Chapter III: His Translations and His Will (4)

We collect from the general tenor of the Anglo-Saxon laws that the evils most frequently calling for remedy were manslaying, wounding, and cattle-stealing; it is obvious enough that the latter, when followed by pursuit in hot blood, was a natural and prolific source of the two former. The rules dealing with such wrongs or crimes (for archaic laws draw no firm line between public offence and private injury) present a strange contrast of crude ideas and minute specification, as it appears at first sight. Both are however really due to similar conditions. A society which is incapable of refined conceptions, but is advanced enough to require equal rules of some kind and to limit the ordinary power of its rulers, is likewise incapable of leaving any play for judicial discretion. Anglo-Saxon courts had not the means of apportioning punishment to guilt in the particular case, or assessing compensation according to the actual damage, any more than of deciding on the merits of conflicting claims according to the evidence. Thus the only way remaining open was to fix an equivalent in money or in kind for each particular injury: so much for life and so much for every limb and member of the human body. The same thing occurs with even greater profusion of detail in the other Germanic compilations of the Dark Ages. In the latter days of Anglo-Saxon monarchy treason was added to the rude catalogue of crimes, under continental influence ultimately derived from Roman law; but the sin of plotting against the sovereign was the more readily conceived as heinous above all others by reason of the ancient Germanic principle of faith between a lord and his men. This prominence of the personal relation explains why down to quite modern times the murder of a husband by his wife, of a master by his servant, and of an ecclesiastical superior by a clerk, secular or regular, owing him obedience, were specially classed as “petit treason” and distinguished from murder in general.[48]

Secret murder as opposed to open slaying was treated with special severity. This throws no light on our later criminal law; nor has it much to do with love of a fair fight, though this may have strengthened the feeling; rather it goes back to a time when witchcraft, and poisoning as presumably connected therewith, were believed to be unavoidable by ordinary caution, and regarded with a supernatural horror which is still easy to observe among barbarous people. With these exceptions, and a few later ones of offences reserved for the king’s jurisdiction, crimes were not classified or distinguished in Anglo-Saxon custom save by the amount of public fine[49] and private composition required to redeem the wrong-doer’s life in each case. Capital punishment and money payment, or rather liability to the blood-feud redeemable by money payment, and slavery for a thief who could not make the proper fine, were the only means of compulsion generally applicable, though false accusers and some other infamous persons were liable to corporal penalties. Imprisonment is not heard of as a substantive punishment; and it is needless to say that nothing like a system of penal discipline was known. We cannot doubt that a large number of offences, even notorious ones, went unpunished. The more skilled and subtle attacks on property, such as forgery and allied kinds of fraud, did not occur, not because men were more honest, but because fraudulent documents could not be invented or employed in a society which knew nothing of credit and did not use writing for any common business of life.

Far more significant for the future development of English law are the beginnings of the King’s Peace. In later times this became a synonym for public order maintained by the king’s general authority; nowadays we do not easily conceive how the peace which lawful men ought to keep can be any other than the Queen’s or the commonwealth’s. But the king’s justice, as we have seen, was at first not ordinary but exceptional, and his power was called to aid only when other means had failed. To be in the king’s peace was to have a special protection, a local or personal privilege. Every free man was entitled to peace in his own house, the sanctity of the homestead being one of the most ancient and general principles of Teutonic law. The worth set on a man’s peace, like that of his life, varied with his rank, and thus the king’s peace was higher than any other man’s. Fighting in the king’s house was a capital offence from an early time. Gradually the privileges of the king’s house were extended to the precincts of his court, to the army, to the regular meetings of the shire and hundred, and to the great roads. Also the king might grant special personal protection to his officers and followers; and these two kinds of privilege spread until they coalesced and covered the whole ground. The more serious public offences were appropriated to the king’s jurisdiction; the king’s peace was used as a special sanction for the settlement of blood-feuds, and was proclaimed on various solemn occasions; it seems to have been specially prominent—may we say as a “frontier regulation”?—where English conquest and settlement were recent.[50] In the generation before the Conquest it was, to all appearance, extending fast. In this kind of development the first stage is a really exceptional right; the second is a right which has to be distinctly claimed, but is open to all who will claim it in the proper form; the third is the “common right” which the courts will take for granted. The Normans found the king’s peace nearing, if not touching, the second stage.

Except for a few peculiar provisions, there is nothing in Anglo-Saxon customs resembling our modern distinctions between wilful, negligent, and purely accidental injuries. Private vengeance does not stop to discriminate in such matters, and customary law which started from making terms with the avenger could not afford to take a more judicial view. This old harshness of the Germanic rules has left its traces in the Common Law down to quite recent times. A special provision in Alfred’s laws recommends a man carrying a spear on his shoulder to keep the point level with the butt; if another runs on the point so carried, only simple compensation at most[51] will be payable. If the point has been borne higher (so that it would naturally come in a man’s face), this carelessness may put the party to his oath to avoid a fine. If a dog worried or killed any one, the owner was answerable in a scale of fines rising after the first offence;[52] the indulgence of the modern law which requires knowledge of the dog’s habits was unknown. But it may be doubted whether these rules applied to anything short of serious injury. Alfred’s wise men show their practical sense by an explanatory caution which they add: the owner may not set up as an excuse that the dog forthwith ran away and was lost. This might otherwise have seemed an excellent defence according to the archaic notion that the animal or instrument which does damage carries the liability about with it, and the owner may free himself by abandoning it (_noxa caput sequitur_).[53]

We have spoken of money payments for convenience; but it does not seem likely that enough money was available, as a rule, to pay the more substantial wergilds and fines; and it must once have been the common practice for the pacified avenger to accept cattle, arms, or valuable ornaments, at a price agreed between the parties or settled by the court. The alternative of delivering cattle is expressly mentioned in some of the earlier laws.

