Remembering, Forgetting and Inventing: Attitudes to the Past in England at the End of the First Viking Age

Abstract

‘Remember’, King Alfred wrote to his bishops, sending them a copy of the translation he had made of Pope Gregory the Great'sCura pastoralis, ‘remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men’. To remedy the twofold disaster consequent on this intellectual and pedagogic failure – not just the ransacking of the churches throughout England and loss of their treasures and books, but, worse, the loss to the English of the wisdom the books had preserved – King Alfred arranged to have the young men among his subjects taught to read in the vernacular. Set-texts for this programme were to be supplied by the translating of ‘certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know’. Among these was Boethius’Consolation of Philosophy, generally thought to have been translated by the king himself and to include some of Alfred's own musings. Towards the end of his text in the context of a discussion of the nature of God, eternity and the place of humanity in the divine plan, Alfred had Wisdom declare: ‘we can know very little concerning what was before our time, except through memory and inquiry, and even less concerning what comes after us. Only one thing is certainly present to us, namely that which now exists. But to God all is present, what was before, what is now, and what shall be after us. The central point at issue here is the disjunction between what an omniscient deity and frail humanity can know of the past, but it usefully introduces this discussion by linking the process of obtaining information about the past with that of personal memory.