The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great

by Benjamin R. Merkle

  The work of translating was always a joint venture, requiring the constant assistance of the courtly scholars whom the king had recruited to Wessex. Each passage was read out in the Latin, then discussed by the cadre of scholars, and finally turned into Anglo-Saxon by the king, in his best attempt to convey the meaning agreed upon by the learned gathering. Before his death, King Alfred personally translated the following into the Wessex vernacular: Pastoral Care, by Gregory the Great; The Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius; the Soliloquies of Augustine; and the first fifty psalms of the Bible. These works were then copied and distributed as widely as possible throughout the schools and churches of Wessex to provide reading material for the newly literate nation.

  Of these chosen texts, the works of Boethius and Augustine were selected because of the constant exhortations given to the reader to turn the mind upward toward wisdom and to value this virtue more than any other earthly treasure. The king hoped that, if this message was taken to heart, these works would awaken a lifelong passion for learning in the hearts and minds of the Anglo-Saxon students. Alfred’s translations of these works often varied between what was sometimes a tight correspondence with the Latin text and other times a very loose paraphrase of the complex philosophical works. If the Latin text became overly abstract, addressing knotty philosophical questions likely to confuse the novice reader, Alfred’s translations would often break free from the tortuous Latin text, giving his own summary of the general thrust of the text but drawing on the concrete imagery of the Anglo-Saxon world.

  Alfred often reshaped the translated passages until they not only used Anglo-Saxon words but also sounded as if they described the Anglo-Saxon world. Human reason became the cable that held a ship 190 floating on a stormy sea to the anchor, firmly fixed on the shore. God, who providentially oversees all of creation, guided history the way an experienced helmsman steers a ship through rough seas. The king’s description of heaven sounded just like an Anglo-Saxon mead hall—the king sitting at his table, joined by his many friends who feast with him. But his enemies, sitting in prison, see the fellowship of the king with his thegns in the hall and are, just like Beowulf ’s Grendel, tormented by the joyous sounds of the king’s revelries. The resurrection of the just, the reward that awaited the righteous, was described as “book-land”—a highly sought-after Anglo-Saxon charter that granted a tremendous degree of independence to a landowner, promising him the right to pass the land on to his descendents in perpetuity. Throughout these works, Alfred sought every opportunity to make his texts come alive for his Anglo-Saxon readers.

  Gregory’s Pastoral Care played a unique role in the king’s program of reform. Although this translation provided useful material for any student struggling to master his Anglo-Saxon letters, this translation was truly aimed at reviving and equipping the ministers of the faltering Anglo-Saxon church. Written at the end of the sixth century by Pope Gregory I, Pastoral Care was essentially the most widely known and respected manual for Christian clergymen in the Western church. Seeing the terrible state of the Anglo-Saxon church and fully aware of the fact that most of the clergymen in his nation were incapable of reading extensive Latin texts, Alfred created a readable Anglo-Saxon translation of this book and ordered copies produced and sent to every bishopric in his kingdom.

  The translation of the Psalms was Alfred’s last project, being only one-third complete at the king’s death. These psalms, primarily the songs of King David composed throughout the king of Israel’s tumultuous reign, had always had a special place in Alfred’s heart. Having memorized many of the psalms in his youth, Alfred had used these sacred words throughout his life to embolden himself in battle, encourage himself in despondency, humble himself in his sins, and comfort himself in his forgiveness. The entire spectrum of Alfred’s personal trials and triumphs seemed to have been lived out already by the shepherd king of Israel. More than any other text, the book of Psalms had become the poetry of Alfred’s life.

  Thus, it is no surprise that when searching for the “books most necessary for all men to know,” Alfred’s thoughts turned to the book of Psalms. This was fit reading material for the king and for the peasant, for the warrior and for the clergyman, for the novice and for the sage. Interestingly, of all the texts Alfred translated, the king’s rendering of the Psalms remained the most consistently literal throughout, with very little of the king’s own explanatory additions to the text. Alfred felt this was a book that needed little assistance in speaking to the Anglo-Saxon heart.

  Perhaps the king’s decision to translate the biblical text into the Anglo-Saxon vernacular seemed like an obviously pious choice to Alfred. This attempt to make the biblical text so readily available to the people would, however, put the Anglo-Saxon king in dangerous company long after his death. Nearly four centuries later, the followers of John Wycliffe, known as Lollards, would be burned at the stake for their insistence that the Scriptures should be translated from the Latin into the English vernacular and made available to the laity. Wycliffe’s labors at translating the Scriptures into English later earned him the nickname “morning star of the Reformation.” When the Protestant Reformation finally reached the shores of England and incited the publishing of English Bibles, the ministers of the newly reformed Anglican church were startled to discover that Wycliffe’s translation project had not been the first attempt to turn the Bible into a vernacular. Ecstatic to find so great a precedent as Alfred the Great, the sixteenth-century Anglican ministers began publishing biographies on Alfred and Anglo-Saxon editions of the Bible.

