title: John Constable

texts: enveloping the entire landscape. One of the most expressionistic and powerful of all his studies is Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, painted about 1824 at Brighton, which captures with slashing dark brushstrokes the immediacy of an exploding cumulus shower at sea. <mask> also became interested in painting rainbow effects, for example in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 1831, and in Cottage at East Bergholt, 1833. To the sky studies he added notes, often on the back of the sketches, of the prevailing weather conditions, direction of light, and time of day, believing that the sky was "the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment" in a landscape painting. In this habit he is known to have been influenced by the pioneering work of the meteorologist Luke Howard on the classification of clouds; <mask>'s annotations of his own copy of Researches About Atmospheric Phaenomena by Thomas Forster show him to have been fully abreast of meteorological terminology. "I have done a good deal of skying", <mask> wrote to Fisher on 23 October 1821; "I am determined to conquer all difficulties, and that most arduous one among the rest". <mask> once wrote in a letter to Leslie, "My limited and abstracted art is to be found under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up".He could never have imagined how influential his honest techniques would turn out to be. <mask>'s art inspired not only contemporaries like Géricault and Delacroix, but the Barbizon School, and the French impressionists of the late nineteenth century. In 2019 two drawings by <mask> were unearthed in a dusty cardboard-box filled with drawings; the


title: John Constable

type: original

texts:
 drawings sold for £60,000 and £32,000 at auction. Gallery

 Selected paintings

 Dedham Vale (1802) – Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonThe Stour (1810) – Philadelphia Museum of Art
 Landscape: Two Boys Fishing (1813) – Anglesey Abbey, Cambs, NT
 Landscape: Ploughing Scene in Suffolk (1814, revised c. 1816 and 1831) – Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
  The Mill Stream, Flatford (1814) – Christchurch Mansion, IpswichThe Stour Valley And Dedham Village (1814–1815) – Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
 Boat-building near Flatford Mill (1815) – Victoria and Albert Museum, London
 Golding Constable's Flower Garden (1815) – Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich
 Golding Constable's Kitchen Garden (1815) – Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich
 Portrait of Maria Bicknell, Mrs. <mask> (1816) – Tate Britain, London
 Wivenhoe Park, Essex (1816) – National Gallery of Art, Washington,


title: Raj Patel

texts:
<mask><mask><mask> (born 1972) is a British Indian academic, journalist, activist and writer who has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the United States for extended periods. He has been referred to as "the rock star of social justice writing." Early life and education
Born to a mother from Kenya and a father from Fiji, he grew up in Golders Green in north-west London where his family ran a corner shop. <mask> received a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), from Oxford, and a master's degree from the London School of Economics, and gained his PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University in 2002. As part of his academic training, <mask> worked at the World Bank, World Trade Organization, and the United Nations. He has since become an outspoken public critic of all of these organisations, and reports having been tear-gassed on four continents protesting against his former employers. Career
<mask> is an educator and academic.He has written articles and books. He is possibly best known for his 2008 book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. In 2009, he published The Value of Nothing which was on The New York Times best-seller list during February 2010. In 2017, he published, with co-author , A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (University of California Press). He has been a visiting scholar at Yale University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Texas at Austin. <mask> is listed as a Research Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas at Austin. Activism

<mask> was one of many organizers in the 1999 protests in Seattle, Washington, and has organised in support of food sovereignty.More recently he has  resided and worked extensively in Zimbabwe and in South Africa. He was refused a visa extension by the Mugabe regime for his political involvement with the pro-democracy movement. He is associated through his work on food with the Via Campesina movement, and through his work on urban poverty

masks:
Rajeev "
Raj
" Patel
Patel
Patel
Patel
Patel
Patel


title: Raj Patel

texts:
 and resistance with Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Landless Peoples Movement. <mask> has written a number of criticisms of various aspects of the policies and research methods of the World Bank and was a co-editor, with Christopher Brooke, of the online leftist webzine The Voice of the Turtle. Film appearances
In 2012, he appeared in the National Film Board of Canada documentary Payback, based on Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He appears in the documentary film A Place at the Table which opened in the US on 1 March 2013. Honours and awards
In 2007 he was invited to give the keynote address at the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo graduation ceremony.He administers the organisation's website. In 2008 he was asked to testify on the global food crisis before the House Financial Services Committee in the USA. In 2009 he joined the advisory board of Corporate Accountability International's Value the Meal campaign. In January 2010 some adherents of Share International, following an announcement by Benjamin Creme, concluded that <mask> could be the Maitreya. <mask> denied being the Maitreya. Political views

<mask> is a libertarian socialist and has described himself as "someone who has very strong anarchist sympathies." In his book The Value of Nothing he praised the grassroots participatory democracy practised in the Zapatista Councils of Good Government in southern Mexico and has advocated similar decentralist models of economic democracy and confederal administration as templates to go by for social justice movements in the global north.He described himself in 2010 as "not a communist [or socialist] ... just open minded". Nonetheless, the analysis of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet,  published seven years later, locates its concept of "cheapness" within a Marxist framework. According to the authors, "Capitalism values only what it can count, and it can count only dollars. Every capitalist wants to invest as little and

masks: Patel Patel Patel Patel


title: Raj Patel

texts:
 profit as much as possible. For capitalism, this means that the whole system thrives when powerful states and capitalists can reorganize global nature, invest as little as they can, and receive as much food, work, energy, and raw materials with as little disruption as possible." This extrapolates a key formulation by Marx: “The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities.”

