King Alfred and the Cakes King Alfred and the Cakes Navigation By Ben Johnson | Comments “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” Rudyard Kipling. One of the best known stories in English history is that of King Alfred and the cakes. Children are taught the story where Alfred is on the run from the Vikings , taking refuge in the home of a peasant woman. She asks him to watch her cakes – small loaves of bread – baking by the fire, but distracted by his problems, he lets the cakes burn and is roundly scolded by the woman. When and where was this supposed to have taken place? By 870 AD, all the independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except Wessex had been overrun by the Vikings. East Anglia, Northumbria, and Mercia had all fallen and now the Vikings were preparing to attack Wessex. Alfred and his brother, King Aethelred of the West Saxons, met the Viking army at the battle of Ashdown near Reading on January 8th 871. After fierce fighting, the West Saxons managed to drive the Vikings back to Reading.

However that April King Aethelred died at just 22 years old, and Alfred became king. Alfred was not in good health (it is possible he suffered from Crohn's Disease) and the years of fighting had taken their toll. Alfred was forced to ‘buy off’ the Vikings and make peace in order to prevent them from taking control of Wessex. For the next few years an uneasy peace existed between the two sides. On January 6th 878 the Vikings under their king Guthrum launched a surprise attack on Alfred’s base at Chippenham. Alfred was forced to flee with just a small company of men into the Somerset Levels, an area he knew well from his childhood. It is here that the story about the cakes is supposed to have taken place. Alfred and his men were hiding in the swamps and marshes of Somerset, living from day to day, dependent on the local people for food and shelter whilst fighting a guerrilla-style war with the Vikings. Alfred decided to base himself at Athelney, a small island in the marshes connected to the settlement of East Lyng by a causeway.

Here in early 878 he built a fortress, reinforcing the existing defences of an earlier Iron Age fort. It was at Athelney that Alfred planned his campaign against the Vikings. Archaeological excavations have found evidence of metal working on the site, suggesting Alfred’s men forged weapons in readiness for battle. Gathering an army of around 3000 men from Somerset, Wiltshire and West Hampshire , he attacked Guthrum and the Viking army at Edington in May 878. This was a ferocious battle with no quarter asked or given. Alfred destroyed the Danish army and pursued the survivors as they fled to Chippenham where they surrendered. On 15th June, Guthrum and 30 of his men were baptised at Aller near Athelney. At the ceremony Alfred stood as Guthrum’s godfather. Afterwards a big feast to celebrate was held at the Saxon estate at Wedmore. Guthrum’s surrender and subsequent baptism later became known as the Peace of Wedmore.

By 886, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “All the English peoples acknowledged Alfred as their king except those who were still under the rule of the Danes in the North and the East”. In thanksgiving for his victory, in 888 Alfred had a monastery built on the Isle of Athelney. The location of the monastery, destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, is marked by a small monument erected in 1801. Tweet If you enjoyed this article, you might also like... Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians - The eldest child of King Alfred the Great, she played a vital role in uniting England... Kings and Queens of Wessex - We trace the history of Wessex through the story of its kings and queens... Winchester - King Alfred's capital of Wessex... Anglo-Saxon Sites - Browse our interactive map of Anglo-Saxon sites and remains... Advertising Who says King Alfred burned the cakes? | EurekAlert! Science News Who says King Alfred burned the cakes? University of Leeds Print E-Mail King Alfred burned the cakes, right? Wrong.

For a start they were loaves - and for another thing, the Vikings reckon their terrifying-sounding hero Ragnar Hairybreeks should take the blame for this ninth century catering disaster. University of Leeds professor Rory McTurk says the tale of Alfred and the cakes is probably the one story we all know about the Anglo-Saxon ruler, a detail as closely woven into popular history as Robert the Bruce being inspired by a spider and King Harold getting an arrow in the eye. But he insists it may be mere propaganda, from a time when much of Britain was under Viking control - the Danelaw - and when both sides used stories to bolster their own position and blacken the names of their enemies. Prof McTurk, of the University's School of English, says the story was used to mark a watershed in the conflict. "Alfred had suffered a series of defeats by the Viking armies - and was virtually in flight at the time," he said. "The story says he took refuge in Athelney, Somerset, where a swineherd's wife left him to watch the loaves cooking beside the fire. But Alfred was distracted by thinking hard about his fate and about how to fight back - and the loaves burned.

The woman reproved him, not realising he was the King." The English used the story to mark a turning point in his life. "Whether or not the legend is true, Athelney was of massive significance to Alfred," explained Prof McTurk. "He built a fort, rallied his troops and from this point onwards did much better against the Vikings." But the Vikings had their own stories, tales passed down by the invaders to justify their reasons for being in England. "The hero of one of their stories, Ragnar Hairybreeks, burned loaves too," he said, adding that the change from "loaves" to "cakes" in the story is a much more recent development. "The English stories portray the Vikings as devils," said Prof McTurk. "The slaying of King Aella of Northumbria in York in 867 is an example - the Vikings carving an eagle into Aella's back, and ripping out his lungs in a horrific sacrifice.

But the Viking tradition re-tells the story as a justified act of revenge." Over the 200 years that followed, the Viking settlers gradually assimilated into the population, but even after the Norman conquest they maintained contact with Iceland, the Orkneys and mainland Scandinavia. And the pro-Viking stories of the Danelaw period were re-told in the Icelandic sagas. "In the sagas from the 13th century onwards there is quite a lot of information about raids against the English," said Prof McTurk, adding that the intervening years, during which the stories were passed down by word of mouth, had allowed them to change, become distorted - and the propaganda to become "fact". Which is why we will never know for sure if Alfred the Great - or even Ragnar Hairybreeks - should have passed into legend as the most notorious baker of Anglo-Saxon times. ### Professor Rory McTurk's inaugural lecture "Who says King Alfred burned the cakes?" will be given at the University's Rupert Beckett lecture theatre at 5.30pm on Monday March 12. Admission is free, and the lecture is open to all. For more information Prof Rory McTurk is available for interview.

Contact via Simon Jenkins, University of Leeds press office, on +44 113 3435764, 07791 333229 Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system. 13.07.06, Irvine & Godden, eds., The Old English Boethius | Beechy | The Medieval Review tiffany.beechy@colorado.edu The Dumbarton Oaks edition of the Old English Boethius is, in its presentation and major editorial choices, true to the series' mission, shared by the long-running Loeb Classical series, to make available important texts from the ancient world to a wide English-speaking audience. The present volume presents the prosimetrical reworking of the all-prose Old English translation of the De consolatione philosophiae in a facing-page format with a readable Modern English translation and limited apparatus.

