It may be that almost all the sources regarding Alfred’s reign ‘originated with either Alfred himself or his immediate entourage’ or, as another scholar somewhat acidly remarked, that ‘We hold that Alfred was a great and glorious king in part because he tells us he was.’10 But if the king was ‘telling the tale’, was he not also perhaps telling the truth? In any case there were Continental precedents for royal propaganda programmes. Einhard’s Vita Caroli is an obvious parallel and the Royal Frankish Annals was straight propaganda for Charles’s dynasty. Given the severity of the Danish Viking threat it would not be surprising if Alfred had a ‘profound sense of dynastic insecurity’ and turned, as has been suggested, to Frankish ‘experts on kingship’.11 We can assume that the Chronicle’s, principal target audience was not posterity but rather Alfred’s contemporaries; his aim, to rally them to take pride in the West Saxon royal house and support it in the struggle against the national enemy.
Apart from perhaps St Boniface, there is no Anglo-Saxon about whom we know more. The youngest of five brothers, it was noteworthy that he came to the throne at all. His sexuality seems to have been more or less normal for a king, with at least one illegitimate child credited to him by rumour. Unusually for a monarch of his time, and laughably by twenty-first century social convention, he valued personal chastity and prayed for some painful disease to inhibit his lusts. As a young man he did suffer from an extremely painful complaint, possibly haemorrhoids, possibly Chrohn’s disease, which seems to have recurred throughout his life. It hardly hampered his achievement. A king who could read was remarkable; one who authored books was unheard of elsewhere in western Christendom before the millennium.
For Patrick Wormald, Alfred was the ‘translucent mind of Old English authority’,12 for Bishop Wulfsige, as we saw, the greatest of treasure-givers. The quality praised is that of the heroic war leader and Alfred was certainly that; but the context, the bishop’s preface to a translation commissioned by the king, is that of cultural patronage. For Alfred, recruits for the war against ignorance demanded the same kind of largesse as warriors against terror raids. In his own translation of Boethius the king claimed to have no interest in money or power for their own sakes but only as means to his job of administering his kingdom ‘virtuously’.
The birth of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ idea and cultural renewal
In the 870s Burgred, ruler of Anglian Mercia, had been expelled by the Danes. He made an English king’s pilgrimage to Rome, where he died. He was followed by Ceolwulf, who gave hostages to the Danes and whom the Chronicle considered a mere puppet, though he issued a joint currency with Alfred. Nothing more is heard of him after 880 and Alfred placed Mercia under the rule of Æthelred, as ealdorman.
By adopting the style ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’, Alfred clearly made a statement of unity within the Angelcynn. In the mid-870s coinage minted by Alfred in London had already represented him as ‘king of the English’ or as ‘king of the Saxons and Mercians’. Such changes heralded ‘a new and distinctive polity’ and a combined effort to restore the glories of Anglo-Saxon culture. The reign’s unparalleled output of vernacular literature was obviously the result of ‘a conscious policy’ carried through by the king and a small group of advisers and doers, to generate texts and see to their dissemination.13
The programme owed much to outside help, including the presence at Winchester of Continental Europeans – initially Fulco of Reims, and then the Frankish scholars Grimbald of St Bertin (proposed by one scholar as the man who suggested the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) and John the Old Saxon (presumably from Saxony) – and the books they brought with them. But there were Welshmen, too, as well as the Franks, Frisians, Irishmen, Bretons and even Scandinavians, all drawn by the king’s reputation for generosity. And, of course, Mercians such as Wærferth, who translated Pope Gregory’s Dialogues at the king’s request, and Plegmund, possibly Cheshire-born and described by Asser as a man of great learning. Alfred named him as one of those who, along with Asser and Grimbald of St Bertin, helped him with the translation of Pope Gregory’s Liber regulae pastoralis (‘Pastoral Care’), the handbook for bishops that was the foundation for Alfred’s cultural reform programme. Alfred was to appoint Plegmund as archbishop of Canterbury. During a long reign (890–923) Plegmund would officiate at the coronation of Alfred’s son Edward the Elder in 900 at Kingston upon Thames (it was here that Edward’s grandfather Æthelwulf had been formally acknowledged as heir to his father, Ecgberht), and reorganize the church in Wessex, a preparation for the extensive church reforms later in the tenth century.
