to avoid being caught by the ebbing tide.] There was slain Lucumon the king's reeve, and Wulfheard the Frisian,1 and Ebb the Frisian, and Ethelere the Frisian, and Ethelforth the king's neat-herd, and of all the men, Frisians and English, seventy-two; and of the Danish men, one hundred and twenty. Then, however, the flood-tide came to the Danish ships before the Christians could shove theirs off, and they, therefore, rowed them out: nevertheless, they were damaged to such a degree that they could not row round the Sussex land; and here the sea cast two of them on shore, and the men were led to the king at Winchester; and he commanded them to be there hanged [for piracy]: and the men who were in the single ship came to East Anglia [England] sorely wounded. That same summer no less than twenty ships, with their crews, wholly perished upon the south coast."

Others of Alfred's expeditions were more successful than this; in one expedition in 885 a fleet on its way to East England met sixteen pirate ships "and fought against them, and captured all the ships and killed the men." 2 His larger ships compelled the Danes to alter their type of vessel also, and to build ships for sea-fighting. Fifty years later

1 The Frisian speech was so closely cognate to the Saxon that a Frisian would easily understand an Englishman, and vice versa. "English Chronicle, 885.

they had made sea warfare a fine art. That fact indicates the weight to be given to the claim made for Alfred that he is the founder of the English navy. There had been ships and sea battles before his time: Ecgfrith of Northumbria had employed a fleet in an attack on Ireland in 684; Ealhere, Alderman of Kent, had fought in ships against the Danes in the time of Alfred's father, Ethelwulf. But Alfred is the first to undertake the building of a fleet, and the first to have hired seamen, foreign and native, in his service. But a navy has to be refounded at least every century if it is to remain a navy. So that Alfred shares the honour of "founder" with many others: he is the first of a group of founders which includes some of the most famous names in English history, of whom none is more justly and honourably famous than the first.

Chapter V

Men of Prayer

"As with the priest, so with the people;

As with the people, so with the priest."-Isaiah.

"The fire of the altar is always brought from the household hearth, the hearth kindled from the altar. It is from the earth itself that the salt of the earth is taken."-Dora Greenwell.

"The soul of all improvement is improvement of soul."-The Note-Book.

WHENEVER it is possible in dealing with the history of the Christian Church to perform a process similar to that which biologists describe as "making a section," it is invariably found that developments of one kind or another are in progress. There is no such thing as rigidity either in organisation or belief in any period of the Church's history. The persistence of certain names and external forms sometimes gives an appearance of permanence; but wherever the historian is able to get beneath the surface, he finds, not the fixity and rigidity which belong to dead things, but the processes of action and reaction, life and development, reformation and transformation, or decadence and failure, which belong to living bodies. It is part of the business

of the historian not to let the recurrence of names and forms in the Christian Church in different ages deceive him as to the real difference of the forces or the ideas for which the names stand. The facts and faith which create the forms of belief and organisation remain the same, but they express themselves variously, according to the material in which they have to work.

Alfred's time was no exception to this rule. It falls in the middle of a long period when the Christian Church was struggling hard to rise out of the slough of heathenism in which it found itself after the inundation of Europe by the northern nations. Society was a long time in unlearning heathenism. It was comparatively easy to make Christianity the religion of the court, to introduce the organisation of the Church as a thin veneer on the top of the underlying barbarism. But it was the work of generations to make any real change in the ideas and habits of the people. For centuries after England had been nominally Christian, heathen superstitions remained and heathen rites were openly practised. There is in the Vatican a manuscript of the eighth century which gives a list of the "superstitions and paganisms" still practised by the people1; and the Penance Lists testify to their prevalence.

1 "Indiculus superstitionum et Paganiarum," Pertz, vol. i. p. 191, quoted by Hatch. "Growth of Church Institutions," p. 158.

So long as the clergy mingled freely with the various classes of society from which they were drawn, they shared their vices, and to a great extent also their ideas. Throughout the eighth century Church Councils on the Continent repeatedly pass laws against clerks frequenting taverns, staying there till midnight, and tottering about the church from drunkenness while engaged in holy office.1 An enactment of Charles the Great at Aachen which requires Presbyters and Bishops to live according to the canons, sets forth the perils from which the canonical rule is to save them. "Let them not be permitted to wander out of doors, but let them live under complete ward, not given to filthy lucre, not unchaste, not thieves, not murderers, not ravishers, not litigious, not passionate, not puffed up, not drunkards, but chaste in heart and body, humble, modest, sober, kind, peaceful, sons of God worthy of being promoted to holy orders, not living lives of luxury or unchastity or other kinds of iniquity, in the villages or homesteads adjoining a church, without control or discipline."

In the presence of these scandals the reforming energy which is always latent within the Christian Church found expression chiefly in two ways, either in founding monasteries to spread or uplift the ideal of monastic life, or in withdrawing the ordinary

1 Cp. Hatch, who gives references G.C.I. p. 161.