If the Dumbarton Oaks volume were the only recent edition to appear, it would perhaps have seemed inadequate given the choice to print only a derivative text (however closely contemporary) that matches the prosimetrical Latin original. But the same editors, Susan Irvine and Malcolm Godden, produced the compendious new standard Oxford UP edition of both the prose and prosimetrical texts in 2009, and the present volume thus has a very welcome place as a less stupendous (though quite elegant), complementary edition suitable for the general reader. [1] As the previous standard edition was published in 1899, Irvine and Godden's excellent editions are a vital update for the field and for those interested in the corpus of Old English literature. [2] Sometime around the late ninth century, Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae was translated into Old English prose. This translation was soon thereafter reworked to make into traditional Old English alliterative verse the passages corresponding to verses in the Latin.

The present volume includes the prosimetrical Old English translation of Boethius, with the prose and verse prefaces before it, as they once appeared in the sole surviving manuscript, the badly damaged London, British Library MS Cotton Otho A.vi. The choice of the prosimetrical version over the all-prose is a natural one for this volume, as it presents the closest Old English approximation of Boethius' original text; of course that effaces all sorts of questions of genre and translation strategy, but those are questions of interest to specialists, and specialists have the Oxford edition. What the Dumbarton Oaks provides, for the most part, is clarity. More importantly, together with the 2009 edition, the present volume represents a major contribution to scholarship in providing access for the first time ever to the prosimetrical version as it appears in its manuscript context, with alternating verse and prose. All previous editions have opted to print the verses separately as appendices to the prose.

That the new editions allow scholars and other readers to experience the prosimetrum qua prosimetrum is a significant step forward (the Oxford edition provides both the prose-only and the prosimetrical texts, while the Dumbarton Oaks edition includes only the prosimetrum). Printed after the prosimetrical text are verse prologues and epilogues associated with King Alfred and his translation scheme: the prologue to the Old English Dialogues of Gregory the Great, the prologue and epilogue to the Old English Pastoral Care (also of Gregory the Great), and the epilogue to the Old English Bede. These materials are of definite interest in relation to the Old English Boethius, as they provide more insight into how the various translations were framed by translators or compilers and thus placed within the larger project of Old English translation. They shed light on the attitudes of the Anglo-Saxons toward their Latin materials and toward the process of translation itself. However, it is here that some unevenness in presentation is apparent. It is not clear to me that a general reader--part of the target audience for the volume--will be able to make good use of these ancillary materials without more contextualizing background than is supplied in the introduction.

There is no general discussion, for instance, describing the setting in Alfred's day and recounting the reasons for his translation project--even if less is truly known about this than tradition has suggested--that would contextualize for a reader the various prologues and epilogues, the translations of the larger Latin works themselves, and the relation of the whole production to the Carolingian court. While some of the naive investment in lore evident in previous scholarship (the burned cakes, Alfred's authorship of the Alfredian translations, Alfred's Great-ness) can no longer be entertained, at least an introduction to the Old English text such as Sedgefield's paints some kind of picture of the times that gave rise to it. Such is surely called for in an edition meant for a non-specialist readership. Whereas the historical background to Boethius and his work is clear and helpful in the present edition, the reader is assumed to have a background in Anglo-Saxon and European early-medieval history to an extent that seems to confuse the readership. Similarly, the discussion of Old English verse at times makes use of technical terms sure to escape the grasp of a general readership, while elsewhere the introduction eschews jargon in favor of basic exposition.

For example, the editors refer to anacrusis and resolution, key features of Anglo-Saxon meter, without explaining the processes or defining the terms, and yet opt for "the device of investing an inanimate object...with a first-person voice" instead of the technical literary term, prosopopoeia. In a volume such as this, one should perhaps do both, that is, include the technical term but also explain it clearly, so as to draw a reader into the ambit of the scholarship. Another place where the general reader may be left behind is in the discussion of the prologues' and epilogues' varying degrees of conventionality in relation to the poetic tradition, as the editors again use but do not define terms such as formulaic system, which cannot be familiar to a general readership. As for the text itself, the Modern English translation is exceedingly clear and idiomatic. It will surely render the Old English Boethius accessible as well as engaging to readers. Most of the translation choices enable the reader to see clearly the Anglo-Saxon translator grappling with a problem in the original and working it out in his native idiom in a way that seems idiomatic in Modern English today--truly an achievement.

It also brings to print a Modern English translation that matches current as opposed to turn-of-the-century thinking regarding emendation. The translation of Sedgfield's, done in 1900, for instance, renders the Old English Wisdom, a masculine noun indexed consistently using masculine pronouns, as Philosophy, indexed by female pronouns, in order to match not the Old English source text being translated but instead the source text of the source text, the Latin original. [3] Thus a striking aspect of the Old English text is simply effaced in the Sedgefield translation. Irvine and Godden's translation reproduces the Old English Wisdom, as we have that word in Modern English, and uses masculine pronouns to refer to this figure, thus representing for a modern reader the mixed texture of the Old English version, which preserves some of the feminine imagery of the Latin Philosophia but nonetheless personifies Wisdom as male. My one criticism regarding translation choices is the use of italics to differentiate the second-person singular pronoun from the second-person plural (you/you), for which Old English has different forms.

While I am grateful indeed that the translators did not opt for the available dialectal y'all, or the colloquial-register-specific you guys, the choice to italicize for plural you creates an unwanted emphatic effect, since italics already exist in our typography to indicate emphasis. As one goes along in the text and comes across a string of italicized pronouns, one registers a sarcasm that is not appropriate. For instance, in Meter 27: "Why can you not wait for that death / in its bitter nature which the Lord created for you, / now that each day it hastens toward you?" (333). An asterisk, perhaps, would have marked each instance of plural you in a way that did not create unwanted inflection, since an asterisk is a standard marker of difference without bearing other inflectional information, as isolated in-text italics do. Overall, as an accessible volume making the Old English prosimetrical Boethius available to a wide readership, the Dumbarton Oaks Old English Boethius is excellent.

I do think the editors could have stepped back from the Oxford project a bit more in preparing their introductory remarks for a general audience, but the readability of both text and translation are of exceptional value to both the scholarly and the literary world. ---------------------------- Notes: [1] Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, trans. and eds., The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). [2] Walter John Sedgefield, ed., King Alfred's Old English Version of Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899). [3] Walter John Sedgefield, trans., King Alfred's Version of the Consolations of Boethius, Done into Modern English, with an Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900).

