One or two points in the preface and in the laws may just be briefly noted. In the former there is an interesting mistranslation of the fifth commandment, the feminine relative in the last clause: ‘which the Lord thy God giveth thee,’ being taken to refer not to land (terra) but to mother (matrem); ‘honour thy father and thy mother whom the Lord gave thee[555].’ Was it the thankful thought of his own noble mother Osburh which prompted this mistake?
The insertion among the causes which excuse the non-return of a deposit, of the case of its having been captured by the enemy[556], throws light on the circumstances of the time, as does the provision of one of the laws that, for certain offences, the punishment is doubled when the ‘fyrd’ is out[557]. Characteristic too of the times is the fact that treason against the lord is ‘boot-less[558],’ i.e. incapable of being atoned for by money-payment, and the provision against harbouring the king’s fugitives[559]. Nor is it surprising that Alfred the truth-teller should be specially severe against falsehood; if any man commits folk-leasing, i.e. public slander, he is to suffer no lighter punishment than the loss of the offending member[560].
At the end of the Apostolic letter, which Alfred translates from Acts xv, is found a version of the golden rule in its negative form, ‘that which ye would not that other men should do to you, do not ye to other men[561].’ This is not, as is often alleged[562], an insertion made by Alfred from the Sermon on the Mount[563], but is an addition to the text of Acts, found in some Greek and Old Latin MSS., from the latter of which it passed into some MSS. of the Vulgate[564]. Most characteristic of Alfred’s thought is the comment: ‘by this one law any one may know how he ought to judge another; he needs no other law book.’
§ 81. Asser gives a striking picture[565], which there is no reason to distrust, of the pains which Alfred took to secure a good administration of justice, and especially to ‘see that such as are in need and necessity have right.’ From this point of view we can understand Alfred’s recasting the precept of Exodus xxiii. 3: ‘pauperis quoque non misereberis in iudicio,’ ‘neither shalt thou favour a poor man in his cause’ (R.V.). The warning that justice is no more to be wrested in favour of the poor, than of the rich, is one not unneeded now. But undue favouring of the poor was a remote danger in Alfred’s day, when, as Asser says, the poor had few helpers, or none, besides the king[566]. And so Alfred puts the precept in a general form: ‘Judge thou very equally, judge not one judgement for the rich, and another for the poor[567].’ And it would seem from Asser’s account that he kept a control on the local administration of justice, not only by constantly hearing appeals himself, but also by a system of special envoys analogous to the Carolingian ‘missi dominici,’ and to the later ‘justices in eyre[568].’
Of Alfred’s accessibility as the fountain of justice a very pleasant picture is given in a document addressed to Edward the Elder detailing the progress of a suit which had come before his father Alfred: ‘we went in to the king and told him how we proposed to settle the matter, and the king stood and washed his hands at Wardour within the bower, and when he had finished, he asked us[569],’ and so forth. It reminds us of the sketch which Josephus gives of Philip, tetrarch of Ituraea, almost the only amiable member of the odious Herod family; how he would stroll through his little state, with a chariot following him on which was his curule chair, and if any of his subjects approached him with their causes, he would at once have the chair brought forward, and sit and give his judgement there and then[570]. It reminds us still more of the great Charles, of whom Einhard relates: ‘When he was putting on his shoes or dressing, he would not only admit his friends, but also, if the Count of the Palace reported that there was some suit which could not be settled without his command, he would have the parties brought in at once, and, as if sitting in his tribunal, would hear the matter, and give his decision[571].’ The satisfaction given by Alfred’s decisions appears not only from Asser’s panegyric, but also from the document already cited, where the writer continues: ‘And, sire, if every judgement which King Alfred gave is to be upset, when shall we come to any conclusion?’
§ 82. The last section of the Preface to the Laws which tells how Alfred gathered these laws from older sources, and rejected others, with the advice of his Witan, not daring to add to them many of his own, which might not be suitable to after ages[572], has been often quoted as an illustration of Alfred’s wise conservatism. It is also the best illustration that we have of the action of the Witenagemót in his reign. Others may be found in the charters, but charters, as we have seen[573], are not numerous. The most interesting illustration is to be found in Alfred’s will, which shows how anxious Alfred was not to bring any undue influence to bear upon his councillors. The will tells us how in a Witenagemót at Long Dean[574] the provisions of Æthelwulf’s will and the agreements made between Alfred and his brothers were recited, in order that the Witan might judge whether Alfred’s proposed disposition of his property was in harmony with these: ‘Then prayed I them all for my love, and gave them my pledge, that I would never bear any grudge against any for what they might conscientiously decide, and that none for love or fear of me should hesitate to declare the law of the case[575].’ The Chronicle does not mention a single meeting of the Witan; and though it would be wrong to argue from this silence, for the same is true of many other reigns, yet it is probable that the circumstances of the time, combined with Alfred’s character and ability, would tend to throw more power into the hands of the king, and to reduce proportionally the importance of the Witenagemót[576].
