"You are a writer and I am a fighter, but here is a fellow
Who could both write and fight, and in both was equally skilful!"
—Longfellow.
This terse, but sincere and enthusiastic eulogium, on the memory of Julius Cæsar by that stout Puritan, Captain Miles Standish, comes instinctively to the mind, as one contemplates the life of good King Alfred. It is not given to many to be alike famous as sovereign, warrior, lawgiver, and author; but such was Alfred, the first of England's great monarchs. If it is the "cunning," the knowing, or able man, as Carlyle tells us, who is the "king" by Divine right; here was the Saxon king par excellence. His lineage was of the most ancient and illustrious; his father Ethelwulf traced his descent from the most renowned of the Saxon heroes, and his mother Osburga was descended from famous Gothic progenitors. Born at the royal manor of Vanathing (Wantage) in the year 849, the youngest of Ethelwulf's four legitimate sons, he was his father's darling, the fairest and most promising of all his boys. This is doubtless the explanation of the fact that, whilst yet a mere child, he accompanied his sire on a pilgrim journey to Rome. How far this pilgrimage and the impressions which he received from his sojourn in what was still the greatest and most civilized city in Europe, may have influenced his after-life and character it is impossible to say; but the earliest story related of Alfred treats of his aptitude for learning and his love for poetry and books. He learned to read before his elder brothers, and even before he could read he had learned by heart many Anglo-Saxon poems, by hearing the minstrels and gleemen recite them in his father's hall. And his passionate love for letters never forsook him.
KING ALFRED THE GREAT.
Much, however, as he might have preferred it, there was another life than that of the mere student and scholar laid up in store for this noble Saxon. One after another his three elder brothers, Ethelbald, Ethelbert, and Ethelred, occupied the throne, and it was on the death of the last named, in 871, in the twenty-second year of his age, that reluctantly Alfred had to shut up his books, and take up the sceptre and the sword. He now comes before us as
(1). The warrior king.
Never did English monarch ascend the throne in darker days. Recently, it is true, the Saxons had come off victors against the Norsemen in one bloody field—the battle of Ashdune, near Reading,—but this dearly bought victory had in turn been succeeded by a series of discomfitures and defeats, the pagan armies having received fresh and continued re-inforcements. It was in one of these sanguinary conflicts that Ethelred received the wound which, though not immediately fatal, was yet the cause of his death. It was a period of prolonged devastation, misery, and rapine. Nine pitched battles were fought in the course of one short year, and the minor skirmishes were innumerable; the internecine conflict being conducted with the most savage ferocity. Prisoners were never spared, unless it was to extort a heavy ransom; and the countryside was everywhere given up to fire and sword. It is not surprising that Alfred, although already distinguished for his military valour, had not sought the crown. Kingship in those times was no sinecure.
Dark, however, as were the clouds when Alfred came to the throne, still gloomier days were in store. The Norsemen, already masters of all Northumbria, had also practically reduced the kingdom of Mercia; and they were now especially directing their attention to Wessex, the country of the West Saxons. With varying success Alfred confronted the enemy during the opening years of his reign; but he soon discovered that, though he might make treaties with his perfidious foes, they never dreamed of permanently abiding by them; and if he succeeded in withstanding them one year, like fresh clouds of locusts, new re-inforcements appeared on the scene, every spring and summer, from Scandinavia. In the depth of winter (A.D. 878), when it was not anticipated that they would pursue their military operations, the Danes made a sudden irruption into Wiltshire and the adjoining shires, and so utterly discomforted the Saxons, that Alfred, almost wholly deprived of his authority, was driven with a small but trusty band of followers, and his old mother Osburga, into Athelney, a secluded spot at the confluence of the Thone and the Parrett, surrounded by moors and marshes, which served at once for his concealment and his defence. Great were the hardships which Alfred here endured; his life was that of an outlaw. For daily sustenance he largely depended upon chance and accident, hunting the wild-deer, and even seizing by force the stores of the enemy. It is of this period of terrible privation that the oft-told tale of the good-wife's cakes is related. Yet all his misfortunes neither damped his courage, nor subdued his energy.
