port of Rome, as the chief seat of the little learning that was left in the world, was necessary for Alfred in his struggle for civilisation against barbarism. We may excuse his devotion to the papacy as, for his age of the world, a comparatively venial error, when we reflect that without him this country would, in all human probability, have relapsed into utter paganism. An acknowledgment of the papal supremacy by a nation at one period of its history, does not prove, as we have observed before, that that nation ought always to submit to the papal yoke. We may, without inconsistency, admit that in such a period of confusion and darkness as commenced with the opening of the 9th century, the subjection of the nations of Western Europe, in matters of religion, to one visible head, may, though founded on usurpation, have been rightly endured, and even joyfully acquiesced in, by Christian kings and statesmen, as a good rather than an evil. This admission can in no way give strength to a title to authority over men's consciences which was originally bad, and which no prescription-which nothing short of a direct revelation from on high, can justify. Or we may regard the Papacy as a system of severe discipline, under which men were to be trained, during the darkness of the middle ages, for the light and liberty which were to dawn upon the world in the 15th century; when the revival of learning and the invention of printing in the West of Europe, were to usher in the Reformation. After that faith was come, they were no longer to be under a schoolmaster." But while the state of bondage was permitted by Almighty God to continue, we must not find fault with the great men who thought it consistent with national independence to acknowledge a foreign spiritual head; more especially while as yet the principle, afterwards asserted by the popes, of the subjection of the temporal power to the ecclesiastical, was not fully developed. Notwithstanding the 66 Gal. iii 25. Italian tendencies of the greatest of Anglo-Saxon kings, we must admire his truly noble and Christian character. We must venerate him, not only as the deliverer of his country, and the legislator of a semi-barbarous people, but as setting an example of private life worthy of all imitation. It is recorded that he assigned one half of the revenue arising from the royal domains to secular, the other to ecclesiastical purposes. The former half, the secular, was subdivided into three portions, one of which was distributed among his warriors and noble thanes, according to their rank; another among the numerous builders and other workmen whom he gathered around him out of foreign nations; a third was for the strangers who flocked to him from all parts. The ecclesiastical half of his revenue was divided into four portions: of which one was for the poor of every nation; the second for his monasteries of Athelney and Shaftesbury; the third for his school for young nobles; the fourth for the neighbouring Saxon churches and monasteries, and occasionally for those of Wales, Ireland, Cornwall, Northumbria, and even France. He showed the same exactness of economy in the distribution of his hours between divine and secular things; and was himself the inventor of a method of measuring time, which served as an ingenious though somewhat rude device for supplying the place of a clock.1 His complete devotion to a life of usefulness is the more to be admired on account of what we learn from his biographer, that he was weakly in constitution from infancy, and constantly subject to a bodily infirmity of a most painful kind through the most active portion of his career. This infirmity, indeed, as well as the period of adversity through which he had 'Lappenberg, vol. ii. pp. 73, 74. Asser tells us that he caused six wax candles to be made of equal weight and length. These he found took exactly twenty-four hours to burn out: and that the consumption of them might not be hurried on, as well as to prevent their being extinguished, he protected them by lanterns of wood and fine horn from the operation of currents of air. It is to pass, only tended to strengthen his character. probable, however, that it was the means of shortening his life, as he died at the comparatively early age of fifty-three, A.D. 901, having reigned upwards of twenty-nine years. Before we conclude this notice of Alfred, it is right to mention that he was the earliest ruler of England who established any intercourse with the East, by sending gifts to the Christians of St. Thomas, on the Malabar coast of India.' It were much to be wished that the transactions of his remote successors, in after ages, with the natives of that country, had been all of an equally pacific and praiseworthy cha racter. 1 Saxon Chron. anno 883; Lappenberg, vol. ii. pp. 71. 72. See also Gibbon's Decline and Fall, chap. xlvii. CHAP. IX. THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH OF THE TENTH AND ELEVENTH CENTURIES, FROM THE DEATH OF ALFRED TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST. A.D. 901-1066. THE reign of Edward the Elder, the eldest son and successor of Alfred, was almost entirely occupied with wars against the Danes. In these he was materially assisted by his sister Ethelfloed, the widow of the regent of Mercia, a woman of extraordinary firmness and heroism. Through their efforts a great part of the territory occupied by the Danes was reconquered, and the Saxon supremacy restored. So formidable did Edward become in arms, that the kings of Wales, Scotland, and Strathclyde, as well as those of Northumbria and the Danish territory in England, acknowledged him as their supreme lord.1 A reign spent in constant warfare does not offer much matter for ecclesiastical history. It appears, however, that about this time were founded three new bishoprics in the west of England.2 William of Malmsbury says that this creation of new sees was in consequence of a bull of pope Formosus, who put the kingdom under an interdict; (i. e., forbade the administration of any religious offices within it), in consequence of the long vacancy of some of the old sees. There are chronological difficulties which prevent us from receiving this account, as pope Formosus died six years before Edward's reign, and it is highly improbable that such a thing should have happened in Alfred's lifetime; but there is no Lappenberg, vol. ii. p. 97. 2 Malmsbury, Kings of England, lib. iii. and lib. i. cap. 6.; lib. ii. cap. 5. question that the sees of Wells in Somersetshire, Crediton in Devonshire, and St. Germain's in Cornwall, were founded in the early part of this century. Edward was succeeded, A.D. 924, by his natural son, Athelstan, who was destined to reap the fruits of his father's and grandfather's victories, by the enjoyment of greater power and influence in foreign courts than had ever been possessed by any of his predecessors. The long period of intestine war, and the intermixture of races in the kingdom, had, however, given rise to much lawlessness and disorder, in the midst of which the rights of property and the due administration of justice were grossly, neglected. By an ordinance of king Athelstan, the king's reeves, or bailiffs, are ordered strictly to render tithes from the royal domains, both of live stock and the yearly fruits of the earth; and the bishops, aldermen, and king's reeves are enjoined to do the same out of their own property.2 The same ordinance contains injunctions, the object of which was to secure the payment of church-shot, soul-shot, and plough-alms; and the king's reeves are ordered to provide for one poor Englishman a certain quantity of food and clothing every month, from two of the king's farms; and if they could not find such an one in their own village, they were to seek him in another. They were also ordered to redeem one 66 wite-theow," that is, one who, from debt or misfortune, had fallen into slavery. Athelstan was succeeded by his half-brother, Edmund, whose reign is remarkable for the commencement of the work of the restoration of the monastic system, in England. We have referred, in the last chapter, to the fact that, in the earlier part of the 10th century, all, or nearly all, the English monastic institutions were extinct. There were, however, some eminent Benedictine monasteries in France |