§ 83. Of synods or special ecclesiastical legislation I can find no trace under Alfred. More than one bishop’s see became temporarily or permanently extinct owing to the ravages of the Danes[577]. The monasteries ‘once filled,’ as Alfred says, ‘with treasures and books[578]’ were favourite objects of attack. In the Preface to the Cura Pastoralis Alfred thanks God for ‘the learned bishops which we now have’; but, with the exception of the two archbishops of Canterbury, Æthelred and Plegmund, Werferth of Worcester, and Asser, it is hard to say anything about any of them. It is the same with the abbots. Thorne, the historian of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, gives a list of abbots about this time, but he can say nothing as to any of them[579]. Beyond the broad fact of the ruin caused by the ravages of the Danes, the whole history of the Church under Alfred is most obscure[580]. This does not mean that there is any truth in Ailred of Rievaulx’ myth[581] that Alfred regained it as a king’s chief dignity to have no power in the Churches of Christ. What little evidence there is points distinctly the other way[582]. There is a curious letter of Pope John VIII to Archbishop Æthelred[583] in which he says: ‘We admonish you to set yourself as a wall for the house of God not only against the king, but also against all who are minded to act perversely.’ There seems some ground for Sir John Spelman’s remark: ‘The life and ways of Alfred were not perfectly pleasing to the Fathers of Rome[584].’ A letter, from Archbishop Fulk of Rheims to Æthelred’s successor, Plegmund[585], shows that clerical and episcopal marriages were common in England at that time; and there are traces of something like hereditary succession to ecclesiastical lands[586]. There is no evidence that Alfred attempted to alter this state of things; there is some evidence that he disapproved it. In the Soliloquies of St. Augustine, the Anglo-Saxon translation of which[587] is almost certainly by Alfred[588], there is a passage in which Augustine declares that he has no desire to marry. This, which in the original is purely personal to Augustine, is by the translator extended to all clergy: ‘I say however that it is better for priests not to marry than to marry[589].’
Alfred made some attempt to revive the monastic life in England. He built a monastery for men at Athelney[590], no doubt as a thank-offering for the deliverance there begun, and a convent for women at Shaftesbury[591]; he also made arrangements, though he did not live to carry them out, for founding the New Minster at Winchester[592]. But he had but small success. The taste for the monastic life had almost been extinguished among men in England; and of the two contradictory causes which Asser suggests[593] for this fact, viz. the Danish ravages, and the too great riches of the English, which caused them to despise the monastic life, there can be no doubt that the former is nearer the truth. Alfred had accordingly to fill his monasteries with foreign monks. The result was not always satisfactory, if there is any truth in Asser’s story[594] how two of these foreign monks at Athelney tried to murder their abbot, John the Old Saxon. Besides his own foundations, Alfred was a liberal contributor to other monasteries, not only in England, but also in Ireland and on the Continent[595]. Yet there is no monastic halo round the head of Alfred, like that which adorns his great-grandson Edgar.
§ 84. That Alfred would be a careful and exact steward of all the resources of his kingdom, we may assume without any proof. But, for my own part, I wholly and entirely distrust the account which Asser gives[596] of the minute and mathematical divisions and subdivisions of revenue instituted by Alfred. I regard it as an indication that at this point of his work Asser was attacked by an acute fit of imagination[597]. Dr. Stubbs has said that there is no point on which we are more in the dark than on the financial system of the Anglo-Saxons[598]. We must also remember that since so much of the revenue of an Anglo-Saxon king was payable in kind, there was much less room for finance, in the strict sense of the word, than in more modern states.
Of Alfred’s interest and skill in mechanical and artistic inventions enough has perhaps been said already[599]. Under this head would come the well-known story of the candles and the lantern shades[600]. I cannot myself go into raptures over this, as some writers profess to do. But the mention of tents[601] in connexion with this invention, may perhaps indicate that it was specially during campaigns that the need of some such contrivance would be felt. It is one of the many curious parallels between things English and Frankish, that Pope Paul I sent to Pippin, the father of Charles the Great, an instrument for showing the time at night[602].
