FROM JUSTINIAN TO LUTHER

 

IV

FROM ALFRED TO EDWARD

 

Alfred (849-900) brother of the Ethelred, King of Wessex, who fell a victim to the Danes, inherited a kingdom which was little better than a wilderness. After 871 had been spent in a series of battles of varying fortunes there was a short respite. Then the Danes attacked again and Alfred retreated to the swamps and woods of Somerset, only to organize and plan. In 878 he came out of his stronghold and won a decisive victory at Edington in Wiltshire. The Danish king, Guthrum, then made peace and England was divided between the Danes and Alfred. Alfred kept all England south of a line drawn from Chester to London, and soon gained London itself.

The tide had really turned and England was saved from completely relapsing into heathenism. A few years later the Danes came back to make a final effort, so confident of victory that they brought their wives and children with them from the Continent. They were outmaneuvered by Alfred and in 897 they gave up the struggle. The power of those who remained in England was diminished in the next century. But they have left their mark on the English language, for they were the first to drop the grammatical inflections of their newly acquired tongue. And though they gradually became Christian, some of their peasant descendants in the north of England, within the memory of men yet living, still remembered the names of the gods of their forefathers, Thor, Wod (Woden), and Lok (Loki).

Alfred, by saving his own kingdom of Wessex, made it the centre of deliverance and unity for the whole country. Though he did not make England one kingdom, he made its union a certainty in the future. His legislation is a careful selection of the laws of earlier kings, imbued with a new and deeply religious character and beginning with the Ten Commandments. His private life was one of steady devotion to practical duty. He strove to restore the monastic life, founded two monasteries, and sent gifts not only to the poor at home but even to Rome and India. But no work that he did proved of a more abiding character than his services to knowledge and learning. He found his people densely ignorant and the Latin language almost forgotten. To remedy these evils Alfred established a court school to which he invited both native and foreign scholars. He himself wrote English translations of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, of the histories of Bede and Orosius, and of the Pastoral Rule of St. Gregory. The result of his work and of his inspiration was not only to raise the level of general and clerical education, but also to provide the English people with a continuous record of their national history. Alfred’s West Saxon dialect was not destined to remain the literary dialect of the whole country; that place was taken by Midland English after the Norman Conquest. But as an English Christian king and scholar, and as the father of the English people, Alfred remains without a rival. It is strange that he was never canonized.

The reign of Edgar (944-975) was a time of peace and happiness in which the work of Alfred bore good fruit. There can be no doubt that he had been a youth of licentious character. But as a king he proved wise, capable, and successful. He let the English and the Danes live on equal terms and secured justice for both. It is significant that he conferred the archbishopric of York on Oswald, a Northumbrian Dane, and not on an English­man. His success was symbolized by his magnificent coronation at Bath in 973, the first English coronation of which we have a full description. And the imagination of the people was kindled by his visit to Chester, where eight kings swore to be his fellow workers and, it is said, rowed his boat at the head of a great procession to the minster of St. John Baptist.

Edgar was fortunate in having as his friend and adviser a man of such unusual capacity and sanctified common sense as St. Dunstan (924-988). Dunstan had been trained by Irish teachers near Glastonbury, and exhibited a singular versatility for both handicraft and statecraft. He was fond of old ballads and of playing on the harp. He made church bells, crosses, and vestments, and encouraged calligraphy and the copying of manuscripts.

When a very young monk he acted as one of the treasurers of King Edred. On the king’s death he had to face the anger of the widowed queen and retired to a monastery at Ghent; but he came to his own on the accession of Edgar and occupied the see of Canterbury for nearly twenty-seven years. At Ghent secular canons had been replaced by Benedictines, and Dunstan himself joined the monastic order. In spite of this fact he showed a wise toleration in dealing with the married clerks of England. They certainly presented a difficult problem. The secular clergy were lax and strict monasticism was nearly extinct. Many of the monasteries which had survived the Danish raids were no longer tenanted by monks bound by vows of celibacy and poverty, but by colleges of clerks frequently married and devoted to few virtues except the virtue of hospitality. Dunstan himself, and likewise Ethelwold of Winchester, a fervent monk, and Oswald of Worcester, were all on the side of reform, and there was no little opposition between the monks and these clerks, later called 'canons'.

