Alfred the Great and the Alfredian Circle

The verb /forgytan/ is used reflexively six times in the extant Old English corpus, and all six instances are found in King Alfred’s translation of Gregory the Great’s /Regula pastoralis/. As the translation adopts from its Latin source the concept of what I call ‘completely reflexive forgetting’ (the forgetting of one’s self), it adjusts the concept for an Anglo-Saxon audience by reimagining and reconfiguring the logistics of the mind and its mechanisms of perception. Completely reflexive forgetting is thus imagined as the process by which a ruler ceases to perceive himself from within (as God always does) and begins perceiving himself from without (from the perspective of his subjects), thereby slipping into a perpetually totalizing state of self-concealment.

Resumo: Como um dos períodos mais ricos em termos de produção de documentos, o reinado de Alfredo, o Grande (871 – 899) se destaca em diversos âmbitos. Estando em um contexto de reformas, o reinado de Alfredo ressignifica as produções intelectuais em Inglês Antigo. Tal ressignificação acontece na criação de documentos oficiais como a Crônica Anglo-Saxônic e diversas obras clássicas em Latim são traduzidas ao vernacular. Uma destas traduções é a da Ecclesiastica Historia Gentis Anglorum, de autoria do monge Beda, o Venerável (673 – 735) publicada na língua latina em 731. A origem desta tradução está dentro do projeto alfrediano que visa contemplar a construção de unidades dos povos Ingleses na esfera do político, com Alfredo proclamando-se rei dos Anglos e dos Saxões e do cultural, com a criação e tradução de documentos no vernacular. Assim, o objetivo deste trabalho é investigar a trajetória dos seis manuscritos que compõe a versão de Beda em Inglês Antigo e, principalmente, dissertar sobre sua origem e transmissão. Ao investigar isto, lemos como um único documento, envolvido em projeto de unidade, fragmenta-se em manuscritos que possuem trajetórias distintas no decorrer da história.

Palavras-Chave: Beda; Alfredo; Unidade; Transmissão manuscrita; Inglês Antigo.

Abstract: As one of the richest periods in terms of production of documents, the kingship of Alfred, the Great (871 – 899) stands out in various scopes. Being in a context of reforms, the kingship of Alfred resignifies the intelectual productions in Old English. Such resignification happen in the creation of official documents like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and a number of classical works in Latin are translated to the vernacular. One of these is the Ecclesiastica Historia Gentis Anglorum, authored by the monk Bede, the Venerable (673 – 735) and published in Latin language in 731. The origin of this translation is on the alfredian project which aims to contemplate the construction of unities of the English people in the sphere of the political, with Alfred claiming itself king of the Angles and the Saxons, and of the cultural, with the creation and translation of documents into vernacular. Thus, the purpose of this work is to investigate the trajectory of the six manuscripts which compounds the version of Old English Bede and, mainly, to dissert of its origin and transmission. By investigating this, we read how a single document, involved in a project of unity, fragments itself in manuscripts which have distinctive trajectories throughout history.

Keywords: Bede; Alfred; Unity; Manuscript transmission; Old English.

This article considers the reputation and career of Alfred the Great, supposed first king of England, alongside the activities of the Viking Great Army in the ninth century. It examines Viking camps, military responses to the Vikings and the ideological responses in the form of a literary programme. It features the Alfred Jewel, the Watlington hoard and the text Ohthere's Voyage.
[Caitlin Ellis, 'Alfred versus the Viking Great Army', The Historian 139 (autumn 2018), 16–22]

This biography of Alfred the Great, king of the West Saxons (871-899), combines a sensitive reading of the primary sources with a careful evaluation of the most recent scholarly research on the history and archaeology of ninth-century England. Alfred emerges from the pages of this biography as a great warlord, an effective and inventive ruler, and a passionate scholar whose piety and intellectual curiosity led him to sponsor a cultural and spiritual renaissance. Alfred's victories on the battlefield and his sweeping administrative innovations not only preserved his native Wessex from viking conquest, but began the process of political consolidation that would culminate in the creation of the kingdom of England.

Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England strips away the varnish of later interpretations to recover the historical Alfred, pragmatic, generous, brutal, pious, scholarly, within the context of his own age.

