The fourteen years which followed the Peace of Wedmore (878 to 892) were, as has been said, in the main years of peace, and may be considered to justify the heading of this chapter; yet that peace was not all unbroken, nor was Alfred’s Danish godson always a placid and peaceful Christian. There were still some slight heavings of the barbarian sea, which must be shortly described before we turn to the much more interesting subject of Alfred’s peaceful labours. The main condition of the Peace of Wedmore was that the Danes should evacuate Wessex. The agreement that the Watling Street should be the boundary between the two nations cannot be stated to have been one of the conditions of the peace now concluded. We have, in fact, no accurate information as to the territorial arrangements of 878. The extremely interesting document called Aelfredes and Guthrumes Frith (the peace of Alfred and Guthrum) must belong to some later year than the meeting at Wedmore, and the course of the history seems to justify us in assigning it to the year 885 or thereabouts.136

After Guthrum and his men had lingered for some time in the neighbourhood of Cirencester, they marched across England to East Anglia (879), and made a permanent settlement there, “occupying and dividing the land”. This probably means that they exchanged the destructive excitement of the life of the viking for the peaceful existence of the husbandman. But when, five years later, in 884, a division of “the army” which had been ravaging Gaul came to Kent and besieged Rochester, the sight of their fellow-countrymen, harrying on the other side of the Thames estuary, seems to have been too much for Danish self-control. Guthrum “broke peace with King Alfred,” and probably sent some of his men to help in the siege. Alfred, however, set to work to besiege the besiegers, who had “wrought another fastness round themselves,” and in the end forced them to abandon their enterprise, leave their horses as the prize of victory, and depart over seas. He then proceeded to chastise the East Anglian Danes for their breach of faith, sending a fleet against them from Kent which won a signal victory. Notwithstanding a subsequent defeat, his operations must have been on the whole successful, for he rescued London from the Danish yoke and concluded, probably in 885, that treaty with Guthrum which as before said is still extant, bearing the title of Alfred’s and Guthrum’s frith.

If the provisions of Wedmore had made the Watling Street the boundary between the two nationalities, which is doubtful, the treaty now concluded was certainly more favourable to the English. It went from the Thames northwards “up the Lea to its source, then straight on to Bedford, and then up along the Ouse to the Watling Street,” which throughout a large part of its further course became practically the boundary of the two nations. This line gave to the English king London, previously abandoned to the Danes, and with London the region round it north of the Thames and west of the Lea, which had previously formed part of the kingdom of Essex, but which now, perhaps, received a special organisation of its own, and the name that it has since borne for ten centuries, Middlesex. It also gave to Alfred the larger and fairer half of Mercia, being in fact all that portion of the midland counties which lies south and west of the London and North Western Railway,137 together with half of Hertfordshire and two-thirds of Bedfordshire. But then, on the other hand, it is true that the rest of Mercia, East Anglia, Essex (mutilated) and Northumbria were practically handed over to the Danes, either as personal rulers or as over-lords. This surrender has often been treated as a wise and politic act of self-sacrifice on Alfred’s part, a view which was the natural result of the historical teaching which spoke of Egbert and his descendants as unquestioned monarchs of all Anglo-Saxon Britain. Now, however, that we see what a precarious and shadowy thing was the supremacy of the ninth century Kings of Wessex over northern and midland England, a supremacy which under a feeble king like Ethelwulf perhaps almost vanished into nothingness, we can see that the settlement which generally (though incorrectly) goes by the name of the Peace of Wedmore was not so great a sacrifice on Alfred’s part as we used to imagine. Bitter doubtless it was to Alfred as to every patriotic heart among the “Angel-cyn” to see the Dane so firmly rooted in the north and east of England, but that was the actual position of affairs, and he, as a statesman, was bound to recognise it. On the other hand, the larger half of Mercia now came under Alfred’s personal rule and was irrevocably joined to his realm, and this great new kingdom was now preparing to enter the lists against the Scandinavian invaders with a fairer prospect of success than could ever have been entertained by the disunited, mutually suspicious states of the “Heptarchy”. As has been already pointed out, the Dane was the real though involuntary creator of a united England.