  The revival of literacy throughout Anglo-Saxon Wessex brought to life a world of other industries necessary for the dissemination of book learning. The translations King Alfred produced, along with many other translations composed by members of the king’s circle of scholars, all required large teams of copyists—the scribes who laboriously generated manuscript after manuscript of these freshly translated texts. Each of these books was produced on vellum, the costly calfskin that served as the paper of the medieval world. The production of vellum soon became its own well-paying industry.

  Many of these volumes would be handed on to illuminators, men who decorated each page with dragons, warriors, biblical characters, and the flora and fauna of the Wessex landscapes, painted in painstaking detail with splendorous colors. By the time these books were finally completed, every volume represented a small fortune that had gone into its manufacturing. The industry of book production, which had essentially disappeared from Wessex at the time of Alfred’s inauguration, soon was brought back from extinction as a thriving Anglo-Saxon enterprise.

  Though each book, having taken weeks of intense labor to produce, already represented a fortune in terms of production costs, the king commissioned the creation of an additional costly gift to accompany many of these manuscripts. The preface to Alfred’s translation of Gregory’s Pastoral Care described this highly valued accessory. The king ordered that his goldsmiths produce what was referred to as an æstel, a word derived from the Latin term for a small spear. An æstel was essentially a place marker or a small pointer stick to help a weary reader direct his eyes as he worked through a text. Each one of these æstels was valued at fifty golden coins (or mancuses) and displayed the height of Anglo-Saxon fine craftsmanship in their delicately wrought gold work. Distributing these place markers to the bishops, Alfred urged those churchmen, who had once lost the ability to follow the tracks of earlier scholars, to pick up these volumes and begin the hunt once more.

  Providentially, one of these æstels was discovered in the seventeenth century, lying in a muddy wheel-rut only a few miles from Athelney, the site of Alfred’s former winter hideout. This æstel, now known as the Alfred Jewel and on display in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, reveals the stunning detail of the craftsmanship produced by the goldsmiths of Alfred’s court. This tear-drop–shaped jewel is composed of a recycled piece of Roman quartz crystal, held in a filigreed golden casing, terminating at the bottom in the shape of a w
ild beast’s head. In the creature’s mouth is a fitting, which would have held the small pointer rod designed to help the reader closely follow the lines of the text. The back of the jewel, decorated with the design of a tree, is flat, allowing the æstel to sit level on the page. Around the edge of the jewel, the gold work forms the words AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN, a stunning testimony to the king’s love for learning, which could be translated: “Alfred ordered me to be made.”

  On the surface of the crystal sits the figure of a man grasping two blooming branches, one in each hand. This image was created by Alfred’s craftsmen through a process known as cloisonné enamel. In this ancient art, gold wire was carefully bent to form a network of cells or cloisonné. These cells were then filled with a glass powder that when melted, filled the gold-edged cloisonné. The significance of the image is still debated by various scholars of the period. The most coherent explanation sees the man depicted on the jewel as an image of Christ, the embodiment of heavenly wisdom, who has come to urge men to turn their minds upward toward the true wisdom from above.

  Since the discovery of the Alfred Jewel, a number of other Anglo-Saxon æstels have been discovered, all equipped with a socket for mounting a pointer and a flat back for sliding along the page, though none have been as beautiful as the Alfred Jewel and none of the others have been marked with the king’s name. Strangely, this peculiar new sort of treasure, a piece of stunning jewelry designed especially to adorn a book, appears to have been unique to Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon world. It had no counterpart on the European continent or in later English generations. This was truly an original creation of Alfred’s court and a fitting symbol of the king’s literary renaissance—a costly ornamentation for the written text.

  Alfred’s passion for reading and study drove him to other interesting innovations as well. Asser described how the king, after having established a substantial degree of peace throughout Wessex, sought to devote himself more fully to the service of God. As king of Wessex, Alfred realized that it was all very easy in one sense to establish monasteries, to generously endow churches, and to provide books for the ministers. It was all very easy for the king of Wessex to do these things because he had been blessed with tremendous wealth and power. But Alfred wanted to give a less-trifling gift to God and began thinking about what he could devote to God that would be a more substantive expression of his personal devotion. Alfred resolved that, inasmuch as his circumstances allowed, he would devote his strength and mind to God’s service for one-half of each day—spending this time in study and prayer.

  The king realized quickly, however, that he could not accurately judge the hours of the day because the sun was often covered by clouds or it set so early during the winter months. Unable to determine the time of day, the king felt that he could not faithfully divide his time as he had vowed, so the king put his innovative mind to work. First, he asked for his chaplains to bring him a supply of wax for making candles. These candles, if made in a uniform size, could provide a timing device, an Anglo-Saxon clock, by which the king could accurately track his hours and faithfully fulfill his pledge.

