A contemporary of position and intelligence and of great wealth was that ÆLFRED who redeemed from heathen hands a noble volume of the Gospels, and conveyed it by a solemn deed of gift in his own name and that of his wife to the brotherhood of Christ Church, Canterbury[1]. That volume is the _Codex Aureus_, which is now in the Royal Library at Stockholm. The Will of this Alfred, who in the course of that document styles himself ‘Elfred dux,’ is one of the most precious relics of Saxon antiquity[2]. A few years after the king’s death, the Chronicle records, in 906, the death of an Alfred, who was Reeve of Bath. It has been argued that with such facts before us the ownership of the Alfred Jewel must be a matter of uncertainty, for we only know that it was ordered by a person of the name of Alfred. Such arguments may sometimes be heard from persons whose opinions are entitled to respect, but I am not aware that any one has undertaken to reason out and maintain this view in a published writing. And perhaps if we attend well to the whole of the evidence, we shall see no cause to marvel at the unanimity of authors in accepting this Jewel as a personal possession of king Alfred’s, and (in some measure, diversely estimated) as a product of his own artistic design. It is not the name by itself, but this name taken in connexion with the richness and costliness of the work, with the thoughtful ingenuity of its device and composition, and with the symbolic meanings which must be assigned to certain parts of the structure;—such evidences as these, again combined with certain external evidences, namely, the locality in which the Jewel was found, and any affinities apparent in the above data with the career or exploits of the king, or with his character and tastes,—when the ownership is questioned, we find ourselves face to face with an accumulation of evidence varying in quality and requiring to be judged by the delicate and sensitive standard of probability. In presence of such a problem we should not neglect the impressions and expressed opinions of persons whose instincts have been cultivated in the sphere of such probabilities. George Hickes, in 1705, mentions some doubting critics, whose difficulty lay in the beauty and perfection of the work. They could not understand how such artistic work could proceed from Anglo-Saxon artists in the ninth century. But for himself, he added, the mere sight of the Jewel had been enough, and that from his first view of it he had never doubted that it was a personal possession of the great king Alfred[3].