It is worth our while to notice the language of the great frith which thus settled the boundary of the two races. It professes to be concluded “between Alfred, king, and Guthrum, king, and all the witan of the English kinship, and all the folk that is in East Anglia, for themselves and for their offspring”. “If any man be slain, as we hold all equally dear, both Englishmen and Danes, the penalty shall be eight half-marks of pure gold,138 but if he be a ceorl or freed-man on gafol [rented] land, the penalty shall be 200 scillings.” “And we all agreed on this day when men swore their [mutual] oaths that neither bond nor free shall fare unto the [Danish] army without leave, nor shall any one of them come to us. Should it happen that one of them wishes to have business with us, or one of us with them, in respect of land or cattle, that is to be permitted only on condition of his giving hostages for the observance of the peace and as a testimony that he has a clean back,” in other words, that his past record is that of a peaceable neighbour.

Evidently the continuance of friendly relations between the two races, parted only by two small streams and the old Roman road, was felt to be precarious, and both rulers agreed that the less they mingled with one another the better.

It is pleasant to turn from the monotonous story of the conflict with the Danes to the subject of Alfred’s family life. In 868, three years before “the year of battles” and his own accession to the throne, he married a noble Mercian lady named Ealhswith, daughter of Ethelred, ealdorman of the Gaini(?), and descended on her mother’s side from the royal family of Mercia. By this lady (who survived him three years) Alfred had five children who grew up. The eldest, Ethelfled, when little more than a child, was given in marriage to Ethelred, ealdorman of the Mercians, and became, after her father’s death, a personage of great importance, ruling her mother’s country with spirit and success under the proud title of “Lady of the Mercians”. The next child, Edward, who was eventually his father’s successor, had for his especial companion his sister Elfrida. “When he was not hunting or engaged in other manly exercises, he was with her learning the psalter or books of Saxon poetry, showing affability and gentleness towards all, both natives and foreigners, and ever in complete subjection to his father.” In after life the two playmates were widely separated. The boy became Edward the Elder, one of the greatest of English kings; the girl was sent across the seas to become the wife of Baldwin II. of Flanders, son of Judith of France, and her husband the handsome forester. After more than two centuries the brother and sister playmates were once more to meet in the persons of their progeny, when Elfrida’s descendant Henry Beauclerk, son of Matilda of Flanders, married Matilda of Scotland, descended in the seventh degree from Edward the Elder. Of the two other children of Alfred, we know only that Ethelgiva was early dedicated to the monastic life, becoming Abbess of Shaftesbury; and that Ethelweard, the youngest of the family, was a pupil in a court school founded by his father, probably in imitation of the similar institutions founded by Charlemagne, in which the sons of the nobility and some others were taught to read books both Latin and Anglo-Saxon, and also learned to write. Ethelweard (who must not be confounded with his kinsman of the same name, author of a chronicle) seems to have specially profited by this training, and was probably the most learned member of his family.

An obscure statement of Asser’s with reference to Alfred’s marriage reveals to us the fact that the great king’s life was in some mysterious way one long battle with disease. From early boyhood he suffered from some malady which caused him grievous pain. In his twentieth year, just about the time of his marriage, this malady left him, but was succeeded by another which caused him at intervals yet sharper pain, and always kept him in terror of its recurrence. This affliction endured from his twentieth till his forty-fifth year, if not longer.139 These hints, obscure as they are, heighten our admiration of the heroic spirit with which Alfred, often suffering from acute bodily pain, with the ever-present fear of attacks either by disease or by the Danes, set himself to fulfil his duties towards his subjects in the wide and comprehensive sense in which he understood them. Of his wisely planned and efficient schemes for the defence of his realm from hostile invasion something will be said in the next chapter. We are now concerned with his earnest endeavours to dispel the intellectual darkness which brooded over his country, yet of which only the king himself and a few chosen friends were fully conscious.

