The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great

by Benjamin R. Merkle

  When the king had searched the tumultuous history of early medieval Britain, he had happened upon descriptions of a golden age, a time when the kings ruled in peace. These were times when the people were moral, with little crime and great respect for their rulers. These were times when not only were their shores free from the raids of pagan plunderers, but the people actually advanced their own territories and extended their borders. And these were times when the Anglo-Saxon tribes were Christian tribes, and not just in name only but faithfully worshiping the God of the Bible with a vibrant and fruitful faith. And the clearest testimony that Alfred saw for their eagerness to worship the Christian God was their dogged perseverance in the discipline of Christian learning.

  As Alfred learned from the history recorded by the venerable Bede, there had been a time when the many Anglo-Saxon monasteries were filled with men who were eager to learn to read and write not only in their native tongue but also in Latin, the lingua franca of western Europe. These men esteemed the knowledge of God as more precious than any treasure and had therefore abandoned all their worldly pursuits for the chance to study the Scriptures and the heritage of Christian learning. God had blessed these men in their studies such that, during this golden age of British Christianity, the various Anglo-Saxon monasteries and abbeys became veritable storehouses of pious wisdom. Their renown had spread throughout Europe, and the intoxicating aroma of their godly learning had attracted knowledge-hungry men from the farthest reaches of the Christian west.

  But things had radically changed during the two centuries that had intervened between the golden age of the Anglo-Saxon church, described by the venerable Bede, and the time of Alfred. The English church had grown complacent, indolent, and lethargic. Numbed by their prosperity, their love of learning grew cold, and their interest in Christian studies died off altogether. Tragically, by the time Alfred came to the throne, he was hard-pressed to think of more than a handful of men who lived south of the Humber river and could read the divine services in their own language. Of the few whom he could name, none lived south of the Thames, meaning Wessex had fallen further into an unchristian ignorance than any other Anglo-Saxon nation. It was virtually impossible to find a churchman in his kingdom who could understand the Latin language.

  Now the nation that had been sought out for its treasury of Christian wisdom must travel abroad to seek assistance in understanding the simplest Christian texts. By neglecting the study of the great works of Christendom, the Bible in particular, the Anglo-Saxon people had lost not only the ability to read but more important, the ability to understand the wisdom of God. England, through her intellectual lethargy, was slowly devolving into a pagan nation, a people who neither knew nor served the Christian God.

  If this was the case, if the Anglo-Saxons had abandoned the service of the Christian God, then it seemed to Alfred that it was no surprise that God had abandoned them. The king could find in the Scriptures close parallels to the predicament of the kingdom of Wessex. The king of Assyria once conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and emptied the land, leading the Israelite people away captive. The Assyrians then resettled the land by bringing in a large host of settlers, drawn from the surrounding pagan nations. However, when these pagan men and women continued to serve the gods of their homeland, God responded by bringing lions into the land to devour the idolatrous men and women who dared to practice their idolatries on the sacred soil of Israel. It was not until an Israelite priest was brought back to his homeland to teach the pagans how to properly serve the Lord that the lions finally relented and the people could live in peace.

  Now Alfred saw his kingdom in a similar light. The nominally Christian Anglo-Saxon people whom Alfred ruled inhabited a landscape marked throughout by empty and decaying churches; it was a land formerly given over to the worship of the Christian God. The Anglo-Saxons had become an unfaithful people dwelling on formerly sacred Christian soil. Was it any wonder then that God had raised up the Viking scourge, the “lions of Israel,” to strike them and remind them of their duties to God? Alfred concluded that the Vikings were not the cause of England’s overthrow. They were the result. The Anglo-Saxons’ own lethargic apostasy had been the cause of the fall of the various Anglo-Saxon nations. If Alfred was to have a victorious defense policy, clearly armies and burhs were not enough. If Wessex wanted to be successful in her ongoing struggle with the plundering Danes, then the nation must devote itself to a revival of Christian learning and Christian worship.

  It had been nearly a full century since the Viking plague had begun with the first tragic raid on the holy island of Lindisfarne. After that disaster, Alcuin had written to the British church urging them to consider this raid as a scourge from God, sent to awaken the Anglo-Saxons from spiritual lethargy. Now, nearly one hundred years later, the king of Wessex finally took this warning to heart and set about reviving Christian learning and worship throughout his land.

  As a youth, Alfred had been naturally inclined toward book learning. In particular, the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, with its haunting cadences and kennings, had cast a spell on his mind that would hold him under its power until his last day. The little volume of poetry his mother had given him had long been a prized possession. The young prince had also had a particular fondness for the book of Psalms and gave special attention to memorizing them, a task made easier by the regular recitation of Psalms in the daily church services. After the death of his mother, however, little attention was paid in the court of Alfred’s father to continuing the young boy’s studies. Thus Alfred’s education largely consisted of a patchwork of memorized poems, psalms, and stock phrases from the church service.

