80 Sir Frederick Pollock [March 3, 



as a scholar like Henry II., who could not only read hut criticise 

 Latin charters. On the other hand, the copious English additions, 

 often characteristic, were beyond question made by Alfred's personal 

 direction, and they may well be in his very words.* 



These details make no difference whatever to the greatness of the 

 man. It matters comparatively little whether Alfred knew more or 

 less Latin, or recovered more or fewer square miles of territory in 

 his lifetime. What does matter is that he rescued the very existence 

 of English civilisation from imminent danger, that he left after his 

 day an England in which learning could take firm root, and an 

 English nation so knit together that when, only a few generations 

 later, Danish kings did come to reign here, they had to reign and 

 govern not as Danes but as Englishmen. It is hardly needful to 

 add that a mere cloistered scholar could not have done Alfred's 

 work. His campaigns are evidence enough that he could be a 

 man of his hands ; but we are expressly told that he was a great 

 hunter. 



On the way back from Borne, in the summer of 856, Alfred and 

 his father spent some time at Worms at the court of the Frankish 

 King Charles the Bald. Ever since Charles the Great's time there 

 had been friendly relations between the Frankish court, the most 

 polished | in Western Europe, so that this was quite a natural stage 

 in Alfred's education. Here he saw the leading statesmen and 

 scholars of the day, such as Grimbald of Old Saxony and John the 

 Scot, the most brilliant of the early schoolmen and first in the line 

 of illustrious Irish divines and philosophers. Grimbald certainly, 

 John the Scot probably,^ came to Alfred in England later. iEthel- 

 wulf took this occasion to marry as his second wife § Charles' 

 daughter Judith, a girl only twelve years old. Historians have 

 spoken harshly of her, forgetting, I think, that at this time and for 

 several years afterwards she can have had no free choice of her own. 

 Charles the Bald was an arbitrary father even according to mediaeval 

 notions of parental power. || When Judith did ultimately get a 

 husband of her own choice, Baldwin of Flanders, she seems to have 

 had no more adventures. Her son married a daughter of Alfred's, 

 and was an ancestor of William the Conqueror's wife, and thus 



* The translation of Bede's ' Ecclesiastical History ' is now ascertained to be 

 Anglian, not West-Saxon, in its language. This appears to exclude, as to that 

 work, Alfred's personal authorship. 



t Such terms are, of course, relative as applied to the Dark Ages. 



% See Mr. Poole's article " Scotus " in ' Diet. Nat. Biog.' 



§ vEthelwulf was not, as sometimes represented, an old man ; he was probably 

 between forty and fifty. Some historians suppose that Alfred's mother Osburh 

 must have been alive, and therefore that JEthelwulf repudiated her : see Free- 

 man's article "iElfred" in 'Diet. Nat. Biog.' As a conjectural remedy for 

 chronological confusion, this seems much too desperate. The thing is not im- 

 possible, but it seems incredible, if it were bo, that neither Asser nor any other 

 chronicler should mention it. 



|l Keary, ' Vikings.' p. 368. 



