Want of teachers supplied by Mercia, Wales, and the Frankish empire. John the Old Saxon. Grimbald. Letter of Archbishop Fulk to Alfred. Question of its genuineness.
§ 88. But the great difficulty was to find teachers. Of England, the part which had suffered least from the ravages of the Danes was Western Mercia; moreover Offa had had a real desire to promote learning in his kingdom, as Alcuin’s letters show[619]; and from Mercia came Plegmund[620], whom Alfred ultimately made archbishop of Canterbury in succession to Æthelred, Werferth, the faithful bishop of Worcester, and two priests, Æthelstan and Werwulf, whom Alfred made his chaplains. The fact that Asser applies to these two last the term ‘sacerdotes,’ which, as I have elsewhere shown, is ambiguous in mediaeval Latin, sometimes meaning bishops, sometimes priests[621], has led Roger of Wendover not only to convert these priests into bishops, but to give them sees at Hereford and Leicester[622]; another illustration of the way in which myths arise. From Wales Alfred got Asser, as we have seen. But Britain alone could not supply Alfred’s needs; and the Frankish empire was now to repay to England some small portion of the debt which it owed for Boniface and Alcuin, in the persons of Grimbald and John the Old Saxon. Of the latter not much is known[623]. He was a monk of Corvey, and was made by Alfred abbot of his new monastery of Athelney. The story of his attempted murder there has been already alluded to[624]. The date of his coming to England is not known. The chronology of Grimbald’s life is also very obscure. Mabillon indeed was led to postulate two Grimbalds, who both came to England under Alfred. But his perplexity was largely caused by his acceptance of the Oxford interpolation in Asser as genuine; and his solution is quite incredible. Grimbald was a monk of St. Bertin’s in Flanders. He held various offices in that monastery, and in 892, on the death of Abbot Rudolf, the monks wished him to become their abbot; but with a view of protecting the monastery against the attacks of Count Baldwin of Flanders, Fulk, archbishop of Rheims, who had been abbot before Rudolf, was allowed to resume the abbacy, and hold it with his archbishopric[625]. If all this is true, Grimbald cannot have come to England much before 893, and as he is mentioned in the Preface to the Pastoral Care as one of Alfred’s helpers in that work (along with Plegmund, Asser, and John), it is obvious that this date for Grimbald’s arrival in England, if it be regarded as established, will have a very important bearing on the chronology of Alfred’s writings[626]. There is a letter extant[627] which purports to be Fulk of Rheims’ answer to Alfred’s application for Grimbald. Certainly, if Fulk was holding the abbacy of St. Bertin’s at this time, he would be the natural person to give permission to a monk of that house to leave his cloister[628], and Dr. Stubbs thought that the MSS. in which the letter is found were sufficiently ancient to exclude the suspicion of forgery. Its authenticity has however been doubted[629], and I confess it presents one very great difficulty to my mind. The letter throughout is written on the assumption that Grimbald is to be a bishop in England; he is to be placed over the care of pastoral rule, he is already a priest, and is worthy of pontifical honour; if Alfred will send Grimbald’s electors and certain leading men in Church and State, Fulk will then ordain him (i.e. as bishop, for he was already priest), and they can escort him to his proper see[630]. Alfred is represented as having stated in his application that, owing to the ravages of the Danes, the lapse of time, the carelessness of prelates, and the ignorance of the people, ecclesiastical order had much decayed in England[631], which is true enough, whoever wrote it. But there is no other evidence anywhere of any intention of making Grimbald a bishop. Dean Hook’s idea[632] that Alfred intended to make him archbishop of Canterbury, but finding the appointment of a foreigner unpopular, substituted Plegmund, has not a scrap of evidence to support it; while if Grimbald did not come to England till 893 the primacy had long been filled up. Ultimately Grimbald was made abbot of the New Minster at Winchester, where he died in 903, and became one of the tutelary saints of that foundation, winning a place in the English Calendar[633]. The tradition that Asser was one of the embassy sent to escort Grimbald to England has been already alluded to[634].
Alfred’s translations; their object.