As for the law of property, it was rudimentary, and inextricably mixed up with precautions against theft and charges of theft. A prudent buyer of cattle had to secure himself against the possible claim of some former owner who might allege that the beasts had been stolen. The only way to do this was to take every step in public and with good witness. If he set out on a journey to a fair, he would let his neighbours know it. When he did business either far or near, he would buy only in open market and before credible persons, and, if the sale were at any distance from home, still more if he had done some trade on the way without having set out for the purpose, he would call the good men of his own township to witness when he came back driving his newly-gotten oxen, and not till then would he turn them out on the common pasture. These observances, probably approved by long-standing custom, are prescribed in a whole series of ordinances on pain of stringent forfeitures.[54] Even then a purchaser whose title was challenged had to produce his seller, or, if he could not do that, clear himself by oath. The seller might produce in turn the man from whom he had bought, and he again might do the like; but this process (“vouching to warranty” in the language of later medieval law) could not be carried more than three steps back, to the “fourth hand” including the buyer himself. All this has nothing to do with the proof of the contract in case of a dispute between the original parties to the sale; it is much more aimed at collusion between them, in fact at arrangements for the receipt and disposal of stolen goods. The witnesses to the sale are there not for the parties’ sake, but as a check in the public interest. We are tempted at first sight to think of various modern enactments that require signature or other formalities as a condition of particular kinds of contracts being enforceable; but their provisions belong to a wholly different category.

Another archaic source of anxiety is that borrowed arms may be used in a fatal fight and bring the lender into trouble. The early notion would be that a weapon used for manslaying should bring home the liability with it to the owner, quite regardless of any fault; which would afterwards become a more or less rational presumption that he lent it for no good purpose. Then the risk of such weapons being forfeited continued even to modern times. Hence the armourer who takes a sword or spear to be repaired, and even a smith who takes charge of tools, must warrant their return free from blood-guiltiness, unless it has been agreed to the contrary.[55] We also find, with regard to the forfeiture of things which “move to death,” that even in case of pure accident, such as a tree falling on a woodman, the kindred still have their rights. They may take away the tree if they will come for it within thirty days.[56]

There was not any law of contract at all, as we now understand it. The two principal kinds of transaction requiring the exchange or acceptance of promises to be performed in the future were marriage and the payment of wergild. Apart from the general sanctions of the Church, and the king’s special authority where his peace had been declared, the only ways of adding any definite security to a promise were oath and giving of pledges. One or both of these were doubtless regularly used on solemn occasions like the settlement of a blood-feud; and we may guess that the oath, which at all events carried a spiritual sanction, was freely resorted to for various purposes. But business had hardly got beyond delivery against ready money between parties both present, and there was not much room for such confidence as that on which, for example, the existence of modern banking rests. How far the popular law took any notice of petty trading disputes, such as there were, we are not informed; it seems likely that for the most part they were left to be settled by special customs of traders, and possibly by special local tribunals in towns and markets. Merchants trafficking beyond seas, in any case, must have relied on the customs of their trade and order rather than the cumbrous formal justice of the time.

Anglo-Saxon landholding has been much discussed, but is still imperfectly understood, and our knowledge of it, so far from throwing any light on the later law, depends largely on what can be inferred from Anglo-Norman sources. It is certain that there were a considerable number of independent free men holding land of various amounts down to the time of the Conquest. In the eastern counties some such holdings, undoubtedly free, were very small indeed.[57] But many of the lesser free men were in practical subjection to a lord who was entitled to receive dues and services from them; he got a share of their labour in tilling his land, rents in money and kind, and so forth. In short they were already in much the same position as those who were called villeins in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Also some poor free men seem to have hired themselves out to work for others from an early time.[58] We know next to nothing of the rules under which free men, whether of greater or lesser substance, held “folk-land,” that is, estates governed by the old customary law. Probably there was not much buying and selling of such land. There is no reason to suppose that alienation was easier than in other archaic societies, and some local customs found surviving long after the Conquest point to the conclusion that often the consent of the village as well as of the family was a necessary condition of a sale. Indeed it is not certain that folk-land, generally speaking, could be sold at all. There is equally no reason to think that ordinary free landholders could dispose of their land by will, or were in the habit of making wills for any purpose. Anglo-Saxon wills (or rather documents more like a modern will than a modern deed) exist, but they are the wills of great folk, such as were accustomed to witness the king’s charters, had their own wills witnessed or confirmed by bishops and kings, and held charters of their own; and it is by no means clear that the lands dealt with in these wills were held as ordinary folk-land. In some cases it looks as if a special licence or consent had been required; we also hear of persistent attempts by the heirs to dispute even gifts to great churches.[59]

Soon after the conversion of the south of England to Christianity, English kings began to grant the lordship and revenues of lands, often of extensive districts, to the Church, or more accurately speaking to churches, by written charters framed in imitation of continental models. Land held under these grants by charter or “book,” which in course of time acquired set forms and characters peculiar to England, was called _bookland_, and the king’s bounty in this kind was in course of time extended to his lay magnates. The same extraordinary power of the king, exercised with the witness and advice[60] of his Witan, which could confer a title to princely revenues, could also confer large disposing capacities unknown to the customary law; thus the fortunate holder of bookland might be and often was entitled not only to make a grant in his lifetime or to let it on such terms as he chose, but also to leave it by will. My own belief is that the land given by the Anglo-Saxon wills which are preserved was almost always bookland even when it is not so described. Indeed these wills are rather in the nature of postponed grants, as in Scotland a “trust disposition” had to be till quite lately, than of a true last will and testament as we now understand it. They certainly had nothing to do with the Roman testament.

