Asser makes no reference to his traditional skill as a harpist and minstrel. Probably it was a matter of course. Two hundred years before, Cædmon, in Northumbria, had fled the festive society of his labouring fellows, because he alone of them, when the harp was passed to him in turn, could not sing; and the sense of isolation in this respect wrought so strongly in his mind that in the dreams of the night he created song, and next morning he remembered the dignified and stately creation. Aldhelm was singing in Wessex in Cædmon’s time, sitting on the parapet of Malmesbury bridge, and beguiling people to sacred thought by the attraction of his secular lays.[9] We have no examples still surviving of English musical notation of Alfred’s time; but many examples exist of the next century, as, for instance, the manuscript written in Wessex about eighty years after Alfred’s death for Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester, which includes the kyrie _Rex Splendens_, composed by Dunstan, who was born in 925. There can practically be little doubt that Alfred had a similar notation, consisting of very rudimentary musical notes, with guide-letters showing time and expression. It was, however, the century after his death that saw the great development of this principle in England. Up to that time the tradition of the plain-song introduced by Augustine had been handed down from ear to ear. The chief use of our musical notation was to guard against the loss or serious variation of the traditional plain-song and the more complicated additions made by Dunstan and other skilled musicians. The Wessex churchmen learned their rugged plain-song so well, that after the Norman Conquest the monks of Glastonbury suffered death at the hands of the Norman soldiers rather than abandon their insular use for the lighter graces of the plain-song of William of Fescamp. Alfred’s warfare against the Danes began before he was king. It was in his eyes much more than a warfare against violent invaders of his territory; it was to him, above all, a religious war. That the enemy were pagans, and that part of their aim was to obliterate Christianity, that was his chief stimulus. To the Danes also it was a religious war. The Angles and Saxons and Jutes, whose lands they pillaged, were their own very distant cousins; they had in times past worshipped the same deities whom now the Danes worshipped. To the Danes they were renegades from the one religion which the Danes held for truth. Asser knew well the king’s feeling on this subject. He describes at some length the series of battles which brought Alfred into prominence, and he describes them from information received from Alfred. He never describes the combatants as English and Danes; he always speaks of them as Christians and pagans.