Quotes

Personal life
<mask> became a US citizen on 7 January 2010. In an interview with The New Yorker'''s Lauren Collins, he considers himself an atheist Hindu.BooksStuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (2008)Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice, Eric Holt Giménez, <mask> (2009)Food Rebellions! : Forging Food Sovereignty to Solve the Global Food Crisis (2009)The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (2010)
Forward to No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony Way by the Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers (2011)A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (2017), with Jason W. MooreInflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice'' (2021), with Rupa Marya

See also
Abahlali baseMjondolo
Landless Peoples Movement
Landless Workers' Movement
Slow Food
Via Campesina
Zapatista Army of National Liberation

References

External links

<mask>'s website
Stuffed & Starved Website
A list of journalism available online by <mask>

1972 births
Living people
Abahlali baseMjondolo members
Alumni of the London School of Economics
Alumni of the University of Oxford
Anti-consumerists
Anti-globalization activists
Anti-globalization writers
British anarchists
British atheists
British democracy activists
British economists
British food writers
British Hindus
British political writers
British social commentators
British socialists
British sociologists
Cornell University alumni
Criticism of capitalism
Deified people
English people of Indian descent
Gujarati people
Libertarian socialists
South African democracy activists
South African economists
Writers from

masks:
Patel
Raj Patel
Raj Patel
Raj Patel


title: Alfred the Great

texts:
<mask> (848/849 – 26 October 899) was King of the West Saxons from 871 to  and King of the Anglo-Saxons from  until his death in 899. He was the youngest son of King <mask>lf and his first wife Osburh, who both died when <mask> was young. Three of <mask>'s brothers, Æthelbald, <mask> and Æthelred, reigned in turn before him. Under <mask>'s rule, considerable administrative and military reforms were introduced, prompting lasting change in England. After ascending the throne, <mask> spent several years fighting Viking invasions. He won a decisive victory in the Battle of Edington in 878 and made an agreement with the Vikings, dividing England between Anglo-Saxon territory and the Viking-ruled Danelaw, composed of northern England, the north-east Midlands and East Anglia. <mask> also oversaw the conversion of Viking leader Guthrum to Christianity.He defended his kingdom against the Viking attempt at conquest, becoming the dominant ruler in England. Details of his life are described in a work by 9th-century Welsh scholar and bishop Asser. <mask> had a reputation as a learned and merciful man of a gracious and level-headed nature who encouraged education, proposing that primary education be conducted in Old English rather than Latin and improving the legal system and military structure and his people's quality of life. He was given the epithet "the Great" in the 16th century. Family

<mask> was a son of Æthelwulf, king of Wessex, and his wife Osburh. According to his biographer, Asser, writing in 893, "In the year of our Lord's Incarnation 849 <mask>, King of the Anglo-Saxons", was

masks:
Alfred the Great
Æthelwu
Alfred
Alfred
Æthelberht
Alfred
Alfred
Alfred
Alfred
Alfred
Alfred


title: Alfred the Great

texts: born at the royal estate called Wantage, in the district known as Berkshire (which is so called from Berroc Wood, where the box tree grows very abundantly)." This date has been accepted by the editors of Asser's biography, Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, and by other historians such as David Dumville and Richard Huscroft.West Saxon genealogical lists state that <mask> was 23 when he became king in April 871, implying that he was born between April 847 and April 848. This dating is adopted in the biography of <mask> by <mask>, who regards Asser's biography as fraudulent, an allegation which is rejected by other historians. Richard Abels in his biography discusses both sources but does not decide between them and dates <mask>'s birth as 847/849, while Patrick Wormald in his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article dates it 848/849. Berkshire had been historically disputed between Wessex and Mercia, and as late as 844, a charter showed that it was part of Mercia, but <mask>'s birth in the county is evidence that, by the late 840s, control had passed to Wessex. He was the youngest of six children. His eldest brother, <mask>, was old enough to be appointed sub-king of Kent in 839, almost 10 years before <mask> was born. He died in the early 850s.<mask>'s next three brothers were successively kings of Wessex. <mask> (858-860) and <mask> (860-865) were also much older than <mask>, but Æthelred (865-871) was only a year or two older. <mask>'s only known sister, <mask>, married Burgred, king of the midland kingdom of Mercia in 853. Most historians think that Osburh was the

masks:
Alfred
Alfred
Alfred Smyth
Alfred
Alfred
Æthelstan
Alfred
Alfred
Æthelbald
Æthelberht
Alfred
Alfred
Æthelswith


title: Alfred the Great

texts:
 mother of all Æthelwulf's children, but some suggest that the older ones were born to an unrecorded first wife. Osburh was descended from the rulers of the Isle of Wight. She was described by <mask>'s biographer Asser as "a most religious woman, noble by temperament and noble by birth". She had died by 856 when Æthelwulf married Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald, king of West Francia.In 868, <mask> married Ealhswith, daughter of the Mercian nobleman Æthelred Mucel, ealdorman of the Gaini, and his wife Eadburh, who was of royal Mercian descent. Their children were Æthelflæd, who married Æthelred, Lord of the Mercians; Edward the Elder, <mask>'s successor as king; Æthelgifu, abbess of Shaftesbury; Ælfthryth, who married Baldwin, count of Flanders; and Æthelweard. Background

