In our time when books are freely produced in great abundance, it is hard to appreciate the power and originality of King Alfred’s work in the field of literature. When we look about for his motives we find such as these: need of occasional retirement and solace in the midst of harassing affairs, desire for personal improvement and edification, strong intellectual appetites, etc.—but all these controlled by one chief and dominant purpose, that of national education. Looking at the external aspect of the king’s situation we might have judged it sufficient for him at that time to concentrate his energies upon the restoration of material prosperity and the strengthening of the national armaments. That the prior necessity of these was not overlooked, we have ample proof in the subsequent progress of Wessex. But this did not satisfy the kingly ambition of Alfred; he craved for his people the higher benefits of political life, their moral and intellectual and spiritual development. Curiosity may well prick us to ask from what source far-reaching aims like these so suddenly burst into our history, and that, too, at a time of exhaustion at home and apprehension from abroad. If King Alfred saw a connection between general education and the acquisition of wealth (as there is some indication that he did), this may partly explain the energy of his educational policy, but we still desiderate something more. If we might assume that being under a strong sense of what he had himself gained by his early education, he desired to impart the like advantages to his people, then and only then the problem would find its appropriate and adequate solution. The beginnings of modern education in the seventh century were quickened with the sense that something had been lost, and the whole movement was coloured with the sentiment of retrieval and recovery. Two great historical exhibitions of this effort are displayed in the Latin schools of Anglia and of Charlemagne, which are in fact but two parts of one movement, linked together by the name of Alcuin. King Alfred’s educational revival is isolated from the preceding by the wars and desolations of the Wicingas, and it starts with a new basis in the installation of the mother tongue as the medium of elementary teaching. To this innovation it is due that we alone of all European nations have a fine vernacular literature in the ninth and tenth and eleventh centuries. And the domestic culture of that era, I take it, was the cause why the great French immigration which followed in the wake of the Norman Conquest did not finally swamp the English language. ENGLISH LAW BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST BY SIR FREDERICK POLLOCK ENGLISH LAW BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST[36] At first sight Anglo-Saxon law may appear merely barbarous to the modern reader. In order to be just to it we must consider its surroundings.