A prince that draws
By example more than others do by laws.
That is so just, to his great act and thought
To do, not what kings may, but what kings ought.
BEN JONSON, The Hue and Cry.
ALFRED THE GREAT belongs in a peculiar sense to Winchester; here he was proclaimed king; here he lived, and ruled, and made his laws; here he gathered round him that assemblage of divines and learned men with whose co-operation he gave the first great impetus to a national literature; here he commenced the English Chronicle; here he devised his plans for constructing a navy to defend the land against foreign foes; here he founded a monastery, the Newan Mynstre, destined to play a great and honourable part for some 600 years after him; here his queen founded a sister institution, the abbey of St. Mary; here he died and was buried, leaving behind him the savour of a life strenuous, blameless, and devoted, having shown his world that the fullest development of manly vigour was compatible both with the saintliness of the devotee and the culture of the book-lover and the student.
It was a rude age, the age of Alfred, but nevertheless it was a great age, for it was, in spite of all its crudeness and brutality, an age in which ideals were sought after, and indeed worshipped. It was Alfred’s high distinction that he not only steered the ship of state successfully through seemingly overwhelming dangers, but that in his own life he exhibited to the world a realized ideal—an ideal that comparatively few monarchs have made any attempt to strive after, and which, it is safe to say, none ever achieved so completely. There have, indeed, been great empire builders like Charlemagne, great law-givers like our first Edward, saints with the spiritual elevation of St. Louis, scholars and patrons of learning like Henry VI., but none have combined these high qualities with such just balance and self-restraint as Alfred, who may be truly said to have embodied in his own life the earnest, long-continued prayer which his own words expressed:
I have sought to live worthily while I lived, and after my death to leave to the men that should be after me my remembrance in good works.
Alfred was born at Wantage in 849, and there is little to connect his early life definitely with Winchester. His association in quite early days with the king’s court, so frequently held in the city, with the aged Swithun, who rarely left the city, not to mention the charter of Æthelwulf, above referred to, which bears his name, all render his early connection with Winchester more than probable. It was an active and stirring boyhood, including one, if not two, visits to Rome, and a solemn confirmation at the Pope’s own hands—events which must have profoundly stirred him, young as he was. The bent of his mind was early displayed when his mother Osberga (or, it may be, his stepmother, Judith; Asser says the latter) showed him and his brothers an illuminated volume—Anglo-Saxon poetry, very possibly the songs of Caedmon—and promised the book to the one who should first learn to repeat them. Alfred immediately sought his tutor’s help, and won the prize, which appealed so much more keenly to him than to his elder brothers. For all that it was as a warrior, prompt in action, resolute in difficulty, that he first rose to distinction. At the critical moment, while his brother, King Æthelred, delayed, he hurled himself on the Danes, and overthrew them at the fierce battle of Ashdown, in the Vale of the White Horse. It was but an episode in the continuous struggle, and the end of the year saw the death of Æthelred, and Alfred was called upon by the Witan, against his will indeed, at the age of twenty-two to mount the throne.
It was a thankless and, as it would seem, hopeless task that the youthful king had before him. The last thirty years had changed the face of the land; bit by bit the Danes had made good their footing; province after province had fallen into their possession. Edmund, the saintly king of East Anglia, had died a martyr’s death at their hands; Alfred’s three brothers had mounted the throne one by one, but, bravely as they had struggled, they had merely been able to retard, not to prevent the resistless advance. As he looked round on the blackened ruins of the capital in which he had just been crowned, his heart might well have sunk within him. Nor was it merely the fate of England which then hung in the balance; that of northern Christendom equally depended on the issue of the conflict. It is not generally recognized that during the early years of Alfred’s reign the heroic determination of the youthful king, and the loyal devotion of the sorely dismembered little kingdom of Wessex—for all else in England was lost—were all that stood between northern Europe and an ever-advancing tide of pitiless and savage heathenism, which, had it not been stemmed, would have engulfed the whole northern continent, with little hope of Christian enlightenment and development, it may have been for centuries. We may well be proud of the part that Winchester, as the capital of Wessex, played in the course of civilization during those dark days; and when, as indeed happened 150 years after, Winchester did see the Danish kingdom realized and herself the capital of it, it was a Christian and civilizing kingdom, and not one of violence and unbridled slaughter, over which she was called to preside. Well was it that Alfred was
One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
It is to Alfred, to the men of Wessex, and in part to Winchester that the cause of civilization owes the deliverance from this impending danger.
For seven years the conflict went on, but it was a conflict almost of despair, though Alfred met all attacks with unfailing heart and resourcefulness. At length in 878 all seemed lost. Alfred was surprised at Chippenham during the Twelfth Night festivities, and forced to take refuge in the morasses of Somersetshire. The story is too well known to need retelling here; suffice it that in less than six months Alfred had reasserted himself, had conquered the Danes, had made peace, and had divided the realm with them. 878, with the refuge in Athelney and the peace of Wedmore, was the turning-point in the struggle and in the fate of the whole nation.