Copyright (c) 2013 Tiffany Beechy Alfred the Great and Anglo-Saxon England History > Dark Ages > Alfred the Great Alfred the Great BY DAVID ROSS , EDITOR King Alfred's struggle By 870 the Danes had overthrown the kingdoms of East Anglia, Northumbria, and Mercia, and were preparing to do the same to Wessex. Standing in their way was a young king of Wessex, Alfred by name. At first the fight went badly for Alfred; some of his allies found it more expedient to cooperate with the Danes, and in 877 he was pushed back to a small corner of the marshes around Athelney, in Somerset. Saxon Soldiers The tale of the griddle-cakes It is this time, at the low ebb of Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Danes, that is commemorated in the folk tale of Alfred and the griddle cakes. The story goes that Alfred was so low in his fortunes that he was forced to travel anonymously and seek lodging in a peasant woman's hut. Told to mind the cakes cooking on the fire, Alfred let his thoughts wander to his troubles.

The cakes burned, and the peasant woman gave her king a good scolding for his carelessness. True or not, (probably not, but it sounds good), the story illustrates the depth to which the young Alfred had sunk in his battle with the Danish invaders. From that point on, however, things began to look up. Alfred's triumph Alfred came out of the Athelney marshes and surprised the Danes under Guthrum at Edington, in Wiltshire. After a thorough victory for Alfred, Guthrum was chased back to his base at Chippenham, where he was besieged for two weeks. Eventually Guthrum surrendered, and agreed to retreat from Wessex, and also to accept baptism as a Christian. This baptism was solemnized at Wedmore, in Somerset, some weeks later, giving us what is known as the Peace of Wedmore. The Danes retreated to East Anglia, and Alfred got on with consolidating his gains. Alfred's Towns Alfred was an innovator and a thinker, as well as a successful warrior. He began a policy encouraging the formation of fortified towns, or burhs, throughout his lands, such that no place in Wessex was more than 20 miles from a town.

In exchange for free plots of land within the towns, settlers provided a defense force. The burhs were also encouraged to become centres of commerce and local government. (See our article on Saxon towns ) The Danelaw Alfred built a new and improved navy to better meet the sea-faring Danes on their own terms. He wrested London from Danish control and reached the agreement by which England was divided into two zones; the south and west, where Saxon law would apply, and the north and east, where Danish law ruled. This second territory became known as the Danelaw. Alfred's Legacy Alfred also did his bit on the cultural front. He established schools and encouraged the dissemination of knowledge. He is said to have personally translated several books from Latin into the Anglo-Saxon tongue. An untraceable myth has it that he established the first university at Oxford. From the depths of despair in 877, Alfred brought Anglo-Saxon England into a golden age of social stability and artistic accomplishment. He was one of the first kings who seems to have looked beyond his own personal glory to a vision of the future well-being of the nation he ruled. He has every right to be remembered as Alfred "The Great".

Dark Ages Britain: Alfred the Great: The Most Perfect Man in History? | History Today Alfred the Great: The Most Perfect Man in History? Anglo-Saxon England Alfred Political Barbara Yorke considers the reputation of King Alfred the Great, and the enduring cult around his life and legend. King Alfred of Wessex (r.871-99) is probably the best known of all Anglo-Saxon rulers, even if the first thing to come into many people’s minds in connection with him is something to do with burnt confectionery. The year 1999 saw the 1100th anniversary of his death on October 26th, 899, at the age of about 50. The occasion is being marked with conferences and exhibitions in Winchester, Southampton and London, but the scale of celebrations will be modest compared with those which commemorated his millenary, and culminated in the unveiling by Lord Rosebery of his statue in Winchester.

Alfred’s reputation still stands high with historians, though few would now want to follow Edward Freeman in claiming him as ‘the most perfect character in history’ (The History of the Norman Conquest of England, 5 volumes, 1867-79). Alfred is someone who has had greatness thrust upon him. How and why did he acquire his glowing reputation, and how does it stand up today? There can be no doubt that Alfred’s reign was significant, both for the direction of the country’s development and for the fortunes of his descendants. After the kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia and Mercia had fallen to the Vikings, Wessex under Alfred was the only surviving Anglo-Saxon province. Alfred nearly succumbed to the Vikings as well, but kept his nerve and won a decisive victory at the battle of Edington in 879. Further Viking threats were kept at bay by a reorganisation of military service and particularly through the ringing of Wessex by a regular system of garrisoned fortresses. At the same time Alfred promoted himself as the defender of all Christian Anglo-Saxons against the pagan Viking threat and began the liberation of neighbouring areas from Viking control.

He thus paved the way for the future unity of England, which was brought to fruition under his son and grandsons, who conquered the remaining areas held by the Vikings in the east and north, so that by the mid-tenth century the England we are familiar with was ruled as one country for the first time. His preservation from the Vikings and unexpected succession as king after the death of four older brothers, seem to have given Alfred a sense that he had been specially destined for high office. With the help of advisers from other areas of England, Wales and Francia, Alfred studied, and even translated from Latin into Old English, certain works that were regarded at the time as providing models of ideal Christian kingship and ‘most necessary for all men to know’. Alfred tried to put these principles into practice, for instance, in the production of his law-code. He became convinced that those in authority in church or state could not act justly or effectively without the ‘wisdom’ acquired through study, and set up schools to ensure that future generations of priests and secular administrators would be better trained, as well as encouraging the nobles at his court to emulate his own example in reading and study.

Alfred also had the foresight to commission his biography from Bishop Asser of Wales. Asser presented Alfred as the embodiment of the ideal, but practical, Christian ruler. Alfred was the ‘truthteller’, a brave, resourceful, pious man, who was generous to the church and anxious to rule his people justly. One could say that Asser accentuated the positive, and ignored those elements of ruthless, dictatorial behaviour which any king needed to survive in ninth-century realpolitik. Alfred and Asser did such a good job that when later generations looked back at his reign through their works they saw only a ruler apparently more perfect than any before or after. Alfred is often thought to have provided his own epitaph in this passage from his translation of the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius: I desired to live worthily as long as I lived, and to leave after my life, to the men who should come after me, the memory of me in good works. Alfred, particularly as presented by Asser, may have had something of a saint in him, but he was never canonised and this put him at something of a disadvantage in the later medieval world.

The Normans and their successors were certainly interested in presenting themselves as the legitimate heirs of their Anglo-Saxon predecessors, but favoured the recognised royal saints, especially Edmund of the East Angles, killed by the Danish army which Alfred defeated, and Edward the Confessor, the last ruler of the old West Saxon dynasty. St Edmund and St Edward can be seen supporting Richard II on the Wilton diptych, and members of the later medieval royal houses were named after them. Nor were Alfred’s heroic defeats of the pagan Vikings enough to make him the favoured military hero of the post-Conquest period. None of the Anglo-Saxon rulers qualified for this role. After Geoffrey of Monmouth’s successful promotion, the British Arthur was preferred – a man whose reputation was not constrained by inconvenient facts, and who proved extremely adaptable to changing literary conventions. However, Alfred was lauded by Anglo-Norman historians, like William of Malmesbury, Gaimar and Matthew Paris, and their presentations, and occasional embellishments, of his achievements would be picked up by later writers.

