other style so exactly expressed the extent of Elfred's dominion. It took in all, or nearly all, of the Saxon part of England, and not much besides. For the Mercian ealdormanship of Ethelred consisted to a great extent of lands which had been won by the West-Saxons in the first conquest, and which had afterwards passed under Mercian rule. Of the high-sounding titles which were taken by the kings who followed.Elfred we see no sign in his time. Asser however more than once speaks of him as AngulSaxonum rex,' the earliest use of a name which, as expressing the union of Angles and Saxons under one king, became not uncommon in the next century. Asser, as a Welshman, naturally speaks of the tongue of Elfred as Saxon, and his land as Saxony. But Ælfred himself, while with minute accuracy he uses the Saxon name in his title, always in his writings speaks of his people and their tongue as English.

As Elfred extended the bounds of his kingdom, there can be little doubt that his reign greatly tended to the increase of the royal authority within his kingdom. This was the natural result both of his position and of his personal character. It is a mere legend which charges him with oppressive or even harsh rule at any time of his life. But when a king has won the position, both legendary and historical, of Elfred, even the most suspicious witness against him becomes of importance. Unless we assume sheer invention for contradiction's sake, it must be an exaggeration or distortion of something. Something must have suggested the story. There seems no reason to charge Elfred, as a great scholar (KEMBLE, Sarons in England, ii. 208) has done, with anti-national and un-Teutonic feeling.' But we may believe that the king who had been marked out for kingship by a papal hallowing in his childhood, and who had come to the kingship of his people by what might seem so marked a course of destiny, may from the beginning have held the kingly authority somewhat higher than the kings who had gone before him, somewhat higher than pleased all his subjects. In fact, the strengthening of the kingly power would be the almost necessary result of Elfred's career. He made his kingdom afresh, and he enlarged its borders. Of all that was done he himself was preeminently the doer. We see the same thing in France under Saint Lewis, a king in whom the warlike side was less prominent than in Elfred, and who never had to fight for the being of his kingdom. Under kings like Elfred and Lewis the kingly power grows, simply because every man knows that

the king is the power that can best be trusted. Asser emphatically says that Elfred was the only man in his kingdom to whom the poor could look for help. The circumstances of Elfred's reign did much also to quicken a change which was then going on both in England and in other parts of Europe. This is the change from the old immemorial nobility of birth to the new nobility of personal service, that is in England the change from corlas to pegnas. Rank and power become attached to service due to the king as a personal lord, a process which, in the beginning at least, does much to strengthen the authority of that personal lord. But it does not appear that Elfred was the author of any formal legal or constitutional changes. In his legislation his tone is one of singular modesty. 'He did not dare to set down much of his own in writ, for he did not know how it would like them that came after.' He speaks of himself as simply choosing the best among the laws of earlier kings, and as doing all that he did with the consent of his witan. And the actual legislation of Elfred is of exactly the same character as the legislation of the earlier kings. What strikes us most in his laws as compared with the laws of his own predecessor Ine is the absence of any reference to the distinction of English and Welsh. The Britons within the immediate West-Saxon kingdom (that is, no doubt, mainly in Somerset and Devonshire) had now practically become English. And the events of Elfred's own reign must have done much to wipe out the distinction. Fighting with the Danes had made Britons and Englishmen one people within the WestSaxon realm.

What is specially characteristic of Elfred's laws is their intensely religious character. The body of them, like other Christian Teutonic codes, is simply the old Teutonic law, with such changes more strictly perhaps such additions-as the introduction of Christianity made needful. What is peculiar to Elfred's code is the long scriptural introduction, beginning with the Ten Commandments. The Hebrew law is here treated very much as an earlier Teutonic code might have been. The translation is far from being always literal; the language is often adapted to Teutonic institutions, while, on the other hand, some very inapplicable Hebrew phrases and usages are kept, and the immemorial Teutonic (or rather Aryan) institution of the wergild is said to be a merciful invention of christian bishops. This last error is specially strange, as Elfred commonly shows a thorough knowledge of the institutions and traditions of his own people

There is some difficulty as to the language of Asser (M. H. B. 497), when he praises Elfred's zeal for the administration of justice and his censures on corrupt or incompetent judges. As Kemble (Saxons in England, ii. 42) shows, it is not very easy to see who thecomites' and 'præpositi' are; Kemble suggests that the reference may be to the king's own pening-manna-gemót, his own court for his own immediate following, and that Elfred may have begun the system of royal missi, controlling to some extent the popular courts, which was in full force in the eleventh century, and out of which sprang our present judicial system. It is hardly needful to say that the story of his hanging the corrupt judges is purely mythical.

man.

