st
time, Woden has worshippers in Britain.

Harassed by the Danes, having had to flee and disappear and hide
himself, Alfred, after a long period of reverses, resumed the contest
with a better chance, and succeeded in setting limits to the
Scandinavian incursions. England was divided in two parts, the north
belonging to the Danes, and the south to Alfred, with Winchester for his
capital.[104]

In the tumult caused by these new wars, what the
Saxons had received of Roman culture had nearly all been swept away.
Books had been burnt, clerks had forgotten their Latin; the people were
relapsing by degrees into barbarism. Formerly, said Alfred, recalling to
mind the time of Bede and Alcuin, "foreigners came to this land in
search of wisdom and instruction, and we should now have to get them
from abroad if we wanted to have them." He does not believe there
existed south of the Thames, at the time of his accession, a single
Englishman "able to translate a letter from Latin into English. When I
considered all this, I remembered also how I saw, before it had been all
ravaged and burnt, how the churches throughout the whole of England
stood filled with treasures and books, and there was also a great
multitude of God's servants, but they had very little knowledge of the
books, for they could not understand anything of them, because they were
not written in their own language." It is a great wonder that men of the
preceding generation, "good and wise men who were formerly all over
England," wrote no translation. There can be but one explanation: "They
did not think that men would ever be so careless, and that learning
would so decay." Still the case is not absolutely hopeless, for there
are many left who "can read English writing." Remembering which, "I
began, among other various and manifold troubles of this kingdom, to
translate into English the book which is called in Latin Pastoralis, and
in English Shepherd's Book ('Hirdeboc'), sometimes word for word, and
sometimes according to the sense, as I had learnt it from Plegmund my
archbishop, and Asser my bishop, and Grimbold my mass-priest, and John
my mass-priest."[105] These learned men, and especially the Welshman
Asser, who was to Alfred what Alcuin was to Charlemagne, helped him to
spread learning by means of translations and by founding schools. They
explained to him the hard passages, to the best of their understanding,
which it is true was not always perfect.

Belonging