§ 85. Of Alfred’s intercourse with foreign nations Asser[603] gives a ‘heightened and telling’ picture, speaking of ‘daily embassies of nations who dwell from the Tyrrhene Sea to the furthest bound of Ireland.’ Of relations of Alfred with the Irish princes[604] I have found no evidence. But an interesting and pathetic instance of accidental intercourse with Ireland is given in the Chronicle under 891: ‘In this year three “Scots” (i.e. Irishmen) came to Alfred king, on a boat without oars or rudder. They had stolen away from Ireland, because they would be for God’s love on pilgrimage, they recked not where. The boat on which they fared was wrought of two and a half hides, and they took with them meat for a sevennight. And at the end of a sevennight they came to land in Cornwall, and straightway fared to Alfred king. Thus were they named, Dubslane, and Macbeth, and Maelinmain.’ The story is most genuine, and redolent through and through of the spirit of Irish History and Saga. The love of pilgrimage became a passion in the Irish Church[605]; the Irish Sagas and the lives of the Irish Saints furnish many illustrations of this desire for exile, this self-abandonment (as they deemed it) to the will of God involved in committing themselves to the deep in a frail skin-covered coracle without oarage or steerage, the slender provision of food for the voyage. In the Book of Leinster is a story how three young Irish clerics set out on a pilgrimage; ‘they took as provision on the sea only three loaves. “In the name of Christ” (said they), “let us throw our oars into the sea, and let us commend ourselves to our Lord.”’ So in the voyage of Maelduin, the Irish Saga so well known to English readers through Tennyson’s poem, Maelduin and his companions exclaim: ‘leave the boat alone, and cease rowing; whither God wills it to be borne, He will bear it[606].’ According to Ethelwerd[607], these ‘Scots’ after leaving Alfred went on to Rome and Jerusalem; and if so, it may well be that this was one of the channels whereby Alfred communicated with the East; for we have seen[608] that Alfred’s intercourse with Elias III, patriarch of Jerusalem, rests on very good evidence.
§ 86. It so happens that we have an account[609] of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, made just twenty-five years earlier, by a Frankish monk named Bernard, who, with two companions, a Spanish and an Italian monk, set out from Rome about the year 865 with the blessing of Pope Nicholas (c. 1). From Rome they went to Bari, then ‘a city of the Saracens,’ from the ‘sultan’ of which they obtained letters to the rulers of Alexandria and Egyptian Babylon, i.e. Old Cairo (c. 3). From Bari they walked to Taranto, where they found six ships proceeding to Alexandria with a cargo of 9,000 Christian captives from Beneventum (c. 4). The admiral refused, however, to let them land, until they had paid a ransom of six ‘aurei’ (c. 5). And when they presented the letters of the sultan of Bari to the governour of Alexandria they helped them not a whit; and only on paying thirteen ‘denarii’[610] apiece were they sent on by water with letters to the governour of Cairo (c. 6). Here the same fate awaited them. In spite of all their letters they were thrown into prison, but on payment of another thirteen ‘denarii’ per head they were released, and furnished with letters which did really prove effective, though they had to get them sealed, or, as we should say, they had to have their passports visaed in every town which they passed through, and this meant ever fresh exactions (c. 7). From Cairo they turned north by the Damietta branch of the Nile and proceeded by Tanis (c. 8) to Farama[611], the traditional abode of the Holy Family, where they procured camels on which they crossed the desert (c. 9) to El Arisch, and so by Gaza, Ramleh, and Emmaus to Jerusalem, where the patriarch was Theodosius, the immediate predecessor of Alfred’s correspondent, Elias III. Here they lodged in the hospice founded for pilgrims by ‘the glorious Emperor Charles,’ near which was the church of St. Mary with a noble library of books, also given by Charles (c. 10). After visiting the holy places (cc. 11-18), they returned all the way by sea, having an unfavourable passage of sixty days to Mont’ Auro (c. 19), whence they returned to Rome, ‘where innumerable bodies of the saints repose’ (c. 20). In some ways, apparently, a pilgrimage to Rome was more dangerous than one to Jerusalem. There is good peace, says the writer, between Christians and pagans both in Egypt and Jerusalem, though they are very strict on all travellers who have no passports (c. 22). In Romagna, on the other hand, things were very bad, and brigands so numerous, that pilgrims had to go in bands and fully armed (c. 23).
