Assistance given to Alfred by his literary advisers.
The degree in which Alfred made use of the help of his learned advisers would vary no doubt with the difficulty of the work in hand, and the degree of the king’s own progress. In the case of the Pastoral Care, Alfred himself has told us who his helpers were[647]; in other cases, as we shall see, interesting traditions have been preserved. But I imagine that in all cases a good deal of the drudgery would be done by others, Alfred supplying the final literary form. Similar instances of co-operation have not been unknown in Oxford in the nineteenth century.
Evidence of the Dialogues as to Alfred’s religious thought.
§ 92. If any evidence were needed to show that Alfred, with all his true and earnest piety, was yet in his religious thought the child of his century, it would be found in the fact that he should have chosen the Dialogues of Gregory as the first of all books to be translated. The work was enormously popular in the Middle Ages[648]; but to our thought it is the least edifying of all Gregory’s writings. In it the principle of St. James, that ‘the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much,’ is materialised, until the prayers of the saints become a mere sort of lucky bag or wishing cap for the obtaining of anything that is wanted, from the raising of the dead, or the punishment of an enemy, to the supply of the most ordinary articles of domestic economy, such as oil, and wine, or the mending of a broken sieve; while the fact that Gregory professes in many cases to have these stories from the mouth of eyewitnesses[649], illustrates the truth of what Dr. Gore has said[650], that ‘there are … ages when belief is so utterly uncritical, that it does seem as if they could not under any circumstances afford us satisfactory evidence of miraculous occurrences.’
Relics.
In this connexion may be mentioned the stress which Asser lays on Alfred’s veneration for the relics of the saints[651]. In this too, if it is authentic, Alfred was the child of his age. The natural feeling of Christian reverence for the body which had once been a temple of the Holy Ghost, degenerated into an unhealthy passion for collecting dead men’s bones, which reached its height in the ninth century[652]. And this passion led to a hungry relic-mongering, a system of pious thefts, and a wholesale manufacture of spurious relics, of which Rome was the head-quarters, which are among the least pleasant features of the mediaeval Church. We may be sure that there was nothing unworthy either in Alfred’s reverence for the relics, or in his belief in the wonder-working powers of the saints. And for the rest, I think one realises more and more how a really religious spirit assimilates the good and is immune from the evil of the particular system in which it is placed by Providence. There is no one, for instance, who knows anything of the lives of the devout peasantry, say, of Scotland, or of Roman Catholic countries on the Continent, but must feel that the somewhat hard creed of the one, and the somewhat superstitious creed of the other are absolutely as nothing compared with the effectual power of religion which is the same in both.
Double recension of the translation of the Dialogues.
To return, however, from this digression to Werferth’s translation of the Dialogues. One very interesting fact about this translation is that, for the greater part of the first two books[653], it exists in two recensions, of which the later is not an independent translation, but stands to the older text in the relation of a revised version[654]. It is, as a rule, much nearer to the original; it retrenches the redundancies[655], and corrects the mistakes[656] of the earlier version. Sometimes we can see that the reviser had a different reading in the Latin text from that adopted in the unrevised translation[657]. Moreover the vocabulary is considerably modified, certain words being systematically substituted by the reviser for others of like meaning[658]. This last feature makes it likely that the reviser was a different person from the original translator. Who he was we shall probably never know. It is unlikely to have been Alfred himself. For the rest, both versions keep pretty close to the original without substantial additions or omissions.
The Anglo-Saxon martyrology. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
§ 93. In the class of works which owe their inspiration to Alfred, though not actually written by him, we may possibly place the Anglo-Saxon martyrology alluded to above[659]. We may certainly place in this class the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle[660] in its original form, and may inscribe upon it the legend which encircles Alfred’s Jewel, ‘Alfred bade make me.’ I have shown elsewhere that all the MSS. of the Chronicle up to 892 are traceable to a common original. From that point they diverge. The explanation is that at that point copies were made[661] and sent to different religious houses, where they were continued to a large extent independently of one another. This view of Alfred’s relation to the Chronicle is strongly confirmed by the genealogical preface in MS.