Long before the Conquest it had become the ambition of every man of substance to hold bookland, and we may well think that this was on the way to become the normal form of land-ownership. But this process, whatever its results might have been, was broken off by the advent of Norman lords and Norman clerks with their own different set of ideas and forms.

The various customs of inheritance that are to be found even to this day in English copyholds, and to a limited extent in freehold land, and which are certainly of great antiquity, bear sufficient witness that at least as much variety was to be found before the Conquest. Probably the least usual of the typical customs was primogeniture; preference of the youngest son, ultimogeniture or junior-right as recent authors have called it, the “borough-English” of our post-Norman books, was common in some parts; preference of the youngest daughter, in default of sons, or even of the youngest among collateral heirs, was not unknown. But the prevailing type was equal division among sons, not among children including daughters on an equal footing as modern systems have it. Here again the effect of the Norman Conquest was to arrest or divert the native lines of growth. In this country we now live under laws of succession derived in part from the military needs of Western Europe in the early Middle Ages, and in part from the cosmopolitan legislation of Justinian, the line between the application of the two systems being drawn in a manner which is accounted for by the peculiar history of our institutions and the relations between different jurisdictions in England, but cannot be explained on any rational principle. But the unlimited freedom of disposal by will which we enjoy under our modern law has reduced the anomalies of our intestate succession to a matter of only occasional inconvenience.

Small indeed, it is easy to perceive, is the portion of Anglo-Saxon customs which can be said to have survived in a recognisable form. This fact nevertheless remains compatible with a perfectly real and living continuity of spirit in our legal institutions.

If we do not nowadays observe King Alfred’s dooms, or anything like them, still we owe it to the work of Alfred and his children that England was saved to become an individual nation, and that our fundamental ideas of justice have survived all external changes. Those ideas may be summed up very shortly. Justice is essentially public; the business of parties is to conduct their cases according to the rules of law, the business of the court is to hear and determine between them, not to conduct an inquiry; judicial interpretation of the law is the only authentic and binding interpretation, and in particular the executive has no such power. These principles appear obvious to most of us, but there are many civilised countries where they are not admitted. We can trace them back to the rudest beginnings of our jurisprudence; they are as vigorous as ever, in all the complexity of modern affairs, wherever the English tongue is spoken.

ALFRED AND THE ARTS

BY REV. W. J. LOFTIE

ALFRED AND THE ARTS

The story of the life of King Alfred connects his name with the practice of three arts. He was an architect, a writer, and a musician. We so often hear of the art of war that when we remember his proficiency as a soldier we are inclined to forget that fortification, fighting, fishing, and hunting, if they may be called arts, are not fine arts. Alfred’s noble defence of England against the Danes has ever since his day been an example to his countrymen of later generations. He first taught them the negative virtue that consists in not knowing when they are beaten. But our concern, in the particular chapter that has fallen to my lot, is with Alfred and the fine arts: and as you cannot enjoy painting or music without a house, it behoves us to inquire first as to the state of architecture in the ninth century, and as to the part taken by Alfred in building houses, churches, and cities. We must remember that though, as we know, writing and the illumination of manuscripts had attained a very high pitch of excellence, Alfred had no maps to guide him. His workmen may have been able to scratch their diagrams on stones, and in other similar ways to obtain guidance in carrying out such buildings as the king required. But he had traversed all that part of England over which he reigned, and was as well acquainted with the marshes of Somerset as with the wooded valley of the Lea and the chalk cliffs of his southern shore. He knew how to build and how to handle the ships of his time, and was able to defeat the Danes on what might be called their own element. Tradition has always and plausibly assigned to him a further feat of naval warfare. When his enemies had sailed up to Hertford and prepared to rest for the winter and mend their boats, he, so to speak, drew the water from under them by the knowledge which prompted him to divide the channels. The object of this and other achievements of the kind was his anxiety to obtain the command of the great estuary into which the Fleet, the Wallbrook, the Lea, and the creeks about Barking fell. To gain this region was one thing, to hold it another. The Saxons before his time disliked the use of walls in warfare. Still more they disliked the trouble of building and maintaining them. But Alfred possessed whatever was known of fortification, and by this knowledge he was able to raise the first permanent impediment in the way of future invaders.

