The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great

The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great

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The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great A Translation and Commentary on the Text Attributed to Asser Alfred P. Smyth

Alfred P. Smyth 2002 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 978-0-333-69917-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 978-1-349-40228-1 ISBN 978-0-230-28722-8 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230287228 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Asser, John, d. 909. [De Rebus gestis Aelfredi. English] The medieval life of King Alfred the Great : a translation and commentary on the text attributed to Asser / translated with a commentary by Alfred P. Smyth. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Alfred, King of England, 849 899. 2. Great Britain Kings and rulers Biography. 3. Anglo Saxons Kings and rulers Biography. 4. Great Britain History Alfred, 871 899. I. Smyth, Alfred P. II. Title. DA153.A8213 2001 942.01 64 092 dc21 [B] 2001048206 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02

In Memory of My Mother, Mary Josephine O Brien

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Contents Abbreviation Acknowledgement Preface Introduction ix xi xii xiii Translation of the Life of King Alfred 1 Commentary 55 1 A Tour around the Manuscripts 57 The importance of the Life of King Alfred 57 Manuscripts of the Life 64 The Cottonian manuscript 64 Byrhtferth s Northumbrian Chronicle 67 The Worcester Latin Chronicle attributed to John (alias Florence) of Worcester 69 The East Anglian Chronicle (or Annals of St. Neots) 72 The Encomium Emmae Reginae 76 The Ramsey Annals 79 The Life of St. Neot 79 Summing up the manuscript evidence 81 The 1574 Parker edition of the Life of King Alfred 84 The task of the historian 89 2 The Author of the Life 92 Unique information on King Alfred which is provided by the author 92 Problems presented by the Life in relation to what we know independently of King Alfred s career 95 The author s claims to being a contemporary witness 104 Who was the historical Asser? 108 What the author tells us of himself 110 The Welsh dimension in the Life of King Alfred 117 3 The Author s Latin Style 132 vii

viii Contents 4 The Author s Use of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 162 A framework for the Life 162 The author s miscalculation of King Alfred s age 176 Errors in the author s treatment of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 181 Other errors and inconsistencies in the author s text 193 5 Why Was the Life of King Alfred Written at Ramsey in c. AD 1000? 202 Notes 211 Index 269

Abbreviations Annals of St. Neots Æthelweard, ed. Campbell A.S.C. A.S.C., MS.A., ed. Bately A.S.E. Birch no. 561 East Anglian Chronicle E.H.D. Eng. Hist. Rev. Historia Regum Also known as The East Anglian Chronicle A. Campbell, ed., Chronicon Æthelweardi: The Chronicle of Æthelweard (Nelson Medieval Texts: London, 1962) Anglo-Saxon Chronicle J.M. Bately, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, iii. Manuscript A (gen. eds., D. Dumville and S. Keynes; Cambridge, 1986) Anglo-Saxon England, ed. P. Clemoes et al. (Cambridge, 1972 ) Charter no. 561 in W de G. Birch, ed., Cartularium Saxonicum: A Collection of Charters Relating to Anglo-Saxon History (4 vols. London, 1964; reprint of 1885 99 edn) Also known as The Annals of St. Neots English Historical Documents, D.C. Douglas, gen. ed., Vol. 1 edited by D. Whitelock (London, 1968, reprint of 1955 edn) English Historical Review in T. Arnold, ed., Symeonis monachi opera omnia (Rolls Series, vol. 1: 1882) HR 1 and HR 2 Two different recensions of extracts and summaries from the Life of King Alfred incorporated into the Historia Regum attributed to Symeon of Durham ix

x The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great Life of Alfred, ed. Stevenson Sawyer no. 346 S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, transl. Alfred the Great: Asser s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth, 1983) W.H. Stevenson, ed., Asser s Life of King Alfred, introd. by D. Whitelock (Oxford reprint 1959 of 1904 edn.) Charter no. 346 in P.H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography (Roy. Hist. Soc., London, 1968) Smyth, Alfred the Great A.P. Smyth, King Alfred the Great (Oxford, 1995) Worcester Latin Chronicle Also known as The Chronicle of Florence of Worcester and The Chronicle of John of Worcester