"This biography of Alfred the Great, king of the West Saxons (871-899), combines a sensitive reading of the primary sources with a careful evaluation of the most recent scholarly research on the history and archaeology of ninth-century England. Alfred emerges from the pages of this biography as a great warlord, an effective and inventive ruler, and a passionate scholar whose piety and intellectual curiosity led him to sponsor a cultural and spiritual renaissance. Alfred's victories on the battlefield and his sweeping administrative innovations not only preserved his native Wessex from viking conquest, but began the process of political consolidation that would culminate in the creation of the kingdom of England. Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England strips away the varnish of later interpretations to recover the historical Alfred, pragmatic, generous, brutal, pious, scholarly, within the context of his own age."

This article argues that the Old English Orosius, a work traditionally
viewed as a product of the educational reforms of King Alfred of Wessex (r. 871–899), can be constructively read in relation to developments in Anglo-Saxon political thought in the early tenth as well as in the late ninth centuries. The earliest extant manuscript of the Orosius was probably copied at Winchester in the early tenth century by the same scribe responsible for the entries for the late ninth and early tenth century in MS A of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This section of the Chronicle charts both the break-up of the Carolingian Empire and the conquests of Alfred and his successors, Edward the Elder and Æthelstan, over various kings and peoples of Britain. Treating the reports of Ohthere and Wulfstan
contained in the geographical preface to the Orosius as an integral part of the text as it was read in the early tenth century, rather than as an extraneous interpolation, I suggest that this passage invites readers to consider the rapidly expanding West Saxon kingdom in relation to the great empires which preceded it. I then outline how the translator refashioned Orosius’s ‘universal history’ into a work of
imperial history which is more directly concerned with Rome’s long and difficult rise than with its fall to the Goths in 410. I conclude that the Orosius might have encouraged early tenth-century Anglo-Saxon readers to interpret the recent rise of Wessex to overlordship in Britain as part of an ongoing process of translatio imperii, the transference or succession of empires, contingent on the Christian virtue of its rulers.

In ninth-and tenth-century England, the ethnonyms Goths and Geatas and the patronymic Gaut became more important than they had ever been to Anglo-Saxon intellectuals. The sudden popularity of these words has been remarked upon by scholars, and has usually been explained as cultural tools for nation-building in the time of Alfred the Great and his heirs. 1 Meanwhile, the shift in mentalities that allowed for the concept embodied in these words (namely, that the Goths are somehow related to the Anglo-Saxons) to emerge has largely gone unexplored. This is, then, the purpose of the present paper: to go beyond the textual sources of this idea by exploring the evolutions in how ethnicity was conceptualized which allowed for an Anglo-Saxon 'Gothicism' to become thinkable and by looking at the socio-cultural and political needs that this concept fulfilled. As I will show, the introduction of Geat to the royal genealogies in all Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the increased importance afforded to the Goths in the Old English translation of Orosius, the fascination with the Geatas in Beowulf and other poetic sources, are all particular embodiments of the idea that the Anglo-Saxons had Gothic origins. This idea has, of course, little historical basis, but it was significant enough for many Anglo-Saxon intellectuals to shape accounts of their past according to it. The significant array of Anglo-Saxon sources that I will be exploring can be dated to the late ninth and tenth century, a time of nation-building, when the concept of Angelcynn came to label a new community that would include all Christian Anglo-Saxons and Danes under the leadership of the West-Saxon royal dynasty. 2 It was therefore crucial to develop new ways of thinking about ethnic identity, as well as finding a narrative that would encapsulate these new conceptualizations. The legendary Goths (including their incarnation as Getae, shadowy inhabitants of the mythical North) thus provided a handy answer to burning socio-political and cultural questions in post-Alfredian England such as 'how can Danes and Anglo-Saxons both be integrated in the new English national identity, the Angelcynn?' or the older 'how do Anglo-Saxons relate to Roman and Christian history?'. 3 Yet these legendary Goths (to be distinguished from the historical Ostrogoths and Visigoths) did not spring out of the fertile ground of Anglo-Saxon poetic imagination fully armed and ready for battle. Rather, the Anglo-Saxons weaving them into their history had at their disposal a long mytho-geographical pedigree, and on the other hand, more recent examples responding to similar socio-political needs. For the Anglo-Saxons were not the first to succumb to the appeal of the Goths. The Carolingian intellectuals did it first throughout the ninth century. I will therefore first explore the construction of Carolingian 'Gothicism' – a phenomenon we can localize very well in time and space, unlike some of its Anglo-Saxon embodiments. This phenomenon consisted in a wave of accounts of Frankish origins that clearly show that at least some ninth-century Franks believed that the Goths were of Scandinavian origins and that they were the ancestors of the Franks (but also of other Germanic peoples such as the Danes and Saxons, who were thus seen to be related). As we shall see, the connection between the Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian conceptualization of ethnicity and interest in the Goths is rarely made. Roberta Frank is an obvious exception, and the present paper owes much to her study of ninth-century 1 Stephen

