Not more than four years of rest seem to have been granted to Alfred after the repulse of this last invasion before death ended his labours. There can be little doubt that some part at least of that plentiful literary harvest which was described in the preceding chapter belongs to these closing years. Especially interesting is it to note that, according to the judgment of the most careful modern inquirers, the king’s metrical translation of Boethius should be referred to this period. The proem to that translation alludes to “the manifold worldly cares that oft troubled him both in mind and body” when he was turning it from Latin into English prose, and then again to the cares, apparently the yet heavier cares, “that in his days came upon the kingdom to which he had succeeded,” but which did not prevent him--so high was his value for the great _Consolatio_--from “working it up once more into verse” as the reader may now behold it. All these cares were now at an end, and ended, too, all his noble toil for the defence, the enlightenment and the guidance of his people. He died on October 26, 900,[151] in the fifty-third year of his age, and was buried in St. Swithun’s monastery at Winchester. In 903, however (according to the legend told by William of Malmesbury), as “the delirious fancies of the canons” declared that the king’s ghost, resuming possession of his corpse, wandered at night through their cells, the royal remains were transferred to the New Minster, founded by his son in fulfilment of a plan which Alfred himself had formed and had confided to his friend and spiritual adviser, Grimbald the Frank. In the reign of Henry I. the monks of New Minster migrated from their narrow domain within the city to a large and convenient site called Hyde Mead, on its northern side, and in their migration they took with them the body of the king. At the suppression of the monasteries Hyde Abbey fell into decay, and near the close of the eighteenth century the Hampshire magistrates purchased the site for the purpose of erecting thereon a county jail. The tombs were ruthlessly opened, the stone coffins were turned into horse troughs, the lead which covered a coffin, presumably Alfred’s, was sold for two guineas, and apparently the dust of the great king himself was scattered to the winds. No leader of the Danish army could have shown greater zest in the work of desecration. This New Minster at Winchester was consecrated by one of Alfred’s friends, Archbishop Plegmund, and numbered another of his friends, Grimbald, as first on its list of abbots. Its records, known as the _Liber Monasterii de Hyda_, furnish us with some valuable information concerning the reigns of Alfred and his sons.