Acknowledgement I am grateful to Oxford University Press for kind permission to reproduce passages in revised form from Chapters 6, 11 and 13 of my book on King Alfred the Great (1995). xi

Preface I have been greatly assisted by the scholarly advice of my colleague Christopher Chaffin, Department of Classics, University of Kent, who has collated my translation of the Life of King Alfred with the Latin of Stevenson s Parker-Cotton text, and whose own immense understanding of Late Antique Latin authors has brought invaluable insights to bear on the Life. Mr Eric Christiansen, New College, Oxford, has also kindly read the translation and saved me from a number of infelicities. He has also provided numerous helpful comments on early English placenames and on historical issues raised in the text. I remain indebted to all those colleagues who encouraged me to publish the biography of King Alfred in 1995, and who are acknowledged in that volume. This book owes much to the inspiration of Dr Roy Hart, whose independent researches have transformed our understanding not only of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and The Chronicle of John of Worcester, but of learning in the late Anglo-Saxon period generally. This work was begun during a busy time in my life at St. George s House, Windsor Castle. I remain indebted to my friends and colleagues at Windsor who did so much to ensure that I had time for my own research. I must especially thank Very Rev. Patrick Mitchell, The then Dean of Windsor; Group Captain Ian Madelin; Mr Michael Orger and my Assistant, Mrs Sue Pendry. Sadly, Sir Patrick Palmer, the Governor and Constable of the Castle, who showed me so many kindnesses during my time at Windsor, died before I could thank him in this volume. The translation was completed at Canterbury Christ Church University College, where I am grateful to the Principal and Vice-Principal for their making precious space available in my day to include my personal research. Ms Leonie James provided me with invaluable assistance in my work as Director of Research during the final months of writing, as we struggled with other pressing administrative matters. Professor Sean Greenwood and his colleagues in the Department of History at Christ Church have offered me friendship as well as support. My wife, Margaret, has helped as always with bibliographical matters. Mrs Alison Guy and Dr Katia Pizzi have gone to great lengths to help with reading proofs. Audrey Green has provided invaluable help with the index. A particular word of thanks should be recorded for Luciana O Flaherty of Palgrave and Ruth Willats for the special interest which they have taken in the production of this publication. This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother who first taught me to stand up for what I believed to be right. Canterbury, 2001 xii

Introduction We should expect that the medieval biography of Anglo-Saxon England s greatest king would attract its fair share of scholarly interest and scrutiny. Alfred the Great occupies a two-fold pivotal role in English historiography first as the historical ninth-century scholar-king who saved Wessex and southern England from conquest at the hands of Danish invaders, and second, as an iconic hero in the saga of England s imperial destiny, the darling of Victorian nationalism. The study of how Alfred was perceived by later generations of the English establishment is almost as complex as the study of the historical king. What fuels the uncertainty surrounding our assessment of King Alfred is the fact that the only surviving medieval manuscript of the king s Life was destroyed in 1731, and that other surviving fragments of the work, as well as an early printed edition, suggest even the lost manuscript may itself have been seriously flawed. It is important for all students of the subject to understand that the translation and commentary presented in this edition represent a minority view that has been vigorously challenged since I first offered my ideas on this subject in my biography of King Alfred the Great in 1995. In summary, I believe that the medieval Life of King Alfred the Great is not what its author claims it to be. The author introduces himself in this work as Asser, a Welsh monk and scholar, who was the personal tutor of King Alfred. It is my contention that the Life of King Alfred is not a contemporary biography but a medieval forgery written at Ramsey Abbey in Huntingdonshire in c. AD 1000 by the monk Byrhtferth, who was also the author of a wide range of other historical and scientific works. Those few scholars who have in the past doubted, and continue today to question the authenticity of the Life of King Alfred are neither guilty of unpatriotic acts nor of trying to sabotage the subject, nor as one more hysterical critic has put it of dishonouring the dead. It has certainly never been my intention to be guilty of any one of those things, but there are times when the pursuit of free enquiry may have to cause upset in the order of paradise. Serious doubts would be raised about the health of any discipline where no significantly new questions had been asked, much less answers given, over 150 years of successive scholarly commentaries on one of the most central works of medieval English history. When historical investigation fails to concern itself with posing new and sometimes difficult questions about the past, it is unlikely to come up with answers which offer new insights into our understanding of it. No one takes it amiss in scholarly circles that we should xiii