Alfred’s well-attested interest in learning made him the obvious choice to be retrospectively chosen as the founder of Oxford University when that institution felt the need to establish its historical credentials in the 14th century. Alfred’s lack of a saintly epithet, a disadvantage in the high Middle Ages, was the salvation of his reputation in a post-Reformation world. As a pious king with an interest in promoting the use of English, Alfred was an ideal figurehead for the emerging English Protestant church. The works he had commissioned or translated were interpreted as evidence for the pure Anglo-Saxon church, before it had become tainted by the false Romanism introduced by the Normans. With a bit of selective editing, Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical provision came to bear an uncanny resemblance to Elizabethan Anglicanism. Archbishop Matthew Parker did an important service to Alfred’s reputation by publishing an edition of Asser’s Life of Alfred in 1574, even if he could not resist adding the story of the burnt cakes which came from a separate, later, Anglo-Saxon source.

Perhaps even more significant for getting Alfred’s reputation widely known was the enthusiastic notice of him in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1570 edition), where material derived from sources of Alfred’s own time was mixed with stories with a later currency, such as his visit to the Danish camp as a minstrel which was first recorded in a post-Conquest account. It was also writers of the sixteenth century who promoted the designation of Alfred as ‘the Great’, an epithet that had never been applied to him in the Anglo-Saxon period. Comparable claims of the contribution of the Anglo-Saxons to English life were used to support radical political change in the seventeenth century, when it was argued, for instance, that the right of all freemen to vote for representatives in Parliament was a lost Anglo-Saxon liberty. The relative abundance of sources from Alfred’s reign, including his surviving law-code and Asser’s description of his interest in law and administration, naturally meant that attention was drawn to him by those searching for an ancient constitution to serve contemporary needs.

Alfred himself was an unlikely champion for the more radical movements, and was more readily adopted by those who wanted to show Stuart, and eventually Hanoverian, rulers, how they could become successful constitutional monarchs by emulating their most famous Anglo-Saxon ancestor. Robert Powell, in his Life of Alfred, published in 1634, attempted to draw parallels between the reigns of Alfred and Charles I, something which often called for considerable ingenuity, and his hope that Charles would share the same respect for English law as that apparently shown by Alfred proved misplaced. Rather more impressive as a work of scholarship was Sir John Spelman’s Life of King Alfred, which drew upon an extensive range of primary material and itself became a source for later biographers. The work was dedicated to the future Charles II when Prince of Wales, and was completed during the Civil War in 1642, in the royalist camp at Oxford. Spelman was to die the following year of camp fever, and publication of the biography was delayed until more propitious times. In fact, any attempts to interest Stuart monarchs in their Saxon forebears had only a limited success.

The Stuarts’ preferred cultural reference points were from the classical world rather than the history of their own islands. The common Saxon heritage of the Hanoverians and the Anglo-Saxons provided more fertile ground for the promotion of a cult of King Alfred. His first aristocratic and royal backers came from the circle which gathered around Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707-51), the eldest son of George II, and was united by the opposition of its members to the prime minister Robert Walpole. Walpole’s opponents called themselves ‘the Patriots’, and Alfred was the first ‘Patriot King’, who had saved his country from tyranny, as it was devoutly hoped Frederick himself would do when he succeeded his father. A number of literary works centred upon Alfred were dedicated to the prince. Sir Richard Blackmore’s Alfred: an Epick Poem in Twelve Books (1723) enlivened the conventional accounts of Alfred’s reign with an extensive description of his imaginary travels in Europe and Africa, in which were concealed many heavy-handed compliments to Prince Frederick.

Of much more lasting worth was Thomas Arne’s masque Alfred, which was first performed in 1740 at the prince’s country seat of Cliveden. The main text was provided by two authors already active in Frederick’s cause, James Thomson and David Mallett, but included an ode by Viscount Bolingbroke, one of the leaders of the opposition to Walpole who had defined their political philosophy in his essay ‘The Idea of a Patriot King’ (1738). A visual representation of this political manifesto was provided in Lord Cobham’s pleasure grounds at Stowe. Alfred’s bust was included alongside those of other Whig heroes in ‘The Temple of British Worthies’ completed in 1734-35 by William Kent. Alfred is described as ‘the mildest, justest, most beneficient of kings’ who ‘crush’d corruption, guarded liberty, and was the founder of the English constitution’, in pointed reference to qualities which George II was felt to lack. Alfred’s bust was placed next to that of the Black Prince, a Prince of Wales whose noble qualities were perceived as having been inherited by Frederick, particularly if he followed the example of King Alfred rather than that of his father.

The Stowe landscape gardens also contain a Gothic Temple, in which ‘Gothic’ should be understood as ancient Germanic. The building was dedicated ‘to the Liberty of our Ancestors’, and was surrounded by statues of Germanic deities (albeit in Classical pose), while the ceiling of the dome was decorated with the arms of the earls of Mercia from whom Lord Cobham claimed descent. This new interest in the Germanic past began to trickle down to other sectors of society. Those who could not afford to erect their own monuments to Alfred’s greatness might nevertheless find remembrances of him in the Wessex landscape. In 1738, the antiquarian Francis Wise, hoping to improve his promotion prospects at the University of Oxford, produced a pamphlet ‘concerning some antiquities in Berkshire’ in which he argued that the White Horse of Uffington had been cut to commemorate Alfred’s victory over the Vikings at the battle of Ashdown, and that all other visible antiquities nearby had some connection with the campaign. His claims were entirely spurious, but helped to publicise the idea that Alfred’s influence permeated the very fabric of the country.

Those who could not have a Saxon memorial in their grounds or in the nearby countryside could at least own a print of the new genre of History painting. Alfredian topics, especially ‘Alfred in the neatherd’s cottage’ (the cake-burning episode), were among those frequently reproduced. Alfred at Stowe was also remembered as one ‘who drove out the Danes, secur’d the seas’, and his role as defender of the country and supposed founder of the British navy ensured him increasing fame as the country found itself embroiled in frequent foreign wars as the reign of Frederick’s son, George III, progressed. A series of patriotic Alfred plays, opera and ballets were performed, particularly during the French Wars (1793-1815). More often than not they ended with the rousing anthem which had closed Arne’s Alfred, ‘Rule Britannia’, which became increasingly popular as an expression of loyalty to the crown under the threat of foreign attack. It was from this period that ‘Alfred’ became favoured as a Christian name at all levels of society.

