As a legislator, Alfred by no means accomplished all that has been attributed to him; indeed, when the facts of his life are considered, the marvel is that he effected as much as he did towards the improvement of the moral condition of his subjects. The statements that he divided England into counties, or that he instituted trial by jury, have long ago been proved to be baseless. What he actually did was to collect and codify the laws of that part of England which was under his sway--Kent, Mercia, and Wessex--preserving on the whole the customs established by previous legislators, like Ethelbert, Offa, and Ina. "I kept," he says, "those that seemed to me good, and rejected those that were not good." Throughout these laws may easily be observed an ardent zeal for justice, and a sincere desire of rooting out oppression and violence. They were indeed mild, if compared with those of later ages, seeing they punished most offences by fines; but the strictness wherewith Alfred caused them to be observed counterbalanced their lenity. If with respect to private persons the rigour of the law was somewhat abated, it was not so with regard to unjust magistrates, for to such Alfred was ever inexorable; and history informs us that he executed four-and-forty judges within the space of one year for corruption. Alfred was, moreover, himself a scholar, and a lover of learned men. As a scholar, he translated several books from Latin into English, for the benefit of his subjects. As Professor Freeman observes, his choice was limited by the fact that heathen authors were held in great dislike, and he, therefore, did not attempt to acquaint the English people with the beauties of Horace or Virgil. He translated, however, the _History_ of Orosius, the _Ecclesiastical History_ of Bede, the monk of Jarrow, which is our main authority for the century and a half that followed the conversion of England to Christianity, some of the works of Gregory the Great and Boethius' _Consolations of Philosophy_. This last was a work written by a Roman while under sentence of death, but there is nothing in the work to show that he was a Christian, although every one believed that he was one at the time when Alfred wrote. It is also supposed that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was put into its present shape in Alfred's time, in which case we owe him a great debt of gratitude. To regenerate religion and letters, he drew learned men from other lands, by whose aid the services of the Church were reanimated, schools were founded, and English prose, which Alfred, it should be observed, was the first to write, encouraged. Such men were Asser, who came from Wales, and who afterwards wrote Alfred's life, Grimbald, and John the Old-Saxon, who crossed over from the Continent; while nearer home, in Mercia, he discovered Werfrith and Plegmund who became Archbishop of Canterbury. [Illustration: THE "LADY OF THE MERCIANS" FIGHTING THE WELSH. (_See p._ 46.)] CHAPTER VI.