§ 89. But it was not only by educational institutions whether in Court or monastery that Alfred endeavoured to raise the culture of his people. The art of translation, which he had practised at first for his own instruction and edification, he came afterwards to use in order to place within reach of his people[635] the most useful works in different branches of knowledge. The object which Alfred had in view is clearly laid down in the oft-quoted Preface to the Pastoral Care. After tracing the practical extinction of the knowledge of Latin south of the Thames[636], which made all the knowledge contained in that language inaccessible to a degree which would have seemed inconceivable to previous generations, he continues: ‘therefore it seems to me best, if you agree[637], that we should translate some books, those namely which are most necessary for all men to know, into the language which we all understand.’
Story how Alfred began to translate. The Handbook.
§ 90. The story how Alfred first began to combine translation with reading[638] is told in a well-known passage of Asser[639]. He relates how one day, while the king and himself were reading and talking together, Alfred was much struck by a passage in the work which Asser was reading to him, and begged him to write it down for him in the little book of psalms and prayers which he always carried about with him. Asser suggested that it would be better to start a separate book for such extracts, and went and fetched a quire of parchment, and in course of time the book of translated extracts grew, until it reached nearly the size of a Psalter. Alfred called it his Encheiridion, Manual, or Handbook[640], because he always kept it close at hand. This according to Asser took place in the year 887.
A great deal of unnecessary mystery has been made about this Handbook. Asser’s account shows that it was simply what we should call a commonplace book. In the course of years Alfred may have made more than one such commonplace book. The one started at Asser’s suggestion contained, according to him, ‘flosculi diuinae scripturae’; that is, probably, extracts from the Bible and the Fathers. But other parts of the volume, or, it may be, a later volume of the same kind, contained historical jottings; for William of Malmesbury quotes Alfred’s Handbook as an authority for the life of Aldhelm, citing Alfred’s high appreciation of Aldhelm’s Saxon poems, and adding the beautiful tradition how by his skill as a minstrel he would gather the people round him, and gradually turn his song to sacred themes[641]. Florence of Worcester[642] also cites a work which he calls ‘Dicta regis Ælfredi’ as an authority on the West Saxon genealogy. Even if we reject the evidence of Malmesbury and Florence as being so much later than Alfred’s time, it seems to me quite impossible to identify a theological commonplace book, such as Asser describes, with the translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies, as Wülker was once inclined to do[643], partly on the ground that Asser applies the term ‘flosculi’ to the Handbook, while the translation of the Soliloquies bears the title ‘Blostman’ or Blooms. But the latter work, however free in the way in which it deals with its original, is very much more than a book of extracts. Besides, according to Asser, the Encheiridion was the very first of Alfred’s works, whereas all critics are agreed that the Soliloquies are among the last, probably the very last of his works.
The translation of Gregory’s Dialogues, attributed by Asser to Werferth.
§ 91. Besides the Encheiridion, the only one of the literary works which owed their origin to Alfred mentioned by Asser is the translation of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great[644]. The existence of the Chronicle, at any rate up to 887, is implied in Asser’s use of it, but it is nowhere mentioned. The easiest explanation of Asser’s silence as to Alfred’s other works is that they did not then exist. The date at which Asser professes to be writing is, as we have seen, 894; and this in turn confirms the view derived from the chronology of Grimbald’s life, as to the comparatively late date at which Alfred commenced his independent literary career.
According to Asser, the translation of the Dialogues was not made by Alfred himself, but by Bishop Werferth at his command[645]; and in the little preface which Alfred prefixes to the work he makes no claim of authorship, but merely says: ‘I besought my trusty friends that out of God’s[646] books of the lives and miracles of the saints they would write for me the instruction which follows, so that, strengthened in my mind through memory and love, I may, amid the troubles of this world, sometimes think on the things of heaven.’ Whether the expression ‘trusty friends’ is merely an impersonal plural for Werferth, or whether others really co-operated, I cannot say; but we may take it that Werferth was mainly responsible, and that in this case the share of Alfred was confined to furnishing a preface; just as authors nowadays are glad to get some man of light and leading to commend their works to the public.