It is clear that in the course of the century which elapsed between the death of Bede and the birth of Alfred, the intellect of England had suffered a terrible relapse into ignorance and barbarism. It was not the inroads of the Northmen alone which had brought about this result, though, of course, the ruin of so many Northumbrian monasteries and the destruction of so many manuscripts were influences unfavourable to the cause of learning. But independently of Scandinavian ravages, England herself was becoming barbarised. In Northumbria the beacon light of Christianity and culture, which had once shone so brightly, was quenched in the blood of her kings, murdered and murderers. In Mercia there was a little more interest in literary pursuits, but apparently there only; East Anglia and Wessex were intellectually dead. As Alfred himself says, in the preface to his translation of Pope Gregory’s Regula Pastoralis: “Even before all this burning and ravaging [by the Danes in the reigns of Ethelwulf and his sons], when the churches were still filled with books and sacred vessels, and God’s servants abounded, yet they knew very little of the contents of their books, because they were not written in their own idiom”. “Formerly men came from beyond our borders, seeking wisdom in our own land; now, if we are to have it at all, we must look for it abroad. So great was the decay of learning among Englishmen that there were very few on this side Humber, and I ween not many north of it, who could understand the ritual [of Mass] or translate a letter from Latin into English. No, I cannot remember one such, south of the Thames, when I came to the throne.”

To help him in the arduous task of once more bringing the English race under the influence of literary culture, nay, rather to teach him who yearned to be the teacher of his people, Alfred sought the aid of learned ecclesiastics beyond his own borders. With much earnestness he invited the Welshman Asser, his future biographer, to repair to his court. From Mercia he imported Plegmund, who became in 890 archbishop of Canterbury, and Werferth, who eventually returned to the midlands as bishop of Worcester. From St. Omer came Grimbald, who was consecrated abbot of the new minster founded by Alfred at Winchester; and from the lands near the mouth of the Elbe came John the Old Saxon, whose ancestors had probably fought hard for heathenism against Charlemagne, but who was himself a learned ecclesiastic. He helped Alfred much in his literary work, and was made by him abbot of his monastery at Athelney; an uneasy post, for two of his monks contrived a villainous plot against his life and his reputation, but were foiled by the vigorous resistance made by the stalwart Old Saxon, who had been a warrior in his youth, when the would-be murderers set upon him by night in the lonely convent church.

These were the chief of Alfred’s literary assistants, and with their help he enriched his people with translations of some of the most highly prized works which the dying Roman world had bequeathed to Teutonic Europe.

1. The passage quoted above concerning the decay of learning in England comes from the king’s translation of Pope Gregory’s Regula Pastoralis, or as Alfred calls it his Herd-book. In this book the great pope to whom England was so largely indebted for her Christianity, gave many excellent hints as to the character, duties and special temptations of the Christian pastor. In his preface, King Alfred explained the reasons which had moved him to undertake the work of a translator. He marvelled that none of the good and wise men who had been in England before him had anticipated him in the work, but concluded that this was because they expected that learning would flourish yet more instead of decaying, and that another generation would be so familiar with Latin as to need no translations. Then on the other hand he remembered how the Old Testament itself had been translated from the Hebrew, first into Greek and then into Latin, and from thence, at any rate in part, into the languages of the other Christian nations of Europe; and on this precedent he resolved to act. “For it seems to me desirable,” he said, “that we should turn some of the books which all men ought to know into that language which we can all understand, and so bring it to pass (as we certainly may do if we only have rest from our enemies) that all the free youth of England, sons of men of substance, shall devote themselves to learning in their early years before they are fit for other occupations; that they shall first learn to read English writing, and then if they are still willing to continue as pupils and desire to rise to the higher ranks of the state, that they shall be taught the Latin language.”

The king then proceeds to describe his mode of translation: “sometimes word for word and sometimes meaning for meaning; as I learned the sense from Plegmund, mine archbishop, and Asser, my bishop, and Grimbald and John my mass-priests”. He describes the measures which he has taken to supply every see in his kingdom with a copy of the book, enriched with an aestel (clasp or book-marker?) worth 300 scillings, and commands in God’s name that no man shall take the aestel from the book or the book from the minster. “Thank God! we have now abundance of learned bishops, but we know not how long this may continue; and I therefore ordain that each book be always kept in the place to which now I send it, unless the bishop himself desire to borrow it, or give a written order for its loan to another.”

