And thou shalt outlive me 'My son, now I bid thee, And keep thou the Law; Of God, with full mind ; And bide till He rede thee In all thy deed; The more shall He help thee And the son here addressed was worthy of these touching words, and of his noble father. Next to Alfred himself, Edward the Elder is the monarch to whom England owes most. Without such a successor Alfred's work must have been in vain, and England, in spite of it, have broken up into a shifting congeries of petty independent States--Danish for the most part-with no national unity, and no splendid vista of national development and national glory. For the averting of this fate we have to thank the children of Alfred, Edward himself and his heroic sister Ethelfled, who, as widow of the Mercian Alderman Ethelred, was styled the 'Lady of the Mercians.' From the moment of their father's death, these two-the same of whose promise in their youth so bright a picture is drawn by Asser-set themselves to complete his work, and to harvest the good seed sown by him. Their first task was the systematic reduction of the Danish settlements in Mercia, pursuant of Ethelfled's claim to the dominion of that whole land, north as well as south of Watling Street. Here the Danes had formed a group of military heathen oligarchies,1 'Such as the 'Five Boroughs '-Derby, Nottingham, Leicester, Lincoln, and Stamford. holding down the old English and Christian populations in a kind of serfdom. One by one these were brought under, and curbed by fortified posts, scientifically placed at strategic points, whose names, like St. Neot's and St. Ives (from the Cornish town so called), still bear witness to their West Saxon origin. And finally, such was the respect inspired by this steady and irresistible advance of the native power, that not only did every district of England acknowledge Edward as King, but the whole of Britain bowed to his sway. The Scots and Picts beyond the Forth, the Britons of Strathclyde and Cumbria, the various Welsh principalities from the Wirral to the Severn Sea, all alike took him to Father and to Lord.' Under his suzerainty the whole island became, for the first time in history, united in one political entity, and the British Empire had begun. Such was the outcome of the life-work of Alfred. : T APPENDIX A. THE ENGLISH SCHOOL' IN ROME. HIS was a precinct in the Leonine City opening into the portico of (old) St. Peter's to the North, and bounded by the Tiber to the South. It is called in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 'The School of England' [Angelcynnes Scolu]. In the Latin chroniclers it is Schola Anglorum, or Saxonum, or Anglo-Saxonum. The word schola had at that date no necessary connection with education, but was used of any kind of corporate institution. That our School had such a corporate organization we learn from the Liber Pontificalis' (A.D. 800 and 846), where we also learn that the English themselves called it a 'borough.' The name Borgo still clings to the site. In early medieval times every nation sending a sufficiently large number of pilgrims to Rome seems to have had such a precinct; we thus read also of the French, Lombard, and Frisian 'Schools.' That of the English contained many lodging-houses (domos), in which our pilgrims found shelter and entertainment, and also a church dedicated to St. Mary (S. Maria in Sassia [Saxonica], now S. Spirito in Sassia), which had the then rare privilege of sepulture (A.S. Chron., 874), and was served by a permanent colony of English ecclesiastics, the Superior being appointed by Papal Bull. Innocent III. transferred them in 1204 to St. Pantaleone, on the other side of the Tiber, and made over their old school to the Knights of St. John. The existing 'English College' in Rome dates from the thirteenth century. The School (founded by Ina, King of Wessex, 688) was twice burnt out, once under Pope Paschal I. (817-824), and again in the first year of Leo IV. (847). In both cases the preservation of the adjoining portico of St. Peter's is ascribed to the special prayer of the Pope: Raphael, in the Vatican stanze, shows us Leo IV. in the act of thus checking the conflagration. At Alfred's visit in 853 the rebuilding of the place (mainly at his father's charge) must have been in progress, and it was probably on its completion that the precinct, at his request. was freed from taxation by Pope Marinus (A.S. Chron., 885). Able articles on this little-known subject will be found in the Dublin Review, vol. cxxiii. APPENDIX B. THE DATE OF ALFRED'S DEATH. THE confusion of dates in the chroniclers, which causes some to place Alfred's death in 899, others in 900, and others, again, in 901, arises from the lack in the early Middle Ages of any generally accepted chronological system. Our present Anno Domini reckoning came into common use about 550, the date of the Incarnation being then supposed to have been conclusively established by the elaborate calculations of Dionysius Exiguus (526). But there were never wanting critics who declared that the true date was two (or four) years earlier than that adopted by him, and Chroniclers were apt to be thus confused. Bede, for example, uses in his Ecclesiastical History' our present reckoning, but in his 'Chronicles' the Verus Annus, two years behind it. Not till the twelfth century did the supreme convenience of a universally recognised era render these criticisms of merely academic interest. A further source of error arose from the absence of any fixed New Year's Day. Most early writers begin the year with the Incarnation (March 25), but some take the Nativity (December 25), some the Circumcision (January 1), whilst some reckon from the Crucifixion. The Roman Era (A.U.C.) is also in use, and this began April 21, though the Roman Civil Year commenced on January 1. Some chroniclers, again, reckon by regal years, and of these, some count as the first year of any given King the whole of the civil (or ecclesiastical) year in which his reign began, some the actual twelve months during which he first sat on the throne. Add the errors and amendments of copyists, and we can easily see how the year given in one chronicle as 899 might be in another 900, and in another 901. The wonder is that there is not much greater confusion. Nor is it worth while to spend overmuch good time and thought in attempting to harmonize these discrepancies. A mild balance of probability between the rival dates is the best we can hope to attain, and this, in my view, seems rather to incline to 900. The whole involved question of the chronology of the mediaval historians is exhaustively dealt with by Mr. Petrie ('Monumenta Brit.,' p. 103). END OF PART I. |