It is interesting to note the agreement of these gifts with the facts of the time. In 847 the Saracens had attacked Rome. The great basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul were suburban churches, outside the walls, and they were plundered and desecrated. We are accustomed to the idea of St. Paul’s being _fuori le mura_, but St. Peter’s, as we know it, lies in a district surrounded by walls. This fortified district is called the Leonine City. It owes its existence and its name to Leo IV., who was Pope when Ethelwulf sent Alfred to Rome as a boy. A concise account of the eight years’ papacy of Leo IV. would state that he devoted himself to building the fortifications of the Leonine City, that St. Peter’s and the Vatican might no longer be suburban, and to restoring the plundered and desecrated churches of the two Apostles. Hence Ethelwulf’s gifts to the two churches and the papal purse. If the dates and periods given by Asser are correct, Pope Leo died while the Saxon king and prince were in Rome, and was succeeded by Benedict III. In that case Alfred witnessed in the autumn of 855 the significant spectacle of an antipope stripping the Pope of his pontifical robes and ruling for a time in the Lateran. Under influences such as these Alfred was brought up. His brothers appear to have been sent out to great men of the kingdom to be educated, but Alfred was kept always at the king’s court, as the favourite son. He was specially noted for the attention with which he listened to the Saxon poems of earlier times, and the care with which he stored them up in an excellent memory. In after years he spoke of Aldhelm’s English songs and hymns as the best he knew;[7] and that was saying a great deal, for the national gift of song, both sacred and secular, was great. It would be difficult to find in the early records of any nation a sacred song more touching and beautiful than the stanzas of the “Dream of the Holy Rood,” incised in early Anglian runes upon the great cross-shaft at Ruthwell, itself a monument such as no other nation can show. The fuller form of this great song, embodying the earlier stanzas found on the Ruthwell cross, was discovered at Vercelli two generations ago, in the Wessex dialect of Alfred’s time. That Alfred knew by heart this among many other English songs may be taken as certain. That it made its religious mark on his mind cannot be doubted. But, Asser remarks with a severe comment on the neglect in this respect by his parents, the boy Alfred had no book-learning at all. He was trained in all bodily exercises, and he especially learned and practised the art of hunting in all its branches with surprising success; an art so practical then that Asser believed skill and good fortune in hunting to be “among the gifts of God, as we have often witnessed.” But book-learning he had none.