<mask>'s grandfather, Ecgberht, became king of Wessex in 802, and in the view of the historian Richard Abels, it must have seemed very unlikely to contemporaries that he would establish a lasting dynasty. For 200 years, three families had fought for the West Saxon throne, and no son had followed his father as king. No ancestor of Ecgberht had been a king of Wessex since Ceawlin in the late sixth century, but he was believed to be a paternal descendant of Cerdic, the founder of the West Saxon dynasty. This made Ecgberht an ætheling – a prince eligible for the throne. But after Ecgberht's reign, descent from Cerdic was no longer sufficient to make a man an ætheling.When Ecgberht died in 839, he was succeeded by his son Æthelwulf; all subsequent West Saxon kings were descendants of Ecgberht and Æthelwulf,

masks: Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred


title: Alfred the Great

texts: and were also sons of kings. At the beginning of the ninth century, England was almost wholly under the control of the Anglo-Saxons. Mercia dominated southern England, but its supremacy came to an end in 825 when it was decisively defeated by Ecgberht at the Battle of Ellendun. The two kingdoms became allies, which was important in the resistance to Viking attacks. In 853, King Burgred of Mercia requested West Saxon help to suppress a Welsh rebellion, and Æthelwulf led a West Saxon contingent in a successful joint campaign. In the same year Burgred married Æthelwulf's daughter, Æthelswith. In 825, Ecgberht sent Æthelwulf to invade the Mercian sub-kingdom of Kent, and its sub-king, Baldred, was driven out shortly afterwards.By 830, Essex, Surrey and Sussex had submitted to Ecgberht, and he had appointed Æthelwulf to rule the south-eastern territories as king of Kent. The Vikings ravaged the Isle of Sheppey in 835, and the following year they defeated Ecgberht at Carhampton in Somerset, but in 838 he was victorious over an alliance of Cornishmen and Vikings at the Battle of Hingston Down, reducing Cornwall to the status of a client kingdom. When Æthelwulf succeeded, he appointed his eldest son <mask> as sub-king of Kent. Ecgberht and Æthelwulf may not have intended a permanent union between Wessex and Kent because they both appointed sons as sub-kings, and charters in Wessex were attested (witnessed) by West Saxon magnates, while Kentish charters were witnessed by the Kentish elite; both kings kept overall control, and the sub-kings were not allowed to issue their own coinage.


title: Alfred the Great

texts:
 Viking raids increased in the early 840s on both sides of the English Channel, and in 843 Æthelwulf was defeated at Carhampton. In 850, Æthelstan defeated a Danish fleet off Sandwich in the first recorded naval battle in English history. In 851 Æthelwulf and his second son, Æthelbald, defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Aclea and, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "there made the greatest slaughter of a heathen raiding-army that we have heard tell of up to this present day, and there took the victory".Æthelwulf died in 858 and was succeeded by his oldest surviving son, <mask>d, as king of Wessex and by his next oldest son, <mask>, as king of Kent. Æthelbald only survived his father by two years, and Æthelberht then for the first time united Wessex and Kent into a single kingdom. Childhood

According to Asser, in his childhood <mask> won a beautifully decorated book of English poetry, offered as a prize by his mother to the first of her sons able to memorise it. He must have had it read to him because his mother died when he was about six and he did not learn to read until he was 12. In 853, <mask> is reported by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to have been sent to Rome where he was confirmed by Pope Leo IV, who "anointed him as king". Victorian writers later interpreted this as an anticipatory coronation in preparation for his eventual succession to the throne of Wessex. This is unlikely; his succession could not have been foreseen at the time because <mask> had three living elder brothers.A letter of Leo IV shows that <mask> was made a "consul" and a misinterpretation of

masks: Æthelbal Æthelberht Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred


title: Alfred the Great

texts:
 this investiture, deliberate or accidental, could explain later confusion. It may be based upon the fact that <mask> later accompanied his father on a pilgrimage to Rome where he spent some time at the court of <mask> Bald, king of the Franks, around 854–855. On their return from Rome in 856, Æthelwulf was deposed by his son Æthelbald. With civil war looming, the magnates of the realm met in council to form a compromise. Æthelbald retained the western shires (i.e. historical Wessex), and Æthelwulf ruled in the east. After King Æthelwulf died in 858, Wessex was ruled by three of <mask>'s brothers in succession: Æthelbald, <mask>ht and Æthelred.The reigns of <mask>'s brothers