I have thought it worth while to give an outline of this most interesting little tract, because it shows us the route taken, and the difficulties encountered, by a pilgrim to Jerusalem in the reign of Alfred’s immediate predecessor[612].
But Alfred’s messengers went further East than Palestine. I have already quoted the passage from the Chronicle which tells how in 883 Alfred sent alms to India to St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew, in fulfilment of the vow which he made ‘when they encamped against the Danes at London.’ On the route taken by these messengers I can unfortunately throw no light. But the entry is of transcendent interest. It is the first recorded instance of a connexion between England and Hindustan, a connexion which has meant so much to India and to England; for it is, I venture to think, to her government of India that England largely owes the position in the world which she holds to-day.
Of missions and alms sent to Rome by Alfred five instances[613] are recorded in the Chronicle, and probably there were many others not recorded, for the omission of a formal embassy seems to be noted as exceptional[614].
Of intercourse with the Frankish empire we shall have some illustrations when we come to speak of the foreign scholars imported by Alfred.
§ 87. But of all the objects which Alfred had in view the one probably to which he attached most importance was, in the words of our University bidding-prayer, ‘a succession of persons duly qualified for the service of God in Church and State.’ In a passage in the Consolation of Philosophy[615] Boethius says to his instructress: ‘Thou knowest that ambition never was my mistress, though I did desire materials for carrying out my task’; ‘which task,’ adds Alfred, in his own words[616], ‘was that I should virtuously and fittingly administer the authority committed to me. Now no man … can … administer government, unless he have fit tools and the raw material to work upon.… And a king’s raw material and instruments of rule are a well-peopled land, and he must have men of prayer, men of war, and men of work.… Without these tools he cannot perform any of the tasks entrusted to him.’
It was with a view to providing these necessary ‘tools,’ that Alfred seems to have established, probably after the example of Charles the Great[617], a Court school, for the education specially of the sons of the upper classes, in which books of both languages, Latin and Saxon, were read, especially the Psalms and Saxon poems, and writing also was taught; and to these studies the pupils applied themselves, till they were old enough to learn ‘hunting and other arts, befitting well-born men.’
This account of Asser[618] agrees well with the wish expressed by Alfred in the Preface to the Pastoral Care, ‘That all the freeborn youth of England who have sufficient means to devote themselves thereto, be set to learning so long as they are not strong enough for any other occupation, until such time as they can well read English writing. Let those be taught Latin whom it is proposed to educate further, and promote to higher office.’ This passage is most interesting; but we must not, on the strength of it, bring Alfred into court as an advocate either for or against classical education. On the one hand Alfred clearly wished that all who had the time and means should be taught Latin; on the other hand Latin was then, as it is not now, the sole vehicle of Western culture and science.
§ 88. But the great difficulty was to find teachers. Of England, the part which had suffered least from the ravages of the Danes was Western Mercia; moreover Offa had had a real desire to promote learning in his kingdom, as Alcuin’s letters show[619]; and from Mercia came Plegmund[620], whom Alfred ultimately made archbishop of Canterbury in succession to Æthelred, Werferth, the faithful bishop of Worcester, and two priests, Æthelstan and Werwulf, whom Alfred made his chaplains. The fact that Asser applies to these two last the term ‘sacerdotes,’ which, as I have elsewhere shown, is ambiguous in mediaeval Latin, sometimes meaning bishops, sometimes priests[621], has led Roger of Wendover not only to convert these priests into bishops, but to give them sees at Hereford and Leicester[622]; another illustration of the way in which myths arise. From Wales Alfred got Asser, as we have seen. But Britain alone could not supply Alfred’s needs; and the Frankish empire was now to repay to England some small portion of the debt which it owed for Boniface and Alcuin, in the persons of Grimbald and John the Old Saxon. Of the latter not much is known[623]. He was a monk of Corvey, and was made by Alfred abbot of his new monastery of Athelney. The story of his attempted murder there has been already alluded to[624]. The date of his coming to England is not known. The chronology of Grimbald’s life is also very obscure. Mabillon indeed was led to postulate two Grimbalds, who both came to England under Alfred. But his perplexity was largely caused by his acceptance of the Oxford interpolation in Asser as genuine; and his solution is quite incredible. Grimbald was a monk of St. Bertin’s in Flanders. He held various offices in that monastery, and in 892, on the death of Abbot Rudolf, the monks wished him to become their abbot; but with a view of protecting the monastery against the attacks of Count Baldwin of Flanders, Fulk, archbishop of Rheims, who had been abbot before Rudolf, was allowed to resume the abbacy, and hold it with his archbishopric[625]. If all this is true, Grimbald cannot have come to England much before 893, and as he is