As in other European countries, a new national pride in nineteenth-century England had an important historical dimension, and an accompanying cult of the heroes who had made later success possible. The English, it was believed, could trace language and constitutional continuity back to the fifth century when they had defeated the effete Romans, and it became increasingly felt that other, positive, facets of ‘the national character’ could be traced back this far as well. These characteristics were felt to have made those of Anglo-Saxon descent uniquely programmed for success, and to rule other less fortunately endowed peoples, and the best of them were represented by King Alfred himself. Alfred was fast being rediscovered as ‘the most perfect character in history’, and alongside his defence of constitutional liberties, his country and true religion, was added renewed admiration for his Christian morality and sense of duty. Anglo-Saxonism, and the accompanying Alfredism, could be found on both sides of the Atlantic. Thomas Jefferson had ingeniously argued that, as the Anglo-Saxons who had settled in Britain had ruled themselves independently from their Continental homelands, so the English settlers of America should also be allowed their independence.

He believed both countries shared an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and proposed a local government for Virginia based on a division into hundreds, an Anglo-Saxon institution widely believed then to have been instituted by Alfred. A less attractive side of this fascination with Anglo-Saxon roots was that it helped foster a belief in racial superiority, as celebrated in a shortlived periodical called The Anglo-Saxon (1849-50), which aimed to demonstrate how ‘the whole earth may be called the Fatherland of the Anglo-Saxon. He is a native of every clime – a messenger of heaven to every corner of this Planet.’ One of the chief supporters of The Anglo-Saxon, who wrote large segments of it if no other copy was available, was Martin Tupper, the author of several volumes of popular, highly sentimental and moralistic verses. Alfred was one of Tupper’s particular heroes, largely because he felt many of the King’s writings anticipated his own, and it was through his impetus that the millenary of Alfred’s birth at Wantage was celebrated in 1849, one of the earliest of all such jubilees.

The event was not the success for which Tupper had hoped, largely because he left arrangements rather late in the day and had no influential backers. Many of the details were still not fixed on the eve of the event to the indignation of the few local gentry inveigled into attending, but the event still managed to attract crowds estimated at 8,000-10,000 who enjoyed traditional games and an ox-roast, as well as Tupper’s specially composed Jubilee song: Anglo-Saxons! – in love are we met To honour a name we can never forget! Father, and Founder, and King of a race That reigns and rejoices in every place, Root of a tree that o’ershadows the earth First of a Family blest from his birth Blest in this stem of their strength and their state Alfred the Wise, and the Good, and the Great!

During the reign of Victoria, who gave birth to the first Prince Alfred since the Anglo-Saxon period (b.1844), King Alfred was accepted as founder of the nation and its essential institutions to such an extent that one commentator was moved to complain ‘it is surely a mistake to make Alfred, as some folks seem to do, into a kind of ninth-century incarnation of a combined School Board and County Council’. Alfred was no longer a mirror for princes, but an exemplar for people at all levels of society and, above all, for children. Charles Dickens’s A Child’s History of England (1851-53) can stand for many such works where Alfred was used to demonstrate the best of the English character: The noble king ... in his single person, possessed all the Saxon virtues. Whom misfortune could not subdue, whom prosperity could not spoil, whose perseverance, nothing could shake. Who was hopeful in defeat, and generous in success. Who loved justice, freedom, truth and knowledge.

So much had Alfred become the epitome of the ideal Victorian that Walter Besant, in a lecture on Alfred in 1897, thought it entirely appropriate to apply to him verse that Alfred, Lord Tennyson had written to commemorate Prince Albert. Alfred was no longer the totem of one political party. In 1877 Robert Loyd-Lindsay, Conservative MP for Berkshire and a perfect exemplar of the paternal landlord of Disraeli’s ‘Young England’ movement, provided Wantage with the statue that Tupper had hoped to raise in 1849, but for which he had failed to get funds. Wantage also got the grand occasion it had missed then as Edward, Prince of Wales, to whom Lindsay had once been an equerry, unveiled the statue carved by Count Gleichen, one of the Prince’s German cousins. In 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death, there were even greater celebrations to commemorate the millenary of that of Alfred.

Problems with the calculation of Anglo-Saxon dates meant it was widely believed then that Alfred had died in 901, rather than 899, which is now recognised as the true date of his death, but at the time it seemed particularly apposite to many that the great Queen and her illustrious forebear had died a thousand years apart. On the surface the Alfred millenary appeared to fulfil its aim, as advertised in the National Committee’s prospectus, of being ‘a National Commemoration of the king to whom this Empire owes so much’. The procession through the heart of Winchester to the site of Hamo Thornycroft’s giant statue of the King, included representatives of Learned Societies and Universities ‘from all lands where the English speaking-race predominate’ (needless to say, they were all white males) and members of the different armed forces. Alfred was further commemorated in the same year by the launching of a new Dreadnought, the HMS King Alfred. But in 1901 Britain was embroiled in the Boer War, and the priority was the reality of the present rather than an imagined past.

The National Committee did not raise nearly as much money as it had expected and had to abandon many of its ambitious plans, including one for a Museum of Early English History. Many were worried at the direction Britain’s imperial policy was taking. Charles Stubbs, Dean of Ely, took advantage of the millenary year to suggest that Alfred’s standards were not only in advance of his own age, but in advance of those of many statesman of the present day, especially in their conduct of the Boer War, which had been prompted by ‘insolence of pride ... by passion of vengeance ... by lust of gold’. But there was also a more positive side to the celebrations when Alfred was used, as he had been in the past, as a cloak for the introduction of change in society. It was not by chance that the statue was unveiled by the Liberal leader Lord Rosebery, for the former Whig support for British Worthies had never completely died away, and Liberals were prominent in the many commemorations of the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was a row over the statue of Oliver Cromwell, commissioned in 1895 by Rosebery from Thornycroft for the House of Commons, that precipitated the former’s resignation as Prime Minister.

The most active members of the National Committee were leading Liberals and others, like the positivist Frederic Harrison and litterateur Walter Besant, who were associated with them in the promotion of Working Mens’ Colleges or the London County Council, formed in 1888 with Lord Rosebery as its first Chairman. Most active of all in the promotion of Alfred was the secretary of the National Committee and mayor of Winchester, Alfred Bowker, who used the millenary as an opportunity to develop the profile and scope of the Corporation of Winchester by, for instance, purchasing the site of Alfred’s final resting-place at Hyde Abbey with adjoining land that could be used for public recreation (as it still is today). Lord Rosebery commented that the statue he was to unveil in Winchester can only be an effigy of the imagination, and so the Alfred we reverence may well be an idealised figure ... we have draped round his form ... all the highest attributes of manhood and kingship. Alfred, though no doubt gratified by his posthumous fame, would have trouble recognising himself in some of his later manifestations, and would find it difficult to comprehend, let alone approve, some of the constitutional developments he was supposed to have championed.

