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sion of the field of battle, was, amongst the Anglo-Saxons, the accepted phrase for gaining the victory. So we still speak of winning the field.

5. This was, however, but a momentary respite. The Danish raids continued, and in 855 the invaders again wintered in the land, this time in the island of Sheppey. In 860 'a mighty ship-host came to land and stormed Winchester,' and from this date onwards we read of the host' of the Danes. They were henceforth always somewhere in the land, and more and more tended to form permanent settlements within its borders.

§ 6. The first of these was in East Anglia, a district in that day almost insular in character, accessible (from a military point of view) by but one narrow strip of down between the Cambridgeshire fens and the primeval forest which crowned the 'East Anglian heights.' And this strip, along which ran the Icknield Street, the ancient warpath of the British Iceni (the clan of Boadicea), was defended across its whole breadth, at this date, by two great ramparts-the Fleam Dyke, near Cambridge, and the wellknown Devil's Dyke, near Newmarket.

§ 7. East Anglia thus formed a secure base for the searovers, where their wives, their ships, and their wealth' could safely be left while they ravaged elsewhere. And their ravages were no longer confined to the sea-board of England. In 866 'they were horsed' (though whence they got all their horses in a land where these animals were commonly used neither for war nor husbandry is a most puzzling question), and burst forth from their East Anglian fastness for a four years' campaign through the very heart of the country. York fell, and Nottingham, and Peterborough, and Ely; Edmund, the saintly King of East Anglia, who had endeavoured, as it would seem, to raise a diversion in the rear of the pirates so soon as they left his realm, was defeated and martyred; and in 871 the Danes crossed the Thames at Reading, 'rushing like a torrent and carrying all before them,' and poured with their whole force into Wessex itself.

SS. This year first brings Alfred upon the scene. First along with his brother, King Ethelred, who died in the thick

of the struggle, then as King himself, he met the invaders in no fewer than nine pitched battles (besides innumerable skirmishes, which are not counted,' as the chronicler naïvely says), during this single year. The fortunes of the war changed from week to week; but finally the Danes, in spite of the arrival of a fresh 'summer-lead' to their aid, found it well to retire beyond the Thames, leaving the newly-crowned monarch a few years' breathing-space in his devastated realm.

CHAPTER IV.

Early life of Alfred-His claim to the throne-Designation by Pope Leo Saracen sack of Rome-Alfred at Rome-Judith, his stepmother -Devout childhood and youth-Friendship with St. Neot-Marriage-Alfred's 'thorn in the flesh.'

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LFRED was at his accession twenty-two years of Born in 849 at Wantage, in Berkshire, the youngest of a band of five brothers, he speedily showed himself to be the flower of the flock. 'Beloved was he, by both father and mother alike, with a great love, beyond all his brethren; yea, and the darling of all. As he grew on stature, both in childhood and boyhood, so showed he ever fairer in form than any one of them, and in looks, and words, and ways the lovesomest." Bright was his face, so that all men marked it, and bright his talk."2 'From his very cradle, above all, his own high-souled temper and high birth bred in him a longing after Wisdom. But, alas! through the carelessness of his up-bringers, he abode even unto his twelfth year, unable so much as to say his letters. Yet learnt he by heart many a Saxon lay; for day and night would he hear them repeated by others, and no dull listener was he. A keen huntsman also; ever at work on woodcraft, and to good purpose. For peerless was he in the hunting-field, ever the first and ever the luckiest; in this, as in all else, supremely gifted by God.'

§ 2. As the cadet of the family, it might have been thought that he had little prospect of the Crown. But the English throne was not yet strictly hereditary. The appointment was 'Asser, § 26.

1 Asser, § 26.

? Simeon of Durham.

by the popular voice, and any member of the royal house might thus be acclaimed King. Nevertheless, to pass over the actual heir-apparent was unusual, and seems to have required some apology. It was done in Alfred's case, and his disappointed nephew, Ethelwald Clito, lived to give trouble a generation later, while the story ran that Alfred's claim had been authorized by the great Pope Leo IV., while he was yet a child. The tale, if true, is interesting as an early example of the Papal claim to supersede unworthy monarchs.

§ 3. For the situation arose thus. After Ethelwulf had crushed the Danes at Ockley, he made munificent thankofferings to God, 'even to the tenth of all he possessed,' ' and established the same wont throughout all his realms.' Having thus formally established the system of ecclesiastical tithepreviously a loose and floating ideal in the Church of England he finally went on pilgrimage to Rome, whither he had already sent his youngest and best-beloved son, Alfred, then six years of age.1 Amongst the Anglo-Saxons, infancy was computed to end with this year, and the rite of Confirmation was usually administered. Alfred thus received this Sacrament at the hands of the Pope himself, the Holy See being at this time held by Leo IV., the fortifier of the 'Leonine City," the deliverer of Rome from the Saracens, whose galleys were to Italy the same ghastly, ever-present horror which those of the Danes were to England. At this date the Mediterranean was practically a Saracen lake: its eastern, western, and southern shores were held by them; every large island within it was in their hands, and in 846 they had sacked Rome itself. When Alfred arrived there, the traces of this raid must still have been sadly perceptible in many a ruined church and desecrated shrine.

§ 4. While on his Roman pilgrimage, Ethelwulf committed the senile folly of marrying a girl of thirteen-Judith, the brilliant, precocious, unprincipled daughter of Charles the Bald, King of France. This was a sad come-down from his

Both Asser and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle say he took Alfred with him, yet also both send Alfred to Rome two years earlier, in 853, and give his Confirmation and royal consecration under both dates.

? The trans-Tiberine region of Rome, including the Vatican, is still known by this name.

first wife, Osburga, a true English lady, worthy to be the mother of Alfred, 'deeply devout, and keen of wit withal; great of heart, as high in place." Leaving Alfred, as it would seem, at Rome, he returned with his bride to England, only to find public opinion so outraged by his wedding a foreign child, and giving her (in defiance of West Saxon custom) the title of Queen, that his eldest son, a wicked young man named Ethelbald, was all but able to organize a successful usurpation. Matters were patched up; but when, two years later, Ethelwulf died, Ethelbald seized not only his father's sceptre, but his father's widow. And, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it was on the news of this incestuous union reaching Rome that Leo 'hallowed Alfred to King.'

$ 5. For the time, however, nothing came of it. Ethelbald retained his throne, and continued to live with Judith as his wife, while Alfred quietly returned to England, not as a Pretender, but as his brother's subject, to have his marvellously many-sided intellect developed, according to the well-known tale,3 by his youthful stepmother, with whom he seems to have continued in most fraternal relations, notwithstanding her exceedingly equivocal position.

§ 6. Yet Alfred himself was far from being an evil-liver in his youth. His early visit to Rome, with all its holy recollections-the lamps burning before the shrines of the Apostles at his father's charge, the English Schools rebuilt by his father's devotion, his own special intercourse with the Universal Apostolic Pontiff'—had left an indelible stamp on his spiritual being. The spell of Rome was upon him.

§ 7. As soon as ever he could read, at twelve years of age, he made it his first task to learn by heart The Daily Course; that is, the Services of the Hours,' so as to be able to take part in the sevenfold scheme of daily devotion set forth in the Breviary of the Catholic Church. His next Ibid., § 4.

1 Asser, § 16.

3 Ibid., § 27. On the incompatibility of the tale with the chronology of Alfred's life, see note there. But it probably is founded on the fact that he really owed much to Judith's instruction.

4

Asser, § 28.

* See Appendix A.

The word 'Breviary' is not found before the time of Hildebrand, but the system can be traced to the earliest days of the Church.

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