The personal character of Elfred, as set forth by his biographer Asser, certainly comes as near to perfection as that of any recorded He gives us not only a picture of a man thoroughly devoted to his work, faithfully discharging the acknowledged duties of his office, but the further picture of one who, as a king, the father of his people, sought for every opportunity of doing good to his people in every way. Many of the details have become household words. His careful economy of time, by which he found means to carry on his studies without interfering with the cares of government, his deep devotion, his constant thought for his people, the various expedients and inventions of a simple age, all stand out in his life as recorded by the admiring stranger. And we must not forget his physical difficulties. The tale of the sickness which beset him on the day of his marriage and at other times of his life seems to have received legendary additions; but the general outline of the story seems to be trustworthy. His bounty was large and systematic. He laboured hard to restore the monastic life which had pretty well died out in his kingdom, by the foundation of his two monasteries, one for women at Shaftesbury, the other for men on the spot which had seen his first resist ance to the Danes on Athelney. And besides gifts to the poor and religious foundations at home, he sent alms to Rome and even to India (Chron. sub an. 883). In his manysided activity, he looked carefully after his builders and gold-workers, his huntsmen and falconers, in a state of things when hunting was no mere sport but a serious business.

But it is after all the strictly intellectual side of Elfred's character which is most specially his own. Any other king would have thought it enough to defend his people with courage, to rule them with justice, to legislate for them with wisdom. Elfred

did all this and more also. He made it his further business to be the spiritual and intellectual teacher of his people. For in all his writings Elfred is emphatically the teacher. He writes from a sheer sense of duty, to profit his own folk. He undertakes the humble office of a translator, and turns into his native tongue such writings, religious, historical, and scientific, as he thinks will tend to the instruction of his people. As a teacher, he does not bind himself to a servile reproduction of his author; as men do still in writings designed solely for edification, he altered and added to his original, whenever he thought that by so doing he could better profit his readers. He is eminently a national writer; we read that, like Charles the Great, he loved the old Teutonic songs and traditions and taught them to his children, and their effect on himself is often seen in his writings. He grasped the fact, which perhaps it was easier to grasp in his day than it was somewhat later, that men can be really stirred and taught only through their own tongue. It is undoubtedly to what he preserved, to what he himself wrote, to what his example encouraged others to write, that we owe our possession of a richer early literature than any other people of Western Europe, and that the habit of writing in English never died out, even when the English tongue had for a while ceased to be a learned and courtly speech in its own land.

Elfred himself, in the preface to the Pastoral of Gregory, sets forth and laments the sad lack of learning which he found in his own kingdom at the time of his accession. It was one of the dead times of English intellect; the literary eminence of Northumberland had passed away; the continuous literary eminence of Wessex was to begin with himself. His foundation of schools at Oxford-a tale as old as the so-called Brompton-is purely fabulous; but he did all that he could for the advancement of learning by planting the best scholars in the monasteries which were the schools of the time, and by giving some of them high ecclesiastical preferment. To this end he invited men both from other parts of Britain and from lands beyond sea. He brought Archbishop Plegmind and Bishop Werfrith from Mercia; he brought Grimbold and John the Old-Saxon from other Teutonic lands; from the land of the Briton came Asser, while John the Scot, John Scotus Erigena, might be said to come from both Celtic and Teutonic lands at once. But it was not only men of book-learning that he brought from other lands. Strangers from all parts flocked to become his men,

and he gladly received all who brought with them any knowledge or any useful art, the seafaring Othhere no less than Grimbold or Asser. And it should be noticed that his reception and encouragement of strangers, forming as it did a marked feature in Elfred's character, seems never to have been turned against him as a fault, as it was against some other kings.