The best authorities agree that to Alfred rather than to the Romans must be ascribed the foundation of London as it was during the Middle Ages, and as, in a sense, it is still. Stow, as far back as the reign of Queen Elizabeth, citing some long-lost document or tradition, tells us that Alfred found London empty. He, to use a very modern expression, “restored” the walls. He rebuilt them with the material at hand, namely, the material with which another Saxon king had built the church of St. Alban. The Saxons had disdained to fight behind walls in their conquest of the degenerate and Romanised Britons. But the Danes were as fighting men equal to the Saxons. Some advantage was needed before the Saxons could overcome their formidable invaders. He saw two important points to be gained by the restoration of London: first, that his new city would be virtually impregnable by the Danes; secondly, that the situation would be that from which he could best defend the whole valley of the Thames. As the Thames rises in Gloucestershire, and runs thence to Essex and Kent, this was to defend all his English dominions. We say now that to hold the Nile is to hold all Egypt and much more. In those days, when the river was the chief highway, to protect the Thames was to protect Kent, Wessex, and Mercia. I have mentioned hunting as an art. Alfred had an eye for a hunting country, as we say now. London was seen by him as we see Pevensey, a ruined wall enclosing nothing. There may have been vestiges of a church. There may have been the piers of a bridge. There can have been little else. Alfred made the bridge into a fortress, renewing the great timbers which had connected the piers. The bridge stood a long way farther down the stream than the modern London Bridge, and to defend it the king built a tower at the south-east corner of the restored wall. William the Conqueror, like Alfred, saw the advantages of the site, and here he placed the tower which still stands, a relic of his reign, a reminiscence of that of his great predecessor. The Roman roads through the city, and the gates by which they made their exit, no longer existed, or, at best, were ruined and useless. He made one road diagonally from the bridge across his market-place to Westgate, which we know as Newgate. A second road led to what we still call Bishopsgate, some distance westward from the site of a Roman gate which opened on the old roads to Lincoln and into Essex. His corn-market, where there was a weighing-stone for wheat, stood to the west of the Market Place or Cheap. A road along the northern side of the Cheap was in existence so soon after Alfred’s time that it must have been planned if it was not made by him. We call it Cheapside, and here there are traditions of a king’s palace near the spot where, centuries later, the great men of the city began to assemble in their Guildhall.

We have mentioned Alfred’s wall. His outline, we may be sure, was speedily filled up. St. Paul’s Church rose among the wooden and brick houses. Civic institutions began to show themselves where there was security; and Alfred’s brother-in-law, Burgred, the last King of Mercia, had a house in Coleman Street, and gave the cabbage garden to the Bishop of Worcester. Alfred’s daughter, Æthelflæd, married Æthelred, Burgred’s successor, who was called the Alderman of the Mercians. To him, and after his death to his widow, the king committed the charge and governance of the city, and Æthelbert became the first alderman of London. The importance of the place is apparent. It was the easternmost bulwark of Alfred’s kingdom against the settled Danes of East Anglia, as well as against the fresh incursions of pirates and filibusters from over the sea. Alfred’s prescience is proved by one single fact. From that day to this London has never been taken by force of arms. The Danes from the North Sea never got past the Tower—the Danes from the Danelaw never broke through the wall.

With regard to ecclesiastical architecture in Alfred’s time we know very little; with regard to civil architecture scarcely anything. The church of St. Lawrence, Bradford-on-Avon, is assigned by competent judges to as late a date as the ninth century; but Aldhelm, who was Bishop of Sherborn near the beginning of the seventh century, founded a nunnery at Bradford, which was afterwards connected with that of Shaftesbury, and the church is mentioned as early as the time of King Æthelred, just a hundred years after the death of Alfred. Building-stone of the best kind abounds in the neighbourhood, as well as in that of Deerhurst, near Tewkesbury. The stone masonry suggests that wooden buildings set the pattern in both places: while, from the ease with which St. Paul’s in London was burnt, both before and after the Norman Conquest, we may be sure it contained very little brickwork. Deerhurst was built in 1053, so we must not look to it as an example of the architecture of Alfred’s time. At Wing, near Aylesbury, the chancel is Saxon, and not unlike St. Lawrence’s chapel in its peculiar flat panelling. It is very lofty, but less narrow in proportion than Bradford, and has a series of very interesting vaulted crypts, in which we see a good many thin bricks of the kind usually ascribed to the Romans, fragments perhaps of a Roman fortress or a villa at that place. Several towers with early Saxon features remain, but many have lately been destroyed, as at St. Albans, Limpsfield, and other places. A few fragments of Beda’s time may possibly remain in the very ancient church of Jarrow. Saxon building with Roman bricks is to be seen at St. Martin’s, Canterbury, and at Dover, but both falsified by injudicious alterations. Where good building-stone comes to the surface, as in Northamptonshire, we find not far apart examples of churches and towers which may well have existed at the beginning of the tenth century. Barnack and Earls Barton may be named, and with them should be classed St. Michael’s at Oxford, and St. Benedict’s at Cambridge. Traces of Saxon work are often found in old churches, but they can seldom be dated in the age of Alfred. It may, in fact, be laid down as a rule that where there were no fortifications, building was of but a temporary character, and where stone did not greatly abound, churches were made of wood and were very perishable. In a few places towers were built specially, like the Irish round towers, for storage and defence. In these cases we usually find great height in proportion, and an arrangement of the entrance so that it can only be reached by a ladder, such as we may still trace in the Tower of London, the keep of which had no entrance on the ground level before the reign of Henry VIII. Of dwelling-houses we see no examples. In London, as much as two centuries later, ordinances were made for the improvement of town dwellings, but that previously this branch of architecture had been sadly neglected we may infer from reading that even chimneys were usually made of wood.