  By the time Alfred had inherited the throne of Wessex, he had managed to learn on his own the rudiments of Anglo-Saxon literacy and could, at best, muddle his way through a text in his native tongue, despite having committed countless poems to memory. The Latin language, which he wanted desperately to understand, had remained beyond his grasp throughout his youth and early reign.

  Seeing the deplorable state of his own inadequate education and the general level of ignorance found throughout his kingdom, Alfred set himself to righting this grievous wrong. It was clear that Wessex would need to humble herself and look for help from without. Just as Alfred had looked to the expert sailors of Frisia to train his navy, now the king began searching near and far for the best Christian scholars who could be enticed to Wessex to help that nation rekindle the flame of learning. Beginning in the 880s, the king gathered the few scholars he knew of who lived north of the Thames, Mercian men—Werferth, Plegmund (later to be made archbishop of Canterbury), Æthelstan, and Werwulf.

  After enticing these four men to Wessex with promises of countless gifts and places of honor, Alfred secured their services as his personal readers. In exchange for his generous ring-giving, these scholars stayed at the king’s side and read to him from whatever books the king could procure. All through the day, and occasionally during the king’s sleepless nights, they stood ready to help Alfred make good use of any idle moment in the court, stepping in to read and discuss with the king as many of the great works of Christendom as the king could obtain. These men also worked to buy, borrow, copy or acquire in any way possible whatever books could be found to expand the virtually nonexistent library of Wessex. Since nearly all of these works were composed in Latin, the king’s readers had the difficult task of translating each passage for Alfred into Anglo-Saxon, discussing the meaning and implications of the text until the king’s curiosity was satisfied and he urged them to continue.

  Soon Alfred’s community of scholars grew. The king sent messengers across the channel, searching out men of learning on the European continent. The messengers returned with Grimbald, a priest from the monastery in Saint Bertins in Flanders, and with John, another priest from Old Saxony. Though these men significantly broadened Alfred’s learning, bringing new texts and opening up new avenues of discussion, the king’s mind hungered for more. Next he looked to his wes
t, sending to the monastery of Saint David’s in the Welsh kingdom of Dyfed. At Saint David’s he found the monk Asser, who agreed, after having been showered with gifts, to return to Alfred’s court for six months out of every year, splitting his time between the company of the king and the monastery where he had spent his entire life. The addition of Asser to the king’s court was significant as the Welsh monk later became Alfred’s biographer and penned the most thorough account of the king’s life.

  After several years of tutelage under this cadre of scholars, the king began to make significant leaps in his own abilities. Of course his studies, which could only be pursued periodically throughout the busy days when the king was at court, were occasionally completely broken off because of national emergencies, such as the need to lead an army to drive away the Vikings from the front gates of Rochester in 885. Nevertheless, the king continued to progress in his studies. On November 11, Saint Martin’s Day, in the year 887, Asser recorded that the king made a significant and miraculous leap, suddenly being able to read and translate the Latin text for himself. Soon the king was fluently working through the church services, reading the Psalms for himself, and working his way through a selection of patristic texts. Now finding himself moving freely through the enormous body of literature that made up the great works of Christendom, Alfred’s mind instantly turned to the people of Wessex. How could this great wealth of Christian wisdom be passed on to his countrymen?

  If Christian virtues were to return to England, then the Anglo-Saxons would need to return to Christian learning. With an eye toward restoring this learned piety to the people, Alfred orchestrated a tremendous revival of literacy, a revival that culminated in the greatest literary renaissance ever experienced in Anglo-Saxon Britain. Alfred later wrote that before the coming of the Vikings, the churches, though empty of people, had been tremendous storehouses of books. These libraries had become useless to the Anglo-Saxons because the books, almost without exception, were all composed in Latin; and the people of the ninth century had almost entirely lost their skill in that tongue. The king of Wessex, always drawn to hunting metaphors, likened the many stacks of Latin texts to the tracks of a wild animal. There were the footprints. If only the English people could follow them closely, they would be successful in their hunt, finding that much sought-after ideal—Christian wisdom. But the people had lost the skill of tracking because of their laziness. They could make no sense of the jumbled footprints and were useless in the hunt, unable to follow the clear signs imprinted in the earth, which led to the prize.

  Frustrated that such a great heritage had been utterly lost, Alfred wondered why the Christians of the seventh and eighth centuries had not translated these works into the Anglo-Saxon vernacular. Had they done so, those books would have not passed beyond the reach of the British church. Then he realized that the Christians of the seventh and eighth centuries never thought it could be possible that the church would ever lose its ability to understand the Latin tongue.

  With the Vikings driven from the borders of Wessex and the restructuring of the Anglo-Saxon military well under way, Alfred soon began to find moments of rest from his other kingly duties, moments in which he could turn his attentions to this problem of Anglo-Saxon illiteracy. Soon a plan began to take shape, a plan striking in both its ambition and its simplicity. First, Alfred decided that his goal was nothing less than the literacy of every freeborn man within his borders. If the purpose of recovering education was to recover piety, then it would do no good to educate only a small and exclusive circle of hermitlike scholars, leaving the rest of the Anglo-Saxons ignorant and impious.

