§ 41. Still the book remains a puzzle both in form and substance. It was a curious work to offer to Alfred if it contained the scandals about Æthelbald and Judith, and what we must regard as the idealised description of Alfred’s court and administration. I am conscious that I am very far from having solved the problem. I shall be content if I am thought to have contributed something towards a solution, which will perhaps be given before long by Mr. Stevenson. The suggestion of Mr. Macfadyen that the work was drawn up with a view to Alfred’s canonisation[229] may be dismissed at once. People are not canonised in their lifetime.
Lives of saints.
§ 42. In one class of historical literature, which often very usefully supplements more formal histories, the reign of Alfred is singularly barren, I mean the lives of saints. We have nothing like the lives of Dunstan, Oswald, and Æthelwold, which give us so much help towards the end of the next century; or like the lives of Wilfrid and Cuthbert at an earlier period. The times, indeed, were not favourable to the development of saintship of the mediaeval pattern. The monasteries, the chief schools of that type of sanctity, suffered more than any other institutions at the hands of the Danes; and the virtues which the age required were of a more active kind than those which went to make up the mediaeval ideal. The title of saint is indeed given by one authority to Werferth, bishop of Worcester; but this rests, as we shall see, on a misconception; though in truth, as Mr. Taylor has remarked, the conduct of Werferth in accepting the see of Worcester in 872, the very year preceding the expulsion of Burgred, king of Mercia, Alfred’s brother-in-law, by the Danes, was as heroic as that of any Christian missionary[230].
Lives of St. Neot; their mythical character.
§ 43. The only hagiological literature relating to Alfred’s reign consists of the lives of St. Neot. And these are late, and not merely unhistorical, but anti-historical. To them are due some of the prevalent misconceptions as to Alfred’s reign. For this very reason something must be said about them.
Five Lives. The Bodleian Life. The Bollandist Life. The Metrical Life. The Anglo-Saxon Life.
The existing Lives of St. Neot are, as far as I know, five in number, four in Latin, of which three are in prose and one in verse, and one Anglo-Saxon Life. Besides these there is, as we have seen, a fragment of another Latin Life, embodied in the Annals of St. Neot, and thence transferred by Archbishop Parker to the text of Asser[231]. Roger of Wendover’s account of St. Neot[232] seems also to be based on some Life different from any of those mentioned above. Of the Latin Lives that have come down to us the earliest is that contained in MS. Bodley 379, and printed at the end of Whitaker’s Life of St. Neot[233]. It may sufficiently characterise this writer’s style to say that he describes Wessex as the country of ‘the Anglican Saxons who dwell beneath the Zephyr wind[234].’ The next Latin Life is that printed by the Bollandists[235] from a MS. formerly belonging to Bec. It bears within itself clear evidence of being later than the Norman Conquest[236]. This is a very pedantic writer. He talks much of form and matter, genus and species[237], ‘the dry notions of Logicians,’ as one translator of Thomas à Kempis[238] depreciatingly calls them; and is fond of using Greek words like ‘anatole,’ ‘mesembria,’ ‘dysis[239].’ The Metrical Life, printed by Whitaker[240] from a MS. belonging to Magdalen College, Oxford, is clearly based on this, of which also John of Tynemouth’s Life[241] is a mere abridgement. The Anglo-Saxon Life (or rather Homily) is preserved in a Cottonian MS. (Vesp. D. xiv), whence it was printed by the Rev. G. C. Gorham in his History and Antiquities of Eynesbury and St. Neot’s (1824)[242], and more recently by Cockayne[243] and Wülker[244]. As to its date widely different views have been held, based on divergent interpretations of a passage near the end, where the writer contrasts the evils of his own times with the prosperity of Alfred’s later years. Sir T. Duffus Hardy thought that this description pointed to the year 986 as the date of composition[245], while Professor Earle would place it in the eleventh or twelfth century[246]. But the mistake of the writer in making Neot contemporary with Ælfheah of Canterbury is absolutely conclusive against the earlier date[247]. Wülker is inclined to attribute it to Ælfric[248]; but this also is unlikely. It is clearly based on earlier Lives, for the expressions occur: ‘as books say,’ ‘it is told in writings,’ &c.[249] But I do not think it is directly derived from any of the preceding Lives, and, though not ancient, it may be earlier than any of them. It certainly contains one miracle which is not found in any of the others, a very quaint story (probably a folk-tale) of a fox which stole the Saint’s shoe while he was bathing[250].
Analysis of the Lives.
§ 44. These lives cover much the same ground. St. Neot is made the son of Æthelwulf and his wife, granted to their prayers as a reward for their piety[251]. Æthelwulf is represented not incorrectly as king of one of the four English kingdoms, viz. of Wessex with Kent[252], the other three of course being Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria. Of the relations of these kingdoms a very ideal sketch is given. As the Metrical Life says, in verses which are as open to criticism on prosodical as they are on historical grounds:—
‘Suffecit cuique sua pars, nec plura petebat,