  After a great deal of experimentation, the king finally determined that a twenty-four-hour day could be accurately measured by six candles, each twelve inches in length, made from a portion of candle wax, with a weight equivalent to seventy-two pennies. By burning these six candles, end to end, Alfred could precisely track his progress throughout the day and night. Unfortunately, the king discovered that the gusty English wind, from which the Anglo-Saxon buildings offered only a partial shelter, often interrupted his plans. Sometimes the breeze, gusting through the cracks and thin walls of the king’s dwellings, entirely snuffed out his candle-clock contraption. Other times, the steady, blowing gentle winds would fan the small flame and cause the candle to burn inordinately fast, resulting in an unsatisfactory level of inaccuracy in the king’s calculations. To combat this, Alfred designed a small lantern made from wood but fitted with sides made of thinly shaved ox-horn, which Alfred had discovered was translucent. This became England’s first ox-horn lantern and was used by the king for the rest of his life to help him faithfully fulfill his vow to devote his time to religious services.

  It is interesting to note the close parallels between Alfred’s work to revive learning in Wessex and his work to reestablish the defenses of his nation. For instance, in both programs the king thought in terms of a nationwide reform, extending to the edge of his borders. His burhs were carefully placed to leave no corner of Wessex more than one day’s march from the safety of a fortified burh. Similarly, the king’s goal in reviving education was to bring literacy to the children of every freeborn Anglo-Saxon. Second, both programs combined a curious mix of a radically ambitious offense with a conservative defense. The enormous standing army, always at the ready and equipped with mounts and months of provision, constituted an army that in terms of size and nature Britain had not seen since the Roman legions. Yet this tremendously powerful striking force was supported by the system of burhs, a defensive organization that preserved an effective military presence throughout the countryside, no matter how far away the standing army may have wandered. In fact, it was the existence of the network of burhs that made the standing army possible, since no army could be kept in the field when the individual soldiers knew their commitment to a campaign meant their homes were unguarded.

  This combination of military offense and defense is nicely paralleled by Alfred’s work to revive learning in the Latin language, along with a major push for literacy in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular. Great rewards could be won by those fluent in the ancient tongue, but learning that language required the concerted efforts of a professional scholar over many years of study. However, literacy in their own vernacular was, with a reasonable bit of work, within the grasp of most of the freeborn men of Wessex. This widespread literacy in the Anglo-Saxon language, together with the translation of central texts into the vernacular, would create a bulwark of learning within Wessex, which would be far more difficult to dislodge from the minds of future generations than literacy in the Latin tongue had ever been.

  With the reorganization of his nation’s defenses and the training of a literate generation of freemen well underway, Alfred felt a pressing need to begin yet another project that would significantly shape the course of the culture and history of his nation. The king began a major reworking of the various law codes and legal policies of the Anglo-Saxon nations, eventually producing his own domboc, the largest and most comprehensive legal code that Wessex had ever possessed. Before the publication of Alfred’s domboc, the legal code of Wessex had been a strange and muddled jumble of various rulings and policies of numerous long-dead kings of Wessex, all of which were largely useless to an almost entirely illiterate class of noblemen who were expected to enforce the law code. By the time of Alfred’s accession to the throne, legal verdicts tended to be based, purportedly, on an oral tradition of an archaic law code; but in actuality, they had far more to do with the power, wealth, and station of the claimants in the case.

  It was just this shortcoming that Alfred’s push for literacy among the freemen of Wessex was intended to rectify. Alfred had always assumed that Christian learning and pious living walked together hand in hand. Now that the restoration of Christian learning had begun in his kingdom, it was time to expect pious living to follow. Having taught the noblemen of Wessex, who were entrusted with judging the various legal disputes that arose in the lands committed to their care, to read and seek out wisdom, he could now trust them to study and justly apply a uniform law code. The construction of the various burhs also assisted the king in the creation of this law code. The garrisoned troops evenly spaced in the burhs, spread throughout Wessex, ensured that the strictures of the king’s legal code were easily backed up by the might of the king’s armies. In a sense, the composition of the domboc really constituted the culmination of Alfred’s work to rebuild the defenses of Wessex and to revive learning throughout the nation.

>   Once more, the king’s approach was marked by both conservation and innovation. First, Alfred stressed throughout the preface to his domboc the importance of shunning rash or novel alterations in the legal code. Alfred insisted that justice was an eternal virtue—a virtue defined by the character of God and passed on to mankind through divine revelation. Therefore, hasty and ad hoc decrees that addressed immediate national problems without taking the time to reflect on and consider the eternal principles of justice were fated to end in villainy and abuse. Only those laws that had been founded on the eternal principles of justice, had stood the test of time, had been passed on from generation to generation, and had received the approval of the wisest of counsellors should be enacted and enforced by a just king.

  To make this point clear, Alfred began the domboc with a translation of the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai as recorded in Exodus 20:2–17. This was then followed by a series of lengthy excerpts of Old Testament case law from Exodus 21 to 23, which illustrated how the principles of the Ten Commandments had been applied in various specific precepts that were relevant to the setting of the ancient Near East.

  Next, the king included several excerpts from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), illustrating how when the Son of God, the “healing Christ,” came to this Middle-Earth (the Anglo-Saxon term for the inhabited world of men), he did not do away with or overturn the Old Testament law but merely reapplied the principles of God’s law to the problems facing the Roman-occupied Palestine of the first century. Jesus taught the Golden Rule, exhorting men to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” a principle that succinctly summarized much of the Old Testament law. If a man understood how to apply this one law alone, Alfred reflected, he would need no domboc.