We know that castles were built by Alfred, and in his time, but in a majority of cases they consisted only of mounds and stockades, strengthened by great beams and balks of timber. To withstand attacks like those of the Danes, sudden and usually brief, these defences may have been very powerful. At a few places like Tamworth, where some supposed Saxon masonry is still pointed out, or at Colchester, where, as at London, Roman walls were restored, a little building took the place of woodwork. Mr. Clark, the best authority about _Medieval Military Architecture_, says plainly that though “the English were from a remote period conversant with masonry, and constructed churches of stone or timber as suited them best,” they avoided everything but timber where they made a mound or an artificial earthwork of any kind. The Norsemen from the mouth of the Elbe were not very different from the Danes and the Saxons, Jutes and Angles were only earlier immigrants from the same regions. It is not possible now to distinguish the earthworks thrown up by Alfred and his men from those of the Danes which they overthrew. One thing only we can recognise as his peculiar work, namely, the formation in his own mind of clearly devised plans by which, with inferior strength, with fewer men and arms, and in face of frequent disaster, he was able to consolidate his power, to turn even defeat into success, and at last, before his early death, both to obtain a time of respite for his people and to show them how in the future they might always hopefully resist the invader. If the Danish attack was for the moment overwhelming, it was desultory. The defence offered by Alfred was far-seeing, part of a consistent whole, a scheme which must eventually prevail.

In 876 the pirates attacked Wareham successfully, and thence fell upon Exeter: but in 878 Alfred made his famous camp in the Somerset marshes, and by slow degrees drove them northward and eastward, established himself in London, and fortified it, thence expelling them from Gravesend, from Rochester, from Farnham, from their great timber fort at Benfleet, until Hasting, the Danish leader, in 893, submitted to Alfred and was converted and baptized. Finally, in 897 the war was over. The Danes had thrown up a work “on the Lea, twenty miles from London, whereupon Ælfred,” says Mr. Clark, “threw up another work on each bank of that river lower down, and diverted the waters through a number of shallow courses, thus effectually shutting in the Danish ships.” From this time to the end of his life, a brief period of about four years, Alfred devoted himself to the arts of peace. Among them he reckoned ship-building and the codification of the laws, but we chiefly remember his love of books, his establishment of schools, in which writing was practised as a fine art, and his encouragement of skilful work in gold, enamel, and inlay.

Many examples remain to show us that art of this last kind, as well as poetry and music, were largely and successfully practised among the Anglo-Saxons. The great discoveries in grave mounds in Kent, of which the results may be seen in the Mayer Museum at Liverpool, prove that from a very early period there were among the people skilful designers and artificers, not only in jewellery, but in glass. The well-known ornament preserved at Oxford, probably a royal badge, which bears his name, is perhaps the most familiar object which can be connected with him. We may remember of Alfred, as well as of King Edwin of Northumbria and of other law-loving monarchs, that he hung up gold bracelets by the wayside, and that none dared to steal them. Unfortunately for another story connecting Alfred with the fine arts, it is not older than the twelfth century. The fact that such a legend existed shows us what was the popular estimate of the king’s character. We are glad therefore to observe that Freeman finds nothing impossible in the story that “Alfred, wishing to know what the Danes were about and how strong they were, set out one day from Athelney in the disguise of a minstrel or juggler, and went into the Danish camp and stayed there several days, amusing the Danes with his playing, till he had seen all that he wanted, and then went back without any one finding him out.” Alfred’s dealings with the Danes, whether in disguise or otherwise, led to the defeat and conversion of Guthorm, to the peace of Wedmore, and to two incidents in which pictorial art has a place: the capture of the Raven standard, and the cutting of one of the figures of a horse on the side of the chalk downs. There are two such white horses, one near Edington, which has been “restored,” the other near Shrivenham, “which has not been altered at all, but is very old and rude, so that you might hardly know that it was meant for a horse at all.”

The pretty story of Alfred’s youth, as to his learning to read, will not, unfortunately, bear critical examination. That it should have been so long believed and so often told is, however, eloquent as to the reputation he acquired as a boy. Some have even doubted if he could read, but in his journey to Rome he learned Latin—at least it is more probable that he knew Latin than that he was ignorant of it. He was certainly desirous, during his scanty leisure from warfare, to further the cause of learning by all means in his power. His monks at Athelney and his nuns at Shaftesbury were expressly devoted to the labours of the scriptorium, and when we observe the number of the books which, in spite of the Danes, were produced in England in the course of the eighth and ninth centuries, we are forced to the conclusion that the powers of the time were unanimously in favour of the art of writing. We may, indeed, go much further than this. After a careful comparison, such as may be made in the British Museum, or any other great public library, we are forced to the conclusion that no country in Europe at that time could boast of the production of such beautiful books, filled with such skilful writing and illustrated with such exquisite pictures, as England in the reign of King Alfred. A well-known manuscript (Addl. MSS. 34, 890) produced by the monks of Alfred’s own monastery at Winchester, or the volume of Gospels and other readings written without illustrations at Canterbury, cannot be surpassed in all the qualities which we admire in manuscripts. Italy itself could do nothing even approaching the _Psychomachia_ of Prudentius, probably written at Shaftesbury in the ninth century. It is filled with figures representing the soul in conflict with evil. They are wrongly described as “tinted,” but the figures and their draperies are drawn in two colours, in outline, in a manner which would not surprise us on a Greek vase of the best period. We admire in a relief by Donatello, or a fresco by Giotto, similar art, centuries later. Of the same period, or earlier, is a book reciting the names of the benefactors of Lindisfarne—St. Cuthbert was Alfred’s special patron—in which the lettering is partly in black, partly in gold, worthy of a _Liber Vitæ_. In many volumes we see such an initial as that which figures in the story mentioned above, among them copies of Beowulf’s or Cædmon’s poems, such as might very well answer to the book of old songs which Alfred’s mother was said to have shown him. (Cottonian MSS. Vit. A. xv.)