  Thus, the king of Wessex wanted to see wisdom passed on to as many of his subjects as possible, introducing the radical proposal that Christian learning ought not to be solely the enterprise of the monks and priests of the medieval church. Such a radically ambitious goal was in danger of being so optimistic as to seem unachievable and thus dismissed from the start. The notion that an average Anglo-Saxon man could find the means and the leisure, let alone the necessary motivation, to learn to read Latin texts, was positively risible. So, ignoring the fact that all of the learning of the Christian west had been handed down in the Latin language, Alfred decided to aim for fluency in the vernacular of his people—the Anglo-Saxon tongue.

  Schools for the Anglo-Saxon children were established throughout the parishes of the Wessex countryside and were aimed at teaching the very basics of reading and writing in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular in the hope of inspiring a lifelong hunger for learning in the students. The bishops, in particular, were charged with seeking out as many of the freeborn children as could be spared from their other labors to be taught the basics of reading in Anglo-Saxon. Those students who became gripped by the written word and proved particularly gifted in their learning were then invited to press on even further with their studies, turning their attentions from the Anglo-Saxon texts, once mastered, to the basics of the Latin grammar and the immense corpus of works available to those skilled in the ancient tongue. These young men, fluent in both languages, were then better fitted to fill the many vacant positions either in the governing of Wessex or in the Anglo-Saxon church.

  Another school was founded in Winchester, a royal school created especially for training the children of the Wessex noblemen. Here, the children of the aristocracy, including Alfred’s younger three children (who were still school age) were educated with a rigorous training in the liberal arts, learning their Anglo-Saxon and their Latin, in order to drink freely from the fount of wisdom—the Holy Scriptures and the works of the Western church. Alfred aimed at having the young noblemen of Wessex thoroughly grounded in the liberal arts before they were old enough to begin training in the other necessary “manly skills”—those of hunting, riding, and fighting.

  Literacy soon became an essential qualification for office holders in the Wessex government. This requirement seemed sensible enough. How could a man effectively rule the people when he was unable to read the various law codes of Wessex or the dispatches sent to him from the royal court? It is truly a wonder that the kingdom of Wessex had held together as long as it had with so few literate men. For Alfred, the argument for making literacy a prerequisite for a government office went much further than such simple pragmatism.

  Alfred was convinced that learning to read would entice the minds of his noblemen to wander through the great works of Western literature and intoxicate them with the wisdom contained therein. Then, having drunk the heady draughts of learned philosophers, theologians, and poets, the noblemen of Wessex would apply their newly acquired wisdom as they worked in their own official capacities and would, subsequently, bring great blessings to Wessex. Like King Solomon of ancient Israel, King Alfred considered wisdom the quintessential kingly virtue. Thus, any man who aspired to a ruling office must begin training himself in this royal skill.

  More than any other of Alfred’s innovations, this expectation of literacy among the leaders of Wessex met with fierce opposition from his noblemen. Men who had stood in Alfred’s court since the beginning of his reign, men who bore on their bodies countless battle scars testifying to their constant loyalty to the throne of Wessex, men hoary-headed and grey-bearded were now told that they must devote their efforts to learning their alphabet and the basics of Anglo-Saxon phonics. Surely the king was asking too much! Despite the fact that the aged minds of many of Alfred’s best nobles seemed to resist new learning, the king was resolute in his new demand. Soon the royal court of Wessex was filled with the comic sight of the thegns of Wessex—the same men who had stood undaunted in the shieldwall, standing shoulder to shoulder 188 with the king throughout countless bloody battles—sitting lost in a mental fog as they tried to push their faltering minds through simple Anglo-Saxon texts.

  For those who were able to master their letters, Alfred proved to be a generous ring-giver. Their efforts were rewarded with wealth and positions of greater honor. Others, however, could not master this new skill despite the king
’s prodding and all their best efforts. The king was patient with these men, but firm. If they were able to acquire a reader, either a son or a literate slave who could read to them throughout the day and they were able to demonstrate that they were still capable of tuning their minds to wisdom, though unable to read the texts themselves, then Alfred would allow them to maintain their offices. But for those who proved to have impenetrable skulls, those who could make no headway whatsoever in learning, their offices were forfeited and given to other men more capable of filling the position.

  This plan, however, of reviving literacy in the Anglo-Saxon tongue throughout Wessex would be a fruitless venture without a selection of Anglo-Saxon books for the newly trained minds of Wessex to devour. The second part of Alfred’s plan to revive learning in his kingdom was aimed at this deficiency. The king and the community of scholars whom he had gathered to his court from abroad dedicated themselves to translating into Anglo-Saxon all the works of Christendom that Alfred considered “most necessary for all men to know.” With this in mind, throughout the 890s, whenever Alfred found himself freed for a moment from his “worldly affairs,” the king set himself to translating Latin texts into Anglo-Saxon.