But for us Elfred's greatest and most abiding work in his character of promoter of knowledge is that he gave us our unique possession, a history of our own folk in our own tongue from the beginning. The most reasonable belief seems to be that it was at Elfred's bidding that the English Chronicles grew into their present shape out of the older local annals of the church of Winchester. We thus have, what no other nation of Western Europe has, a continuous national record from our first coming into our present land. In its earlier parts some mythical names and reckonings may have found their way into its text; but the essential truth of the record becomes more and more strengthened every time it is put to the test. In the course of Elfred's reign it grows into a detailed contemporary narrative of the most stirring years of his life.

Of Elfred's own writings the chief are his translations of Boetius's Consolation of Philosophy, of the Histories of Bæda and Orosius, and of the Pastoral Care' of Gregory the Great (pa boc pe is genemned on Leden Pastoralis and on Englisc Hirdeboc'). The order in which they were written is a matter of some interest which is discussed by Dr. Bosworth in his preface to the Orosius. He is inclined to place them in this order, Boetius, Bada, Orosius, Gregory. The first three he places in the time of peace, between 887 and 893, and the fourth in the last years of peace after the war with Hasting, between 897 and Elfred's death. And we may perhaps safely infer that the Boetius is the earliest, and that it was begun in the year 887. For it is in that year that Asser (M. H. B. 492) places the beginning of. Elfred's work of translation, and William of Malmesbury (Gesta Regum, lib. ii. cap. 122) speaks of Asser as giving Elfred help in the translation of Boetius. The Gregory cannot be earlier than 890, as Elfred speaks of Plegmund as archbishop, which he did not become till that year. And, even without dates, we might set down the Boetius as earlier than the Orosius. It is perhaps the most interesting of all Elfred's works, and best shows the spirit of the man and the way in which he went to work. He wrote for the edification of his people, and a literal translation of the Latin writer was

not that which would be most edifying. Whether Boetius was personally a Christian or not is a difficult question; the popularity of his name and writings was largely due to the belief that he was a martyr for orthodoxy at the hands of an heretical prince, and to the existence of several theological treatises bearing his name. These were doubtless the grounds which suggested the works of Boetius to Elfred or to Asser as a subject for study and translation. But, whatever its author was, the Consolation' is certainly not a christian book, though, like many writings of the last days of paganism, it is to some extent tinged with christian thoughts and phrases. It is also a learned book, full of allusions which would be quite unintelligible to Elfred's unlettered West-Saxons, many of which were not well understood by Elfred himself. It is also a book written partly in prose and partly in verse. The book needed a thorough recasting to suit Elfred's purpose. He did thoroughly recast it; the pagan book became christian, the learned book became popular. Short allusions of Boetius to historical or mythological points are expanded into full narratives under the hand of Alfred. In these expansions Elfred sometimes makes historical mistakes which he would hardly have made after he had mastered the history of Orosius, and which thus help us to fix the Boetius as the earlier work of the two. On the other hand, he sometimes catches historical analogies with the happy grasp of true genius. The Consolation of Boetius is interspersed with poems, which are specially crowded with allusions which for Ælfred's readers needed a commentator. In Elfred's hands therefore the Metres become prose, and prose of a very different kind from that of the original. Elfred made it his business to explain whatever would be puzzling. Thus in the Metre in iv. 3 of the Consolation,' Boetius tells the story of Odysseus and Kirke without mentioning the name of either. Odysseus is merely pointed at as Neritius dux,'as in iv. 7 he is pointed at as 'Ithacus." Elfred explains at length who 'Aulixes' was. He was king of two kingdoms-Ithacige' = Ithaca insula, and Retie,' seemingly a corruption of Neritos. These two kingdoms King Aulixes held of the Emperor Agamemnón (Aulixes. . . hæfde twa pioda under pam kasere. and pres kaseres nama was Agamemnón). The over-king at Winchester understood the position of the overking at Mykéné so much better than many much deeper scholars that we may forgive him his little slip in the geography of Western Greece.

Then come the two strictly historical

works, Bæda and Orosius. The choice of Beda was obvious. And Orosius, author of a history of the world written from a specially christian point of view, was just the kind of work that suited Elfred's purpose. But he treated it in his usual way; he added and left out at pleasure. In the first book, where Orosius treats of the geography of Europe, he works in the long original narratives of Othhere and Wulfstan, describing the northern lands which were unknown to Orosius. The historian, in short, no less than the philosopher, is not simply translated by Alfred, but recast. But, as dealing with a more technical book, Elfred keeps to technical language in the Orosius in a way in which he did not in the Boetius. Then a Roman consul was turned into an English heretoga; now he remains a Roman consul.