The famous _Benedictional_ written for Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester, some fifty years after Alfred’s time, may be taken to show us to what perfection this art was brought. The style is that to which the artists of his time were tending. Here and there, among older books, we may trace features which occur in this sumptuous volume, both among the figure-subjects and among the ornaments. Sir Digby Wyatt, an excellent judge, is enthusiastic on the manuscript, yet fails to appreciate the figure-subjects, because they show “little classical influence.” I am not inclined to find fault on that account. The opinion of a learned antiquary of the last generation, John Gage, should have great weight. He looked upon the _Benedictional_ as the culmination of the art of the Anglo-Saxon school; and John Young Ottley expressed himself in equally eulogistic terms about the manuscript, which is in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire and which was fully described and in great part engraved by the Society of Antiquaries in 1832 (_Archæologia_, vol. xxiv.) Ottley points out its chief claim on our admiration thus: “You desire from me a few words on the illuminations in St. Æthelwold’s Benedictionary, with my opinion of their merits as works of art. I feel honoured by the request, and comply with it the more willingly as I can honestly say that I think them in the highest degree creditable to the taste and intelligence of this nation at a period when in most parts of Europe the fine arts are commonly believed to have been at a very low ebb.” Farther on, Ottley speaks of “the justness of the general proportions of the figures.” He especially praises some little angels holding scrolls, which, he says, “have so much gracefulness and animation, are so beautifully draped, and so well adapted in their attitudes to the spaces they occupy, that I hardly know how to praise them sufficiently.”

The mechanical part of the work should be carefully examined. It shows—and not it alone, but many early books as well—that in the time of Alfred artists could command the help of artificers who knew how to make vellum fit for the most delicate painting and writing; that colours were produced worthy of the vellum for which they were prepared; that gold-beating and gilding with the leaf had been carried to a perfection never since surpassed. Godeman, the monk, afterwards, in 970, abbot of Thorney, who wrote the book, must have been born during the reign of Alfred, or soon after, and learned his art from the writers of the great king who, in his English translation of the Pastoral of Gregory, remarks feelingly on the destruction wrought by the Danes, and how before their incursions “the churches throughout Britain were filled with treasures and books.”

FOOTNOTES

[1] We still have, at Llantwit Major, the beautiful monument set up by one of the kings who thus made submission, Howel, son of Ris. The Latin is not as good as the decoration of the monument: _ni nomine di patris et spiritus santdi anc crucem houelt properabit pro anima res patris eus_. The monument is a singularly beautiful “wheel” cross with broad stem. It has long been broken in two. It lies on the ground in the remarkable western portion of the double church at Llantwit.

[2] Possibly meaning an Englishman who was not a Wessex man.

[3] The mancus was more than the third of a pound.

[4] In 959, Alfsin, Archbishop of Canterbury, died in the Alps on his way for the pall, overcome by the snow and the cold.

[5] A hundred years before Alfred’s time, Alcuin of York wrote to Bishop Remedius of Coire, to beg him to let his messenger pass through the mountains to Italy without payment of the heavy tolls.

[6] Canute’s descriptive letter is given by Florence, under the year 1031. The argument used by Wilfrith at Whitby, and by Aldhelm in writing to the Britons, had been brought to bear on the king. “I learned from wise men that the holy Apostle Peter received of the Lord great power of binding and loosing, and is the key-bearer of the heavenly kingdom, and thus I held it mightily useful to seek diligently his more special patronage with the Lord.”

[7] We learn this from William of Malmesbury, Aldhelm’s own monastery. William reports Alfred as saying that no one in any age equalled Aldhelm in poetry, for he could make a poem, compose an air, and aptly either sing or recite. A street-song common in Alfred’s time was composed by Aldhelm. See also p. 81.

[8] A marginal note in the Cotton MS. remarks that this disposes of the story of a school of literature at Oxford at that time. An interpolation in Asser credits this school with the high approval of Germanus in A.D. 430.

[9] See also note on p. 76.

[10] In the form of treaty as it has come down to us, there is no mention of Christianity, except so far as this, that it is confirmed by an oath for themselves and their “successors born and unborn who love God’s mercy and ours.” The tradition probably mixes up the simple terms of peace with the events that followed, and treats those events as the fulfilment of conditions.

[11] Nothing is said of her training in needlework. The skill of the Saxon ladies was great. There is contemporary evidence of this in the tapestry-work figures of the stole of Frithestan, now in the Chapter Library at Durham, worked under the direction of Alfred’s daughter-in-law Ælflæd, between 910 and 915. A Latin inscription states that _Ælflæd ordered it to be made for the pious Bishop Frithestan_. The most gorgeous cope seen by Anselm at the Council of Bari in 1098 had been a Canterbury vestment in Canute’s time.

[12] Frithestan’s stole is a wonderful example of weaving in gold-wire, beaten flat like narrow tape. It is woven with selvedged openings for the insertion of the prophets, etc., these figures being made in tapestry-work.

[13] This is variously stated.

[14] Here as elsewhere we may suppose that the various races in these islands are meant. The list of countries given under the fourth head is probably a sufficient guide to the meaning of the phrase.

