Chapter V

King Alfred, first layman to be a great power in literature; man of
action; of thought; of endurance. Freedom first great possession;
afterwards learning and culture. Alfred a loyal Son of the Church.
Founder of English prose. Earliest literature of a nation in verse;
why. Influence of Rome on Alfred.

"Let us praise the men of renown," says Holy Scripture (Ecclesiasticus, 44), "and our fathers in their generations.... Such as have borne rule in their dominions, men of great power and endued with their wisdom ... ruling over the present people, and by the strength of wisdom instructing the people in most holy words."

We have to think now of a man of renown who bore rule in his dominions; a man of great power, and endued with wisdom; who by strength and wisdom instructed his people in most holy words. We have hitherto spoken of work done in the dedicated life of religion: to-day we direct our attention to the work of a great layman; the first English layman whom we know to have been a great power in literature; less as a "maker," poet or proseman, than as an opener out to "makers" of precious store; a helper and encourager; a fellow-student; a learner and a teacher of whom it could be said, as Chaucer says of his Clerk of Oxford, "gladly would he learn and gladly teach."

It would not, I think, be possible for English people to over-estimate the value of the gift God gave them in KING AELFRED. That is really the right way to spell his name, but as to most people it looks unfamiliar, we will adopt the more usual spelling and write of him as Alfred.

We think of him in various aspects: first as the strong, brave man who did so much toward making noble history for time to come, by his own action, guided by his piety and devotion. His earliest work was to fight for the gaining of freedom and unity for his people, and this work went over many years. When there was an interval of peace, and when a more settled peace had been won, he worked hard to gain for them the freedom of the mind which can never exist where ignorance is reigning. Freedom is the first great possession; afterwards we seek for learning and culture. People who may be called away at any moment to fight for life or liberty cannot do much in the way of quiet study; and while the Danes were not yet finally repulsed or bound by treaty, the great work of Alfred in civilizing England had to remain in suspense.

We love to think that Alfred's wars were not to greaten himself, but to set his country free. Then, as later on, if I may quote what I have elsewhere said, the English

Had fought for their God-given birthright, their country to have and to hold,
And not for the lust of conquest, and not for the hunger of gold.

There is another aspect in which we may look at this great King; we think of him not only as a doer but as a sufferer; and not only as an endurer of disappointment, a bearer of toil, difficulty, trouble, but as one who bore in his body a "white martyrdom" of great pain, perhaps even anguish; and this for some twenty years.

Alfred was always a loyal son of the Church. His father, Æthelwulf, sent him to Rome when he was quite a little boy, and Pope Leo IV was godfather to him at his Confirmation, and, on hearing the report of Æthelwulf's death, consecrated him as king, as he had been asked to do. But Æthelwulf did not die for a little time after, and took Alfred for a second visit to Rome. Each of Alfred's three brothers reigned a short time before he became King of Wessex in 871. In that same year he fought no fewer than nine battles against the Danes, besides making sundry raids upon them. It is well to be a good fighting man where need is, and it is well to use the qualities that go to the making up of the good fighting man to meet the difficulties that beset the path of duty and the way of progress. Courage, strength, generosity, perseverance, these are needed for all work alike in peace and war.

Alfred was familiar in his youth with English songs, and most probably knew the old Norse sagas; but he had to learn Latin in his later life. We must remember that most of the literature which Alfred could get at was locked up in Latin; even the invaluable Church History of St Bede needed a translator's key; and it was Alfred who first applied this key to it.

When we think of the prose written in England in early days, we are thinking of the work of scholars, in a grand language that had done growing; a language that was to be in Western Christendom the language of religion, the language of the altar, for how long a time who can know? the language that gave birth to other languages, as its literature so powerfully influenced both theirs and that of others not descended from it. Not yet was the time for a great prose literature in England, such as grew up many a year ago, and is going on in our own days.

The earliest literature of a people is almost invariably in verse: the literature that comes from the heart of a people, and is not the production of a few learned folk. In early days, there was little reading or writing, except in the shelter of the great monasteries. The common folk-literature, which is a very precious thing, is preserved, in such times as we are thinking of, in people's memories, and circulated by recitation, this recitation being accompanied by music or by rhythmical movements of the body. We all know how much easier it is to remember a page of verse than a page of prose. Thus, the form that could most easily be carried in the memory and recited, would naturally be the first to flourish.

We have seen something of early English religious poetry in Caedmon's work and that of his followers; and next we shall come back to poetry with Cynewulf, who made great and holy verse.

But beside such work as these poems which were written by cultivated men, many poems and fragments of verse were floating about the land, come over from the old native country with the first Angles and Saxons who made their home in Britain. These were dear to the people and dear, as we shall see, to the greatest among their kings, Alfred, who was, we may say, the founder of English prose. It was not English prose as we know English prose, because the language was then more like German than anything else; but it was prose in the native tongue, and this was a good and great thing to begin.

In our gratitude to Alfred, we must not forget our gratitude to the English scholars of older days, none of whom had put us under so great a debt as our dear old Benedictine of Jarrow.

A later writer than St Bede, though not so great as he, was Alcuin of York, who was invited by no less a man than Charlemagne to teach his children, and who became, as it has been phrased, a sort of Minister of Public Education in his empire.

Alcuin was good as well as great, and I will give you a little instance of the rightness of his thought. In a Dialogue which he wrote, in his teaching days, he supposes Prince Pepin to ask the question, "What is the liberty of man?" and the answer is, "Innocence."

But the evil days of invasion and war and trouble had swept learning from its northern home; and Alfred's work was to bring it back to another part of England.