One hopes that it will not be possible for such a wide divorce between an idealised Alfred and the reality of Anglo-Saxon rule to occur again, but it is possible that Alfred’s symbolic career is not over. Now that Britain is relapsing into its regional components, who better than Alfred, the champion of the English language and Anglo-Saxon hegemony, to be a figurehead of the new England? Barbara Yorke is Reader in History at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. Her latest book is Anglo-Saxons (Sutton Pocket Histories, 1999). Pause for Prayer: Burning the cakes Burning the cakes There was a very famous English king by the name of Alfred. He lived more than one thousand years ago and, during his reign, worked hard to establish justice in the country. He made many wise laws and rebuilt the navy. Alfred’s reign was quite peaceful at a time when the lives of most monarchs were spent in waging war. Alfred was a very good king. However, if one asks most English children what they know about King Alfred, they will usually say that he burned the cakes.

In spite of all the wise decisions Alfred made during his reign, the one thing for which everybody remembers him is that he burned the cakes. What happened was that, at one time, King Alfred was escaping from some enemies who wanted to kill him. He decided to hide in a nearby forest and there, in a clearing, he found a small house. A widow lived there on her own, so the king thought that she would be willing to let him stay there for a short time, until it was safe for him to leave the forest and take up his rightful place in his kingdom. However, that day, the widow was very busy in the kitchen. She didn’t really have time to wait on the king and wasn’t very happy when he asked if he might stay with her for a while. The old lady grumbled a bit and then told King Alfred that if he wanted to stay in her house, he had better make himself useful. She was baking some cakes in her oven, but there were plenty of other jobs to be done. Alfred must take care of the cakes as they baked, whilst the widow continued with the rest of her work. King Alfred had not expected such a welcome.

He was very worried about how he was going to escape from his enemies, stay alive and rule England. He agreed to watch the cakes in the oven, but his mind was occupied with other things. A short time later, the widow came into the kitchen and discovered the king sitting in front of the oven. Clouds of smoke filled the room. Instead of taking care of the widow’s baking, he had let the cakes burn………..and that is why, in spite of all the good and brave deeds King Alfred performed in his lifetime, the one thing for which he is really remembered is that he burned the cakes. All of us would like to be remembered for accomplishing wonderful things in our lives. Which of us, when we were children, did not dream that one day we would be rich and famous? Is there anybody who did not imagine themselves performing some incredibly brave act of rescue that nobody else would dare, and thereby saving many lives? If we are honest, we all had such dreams, and, again, if we are honest, most of us are still waiting to be rich, famous and daring. Most of us will never achieve greatness.

Perhaps, when we die, we might even be remembered for a silly mistake, just as Alfred is remembered for burning some cakes. The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we are never important in the eyes of the world. Each of us is important to God. Each of us is important in the eyes of those who love us. That is of much more significance than the greatest of wealth and fame. Love changes everything and teaches us what is really valuable in life. Lord, you didn’t call me to be great. You made me very small and insignificant in the eyes of the world, but that doesn’t matter because I’m important to you and to those who love me. It doesn’t matter if people will only remember my mistakes. Grant that they will also remember my love. God bless, Alfred the Great for children | King Alfred KS2 homework help | TheSchoolRun gallery About A weak and sickly child with four older brothers, Alfred was an unlikely king. However from his youth he proved to be brave and intelligent, a man who valued wisdom and knowledge and saw himself as part of a wider Christian community. He was inspired by his early trips to Rome and developed a view of kingship based on firm moral and religious grounds.

Fierce Viking attacks threatened to destroy the Anglo-Saxon world into which Alfred had been born. By 870 the ancient kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia and Mercia had fallen to the Vikings, their kings replaced by puppet leaders who were loyal to their Viking overlords. As the last independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Wessex was under constant attack. Alfred and his brother King Aethelred were engaged in almost continuous warfare. Although they won some victories they were at times driven back into the heart of their land and forced to rely on guerrilla tactics. A fierce and brave warrior, Alfred is described as charging at his enemies like a wild boar. In 871 Aethelred died from his injuries and Alfred became king. Alfred’s personal qualities enabled him to rally his people and inspired them to continue their struggles even when the odds seemed overwhelming. Alfred proved himself to be a clear-sighted tactician, a valiant and insightful leader, courageous, but willing to deal with his enemies in order to buy more time for Wessex. By converting Guthrum and adopting him as a foster son he effectively neutralised one of his most dangerous enemies.

One of Alfred’s greatest innovations lay in the system of burhs or fortified garrisons that he established as part of his defences. Provisioned by the surrounding countryside, these well-defended settlements attracted merchants and craftsmen. Careful town planning laid the basis for later development and growth. Alfred introduced a rota system into the military which meant that farms and fields were not neglected during time of war and could continue to supply the army with provisions. Alfred also recognised the importance of a strong navy in preventing Viking attacks on the land. He built large warships and brought in foreign craftsmen to supply expertise where necessary. He also reissued coins with a higher silver content and a new design in order to restore faith in the economy. Taxation and a written system of laws, together with a keen sense of justice, enabled him to carry out his reforms. One of Alfred’s deepest regrets was the loss of knowledge which had resulted from the Viking destruction of the monasteries and the fall in literacy rates that had followed. He believed that all English freemen should be literate and that the clergy should be schooled in Latin. Alfred himself learned Latin when middle-aged in order to undertake the translation of important classical texts into English.

He imported scholars from overseas and set up a school at court. Alfred had a keen eye for posterity (what people in the future would think about him). He asked Bishop Asser to write his biography and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were commenced during his reign. Alfred’s sense of history and his own historic destiny were fundamental to the development of the English monarchy. His reforms helped to transform the society in which he lived and laid the foundations of the English state. His grandson Athelstan, building on Alfred’s successes, was recognised as the King of all Britain. Famous Friends Bishop Asser – a Welsh monk who was recruited by Alfred to join the community of scholars at Winchester. In 893 he began writing his Life of King Alfred. He became Bishop of Sherborne in the 890s. Guthrum – more of an enemy than a friend! He was king of the Danish chieftains and was actively fighting Alfred from 874. In 878 his surprise night-time attack on Alfred forced Alfred to hide out in the Somerset marshes. Guthrum was defeated by Alfred at Edington and as part of the peace treaty converted to Christianity taking the name Aethelstan.

