CHAPTER IX.

ATHELNEY.

Behold a King shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment. And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

AT first sight it seems hard to account for the sudden and complete collapse of the West Saxon power in January 878. In the campaign of the last year Alfred had been successful on the whole, both by sea and land. He had cleared the soil of Wessex from the enemy, and had reduced the pagan leaders to sue humbly for terms, and to give whatever hostages he demanded. Yet three months later the simple crossing the Avon and taking of Chippenham is enough,

can believe the chroniclers, to paralyse the whole kingdom, and to leave Alfred a fugitive, hiding in Selwood Forest, with a mere handful of followers and his own family. But there is no doubt or discrepancy in the accounts. The Saxon Chronicle says, in its short clear style, that the army stole away to Chippenham during mid-winter, after Twelfth-night, and sat down there; "and many of the people they drove beyond the sea, and of the rest the greater part

they subdued and forced to obey them, except King Alfred; and he with a small band with difficulty retreated to the woods and the fastnesses of the moors." Asser and the rest merely expand this statement in one form or another, leaving the main facts-the complete success of the blow, and the inability of Alfred at the moment to ward it off, or return it, or recover from it-altogether unquestioned.

Some writers have thought to account for it by transposing a passage from Brompton, narrating obscurely a battle at Chippenham, and another at a place called Abendune, in both of which Alfred is defeated. This occurs in Brompton in the year 871, and, being clearly out of place there, has been seized on to help out the difficulty in the year 878.

But there does not appear to be the least ground for taking this liberty with Brompton's text, nor even, if there were, is he a sufficiently sound authority to rely upon for any fact which is not to be found in the Saxon Chronicle, or Asser. Nor indeed is there need of any such explanation when the facts come to be carefully examined.

In the first place, this winter inroad on Chippenham was made at a time of year when even the vikings and their followers were usually at rest. Guthrum and his host fell upon the Wiltshire and Somersetshire men when they were quite unprepared, and before they had had time to hide away their wives and children or any provision of corn or beasts. Then the country was already exhausted. The Pagans, it is true, had not yet visited this part of Wessex, but the

drain of men must have been felt here, in the last eight years, as well as further east and south. We remark, too, that these West Saxons are the nearest neighbours of the Mercians, amongst whom a considerable body of the Danes had been now settled for some years. Paganism was rife again at Gloster, and no great harm seemed to come of it. These pagan settlers, though insolent and overbearing, still lived side by side with the Saxon inhabitants; did not attempt to drive them out or exterminate them; left them some portion of their worldly goods. On the other hand, what hope is there in fighting against a foe who has nothing to lose but his life, whose numbers are inexhaustible. Might it not be better to make any terms with them, such, for instance, as our Mercian brethren have made? This young king of ours cannot protect us, has spent all his treasure in former wars, has little indeed left but his name. Who is Alfred? and what is the race of Cerdic? Know ye not that we are consumed?

Here, for the first time, in 878, we find traces of this kind of demoralization and of disloyalty to their king and land on the part of a portion of his people; and the strong and patient soul of Alfred must have been wrung by an anguish such as he had not yet known, as he heard from his hiding-place of this apostasy. Here then our great king touches the lowest point in his history. So far as outward circumstances go, humiliation can indeed hardly go further than this. Are we to believe the story that he had earned and prepared that humiliation for himself in

those first few years of his reign between the autumn of 872, when the camp at Reading broke up, and the early spring of 876, when the pagan fleet appeared off Wareham? The form in which this story comes down to us is in itself suspicious. It rests mainly on the authority of the "Life of St. Neot," a work of the next century, the author of which is not known; but only thus much about him, that he was a monk bent on exalting the character and history of his saint, without much care at whose expense this was to be done. The passage in Asser, apparently confirming the statement, is regarded by all the best scholars as spurious, and indeed commences with a reference to the "Life of St. Neot," so that it could not possibly be of the same date as the rest of Asser's book, which was written during the King's lifetime. "The Almighty," so the anonymous author writes, "not only granted to this glorious king victories over his enemies, but also allowed him to be harassed by them, and weighed down by misfortunes and by the low estate of his followers, to the end that he might learn that there is one Lord of all things to whom every knee must bow, and in whose hand are the hearts of kings; who puts down the mighty from their seat, and exalts them of low degree; who suffers His servants, when they are at the height of good fortune, to be touched by the rod of adversity, that in their humility they may not despair of God's mercy, and in their prosperity may not boast of their honours, but may also know to whom they owe all they have. One may therefore believe that these misfortunes were

brought on the King because in the beginning of his reign, when he was a youth and swayed by a youth's impulses, he would not listen to the petitions which his subjects made to him for help in their necessities, or for relief from their oppressors, but used to drive them from him and pay no heed to their requests. This conduct gave much pain to the holy man St. Neot, who was his relation, and often foretold to him in the spirit of prophecy that he would suffer great adversity on this account. But Alfred neither attended to the proof of the man of God, nor listened to his soothsaying. Wherefore, seeing that a man's sins must be punished, either in this world or the next, the true and righteous Judge willed that his sin should not go unpunished in this world, to the end that He might spare him in the world to come. For this cause, therefore, King Alfred often fell into such great misery that sometimes none of his subjects knew where he was or what had become of him."

So writes the monkish historian, upon whose statement one remarks, that in the only place where it can be tested it is not accurate. The one occasion on which Alfred fell into such misery that his subjects did not know where he was, was in this January of 878. We know that for many years before his accession he was anxiously bent on acquiring knowledge, and in disciplining himself for his work in life, whatever it might be. Patience, humility, and utter forgetfulness of self, the true royal qualities, shine out through every word and act of his life wherever we can get at them. Indeed, I think no one can be