Asser

• 1. Introduction

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  Asser, a Welsh monk who died around 909, wrote the main surviving account of the life of Alfred the Great. On the morning of Saturday, the 23rd of October 1731, fire broke out in the library that held the only copy of that account to reach modern times. The manuscript was lost in the blaze. Yet the book did not vanish. It still tells us far more about Alfred than any source tells us about another early English ruler. How did a monk from south-west Wales end up writing it? Why does the text stop without a conclusion? And why have some scholars argued that Asser never wrote it at all?

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• 2. A Welsh Monk

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  The name Asser may come from Aser, or Asher, the eighth son of Jacob in the book of Genesis. Old Testament names were common in Wales at the time. Even so, it has been suggested that Asser took the name when he entered the church. He may also have known a work by St Jerome on Hebrew names, which gave the meaning of Asser as blessed.

  John Asser and Asserius Menevensis are two other names under which later writers know him. Almost nothing is recorded of his early life, and he can be traced only from about AD 885 until about 909.

  His own Life of King Alfred places him at St David's, in the kingdom of Dyfed in south-west Wales. Asser makes clear that he grew up in that area, and that he was tonsured, trained and ordained there. He also names Nobis, a bishop of St David's who died in 873 or 874, as a kinsman. No record explains how Alfred first heard of this monk.

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• 3. Alfred's Offer

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  At the royal estate at Dean in Sussex, now East and West Dean, Asser first met Alfred, and he later described the meeting himself. His account of being recruited is a short passage, and it supplies much of what historians know about his life. Alfred prized learning highly. He gathered scholars from across Britain and continental Europe to build a centre of study at his court.

  In 885, several Welsh kings accepted Alfred as their overlord. Among them were Hywel ap Rhys of Glywysing and Hyfaidd of Dyfed, whose land contained Asser's monastery. Asser describes these events in some detail. A charter of Hywel's, dated to about 885, lists a witness named Asser, who may be the same man. That link may explain how word of him reached Alfred.

  Asser gives only one datable event in his account. On St Martin's Day, the 11th of November 887, Alfred decided to learn to read Latin. Counting back from that date, historians judge that the recruitment happened in early 885.

  Asser did not answer at once. He asked for time to consider, since he thought it unfair to leave his post in favour of worldly recognition. Alfred agreed to wait and proposed a compromise, with half of each year at St David's and half at court. Asser again asked for time and promised to return with an answer after six months.

  Back in Wales, he fell ill with a fever and was confined at the monastery of Caerwent for twelve months and a week. Alfred wrote to ask the reason for the delay. Asser replied that he would keep his promise once he recovered. He did recover, in 886, and he accepted the split arrangement. His colleagues at St David's welcomed the plan. They hoped to escape "damaging afflictions and injuries at the hands of King Hyfaidd", whom Asser says often assaulted the monastery.

  Asser joined other noted scholars at the court, including Grimbald of Saint-Bertin and John the Old Saxon. All three probably arrived within a year of one another. Asser's first long stay with the king was at the royal estate of Leonaford, probably from about April through December 886. Nobody knows where Leonaford stood, though a case has been made for Landford in Wiltshire. There Asser read aloud to the king from the books at hand.

  On Christmas Eve 886, Asser had still not won leave to return to Wales. Alfred settled the matter with gifts. He gave the monasteries of Congresbury and Banwell, a silk cloak, and incense "weighing as much as a stout man." Asser was then free to visit his new holdings and go home to St David's.

  After that, Asser seems to have divided his time as planned. He says nothing about Wales, but he names English places he visited, including the battlefield at Ashdown, Cynuit (Countisbury) and Athelney. He says he often saw Alfred hunting, and he met the king's mother-in-law, Eadburh, many times. She is a different woman from a namesake whose fate Asser relates elsewhere.

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• 4. Bishop of Sherborne

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  Sometime between 887 and 892, Alfred gave Asser the monastery of Exeter. Asser later became Bishop of Sherborne, in a year that nobody can name. His predecessor, Wulfsige, witnessed a charter in 892, and Asser first appears in the post in 900, as a witness to another charter. The change of bishops therefore fell between 892 and 900.

