No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Competition for King Alfred's Aura in the Last Century of Anglo-Saxon England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
This paper approaches a large problem — the changing image of late Anglo-Saxon kingship — from a very limited perspective. In later work I hope to study Alfred's changing image as a symbol of kingship within its broader political context. This paper is limited to studying the changing relationship between Crown and monastery, as illustrated by the portrayal of King Alfred in a pair of late-Saxon saint's lives.
Historians owe most of their knowledge of King Alfred to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Asser's Life of Alfred, both generally agreed to be products of Alfred's own court. Given the detail of these works and their status as “official histories,” it might be expected that all subsequent treatments of King Alfred depend on them. Yet the most popular episode of Alfred's life, the one still known by every English schoolchild, is the story of Alfred and the cakes, which occurs nowhere in these authoritative sources. In fact, by the end of the tenth century King Alfred emerges in literary contexts far from the West Saxon court, engaging in activities that are certainly not recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or the Life of Alfred. What had taken place to give Alfred this life of his own outside of the official histories?
- Type
- The 1990 Denis Bethell Prize Essay of the Charles Homer Haskins Society
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1991
References
1 See Lapidge, M., “Vita Prima Santci Neoti et Translatio,” in Dumville, D. and Lapidge, M., eds., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, A Collaborative Edition, vol. 17 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. xciii–xcviGoogle Scholar.
2 For discussions of the date of composition of the Historia see Craster, E., “The Patrimony of St. Cuthbert,” English Historical Review 271 (1954): 177–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Simpson, L., “The King Alfred/St. Cuthbert Episode in the Historia de sancto Cuthberto: Its Significance for mid-tenth century English History,” in Bonner, G., Rollason, D. and Stanclife, C., eds., St. Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to A.D. 1200 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1989), pp. 397–98Google Scholar. Craster assumes that the HSC was written in three distinct stages: A) §§1–13 + 19b–28, written in the reign of Edmund, c. 945; B) §§29–32, written in the reign of Cnut, c. 1030; C) §§14–19a + 33, written at the end of the eleventh century. However, the main body of the text displays a unity of purpose that contradicts Craster's model, and suggests that the HSC's fragmentary appearance comes instead from the fact that its author actually compiled it from a number of different earlier sources. In particular, the second half of Craster's stage A, which deals with events in the reigns of Ethelred and Edmund, contains references to events from Alfred's time that are only described in stage C. This suggests that A cannot have been written before C. Since C contains an anachronistic reference to Cnut's battle at Ashington (1016), this in turn suggests that the HSC as a whole cannot have been compiled before the reign of Cnut.
3 The site of this battle is given as Assandune in all three manuscripts of the Historia. There is scholarly agreement that this is the result of confusion between Alfred's victory at Edington and Cnut's victory at Ashingdon in 1016, either by the author or by a later scribe.
4 For full discussions, see Appendix I, “Alfred and the Cakes,” in Keynes, S. and Lapidge, M., eds., Alfred the Great (Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 197–202Google Scholar, and Lapidge, , “Vita Prima Sancti Neoti,” pp. cxi–cxxivGoogle Scholar.
5 For full discussion, see Colgrave, B., “The Post-Bedan Miracles and Translations of St. Cuthbert,” in Fox, C. and Dickens, B., eds., The Early Cultures of North-West Europe (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 307–325Google Scholar.
6 This claim is repeated verbatim in §96 of the Historia Regum.
7 Macray, W. D., Catalogi codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecæ Bodleianæ pars IX (Oxford, 1883), entry 175Google Scholar.
8 See appendix for a comparison of these two texts.
9 See e.g. Rollason, D., Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989), p. 145Google Scholar, and Lapidge, M., “Vita Prima Sancti Neoti,” p. cvGoogle Scholar.
10 See Lapidge, , “Vita Prima Sancti Neoti,” p. lxxvGoogle Scholar.
11 Vita Ælfredi, §74. On this point I follow Lapidge's interpretation of Asser; see Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp. 254–55.
12 This implies that the Vita Neoti's statement that Neot was a monk at Glastonbury is probably not historical. This assumption is supported by two facts. First, Glastonbury only gained real prominence after Neot's death, when it was reformed by St. Dunstan. Second, the Vita Neoti names Æthelwold as prior of Glastonbury. This is certainly unhistorical, but Æthelwold was associated with Dunstan and the reform movement, suggesting that the author had the reformed Glastonbury in mind.
13 See VA §§74+ 92–97.
14 See Lapidge, , “Vita Prima Sancti Neoti,” pp. lxxxvii, xcvGoogle Scholar; see also Rollason, , Saints and Relics, p. 155Google Scholar.
15 The Historia claims over one hundred vills for the Community of St. Cuthbert, and its evidence suggests that by the tenth century the Community controlled some 400,000 acres of land between the rivers Tweed and Tees, a territory that would have represented several thousand peasant households. See Johnson-South, T., “Estate Structure,” in The Historia de Sancto Cuthberto: A New Edition and Translation, with Discussions of the Surviving Manuscripts, the Text, and Northumbrian Estate Structure (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1990), pp. 187–226Google Scholar.
16 HSC §13.
17 HSC §§26, 28.
18 See John, E., “The King and the Monks in the Tenth-Century Reformation,” in Orbis Britlaniæ and Other Studies (Leicester, 1966), pp. 177–180Google Scholar.
19 See Nelson, J., “‘A King Across the Sea’: Alfred in Continental Perspective,” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 36 (1986): 58–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 See Rollason, , Saints and Relics, p. 155Google Scholar.
21 See Simpson, L., “The King Alfred/St. Cuthbert Episode in the Historia de sancto Cuthberto: Its Significance for mid-tenth-century English History,” in Bonner, G., et al., St. Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community, pp. 400–404Google Scholar.
22 Three manuscripts containing the Historia survive: 1) Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Bodley 596, probably written in Canterbury at the end of the eleventh century; 2) Cambridge, Cambridge University Library MS. ff. 1. 27, probably written in Northumbria in the third quarter of the twelfth century; 3) London, Lincoln's Inn MS. Hales 114, probably written at Durham in the second quarter of the fifteenth century. It has been argued that the Cambridge text preserves an earlier version of the text than the other two, but there is no textual evidence for this (see note 2 above).
23 Madan, F. and Craster, H. H. E., A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1922), 2: 336Google Scholar.
24 Rollason, D., “St. Cuthbert and Wessex: The Evidence of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 183,” in Boner, G., et al., St. Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community, p. 417Google Scholar.
25 See Johnson-South, T., “The Text,” in The Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, pp. 124–186Google Scholar. The Historia's stylistic variations, chronological discontinuities, and abrupt changes from narrative to cartulary material, all suggest that it represents a compilation and reworking of earlier sources.
26 Simpson argues that the Alfred/Cuthbert episode was written in the north, since it is out of place chronologically, and refers to the south of England as terram Australium Saxonum (Simpson, , “The King Alfred/St. Cuthbert Episode,” p. 407Google Scholar). Instead, these minor errors could have crept in after the episode's initial composition, when the Historia's Northumbrian author compiled his text.