The Danish Conquest and King Alfred

The Danish Conquest and King Alfred

In the middle of the eighth century, new invaders loomed off the coasts of Britain. Known to the English as the Danes, the Northmen, kinsmen of the Angles and Jutes, extended their inroads to most parts of Europe; they came up the rivers from the North Sea, carried out raid after raid, and finally settled in the land; but whereas the English had exterminated the Britons whom they had vanquished, the Danish conquerors were absorbed in the mass of the English nation; the fact that they were closely related to the English in Language and in blood no doubt accounts for their prompt assimilation. English letters received a splendid impulse at the end of the ninth century from the encouragement - and through the personal activity - of King Alfred, born in 871 and died in 901. This sovereign, who had when very young been at the court of Rome and had spent some time at the court of Charles the Bald where he had seen with his own eyes much of the admirable work achieved by the Emperor Charlemagne, resolved to devote himself entirely to the welfare of his subjects and to do for England what Charles the Great had done for France. His aim was practical. "When I began to reign, says king Alfred, I cannot remember one south of the Thames who could explain his service-book in English.

Formerly men came hither from foreign land to seek for instruction, and now when we desire it we can only obtain it from abroad". Accordingly, he gathered round him whatever scholars he could find in England, founded an abbey at Winchester and called a scholar from Saint-Omer, Grimbald, to preside over it. He himself undertook to collect in a Law-Book all the laws existing in England at his time, and afterwards set himself to the ask of translating a vast number of Latin works, among others Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England. The intellectual revival initiated by Alfred did not survive him. Alfred's death was followed by a long period of literary barrenness. During the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh centuries poems were no doubt composed (in many cases taking the themes of the ancient sagas handed orally from generation to generation), and wandering minstrels would sing these war-songs, ballads or complaints to the accompaniment of the harp in the halls of castles or at village-fairs. But with the exception of these poems, as monotonous in subject as in style, no literary work of any importance was produced in those years.