It was his mother who gave him his first taste for book-learning. If we are to accept the dates and statements of Asser as on the whole correct, this must have been his step-mother, Judith, though one of the statements would refer it to Osburga’s time. Alfred was about thirteen when the event occurred; he remained illiterate, Asser says, till he was twelve years old or more. Those who take the other view make him almost four at the time of the following episode. There is no evidence that Osburga had any learning, though her love for Saxon ballad may be assumed. Judith, on the other hand, was the daughter of a house which paid much regard to learning and art. The beautiful Bibles of her father are in existence still, and we can well understand that she would try to win the affection of her step-sons by showing them treasures of a kind new to them. No one who has had the privilege of handling and examining the books in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris can ever forget the beauty of the manuscripts which belonged to Charles le Chauve, Judith’s father. The ivory covers of his Psalter and his Book of the Gospels, the beauty of the interior of those books, and the fineness of his St. Denis Bible and his Metz Bible (which is possibly the Bible prepared at Tours for Charlemagne under the care of Alcuin), abundantly convince us of the artistic taste of his family. Their evidence could be largely supplemented from the still-existing manuscripts of Charlemagne, Louis le Débonnaire, and Lothaire. His mother, then, one day showed to Alfred and an older brother an ornamental manuscript of Saxon poems. To tempt them to begin to learn—again the act of one who had not been responsible for their ignorance of book-learning—she said she would give the book to the boy who could first learn to read it. Alfred was delighted with the beauty of the initial letter. He might well be delighted if it approached the beauty of the Lindisfarne gospels, wrought a century and a half before, or the very different style of beauty of the manuscript known as the Psalter of Athelstane, with its Byzantine type and Teutonic origin, parts of which Judith may well have seen and handled. The initial letter of the first Psalm in this Psalter would indeed have been a prize for which a boy might face the pain of learning to read, even a boy devoted to hunting.