<mask> is not mentioned during the short reigns of his older brothers Æthelbald and Æthelberht. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes the Great Heathen Army of Danes landing in East Anglia with the intent of conquering the four kingdoms which constituted Anglo-Saxon England in 865. <mask>'s public life began in 865 at age 16 with the accession of his third brother, 18-year-old Æthelred. During this period, Bishop Asser gave <mask> the unique title of secundarius, which may indicate a position similar to the Celtic tanist, a recognised successor closely associated with the reigning monarch. This arrangement may have been sanctioned by <mask>'s father or by the Witan to guard against the danger of a disputed succession should Æthelred fall in battle. It was a well known tradition among other Germanic peoples - such as the Swedes and Franks to whom the Anglo-Saxons were closely related - to crown a successor as

masks:
Alfred
Charles the
Alfred
Ætheber
Alfred
Alfred
Alfred
Alfred
Alfred


title: Alfred the Great

texts:
 royal prince and military commander. Viking invasion
In 868, <mask> was recorded as fighting beside Æthelred in a failed attempt to keep the Great Heathen Army led by Ivar the Boneless out of the adjoining Kingdom of Mercia.The Danes arrived in his homeland at the end of 870, and nine engagements were fought in the following year, with mixed results; the places and dates of two of these battles have not been recorded. A successful skirmish at the Battle of Englefield in Berkshire on 31 December 870 was followed by a severe defeat at the siege and the Battle of Reading by Ivar's brother Halfdan Ragnarsson on 5 January 871. Four days later, the Anglo-Saxons won a victory at the Battle of Ashdown on the Berkshire Downs, possibly near Compton or Aldworth. The Saxons were defeated at the Battle of Basing on 22 January. They were defeated again on 22 March at the Battle of Merton (perhaps Marden in Wiltshire or Martin in Dorset). Æthelred died shortly afterwards in April. King at war

Early struggles
In April 871 King Æthelred died and <mask> acceded to the throne of Wessex and the burden of its defence, even though Æthelred left two under-age sons, Æthelhelm and Æthelwold.This was in accordance with the agreement that Æthelred and <mask> had made earlier that year in an assembly at an unidentified place called Swinbeorg. The brothers had agreed that whichever of them outlived the other would inherit the personal property that King Æthelwulf had left jointly to his sons in his will. The deceased's sons would receive only whatever property and riches their father had settled upon

masks: Alfred Alfred Alfred


title: Alfred the Great

texts: them and whatever additional lands their uncle had acquired. The unstated premise was that the surviving brother would be king. Given the Danish invasion and the youth of his nephews, <mask>'s accession probably went uncontested. While he was busy with the burial ceremonies for his brother, the Danes defeated the Saxon army in his absence at an unnamed spot and then again in his presence at Wilton in May. The defeat at Wilton smashed any remaining hope that <mask> could drive the invaders from his kingdom.<mask> was forced instead to make peace with them. Although the terms of the peace are not recorded, Bishop Asser wrote that the pagans agreed to vacate the realm and made good their promise. The Viking army withdrew from Reading in the autumn of 871 to take up winter quarters in Mercian London. Although not mentioned by Asser or by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, <mask> probably paid the Vikings cash to leave, much as the Mercians were to do in the following year. Hoards dating to the Viking occupation of London in 871/872 have been excavated at Croydon, Gravesend and Waterloo Bridge. These finds hint at the cost involved in making peace with the Vikings. For the next five years, the Danes occupied other parts of England.In 876, under their three leaders Guthrum, Oscetel and Anwend, the Danes slipped past the Saxon army and attacked and occupied Wareham in Dorset. <mask> blockaded them but was unable to take Wareham by assault. He negotiated a peace that involved an exchange of hostages and oaths, which the Danes swore on a "holy ring" associated with the worship of Thor. The

masks: Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred


title: Alfred the Great

texts:
 Danes broke their word, and after killing all the hostages, slipped away under cover of night to Exeter in Devon. <mask> blockaded the Viking ships in Devon, and with a relief fleet having been scattered by a storm, the Danes were forced to submit. The Danes withdrew to Mercia. In January 878, the Danes made a sudden attack on Chippenham, a royal stronghold in which <mask> had been staying over Christmas "and most of the people they killed, except the King <mask>, and he with a little band made his way by wood and swamp, and after Easter he made a fort at Athelney in the marshes of Somerset, and from that fort kept fighting against the foe".From his fort at Athelney, an island in the marshes near North Petherton, <mask> was able to mount a resistance campaign, rallying the local militias from Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. 878 was the nadir of the history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. With all the other kingdoms having fallen to the Vikings, Wessex alone was resisting. The cake legend
A legend tells how when <mask> first fled to the Somerset Levels, he was given shelter by a peasant woman who, unaware of his identity, left him to watch some wheaten cakes she had left cooking on the fire. Preoccupied with the problems of his kingdom, <mask> accidentally let the cakes burn and was roundly scolded by the woman upon her return. There is no contemporary evidence for the legend, but it is possible that there was an early oral tradition. The first known written account of the incident is from about 100 years after <mask>'s death.Counter-attack and victory

