Alfred made very strict laws and severely punished those who did wrong. Indeed, it is said that the people of England were so careful to obey the law in his reign that one might leave gold by the roadside, and no one would steal it.
Alfred also brought over learned men from Europe to show his people how to make things and to teach the boys and girls and the older people how to read and write. He is also said to have started a school that is now one of the greatest places of learning in the world, a university called Oxford that is now more than a thousand years old.
But Alfred not only built a navy and made wise laws and started schools and colleges which the English had not had before; he did many other useful things, besides.
He invented, for instance, a way of telling time by a burning candle. You have heard how wonderful the clock, that which Haroun-al-Rashid sent to Charlemagne one hundred years before was thought to be. Although striking clocks are, of course, very common nowadays, it was an extraordinary thing then when there were no clocks nor watches at all in England. Alfred found out how fast candles burned down and marked lines around them at different heights—just the distance apart that they burned in one hour. These were called time-candles.
Candles were also used for lighting, but when they were carried outdoors they were very likely to be blown out by the wind. So Alfred put the candle inside of a little box, and in order that the light might shine through the box, he made sides of very thin pieces of cow’s-horn, for glass then was very scarce. This box with horn sides was called a horn lamp or “lamphorn,” and after a while this word when said rapidly became “lanthorn,” and finally “lantern,” which we still call such a thing to-day, although horn is, of course, no longer used, but glass. This is one explanation of the word as the old spelling was “lanthorn,” but it seems more likely that lantern came from the Latin word “lanterna.”
Such inventions may seem very small and unimportant, and they are when you think of the marvelous inventions and wonderful machines that are made by the thousands nowadays. These inventions of Alfred were no more than the household ideas for which some magazines now offer only a dollar apiece. But I have told you about them just to show you how ignorant and almost barbarian the English, as well as other Teuton tribes of Europe, were in those days. How much superior were the Arab thinkers with their striking clocks. The English were just “getting a start.”
47
The End of the World
What would you do if you knew the world was coming to an end next week, or even next year?
The people who lived in the tenth century thought the Bible said[4] something that meant that the world was coming to an end in the Year 1000—which was called the millennium from the Latin word meaning a thousand years.