The second period of the reign, the period of more peaceful reconstruction and consolidation, for plenty of fighting still remained to be done, centres largely round Winchester, and it is more particularly round Wolvesey and the scanty remains of Hyde Abbey that the memory of Alfred still most closely lingers. Wolvesey was the royal seat. Here he formed his court; here he inaugurated his reforms; here he laboured, studied, deliberated. The defence of his kingdom, the repair of the material ruin caused by foreign invasion, the construction of a fleet of ships, the promulgation of wise laws, the promotion of education, the encouragement of literature and travel, the actual founding of a national English literature and an English historical record, which no other nation can find a parallel to, the endowment of religious worship—all these in turn occupied his attention while he dwelt at Wolvesey. The command of the seas he early recognized to be the real defence of the land, and as soon as opportunity served he set himself to build a fleet. The Chronicle tells us that he
commanded long ships (aescas) to be built against them (the Danes, that is) which were full nigh twice as long as the others. Some had sixty oars, some more; they were both swifter and steadier, and also higher than the others. They were shaped neither like the Frisian nor the Danish, but as it seemed to him they could be most useful.
The Chronicle gives us also a stirring account of a sea-fight in one of the Hampshire harbours between Alfred’s vessels and three Danish long ships. It is a graphic and well-told narrative, too long to be quoted here. The crews of two of the pirates were captured, and brought to the king at Winchester. The king, who was then at Wolvesey, commanded them to be hanged, very likely above those very walls of Wolvesey, grey and weather-beaten, which we see now, and which in their “herring-bone” masonry still show the hand of the Saxon builder who erected them. In the bed of the Hamble River there lies still embedded the keel of a ‘long ship.’ One would dearly like to believe that it was one of those very pirate vessels which were driven aground, and whose crews were captured as related above, and the fact is not indeed impossible. Some planks and portions of this vessel may be seen in the Westgate Museum in Winchester, and various mementoes, such as the ceremonial casket presented to Lord Roberts with the freedom of the city on his return from South Africa, have in recent times been made from it.
Of Alfred’s life of study and devotion we have a pleasant picture in Asser’s Biography. Asser, afterwards Bishop of Sherborne, was a monk of St. David’s whom Alfred persuaded to come to Winchester, and to enter his service as scribe and literary helpmate. Asser tells us that “it was his usual custom both by night and day, amid his numerous occupations of mind and body, either himself to read books or to listen while others read them.” The roll of Alfred’s literary productions is a long one—Orosius, the Consolations of Boethius, the Pastoral Care of Pope Gregory, and Bede’s History of the English Church were all rendered into the vernacular. More important still was the English Chronicle, of which no less an authority than Professor Freeman says, “It is the book we should learn to reverence next after our Bible.” It is a treasure-house of contemporary record, systematically kept and reliable, such as no other nation, save the Hebrews, has ever possessed. In all probability the original was compiled and kept at Wolvesey, and copies were made for use at various other places, as Canterbury, Hereford, Peterborough. Six ancient copies are extant, of which four are in the British Museum. One of the two others is an actual Winchester copy of extreme antiquity, and is preserved in the Parker Collection of MSS. at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
A village on the Itchen, five miles above Winchester, surrounded everywhere by picturesque scenery. The ‘Gospel Oak’ in Avington Park, is some mile or so distant. Kingsley wrote part of his Water-Babies while staying at the Plough Inn at Itchen Abbas in the course of a fishing holiday. Big trout may often be seen lying under the bridge here.
Alfred’s last years were devoted to founding religious houses—one at Shaftesbury, one at Athelney, and one, which concerns us most immediately, at Winchester, the ‘Newan Mynstre,’ and his queen, Alswitha, founded a nunnery at Winchester also—‘Nunna Mynstre’ or St. Mary’s Abbey.
Alfred matured his plans for the Newan Mynstre in conjunction with Grimbald of Flanders, whom he invited over to England, and whom he induced to remain by making him the first abbot. But he only lived to acquire the site, for which, it is said, he paid the enormous rate of a mark of gold per foot. The spot selected was north-west of the present cathedral churchyard, in the angle near St. Laurence’s Church, and the minster was completed by Edward the Elder, King Alfred’s son, who succeeded him. The further history of the Newan Mynstre, its removal and rebuilding as Hyde Abbey, its dissolution and its decay, will be related in due course.
Alfred died in 901, and his remains have been thrice interred—first of all in the ‘Ealden Mynstre,’ the old minster, as the cathedral began then to be called; then at the completion of the Newan Mynstre they were translated thither with solemn pomp and reverence; and again at the reconstruction and removal of the fabric with equal pomp and circumstance to Hyde Abbey. The abbey is now merely a ruined fragment, and every trace of the abbey church has disappeared. The citizens of Winchester, so careful in the main of their treasures of antiquity, have permitted Alfred’s resting-place to be lost sight of and forgotten altogether, and modern search has not as yet identified the spot. In 1901, the year of the millenary of his death, an attempt was made to atone in some measure for this irreparable neglect, and the boldly conceived statue of Alfred, erected in Winchester Broadway, in front of the spot which his own queen’s abbey had actually occupied, is a reminder, not unworthy so far as outward monument and statuary art can serve, of the hallowed association of Winchester with this, the greatest of all our English monarchs. True is it that little tangible now remains, whether of Wolvesey, Newan Mynstre, or Hyde which we can directly connect with him—but his story, and his work, the inspiration of his life, and his example are things more real and more tangible in their way even than brick or stone or carven figure, and Alfred’s memory can never here be lost, even though his tomb remains lost sight of and slighted, and ‘no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’