2. In order that his subjects might have some knowledge of the history of that great and splendid Roman past which lay in ruins behind them, Alfred, always with the help of his ecclesiastic friends, translated the seven books of the History of Paulus Orosius against the Pagans. The selection was in many respects an excellent one, for Orosius, a Spanish ecclesiastic of the fifth century and a friend of St. Augustine, has here set forth, in a concise manner and fairly interesting style, all that his contemporaries knew of the history of the world from the building of Babylon to Alaric’s capture of Rome. He was credulous and inaccurate, and his work, except for the events of his own age, has no scientific value, but as a manual of ancient history for the young Anglo-Saxon nobleman it could hardly have been surpassed. Both Alfred, however, and his readers must have been somewhat unnecessarily depressed by its perusal; for as the book had a polemical bearing, adversus Paganos, and was intended to show that the calamities which were befalling the Roman empire in the fifth century were not due to its adoption of the Christian faith, its author was naturally led to exaggerate the misery of the world in preceding ages. While enumerating, therefore, all the murders, pestilences and earthquakes of which he could find mention in the 5,617 years that had elapsed since the creation of the world, he omits to notice the long interspaces of quiet happiness which there had been in some ages and some countries of the world, and he has no praise for the progress which Humanity had made in some departments of life from Sardanapalus to Constantine.

King Alfred and his teachers were evidently sometimes at a loss to understand the meaning of their author, and it is amusing to see the ingenious arts by which in such cases they evaded the difficulty. They decided, no doubt wisely, that the unabridged history would be too long for their Saxon students, and therefore practised severe compression. Unfortunately for us this compression applies much more to the later portions of the history, where Orosius’s testimony is valuable, and where his translators might have added something of importance, than to the earlier books where neither he nor they have anything to say that we care to hear. The long account of Cæsar’s campaign in Gaul is reduced within the limits of a single sentence, and even the story of his British campaigns is shortened, though here we derive from the translation the fact that in Alfred’s opinion the site of Cæsar’s third battle was “near the river that is called Thames, near the ford that is called Wallingford”.

Incomparably the most interesting, however, of Alfred’s interpolations is made at the very beginning of the history, in the long geographical description which Orosius thought it his duty to prefix to his work. In translating this chapter the king has allowed himself very great freedom and sometimes has not improved upon his author; as when he volunteers a statement, borrowed doubtless from some classical geographer, that Scotland (by which, of course, he means Ireland) lies over against the Wendel Sea (or Mediterranean) at its western end. But when he comes to speak of the Teutonic and Scandinavian lands, he breaks quite away from Orosius and gives us a detailed ethnological description of Northern Europe, which, though in some of its details not easy of interpretation, is far more valuable than the meagre Orosian sentences for which it is exchanged. And then, suddenly, without any pretence of following his author’s guidance, he introduces the weather-beaten forms of two Norwegian pilots, Ohthere and Wulfstan, and imparts to his subjects and to posterity the information which they had given him as to their voyages in the North Sea and the Baltic.

Of these two men Ohthere, “who dwelt northmost of all the Northmen,” was the most adventurous. He told how he had sailed northward as far as any of the whale-hunters go, keeping the waste land on his right and the wide sea on his left hand. Then, leaving even the whalers behind, he had sailed northward for three days more, at the end of which time he found the coast turning suddenly to the east and then to the south. After this he had anchored his ship at the mouth of a great river. In other words, this bold seaman had doubled the North Cape, entered the White Sea, and probably cast anchor at the mouth of the river Dwina, somewhere near the site of the modern Archangel. The conversation of this old salt concerning the whales and walruses of the Polar Sea, the Fins and their reindeer, their accumulated skins of martens and bears, and feathers of sea-birds, which constituted the sole wealth of those desolate regions, evidently made a deep impression on the mind of “his lord King Alfred”. Though we may be inclined to smile at the naïve literary device which introduced all these details into the history of a Spanish presbyter who lived some five centuries earlier, we must be grateful to the king who preserved for us this record of the exploits of the Franklins and the Nansens of that long-vanished age.

3. It was not, however, only the history of the Biblical and classical ages which Alfred desired to render accessible to his people. He knew that the deeds of their own forefathers since they had entered the land of Britain, were worthy of their remembrance, and he rightly judged that the great struggle with the Danes, in which he was himself engaged, would soon be History, as memorable as anything that was recorded in the pages of Orosius. With this view, as Geoffrey Gaimar, a historian of the twelfth century, says, “He caused to be written an English book of adventures and of laws of the land and of the kings who made war”. In other words, Alfred’s orders brought into being the Saxon Chronicle. As its latest editor140 says: “The popular answer is in this case the right one. The Chronicle is the work of Alfred the Great. The idea of a national chronicle, as opposed to merely local annals, was his, and that this idea was realised under his direction and supervision, I most firmly believe. And we may, I think, safely place in the forefront of the Chronicle the inscription which encircles Alfred’s jewel [found at Athelney in 1693 and now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford], AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN, ‘Alfred ordered me to be made’.”

