There is some difficulty as to the language of Asser (M. H. B. 497), when he praises Ælfred's zeal for the administration of justice and his censures on corrupt or incompetent judges. As Kemble (Saxons in England, ii. 42) shows, it is not very easy to see who the ‘comites’ and ‘præpositi’ are; Kemble suggests that the reference may be to the king's own þening-manna-gemót, his own court for his own immediate following, and that Ælfred may have begun the system of royal missi, controlling to some extent the popular courts, which was in full force in the eleventh century, and out of which sprang our present judicial system. It is hardly needful to say that the story of his hanging the corrupt judges is purely mythical.
The personal character of Ælfred, as set forth by his biographer Asser, certainly comes as near to perfection as that of any recorded man. He gives us not only a picture of a man thoroughly devoted to his work, faithfully discharging the acknowledged duties of his office, but the further picture of one who, as a king, the father of his people, sought for every opportunity of doing good to his people in every way. Many of the details have become household words. His careful economy of time, by which he found means to carry on his studies without interfering with the cares of government, his deep devotion, his constant thought for his people, the various expedients and inventions of a simple age, all stand out in his life as recorded by the admiring stranger. And we must not forget his physical difficulties. The tale of the sickness which beset him on the day of his marriage and at other times of his life seems to have received legendary additions; but the general outline of the story seems to be trustworthy. His bounty was large and systematic. He laboured hard to restore the monastic life which had pretty well died out in his kingdom, by the foundation of his two monasteries, one for women at Shaftesbury, the other for men on the spot which had seen his first resistance to the Danes on Athelney. And besides gifts to the poor and religious foundations at home, he sent alms to Rome and even to India (Chron. sub an. 883). In his many-sided activity, he looked carefully after his builders and gold-workers, his huntsmen and falconers, in a state of things when hunting was no mere sport but a serious business.
But it is after all the strictly intellectual side of Ælfred's character which is most specially his own. Any other king would have thought it enough to defend his people with courage, to rule them with justice, to legislate for them with wisdom. Ælfred did all this and more also. He made it his further business to be the spiritual and intellectual teacher of his people. For in all his writings Ælfred is emphatically the teacher. He writes from a sheer sense of duty, to profit his own folk. He undertakes the humble office of a translator, and turns into his native tongue such writings, religious, historical, and scientific, as he thinks will tend to the instruction of his people. As a teacher, he does not bind himself to a servile reproduction of his author; as men do still in writings designed solely for edification, he altered and added to his original, whenever he thought that by so doing he could better profit his readers. He is eminently a national writer; we read that, like Charles the Great, he loved the old Teutonic songs and traditions and taught them to his children, and their effect on himself is often seen in his writings. He grasped the fact, which perhaps it was easier to grasp in his day than it was somewhat later, that men can be really stirred and taught only through their own tongue. It is undoubtedly to what he preserved, to what he himself wrote, to what his example encouraged others to write, that we owe our possession of a richer early literature than any other people of Western Europe, and that the habit of writing in English never died out, even when the English tongue had for a while ceased to be a learned and courtly speech in its own land.
Ælfred himself, in the preface to the Pastoral of Gregory, sets forth and laments the sad lack of learning which he found in his own kingdom at the time of his accession. It was one of the dead times of English intellect; the literary eminence of Northumberland had passed away; the continuous literary eminence of Wessex was to begin with himself. His foundation of schools at Oxford—a tale as old as the so-called Brompton—is purely fabulous; but he did all that he could for the advancement of learning by planting the best scholars in the monasteries which were the schools of the time, and by giving some of them high ecclesiastical preferment. To this end he invited men both from other parts of Britain and from lands beyond sea. He brought Archbishop Plegmund and Bishop Werfrith from Mercia; he brought Grimbold and John the Old-Saxon from other Teutonic lands; from the land of the Briton came Asser, while John the Scot, John Scotus Erigena, might be said to come from both Celtic and Teutonic lands at once. But it was not only men of book-learning that he brought from other lands. Strangers from all parts flocked to become his men,
