Читать книгу The Life and Times of Alfred the Great - Charles Plummer - Страница 8

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Character of the present lectures.

§ 5. When the electors to the Ford Lectureship did me the great honour of offering me the lectureship, coupled with the informal suggestion that the present set of lectures might appropriately be devoted to some subject connected with King Alfred, I warned them, in the letter in which I accepted both the offer and the suggestion, that it was unlikely that on such a well-worked period of English history I should be able to offer anything very new or original. That warning I must now repeat to you. If in the course of our labours I can remove some of the difficulties and confusions which have gathered round the subject, and put in a clearer light some points which have been imperfectly apprehended, that will be all that I can aspire to. For the rest I must be content to put in my own words, and arrange in my own way, what has been previously written by others or by myself; and these lectures may rank as Prolegomena, in the sense in which the late Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, remarked that Dean Alford seemed to have used that word in his edition of the Greek Testament, viz. ‘things that have been said before.’

Prevalence of uncritical statements about Alfred.

§ 6. But if I cannot tell you much that is very new, I hope that what I shall tell you may be approximately true. I shall not tell you, as a recent writer has done, that ‘by his invention of the shires [Alfred] anticipated the principles of the County Council legislation of ten centuries later[5].’ For, in the first place, Alfred did not ‘invent the shires’; and secondly, if I may quote a letter of my friend the Rev. C. S. Taylor, whose papers on Anglo-Saxon topography and archaeology[6] are well known to and appreciated by historical students, it ‘is surely a mistake to make Alfred, as some folks seem to do, into a kind of ninth century incarnation of a combined School Board and County Council.’ Yes, it is surely a mistake; and no less surely is it a mistake to make him into a nineteenth century radical with a touch of the nonconformist conscience[7]; or a Broad-Churchman with agnostic proclivities[8]. Nor shall I, with another recent writer, revive old Dr. Whitaker’s theory that St. Neot was an elder brother of Alfred, identical with the somewhat shadowy Athelstan who was under-king of Kent at any rate from 841 to 851[9]. For, firstly, it is very doubtful whether Athelstan was really Alfred’s brother, and not rather his uncle[10]; and secondly, as we shall see later on, St. Neot is an even more shadowy person than the under-king with whom Dr. Whitaker and Mr. Edward Conybeare would identify him; so shadowy indeed, as almost to justify an attitude of scepticism towards him as complete as that which Betsy Prig ultimately came to adopt towards the oft-quoted Mrs. Harris:—‘I don’t believe there never was no such person.’ I shall not repeat William of Malmesbury’s confusion of John the Old Saxon with John Scotus Erigena[11], and of Sighelm, Alfred’s messenger, with Sighelm, bishop of Sherborne in the following century[12]; or Henry of Huntingdon’s assertion[13] that Æthelwulf before his accession was bishop of Winchester. I shall not speak of an ‘Earl of Berkshire’ in the ninth century, nor tell you that Alfred’s Jewel is in the Bodleian[14], or that ‘the Danes made their first appearance on these shores in 832[15].’ Nor shall I tell you that ‘Alfred supplied chapter-headings and prefixed tables of contents to each of his authors, an improvement hitherto unheard of in literary work, which, simple as it seems now to us, betokened in its first conception no small literary genius[16]’; for I happen to have had better opportunities than most people of knowing that, in the case of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the chapter-headings were there long before Alfred undertook the work of translation. The same is true of Pope Gregory’s Dialogues, and of his Pastoral Care. The only works to which the above remarks could apply would be the Boethius and the Orosius translations; and even there we cannot be sure that the Latin MSS. used by Alfred had no chapter-headings; certainly the St. Gallen and Donaueschingen MSS. of Orosius have capitula[17], though, owing to the free way in which Alfred dealt with the Orosius, the Latin and Anglo-Saxon capitula do not correspond very closely. And the same is true of some Boethius MSS.[18] It is in truth a little disheartening to have all these old confusions and myths trotted out once more at this time of day as if they were genuine history. The fact is that there has been, if I may borrow a phrase from the Stock Exchange, a ‘boom’ in things Alfredian lately; and the literary speculator has rushed in to make his profit. Along with a few persons who are real authorities on the subjects with which they deal, eminent men in other departments of literature and life are engaged to play the parts which the ducal chairman and the aristocratic director play in the floatation of a company. They may not know very much about the business in hand, but their names look well on a prospectus. The result is not very creditable to English scholarship.

