conferred on him.

§ 54. The earliest event recorded in the life of Alfred is his being sent to Rome in 853, when he would be, according to this, five years old. Of the fact there can be no possible doubt. It is not only mentioned by the Chronicle and Asser; but we have the actual letter which Leo IV wrote to Æthelwulf announcing Alfred’s safe arrival[336]. Considering the child’s tender age, I can hardly think that the object of the journey was educational, as is very commonly supposed; to say nothing of the fact that Rome, at this time, had very little to offer in the way of education, being far outstripped in this respect by the Carolingian schools of Germany and Gaul[337]. The motive was, I think, much more religious than intellectual. I see no reason to doubt Asser’s statement that Alfred was, from the very first, a child of singular promise and attractiveness[338]; and his parents, who were both conspicuous for their piety[339], may well have wished to secure for their favourite child[340], in his earliest years, those spiritual advantages which were believed to attend a pilgrimage to Rome, and contact with the visible head of the Church. The passion for pilgrimages and relics was indeed at its height in the ninth century[341]. So far there is no difficulty. The difficulty is as to what took place at Rome. Not only Asser, but the Chronicle, assert that the pope ‘hallowed Alfred as king, and took him as his bishop’s son.’ The latter phrase clearly points to confirmation. We have seen by the case of Anaraut of North Wales, that it was no unusual compliment for one exalted person to act as sponsor to another at his confirmation[342], or, as in the case of Guthrum, at his baptism. And in some cases the confirming or baptising prelate acted also as sponsor, as we see in the case of Birinus and Cuthred of Wessex, mentioned in the Chronicle at 639. There is therefore some plausibility in the suggestion, that the unction which formed part of the rite of confirmation was afterwards misinterpreted as a royal anointing. This theory was put forward as early as the seventeenth century, as appears by Sir John Spelman’s life of Alfred[343], and has been accepted by many subsequent writers, myself included. I confess it fails to satisfy me now. The statement of the Chronicle seems to me too explicit to be lightly set aside. Dr. Liebermann indeed argues[344] that the Chronicle cannot have been drawn up under Alfred’s influence, because of the gross improbability of this very statement. I am inclined to turn the argument round the other way. I think that Alfred must have understood the ceremony to mean something more than confirmation, especially as the two ceremonies, the hallowing as king, and the reception as ‘bishop’s son,’ are in the Chronicle clearly distinguished. In the letter of Leo IV alluded to above the words run thus: ‘We have affectionately received your son Erfred … and have invested him as a spiritual son with the girdle (or office), insignia, and robes[345] of the consulate, as is the manner of Roman consuls.’ It is certain that Clovis wore a diadem after receiving the consular insignia from Constantinople[346]; and in these ceremonial matters the Papacy largely inherited the traditions of the Byzantine Court. If then the imposition of a diadem of some kind on the child’s head formed part of the ceremony of the consular investiture, this would come very near to a royal coronation. I am however inclined to go a step further in the way of suggestion. Ailred of Rievaulx indeed, who compares the anointing of David by Samuel, supposes the pope to have been endowed with the gift of prophecy[347]. And a spurious charter[348] represents Alfred as making promises to the pope, as if it was then certain that he would one day become king. But, humanly speaking, it was of course impossible that Alfred’s succession to the West Saxon throne should have been foreseen in 853, seeing that he had three brothers living, all older than himself. But is it not possible that he may titularly have held some subordinate royalty conferred on him by his father for this very object? Athelstan, the under-king of Kent, disappears from history after 851. Æthelberht, Alfred’s second brother, was appointed to that under-kingdom when Æthelwulf went to Rome in 855[349]. Is it not just possible that in the interval it may have been titularly conferred on Alfred? What emboldens me to make this suggestion is the curiously interesting parallel of Louis the Pious, who, at the age of three, was crowned by Pope Hadrian I in 781 as king of Aquitaine[350]. But if this be thought too bold a theory, then I should fall back on the diadem as one of the consular insignia. When in the course of years Alfred inherited his father’s throne, he, and others, may well have seen in the action of him who was ‘high priest that same year,’ a prophetic significance; just as St. John traces a higher inspiration in words[351], which, in the intention of the speaker, simply laid down the doctrine of political expediency in its most brutal form.

Æthelwulf’s visit to Rome.

§ 55. Two years later, in 855, Æthelwulf went to Rome himself[352]. As early as the year of his accession, 839, he had formed the plan, and had sent an embassy to the emperor, Louis the Pious, to prepare the way[353]; and now at last, after sixteen years, he was able to accomplish it. How much the subject filled his thoughts seems to be indicated by the fact that a charter of this year is dated: ‘when I set out to go beyond the sea to Rome[354].’ He hardly left ‘composito regno’ as William of Malmesbury states[355], for in 855 the Danes for the second time wintered in the island[356], and a Mercian charter of this very year is dated: ‘when the Pagans were in the country of the Wrekin[357]’; though that concerned Mercia more immediately than Wessex. Before leaving England Æthelwulf entrusted his dominions to his two eldest sons in the way in which they were ultimately divided at his death; Æthelbald receiving Wessex, and Æthelberht Kent with its dependencies[358]. The spirit of family partitions, which wrecked the Carolingian empire, threatened the house of Wessex also. Happily the evil consequences were averted, as we shall see[359], by the patriotic unselfishness of the two youngest brothers, Æthelred and Alfred.

He takes Alfred with him. Æthelwulf’s reception on the Continent.