LECTURE I
THE SOURCES
Character of the present lectures.
§ 5. When the electors to the Ford Lectureship did me the great honour of offering me the lectureship, coupled with the informal suggestion that the present set of lectures might appropriately be devoted to some subject connected with King Alfred, I warned them, in the letter in which I accepted both the offer and the suggestion, that it was unlikely that on such a well-worked period of English history I should be able to offer anything very new or original. That warning I must now repeat to you. If in the course of our labours I can remove some of the difficulties and confusions which have gathered round the subject, and put in a clearer light some points which have been imperfectly apprehended, that will be all that I can aspire to. For the rest I must be content to put in my own words, and arrange in my own way, what has been previously written by others or by myself; and these lectures may rank as Prolegomena, in the sense in which the late Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, remarked that Dean Alford seemed to have used that word in his edition of the Greek Testament, viz. ‘things that have been said before.’
Prevalence of uncritical statements about Alfred.
§ 6. But if I cannot tell you much that is very new, I hope that what I shall tell you may be approximately true. I shall not tell you, as a recent writer has done, that ‘by his invention of the shires [Alfred] anticipated the principles of the County Council legislation of ten centuries later[5].’ For, in the first place, Alfred did not ‘invent the shires’; and secondly, if I may quote a letter of my friend the Rev. C. S. Taylor, whose papers on Anglo-Saxon topography and archaeology[6] are well known to and appreciated by historical students, it ‘is surely a mistake to make Alfred, as some folks seem to do, into a kind of ninth century incarnation of a combined School Board and County Council.’ Yes, it is surely a mistake; and no less surely is it a mistake to make him into a nineteenth century radical with a touch of the nonconformist conscience[7]; or a Broad-Churchman with agnostic proclivities[8]. Nor shall I, with another recent writer, revive old Dr. Whitaker’s theory that St. Neot was an elder brother of Alfred, identical with the somewhat shadowy Athelstan who was under-king of Kent at any rate from 841 to 851[9]. For, firstly, it is very doubtful whether Athelstan was really Alfred’s brother, and not rather his uncle[10]; and secondly, as we shall see later on, St. Neot is an even more shadowy person than the under-king with whom Dr. Whitaker and Mr. Edward Conybeare would identify him; so shadowy indeed, as almost to justify an attitude of scepticism towards him as complete as that which Betsy Prig ultimately came to adopt towards the oft-quoted Mrs. Harris:—‘I don’t believe there never was no such person.’ I shall not repeat William of Malmesbury’s confusion of John the Old Saxon with John Scotus Erigena[11], and of Sighelm, Alfred’s messenger, with Sighelm, bishop of Sherborne in the following century[12]; or Henry of Huntingdon’s assertion[13] that Æthelwulf before his accession was bishop of Winchester. I shall not speak of an ‘Earl of Berkshire’ in the ninth century, nor tell you that Alfred’s Jewel is in the Bodleian[14], or that ‘the Danes made their first appearance on these shores in 832[15].’ Nor shall I tell you that ‘Alfred supplied chapter-headings and prefixed tables of contents to each of his authors, an improvement hitherto unheard of in literary work, which, simple as it seems now to us, betokened in its first conception no small literary genius[16]’; for I happen to have had better opportunities than most people of knowing that, in the case of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the chapter-headings were there long before Alfred undertook the work of translation. The same is true of Pope Gregory’s Dialogues, and of his Pastoral Care. The only works to which the above remarks could apply would be the Boethius and the Orosius translations; and even there we cannot be sure that the Latin MSS. used by Alfred had no chapter-headings; certainly the St. Gallen and Donaueschingen MSS. of Orosius have capitula[17], though, owing to the free way in which Alfred dealt with the Orosius, the Latin and Anglo-Saxon capitula do not correspond very closely. And the same is true of some Boethius MSS.[18] It is in truth a little disheartening to have all these old confusions and myths trotted out once more at this time of day as if they were genuine history. The fact is that there has been, if I may borrow a phrase from the Stock Exchange, a ‘boom’ in things Alfredian lately; and the literary speculator has rushed in to make his profit. Along with a few persons who are real authorities on the subjects with which they deal, eminent men in other departments of literature and life are engaged to play the parts which the ducal chairman and the aristocratic director play in the floatation of a company. They may not know very much about the business in hand, but their names look well on a prospectus. The result is not very creditable to English scholarship.
English learning non-professional.
§ 7. I would not be understood as wishing to confine the writing of English history to a small body of experts. It is one of the great characteristics of English learning that it has never been the monopoly of a professional or professorial caste, as in Germany, but has been contributed to by men of every, and of no profession. To this fact it owes many of its best qualities—its sanity and common sense, its freedom from fads and far-fetched fancies, its freshness and contact with reality—qualities in which German learning, in spite of its extraordinary depth and solidity, is sometimes conspicuously wanting.
Qualities required for writing English history.