The first French translation of Asser's 'Life of King Alfred', with Stevenson's Latin text facing.
The volume also contains :
- an introduction to the text and its history, with a discussion of issues concerning the work's authorship
- a selective bibliography
- explanatory footnotes
- longer explanatory notes on Asser's chronological timeframe, Alfred's genealogy, his literacy, and his illnesses
- presentations and translations (with Old English text facing) of the prose and verse prologues and epilogue to the Alfredian translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care, and of Alfred's will
- a genealogy, map, and indexes

This study reconstructs the Alfredian network as consisting of twelve actors. This network is termed a coalition, within which a cluster of Mercian actors is further hypothesised. Historical sources and charter evidence suggest that Mercian scribes worked for West Saxon kings and may even have taken part in the establishment of a proto-chancery at the royal court. This writing office can be conjectured to have ties with the Alfredian coalition and described as a community of practice. The whole sociolinguistic reconstruction is supported by three case studies: Angelcynn ‘the English people’ and here ‘band, troop’ in historical-political genres, and gretan freondlice in epistolary genres. The diffusion of these Alfredian norms across time, place and genres is linked to the royal chancery and its distribution channels, as well as to the diachronic sustainability of linguistic practices within professional discourse communities and their archives.

"In the end of 9th century, the actions taken by King Alfred the Great were decisive for the survival of the Anglo-Saxon England against the Vikings. His cultural revival would change the Anglo-Saxon society, reinforcing the defenses of the kingdom, the politics and enable the unification of England in the mid-10th century under king Athelstan’s reign. However, the main reason behind this revival was not cultural but a spiritual. For this task, inspired by the works like Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, a myth of origins was forged. A myth that said the Anglo-Saxons were the spiritual heirs of the Hebrews of Old Testament. And their kings would be descendent of a holy lineage of a mysterious forth son of Noah. In this article we will analyze the elements of this myth, how was its construction and its importance for the Alfredian period."

RESUMO: Nas fontes literárias do período da Inglaterra anglo-saxônica, assim como em outras so-ciedades europeias da época, é comum a presença de personagens masculinas (ficcionais ou históricas) desempenhando papeis heroicos, sendo figuras centrais de tais narrativas. Contudo, em tal documen-tação temos personagens femininas na posição de líderes militares frente à grandes adversidades, algo singular na documentação existente. Esse artigo visa abordar a relação entre tais personagens femini-nas na literatura anglo-saxônica e sua importância para os estudos na área. [ABSTRACT: In the literary sources from the times of Anglo-Saxon England, as it happens in other European societies from the same age, it is usual the presence of male characters (fictional or historical) playing heroic roles as central figures in those narratives. However, within these same sources there are feminine characters behaving as military leaders facing great peril, something unusual in the sources of the period. The aim of this article is to show the relationship between these feminine characters of the Anglo-Saxon literature and their importance for further analysis in this field of studies].

In 1899, a widely shared desire to fix Alfred’s birth-date without consulting Asser led Plummer to conjure up a mirage: “It seems to have been overlooked that the date is fixed by the genealogical Preface to MS. A of the Chron., a strictly contemporary authority, which says that he was ‘turned’ twenty-three at his accession in 871.” Plummer’s mirage may be traced back to Archbishop Parker’s original interest in his manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which Parker erroneously characterised as written when Alfred was twenty-three years old. The clause recording Alfred’s twenty-three-year regnal length in the last sentence of the Alfredian West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List can be reversed to yield a birth date of 848 only by imposing on the text a feebler standard of style and syntax, numeracy and logic, rhythm and coherence than the text deserves, ignoring its arithmetic, semantics, and genre. Letting go of Alfred’s hitherto canonical birthdate is not a trivial matter. Alfred's 848 birthdate is based on a mirage. This is in part a case history of Elizabethan, Victorian, and current OE philology. "Much will change if we come to imagine the historical Alfred in 855 as more or less the same age as Judith, the thirteen-year-old Carolingian princess old enough to marry his father on their way back from Rome."