In his preface to the Pastoral Care, Alfred famously deplored the decay of learning and modern historians have commented on the ‘atrocious quality’ of, particularly Kentish, surviving charters, although Kent was not typical. English cultural life was certainly at a low ebb – even the transmission of Bede’s works from this period depends heavily on manuscripts preserved on the Continent. The outflow of talented scholars probably meant a shortage of Latin teachers in the early ninth century with a consequent impact on later generations of clergy.14And Alfred may have been exaggerating so as to shock people into action.
The preface presents his plans for cultural and literary reform. A copy of the translation is to be sent to all bishops, for the ‘cure of souls’ is the beginning of wisdom. In former (i.e. pre-Viking) days, he reflects, men had come to England in quest of knowledge; in his day the country had to send abroad for help. Latin was in deep decline. Important books must be translated from the Latin into English. While peace prevails young men of free birth and apt ability should learn to read English and, those who could, Latin as well, since learning was not to be a clerical preserve. A school was to be set up in the royal household for his sons, young nobles being fostered and some boys of non-noble rank.
Alfred believed it was his duty to God to revive the kingdom of the English in learning and devotion and rally his people to the good fight against the heathen. The programme of historical writing, religious education and literary productions had its part to play by boosting the dynasty and recruiting the energies of his subjects to the common good. The most famous part of the programme, the translation from Latin into English of those books ‘necessary to know’, was unique in Christendom. Even Ireland, with Europe’s other tradition of vernacular writing, had ‘no parallel for the translation into the vernacular from Latin, such as was the hallmark of Alfred’s reform’.15
The intervention of Continental scholars was a just payback for the Anglo-Saxon contribution to the Carolingian Renaissance. (There are indications that Alfred first considered Grimbald instead of Plegmund as archbishop of Canterbury.) After all, its central figure Einhard had been educated at Fulda, founded by St Boniface, and then graduated to study under Alcuin. But Alfred’s English revival was not sympathetic to the contemporary Carolingian ethos of grandiloquence. No doubt England did not have the money and resources to match those of Charles the Bald, that ‘Carolingian renaissance prince’. But the real difference lay in the contrasting personalities of king and emperor. The sumptuous bibles and psalters created for Charles glorified the monarch and distanced him from his subjects. Alfred’s books, much more modest and workmanlike, were meant for circulation among courtiers and clergy as part of a dialogue between king and subjects.
Fittingly, it seems almost certain that the famous Alfred Jewel, the most familiar object from the period, was part of an aestel, a reading aid. Originally it seems a pointer was fitted in the gold animal head to be used, somewhat like the cursor on a computer screen, to locate the point in the text where attention was focused, much as the yad is used in Jewish synagogues to this day when reading the Torah. Depicting a figure with large staring eyes that may be meant to symbolize the sense of sight, and bearing the legend AELPRED MEC HÆT GEWYRCAN (‘Alfred had me made’) picked out in gold filigree, it was found in the marshes at Athelney, site of the king’s retreat and monastic foundation, and is indeed a charismatic icon of the Alfredian age. There seems no doubt that the
sponsor of the piece was King Alfred the Great, though some have suggested it might have been intended as a pendant.
Four such objects survive of different types. All make striking use of unusual materials, such as, in the case of the Jewel, ‘recovered’ rock-crystal, that is a pre-existing piece of crystal shaped for a Roman jewel and reused.
As beautiful as it is, the famous jewel is perhaps outdone in sophistication by the Fuller Brooch, a silver and niello ornament of complex iconography relating to the five senses and product of a highly intellectual court circle.
The practicalities of government and a reform programme
Because virtually nothing remains above ground, it is hard to realize the impact that Alfred’s building programme must have had. In addition to the fortified burhs springing up the length and breadth of the kingdom, contemporaries wondered at ‘the royal halls and chambers marvellously constructed of stone and wood’.
