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either of Ine, my kinsman, or of Offa, King of the Mercians, or of Ethelbert, who first of English race received baptism, such as seemed to me the best I have gathered herein, and the others I have thrown aside." He speaks, it will be seen, of nothing new. The new thing is that the laws of Wessex, of Mercia, and of Kent, are brought together to make a common law of England

In the administration of justice his hand was probably felt more directly. Here the need of a strong and righteous ruler was especially needed. Inter arma silent leges, “Laws are silenced before the sword," was a Roman saying, and in Alfred's days the sword was everywhere. The nobles were too powerful; the judges feeble and ignorant. Alfred is said to have taken from the aldermen some of their powers, and to have handed them over to judges. To the doings of the judges themselves he looked most closely. He urged them to make themselves. acquainted with their business. Causes that they decided ignorantly he himself reviewed. Where he found that they had acted corruptly he visited them with the severest punishment.

In other branches of government his work was great and useful. "His budget," says Mr. Green, "is the first royal budget that we possess." He divided his revenue into two parts, devoting one to civil, the other to ecclesiastic purposes. The former was again divided into three parts: one went to his "men-of-war and noble thanes." In these we see a curious anticipation of the great officers of State of modern times. They spent one month, we are told, in the King's

Court, and gave two to their own private affairs. A second third was spent on the "workmen skilled in all kinds of building, whom he had gathered and brought together from all nations in numbers almost beyond counting." The last portion was assigned to strangers that came to him from foreign parts, and this whether they asked for his help or no.

Of the ecclesiastical part of the revenue a fourfold division was made. One went to the poor; another to the two monasteries which he had himself founded (at Athelney and Shaftesbury); a third to his school for young nobles; the fourth to all the monasteries and churches, not only in England, but in the British kingdom, in Northumbria, and even Ireland and France.

It will be thought, perhaps, that only a small part of the royal revenue went to what we call the military, naval, and civil services. But it will be remembered that these were still mainly supported by local means. But here also Alfred seems to have made changes which tended to make these services stronger and more permanent.

Of the navy we have heard already. This indeed seems to have been almost a creation of Alfred's. We hear nothing of a fleet before his time. But during his reign we hear again and again of ships being built of new and improved designs for their construction. There is nothing in which the great king stands out more clearly as the founder of England's power.

The army was not, of course, called into existence by him in anything like the same way. There had

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always been an army in which every able-bodied man was bound to serve. This would have been a vast force with which no invader could possibly have coped, if it could ever have been brought, or, when brought, kept together. Here was the difficulty. Every man had his own occupations, which he was loath to leave, and to which he was very anxious to return. However willing he might be to serve, he often could not provide himself with the necessary arms. When an army had been brought together it was not easy to feed it. The invading Danes, on the other hand, were from the very necessity of the case, a standing army. They might be beaten by the levies which were hastily brought against them. But when these levies had dispersed to their own homes, they were still there. This is a summary of the difficulties which Alfred had to meet, and he and his successors did it in this way. Every five hides of land sent a soldier to the king's army, furnishing him with arms, victuals, and pay. At the same time every free man was still bound to serve in case of need. The force thus raised was divided into two parts, which were called into the field by turn, the other remaining at home to defend their own townships.2

But Alfred's greatest services to his country were done in the field of education, letters, and learning. That he founded the University of Oxford is undoubtedly a fiction, though indeed a few years ago

A hide of land = 120 acres. This may be taken as an approximation, but it is doubtful whether the hide always meant the same.

2 I must express here my special obligations to Mr. J. R. Green's "Conquest of England."

University College celebrated its thousandth anniversary on the strength of the story. But there was certainly a school attached to his palace in which young nobles were taught, and where "books in both languages, the Latin, that is to say, and the English, were continually read." The monasteries which he founded or supported had also schools attached to them, and were regarded by the King as promoters of education as well as of learning. Scholars were invited from other lands to help him. Thus Plegmund was called from Mercia, and was promoted to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. Grimbald was invited from St. Omer, and Asser, who was afterwards to write the life of his patron, as we have seen, from St. David's. To this list a more doubtful account adds the famous philosopher, John Scotus, or Erigena, who is said to have been invited from the Court of Charles the Bald.

But Alfred did not content himself with giving money or land to schools and other places of learning, or with hospitably entertaining scholars from other lands. He set the example of a diligent love of letters. He found time amidst all the distractions of war and of government to be a student and a writer. When he was nearly forty he had at last the opportunity of learning Latin. At his accession, indeed, as he tells us himself, very few south of the Humber, and not one south of the Thames, could translate from Latin into English. This was the deplorable had to remedy, and he

state of things which he remedied it by his own personal exertions. He is not indeed the first of royal authors; but his author

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ship has the extraordinary merit of coming out under the greatest difficulties. Occupied almost incessantly with the business of war or of peace, beset by frequent illness, and living in an age of ignorance, he yet made himself a man of learning and letters.

His chief works, and though many others have been attributed to him, perhaps we may say, his only works, were translations. One of these was his version of the "Liber Pastoralis" of Gregory the Great. His preface to this modestly describes his motives and his method. "When I remembered how the knowledge of Latin had formerly decayed throughout England, and yet many could read English writing, I began among other manifold and various troubles. of this kingdom to translate into English the book which is called in Latin, ' Pastoralis,' and in English, 'Shepherd's Book,' sometimes word by word, and sometimes according to the sense, as I had learnt it from Plegmund, my archbishop, and Asser, my bishop, and Grimbald, my mass-priest, and John, my mass-priest." The "Liber Pastoralis" is a treatise on the duties of a Christian minister, and was in Alfred's time and for long afterwards regarded as a standard work. Another book which the King translated was the "Historia" of Orosius, a Spanish priest of the fifth century, and a disciple of Augustine of Hippo. This is an attempt at Universal History, beginning with the Creation of the world, and carried down to A.D. 417. Then again he translated the "Ecclesiastical History" of the Venerable Bede, and the "Consolations of Philosophy," written by Boethius, 470-524 A.D.