mentioned in the Preface to the Pastoral Care as one of Alfred’s helpers in that work (along with Plegmund, Asser, and John), it is obvious that this date for Grimbald’s arrival in England, if it be regarded as established, will have a very important bearing on the chronology of Alfred’s writings[626]. There is a letter extant[627] which purports to be Fulk of Rheims’ answer to Alfred’s application for Grimbald. Certainly, if Fulk was holding the abbacy of St. Bertin’s at this time, he would be the natural person to give permission to a monk of that house to leave his cloister[628], and Dr. Stubbs thought that the MSS. in which the letter is found were sufficiently ancient to exclude the suspicion of forgery. Its authenticity has however been doubted[629], and I confess it presents one very great difficulty to my mind. The letter throughout is written on the assumption that Grimbald is to be a bishop in England; he is to be placed over the care of pastoral rule, he is already a priest, and is worthy of pontifical honour; if Alfred will send Grimbald’s electors and certain leading men in Church and State, Fulk will then ordain him (i.e. as bishop, for he was already priest), and they can escort him to his proper see[630]. Alfred is represented as having stated in his application that, owing to the ravages of the Danes, the lapse of time, the carelessness of prelates, and the ignorance of the people, ecclesiastical order had much decayed in England[631], which is true enough, whoever wrote it. But there is no other evidence anywhere of any intention of making Grimbald a bishop. Dean Hook’s idea[632] that Alfred intended to make him archbishop of Canterbury, but finding the appointment of a foreigner unpopular, substituted Plegmund, has not a scrap of evidence to support it; while if Grimbald did not come to England till 893 the primacy had long been filled up. Ultimately Grimbald was made abbot of the New Minster at Winchester, where he died in 903, and became one of the tutelary saints of that foundation, winning a place in the English Calendar[633]. The tradition that Asser was one of the embassy sent to escort Grimbald to England has been already alluded to[634].
§ 89. But it was not only by educational institutions whether in Court or monastery that Alfred endeavoured to raise the culture of his people. The art of translation, which he had practised at first for his own instruction and edification, he came afterwards to use in order to place within reach of his people[635] the most useful works in different branches of knowledge. The object which Alfred had in view is clearly laid down in the oft-quoted Preface to the Pastoral Care. After tracing the practical extinction of the knowledge of Latin south of the Thames[636], which made all the knowledge contained in that language inaccessible to a degree which would have seemed inconceivable to previous generations, he continues: ‘therefore it seems to me best, if you agree[637], that we should translate some books, those namely which are most necessary for all men to know, into the language which we all understand.’
§ 90. The story how Alfred first began to combine translation with reading[638] is told in a well-known passage of Asser[639]. He relates how one day, while the king and himself were reading and talking together, Alfred was much struck by a passage in the work which Asser was reading to him, and begged him to write it down for him in the little book of psalms and prayers which he always carried about with him. Asser suggested that it would be better to start a separate book for such extracts, and went and fetched a quire of parchment, and in course of time the book of translated extracts grew, until it reached nearly the size of a Psalter. Alfred called it his Encheiridion, Manual, or Handbook[640], because he always kept it close at hand. This according to Asser took place in the year 887.
A great deal of unnecessary mystery has been made about this Handbook. Asser’s account shows that it was simply what we should call a commonplace book. In the course of years Alfred may have made more than one such commonplace book. The one started at Asser’s suggestion contained, according to him, ‘flosculi diuinae scripturae’; that is, probably, extracts from the Bible and the Fathers. But other parts of the volume, or, it may be, a later volume of the same kind, contained historical jottings; for William of Malmesbury quotes Alfred’s Handbook as an authority for the life of Aldhelm, citing Alfred’s high appreciation of Aldhelm’s Saxon poems, and adding the beautiful tradition how by his skill as a minstrel he would gather the people round him, and gradually turn his song to sacred themes[641]. Florence of Worcester[642] also cites a work which he calls ‘Dicta regis Ælfredi’ as an authority on the West Saxon genealogy. Even if we reject the evidence of Malmesbury and Florence as being so much later than Alfred’s time, it seems to me quite impossible to identify a theological commonplace book, such as Asser describes, with the translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies, as Wülker was once inclined to do[643], partly on the ground that Asser applies the term ‘flosculi’ to the Handbook, while the translation of the Soliloquies bears the title ‘Blostman’ or Blooms. But the latter work, however free in the way in which it deals with its original, is very much more than a book of extracts. Besides, according to Asser, the Encheiridion was the very first of Alfred’s works, whereas all critics are agreed that the Soliloquies are among the last, probably the very last of his works.
