§ 2. His Zeal for Learning.

For of all the many forms of activity into which Alfred plunged in his eagerness to make up for lost time, we are sure that, next to religion, the cause of Edition: current; Page: [xiii]learning lay nearest his heart. He himself had always loved it, its books and its bookmen, and he wanted his people to share his love. He quite understood that before a nation can begin to advance along the road of enlightenment and civilization it must be taught the elements of education; and we know from his own account into what a lamentable ignorance, not only the common people, but even the clergy had fallen. The words of the King on this subject are most instructive, and for the history of his times of prime authority. ‘The sacred orders,’ he says, ‘were once zealous in teaching and study. . . . Men used to come to England from other lands in search of wisdom and instruction, but now we should be obliged to get them from abroad if we wanted them. So entirely was learning fallen away in England that there were very few on this side of the Humber who could understand their church services in English, or even turn a Latin letter into English; and I think there were not many beyond the Humber. There were so few of them that I cannot call to mind a single one south of the Thames, when I succeeded to the throne. . . . Thinking over all this, I remembered also how I had seen, before the country was all ravaged and burnt, the churches throughout England standing full of treasures and books. There was also a great number of God’s ministers, but they had very little profit of their books, of which, not being written in their own tongue, they could make nothing.’

One of Alfred’s first acts in furtherance of his educational schemes was, if we may believe the story in Asser’s Life, the foundation of a court school, wherein he followed, consciously or not, the example of the Edition: current; Page: [xiv]great Frankish king whom he resembled in so many ways. It is interesting to note that Charlemagne had, like Alfred, much trouble in interesting his rough war-like nobles in his schemes for the spread of education.

As stated by himself, Alfred’s plan was that ‘all the sons of English free men, who could afford the time, should be kept at their studies, while they were as yet of no use to the state, until they could read English with ease. Then those who were to continue their education and to be promoted to a higher order should be taught Latin.’

Alfred, again like Charlemagne, had the good sense to gather round him the best scholars he could find, sending to other lands for them, as his own produced them no longer. The names of the little group of learned clerics that helped the King to such good purpose were—the two Mercians, Werfrith or Waerferth, Bishop of Worcester, and Plegmund, Archbishop of Canterbury; Grimbold, a Frankish priest, afterwards Abbot of Winchester; John, a priest from Old Saxony; and Asser, a Welsh monk. All of these, except the last, are mentioned by the King in the preface to his translation of the Pastoral Care of Pope Gregory.

With the co-operation of these scholars, then, Alfred took in hand the education of his people. Though hungry for knowledge, it is probable that he was at a disadvantage in his equipment for its pursuit. He doubtless had an education suitable to a king’s son when he was at Rome, and afterwards in England, but he assumed the reins of government at so early an age, and was so entirely absorbed in fighting the Northmen during the first years of his reign, that he cannot have had Edition: current; Page: [xv]much leisure for keeping up or adding to his learning. Hence he could not fully understand unaided the more difficult books written in Latin, the sole language of the learned in Western Europe in his day. In the Life of Alfred, ascribed to Asser, we are told that one of his learned men used daily to read aloud to the King passages from his favourite authors. William of Malmesbury, too, a later chronicler, who made use of early annals and other old sources, mentions how Asser used to explain to Alfred the harder passages met with in reading the Latin text of the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius. Being aware that the knowledge of Latin was wellnigh extinct among the clergy of his kingdom, and that to the common folk every avenue to learning was barred, Alfred conceived, and about the year 886 began to carry out, a plan of translating into English certain well-known standard works which he judged best fitted to give in moderate compass a good plain fund of knowledge to the Englishman of his day. These works, to use the King’s words, were ‘such books as are the most needful for all men to know.’ The modern reader should remember that a man who had mastered ten Latin books in the ninth century in England would have been accounted well read, and a knowledge of the contents of fifty would have amounted to encyclopaedic learning. Alfred’s choice fell upon the following works:—

1. The Universal History of Orosius, written early in the fifth century, being a compendium of the history of the world, written from a Christian point of view.

2. The History of the English Church by the Venerable Bede, containing the history of the English Edition: current; Page: [xvi]from their conquest of Britain up to the end of the seventh century, chiefly ecclesiastical, enlivened with accounts of saints and miraculous occurrences.

3. The Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great, a popular book, describing the lives and miracles of Italian saints, and treating of the life of the soul after death.

4. The Pastoral Care or Rule of the same Gregory, a practical manual of the duties of the clergy.

5. The De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius.

6. The Soliloquies of St. Augustine.

Of these books the History of Orosius, the Consolation of Philosophy, the Pastoral Care, and the Soliloquies were put into English by the King himself. The Dialogues of Gregory were perhaps translated by Bishop Werfrith at Alfred’s suggestion, and it is probable that the English version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in its original form was also the work of one of the King’s learned priests.