John Earle

“ By the sudden surprize with which the Danes had broken the peace and come upon him at Chippenham in the dead of winter, they had almost fulfilled their design and taken him captive. But he had fled, and they had Wessex at will, and were proceeding to divide and occupy the land. The king, with a few companions, had escaped into Selwood, and thence by wood and by fen, like hunted creatures, they eluded pursuit, but were never secure until they had passed beyond Pedrida. ”

“ As the course of investigation into the variety and unity of this composite Jewel brings it more and more home to the creative mind of Alfred, the conviction rises that this work represents no passing freak of artistic fancy, nor the fond elaboration of some fascinating idea (as in a sonnet) ; but rather that we have before us the thoughtful record of a period of life and a phase of some duration, containing serious reflections by one who had reached a higher stage of observation, a stage commanding a wider outlook. ”

“ In the Alfred Jewel the Boar’s Head appears to discharge a double function: one subservient, as affording a base or pedestal to the frame of the sacred effigy; the other servile, as a socket for the shaft whereby the elaborate and composite design is to be fixed in its destined place. ”

“ We at least know a number of things that have appeared plausible in their time, and are now no more to be thought of; namely, an amulet, a pendant to a collar of state, a decorated umbilicus, the head of a stilus, a military standard, the handle of a book-pointer, the tip of a sceptre.
Our review of the abortiveness of early speculations concerning the design and use of the Jewel drove us by a process of elimination to seek a place for it in the helmet. In favour of this new theory historical evidence has been adduced, such as has not been offered in support of any other explanation. ”

“ And, indeed, there is a certain advantage in having to reckon with this sceptical attitude of mind, insomuch as the presence of doubt has a stimulating effect in furnishing the discourse with a determinate aim and direction. It will set me on the alert, that I may not miss any incidental chance of a reflection tending to assure those who would be gratified to think that we do indeed possess a relic intimately associated with the person, and with the mind, of Alfred, king of Wessex. ”

“ If we make this change, we shall see that the sentence will become a trifle more like English, thus: ‘Alfred hight work me.’ Another movement is that which in process of time takes place in the usage of words. There is a fashion in the choice of words for the clothing of our ideas, and that fashion changes sometimes capriciously and fitfully, but for the most part so slowly and gradually that it takes an era of time to make the change conspicuous. Words are liable to this kind of alteration in various degrees, and this inequality of change is observable even in a sentence of four words. ”

“ ALFRED IN SOMERSET BEYOND PEDRIDA
When we have described the form and symbolism of the Alfred Jewel, and reviewed the various interpretations which it has evoked, and when we have moreover analyzed its design and considered each several feature, we have not as yet exhausted the matter of our theme. An important part of the problem remains to be discussed, and that is the place of its discovery, the how and the why of its deposit there, and the possibility of light to be derived from the historical associations of the locality. It was found near the Isle of Athelney. ”

“ Nevertheless there is a group of words which are still more unchangeable in signification, and these are the Proper Nouns. External changes of form they do admit, but not the internal change of sense. The name ælfred is the form prevalent on the coinage of his reign, but there are variations, thus: ælfred, ælbred, elfred, elfered; and there is the form alfred, which has become established in modern English in consequence of the fact that our earliest popular histories of the king were derived from Latin books, in which language his name was commonly spelt alfredus. ”

“ In like manner the nave is continually so sure, jolt the fellies on whatso they may jolt; and this even though the nave is somewhat apart from the axle. By this figure thou mayest understand that as the waggon is much more durably sound, the less it is parted from the axle; so are those men the freest of all from care (whether about anxieties of this life or of the next) who are fast in God: but in whatever degree they are asunder from God, in the same degree are they worried and harassed, both in mind and in body. ”

“ These sombre grenadiers dress up their lines so close as to leave little room for other trees. They suck the fruitful soil more than any other tree, and they repay their costly nurture with timber of inferior value. ”

“ But now, the fair places of the field are encumbered by the tall cousins of the nettle, and the most diversified of English counties is muffled with a monotonous shroud of outlandish and weedy growth.
In the animal world, likewise, the lapse of a thousand years has brought change. In the pastures the most frequent animal is the cow, and only on rare occasions, as we view the moors from some elevated ‘tump,’ have we the chance to see a little company of antlered deer careering over the open plain, clearing the rhines with an airy bound. ”

“ In Alfred’s time the eye was greeted by a variety of trees which are not observable now. The elm predominates all over the plain. I asked the occupier of Athelney Farm about the trees on his land, and he said there was hardly anything but elm. Of other kinds he had only two ash-trees and one beech; ‘but (he added) we find bog-oak in the moors, and it makes good gate-posts.’ The elms have driven out both oak and ash, and whatever other sorts they touched in their ‘wrastling’ progress. ”

“ This refined similitude was translated by king Alfred, out of the diamond-cut succinct Latin of Boethius, into the homely speech of his own people, by means of a concrete figure that was familiar to every son of the soil.
Accordingly some things in this world are subject to Fate, some are no whit subject thereto: but Fate, and all the things subject to it, are in subjection to Divine Providence. Concerning this I can rehearse unto thee a similitude, whereby thou mayest the better understand, which men be subject to Fate, 164 and which be not. ”

“ In Alfred’s time too, cow-keeping was a stock industry, and we read of the king as entertained incognito by one of his own cowherds (apud quendam suum vaccarium) .
But the proportion of wild to domesticated animals was far greater then than it is now. The whole stretch of country from Pedrida to the end of Exmoor, fifty miles long and twenty miles wide, was then almost a continuous forest, abounding with game of all kinds, but 114 especially with red deer, which still continues, though in diminished numbers. ”