4. In further pursuance of the same plan a translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History from Latin into Anglo-Saxon was made, as we have reason to believe, either by Alfred’s own hand or under his immediate supervision. As this book had become a kind of classic among churchmen, Alfred allowed himself here less liberty than in some of his other translations. Some letters, epitaphs and similar documents are omitted, and there is an almost complete erasure of the chapters relating to the wearisome Paschal controversy. In other respects the king’s translation seems to be a fairly accurate reproduction of the original work.

5. Last, and in some ways most interesting of all the literary labours of Alfred, comes his translation of the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. This is a book which, after enjoying during the early Middle Ages a popularity perhaps somewhat greater than its merits, has fallen since the revival of learning into much less deserved oblivion. In it Boethius, a Roman nobleman who was cast into prison and eventually executed by order of the Gothic king Theodoric, sets forth the comfort which came to him in his wearisome imprisonment by meditations on Divine Philosophy. The problem which perplexed him and which Philosophy, the spiritual companion of his solitude, sought to solve, was the world-old one, “Why do the wicked flourish and why are the righteous afflicted?” Strange to say, though Boethius was a Christian, and was even in a certain sense a martyr for the Catholic faith, the Christian solution of the problem is kept almost entirely out of sight, and the answers suggested are such as might have been given by Socrates or Epictetus. Boethius believes in a Divine Ruler of the universe, and the general tendency of the book is towards the strengthening of belief, but it is belief rather of a theistic than of a definitely Christian type. However with all its defects and all its strange silences, the book was one which had a great attraction for many of the noblest minds of a bewildered Europe, and not least for the great West Saxon king, who, struggling against the depressing influences of disease, and ever dreading a fresh outburst of the Danish volcano, felt that he, too, like the author, had much need of “the Consolation of Philosophy”. In his other translations he had been working for his people; in this, which was probably executed towards the close of his reign, he was, perhaps, working rather for himself, for the solace and fortification of his own troubled spirit.

We have seen that Alfred did not take a slavish view of the duties of a translator; and in his Boethius he is more lordly than ever, omitting, adding, altering with a sublime contempt for mere verbal accuracy. It is, however, these very changes which make the book so precious to a student of Alfred’s own character. We see therein what were the thoughts which were most akin to his nature; we learn something of the secret springs of his actions; we can almost listen to the conversations which he held with his bishops and thegns in the great wooden palace at Winchester.

In the first place, he gives to the whole inquiry a more religious turn than he found in the original. For “Nature” he substitutes “God”; he sometimes introduces the name of Christ; he speaks of the Judgment-day, and his language has throughout that distinctly religious tone which is so strangely absent from the meditations of Boethius. He takes us into his royal council and tells us the principles upon which he has sought to administer the state, using for his instruments three sorts of ministers, men of prayer, men of war, and men of work, for all of whom suitable maintenance must be found out of the land. He expands a slight sentence of Boethius in praise of friendship into a noble passage, in which he declares that true friendship is not an earthly but a heavenly blessing; that all other objects of desire in this world are sought after in obedience to some selfish motive, but a true friend we love for love’s own sake and because of our trust in his truth, hoping for no other return. “Nature joins friends together and unites them with an inseparable love, whereas by our worldly goods and the wealth of this life we more often make foes than friends.”141

Boethius puts into the mouth of Philosophy some words deprecatory of too great regard for noble birth; but Alfred says boldly on his own account that “true high birth is that of the mind not of the flesh,” a memorable utterance in the mouth of the man whose lineage “went unto Cerdic” and who according to the songs of Saxon bards was descended from Woden. There are also in this most interesting translation many passages which show Alfred’s keen perception of the beauties of Nature, his unfailing interest in geography, and his knowledge of Saxon folk-lore (as illustrated by his allusion to the bones of Weland the Smith), besides some which reveal his naïve ignorance of well-known facts of ancient history, as when he describes the sella curulis as a kind of carriage, or when he tells us that Cassius was another name for Brutus. One sees with pleasure that the wise king had a certain gift of humour, and that he could at times be even sarcastic. He alone, not his author, is responsible for the following remark attributed to Philosophy: “Two things honour and power can do, if they fall into the hands of a fool: they can cause him to be respected and even revered by other fools”. Whosoever would get at the heart of this great man, the true founder of the English kingdom, and discover his inmost thoughts, should carefully study Alfred’s translation of Boethius, and observe where he neglects and where he reinforces from his own experience the maxims and arguments of the Roman statesman.