Alfred became his godfather. He lived in East Anglia until his death in 890. Pope Leo IV – a Roman by birth, he was pope from 847-855. During this time Alfred visited him twice on pilgrimage. Pope Leo is said to have recognised the young Alfred’s abilities and appointed him a consul. The Battle of Ostia, a famous victory of the papacy over Saracen pirates, took place in 849. Pope Leo is also said to have halted the burning of the Anglo-Saxon quarter of Rome by making the sign of the cross. Related Videos Who was Alfred the Great? (a very brief history) contact us Alfred, 849-99, king of WESSEX (871-99), sometimes called Alfred the Great. The son of ÆTHELWULF, he shared his father's piety. When his brother ÆTHELRED took the Wessex throne (865), Alfred aided him in battles against the Danes, who threatened to overrun England. Unable to establish a clear victory, Alfred rid Wessex of the Danes by paying the DANEGELD when he became king in 871.

In 878, however, the Danes returned, and Alfred's flight to Somerset at that time is the basis for the legend about the king and a peasant woman's burned cakes. In May 878, Alfred triumphed over the Danes at Edington. This victory produced relative security, and Alfred began to institute reforms, including a code of laws combining Christian doctrine with a strong, centralized monarchy. His greatest achievements were the creation of a navy, the revival of learning among the clergy, the education of youths and nobles at court, the establishment of Old English literary prose, his own English translation of Latin works, and his influence on the extant form of the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE. If you are in the middle of reading Self-Reliance, simply exit out of this window and continue to read. If you have arrived at this page from somewhere else and would like to, Who Was King James Who Was King James? For the last three centuries Protestants have fancied themselves the heirs of the Reformation, the Puritans, the Calvinists, and the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock. This assumption is one of history's greatest ironies.

Today, Protestants laboring under that assumption use the King James Bible. Most of the new Bibles such as the Revised Standard Version are simply updates of the King James. The irony is that none of the groups named in the preceding paragraph used a King James Bible nor would they have used it if it had been given to them free. The Bible in use by those groups, until it went out of print in 1644, was the Geneva Bible. The first Geneva Bible, both Old and New Testaments, was first published in English in 1560 in what is now Geneva, Switzerland. William Shakespeare, John Bunyan, John Milton, the Pilgrims who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, and other luminaries of that era used the Geneva Bible exclusively. Until he had his own version named after him, so did King James I of England. James I later tried to disclaim any knowledge of the Geneva Bible, though he quoted the Geneva Bible in his own writings.

As a Professor Eadie reported it: "...his virtual disclaimer of all knowledge up to a late period of the Genevan notes and version was simply a bold, unblushing falsehood, a clumsy attempt to sever himself and his earlier Scottish beliefs and usages that he might win favor with his English churchmen." The irony goes further. King James did not encourage a translation of the Bible in order to enlighten the common people: his sole intent was to deny them the marginal notes of the Geneva Bible. The marginal notes of the Geneva version were what made it so popular with the common people. The King James Bible was, and is for all practical purposes, a government publication. There were several reasons for the King James Bible being a government publication. First, King James I of England was a devout believer in the "divine right of kings," a philosophy ingrained in him by his mother, Mary Stuart. Mary Stuart may have been having an affair with her Italian secretary, David Rizzio, at the time she conceived James. There is a better than even chance that James was the product of adultery.

Apparently, enough evidence of such conduct on the part of Mary Stuart and David Rizzio existed to cause various Scot nobles, including Mary's own husband, King Henry, to drag David Rizzio from Mary's supper table and execute him. The Scot nobles hacked and slashed at the screaming Rizzio with knives and swords, and then threw him off a balcony to the courtyard below where he landed with a sickening smack. In the phrase of that day, he had been scotched. Mary did have affairs with other men, such as the Earl of Bothwell. She later tried to execute her husband in a gunpowder explosion that shook all of Edinburgh. King Henry survived the explosion only to be suffocated later that same night. The murderers were never discovered. Mary was eventually beheaded at the order of her cousin, Elizabeth I of England. To such individuals as James and his mother, Mary, the "divine right of kings" meant that since a king's power came from God, the king then had to answer to no one but God. This lack of responsibility extended to evil kings. The reasoning was that if a king was evil, that was a punishment sent from God. The citizens should then suffer in silence.

If a king was good, that was a blessing sent from God. This is why the Geneva Bible annoyed King James I. The Geneva Bible had marginal notes that simply didn't conform to that point of view. Those marginal notes had been, to a great extent, placed in the Geneva Bible by the leaders of the Reformation, including John Knox and John Calvin. Knox and Calvin could not and cannot be dismissed lightly or their opinions passed off to the public as the mere ditherings of dissidents. First, notes such as, "When tyrants cannot prevail by craft they burst forth into open rage" (Note i, Exodus 1:22) really bothered King James. Second, religion in James' time was not what it is today. In that era religion was controlled by the government. If someone lived in Spain at the time, he had three religious "choices:" 1.Roman Catholicism 2.Silence 3.The Inquisition The third "option" was reserved for "heretics," or people who didn't think the way the government wanted them to. To governments of that era heresy and treason were synonymous. England wasn't much different.

From the time of Henry VIII on, an Englishman had three choices: 1.The Anglican Church 2.Silence 3.The rack, burning at the stake, being drawn and quartered, or some other form of persuasion. The hapless individuals who fell into the hands of the government for holding religious opinions of their own were simply punished according to the royal whim. Henry VIII, once he had appointed himself head of all the English churches, kept the Roman Catholic system of bishops, deacons and the like for a very good reason. That system allowed him a "chain of command" necessary for any bureaucracy to function. This system passed intact to his heirs. This system became a little confusing for English citizens when Bloody Mary ascended to the throne. Mary wanted everyone to switch back to Roman Catholicism. Those who proved intransigent and wanted to remain Protestant she burned at the stake ï¿½ about 300 people in all. She intended to burn a lot more, but the rest of her intended victims escaped by leaving the country. A tremendous number of those intended victims settled in Geneva.

Religious refugees from other countries in Western Europe, including the French theologian Jean Chauvin, better known as John Calvin, also settled there. Mary died and was succeeded in the throne by her Protestant cousin, Elizabeth. The Anglican bureaucracy returned, less a few notables such as Archbishop Cranmer and Hugh Latimer (both having been burned at the stake by Bloody Mary). In Scotland, John Knox led the Reformation. The Reformation prospered in Geneva. Many of those who had fled Bloody Mary started a congregation there. Their greatest effort and contribution to the Reformation was the first Geneva Bible. More marginal notes were added to later editions. By the end of the 16th century, the Geneva Bible had about all the marginal notes there was space available to put them in. Geneva was an anomaly in 16th century Europe. In the days of absolute despotism and constant warfare, Geneva achieved her independence primarily by constant negotiation, playing off one stronger power against another. While other governments allowed lawyers to drag out cases and took months and years to get rid of corrupt officials, the City of Geneva dispatched most civil and criminal cases within a month and threw corrupt officials into jail the day after they were found out.