§ 91. Besides the Encheiridion, the only one of the literary works which owed their origin to Alfred mentioned by Asser is the translation of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great[644]. The existence of the Chronicle, at any rate up to 887, is implied in Asser’s use of it, but it is nowhere mentioned. The easiest explanation of Asser’s silence as to Alfred’s other works is that they did not then exist. The date at which Asser professes to be writing is, as we have seen, 894; and this in turn confirms the view derived from the chronology of Grimbald’s life, as to the comparatively late date at which Alfred commenced his independent literary career.
According to Asser, the translation of the Dialogues was not made by Alfred himself, but by Bishop Werferth at his command[645]; and in the little preface which Alfred prefixes to the work he makes no claim of authorship, but merely says: ‘I besought my trusty friends that out of God’s[646] books of the lives and miracles of the saints they would write for me the instruction which follows, so that, strengthened in my mind through memory and love, I may, amid the troubles of this world, sometimes think on the things of heaven.’ Whether the expression ‘trusty friends’ is merely an impersonal plural for Werferth, or whether others really co-operated, I cannot say; but we may take it that Werferth was mainly responsible, and that in this case the share of Alfred was confined to furnishing a preface; just as authors nowadays are glad to get some man of light and leading to commend their works to the public.
The degree in which Alfred made use of the help of his learned advisers would vary no doubt with the difficulty of the work in hand, and the degree of the king’s own progress. In the case of the Pastoral Care, Alfred himself has told us who his helpers were[647]; in other cases, as we shall see, interesting traditions have been preserved. But I imagine that in all cases a good deal of the drudgery would be done by others, Alfred supplying the final literary form. Similar instances of co-operation have not been unknown in Oxford in the nineteenth century.
§ 92. If any evidence were needed to show that Alfred, with all his true and earnest piety, was yet in his religious thought the child of his century, it would be found in the fact that he should have chosen the Dialogues of Gregory as the first of all books to be translated. The work was enormously popular in the Middle Ages[648]; but to our thought it is the least edifying of all Gregory’s writings. In it the principle of St. James, that ‘the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much,’ is materialised, until the prayers of the saints become a mere sort of lucky bag or wishing cap for the obtaining of anything that is wanted, from the raising of the dead, or the punishment of an enemy, to the supply of the most ordinary articles of domestic economy, such as oil, and wine, or the mending of a broken sieve; while the fact that Gregory professes in many cases to have these stories from the mouth of eyewitnesses[649], illustrates the truth of what Dr. Gore has said[650], that ‘there are … ages when belief is so utterly uncritical, that it does seem as if they could not under any circumstances afford us satisfactory evidence of miraculous occurrences.’
In this connexion may be mentioned the stress which Asser lays on Alfred’s veneration for the relics of the saints[651]. In this too, if it is authentic, Alfred was the child of his age. The natural feeling of Christian reverence for the body which had once been a temple of the Holy Ghost, degenerated into an unhealthy passion for collecting dead men’s bones, which reached its height in the ninth century[652]. And this passion led to a hungry relic-mongering, a system of pious thefts, and a wholesale manufacture of spurious relics, of which Rome was the head-quarters, which are among the least pleasant features of the mediaeval Church. We may be sure that there was nothing unworthy either in Alfred’s reverence for the relics, or in his belief in the wonder-working powers of the saints. And for the rest, I think one realises more and more how a really religious spirit assimilates the good and is immune from the evil of the particular system in which it is placed by Providence. There is no one, for instance, who knows anything of the lives of the devout peasantry, say, of Scotland, or of Roman Catholic countries on the Continent, but must feel that the somewhat hard creed of the one, and the somewhat superstitious creed of the other are absolutely as nothing compared with the effectual power of religion which is the same in both.