To the interval of comparative peace with which we are now dealing we may probably assign the reorganisation of the royal household. Apparently service in the palace was conducted on parallel lines with service in the army, being performed in both cases by men who had houses of their own to govern and lands of their own to cultivate. The king, therefore, ordained that the household should be divided into three portions, each of which should take palace-duty (“night and day,” says the biographer) for one month, and then, being relieved by another detachment, return home for two months’ furlough. The same principle of threefold division prevailed partially in the simple budget of Alfred’s exchequer. He divided, says Asser, all the revenue which was yearly collected by his officers into two parts, one of which was devoted to secular and the other to religious uses. Of the secular portion one-third was paid to the household, according to their respective dignities and special services; one-third to the workmen of various nationalities whom he had gathered about him for his great works of building and restoration; and one-third to the foreigners—probably for the most part scholars or professors of some liberal art—who flocked in great numbers to his court. Of the religious half of his revenue, one-quarter went to the poor, one-quarter to the two new monasteries founded by him at Winchester and Athelney, one-quarter to the court school, and the remainder promiscuously to the various monasteries in Wessex and Mercia, and the needy churches in Britain and even in Gaul and Ireland.

One of the most extraordinary of the king’s benefactions, one which we might well have doubted had it not been vouched for by the contemporary evidence of the Chronicle, is thus described therein: “And that same year [883 for 882] Sighelm and Athelstan carried to Rome the alms which he had vowed to send thither when he was fighting the [Danish] army at London: and also to India to St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew”. Of the campaign before London in the course of which this vow was made we have no more definite information. The sending of alms to Rome is easily understood, but the mission of West Saxon almoners to “St. Thomas’s Christians” in India is indeed a marvellous fact if true. Unfortunately the tendency of modern criticism is somewhat unfavourable to the genuineness of the entry.142

Though we know not the exact year when Alfred’s Dooms were compiled, this will be the best place for a brief statement of the legislative work of the great king.

“These are the dooms which Alfred the king chose, in order that no man should deem them otherwise than according to his will.” Such is the opening sentence of the laws. Then follows an elaborate table of contents including Ine’s laws as well as his own; and then, strangely enough, we have almost the whole of four chapters of the book of Exodus (xx.-xxiii.), containing the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic code of civil law in all its archaic simplicity and with all its Draconian sternness: the principle of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”; “whosoever doeth this or that he shall surely die,” the keynote of the whole. Then, however, comes a reference to the mission of “the Lord’s Son, our God, who is Jesus Christ, who came into the world, not to destroy the law but to fulfil it, and to increase it with all good things. With mild-heartedness and humility did He teach.”

Thereupon follows a description of the Council of Jerusalem as given in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, and a rehearsal of its decrees about “abstaining from fornication, from things offered in sacrifice to idols, from things strangled and from blood”. The acts of this council end with the Golden Rule (omitted from the manuscripts on which the Received Text of the New Testament is founded, but inserted in Codex Bezae and several early authorities), “And that which ye will that other men should not do to you, do not ye to other men”. “On this one doom,” says the king, “let each man meditate that he may judge each one rightly; nor needs he any other law-book. Let him seek for no other doom upon his neighbour than he would be willing to have pronounced upon himself.”

But, as Alfred proceeds to show, since the conversion of many nations to Christianity, synods have been held at which bishops and other distinguished witan have been present, and these assemblies, for the sake of the “mild-heartedness” which Christ taught, have commuted the death-penalty for the offences named in the Mosaic law to money payments on the scale set forth by them; and such payments may, therefore, without sin be taken by the secular lords to whom they are made payable. Only, there is one crime for which no money payment must be suffered to atone; and that is treason against a man’s rightful lord, because Almighty God ordained no remission of punishment to those who despised Himself, nor could His Son give any such remission to the traitor who delivered Him to death; and He ordered that a man should love his lord even as himself.

