Besides the hint which his translation of Boethius gives, it is on another account probable that Alfred took a broad view of religious questions. If the evidence is to be accepted as sufficient, he was a patron of Johannes Scotus Erigena. John the Scot, that is, as we should now say, the Irishman, had made the Continent too hot to hold him by the breadth of his religious views. He refused to distinguish religion from philosophy, an attitude of mind which may have specially influenced Alfred, who had probably known him as a boy at the court of Charles the Bald, where John acted as tutor to Judith. He had maintained, too, that authority, when it is not confirmed by reason, is of no value. He had made a determined stand against the new and materialistic teaching on the Real Presence, known as transubstantiation. He found a refuge at the court of Alfred. This can scarcely have meant less than that Alfred, to some extent at least, shared his opinions; and if that was so, we see an additional reason for Alfred’s admiration of Boethius, and we have some explanation of the character of the provisions of the will by which the king disposed of his property. In those days, and in days earlier still, to teach an unpopular opinion was a dangerous thing. Great violence was not unknown in schools of learning. Even in modern times we hear a good deal of the violence of students in Paris and in other universities of the Continent. When Archbishop Theodore came over to England in 664 and began to teach, there were very sharp passages at arms between the teacher and the Irish students who attended his lectures. Aldhelm was a student at Canterbury at the time, and he describes one of these encounters, where the Irish students baited their lecturer, Archbishop though he was. The old student and lecturer of the University of Athens was more than a match for them. “He treated them,” Aldhelm wrote to a friend, “as the truculent boar treats the Molossian hounds. He tore them with the tusk of grammar, and shot them with the deep and sharp syllogisms of chronography, till they cast away their weapons and hurriedly fled to the recesses of their dens.” In Wessex the students went further still. One John—almost certainly not the famous John of whom we are speaking, though mediæval writers took him to be the same—so irritated the students of the great school of Malmesbury, that they set on him with the sharp iron styles of the time, which represented our modern pens, and inflicted wounds of which he died. William of Malmesbury gives the epitaph of this John from a tomb on the left side of the altar at Malmesbury; he is described as the holy sophist John, and is said to have been a martyr. William does not absolutely identify him with Johannes Erigena, but he describes him as Johannes Scottus, and says that he had been at the court of Charles the Bald, and was attracted by the munificence of Alfred. We may fairly