The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great (25 page)

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 west, 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.

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.