side of life. Roger de Hoveden asserts roundly that he had been Bishop of Winchester, until, being compelled by necessity,' he was made king. His father Ecgberht had thought him over-fond of churchmen as councillors. But there is no evidence of lack of vigour in his actual conduct of the kingship. He fought against the invading hosts of the Northmen when he was under-king in Kent, and after he had succeeded to Ecgberht's throne he helped to inflict on one pirate host at Aclea2 a crushing defeat. It was said that more Danes fell there than had ever fallen on English ground before:

"Men fell like corn in harvest-tide, in both these mighty hosts."

There was a side of Æthelwulf's character with which his Witan [Wise Men] probably had little sympathy. Possibly through his tutor and later friend, Swithun, Bishop of Winchester, he came under the spell which the name of Rome exercised in the Middle Ages on all who did not come too near it. He put aside the many claims of his kingdom to make time for a pilgrimage to the city of St Peter and St Paul, which was to the medieval Christian all that Mecca is to the Mahommedan. It is possible

1 Roger de Hoveden, p. 36, Bohn's edition.

2 Ockley in Surrey, "a few miles south or Dorking, under Leith Hill."

that Æthelwulf's motive was to secure the intercession of the Pope, with a view to averting the threatened incursions of the Northmen. His kingdom would have been better served had he stayed at home and fortified his coasts, for the danger was imminent.

Before he left for his visit to the sacred city he granted a tenth part of the rents from his private dominions for ecclesiastical and charitable purposes. It was this grant which was afterwards represented as a grant of the tenth of the whole revenue of the kingdom, and as the legal origin of tithes.1 It is recognised, even by those who would prefer to vindicate the antiquity of tithes, that the attempt to base their legal origin in England on Ethelwulf's testament must be regarded as a pious fraud.2 Though the provisions of his will cannot be made into a national endowment of the clergy, they illustrate the direction which his religious instincts had taken. When he has provided for gifts to the poor and gifts to the Pope, he has, to his own mind, and to 1 Kemble, "Saxons in England," vol. ii. pp. 488-490.

2 "The bearing of this whole discussion on the subject of tithes appears to be merely that Æthelwulf used the tenth as a convenient measure for ecclesiastical and other benefactions, and that this testifies to an established, or at least a growing recognition of the tithe as the clerical portion. The measure, whatever its character, affected Wessex only." -Haddan and Stubbs' "Councils and Ecclesiastical Doct. " vol. iii. p. 637. Tithe was originally a rent charge paid to monasteries or churches by those who farmed their lands. The attempt to identify the Christian and the Mosaic system was an afterthought.

the mind of his age, fulfilled the whole religious duty of man. The money he left behind him was to be divided between his sons and his nobles for the good of his soul. "Further, for the benefit of his soul, which, from the first flower of his youth, he had studied to promote, he directed that, through all his hereditary dominions, one poor man, either a native or a foreigner (ie. not a Wessex man), for each ten hides of land should be provided by his successors with meat, drink, and clothing, even to the day of judgment, if the country should continue to be inhabited by men and cattle, and not become deserted." That was the dread shadow which hung over the future, and chilled heart and hope. The Northern hordes were threatening, and they were regarded as a force purely destructive and devastating. "Also for the good of his soul, three hundred mancuses were to go to Rome: one hundred mancuses1 in honour of St Peter, specially to buy oil for filling all the lamps of the Apostolic Church on Easter Eve and at cock-crow [surely a word to be avoided in a testament in honour of St Peter!]; also one hundred mancuses in honour of St Paul, for the same purpose of providing oil for the Church of St Paul the Apostle, to fill the lamps on Easter Eve and at cock-crow: and one hundred mancuses for the universal Pontiff."

1 A mancus was more than the third of a pound.

There is some evidence to show that Æthelwulf was a man of wider vision than most of his contemporaries, and that he entertained a far-reaching scheme for combined action between England and the successors of Charles the Great for defence against the Northmen. At the beginning of his reign he had entered into a hortatory correspondence with Lewis the Gentle [or Pious], with a view to common action. It has been suggested that it was the same motive which led to his visit to the court of Charles the Bald on his return from Rome, and to his marriage with Judith, Charles's child-daughter.1 The marriage of the Saxon king, already on the further side of sixty, with a girl hardly more than twelve years of age, requires a political motive to explain it; and the suggestion that it was the seal of a defensive alliance between Ethelwulf and Charles is both probable and in keeping with the habit of the times.

It is worth while to keep in mind the few characteristic facts we know about Ethelwulf, because many of the qualities of the father are found also in the son. Æthelwulf's piety, his large views of policy, his touch with other lands, his generosity, and his magnanimity re-appear in more robust and chastened forms in Alfred's life.

Of Alfred's mother Osburh we do not know much.

1 Green, "Conquest of England," pp. 81, 82.

She was the daughter of Oslac, the king's cupbearer, who came of the royal house of the Jutes, settled in the Isle of Wight. She is described as a religious woman, noble both by birth and nature. As service about the person of the king was a mark of high rank, it is clear that Oslac held high rank among the West Saxon nobles. We may recall that in no country in the world of the ninth century did woman take a higher place than among the Saxon thegns. Even before Christianity had come to cast a halo round the head of womanhood, while the Saxons were still in the forests of Germany, the dignity of the position of their women had attracted the attention and captivated the imagination of the Roman historian Tacitus. "The Germans," he says, "believe that the sex has a certain sanctity and prescience, and they do not despise their counsels nor make light of their answers." They were admitted into that comradeship in council and in home which comes from sharing the perils of war. "Tradition says that armies, already wavering and giving way, have been rallied by women, who, with earnest entreaties and loud threats and bared bosoms, vividly represented the horrors of captivity, which the Germans fear with such extreme dread on behalf of their women, that the strongest tie by which a state can be bound is by being required to give among