In the seventh week

masks: Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred


title: Alfred the Great

texts:
 after Easter (4–10 May 878), around Whitsuntide, <mask> rode to Egbert's Stone east of Selwood where he was met by "all the people of Somerset and of Wiltshire and of that part of Hampshire which is on this side of the sea (that is, west of Southampton Water), and they rejoiced to see him". <mask>'s emergence from his marshland stronghold was part of a carefully planned offensive that entailed raising the fyrds of three shires. This meant not only that the king had retained the loyalty of ealdormen, royal reeves and king's thegns, who were charged with levying and leading these forces, but that they had maintained their positions of authority in these localities well enough to answer his summons to war. <mask>'s actions also suggest a system of scouts and messengers. <mask> won a decisive victory in the ensuing Battle of Edington which may have been fought near Westbury, Wiltshire. He then pursued the Danes to their stronghold at Chippenham and starved them into submission. One of the terms of the surrender was that Guthrum convert to Christianity.Three weeks later, the Danish king and 29 of his chief men were baptised at <mask>'s court at Aller, near Athelney, with <mask> receiving Guthrum as his spiritual son. According to Asser,

At Wedmore, <mask> and Guthrum negotiated what some historians have called the Treaty of Wedmore, but it was to be some years after the cessation of hostilities that a formal treaty was signed. Under the terms of the so-called Treaty of Wedmore, the converted Guthrum was required to leave Wessex and return to East Anglia. Consequently, in 879 the


title: Alfred the Great

texts:
 Viking army left Chippenham and made its way to Cirencester. The formal Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum, preserved in Old English in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Manuscript 383), and in a Latin compilation known as Quadripartitus, was negotiated later, perhaps in 879 or 880, when King Ceolwulf II of Mercia was deposed. That treaty divided up the kingdom of Mercia. By its terms, the boundary between <mask>'s and Guthrum's kingdoms was to run up the River Thames to the River Lea, follow the Lea to its source (near Luton), from there extend in a straight line to Bedford, and from Bedford follow the River Ouse to Watling Street.<mask> succeeded to Ceolwulf's kingdom consisting of western Mercia, and Guthrum incorporated the eastern part of Mercia into an enlarged Kingdom of East Anglia (henceforward known as the Danelaw). By terms of the treaty, moreover, <mask> was to have control over the Mercian city of London and its mints—at least for the time being. In 825, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had recorded that the people of Essex, Sussex, Kent and Surrey surrendered to Egbert, <mask>'s grandfather. From then until the arrival of the Great Heathen Army, Essex had formed part of Wessex. After the foundation of Danelaw, it appears that some of Essex would have been ceded to the Danes, but how much is not clear. 880s

With the signing of the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum, an event most commonly held to have taken place around 880 when Guthrum's people began settling East Anglia, Guthrum was neutralised as a threat. The Viking army, which had stayed at Fulham during the winter of


title: Alfred the Great

texts: 878–879, sailed for Ghent and was active on the continent from 879 to 892.There were local raids on the coast of Wessex throughout the 880s. In 882, <mask> fought a small sea battle against four Danish ships. Two of the ships were destroyed, and the others surrendered. This was one of four sea battles recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, three of which involved <mask>. Similar small skirmishes with independent Viking raiders would have occurred for much of the period as they had for decades. In 883, Pope Marinus exempted the Saxon quarter in Rome from taxation, probably in return for <mask>'s promise to send alms annually to Rome, which may be the origin of the medieval tax called Peter's Pence. The pope sent gifts to <mask>, including what was reputed to be a piece of the True Cross.After the signing of the treaty with Guthrum, <mask> was spared any large-scale conflicts for some time. Despite this relative peace, the king was forced to deal with a number of Danish raids and incursions. Among these was a raid in Kent, an allied kingdom in South East England, during the year 885, which was possibly the largest raid since the battles with Guthrum. Asser's account of the raid places the Danish raiders at the Saxon city of Rochester, where they built a temporary fortress in order to besiege the city. In response to this incursion, <mask> led an Anglo-Saxon force against the Danes who, instead of engaging the army of Wessex, fled to their beached ships and sailed to another part of Britain. The retreating Danish force supposedly left Britain the following summer. Not long after

masks: Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred


title: Alfred the Great

texts: the failed Danish raid in Kent, <mask> dispatched his fleet to East Anglia.The purpose of this expedition is debated, but Asser claims that it was for the sake of plunder. After travelling up the River Stour, the fleet was met by Danish vessels that numbered 13 or 16 (sources vary on the number), and a battle ensued. The Anglo-Saxon fleet emerged victorious, and as Huntingdon accounts, "laden with spoils". The victorious fleet was surprised when attempting to leave the River Stour and was attacked by a Danish force at the mouth of the river. The Danish fleet defeated <mask>'s fleet, which may have been weakened in the previous engagement. A year later, in 886, <mask> reoccupied the city of London and set out to make it habitable again. <mask> entrusted the city to the care of his son-in-law Æthelred, ealdorman of Mercia.The restoration of London progressed through the latter half of the 880s and is believed to have revolved around a new street plan; added fortifications in addition to the existing Roman walls; and, some believe, the construction of matching fortifications on the south bank of the River Thames. This is also the period in which almost all chroniclers agree that the Saxon people of pre-unification England submitted to <mask>. In 888, <mask>, the archbishop of Canterbury, also died. One year later Guthrum, or <mask> by his baptismal name, <mask>'s former enemy and king of East Anglia, died and was buried in Hadleigh, Suffolk. Guthrum's death changed the political landscape for <mask>. The resulting power vacuum stirred other power-hungry warlords eager to take his