xiv The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great question some minor and occasionally major assumptions regarding traditional interpretations of, say, the Viking Wars or the Norman Conquest. When W.H. Stevenson published his scholarly edition of the Latin text of the Life of King Alfred the Great in 1904, he protested in his Preface that he had attempted to approach it without any bias for or against it. Even if Stevenson failed to honour fully his commitment in his vast commentary on the Life, he did at least thoroughly review the welter of arguments put forward by those who had questioned its authenticity throughout the nineteenth century. In reality, however, while he faced each formidable objection to the authenticity of Asser s authorship in its turn, Stevenson likewise dismissed all of them in spite of his own admission that nothing was certain; that the objections were formidable; and that proof of authenticity of Asser s authorship was impossible to come by. Unfortunately for Alfredian studies, Stevenson s limited caution and all of his caveats have not always been taken into account by later scholars. For even as he presented what was immediately accepted as a definitive case in favour of the authenticity of this work, Stevenson was extraordinarily defensive about the outcome of the debate. He admitted that in spite of his 250-page commentary and notes, he had to qualify almost every statement or conclusion with a possibly, a perhaps, or a probably. 1 And although he may not himself have been conscious of it, he was forever looking over his shoulder at how the nineteenth-century historical establishment might view this highly sensitive subject. Already by 1900, belief in the authenticity of Asser as the biographer of King Alfred had become nothing less than an article of scholarly faith for some. As he reached the conclusion to his Preface, Stevenson declared: The profession of belief in its authenticity by such eminent historians as Kemble, Pauli, Stubbs, and Freeman agrees with my own conclusion. 2 It is not always a healthy sign to find one scholar appealing to the authority of another, when struggling to win acceptance for a contested opinion. Besides, neither Stubbs nor Pauli could be described as fervent in their belief in Asser. Were they airing their own reasonable scholarly doubts on points of detail today, both men might find themselves described as controversial in the tense atmosphere of current scholarly debate. It is clear from reading Stevenson s labyrinthine commentaries that he himself regarded the question of who wrote this extraordinary Life of King Alfred the Great as an ongoing question for further study. When Dorothy Whitelock came to write an updated introduction to Stevenson s edition in 1959, not only did she feel it was unnecessary to alter a line of the 1904 edition, but she declared: Stevenson did his work so well that the fifty-five years which have elapsed since he published his edition of Asser have brought to light little new material. While acknowledging a few helpful notes on the subject by Sisam, Wheeler and Schütt, she believed that Stevenson remained