These passages give us an interesting glimpse of the mental process which governed the compilation of Alfred’s law-book. In the same spirit in which he translated Orosius and Gregory for his subjects’ benefit, he sets before them what he considers the source of all legislation, the divine ordinances given amidst the thunders of Sinai. He then shows how that law was modified by the teaching of Christ; he rehearses the several points of the decree of the Council of Jerusalem, and thence glides by an easy transition to that tariff of compensations and fines (payment of wergild and wite) by which, in his day, atonement might be made for all offences, with the one exception here so emphatically insisted on, the crime of treason against a man’s natural lord. Of course, modern historical science cannot concede to Church synods the credit of this great change, which we believe to have been wrought possibly through long ages in the forests of Germany—namely, the change by which the blood feud slowly gave place to the exacted wer: but doubtless Christian ecclesiastics accepted the principle, perhaps in many instances regulated its application; and King Alfred was so far right in claiming the authority of the Church for the practice of money compensation instead of the relentless severity of some of the ordinances of Exodus. The conclusion of Alfred’s Prologue is important as indicating what was the legislative competence of the king and how he shared it with the witan.

“I then, King Alfred, gathered these laws together and caused them to be written down, selecting many which pleased me from among those ordained by my predecessors. And many of those which I liked not I abrogated by the counsel of my Witan, ordaining some different way for the future. For I did not dare to set down in writing many of my own suggestions, not knowing how they would be liked by those who should come after. But whenever I found in the laws passed in the days of my kinsman Ine, or of Offa, King of Mercia, or of Ethelbert, the first English convert to Christianity, anything that seemed to me to be most justly decided, such laws I gathered in and the others I left out.”

Generally speaking, Alfred’s laws differ from those of Ine, and still more from those of Kentish Ethelbert, in the direction of greater leniency, the amount of fine payable for injuries to the person being almost always considerably reduced. This tendency, when we compare Alfred’s and Ethelbert’s laws, is at first sight obscured by the fact that the fines imposed by the latter are expressed in terms of the Kentish scilling, which was worth four times as much as that of Wessex, but when we have made the necessary correction for this difference, it comes out very clearly. Thus the fine for cutting off the thumb was in Ethelbert’s code the equivalent of 80 shillings of Wessex, while under Alfred it was only 30. For the like injury to the middle finger it was respectively 32 and 15 shillings; for the “gold” or ring finger, 24 and 17.

This remarkable diminution in the scale of pecuniary punishments was probably due, not simply to “mild-heartedness” on the part of the king and his witan, but also to the economic effect of the Danish ravages. So much of the portable wealth of the country had been carried off from hall and monastery to the homesteads of Scandinavia, that the value of gold and silver remaining in the land was sensibly increased, and a fine which was reasonable at the beginning of the eighth century became exorbitant at the close of the ninth. This abatement of pecuniary penalty is modified in a singular way in the case of forest trespass. It may be remembered that by the laws of Ine, a man going into a forest and felling timber for his own use was liable to a fine of 30 scillings for each tree so felled, up to three, but that 90 scillings was the maximum penalty. Now, by the laws of Alfred the penalty for each tree so felled was only 5 scillings, but there was no maximum. A forest-thief, therefore, who cut down twenty trees would fare worse under the new law than under the old. One would like to know what were the developments in English forestry which led to this singular modification of the law.

Our attention begins to be directed to the public assemblies for the transaction of business, the local moots which, as we know from other sources, had judicial as well as administrative duties to discharge, arranging the levy of men for the fyrd and raising money for the equipment of ships, as well as settling important questions of inheritance and disputes about property. It was important that such meetings should not be disturbed by the brawls of unruly partisans of the litigants, and accordingly we find it enacted that “if any man fight before the king’s ealdorman in the gemot (meeting), he shall pay his wer and wite as the law ordains for any assault that he may have committed, and in addition shall pay a fine (wite) of 120 scillings to the ealdorman”.