English learning non-professional.

§ 7. I would not be understood as wishing to confine the writing of English history to a small body of experts. It is one of the great characteristics of English learning that it has never been the monopoly of a professional or professorial caste, as in Germany, but has been contributed to by men of every, and of no profession. To this fact it owes many of its best qualities—its sanity and common sense, its freedom from fads and far-fetched fancies, its freshness and contact with reality—qualities in which German learning, in spite of its extraordinary depth and solidity, is sometimes conspicuously wanting.

Qualities required for writing English history.

Still the fact remains, that to write on any period of early English history requires something more than the power of construing the Latin Chroniclers in the light of classical Latin, and of spelling out the Saxon Chronicle with the aid of a translation[19]. It needs some knowledge of the general lie of English history, and of the main line of development of English institutions; it needs some grasp of the relations of England to the Continent during the period in question, some power of weighing and comparing different kinds of historical evidence, some acquaintance with the existing literature on the subject[20]. It must be confessed that in many of the recent writings on King Alfred we look for these requirements in vain.

Need for a critical survey of the sources.

§ 8. But, seeing that so many uncritical statements on the subject of King Alfred are abroad, it is all the more imperative that we should begin our work with a critical survey of the materials at our disposal. We shall find them in many respects disappointingly scanty and incomplete. But we must look that fact full in the face, and must not allow ourselves to supply the defects of the evidence by the luxuriance of a riotous imagination. The growth of legend is largely due to the unwillingness of men to acquiesce in inevitable ignorance, especially in the case of historical characters like Alfred, whom we rightly desire to honour and to love.

Alfred’s own works.

§ 9. The first place in our list of authorities for the life of Alfred must be given to his own literary works. It is true that the evidence which they furnish is mostly indirect, but it is, for that very reason, all the more secure. It might be thought that the fact that these works consist almost entirely of translations would prevent them from throwing much light on the life and character of their author. In reality the contrary is the truth.

Their evidence largely indirect; but also direct.

It was very acutely remarked by Jaffé[21] that if, as Ranke alleged, the fact that Einhard’s Life of Charles the Great is obviously modelled on Suetonius’ Life of Augustus detracts somewhat from its value as an original portrait, on the other hand the careful way in which Einhard alters those phrases of his model which were not strictly applicable to his own hero, brings out many a fine shade in Charles’ character of which we should otherwise have been ignorant. In the same way, the manner in which Alfred deals with the works which he translated reveals as much of his mind as an original work could do. And this is not merely the case with works like the Orosius, the Boethius, and the Soliloquies of St. Augustine, in which he allowed himself a large freedom in the way of adaptation and addition. Even in the Cura Pastoralis, in which he keeps extremely close to his original, there are little touches which seem to give us glimpses into the king’s inmost soul[22].

And sometimes the evidence is not indirect but direct. The well-known and oft-quoted Preface to the Cura Pastoralis is an historical document of the first importance; and, as a revelation of the author’s mind, it holds, as Professor Earle has said[23], the first place. Next to this would come the Preface to his Laws, which, for the purposes of this section, may be included among his literary works, and the mutilated preface to the translation of the Soliloquies of St. Augustine. On all these literary works I shall have much to say later on[24]; I only mention them here in their character of historical authorities.

The Saxon Chronicle.