Introduction xv sound, for instance, on matters relating to placenames, and that little needs correction in what Stevenson says of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. But Chronicle studies had moved on, and continue to move on, and the role of the translated Chronicle remains pivotal in our understanding of the Life of Alfred. As for arguments against the authenticity of Asser s authorship of King Alfred s Life, Whitelock believed that during the first half of the twentieth century no arguments of any weight against it have been published since Stevenson wrote this in the face of V.H. Galbraith s crucial paper presented as a Creighton Lecture in London in 1949. Galbraith s more developed criticisms of the Life of Alfred which appeared in 1964 were dismissed by Whitelock three years later in her Stenton Lecture on The Genuine Asser. Whitelock included a partial translation of the Life of Alfred in her monumental English Historical Documents volume of 1955. Her translation exhibited all the meticulous attention to detail which characterised so much of her scholarly work, but it included less than one third of the chapters in the whole text and significantly omitted several of the more problematic and contradictory passages. Her omission of Chapter 74 with its key passages on King Alfred s illnesses all of which are unique to the medieval Life can be explained only by Whitelock s unwillingness to confront such problematical evidence. Some, at least, of the scholarly tension in the debate which centres on the text of the Life of Alfred arises from a misunderstanding of the translation process, as it does also from a misunderstanding of the nature of historical debate. All language however precise affords us only an approximation of the complete thought process which inspired a speaker or writer in the first instance. Translation takes us, in turn, one step further away again from the original intentions of the author. Even simultaneous translation of speeches of latter-day politicians may lead to serious misunderstandings. Translation serves only to deflect meaning through yet another surface of the prism, and translation of an early medieval text the transmission of which may have been contaminated by extraneous material is inevitably open to a variety of interpretations. No one questions the scholarly integrity of Whitelock and the Stenton school. Her views on the authorship of the Life of Alfred were sincerely held, but they were held with such passion and authority that given the complex relationship between scholarship and patronage little room was left for an alternative view. Keynes and Lapidge, in their translation of the Life of Alfred in 1983, kept in step with Stevenson s commentary and notes of 1904 in regard to all the significant arguments, pausing here and there to qualify his ideas by way of minor adjustments. In essence, the 1983 English translation carried a commentary which mirrored Stevenson s thesis and supported Whitelock s pronouncements on the debate regarding authenticity. The translation of

xvi The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great 1983 was heavily influenced by a scholarly position taken up by Stenton and sustained by Whitelock. That is not to say that the 1983 translation was bad or lacking in scholarly integrity. Like all translators of a problematical text, its editors had to follow a consistent approach, and once having committed themselves to a genuine Asser thesis, they were left with no choice but to render the text in a consistent way opting for legitimate interpretations which remained in line with Stevenson s and Whitelock s approach. But while interpretations may be legitimate, it is also necessary to allow for alternative meanings in a text. The 1983 English translation of key Latin passages in the Life of King Alfred which contain glaring contradictions (in the original) or which might be suggestive of an authorship after King Alfred had died, was rendered, on occasion, to yield a sense that was supportive of a genuine Asser thesis. Other telling errors and inconsistencies within the Latin text as it has come down to us were amended to conform with current scholarly orthodoxies. Some aspects of the text, however, were more needlessly altered. King Alfred s enemies, consistently described by his medieval biographer as Pagans, were turned into Vikings, giving a false sense of ninth-century immediacy to a narrative of uncertain date. The present translation lays no claim to represent the definitive and original Latin text in English, for that is impossible due to the loss of the only complete medieval manuscript. Furthermore, this translation has been produced under the influence of an alternative interpretation regarding the origins, the authorship and the date of the medieval Life of King Alfred the Great. There is no sense in which I present this work as the true version of Alfred s Life with all the pejorative implications that might have for earlier printed editions of the text. Historians know that because of the uncertainties surrounding this medieval Life, there is no true version. Much controversy could be avoided if this fact were grasped by all contributors to the debate. But neither is it right to hold that one viewpoint is as good as another. This translation does strive to provide the reader with an English version of King Alfred s Life which is as close as possible to the Latin text as it survives in Archbishop Parker s 1574 printed edition as edited by Stevenson, and supplemented with key passages from the other surviving medieval fragments of the Life. Nothing has been silently omitted or amended. I have also identified (by use of italics) those passages which the medieval author borrowed into his Latin narrative from the Old English text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This will allow readers for the first time to assess the magnitude of the author s indebtedness to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle when compiling his Life of Alfred. It will be made clear in the Commentary that Byrhtferth of Ramsey involved himself more than any other Anglo-Saxon historian in producing versions of the Chronicle text both in the copying and continuation of vernacular editions and in the compiling of Latin versions of the