Government needed tools and resources. By the nature of his office a king was a figure of opulence in dress and of wealth in land. Alfred viewed riches as essential tools of the king’s trade. A kingdom, if it is to flourish, must be peopled with fit and capable subjects to discharge the functions of war, prayer and labour; and the king (the ring-giver) needs the wherewithal to reward them with weapons, lands, drink, victuals and luxurious gifts if he is to keep their loyalty and service. The significance of such a list fills out when we realize that a ‘weapon’ might be a sword such as that Alfred bequeathed to his son-in-law Ealdorman Æthelred, which was valued at 3,000 silver pennies, enough to purchase more than 100 oxen or 300 acres of land.16
Much was indeed demanded. Nobles were required to lead their followers to the king’s wars; to help him in the administration of public order; to mobilize the work forces on roads and fortifications and generally in the running of the kingdom. Some were charged with additional responsibilities as senior royal officials or ‘ealdormen’. At first a kind of prefect in a sub-kingdom of Wessex, the ealdorman was the principal administrator of a shire from the time of King Ine. The high standing of men such as Ceolmund, ealdorman of Kent, or Wulfred of Hampshire, equivalent to a bishop in rank, was signalled by their wergild: 1,200 shillings as they were noble, and another 1,200 shillings as they held office. By 970 there were certain ealdormen (after c. 1020 the term gave way to ‘earl’ from the Danish jarl) with responsibility for many shires – regional governors in effect. They were however, always royal appointees and not, like French ducs and comtes, regional territorial dynasts.
In the Pastoral Care Alfred describes St Peter as receiving the ‘ealdordom’ of the Holy Church from God, which is as much a comment on the king’s estimation of his own standing as on that of an ealdorman. Alfred describes the king on great occasions as seated ‘on a high seat, in bright raiment’, surrounded by thegns wearing ornamented belts and gold-inlaid swords.17 The most celebrated lawsuit in Anglo-Saxon legal records concerns a man’s loss of standing at law because of his conviction for the theft of a ceremonial belt. Perhaps the king had in mind the meeting of his witan convened to approve the will that excluded his nephews from the succession in favour of his son Edward.
Alfred relied on the council of his ealdormen and, of course, of his senior churchmen, but he might well consult less exalted but nevertheless important people, such as Beornwulf, the town-reeve of Winchester. A royal servant such as his ‘horse thegn’ or marshal could be in a position of influence: the king’s own mother had been the daughter of his father’s famous butler Oslac. Alfred divided his staff into three groups, who served at court for one month alternating with two months at home. Those in residence had their appointed sleeping quarters: those allocated to the royal chamber apartments might be the king’s drinking and hunting companions and have their place in the great hall; others were relegated to sleeping ‘on the threshing floor’ in the barn. Then there would be noblemen’s sons being ‘fostered’ in the royal household, and the household warriors. Outside the immediate entourage, royal officers in the country at large, and also prominent local landowners or ‘king’s thegns’, could claim to be of what a later age would call the king’s ‘affinity’, that is to have a special connection with the king. He communicated with them by sealed letters and the messengers could expect handsome lodging. At grassroots level the presence of kingship in a locality resided in the king’s reeves, to whom a traveller or merchant in a district made his first report; they were agents of the king’s interest in his estates, and among the villagers and local thegns, and were men of note.
The counsellors he summoned most regularly to advise him were accorded a status of respect as his ‘witan’, though their meetings never achieved the formalized standing of an institution of government suggested by the later (essentially Victorian) coinage ‘witanegemot’ (‘wisemen’s meeting’). Compared with the quasi-imperial court of this grandson Æthelstan, Alfred’s seems to have comprised rarely more than two or three bishops, four ealdormen and eight or so king’s thegns, or ministers.18 In earlier times nobles did not only hold land in their own right, but could be awarded ‘loan-land’, to use the term Alfred used, by the king in gratitude for services, which would revert to him on their death. The church by contrast had established the principle that lands granted to them by noble patrons or by the king himself could be secured by written charter to the recipient in perpetuity. By the late 700s the principle of ‘bookland’ was established for secular landowners too. The terms of his charter would probably require him to take armed forces to the king’s army and mobilize labour for the king’s works (see below), but the land could now remain in his family.
