have been taken for weakness or for cowardice. It was, above all things, necessary that the power. of the king, which meant the power of the law, should be felt at every turn. Take, for instance, the origin and the development of the "King's Peace." On this point I venture to quote the words of a learned lawyer (Pollock, in Bowker's "Alfred," p. 228):—

In

"Far more significant for the future development of English law are the beginnings of the king's peace. later times this became a synonym for public order maintained by the king's general authority; nowadays we do not easily conceive how the peace which lawful men ought to keep can be any other than the queen's or the commonwealth's. But the king's justice, as we have seen, was at first not ordinary but exceptional, and his power was called to aid only when other means had failed. To be in the king's peace was to have a special protection, a local or personal privilege. Every free man was entitled to peace in his own house, the sanctity of the homestead being one of the most ancient and general principles of Teutonic law. The worth set on a man's peace, like that of his life, varied with his rank, and thus the king's peace was higher than any other man's. Fighting in the king's house was a capital offence from an early time. Gradually the privileges of the king's house were extended to the precincts of his court, to the army, to the regular meetings of the shire and hundred, and to the great roads. Also the king might grant special personal protection to his officers and followers; and these two kinds of privilege spread until they coalesced and covered the whole ground. The more serious public offences were appropriated to the king's jurisdiction; the king's peace was used as a special sanction for the settlement of blood-feuds, and was proclaimed on various solemn occasions; it seems to have been specially prominent— may we say as a frontier regulation"?-where English conquest and settlement were recent. In the generation before the Conquest it was, to all appearance, extending

fast. In this kind of development the first stage is a really exceptional right; the second is a right which has to be distinctly claimed, but is open to all who will claim it in the proper form; the third is the "common right" which the courts will take for granted. The Normans found the king's peace nearing, if not touching, the second stage.”

With these introductions we can read Asser's words with profit and understanding :

"The king showed himself a minute investigator of the truth in all his judgements, and this especially for the sake of the poor, to whose interest, day and night, among other duties of this life, he ever was wonderfully attentive. For in the whole kingdom the poor, besides him, had a few or no protectors; for all the powerful and noble of that country had turned their thought rather to secular than to heavenly things: each was more bent on secular matters, to his own profit, than on the public good.

“He strove also, in his own judgements, for the benefit of both the noble and the ignoble, who often perversely quarrelled at the meetings of his earls and officers, so that hardly one of them admitted the justice of what had been decided by the earls and prefects; and in consequence of this pertinacious and obstinate dissension, all desired to have the judgement of the king, and both sides sought at once to gratify their desire. But if any one was conscious of injustice on his side in the suit, though by law and agreement he was compelled, however reluctant, to go before the king, yet with his own good will he never would consent to go. For he knew that in the king's presence no part of his wrong would be hidden; and no wonder, for the king was a most acute investigator in passing sentence, as he was in all other things. He inquired into almost all the judgements which were given in his own absence, throughout all his dominion, whether they were just or unjust. If he perceived there was iniquity in those judgements, he summoned the judges, either through his own agency, or through others of his faithful servants, and asked them mildly, why they had

judged so unjustly, whether through ignorance or malevolence, i.e., whether for the love or fear of any one, or hatred of others, or also for the desire of money. At length, if the judges acknowledged they had given judgement because they knew no better, he discreetly and moderately reproved their inexperience and folly in such terms as these: I wonder truly at your insolence, that, whereas by God's favour and mine, you have occupied the rank and office of the wise, you have neglected the studies and labours of the wise. Either, therefore, at once give up the discharge of the temporal duties which you hold, or endeavour more zealously to study the lessons of wisdom. Such are my commands. At these words the earls and

prefects would tremble, and endeavour to turn all their thoughts to the study of justice, so that, wonderful to say, almost all his earls, prefects, and officers, though unlearned from their cradles, were sedulously bent upon acquiring learning, choosing rather laboriously to acquire the knowledge of a new discipline than to resign their functions; but if any one of them from old age or slowness of talent was unable to make progress in liberal studies, he commanded his son, if he had one, or one of his kinsmen, or if there was no other person to be had, his own freedman or servant, whom he had some time before advanced to the office of reading, to recite Saxon books before him night and day, whenever he had any leisure, and they lamented with deep sighs, in their inmost hearts, that in their youth they had never attended to such studies; and they blessed the young men of our days, who happily could be instructed in the liberal arts, whilst they execrated their own lot, that they had not learned these things in their youth, and now, when they are old, though wishing to learn them, they are unable.'

Alfred's work as a law-giver is summed up by J. A. Green ("History of the English People," p. 92):—

"In Wessex itself, spent by years of deadly struggle, with law, order, the machinery of justice and government weakened by the pirate storm, material and moral civili

zation had alike to be revived. His work was of a simple and practical order. In politics as in war, or in his after dealings with letters, he took what was closest at hand and made the best of it. In the reorganization of public justice his main work was to enforce submission to the justice of hundred-moot and shire-moot alike on noble and ceorl, who were constantly at obstinate variance with one another in the folk-moots, so that hardly any one of them would grant that to be true doom that had been judged for doom by the ealdorman and reeves.' .

"Of a new legislation the king had no thought. 'Those things which I met with,' he tells us, ‘either of the days of Ine, my kinsman, or of Offa, King of the Mercians, or of Æthelberht, who first among the English race received Baptism, those which seemed to me rightest, those I have gathered, and rejected the others.' But unpretending as the work might seem, its importance was great. With it began the conception of a national law. The notion of separate systems of tribal customs for the separate peoples passed away; and the codes of Wessex, Mercia, and Kent blended in the doom-book of a common England."

Or, in the words of Sir Frederick Pollock

"If we do not nowadays observe King Alfred's dooms, or anything like them, still we owe it to the work of Alfred and his children that England was saved to become an individual nation, and that our fundamental ideas of justice have survived all external changes. Those ideas may be summed up very shortly. Justice is essentially public; the business of parties is to conduct their cases according to the rules of law, the business of the court is to hear and determine between them, not to conduct an inquiry; judicial interpretation of the law is the only authentic and binding interpretation, and in particular the executive has no such power. These principles appear obvious to most of us, but there are many civilized countries where they are not admitted. We can trace them back to the rudest beginnings of our jurisprudence; they are as vigorous as ever, in all the complexity of modern affairs, wherever the English tongue is spoken."

CHAPTER VI.

ALFRED AS EDUCATOR.

THERE can be no doubt whatever that Alfred was from childhood imbued with a deep reverence for letters. The story about the illuminated book sufficiently indicates the fact. It has been already suggested that Judith, his step-mother, not Osburh, his mother, played the leading part in that history. Perhaps; we must remember, however, that even in the case of Judith the dates do not hold together. Alfred was nine years of age at the death of his father, and the incestuous marriage of his brother Ethelbald with Judith, who thus became his sister-in-law. When he was eleven, Ethelbald died, and Judith went back to France. The theory consequently falls to the ground, and has no other point in its favour than that Judith's father, Charles the Bald, was rich in illuminated books and in the company of scholars. Still, we may, as I said before, accept the story without too much curiosity as to its origin and literal truth. It strikes a note.

We have seen how Alfred, as soon as some kind of order and security had been re-established, called divines and scholars to his court. We next hear that he created a school, at which his own sons and the sons of thanes and nobles were educated. As for himself he certainly could read, because he learned by heart the daily prayers and many of the psalms, and to assist himself he read them out of a book in which they were written down. But it would appear that he read with difficulty. Asser, his biographer, had