Introduction xvii Chronicle to serve regional needs in southern, eastern and northern England. My aim is to provide students of Anglo-Saxon history with a translation which allows them to form their own opinion as to the value of the Life of King Alfred. While no translator can be free of personal bias, I have consciously striven to provide a translation which stays as close as possible to the original Latin. The Stenton Whitelock thesis to the effect that the historical bishop, Asser, is the genuine author of the Life of King Alfred still enjoys widespread acceptance in leading scholarly circles today, and it must be said that my views on this subject are still those of a dissenting minority. On 8 December 1995, Professor Keynes came to the defence of Asser s authorship in The Times Higher Education Supplement 3 arguing that the Life of Alfred contained no errors or anachronisms that would be fatal to its authenticity and that it did not serve any identifiable purpose of a later forger. Keynes followed this initial salvo with a much lengthier and more constructive review of my work in 1996. 4 Professor Lapidge took up his pen for The Times Higher Education Supplement, in a more personal vein than Professor Keynes. 5 I had argued and continue to argue that the Life of King Alfred owes a marked dependence for its hagiographical motifs, on the Life of Gerald of Aurillac which was written in c. 940 by Odo of Cluny. Lapidge insisted that for this argument to hold good, it was necessary for verbal links to be demonstrated between the Latin in Odo s Life of Gerald and that in the Life of King Alfred. 6 Historians are aware that medieval writers were quite capable of borrowing literary motifs from other authors without imitating their Latin style. Lapidge went on to challenge any argument which suggested similarities between the style of Byrhtferth of Ramsey and the author of the Life of Alfred, in a vein not always consistent with what this scholar had written previously on Byrhtferth s style elsewhere. I replied to this contribution more in sorrow than in anger on 29 March 1996. 7 Professor Lapidge s notion that if he could prove it was not Byrhtferth of Ramsey who wrote the Life of King Alfred, then the principal pillar [in my biography of King Alfred] is removed and the book collapses under the weight of its own pomposity is as misplaced as it is intellectually flawed. The major brunt of my argument regarding the Life of King Alfred remains essentially the same as that of Galbraith. This is a source which from its own internal organisation and the content of its narrative proclaims itself to have been written long after its subject, King Alfred, had died. Critics of my thesis must address the multitude of problems inherent in the narrative as well as the issue of why there is such an overwhelming Ramsey connection with this text regardless of what Byrhtferth s personal contribution to it may have been. And like Galbraith and others before him, I remain unconvinced that the glaring contradictions within the text can be put down to a naive biographer offering pious theological and Gregorian insights on the duties of

xviii The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great an early medieval ruler. For while it may have been just possible for a ruler suffering from intermittent serious illness to lead, on occasion, in war, it was never possible for a man to have been highly literate and completely illiterate at one and the same time. And that is precisely what this Life tells us about its king. As for the Ramsey dimension, this cannot be discussed in crude topographical terms as a place too far removed from Alfredian Wessex to offer a plausible location for King Alfred s biographer. Ramsey was the intellectual power-house of tenth- and eleventh-century Monastic Reform, and since I first wrote on this subject in 1995, the argument for a Ramsey dimension has grown ever more compelling rather than less. It is interesting to find that while Professor Lapidge hoped for the speedy collapse of my case, and Professor Keynes predicted that the establishment will strike back... [with] arguments of sufficient weight to flatten a book as fat as this, the central concern of both scholars was with my views on the Life of King Alfred. Yet my biography of the king concerned itself at length with Alfred s military career, with the all-important Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and with the king s own writings. And while I agree with Professor Nelson that I allowed the spectre of Asser to loom too large in my biography of Alfred, I did nevertheless devote great space to the study of so many other aspects of King Alfred s life. 8 It was inevitable, given the deeply unsatisfactory state of the Genuine Asser debate during the 1980s, that my biography of King Alfred should become preoccupied with the biography written by Asser. A major argument in my study on King Alfred centred on the case that too much emphasis had been placed in the past on studying the medieval Life of the king and too little time had been devoted to the study of Alfred s own writings for the evidence they shed on his personality, his intellectual concerns, and on his thought world generally. While Professor Keynes lamented the destructive approach which I had taken in my investigation of Anglo-Saxon sources, Eric Christiansen took a more balanced view involving a wider vision beyond the obsessive preoccupation with the genuine Asser, pointing to a far more credible Alfred than we have yet seen. 9 Professor Campbell, while holding fast to genuine Asser orthodoxies, was generous enough to point out that even if I were completely wrong about the authorship of the Life of King Alfred, my 1995 biography had important things to say about the Alfredian annals. 10 The Alfredian annals, forming the core of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, have a major bearing on the Life of Alfred where they appear by way of a Latin translation embedded in that work. It is difficult not to conclude that the hysterical reception with which my views on the Life of King Alfred were greeted by a few scholars in 1995, proves the point that Asser s life of Alfred had been allowed to develop into a scholarly black hole over the past century. And that black hole has drawn far too much scholarly energy into its destructive vortex, precluding progress in other aspects of