La cour du roi anglo-saxon Alfred le Grand (871-899) est décrite dans les sources émanant de l’entourage royal (en particulier dans l’Histoire du roi Alfred de l’évêque Asser, écrite du vivant du roi) comme un lieu d’harmonie, un pôle d’attraction culturelle et un exemple de bonne organisation politico-militaire. Or on ne peut manquer d’observer à quel point ces évocations de la cour d’Alfred sont calquées sur des modèles littéraires préexistants : il s’agit en particulier d’un modèle d’origine proche-orientale, tiré de l’Ancien Testament (la cour des rois David et Salomon), et d’un modèle venu du monde carolingien tout proche (en particulier la cour de Charlemagne). L’historien se retrouve alors face à une difficulté de méthode : doit-il faire confiance aux sources ou récuser leur témoignage sous prétexte qu’elles sacrifient à l’imitation de modèles antérieurs ? En effet, l’influence de ces deux modèles a pu s’exercer de deux manières : en informant l’écriture de la cour (ce qui est avéré) ou en informant les décisions politiques du roi et de son entourage (ce qui est plus difficile à vérifier).

"Now that we are learning to hear Asser’s voice not through the ears of the Victorians, but with our own ears, with no reason at all to fear the voice of an intelligent and sophisticated hagiographer, we will at last be hearing a voice which Alfred himself heard.  And we may gain a richer and historically more accurate understanding of the function of hagiographic discourse in Alfred’s circle of scholars.  The primary function of hagiography at Alfred’s court may have been to help inaugurate the incipient cult of Alfred himself.  If so, it launched something that has lasted eleven hundred years: a cult that is alive and still kicking.  No mean achievement.  Well worth celebrating!"
At its Biennial Conference at Notre Dame University in 1999, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists set aside the evening of August 10 to commemorate the 1100th anniversary of the death of Alfred the Great.  Patrick Geary was Master of Ceremonies.  The main event was Simon Keynes’ now famous paper on ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great.’  This was preceded by my 20 minute paper on ‘Mythical Millenaries: The Victorian Quest for the Historical Alfred,’ my maiden speech to that body, presented here verbatim, including the handout on ‘Some key dates: 1849-1904.’

Imitating redaction criticism as practiced by Biblical scholars I offer here a close reading of ‘the anecdote of Alfred’s learning to read for Judith’s gift’ as a pericope, with particular attention to how Asser’s Latin prose condenses the curve of Alfred’s destiny into a figura too good to be false. This is the penultimate draft of a companion piece to ‘Asser’s imitatio of Einhard: clichés, echoes and allusions,’ EOLAS 7 (2014) 65-91 (#4 above) which concluded that “Asser ... invites us to watch him do what Einhard did not: contain the modus of Alfred’s life in a figura, a rhetorical gem, with its tight dramatic exchanges of short speech acts, simple gestures, and the book.”

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The Anglo-Saxon literary sources can be considered among the most important sources from the western Early Middle Ages. There can be found different sorts of subjects and themes, in prose as well in verse. Among some of these types there is what is conventionally called "wisdom literature". The aim of this paper is to present an introduction to this kind of literary construction and, at the same time, bring for the first time in Portuguese the poem Vainglory and one of the chapters of the Anglo-Saxon version of the work of Boethius, De Consolatio Philosophiae; both from their originals in Old English.

Durante o final do século IX, as ações tomadas pelo rei Alfred o Grande foram decisivas para a sobrevivência da Inglaterra anglo-saxônica contra os ataques dos vikings. Seu resgate cultural iria mudar a sociedade anglo-saxônica, reforçando as defesas do reino, a política e possibilitar a unificação da Inglaterra em meados do século X sob o governo do rei Athelstan. Entretanto, a razão principal para este resgate não era cultural, mas espiritual. O plano de Alfred era trazer seu povo de volta para Deus. Para esta tarefa, inspirado por obras como a Historia Ecclesiastica de Beda, um mito de origem foi forjado. Um mito que dizia que os anglo-saxões eram os herdeiros espirituais dos hebreus do Velho Testamento. E seus reis seriam descendentes de uma linhagem sagrada de um misterioso quarto filho de Noé.

The paper examines the early years of King Alfred's reign, from the perspective of his relationship to the viking armies. I argue that there was a kind of "coopetition" between them: a form of cooperation + competition which made him nearly a client king, but not quite.

