ABSTRACT
I start with a truth which I’m sure we all hold to be self-evident. We have at our disposal an extraordinary variety of written sources for the reign of King Alfred the Great, ranging from extended ‘literary’ works produced for polemical or didactic purposes, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, and the large corpus of Alfredian prose, to the variety of ‘documentary’ records which originated in the service of more strictly utilitarian ends, such as the treaty between Alfred and Guthrum, the king’s law-code, his will, and the small corpus of the king’s charters. It is sometimes suggested that this truth is an accident of survival, and that if we happened to have similar material for Offa, or for Æthelstan, we would see that there was not so much difference between them all. The fact is we don’t, and there was. The variety of written sources for Alfred the Great is at once the product, the expression, and the symbol of what was so distinctive about Alfred’s kingship and royal government. The régime did not have to invent the technology, but it did need the will and the wherewithal to exploit it, and to foster conditions in which the product might thrive. What we seem to encounter at King Alfred’s court is the feverish activity of a small group of men who were eager to generate verbiage in the king’s interests, to control its dissemination, and to ensure at the same time that it would reach a wide public. The modern analogies spring readily to mind. Just as advocates of the Internet, in the present day, have to overcome the passive resistance of the inveterate technophobe, so too did Alfred have to prevail over those among his ealdormen, reeves and thegns who (as Asser put it), ‘either because of [their] age or because of the unresponsive nature of [their] unpractised intelligence’,1 were slower than others to take advantage of new opportunities. Nor is it inappropriate that the most immediately recognizable symbol of the age should be an object identified as an æstel, or reading-aid; and in so far as we now have four such objects, each of a different type or grade, it would appear to follow that the reading-aid was as ubiquitous in Alfredian Wessex as the mobile telephone, or the computer mouse, has become in Tony Blair’s Britain. Of course, the objects in question may have been status symbols, fashion accessories, or gadgets of some other kind; but
leaving them aside, there should be an organizing principle behind such a variety or profusion of written material, and a sense, therefore, in which those in the king’s circle perceived the potential of the written word in securing their political objectives, and were able then to harness and to exploit its power.