[15] A mediæval editor proposes to read Hiberiæ instead of Hiberniæ, Spain instead of Ireland. But the English Chronicle tells of a visit to Alfred in 891 of three Scots, that is, Irishmen, smitten with the desire to wander. A later Chronicle assigns their departure from their own land to the death of their favourite teacher Swifneh. He was known as the most wise, or most skilled, of the Scots, and the English Chronicle mentions his death. His beautiful Celtic grave slab is at Clonmacnoise. The close connection which existed between the early Anglo-Saxons and the Irish schools of learning had now ceased.

[16] We have lost the sense of paganism in the names of our days, but it comes out quaintly in the Saxon form, _on thone Halgan Thunres dæg_.

[17] Still called in Yorkshire, as in Alfred’s Ecclesiastical Law, gang-days.

[18] Even of the famous scholar Aldhelm, 200 years before, it was said that when he became bishop he was absorbed, as the manner of bishops was, in the secular cares of his position.

[19] His translation of this book is much closer to the original than is the case with his History (Bede), Geography (Orosius), and Philosophy (Boethius).

[20] Perhaps a desk and pointer. See Professor Earle’s remarks in this volume.

[21] The words in the Saxon will are _sec man eac on cwicum ceape_; in the Latin will, _imploretur deus viventi pretio_.

[22] Saxon, _swa hit beon mæge_; Latin, _quantum fieri possit_.

[23] in Shropshire, and not to be identified with Boddington in Gloucestershire.

[24] Now Quatford, in Shropshire, like their former stronghold at Buttington.

[25] The manuscripts of Alfred’s _Orosius_ are in the Cottonian collection and in the Lauderdale MS. They were used by Hakluyt. The work was first edited by Daines Barrington and Reinhold Foster in 1773; and in 1855 a literal English translation, with a facsimile, and the Anglo-Saxon text, were published by the Rev. Joseph Bosworth, D.D.

[26] It is a noted character of this book that while it contains much that is acceptable to the Christian spirit and nothing that is repugnant to it, there is not a word in it which might not have been written by a pagan of the sixth century who had inherited the influences of centuries of Christianity. Those who desire to know more about Boethius, and the various ancient translations of his last work, and his influence upon mediæval thought, and the controversies of which he has been the occasion, should consult _Boethius, An Essay_, by Hugh Fraser Stewart, M.A.; Blackwood and Son, 1891.

[27] The only one to be compared with it is the _History of Early Frankish Christianity_, by Gregory, the Bishop of Tours, with which, indeed, it has been compared by Canon Bright, and the comparison is made in a generous spirit.

[28] _König Ælfred und seine Stelle in der Geschichte Englands_, von Dr. Reinhold Pauli, Berlin, 1851. _The Life of Alfred the Great._ Translated from the German of Dr. R. Pauli. To which is appended Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon version of Orosius. With a literal English translation, etc. London, 1853. (Bohn’s Antiquarian Library.)

[29] _King Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon Version of Boethius_, etc. By the Rev. Samuel Fox, M.A., 1864. (Bohn’s Antiquarian Library.) This book will continue to be in request, because of the translation which faces the Anglo-Saxon text.

[30] The characters Þ þ and Ð ð are of identical value, meaning TH th.

[31] _King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care_, with an English translation, etc. By Henry Sweet, Esq., Balliol College, Oxford, 1871 and 1872. (Early English Text Society.)

[32] My excuse for using an obsolete word is that it is Alfred’s own, and I could not do without it. Moreover, I was fortified by the hope that some poet might adopt it and revive its transitival use.

[33] It is said that a critical edition, based upon the three manuscripts, is in preparation by Herr Hans Hecht.

[34] This bizarre composition was published by Dr. Krebs in _Anglia_, iii. (1880).

[35] Yet there is a later edition proceeding from the press, by Dr. Schipper, Professor of English at Vienna.

[36] A chapter from a work in preparation, reprinted here, with some omissions and alterations, from the _Law Quarterly Review_.

[37] There is more authority for this short form than for the fuller Witena-Gemót (not witenágemot as sometimes mispronounced by persons ignorant of Old-English inflexions).

[38] Such a court, after the Conquest, was that which restored and confirmed the rights of the see of Canterbury on Penenden Heath: but it was held under a very special writ from the king.

[39] The common form of reference in Domesday Book.

[40] _Æthelr._ ii. 9.

[41] There is a curious French variant of the cold-water ordeal in which not the accused person, but some bystander taken at random, is immersed: I do not know of any English example.

[42] The cold-water ordeal was apparently most feared; see the case of Ailward, _Materials for Hist. St. Thomas_, i. 156, ii. 172; Bigelow, _Plac. A.-N._ 260. For a full account, see Lea, _Superstition and Force_.

[43] See more in Neilson, _Trial by Combat_, an excellent and most interesting monograph.

[44] Cases from D. B. collected in Bigelow, _Plac. A.-N._ 40-44, 61. Even under Henry II. we find, in terms, such an offer, but it looks, in the light of the context, more like a rhetorical asseveration—in fact the modern “j’en mettrais ma main au feu”—than anything else: _op. cit._ 196.

[45] The so-called laws of Edward the Confessor, an antiquarian compilation of the twelfth century largely mixed with invention, do not even profess to be actual dooms of the Confessor, but the customs of his time collected by order of William the Conqueror.

[46] The modern forms of these words, _thane_ and _churl_, have passed through so much change of meaning and application that they cannot be safely used for historical purposes.

[47] There were minor distinctions between ranks of free men which are now obscure, and were probably no less obscure in the thirteenth century: they seem to have been disregarded very soon after the Conquest.

[48] Blackstone, _Com._ iv. 203.

