ed in positions of danger, new abbeys
founded, the machinery of justice and government restored, the laws
codified and amended. Still more strenuous were Alfred's efforts for its
moral and intellectual restoration. Even in Mercia and Northumbria the
pirate's sword had left few survivors of the schools of Egbert or Bede,
and matters were even worse in Wessex, which had been as yet the most
ignorant of the English kingdoms.

"When I began to reign," said Alfred, "I cannot remember one priest
south of the Thames who could render his service-book into English." For
instructors indeed he could find only a few Mercian prelates and
priests, with one Welsh bishop, Asser.

"Formerly," the King writes bitterly, "men came hither from foreign
lands to seek for instruction, and now when we desire it we can only
obtain it from abroad." But his mind was far from being prisoned within
his own island. He sent a Norwegian shipmaster to explore the White Sea,
and Wulfstan to trace the coast of Esthonia; envoys bore his presents to
the churches of India and Jerusalem, and an annual mission carried
Peter's pence to Rome.

But it was with the Franks that his intercourse was closest, and it was
from them that he drew the scholars to aid him in his work of education.
A scholar named Grimbald came from St. Omer to preside over his new
abbey at Winchester; and John, the old Saxon, was fetched from the abbey
of Corbey to rule a monastery and school that Alfred's gratitude for his
deliverance from the Danes raised in the marshes of Athelney. The real
work, however, to be done was done, not by these teachers, but by the
King himself. Alfred established a school for the young nobles in his
court, and it was to the need of books for these scholars in their own
tongue that we owe his most remarkable literary effort.

He took his books as he found them--they were the popular manuals of his
age--the _Consolation of Boethius_, the _Pastoral_ of Pope Gregory, the
compilation of Orosius, then the one accessible handbook of universal
history, and the history of his own people by Bede. He translated these
works into English, but he was far more than a translator, he was an
editor for the people. Here he omitted, there he expanded. He enriched
Orosius by a sketch of the new geographical discoveries in the north. He
gave a West Saxon form to his selections from Bede. In one place he
stops to explain his theory of government, his wish for a thicker
populati