masks: Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Æthelred Athelstan Alfred Alfred


title: Alfred the Great

texts:
 place in the following years. The quiet years of <mask>'s life were coming to a close.Viking attacks (890s)
After another lull, in the autumn of 892 or 893, the Danes attacked again. Finding their position in mainland Europe precarious, they crossed to England in 330 ships in two divisions. They entrenched themselves, the larger body at Appledore, Kent, and the lesser under Hastein, at Milton, also in Kent. The invaders brought their wives and children with them, indicating a meaningful attempt at conquest and colonisation. <mask>, in 893 or 894, took up a position from which he could observe both forces. While he was in talks with Hastein, the Danes at Appledore broke out and struck north-westwards. They were overtaken by <mask>'s eldest son, Edward and were defeated at the Battle of Farnham in Surrey.They took refuge on an island at Thorney, on the River Colne between Buckinghamshire and Middlesex, where they were blockaded and forced to give hostages and promise to leave Wessex. They then went to Essex and after suffering another defeat at Benfleet, joined with Hastein's force at Shoebury. <mask> had been on his way to relieve his son at Thorney when he heard that the Northumbrian and East Anglian Danes were besieging Exeter and an unnamed stronghold on the North Devon shore. <mask> at once hurried westward and raised the Siege of Exeter. The fate of the other place is not recorded. The force under Hastein set out to march up the Thames Valley, possibly with the idea of assisting their friends in the west. They were met by a large force under the three great ealdormen of


title: Alfred the Great

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 Mercia, Wiltshire and Somerset and forced to head off to the north-west, being finally overtaken and blockaded at Buttington.(Some identify this with Buttington Tump at the mouth of the River Wye, others with Buttington near Welshpool.) An attempt to break through the English lines failed. Those who escaped retreated to Shoebury. After collecting reinforcements, they made a sudden dash across England and occupied the ruined Roman walls of Chester. The English did not attempt a winter blockade but contented themselves with destroying all the supplies in the district. Early in 894 or 895 lack of food obliged the Danes to retire once more to Essex. At the end of the year, the Danes drew their ships up the River Thames and the River Lea and fortified themselves  north of London.A frontal attack on the Danish lines failed but later in the year, <mask> saw a means of obstructing the river to prevent the egress of the Danish ships. The Danes realised that they were outmanoeuvred, struck off north-westwards and wintered at Cwatbridge near Bridgnorth. The next year, 896 (or 897), they gave up the struggle. Some retired to Northumbria, some to East Anglia. Those who had no connections in England returned to the continent. Military reorganisation

The Germanic tribes who invaded Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries relied upon the unarmoured infantry supplied by their tribal levy, or fyrd, and it was upon this system that the military power of the several kingdoms of early Anglo-Saxon England depended. The fyrd was a local militia in the Anglo-Saxon shire in which all freemen had to


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 serve; those who refused military service were subject to fines or loss of their land.According to the law code of King Ine of Wessex, issued in about 694,

Wessex's history of failures preceding <mask>'s success in 878 emphasised to him that the traditional system of battle he had inherited played to the Danes' advantage. While the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes attacked settlements for plunder, they employed different tactics. In their raids the Anglo-Saxons traditionally preferred to attack head-on by assembling their forces in a shield wall, advancing against their target and overcoming the oncoming wall marshalled against them in defence. The Danes preferred to choose easy targets, mapping cautious forays to avoid risking their plunder with high-stake attacks for more. <mask> determined their tactic was to launch small attacks from a secure base to which they could retreat should their raiders meet strong resistance. The bases were prepared in advance, often by capturing an estate and augmenting its defences with ditches, ramparts and palisades. Once inside the fortification, <mask> realised, the Danes enjoyed the advantage, better situated to outlast their opponents or crush them with a counter-attack because the provisions and stamina of the besieging forces waned.The means by which the Anglo-Saxons marshalled forces to defend against marauders also left them vulnerable to the Vikings. It was the responsibility of the shire fyrd to deal with local raids. The king could call up the national militia to defend the kingdom but in the case of the Viking raids, problems with


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 communication and raising supplies meant that the national militia could not be mustered quickly enough. It was only after the raids had begun that a call went out to landowners to gather their men for battle. Large regions could be devastated before the fyrd could assemble and arrive. Although the landowners were obliged to the king to supply these men when called, during the attacks in 878 many of them abandoned their king and collaborated with Guthrum. With these lessons in mind <mask> capitalised on the relatively peaceful years following his victory at Edington with an ambitious restructuring of Saxon defences.On a trip to Rome <mask> had stayed with <mask> Bald, and it is possible that he may have studied how the Carolingian kings had dealt with Viking raiders. Learning from their experiences he was able to establish a system of taxation and defence for Wessex. There had been a system of fortifications in pre-Viking Mercia that may have been an influence. When the Viking raids resumed in 892 <mask> was better prepared to confront them with a standing, mobile field army, a network of garrisons and a small fleet of ships navigating the rivers and estuaries. Administration and taxation
Tenants in Anglo-Saxon England had a threefold obligation based on their landholding: the so-called "common burdens" of military service, fortress work, and bridge repair. This threefold obligation has traditionally been called trinoda necessitas or trimoda necessitas. The Old English name for the fine due for neglecting military service was .To maintain the burhs, and to reorganise the fyrd

