Alfred of Wessex at a cross-roads in the history of education

Abstract

This paper first situates King Alfred in Winchester, in Wessex, in Anglo-Saxon England, and in the Christendom of the ninth century. Attention is drawn to Alfred’s education, which included experience of court life in Wessex, Rome and Francia. The paper argues that Alfred prioritised vernacular literacy as a means of educating elites in a shared culture of service. This project required the attraction to his kingdom of scholars from abroad, the translating of foundational Christian texts into Old English, and the use of the court as a school. The king provided the context, and the resources, for supporting craftsmen engaged in the manufacture of, among other items, book-pointers, small high-value objects intimately associated with literacy and at the same time badges of service as well as of honour. The concluding section assesses Alfred’s sustained promotion of his educational project as connected to the rest of his political and ideological agenda.

Keywords:

• education
• history
• literacy

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Stephanie Spencer and Andrea Jacobs for their welcome to Winchester, and subsequent editorial help and patience.

Notes

1 Alfred Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary (London: Macmillan, 1902), frontispiece. As Mayor, Bowker organised the celebrations at Winchester.

2 Barbara Yorke, ‘Alfredism: The Use and Abuse of King Alfred’s Reputation’, in Alfred the Great, ed. Timothy Reuter (Aldershot: Ashgate 2003), 361–80; Barbara Yorke, Alfred the Great: Warfare, Wealth and Wisdom. A Book to Accompany the Exhibition at Winchester Discovery Centre (Winchester: Hampshire County Council, 2008); Ryan Lavelle, ‘The Politics of Rebellion: the Ætheling Æthelwold’, in Challenging the Boundaries of Medieval History. The Legacy of Timothy Reuter, ed. Patricia Skinner (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 51–80.

3 See Maps 1 and 2, in Richard Abels, ed., Alfred the Great (London: Longman 1998), 348–51.

4 For this and what follows by way of political context, see Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (London: Penguin, 1983); Alfred Smyth, King Alfred the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Simon Keynes, ‘On the Authenticity of Asser’s Life of King Alfred’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47 (1996): 529–51; Abels, Alfred; Janet L. Nelson, ‘Waiting for Alfred: Review Article’, Early Medieval Europe 7 (1998): 115–24, and Rulers and Ruling Families in Early Medieval Europe: Alfred, Charles the Bald and Others (Aldershot: Ashgate 1999). Among the most thought-provoking recent contributions to the literature on Alfred’s court and the politics of identity are Anton Scharer, Herrschaft und Repräsentation. Studien zur Hofkultur König Alfreds des Großen (Vienna: R. Oldenbourg, 2000); David Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), both with comprehensive references to earlier works, and, casting a critical eye on misconstruction, George Molyneux, ‘The Old English Bede: English Ideology or Christian Instruction?’, English Historical Review 124 (2009): 1289–1323.

5 See the family-tree in Abels, Alfred, 347.

6 Janet L. Nelson, ‘Was Charlemagne’s Court a Courtly Society?’, in Court Culture in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Catherine Cubitt (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). 39–57.

7 Nelson, Rulers and Ruling Families, 145–6.

8 Asser, Gesta Ælfredi regis, ed. W. Stevenson (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1904), c. 71, 53–4, trans. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 88, and comment at 254.

9 Simon Keynes, ‘Anglo-Saxon entries in the “Liber Vitae” of Brescia’, in Alfred the Wise. Studies in Honour of Janet Bately, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 99–119.

10 Nelson, Charles the Bald (London: Longman, 1992), 182.

11 Lawrence Du Garde Peach, King Alfred the Great (Loughborough: Wills & Hepworth, 1956), 10.

12 Asser, Gesta, c. 23, 20, trans. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred, 75.

13 Bowker, Millenary, facing 168.

14 Asser, Gesta, cc. 75, 76, 57–62, trans. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred, 90–2.

15 Asser, Gesta, c. 74, 54–7, trans. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred, 88–90; see Paul Kershaw, ‘Illness, Power and Prayer in Asser’s Life of King Alfred’, Early Medieval Europe 10 (2001): 201–24.

16 Du Garde Peach, King Alfred, 162–5.

17 See the earliest extant, ‘A’ version of the Chronicle, ed. Janet M. Bately, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. A Collaborative Edition, 3, MS A (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), 48; trans. George N. Garmonsway, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London: Dent 1953), 72.

18 See Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred, 124–6, with notes at 293–4.

19 Preface to the OE Version of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, trans. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred, 126.

20 Janet Bately, ed., The Old English Orosius, Early English Text Society 6 (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), with an excellent introduction, clarifying the author’s purposes, but, alas, with no translation.

21 For all these works, see now Pratt, Political Thought, as note 4, above.

22 The Alfred Jewel is reproduced by kind permission of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

23 Leslie Webster, ‘Aedificia nova: Treasures of Alfred’s Reign’, in Alfred the Great, ed. Reuter, 81–7; David Pratt, ‘Persuasion and Invention at the Court of King Alfred the Great’, in Court Culture, ed. Cubitt, 194–200, with the suggestion, p. 199, that the smaller æstels belong in ‘humbler contexts’.

24 Webster, ‘Aedificia nova’, 83. Asser, Gesta, c. 91, pp. 76–7, trans. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred, 101; cf. c. 76, 59, trans. 91, and c. 101, 87, trans. 106, with 249–50 and 257. What follows is partly summarised from Janet L. Nelson, ‘Bits and Pieces’, in Geschichtsvorstellungen. Festschrift für Hans-Werner Goetz, ed. Steffen Patzold et al. (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2012), 372–91.

25 Asser’s inspiration was from I Reg. 5: 13–14: see David Howlett, ‘Alfredian Arithmetic – Asserian Architectonics’, in Alfred the Great, ed. Reuter, 60–1.

26 Nelson, ‘West Francia and Wessex’, at 107–9, with photos following 112. Special thanks go to Barbara Yorke for sending me her Alfred the Great: Warfare, Wealth and Wisdom. A Book to Accompany the Exhibition of Winchester Discovery Centre, February–April 2008, esp. 15–20, and to David Hinton for a copy of The Alfred Jewel, and Other Late Anglo-Saxon Decorated Metalwork, Ashmolean Handbooks (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2008).

27 These are: Bowleaze Cove (Dorset), found 1990, and Cley Hill (Wiltshire), found 1997, among the four known before 2002; Bidford-on-Avon (Warwickshire) and Aughton (Yorkshire) among the more recent finds.

28 The Borg Jewel, reproduced, gratis, by very kind permission of TLofotr Viking Museum, Lofoten, Norway. I am most grateful for the Museum’s enthusiastic response to my request for permission to reproduce.

29 G. S. Munch, ‘Borg in Lofoten’, in Ohthere’s Voyages: A Late 9^th-century Account of Voyages along the Coasts of Norway and Denmark and its Cultural Context, ed. Janet Bately and Anton Englert (Roskilde: Viking Ship Museum, 2007), 200–5. In Bately’s newly edited text and translation, the walrus-teeth and walrus-hide ropes that would have particularly interested Alfred are mentioned at 45.

30 Pratt, Political Thought, 151–92.

31 See Yorke, Alfred the Great: Warfare, Wealth and Wisdom, 17, and Hinton, The Alfred Jewel, 33, 36–9, both opening up debates that will go on.

32 The best discussions are Pratt, ‘Persuasion and Invention’, 198–9, and Pratt, Political Thought, 189–92.