“ George Hickes, in 1705, mentions some doubting critics, whose difficulty lay in the beauty and perfection of the work. They could not understand how such artistic work could proceed from Anglo-Saxon artists in the ninth century. But for himself, he added, the mere sight of the Jewel had been enough, and that from his first view of it he had never doubted that it was a personal possession of the great king Alfred [3] . ”

“ Elworthy’s works, The Dialect of West Somerset, and his West Somerset Word-Book. Especially to be noted is the ‘u’ of the West Country, which is radically one with the Welsh ‘u’ and with the French ‘u,’ while at the same time it has a very distinct local character of its own. Every Englishman who is conversant with the French language knows how hard it is to acquire the utterance of the French ‘u’ after the age of infancy. A like strangeness is experienced by English people born east of Pedrida, when they attempt to reproduce the western ‘u.’ In fact, this vowel-sound is Keltic ”

“ In the Minster Lovel jewel this member consists of a blank gold plate, but in the Alfred Jewel this surface is occupied with an engraving which is certainly allegorical. At first sight it seems to be no more than a decorated pattern made upon the idea of a tree with branches and blossoms and fruit [27] . But upon closer inspection this tree appears to be a sword with its point buried in a human heart, and when this is discovered it becomes plain that the branches and blossoms must be allegorical. ”

“ The Welsh at the back of those nations were98 always ready to co-operate with the invader, but that is not so here in the west. The Cornish have never made common cause with the heathen since the battle of Hingston Down, in which that coalition was quashed by Ecgberht. And we have a still better guarantee in the constant policy of Wessex ever since the days of Ina and Aldhelm. The territorial quarrel was then appeased, and the religious difference too. The West Welsh were conquered, but they were never wantonly humiliated, no man was ejected from his own. ”

“ The place of the find is one that naturally suggests direct and immediate connexion with the goings and comings of the king himself, for it lies near the centre of that region in which he spent some months of acute effort in the most critical juncture of his diversified and adventurous life. If our interpretation harmonize with the associations which are linked to the spot, and through the spot to the Jewel, probability is strengthened while the interest is heightened; but what possibility is there of bringing these39 associations to bear upon a costly book-pointer? ”

“ So it is with men of the middling sort; at one time he thinks in his mind about this earthly life, at another time about the heavenly; like a man looking with one eye to heaven and with the other to earth. Just as the spokes have one end sticking in the felly and the other in the nave, while the middle of the spoke is equally near to both, even so are the middling men in the middle of the spoke, and the better men nearer to the nave, and the meaner men nearer to the fellies: they are, however, in connexion with the nave, and the nave with the axle. ”

“ Some earnest and ardent minds would find solace and strength in writing poetry, and perhaps Alfred did so. If this Jewel is not the equivalent of such a poem it is nearly akin to it. In constructive art there certainly is a solace of a healing kind, and the Jewel before us answers remarkably to the situation. ”

“ If this surprizes us in an age when the minds of men were so much awakened, we should30 remember that the new movement was chiefly in the direction of physical science, and that little progress had as yet been made in the analysis of human history and the science of historical criticism.
From these abortive attempts at interpretation, we gather that this singularly elaborate phenomenon of a Jewel had the effect of setting curiosity and imagination awork in the minds of those who contemplated it, and that some theory, however precipitate, became a sort of necessity. ”

“ Both the eagle and the ouche, although exposed for long periods to the direct action of the soil, preserve a far higher degree of polish.
Yet the rough workmanship by itself cannot, it must be remembered, be held to preclude the Byzantine origin of this enamel, since, as there is not known to exist a single indisputably dated work of the Byzantine school in its primitive stages, it is impossible to assert that this school was not, during the lifetime of king Alfred, producing work as rude in execution as the Jewel. ”

“ The modern historian will not hesitate to say of St. Cuthbert that his relations to Alfred are wholly fictitious; but he cannot undertake to179 say the same of St. Neot. Nevertheless, they are equally out of the question so far as regards the icuncula. The idea that the Figure might be St. Neot is excluded by the homily, which places the death of St. Neot shortly before the troubles of Alfred, and the accepted date is 877. According to the most probable chronology we have been able to make out for the Jewel, it was fabricated before 866. ”

“ As on a waggon’s axle the wheels revolve and the axle standeth still and beareth the whole waggon and governs all the motion; while the wheel turns about, and the nave next to the axle moves more steadily and more securely than the fellies do: in such a manner that the axle is the highest good, which we call God, and the happiest men move nighest to God, even as the nave moveth nighest to the axle, and the middling sort are just like the spokes ”

“ The red deer still lives and breeds along the southern coast of the Severn Sea, and this is I believe the only part of Great Britain in which this right royal animal still ranges at large in all the freedom of nature. ”

“ There was a very great difference between the disposition of the West Welsh towards the Saxon and that of the ‘North Welsh’ on the opposite coast of the Severn Sea.
These pacific relations were not of recent date; they appear as a deliberate policy in the reign of Ina before the end of the seventh118 century, and even earlier indications of this tendency may be gleaned which carry us back two hundred years behind the reign of Alfred.
When in 665, Wina [40] , bishop of Winchester, consecrated Ceadda (St. Chad) , he had with him two British bishops as his assistants. ”