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 as a standing army, <mask> expanded the tax and conscription system based on the productivity of a tenant's landholding. The hide was the basic unit of the system on which the tenant's public obligations were assessed. A hide is thought to represent the amount of land required to support one family. The hide differed in size according to the value and resources of the land and the landowner would have to provide service based on how many hides he owned. Burghal system

The foundation of <mask>'s new military defence system was a network of burhs, distributed at tactical points throughout the kingdom. There were thirty-three burhs, about  apart, enabling the military to confront attacks anywhere in the kingdom within a day. <mask>'s burhs (of which 22 developed into boroughs) ranged from former Roman towns, such as Winchester, where the stone walls were repaired and ditches added, to massive earthen walls surrounded by wide ditches, probably reinforced with wooden revetments and palisades, such as at Burpham in West Sussex.The size of the burhs ranged from tiny outposts such as Pilton in Devon, to large fortifications in established towns, the largest being at Winchester. A document now known as the Burghal Hidage provides an insight into how the system worked. It lists the hidage for each of the fortified towns contained in the document. Wallingford had a hidage of 2,400, which meant that the landowners there were responsible for supplying and feeding 2,400 men, the number sufficient for maintaining  of wall. A total of 27,071 soldiers were needed, approximately one in four of


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texts: all the free men in Wessex. Many of the burhs were twin towns that straddled a river and were connected by a fortified bridge, like those built by <mask> Bald a generation before. The double-burh blocked passage on the river, forcing Viking ships to navigate under a garrisoned bridge lined with men armed with stones, spears or arrows.Other burhs were sited near fortified royal villas, allowing the king better control over his strongholds. The burhs were connected by a road system maintained for army use (known as herepaths). The roads allowed an army quickly to be assembled, sometimes from more than one burh, to confront the Viking invader. The road network posed significant obstacles to Viking invaders, especially those laden with booty. The system threatened Viking routes and communications making it far more dangerous for them. The Vikings lacked the equipment for a siege against a burh and a developed doctrine of siegecraft, having tailored their methods of fighting to rapid strikes and unimpeded retreats to well-defended fortifications. The only means left to them was to starve the burh into submission but this gave the king time to send his field army or garrisons from neighbouring burhs along the army roads.In such cases, the Vikings were extremely vulnerable to pursuit by the king's joint military forces. <mask>'s burh system posed such a formidable challenge against Viking attack that when the Vikings returned in 892 and stormed a half-built, poorly garrisoned fortress up the Lympne estuary in Kent, the Anglo-Saxons were able to limit their penetration to the outer

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 frontiers of Wessex and Mercia. <mask>'s burghal system was revolutionary in its strategic conception and potentially expensive in its execution. His contemporary biographer Asser wrote that many nobles balked at the demands placed upon them even though they were for "the common needs of the kingdom". English navy
<mask> also tried his hand at naval design. In 896 he ordered the construction of a small fleet, perhaps a dozen or so longships that, at 60 oars, were twice the size of Viking warships. This was not, as the Victorians asserted, the birth of the English Navy.Wessex had possessed a royal fleet before this. <mask>'s older brother sub-king <mask> of Kent and Ealdorman Ealhhere had defeated a Viking fleet in 851 capturing nine ships and <mask> had conducted naval actions in 882. The year 897 marked an important development in the naval power of Wessex. The author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle related that <mask>'s ships were larger, swifter, steadier and rode higher in the water than either Danish or Frisian ships. It is probable that, under the classical tutelage of Asser, <mask> used the design of Greek and Roman warships, with high sides, designed for fighting rather than for navigation. <mask> had seapower in mind; if he could intercept raiding fleets before they landed, he could spare his kingdom from being ravaged. <mask>'s ships may have been superior in conception, but in practice they proved to be too large to manoeuvre well in the close waters of estuaries and rivers, the only places in which a naval battle could be fought.The warships of the time were not

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 designed to be ship killers but rather troop carriers. It has been suggested that, like sea battles in late Viking age Scandinavia, these battles may have entailed a ship coming alongside an opposing vessel, lashing the two ships together and then boarding the craft. The result was a land battle involving hand-to-hand fighting on board the two lashed vessels. In the one recorded naval engagement in 896, <mask>'s new fleet of nine ships intercepted six Viking ships at the mouth of an unidentified river in the south of England. The Danes had beached half their ships and gone inland. <mask>'s ships immediately moved to block their escape. The three Viking ships afloat attempted to break through the English lines.Only one made it; <mask>'s ships intercepted the other two. Lashing the Viking boats to their own, the English crew boarded and proceeded to kill the Vikings. One ship escaped because <mask>'s heavy ships became grounded when the tide went out. A land battle ensued between the crews. The Danes were heavily outnumbered, but as the tide rose, they returned to their boats which, with shallower drafts, were freed first. The English watched as the Vikings rowed past them but they suffered so many casualties (120 dead against 62 Frisians and English) that they had difficulty putting out to sea. All were too damaged to row around Sussex, and two were driven against the Sussex coast (possibly at Selsey Bill).The shipwrecked crew were brought before <mask> at Winchester and hanged. Legal reform

