ASSER'S LIFE OF KING ALFRED.*
Mu. STEVENSON is to be congratulated upon the completion of his important task. He has at last given 1113 a trustworthy text of Bishop Asser's Life of King Alfred,—a Life which, if con- temporary, is of the first importance as a source of history in an age otherwise " illuminated only by the Old-English Chronicle and a few charters, preserved in much later chartularies of a more or less suspicious nature." The microscopic investigation and collation of every source that could contribute to a critical edition, the elaborate and ex- haustively learned, though occasionally disputable—as in the case of the Saxon School at Rome—notes to the text, and the practically conclusive establishment of the authenticity of the Life by the judicial weighing of every particle of intrinsic and extrinsic evidence, make this work a model for future editors of mediaeval texts. Mr. Stevenson's critical apparatus is, perhaps, as perfect as it could be made, and his text approaches finality. It can only in a measure be displaced by the possible appearance of a tenth-century manuscript.
The literary history of the Life is one of absorbing interest. Its importance as a source of history was early realised, and it was " transcribed almost, entirely into the continuous Chronicles of Florence of Worcester and Simeon of Durham." On this fact is founded the modern and very unintelligent
*Asset's Life of King Alfred: together with the Annals of Saint Neots, erroneously ascribed to Auer. Edited, with Introduction and Commentary, by William Henry Stevenson, M.A., late Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Oxford : at the University Press. [Ifa. net.] assertion, accepted by no serious student, that the Life is a twelfth-century forgery founded on Florence (who died in 1108) and the first part of Simeon, which possibly dates from the tenth century. The multiplication of Chronicles ended the popularity of the Life, which, it is asserted, " was transmitted beyond the Middle Ages by one copy only, and that a very unsatisfactory one," derived, perhaps, from St. Augastine's Hall, Canterbury. It eventually came into the hands of Leland, and passed from him to Sir John Cheke, and from Cheke to Archbishop Parker, the first editor of the text. It finally was added to the Cottonian Library, where it was entirely destroyed by fire on October 23rd, 1731. We may, despite Mr. Stevenson's weighty opinion, doubt if it was the only copy that survived the Middle Ages. The copies seen by Bale, by Lady Cheke, by Stowe, Boyer, and the Brothers Callus may have been this copy or manuscript translations, but they may also have been copies now lost. Parker in his Editio Princeps of 1574 seems to suggest collation when he speaks of the "antiquity of the Archetype," while it is not absolutely certain that Camden did not possess a very late mediaeval copy. Parker's deliberate falsification of his Archetype is one of the most astonishing facts in the history of literature. " His un- paralleled services in rescuing for posterity so many priceless MSS." are, indeed, blurred by his sins as sa4editor. His inter- polations and his gross carelessness have for three centuries mystified the learned world. The interpolation of the Norman story of Alfred and the cakes, for instance, has, until now, formed the strongest evidence that the Life was a twelfth- century forgery. Mr. Stevenson has at last finally analysed this famous edition into its constituent parts of .true text, forgeries, and ignorances. The second edition, issued by Camden from the Frankfort Press in 1602-3, was practically a reprint in Latin, instead of Saxon, letters of the first edition. It is only famous as containing what is almost certainly an impudent forgery,—the notorious chapter on which Oxford based her now long-abandoned claim to a continuous life extending behind the days of King Alfred. This chapter had previously appeared in Camden's Britannia as es optimo manuscripto Asserii exemplari, and twenty years later Camden declared that he had extracted it from a four- teenth-century MS. of Asser. The use of the Renaissance word Divas, however, disposes of this assertion. It is possible that Henry Savile foisted the forgery upon Camden, and "(Risher, who roundly denounced the passage, held this view. It would be interesting to inquire if editors and critics have grown honester in the three centuries that have passed since Camden added this gem to the curiosities of literature.
It was a fortunate fact that a third edition—that of Francis Wise in 1722—appeared before the destruction of the manu- script. For the purposes of this edition Humphrey Wanley, who had a unique acquaintance with Anglo-Saxon manu- scripts, examined the copy, and was able without hesitation to date it at the year 1000 or 1001 A.D. This fact, and the facsimile of the first fourteen lines of the manuscript given by Wise, have been of value in the preparation of this edition. The fourth edition was that of Henry Petrie in 1848, and now we have from Mr. Stevenson the final text, "established by a minute collation of the existing transcripts and editions and of the early compilers who embody matter derived from this work. By the aid of these compilers we are able to get back to twelfth-century texts, which are, in the nature of the case, superior to the printed texts."
The mists that half shroud the tenth century have not spared Bishop Asser. King Alfred, in his famous preface to the translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care, mentions him. He, indeed, helped Alfred in the preparation of the work, and stood to the King in a relation not dissimilar to that in which Alcuin had stood to Charlemagne. The Life tells us that he was educated and ordained in the Welsh diocese of St. David's. It was probably in the year 887 that the King took him as his literary guide, and for some years he spent half his time with the King and half in Wales. Gifts of land were showered upon the scholar. He became Bishop of Exeter, and later of Sherborne, and died in 908 or 910 in possession of the latter See. The internal evidence of the Life confirms what we know of him from other sources. He writes as a contemporary. He shows a knowledge of Wales and her rulers that marks his nation- ality, and the Welsh he uses is unmistakably that of the ninth and tenth centuries. No forger could have imitated
this, nor would a forger have used, as Asser did, Welsh forms of British names. It is clear that the author of the Life used an older form of the Old-English Chronicle than we now possess, and this is weighty evidence against a Norman origin; while the facts that the Latin used is that of a Welshman of the end of the ninth century, that ninth - century Frankish influence is apparent, and that, above all, Celtic pre-Vulgate versions of the Bible are used, must convince most educated persons acquainted with the laws of evidence and common- sense that the Life is contemporary with its subject.
The matter of evidence is much more important than the average reader may suppose. The intensely technical character of the proof has been rendered necessary by the blunders of Mr. Thomas Wright (1841), Sir Henry Howorth (1876-77), and an anonymous writer in the Times (1898), who thought fit to attack the authenticity of the work on totally baseless grounds. It must now, we hold, be admitted that we possess an absolutely authentic contemporary Life of the great founder of England, and that this edition of the text illuminates it with a wealth of illustrative contemporary detail which enables us for perhaps the first time to grasp in its entirety the age when the deep bases of the Empire were laid. Alfred is no longer a myth, a shadow moving behind the consciousness of history. He stands out in these pages as a living man, a patriot, a strong, wise King, and, above all, as the physician and teacher of his people,—a man ever con- scious of his own shortcomings, ever ready to learn and to apply his learning ; ever turning, by the transmuting magic of his personality, national and personal misfortune and suffering into forces of permanent good. The first great Englishman, the first man who called our tongue the English tongue, lives to-day and for ever in the pages of Asser and of the Old-English Chronicle. He is part of our national life, and it is good for us to realise that the passage of a millennium has not obscured either the gifts that he gave or the man himself.
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