For fan fiction based on the TV serial drama The Last Kingdom (2014-), some fan fiction authors use fragments of the translations of the Psalms by King Alfred of Wessex (849-899) to firmly ground their stories in the historical reimagination of the Anglo-Saxons. In the 2019 short story "AEthelflaed and Lagertha," fan fiction writer Bandi Crawford uses an Alfredian psalm to connect The Last Kingdom to another major TV series, Vikings (2013-). By developing bisexual and biromantic story lines along the lines of Alfredian Psalms, Crawford constructs a twenty-first-century neomedieval-based culture in which the Alfredian Psalms are reinterpreted or critically reexamined through a queer lens, thereby negotiating more diversity within a favorite show's story world.

With the advent of digitization and growing abundance of graphic and image processing tools, use cases for clipping using circular windows have grown considerably. This paper presents an efficient clipping algorithm for line segments using geometrical features of circle and vector calculus. Building upon the research with rectangular windows, this method is proposed with the belief that computations are more expensive (heavy) than other computations. Execution time can be drastically improved if we replace expensive computations with cheaper computations. The cheaper computations can be computed even more efficiently using parallelization thus improving time complexity.

"I’m going to tell an 8th C story about what happened when bilingualism met literacy, when Boniface met Gregory. And then I’m going to chart the plot of the story in the form of an abstract diagram. This schematic approach may help clarify Asser’s typological account of Alfredian biliteracy." This working paper is the script of a twenty minute paper I read in a  Session on “Toward a Theory of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England” organized by the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library at the Biennial Conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, Honolulu, July 31 2017.  Based on a lively exchange of collegial comments in the subsequent academia.edu "session" on this draft, I am now expanding it, first to 4,000 words, and then after further feedback from colleagues, to a 12,000 wd chapter. Your continued feedback and advice much appreciated.

В докладе анализируется география первого путешествия норвежца Оттара/Охтхере (Ohthere), рассказ о котором был записан при дворе Альфреда Великого в конце IX в., и делается вывод, что Охтхере скорее всего побывал в Архангельском краю, а не на Кольском полуострове.
This paper analyses a Norseman Ottar/Ohthere's first journey's geography. The conclusion has it that Ohthere most likely visited the Arkhangelsk region, not the Kola Peninsula.

Abstract from recently completed dissertation at The Catholic University of America, published and available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Also available Open Acces via CUA's Institutional Repository: http://hdl.handle.net/1961/cuislandora:60001

Dentro do estudo da Inglaterra anglo-saxônica (seculos V -XI), sem sombra de dúvidas, uma das figuras de grande destaque é Alfred o Grande, rei de Wessex (c.871-899). Sua importância para a história inglesa é vital para compreensão de todo o processo de unificação que resulta no nascimento do reino da Inglaterra, e suas iniciativas nas mais diversas áreas nos proporcionam um volume documental que corresponde à boa parte do material que temos hoje disponível para o estudo do que

The evidence that Asser thought Alfred was born in 849 is too slender to bear the weight that has been hung from it. The systematic dating of events from AD 849, the birthdate of Alfred preserved in the Cotton MS. version of Asser’s Vita Ælfredi, was probably absent from the source of both ‘The Annals of St Neots’ and John of Worcester, and may therefore have been unknown to Asser himself. Asser may have written his Vita soon after 887. The implications for Asser’s contribution to the Alfredian canon, and especially for his account of Alfred’s trip to Rome, are not trivial.
'In trying to settle where Asser belongs in the Alfredian canon it might prove prudent to accept the gambit proposed by Stubbs over a hundred years ago: to see what sense the Life makes if instead of trying to rectify what was dislocated in the margin, we simply sacrifice the Anno Ælfredi series altogether, take it off the board, and remove it from play. There will be losses and gains. We shall have to let go of our desire to know the exact year of Alfred’s birth. In return we shall gain a coherent representation of Alfred’s inner and outer life as constellated by three childhood virtutes: the story of the book, the trip to Rome in his eleventh year, and his conversion to Latin literacy in his twelfth — a ‘quintessentially hagiographic’ interpretation of Alfred’s modus vitae which deserves, and rewards, serious hagiographical readings and re-readings.'