Of these writings the Gregory is the only one that has been edited by any scholar of the latest critical school. It appeared from the hand of Mr. Sweet among the publications of the Early-English Text Society, 1871-72. The Orosius was edited in 1851 by Dr. Bosworth, who in his preface describes the manuscripts and earlier editions. The translation of Bada is printed in Smith's great edition of Breda, 1722. The Boetius was edited in 1864 by Mr. Samuel Fox for Bohn's 'Antiquarian Library. Strange to say, in this edition the Old-English text is printed in the so-called 'Saxon characters, though Dr. Bosworth had, thirteen years before, had the sense to print in ordinary type. A uniform critical edition of all the great king's writings would be no small gain to OldEnglish learning.

6

Of other writings or alleged writings of Elfred it appears that a translation of the Soliloquies of Saint Augustine remains unprinted. The separate version of the Metres. of Boetius-that is, the separate version of the metrical passages in the Consolation ' which is printed in Mr. Fox's edition, seems clearly not to be Elfred's. The Encheiridion,' or 'Handbook '-a book of entries and jottings of all kinds, of the beginning of which Asser (M. H. B. 491) gives an account--seems to have been extant in William of Malmesbury's time, and he quotes a story about Saint Ealdhelm from it (Gest. Reg. lib. ii. cap. 123; Gest. Pont. Rolls Ser. pp. 3:33, William also mentions a version of the Psalms, which Eltred began but did not finish. The so-called Proverbs of Elfred, a

336).

work of the thirteenth century, simply bears witness to the veneration in which his name was still held. There seems also to have been extant in the same century an English version

VOL. I.

of Esop's Fables by an English king, the authorship of which strangely fluctuates between Elfred and Henry I (see WRIGHT, Biographia Britannica Literaria, Anglo-Saxon Period, p. 396, and FREEMAN, Norman Conquest, iv. 796). The wonder is, not that some spurious writings should have been attributed to Elfred, but that there are not many more.

But, among the writings of Elfred, we must not forget his will, of which the English text is given by Kemble, Cod. Dipl. ii. 112, and a Latin version in Cod. Dipl. v. 127, where the preface, reciting the will of Ethelwulf, is given at much greater length. In its many special bequests to his children and to other persons, and in its legal and other allusions, especially the account of the minute arrangements made by Ethelwulf for the disposal of his property, it is one of the most instructive documents of the time.

[Our main authorities for the reign and life of Alfred are his life by Asser and the English Chronicles during his reign. The genuineness of Asser's work was called in question by Mr. Thomas Wright, but it has been generally accepted by later scholars. It has no doubt been Saint Neot and in the more shameless forgery interpolated, as in some of the passages about about Grimbold at Oxford. But the original text can be recovered with no great trouble, very much by the help of Florence of Worcester, who has so largely copied Asser. The work of Asser, thus distinguished, bears every mark of genuineness. It seems quite impossible that any forger could have invented the small touches which bespeak the man writing from personal knowledge, and that man no Englishman but a Briton. The constant use of the word Saxon where Elfred

himself would have used English' is of itself proof enough; a later forger might have thought of it, but hardly one so early as to have been mistaken by Florence for the genuine Asser. His notices of York (M. H. B. 474) and of the table-land of Escesdún (ibid. 477) are evidently, as the writer says of the latter, the result of personal knowledge. It is enough to compare the true Asser with the false Ingulf to see the difference between the two. A few other notices, which seem to come from independent sources, are preserved by Ethelward and William of Malmesbury.

A list of the earlier modern writers on Elfred

is given by Wright, Biographia Literaria, 384. The best known is the life by Sir John Spelman, son of the better known Sir Henry, which first appeared in 1678. In modern times there has been a life of Elfred by Dr. Giles (London, 1848) and a German life by Wyss. More important is the youthful work of Dr. Pauli, the English version of which was edited by Mr. Thomas Wright. Mr. Wright's notices of Ælfred's works, in his Biographia Literaria, have

M