  Asser was already a bishop by then. Wulfsige received a copy of Alfred's Pastoral Care in which Asser is described as a bishop. He may have served as a suffragan bishop within the see of Sherborne. He may instead have been a bishop of St David's. Giraldus Cambrensis lists him as such in his Itinerarium Cambriae, though that work dates from 1191, three centuries later, and may be unreliable. A closer clue comes from Asser himself. He notes that King Hyfaidd sometimes drove out the bishops of St David's, then adds that "he even expelled me on occasion."

  Alfred credits Asser among several scholars who helped him translate Pope Gregory I's Regula Pastoralis, known in English as Pastoral Care. William of Malmesbury, a historian of the 12th century, believed that Asser also assisted with Alfred's translation of Boethius.

  The Annales Cambriae, Welsh annals probably kept at St David's, record Asser's death in 908. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes it under 909 or 910, depending on the version: "Here Frithustan succeeded to the bishopric in Winchester, and after that Asser, who was bishop at Sherborne, departed." Chroniclers began their year on different dates, so his death is usually given as 908/909.

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• 5. The Life of King Alfred

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  The book Asser finished in 893 carries the Latin title Vita Ælfredi regis Angul Saxonum, and it runs to fewer than twenty thousand words. Its date is known because Asser mentions the king's age in the text. In manner it resembles two biographies of Louis the Pious. One was written about 840 by an unknown author called the Astronomer, and the other by Thegan of Trier. Asser may have known both.

  Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, the Welsh Historia Brittonum, the Life of Alcuin and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were all familiar to him. So were Virgil's Aeneid, Caelius Sedulius's Carmen Paschale, Aldhelm's De Virginitate and Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, the Vita Karoli Magni. He quotes Gregory the Great's Regula Pastoralis, the work he and Alfred translated together. He also quotes Augustine of Hippo's Enchiridion.

  About half of the Life is little more than a translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entries for 851-887. Asser threads his own opinions and extra details about Alfred's life through that framework. He also adds material about the years after 887, along with general judgments on Alfred's character and reign.

  Critics have faulted Asser's prose for weak syntax, stylistic pretensions and garbled exposition. He loved archaic and unusual words, which gave his Latin a baroque flavour common among Insular Latin authors of the period. Some of his vocabulary is peculiar to Frankish Latin sources. That has led to speculation that he studied partly in Francia. He may equally have picked the words up from Frankish scholars at court, such as Grimbald.

  The Life stops abruptly, with no concluding remarks, and it is thought to be an unfinished draft. Asser lived another fifteen or sixteen years and Alfred six more. Yet no event after 893 is recorded.

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• 6. Audience and Silences

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  Place names offer the best clue to whom Asser expected to read his book. He takes care to explain local geography. At several points he gives an English name followed by its British or Welsh equivalent, as with Nottingham. Alfred's overlordship of south Wales was recent, so Asser may have wanted Welsh readers to learn the king's personal qualities and accept his rule. Other explanations fit too, such as an interest in etymology or Welsh readers within Asser's own household. Passages supporting Alfred's programme of fortification read as if aimed at English readers.

  Some things are missing. Asser's Life mentions no internal strife or dissent during Alfred's reign. Yet he admits that Alfred punished harshly those who were slow to obey his orders to fortify the realm, so obedience had to be enforced. The portrait is one-sided. Because Alfred was alive when it was composed, however, gross errors of fact are unlikely.

  Asser's additions to the Chronicle also preserve stories from earlier periods. One concerns Eadburh, daughter of Offa, who married Beorhtric, king of the West Saxons. Asser says she behaved "like a tyrant". He reports that she accidentally poisoned Beorhtric while trying to murder someone else, and he finishes with her death as a beggar in Pavia.

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• 7. Fire and Fragments

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  Byrhtferth of Ramsey, writing in the late tenth or early 11th century, copied large sections of the Life into his Historia Regum. That work was until recently attributed to Symeon of Durham. The only surviving manuscript, known as Cotton MS Otho A xii, was written about 1000. Medieval readers seem not to have known the book widely. One explanation is that Asser never finished it and so had no copies made.