Historians have been baffled by the way Asser interlaces allusions to Einhard, echoes of his own words, and hagiographic clichés.  Reading the Vita Alfredi as literature advances the current paradigm shift in our attitudes towards Asser, allowing us to appreciate the rhetoric and imagination that inform his imitatio of Einhard’s Vita Karoli.  Thomas Greene on literary imitation, Walter Berschin on Carolingian life-writing, Christopher Ricks on the poetics of allusion, Erich Auerbach on prefiguration and fulfilment, David Howlett on chiasmus, and John Hollander on self-echoing illuminate what Asser was doing with words and help us interpret and evaluate his achievement.

Resumo: Uma ausência significativa se faz notar na maior parte das obras sobre historiografia medieval, a Vita Alfredi Regis Angul Saxonum, de autoria do monge galês Asser, que narra a vida e os feitos do rei Alfred o Grande, considerado o primeiro rei inglês. Até mesmo na Inglaterra, de onde se poderia esperar o contrário, a obra de Asser não aparece com a frequência esperada. O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a questão, mostrando que a obra de Asser é muito mais que uma forma medieval de biografia ou um simples panegírico. Palavras-chave: Historiografia Medieval, Asser, Vita Alfredi Regis Angul Saxonum. Abstract: In most works on medieval historiography, there is a notable silence about the Vita Alfredi Regis Angul Saxonum, written by a Welsh monk called Asser, which has registered the life and deeds of King Alfred the Great, considered the first English king. Even in England, where one might expect the opposite, the work of Asser is not often quoted for this historiographical purpose as one could expect. The main aim of this article is to analyze the issue, pointing out the work of Asser is much more than a medieval form of biography or a simple panegyric.

co-edited with Paul E. Szarmach Eleven major scholars of the Anglo-Saxon period consider Alfred the Great, his cultural milieu, and his achievements. With revised or revived views of the Alfredian revival, the contributors help set the agenda for future work on a most challenging period. The collection features the methods of history, art history, and literature in a newer key and with an interdisciplinary view on a period that offers less evidence than inference. Major themes linking the essays include authorship, translation practice and theory, patristic influence, Continental connections, and advances in textual criticism. The Alfredian moment has always surprised scholars because of its intellectual reach and its ambition. The contributors to this collection describe how we must now understand that ambition. While I cannot upload the book, I have uploaded my own chapter, "The Old English Boethius," to https://ndiscenza.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/the-old-english-boethius-from-a-companion-to-alfred-the-great/.

co-edited with Paul E. Szarmach Eleven major scholars of the Anglo-Saxon period consider Alfred the Great, his cultural milieu, and his achievements. With revised or revived views of the Alfredian revival, the contributors help set the agenda for future work on a most challenging period. The collection features the methods of history, art history, and literature in a newer key and with an interdisciplinary view on a period that offers less evidence than inference. Major themes linking the essays include authorship, translation practice and theory, patristic influence, Continental connections, and advances in textual criticism. The Alfredian moment has always surprised scholars because of its intellectual reach and its ambition. The contributors to this collection describe how we must now understand that ambition. While I cannot upload the book, I have uploaded my own chapter, "The Old English Boethius," to https://ndiscenza.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/the-old-english-boethius-from-a-companion-to-alfred-the-great/.

Building upon several years' research and several changes of opinion in that time (beginning with the essay linked below), this paper set out to do a number of things. First and foremost, to make a case for understanding 'Hebbeshamm' (sorry, can't format in italics), the promulgation place of a charter of King Alfred dated 882, as being commensurate with Epsom in Surrey. The site of the assembly at which this grant was witnessed may be localised at Nutshambles, part of the meeting place of Copthorne Hundred in the south-west corner of Epsom parish. Second, to elevate the charter (which is said to have been created while "on military service") to its rightful place among the precious morsels of evidence for intermittent military operations in the years 878-92, usually thought of as a period of peace and reconstruction. Thirdly, and at such a broader level that it was only touched upon briefly, to suggest previous suggestions about how to differentiate place-names in Old English ham ("homestead, village" etc.) from ones in hamm ("hemmed-in land, river meadow" etc.) in the absence of conclusive early attestations have been misguided and marked by inherent preconceptions.

Within this paper I use the case study of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Latin 5574, fols. 1-39, a book containing five hagiographical narratives, as a means of considering the nature and extent of the consumption of Latin hagiography in England in c. 900. To date, this manuscript has received little scholarly attention, yet its content provide good further evidence for the relative vitality of Mercian literary culture, for Frankish influence in England at this time and, furthermore, for the popularity of certain saints in England. I suggest that the patron of this book may well have been female and that the production of this book may have been linked with the acquisition of relics.