The academy that John Calvin founded there in 1559 later became the University of Geneva. Religious wars wracked Europe. The Spanish fought to restore Roman Catholicism to Western Europe. The Dutch fought for the Reformation and religious freedom. England, a small country with only 4-1/2 million people, managed to stay aloof because of the natural advantage of the English Channel. The Dutch declared religious freedom for everybody. Amsterdam became an open city. English Puritans arrived by the boatload. The 1599 Edition of the Geneva Bible was printed in Amsterdam and London in large quantities until well into the 17th century. King James, before he became James I of England, made it plain that he had no use for the "Dutch rebels" who had rebelled against their Spanish King. Another irony left to us from the 16th century is that the freedom of religion and freedom of the press did not originate in England, as many people commonly assume today. Those freedoms were first given to Protestants by the Dutch, as the records of that era plainly show. England today does not have freedom of the press the way we understand it.

(There are things in England such as the Official Secrets Act that often land journalists in jail.) England was relatively peaceful in the time of Elizabeth I. There was the problem of the Spanish Armada, but that was brief. Elizabeth later became known as "Good Queen Bess," not because she was so good, but because her successor was so bad. Elizabeth died in 1603 and her cousin, James Stuart, son of Mary Stuart, who up until that time had been King James VI of Scotland ascended the throne and became known as King James I of England. James ascended the throne of England with the "divine right of kings" firmly embedded in his mind. Unfortunately, that wasn't his only mental problem. King James I, among his many other faults, preferred young boys to adult women. He was a flaming homosexual. His activities in that regard have been recorded in numerous books and public records; so much so, that there is no room for debate on the subject. The King was queer. The very people who use the King James Bible today would be the first ones to throw such a deviant out of the congregations. The depravity of King James I didn't end with sodomy. James enjoyed killing animals.

He called it "hunting." Once he killed an animal, he would literally roll about in its blood. Some believe that he practiced bestiality while the animal lay dying. James was a sadist as well as a sodomite: he enjoyed torturing people. While King of Scotland in 1591, he personally supervised the torture of poor wretches caught up in the witchcraft trials of Scotland. James would even suggest new tortures to the examiners. One "witch," Barbara Napier, was acquitted. That event so angered James that he wrote personally to the court on May 10, 1551, ordering a sentence of death, and had the jury called into custody. To make sure they understood their particular offense, the King himself presided at a new hearing ï¿½ and was gracious enough to release them without punishment when they reversed their verdict. History has it that James was also a great coward. On January 7, 1591, the king was in Edinburgh and emerged from the toll booth. A retinue followed that included the Duke of Lennox and Lord Hume. They fell into an argument with the laird of Logie and pulled their swords.

James looked behind, saw the steel flashing, and fled into the nearest refuge which turned out to be a skinner's booth. There to his shame, he "fouled his breeches in fear." In short, King James I was the kind of despicable creature honorable men loathed, Christians would not associate with, and the Bible itself orders to be put to death (Leviticus 20:13). Knowing what King James was we can easily discern his motives. James ascended the English throne in 1603. He wasted no time in ordering a new edition of the Bible in order to deny the common people the marginal notes they so valued in the Geneva Bible. That James I wasn't going to have any marginal notes to annoy him and lead English citizens away from what he wanted them to think is a matter of public record. In an account corrected with his own hand dated February 10, 1604, he ordained: That a translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek, and this to be set out and printed without any marginal notes, and only to be used in all churches of England in time of divine service.

James then set up rules that made it impossible for anyone involved in the project to make an honest translation, some of which follow: 1. The ordinary Bible read in the church, commonly called the Bishop's Bible to be followed and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit. 2. Or, since the common people preferred the Geneva Bible to the existing government publication, let's see if we can slip a superseding government publication onto their bookshelves, altered as little as possible. 3. The old Ecclesiastical words to be kept, viz. the word "church" not to be translated "congregation," etc. 4. That is, if a word should be translated a certain way, let's deliberately mistranslate it to make the people think God still belongs to the Anglican Church ï¿½ exclusively. 5. No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words, which cannot without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the text. All excerpts from Global Insights . ***For verification of King James homosexuality, I got my info from Global Insights.

You can also find more info at Otto Scott's "James I: The Fool As King" (Ross House: 1976), pp. 108, 111, 120, 194, 200, 224, 311, 353, 382; King James-VI of Scotland/I of England by Antonia Fraser (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1975)pp. 36, 37, 38; King James VI and I by David Harris Willson, pp.36, 99; James I by his Contemporaries by Robert Ashton, p114; and A History of England by Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Vol. 4, p.112. Check also A LITERARY HISTORY OF THE BIBLE by Geddes MacGregor who has devoted a whole chapter entitled "QUEEN" JAMES. The Mammoth Book of Private Lives by Jon E. Lewis, pp. 62,65,66 James White also makes mention of it in his book, THE KING JAMES ONLY CONTROVERSY.

and King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire by David Moore Bergeron , both available on amazon.com For those people who feel that the above is a result of the attack on King James by the 17th century tobacco industry are ignorant of the fact that his behavior and personal life were quite well known to his contemporaries. " He disdained women and fawned unconscionably on his favorite men." ENCYCLOPEDIA AMERICANA-pp. 674,675 "And shall I then like bird or beast forget For any storms that threatening heaven can send The object sweet, where on my heart is set Whom for to serve my senses all I bend?..." A poem written by King James to his homosexual love interest (pictured above, Esme Stuart). King James-VI of Scotland/I of England, by Antonia Fraser, New York 1975 The 1599 Geneva Bible: The Bible of the Pilgrims Now available for the first time in 394 years, this is the Bible the Pilgrims carried when they landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. The Puritans of that era considered the King James bible a "government issue" publication.

King James banned the Geneva Bible in England and made its ownership a felony. The Geneva Bible is famous for its "margin notes," authored by John Calvin, John Knox and other leaders of the Reformation. These marginal notes illuminate many difficult to understand passages and the pages have been expanded 20 percent for easier reading. Learn about the religion of your ancestors in the pages of this handsome six-pound leatherette bound Bible! To Order: ï¿½

Question: Which old English King is associated with having burned cakes?
Answer: Alfred