So many efforts and so much foresight must necessarily have proceeded from a great and enlightened mind. Alfred had neglected nothing in order to add to his stock of knowledge. He had not studied during his childhood, in spite of his ardent desire to acquire knowledge, for there were no intellectual resources at the court of King Ethelwulf. The ancient kind of erudition which had already been remarkable in England, where the means of study, at the beginning of the eighth century, were far superior to anything of the kind which could be found upon the Continent, had become extinct during the wars with the Danes. "When I began to reign," wrote Alfred the Great in the preface to his translation of the Pastoral of Gregory I., "very few people on this side of the Humber could say their daily prayers in English, or could explain in English a Latin epistle, and I suspect that there was not a greater number on the other side of the Humber." It was thus that, notwithstanding his eagerness to instruct himself, Alfred had arrived at the age of thirty-five years without understanding Latin, and he only began the study of it in 884, after having made prodigious efforts to secure masters who were to instruct himself and his people. In the way of embassies, presents, negotiations, he spared no trouble in order to attract John, the old Saxon of the monastery of Corbie; Grimbald, monk at Saint-Omcr; and Plecmund, a learned Mercian, who had taken refuge in a solitary island of the county of Chester during the Danish wars, and whom he made archbishop of Canterbury; finally, he invited the monk Asser, living at the extremity of Wales, in the convent of St. David, and whom he soon secured, not only as a master, but as a friend. It is to Asser that we owe a biography of Alfred, so minute in its details that it proves beyond question the great intimacy which existed between the monarch and the historian. {56}