At the practical level, Alfred’s cultural programme (the term is hardly too strong) required an extraordinary amount of scribal activity based on his own and other groups of clerics, most of whom would have learnt their trade copying charters. After all, much administration was via letter, and some 200 charters survive from the ninth century for Wessex and Mercia. In the less polished examples scribal errors could creep in, which once prompted unjust suspicions of forgery (though some forgeries do exist). Some, notably those of the West Saxon type of the 830s–870s, remind us that beyond the bustle and sophistication of Winchester lie meetings of king and counsellors in shire towns, with the local reeves in attendance.
No doubt the network of book scribes was based on a ‘headquarters’ staffed by experts in the production and multiplication of bound manuscripts and where (surmises Michael Keynes) master copies were kept. He has identified a team of six: five of varying skills A, B, C, D and E (‘the rather superior scribe’), who did the work while a sixth scribe, X, ‘hovered behind them keeping track of their work’. The distribution network comprised various copyists at fixed points for the further duplication of exemplars. The preface to the Pastoral Care tells us that ‘Alfred translated me into English’ and then ‘sent [the exemplar] south and north to his scribes (writerum) . . . to produce more copies [to be sent] to his bishops’. We know that at least ten bishops received copies in the 890s and can assume that they had further copies made for their parish clergy.19
Today the generally accepted canon of Alfred’s literary work comprises the Pastoral Care, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, St Augustine of Hippo’s Soliloquies and the first fifty of the prose versions of the Psalms. To these four works, which it is felt share characteristic features of style and vocabulary, the prefatory material to the laws is also added. While he almost certainly did not make the translation of Orosius it seems reasonable to suppose that it dates from his reign and may have been composed as part of his programme. Although Alfred had his children taught to write, he himself probably dictated his manuscripts and, for translations, may have dictated a first draft, to be worked up by a group of scholarly assistants.20
However it was done, we feel the presence of a vigorous and sympathetic imagination. When the writer of the Old English book of reflections loosely based on Augustine’s Soliloquies, which is cast in the form of a dialogu
e between Augustine and Reason, compares himself, as a researcher in the groves of scholarship, to a forester going out to select timbers suited for his new structure of learning and his assistants to axemen following up with wagons, it is hard not to think of the architect-king supervising work for a new burh. Elsewhere a striking passage expounds trust in divine revelation in terms of the trust accorded to a secular lordship, when Reason asks
Have you not a lord [the emperor] whom you trust in all matters better than yourself? . . . and do you think that the Emperor, the son of an emperor, is wiser or more truthful than Christ the son of God? 21
There is nothing mechanical or hack about Alfred’s English prose works, which are among the very earliest of the genre. It is a sophisticated style derived from the rhetorical devices of Latin models and deploying the typical patterns of Anglo-Saxon verse, alliteration and wordplay.
Alfred loved the dialogue as a literary form. A foundation text in his programme was the Dialogues of Pope Gregory (an exchange between Gregory and his friend Peter the deacon). It was followed by Alfred’s own adaptation of Boethius. Conceived as a dialogue between the author and Lady Philosophy, the book became one of the most popular of the Middle Ages and its devotion to wisdom immediately seized Alfred’s imagination. The king’s version, internalized as a dialogue between Wisdom and the Mind, creates an authorial person called ‘Boethius’, who is the victim of a tyrant king and invites us to see the world from his perspective.
The Church, the junior partner?
Alfred strongly associated the church with the governance of his realm but it seems he was the dominant partner: indeed the balance of power between church and court seems to have shifted in favour of the king so that ‘the reign of Alfred should be put in a context of major constitutional change’. By the 790s the church in England had acquired immense wealth, both in treasure and in real estate: in Kent, for example, more than 30 per cent of all the landed wealth seems to have been in the hands of the clergy. Monasteries, it seems, were everywhere. By 800 there were almost thirty in the Worcester diocese alone. Senior clergy were pivotal figures: the archbishop often dominated the synods even when the king was present and Archbishop Wulfred of Canterbury (805–32) struck coins bearing his name alone. But as the ninth century advanced, thanks in part to the Viking raids, the church’s grip was loosened and many religious estates passed into lay control. Alfred gave the huge see of Sherborne to Asser without papal intervention, and after the Welshman’s death King Edward the Elder would divide it into three sees.22
A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons Page 26