Introduction xix Anglo-Saxon studies and stifling constructive debate and a free exchange of ideas. The caravan has rolled on for many scholars at least since 1995, and much new work is coming forward to enrich our understanding of ninth- and tenth-century England. Richard Abels book on King Alfred contains an appendix on The Authenticity of Asser s Life of King Alfred, 11 which, as its title suggests, adheres to traditional thinking on this subject. But Abels provides a fair and reasoned survey in a brief space which brings many complex strands in the argument up to date, and wisely refrains from offering too many solutions. Pauline Stafford has produced her Queen Emma and Queen Edith, 12 which although it has little bearing on Alfredian England, sheds much light on the eleventh century a time which many scholars are now coming to realise had a crucial bearing on the rewriting of the Anglo- Saxon past. Stafford s treatment of the Encomium Emmae, a celebratory piece on Queen Emma which contains definite echoes of passages from the Life of Alfred adds to our understanding of the social and political background to this work. 13 An ongoing series of detailed studies on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, including its Alfredian sections, have been undertaken by Janet Bately, Roy Hart, David Dumville and other scholars, with the result that simplistic views on the manuscript transmission of the Chronicle which were in vogue as late as the 1970s and 1980s have now given way to a much more complex and sophisticated picture. It is fair to say that notions of an Abingdon Chronicle, and of the relationship between the A-Text and later recensions, have been revolutionised by Hart s researches based as they are, on independent scholarly insights into late tenth- and early eleventh-century English historiography. It is also the case that in spite of the highly charged nature of the debate over the authorship of the Life of Alfred at times verging on scholarly meltdown some scholars who hold the orthodox view on authenticity, are nevertheless moving towards the centre ground. Since the first publication of my views on a Ramsey origin for the Life of Alfred in 1995, Professor Lapidge has endorsed Hart s researches on the Ramsey Annals as a source which began life at Ramsey in c. AD 1000 precisely the time when Byrhtferth was active there. Lapidge has also come to accept the possibility that Byrhtferth was responsible for the compilation of the tenth-century section of the Worcester Latin Chronicle, later ascribed to John of Worcester. 14 So we now have a situation where Byrhtferth of Ramsey is acknowledged to have been responsible for, or closely associated with, no less than three compilations which contain summaries or as some might argue alternative manuscript readings of the Life of King Alfred dating to c. AD 1000. These Byrhtferthian renderings of material from Alfred s Life are found in the Northumbrian Chronicle, the Worcester Latin Chronicle and in much more fragmentary (but none the less definite) form in the Ramsey Annals.

xx The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great And the date of all three recensions of material from Alfred s Life coincides precisely with the age of the oldest, only surviving and more complete manuscript of the Life (British Library Cotton MS Otho A.Xii). So the Ramsey connection and a date of c. 1000 have been reinforced by scholars from both sides of the debate, and the figure of Byrhtferth remains at centre stage. Other English translations of the Life of King Alfred the Great include those of J.A. Giles in his Six Old English Chronicles of 1848; followed in 1854 by the Revd. J. Stevenson s translation in his Church Historians of England. A more recent translation by L. Cecil Jane appeared in New York in 1960, where its editor presented a sensible and cautious appraisal of the difficulties presented by this text.