  Still, echoes of the Life turn up elsewhere. The anonymous author of the Encomium Emmae Reginae, written in the early 1040s, seems to have known it. He was a monk of St Bertin's in Flanders, and how he learned of the work is unclear. Florence of Worcester folded parts of it into his chronicle in the early 12th century. In the second quarter of the 12th century, an anonymous chronicler at Bury St Edmunds compiled the Annals of St Neots. He drew on a version of Asser that differs from the Cotton manuscript and in places looks more accurate.

  Giraldus Cambrensis, writing a Life of St Æthelberht in the 1190s, probably at Hereford, quotes an incident from Asser set in the reign of Offa of Mercia, who died in 796. No surviving copy contains it. Giraldus may have seen another copy, or a different lost work by Asser. He may even have invented the reference, which is plausible since he is not always regarded as trustworthy.

  The Cotton manuscript had a tangled journey. The antiquary John Leland owned it in the 1540s, and it probably became available after the dissolution of the monasteries. Leland died in 1552. Matthew Parker held it from some time afterwards until his own death in 1575. Parker left most of his library to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, but this volume was not included. By 1600 it belonged to Lord Lumley, and by 1621 to Robert Cotton. In 1712 the Cotton library moved from Cotton House in Westminster to Essex House in the Strand. In 1730 it moved again, to Ashburnham House in Westminster, the manuscript's last address.

  Scholars therefore rebuilt Asser's text from many pieces. Transcripts of the Cotton manuscript existed, and a facsimile of its first page had been published, showing the scribe's hand. The extracts in other early works helped as well. Some transcribers had copied Parker's annotations as though they belonged to the text, which made editors' work harder.

  W. H. Stevenson's critical edition of 1904, with 130 pages of introduction, still supplies the standard Latin text. It also includes the Annals of Saint Neots, wrongly ascribed to Asser. Albert S. Cook translated it into English in 1905. An important recent translation, with thorough notes on scholarly problems, is Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge.

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• 8. Legend and Forgery

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  In 1603 the antiquarian William Camden published an edition of Asser's Life containing a passage about a community of scholars at Oxford. It says that in 886, the second year of Grimbald's stay in England, "the University of Oxford was begun". It names two scholars called John. One, a monk of St David's, lectures on logic, music and arithmetic. The other, a colleague of Grimbald, teaches geometry and astronomy before the king.

  No known source supports this. Camden based his edition on Parker's manuscript, and other transcripts of it contain no such material. The passage is now acknowledged as Camden's own insertion, though the legend itself first surfaced in the 14th century. Older books repeated it. Jacob Abbott's Alfred the Great of 1849 ranks the founding of "the great University of Oxford" among the king's most important measures for the intellectual improvement of his people.

  Doubts of a bigger kind arose in the 19th and 20th centuries, when several scholars called the whole biography a forgery. The most prominent claim came in 1964 from the respected historian V.H. Galbraith, in his essay "Who Wrote Asser's Life of Alfred?" He argued that anachronisms ruled out a date within Asser's lifetime. One was the phrase "rex Angul Saxonum", meaning king of the Anglo-Saxons, which he said did not appear until the late 10th century. Another was the word "parochia" for Exeter, which he read as diocese. The bishopric of Exeter was not created until 1050.

  Galbraith named Leofric, who became Bishop of Devon and Cornwall in 1046, as the true author. Leofric's motive, he said, was to justify moving his see to Exeter by showing an earlier precedent.

  The objections were strong. The title "king of the Anglo-Saxons" does occur in royal charters dated before 892. The word "parochia" can also mean the jurisdiction of a church or monastery rather than a diocese. Leofric would have known little about Asser, which makes a convincing forgery unlikely. The Cotton manuscript is dated to about 1000, and other early works that predate Leofric appear to use Asser's material. Dorothy Whitelock answered Galbraith in Genuine Asser, her Stenton Lecture of 1967, to the satisfaction of most historians.

  In 2002, Alfred Smyth proposed a different forger, Byrhtferth. His case rests mainly on a comparison of the Latin vocabulary of Byrhtferth and Asser. Smyth suggested a motive of lending Alfred's prestige to the Benedictine monastic reform movement of the late tenth century. The argument has not persuaded historians, and few now doubt that the Life is genuine.

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