Law 42 in Alfred’s code illustrates in an interesting manner that gradual transition from the blood-feud to the law-suit which was perhaps the most important conquest of Teutonic civilisation. By the various sections of this law it is provided that no man who has a grievance against another shall fight his foe until he has first demanded justice of him. That done, however, and justice denied, he may, if he have a sufficiently strong body of friends to back him, besiege the defendant for seven days. Should that blockade bring about a surrender and a disarmament, he must keep his adversary in custody for thirty days, sending word to his kinship that they may come and pay the mulct for which the prisoner is liable. What is to happen if the surrender does not take place at the end of the seven days, or the payment at the end of the thirty, we are not informed, but it seems to be implied that the claimant may then fight and even slay his enemy without guilt. If the plaintiff have not sufficient power to besiege his foe, he must ride to the ealdorman and demand his aid. Failing that, he must seek redress of the king, before he takes it upon himself to fight his foe. Moreover, a man might always fight for his lord or his kinsman without incurring the penalties of blood-guiltiness, and so too he could wage “lawful war” with the seducer of his wife, his sister, or his mother. We see that the ideas of the old blood-feud and of the so-called “Fist-right” still lingered in the mind even of so wise and religious a legislator as Alfred. Redress of wrongs by the action of courts of law might be the ideal, but in the actual Saxon world private warfare must still be allowed, and all that the king could hope to accomplish was to confine it within narrow bounds and regulate its procedure.

On the condition of the servile class, the theows and esnes, in the time of Alfred, not much light is thrown by Alfred’s Doom-book. We learn, however, that there was already a large class of free-men working for wages, for whose holidays, amounting in all to about thirty-six days in the year, the forty-third of Alfred’s laws made provision. From this enactment the theows and esnes are expressly excluded, but it is provided that all men in servile condition shall have the four Wednesdays in the Ember-weeks, on which days they are graciously permitted to make a present of their labour to any one who may have helped them in God’s name, or even to work for themselves. There is also a curious provision (law 20) exempting from liability the lord of a monk who has received money on deposit which he has failed to restore. This passage coincides with some others which seem to indicate that owing to the ruin of the monasteries wrought by the Danes, many of the monks, in order to keep body and soul together, accepted a servile position on the estate or in the house of some great landowner.

There are other indications that during the two centuries which had elapsed since the legislation of Ine, the tendency which was even then observable, towards the formation of large landed estates and the lessening of the number of free and independent ceorls, had been going forward. One cause which probably contributed to this result was the conversion of Folkland into Bookland: two terms which, after puzzling a whole generation of English historians, have at last, it may be hoped, yielded up their secret to the patient research of a foreign student of our institutions.143 Folkland, it seems now safe to say, was “family land held by common right and without written evidence”.144 Bookland was, as it is called by a Latin interpreter,145 terra testamentalis, land over which the owner had full power of disposition by will, and his right to which rested on some “book” or written document, not on folk-right and immemorial custom. A striking illustration of the difference between the two kinds of property is afforded by the will of a certain ealdorman Alfred who was a contemporary of his great namesake the king.146 This nobleman leaves the bulk of his large property, which is expressly stated to be bookland, to his widow and “our common bairn” Aldryth: but there is also a son, probably not born in wedlock, for whom he wishes to make provision. After leaving him a certain small “bookland” property, he adds: “If the king will let him have the folkland in addition to this bookland, then let him have and enjoy it”; if not, the widow is to convey to him certain other bookland estates. It is argued with much force that here we have the case of a nobleman owning large properties which have been conveyed to him by perhaps recent “books,” written instruments of purchase and sale, royal donations and the like. But he has inherited also another, probably smaller, property which has been in his family from time immemorial, is his by folk-right, and is called folkland. But this property is held subject to certain customary laws of inheritance, and is perhaps liable to reversion to other members of the kinship in default of male heirs. The ealdorman hopes for the king’s intervention on behalf of his son should any difficulty be made about his succession to the folkland, and, failing that, desires that the loss shall be made up to him out of the bookland estate, over which his disposing power is incontestable.

If, as there is reason to believe, the cases of conversion of folkland into bookland were frequent throughout the later Saxon centuries, if the slumbering rights of succession of distant members of the kinship were being barred by “books” granting the land to members of the royal household, to convents and churches, or simply confirming ordinary commercial transactions of sale and exchange, it is easy to see that the class of “twy-hind” ceorls would be sensibly diminished and the possessions of the “twelf-hynd” man, the thegn or the king’s retainer visibly increased. All these causes would augment the number of poor and struggling freemen who, especially in times of war and invasion during “the clash of mighty opposites,” were glad to sacrifice some part of their precarious independence by “commending” themselves to the protection of some powerful landowner.