[49] _Wite_ was probably, in its origin, rather a fee to the court for arranging the composition than a punishment. But it is treated as penal from the earliest period of written laws. In the tenth century it could mean pain or torment; see C. D. 1222 _ad fin._

[50] See the customs of Chester, D. B. i. 262 b, extracted in Stubbs, _Sel. Ch._

[51] Ælf. 36. The statement is rather obscure. One is tempted to suppose that an accident of that kind had happened to some well-known person at the king’s court.

[52] Ælf. 23.

[53] See Holmes, _The Common Law_, 7-12.

[54] See especially Edg. iv. 6-11.

[55] Ælf. 19.

[56] Ælf. 13.

[57] Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, 106.

[58] Ælf. 43.

[59] See C. D. 226 compared with 256.

[60] A strictly accurate statement in few words is hardly possible. See the section “Book-land and Folk-land” in Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, p. 244 _sqq._

INDEX

Æstel, the, 192, 195

Africa, description of, 164

Alfred regains his kingdom, 17, 18
as law-giver, 22-26
permanence of his work, 32
personal appearance of, 33
as king, 41
legendary and real, 42, 43
army, 45
accession to throne, 46, 133
visit to Rome, 58, 172
portrait of a king, 61, 62
writings of, 63, 64
life work, 66
mother of, 71
parentage, 71, 72
his youth, 76
as a musician, 81
his laborious life, 88-90
translations of books, 100-104
religious views, 107
will of, 110, 203
military tactics, 118
first campaign, 129
marriage, 129
campaigns against Hasting and the “Great Army,” 145-147
as a geographer, 151
selection of books for the people, 177-181
minor literary works, 199-202
as architect, writer, musician, 243

Anglo-Saxon dooms, 222
justice, 218
landholding, 234-239
life, 209
women, 7, 8

Anglo-Saxons, gods of, 3-5
manners and customs of, 7-10

Ashdown, battle of, 118

Basing, battle of, 133

Bede, literary works of, 180

Bede’s _History_, 198

_Benedictional_, 255

Boethius’s _Consolation of Philosophy_, 30, 178, 183
extract from Sedgefield edition, 185, 186

Britons of Cornwall and Wales, 58, 59

Burhs, 142

Candle-clocks, invention of, 91

Canute on pilgrimages to Rome, 74

Capital punishment, 228

Castles built by Alfred, 250

Church, Alfred’s relation to the, 63

_City of God_, Orosius’s, 177

Code of Alfred, 174-176

Courts of bishops and great men, 212

_Cura Pastoralis_, 179, 180
translation of, 187

Danes, Alfred’s feelings towards, 83
baptism of, 85
first appearance of, 11
second invasion of, 55
wars of, 15

Danish Conquest, 15
invasion, 46-50

_Dialogues_ of Gregory the Great, 180

Ealhswith, 129

Ecclesiastical Laws, 97-99

Eddington, battle of, 118

Edmund the Martyr, 130

Education of Alfred’s children, 87, 88
of children, Alfred’s views on, 188

Embassies to foreign parts, 95, 96

England in Alfred’s time, map of, 2

Ethelred, death of, 133

Ethelwulf’s will, 73

Europe, summary of inhabitants, 154-156

Final judgment in court, 220

Foreign discoveries, 59, 60

Fortification of towns, 141, 143

Gregory the Great, 179

Gregory’s treatise, 105

Guthrum, King of Danes, 50
treaty with, 55

Haddeby, 160

_Hierdebóc_, 187-192

Hyde Abbey, Register of, 110

Income, distribution of, 92

John the Scot, 108

Kingdom, settlement of, 54

King, portrait of, by Alfred, 61, 62

King’s peace, 228

Kriegs Spiel, 16

Laws, code of, compiled, 53

Learning, encouragement of, 60, 61
introduced, 90

Letter to bishops, 189-192

Life work of Alfred, 66

Literature fostered by Alfred, 29

London fortified, 19, 20
restoration of, 57

Map of Alfred’s England, 2

Manual, formation of Alfred’s, 94

Military tactics of Alfred, 118

Monasteries, foundation of, 93, 94
rebuilt, 26, 27

Monument to Alfred, reasons for, 36

Naval forces, state of, 123-125

Navy, development of, 135, 140
foundation of, 52

Oath, in court of law, 214-217

Oht-here, voyage of, 157-160

Orosius, Paulus, 152, 177

Payments for convenience, 225, 231

Peace of 878, 139

Pilgrimages to Rome, 75

Property law, 231, 232

Religion of the tribes, 3-5

Religious bequests by Alfred, 112

Rome, Alfred’s connection with, 28
communication with, 86

Slaves, freedom of, 113
of Anglo-Saxons, 223-225

St. Cuthbert, 15

St. Lawrence, Bradford-on-Avon, 248

State of English defences, 119-123

Stone masonry, 248

Thegnhood increased, 143, 144

Viking raids, 125-129, 135-139

Vikings, invasion of, 55

Voyages of Oht-here and Wulfstan, 157-160

Walls of London restored by Alfred, 245, 247

Wergild, payment of, 233

Will of Alfred, 110, 203
of Ethelwulf, 73

Witenagemot, 31, 32, 211

Women of Anglo-Saxons, 7, 8

Writings of Alfred, 63, 64

Wulfstan, voyage of, 160, 161

York, battle of, 128

_Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh._

THE THOUSANDTH ANNIVERSARY

OF

KING ALFRED THE GREAT

1901