Dunstan left the clerks unmolested at Canterbury, and when he died, in 988, they were still in possession at York, London, Dorchester, and other lesser houses. A married mass priest under Dunstan was not expelled, but was admonished and had to forfeit certain privileges. A similar rule appears to have been made by Oswald when he went to Northumbria, where a priest was excommunicated if he forsook his wife in order to take another, and as late as 1076 a Council of Winchester, while forbidding canons to have wives, permitted the clergy in villages to retain their wives. The moderate policy of Dunstan in dealing with the married clergy had its counter­part in the king's attitude towards the Danes and the Mercians, an attitude which was almost certainly suggested by the archbishop himself. The result was an era of peace and prosperity.

The ecclesiastical canons drawn up by Dunstan show the same practical mind and tender heart that we find at work in the State. He is not content to denounce heathen practices, but also urges a sound education and weekly sermons. Strict rules as to ceremonial are balanced by insistence upon the duty of forgiving an enemy and comforting the sorrowful. As a teacher he was known to spare the child as well as the rod. And though he was in touch with Rome, he flatly refused to obey a papal mandate which commanded him to absolve a nobleman who had con­tracted an unlawful marriage. Dunstan is indeed one of the great figures in the ages that are confidently called dark by those who have done little to explore their recesses.

In 990 King Ethelred 'the Redeless' attained his majority. The hostile Danes returned, sure of some sympathy on the part of their kinsmen in the north of England. Again and again Ethelred bought a respite by paying larger and larger ransoms, until, maddened by failure, he planned a general massacre of the Danes in his own service on St. Brice's Day, 1002. The next year Svein, the Danish king who had apostatized from Christianity, began his terrible raids, sacking one English town after another. He would have been crowned King of England if he had not died unexpectedly in 1014. But only three years later Knut, a son of Svein, became king and reigned for eighteen years, and Englishmen had no cause to be sorry. He held a great gemot at Oxford in which he declared his intention of governing in accordance with the law of Edgar; he sent back to Denmark the bulk of his Scandinavian forces; he not only ruled humanely, but showed himself a zealous Christian. He continued Dunstan's work of trying to extirpate heathenism, and heartily supported the reforming monastic party in the Church. He appears to have been thoroughly sincere and not to have strengthened the Church merely because it was the only unifying and civilizing force in the country. He rebuilt the church at St. Edmundsbury in memory of the king who had been murdered by former vikings. And he transferred with much pomp to Canterbury the relics of St. Alphege (Aelfheah), whom the Danes had murdered at a drunken feast at Greenwich in 1012. 

Knut died in 1035. His empire quickly fell to pieces, and the Norsemen and the Danes, being at war with each other, left England alone. The reign of Edward the Confessor (d. 1066) closes the history of the Old English Church. It was really a time of transition; for the king himself was half a Norman, he preferred the Normans as more cultured than the English, and unwisely showed his preference by constantly promoting Norman noblemen and ecclesiastics to positions of importance. Among these ecclesiastics was Robert of Jumièges, who was made Bishop of London in 1044 and was said to have such unlimited influence over the king that the king would have believed him if he had said that a black crow was white. But in spite of his partiality for foreign favorites, the king retained a hold upon the affection of his English subjects. He was dignified, affable, charitable, moderate in eating and drinking, virtuous and devout, fond of hunting. After his death the fact that Edward was the last of the line of Alfred helped to secure for him among the English people a veneration which their Norman monarchs in no way discouraged. His undoubted loyalty to the Church and his patronage of monasticism won for him the praises of his monkish biographers, and his halo was completed by the glories of the abbey church of Westminster. To the older Saxon church he added a great apsidal choir with radiating chapels in the Norman style. It was consecrated a few days before his death, and within its walls he was laid to rest. Two hundred years later the church was rebuilt in a triumphant harmony of French and English art, and over the retable of the high altar glowed in the background the shrine of the canonized St. Edward the Confessor, a marvel of pure gold and precious stones. The gold is gone, but his bones remain.