Asser’s biography of king Alfred gives a vivid portrait of the man. It combines the use of earlier Anglo-Saxon chronicles as sources with Asser’s own composition, often based on his personal acquaintance with the king. Here some excerpts are given from both categories, showing that Asser’s style changes somewhat depending on the source. For the chapters covering the period 874-8 which give an account of Alfred’s dealings with the Danes, relevant excerpts from the Old English version in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are given in an appendix to the Section.

Æthelweard’s chronicle, in a rugged and distinctive Latin, covers history from Creation down to 975, just before he wrote the work. He bases it largely on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and parts of his chronicle provide valuableinformation about this Old English work, here in Æthelweard’s Latin translation or paraphrase. Æthelweard was a high-ranking lay leader. He addresses the work to his cousin, Matilda, abbess of Essen in Germany. Here the famous and dramatic story (which also exists in Old English) of prince Cyneheard and king Cynewulf is given, as well as sections on ninth and tenth century history.

The famous story of king Alfred burning the cakes in the humble kitchen of the country wife is first recorded in Latin in the first Life of St. Neot, written in the eleventh century, before the Norman Conquest. It is interesting in containing not only a Biblical reference, but also a reference to Juvenal’s seventh satire.Here the original version of this literary vignette is compared with a briefer post-Conquest version in the Annals of St. Neot’s and an expanded version from the thirteenth century, from the Chronicle of John of Wallingford, which preserves the reference to Juvenaland the Biblical reference used in the original but adds other references.

Vernacular literature in English first developed in two separate iterations: the first ‘Old English’, the language brought to the island by Germanic invaders in the fifth century, and used (alongside Latin) in writing from as early as the seventh century; the second, after the hiatus brought about by the Norman Conquest, the twelfth-century re-emergence of ‘Early Middle English’, a non-standardized rendering of a fast-changing vernacular, dialectally highly variant, in constant textual contact with Latin and French. This chapter discusses each in turn, arguing that Old English literature, for all its astonishing precocity, variety, and brilliance, provides us with a fascinating study of a centuries-long, and eventually truncated, ‘beginning’: a vernacular literature sustained over time by a particular, and crucially coterminous, audience and patronage context (the royal or aristocratic court; the monastery) without ever reaching the point of being self-sustaining. In contrast, Early Middle English emerged spontaneously in the margins of multilingual manuscripts, and as an act of translation and adaptation without institutional support or aristocratic patronage; but it emerged into a different world, in which growing community literacy gave it an audience – potentially the whole population – that would drive its development ever forward.

This chapter examines the most apparently troubled episode in the history of Cuthbert’s community – its intermittent perambulations around northern England in the ninth and tenth centuries – through the lenses of its earliest historical record, the anonymous Historia de Sancto Cuthberto. Noting the irrelevance of Cuthbert’s asceticism to this narrative, it argues that his life and posthumous miracles are used as vehicles to authorize the land claims of the Lindisfarne/Chester-le-Street community during this period of prolonged insecurity. In the course of consolidating and adding to these landholdings, Cuthbert demonstrates a readiness to work flexibly with the Danish elite where necessary – respect for land trumps ethnic difference. Where crossed, however, he is mercilessly retributive, a far cry from Bede’s pastoral and ecological saint. In addition to these local negotiations, the chapter explores how the Historia ambitiously sets Cuthbert to work as a kingmaker on a national level, insinuating him into the West Saxon narrative of hereditary English monarchy, while the West Saxons manifest a devotional interest towards him in turn to help strengthen their foothold in the north.