proved the ablest rulers of their time.
But at the outset of his reign he stood alone, and what work was to be
done was done by the King himself. His first efforts were directed to the
material restoration of his realm. The burnt and wasted country saw its
towns built again, forts erected in positions of danger, new abbeys
founded, the machinery of justice and government restored, the laws
codified and amended. Still more strenuous were AElfred's efforts for its
moral and intellectual restoration. Even in Mercia and Northumbria the
pirates' sword had left few survivors of the schools of Ecgberht or Baeda,
and matters were even worse in Wessex which had been as yet the most
ignorant of the English kingdoms. "When I began to reign," said AElfred,
"I cannot remember one priest south of the Thames who could render his
service-book into English." For instructors indeed he could find only a
few Mercian prelates and priests with one Welsh bishop, Asser. "In old
times," the King writes sadly, "men came hither from foreign lands to
seek for instruction, and now if we are to have it we can only get it
from abroad." But his mind was far from being prisoned within his own
island. He sent a Norwegian ship-master to explore the White Sea, and
Wulfstan to trace the coast of Esthonia; envoys bore his presents to the
churches of India and Jerusalem, and an annual mission carried
Peter's-pence to Rome. But it was with the Franks that his intercourse
was closest, and it was from them that he drew the scholars to aid him in
his work of education. Grimbald came from St. Omer to preside over his
new abbey at Winchester; and John, the Old Saxon, was fetched it may be
from the Westphalian abbey of Corbey to rule the monastery that AElfred's
gratitude for his deliverance from the Danes raised in the marshes of
Athelney. The real work however to be done was done, not by these
teachers but by the King himself. AElfred established a school for the
young nobles at his own court, and it was to the need of books for these
scholars in their own tongue that we owe his most remarkable literary
effort. He took his books as he found them--they were the popular manuals
of his age--the Consolation of Boethius, the Pastoral Book of Pope
Gregory, the compilation of "Orosius," then the one accessible handbook
of universal history, and the history of his own people by Baeda. He
translated these works into English, but he was far more than a
translator, he was an