‘Of all the English nation’. These few words contain the germ of a national political idea. But, in the circumstances of 886, in which the Vikings held half England and still threatened to take the whole, it was only an idea. Nor is it clear how many shared it, or thought that its realization was inevitable or even desirable. But, whatever their number, Alfred determined to increase it by a sustained programme of writing and publication. An earlier generation called the result scholarship. It was, of course. But it was also propaganda – for Alfred and for England. And the king was his own Minister for Information, and, as in everything else he did, a highly effective one.
But first Alfred had to address his own inadequacies. For most of his adult life, the king was literate only in Anglo-Saxon. That was enough for most practical purposes. But, for the task which he now had in hand, Alfred required access to the surviving riches of Classical culture which only a knowledge of Latin could give. His first, interim, solution was to get some of his more learned clergy to read Latin texts with him, translating and expounding as they went. This could have been the lazy man’s way out. Alfred instead treated the experience as one-to-one language teaching and benefited accordingly. His pious biographer, Asser, presents the result as a miracle, in which, on 11 November 887, Alfred learned to read Latin at a stroke. We can discount the miracle, but accept the idea that by this stage the king felt confident enough to tease the good bishop by doing the translation himself. We should also take the date – a year after the occupation of London – seriously too. Alfred was now ready to launch his propaganda campaign.
It was announced in the Preface to his translation of St Gregory’s Pastoral Care. Why, Alfred asked himself, had not the scholars of the pre-Viking golden age of Anglo-Saxon England translated the key works of Christianity into ‘their own language’? Then knowledge of them would have survived into his own, post-Viking, iron age, when (he recollected of the time he came to the throne) there were very few ‘who could … even translate a single letter from Latin into English’ and not ‘a single one south of the Thames’. Moreover, by translating, they would only have been following a long line of distinguished precedents:
Then I recalled how the Law was first composed in the Hebrew language, and thereafter, when the Greeks learned it, they translated it all into their own language, and all other books as well. And so too the Romans, after they had mastered them, translated all through learned interpreters into their own language … Therefore it seems better to me … that we too should turn into the language that we can all understand certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know.
His present translation would, Alfred hoped, set the ball rolling.
Finally, with characteristic attention to practical detail, Alfred set out how his text should be distributed: each bishop would be sent a copy, together with a pointer or aestel, worth the vast sum of fifty mancuses or the equivalent of six and a quarter pounds of silver. The book and its aestel must never, Alfred further stipulated, be separated and must be set up in church together. This, I think, makes clear how Alfred intended each copy of his book to be used: it was to be set up openly in church so that it could be used for public readings and instruction – for which, of course, the aestel would come into its own. Interestingly, a remarkably similar procedure (though without the precious aestel) was to be used by that later practical visionary, Thomas Cromwell, to disseminate the English translation of the Bible in Reformation England.
Alfred’s practicality also extended to his approach to the art of translation itself. For his books were intended to be, not academic exercises, but things that were useful and were used. This meant in turn that Alfred had to prevent his readers from seeing the late Roman world of Gregory or Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy Alfred (like Queen Elizabeth I) also translated, as foreign to their own experience and therefore irrelevant to it. Instead, he cut his Roman cloth, very thoroughly, into English dress. The ‘senate’ becomes the ‘Roman witan’ and ‘magistrates’, ‘ealdormen’. Most ingenious is his rendering of Boethius’s reference to the fleetingness of the fame of even the conqueror Fabricius. Alfred guessed that the name of the Roman hero would have meant nothing to his target English audience. Instead, he went to the root of the name in faber (‘smith’) and, for the unknown Roman, substituted a reference to Weland the Smith, the Germanic smith-god whose smithy the men of Wessex believed to have been a neolithic barrow on the Berkshire Downs. ‘Where now’, Alfred’s inspired translation read, ‘are the bones of the famous and wise goldsmith, Weland?’
It was also Alfred, or a member of his intimate court circle, who commissioned the national book of record known as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Its chronicle form is deceptively simple (and has deceived many historians). In fact, it is a highly sophisticated piece of historical special pleading, to be put on a par (in approach if not in method) with Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Like Bede, the Chronicle is a providential history of the Anglo-Saxon people: of their conquest of Britain, of their conversion to (Roman) Christianity, and of their quest for political union. The novelty of the Chronicle lies in the role it assigns to Wessex. In Bede, we see the torch of the bretwalda-ship (or overlordship) passing from the southern kingdoms of Kent and East Anglia to the strong hands of his native Northumbria. The Chronicle picks up the story in the ninth century. In so doing, the intervening, century-long Mercian supremacy of Æthelbald, Offa and Cenwulf is ignored; instead, following his victories of 829, the Chronicle hails Egbert of Wessex, Alfred’s grandfather, as the eighth bretwalda. Finally, the marriage of Æthelwulf, Alfred’s father, into the sacred house of Charlemagne, Æthelwulf ’s pilgrimage to Rome and Alfred’s own mysterious anointing there, confer divine sanction on the House of Egbert and mark out Alfred as the eventual heir to its glories.
‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,’ wrote another great Englishman, George Orwell. Alfred was determined that the future should be England as a greater Wessex, with his own issue on the throne. But the language of the Chronicle is just as important as its subject matter. For, as we would expect from Alfred’s general approach, the Chronicle is not written in Latin, like the chronicles produced elsewhere in Europe, but in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular. And that changed everything. The Chronicle was not written by churchmen for churchmen. Instead, it is a king talking to his people in the language that they understand and his people talking to themselves. The Chronicle is, in short, the greatest cultural achievement of Alfred’s reign and a symbol of national independence and identity that was so powerful that not even the Norman Conquest could extinguish it outright.
Alfred’s kulturkampf (cultural struggle) began in the years of uneasy peace. But it continued during the Third Viking War of 892–6. The war was as hard-fought as previously. But it was fought differently. For this time the Vikings, after an initial foray, were never able to cross large sections of Wessexian territory. The burhs, it seems, had done their work well.
So, too, had Alfred. Three years after the end of the war, Alfred died on 26 October 899, aged only fifty. He still ruled over only part of England. But, as he so clearly intended, his legacy was the permanent unification of the country. The actual work was the task of his sons and grandsons. But it was Alfred, who, in the crucible of the Viking invasions, had forged an idea of England that was more than simply cultural and linguistic, it was political as well. Or rather, uniquely in Europe at the time, it was a combination of all three.
In other words, Ængla Land was to be a nation-state, Dark Age style.
Chapter 4
Triumph and Disaster
Edward the Elder, Æthelstan, Edmund I, Eadred, Eadwig, Edgar, St Edward, Æthelred II, Swein Forkbeard, Edmund Ironside, Cnut, Harold Harefoot, Harthacnut
AFTER ALFRED’S DEATH, HIS SON, King Edward the Elder, and his grandsons, Æthelstan, Edmund I and Eadred, continued Alfred’s policy of uncompromising resistance to the Vikings. Soon they were able to turn the tables and go on the offensive. One by one the Viking kingdoms