§ 10. The next place in our list of authorities belongs on every ground to the Saxon Chronicle. Of the relation of Alfred to the Chronicle I may also have something to say subsequently[25]. But I have elsewhere[26] given my reasons for believing that the idea of a national chronicle, as opposed to local annals, was due to the inspiration of Alfred, and was carried out under his supervision; and I have said that ‘I can well fancy that he may have dictated some of the later annals which describe his own wars.’ For the former view the high authority of the late bishop of Oxford[27] may be quoted, while as to the second point Professor Earle writes[28]: ‘I never can read the annals of 893-897 without seeming to hear the voice of King Alfred.’ My friend Sir Henry Howorth indeed has a very low opinion of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; and as regards the early part of the Chronicle I am entirely at one with Sir Henry Howorth. I have more than once[29] recorded my conviction of the futility of the attempts of Dr. Guest, Mr. Freeman, and Mr. Green, to base an historical account of the Saxon Conquest of Britain on the unsubstantial dreamwork of traditions embodied in the earlier entries of the Chronicle. But Sir Henry Howorth seems to me to carry his scepticism down to an unduly late period. Anyhow, for the period covered by the public activity of Alfred, 868-901, the Chronicle is as nearly contemporary with the events which it records as any written history is likely to be.

Meagreness of the Chronicle.

But granting that the Chronicle is, for this period, trustworthy as far as it goes; it must be confessed that it is often disappointingly meagre. Of the thirty-four years 868-901, three are entirely vacant[30]. Eight have merely brief entries of a line or two recording the movements of the Danish army or here; and of these eight entries the last three have nothing to do with England, being concerned with the doings of the here on the Continent[31]. Two other very brief entries deal with the sending of couriers to Rome, and with certain obits[32]. The date of Alfred’s death is barely (and probably wrongly) recorded[33]; not a word as to its place or circumstances. And there is a singular dearth of any note of panegyric like that which meets us in the records, meagre as they are, of the reigns of Athelstan, Edmund, and Edgar[34]. In regard to the doings of Alfred this may be due to the influence of Alfred himself; but on the occasion of his death one might have expected, if not the worthy tributes which Ethelwerd and Florence insert at that point[35], at least some recognition of the work which he did. But there is nothing beyond the rather cold statement that ‘he was king over the whole Anglekin, except that part which was under the power of the Danes.’ One would fain hope that this reticence was due to the feeling so finely expressed by Hallam where he speaks of Sir Thomas More as one ‘whose name can ask no epithet[36].’ But I do not think it was; and I rather doubt whether Alfred’s greatness was fully appreciated in his own day, except by one or two of those in his immediate neighbourhood.

Charters not numerous.

§ 11. In charters, which often supplement so usefully the deficiencies of formal histories, the reign of Alfred is far from rich. The time, indeed, was not favourable to the preservation of documents. Of the destruction of title deeds owing to the troubles of the time we have a striking and pathetic instance[37]:—Burgred, king of Mercia, had, for a consideration, granted land to a man named Cered, with remainder to his wife after his death. In course of time Cered died, and his widow Werthryth desired to go to Rome, and to dispose of the land to her husband’s kinsman, Cuthwulf. The charter of the original grant to Cered had however been carried off by the Danes; and Werthryth consequently could not prove her title. She accordingly appeared before a Mercian Witenagemót held under Æthelred, Alfred’s son-in-law, as ealdorman of Mercia, and made oath to this effect. Whereupon Æthelred and the Witan allowed a new charter to be made out securing the land to Cuthwulf.

And the strong-handed took advantage of this confusion to annex the property of their neighbours. Thus in 896 Æthelred of Mercia, with Alfred’s permission, held a Witenagemót at Gloucester, in order ‘to right many men both clerical and lay in respect of lands and other things [wrongfully] withheld from them’; a measure no doubt necessitated by the great campaign of 892-895. Here Werferth, bishop of Worcester, complained that he had been robbed of woods at Woodchester, which had belonged to his see ever since the days of Æthelbald of Mercia[38]. If this was the experience of a powerful bishop, a special friend of the king himself, we may imagine the dangers to which lesser men were exposed. Fortunately among the documents which have been preserved is Alfred’s own will, a most interesting relic, on which something will be said later[39].