In the late 880s or early 890s, <mask> issued a long domboc or law code consisting of


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texts: his own laws, followed by a code issued by his late seventh-century predecessor King Ine of Wessex. Together these laws are arranged into 120 chapters. In his introduction <mask> explains that he gathered together the laws he found in many "synod-books" and "ordered to be written many of the ones that our forefathers observed—those that pleased me; and many of the ones that did not please me, I rejected with the advice of my councillors, and commanded them to be observed in a different way". <mask> singled out in particular the laws that he "found in the days of Ine, my kinsman, or Offa, king of the Mercians, or King Æthelberht of Kent who first among the English people received baptism". He appended, rather than integrated, the laws of Ine into his code and although he included, as had Æthelbert, a scale of payments in compensation for injuries to various body parts, the two injury tariffs are not aligned. Offa is not known to have issued a law code, leading historian Patrick Wormald to speculate that <mask> had in mind the legatine capitulary of 786 that was presented to Offa by two papal legates.About a fifth of the law code is taken up by <mask>'s introduction which includes translations into English of the Ten Commandments, a few chapters from the Book of Exodus, and the Apostolic Letter from the Acts of the Apostles (15:23–29). The introduction may best be understood as <mask>'s meditation upon the meaning of Christian law. It traces the continuity between God's gift of law to Moses to <mask>'s own issuance of law to the West Saxon people. By doing so, it linked the holy


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texts: past to the historical present and represented <mask>'s law-giving as a type of divine legislation. Similarly <mask> divided his code into 120 chapters because 120 was the age at which Moses died and, in the number-symbolism of early medieval biblical exegetes, 120 stood for law. The link between Mosaic law and <mask>'s code is the Apostolic Letter which explained that Christ "had come not to shatter or annul the commandments but to fulfill them; and he taught mercy and meekness" (Intro, 49.1). The mercy that Christ infused into Mosaic law underlies the injury tariffs that figure so prominently in barbarian law codes since Christian synods "established, through that mercy which Christ taught, that for almost every misdeed at the first offence secular lords might with their permission receive without sin the monetary compensation which they then fixed".The only crime that could not be compensated with a payment of money was treachery to a lord "since Almighty God adjudged none for those who despised Him, nor did Christ, the Son of God, adjudge any for the one who betrayed Him to death; and He commanded everyone to love his lord as Himself". <mask>'s transformation of Christ's commandment, from "Love your neighbour as yourself" (Matt. 22:39–40) to love your secular lord as you would love the Lord Christ himself, underscores the importance that <mask> placed upon lordship which he understood as a sacred bond instituted by God for the governance of man. When one turns from the domboc's introduction to the laws themselves, it is difficult to uncover any logical arrangement. The


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texts: impression is of a hodgepodge of miscellaneous laws. The law code, as it has been preserved, is singularly unsuitable for use in lawsuits. In fact, several of <mask>'s laws contradicted the laws of Ine that form an integral part of the code.Patrick Wormald's explanation is that <mask>'s law code should be understood not as a legal manual but as an ideological manifesto of kingship "designed more for symbolic impact than for practical direction". In practical terms the most important law in the code may well have been the first: "We enjoin, what is most necessary, that each man keep carefully his oath and his pledge" which expresses a fundamental tenet of Anglo-Saxon law. <mask> devoted considerable attention and thought to judicial matters. Asser underscores his concern for judicial fairness. <mask>, according to Asser, insisted upon reviewing contested judgments made by his ealdormen and reeves and "would carefully look into nearly all the judgements which were passed [issued] in his absence anywhere in the realm to see whether they were just or unjust". A charter from the reign of his son Edward the Elder depicts <mask> as hearing one such appeal in his chamber while washing his hands. Asser represents <mask> as a Solomonic judge, painstaking in his own judicial investigations and critical of royal officials who rendered unjust or unwise judgments.Although Asser never mentions <mask>'s law code he does say that <mask> insisted that his judges be literate so that they could apply themselves "to the pursuit of wisdom". The failure to comply with this royal order was to be

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 punished by loss of office. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, commissioned at the time of <mask>, was probably written to promote unification of England, whereas Asser's The Life of King <mask> promoted <mask>'s achievements and personal qualities. It was possible that the document was designed this way so that it could be disseminated in Wales because <mask> had acquired overlordship of that country. Foreign relations
Asser speaks grandiosely of <mask>'s relations with foreign powers but little definite information is available. His interest in foreign countries is shown by the insertions which he made in his translation of Orosius. He corresponded with Elias III, the patriarch of Jerusalem, and embassies to Rome conveying the English alms to the pope were fairly frequent.Around 890, Wulfstan of Hedeby undertook a journey from Hedeby on Jutland along the Baltic Sea to the Prussian trading town of Truso. <mask> personally collected details of this trip. <mask>'s relations with the Celtic princes in the western half of Great Britain are clearer. Comparatively early in his reign, according to Asser, the southern Welsh princes, owing to the pressure on them from North Wales and Mercia, commended themselves to <mask>. Later in his reign, the North Welsh followed their example and the latter cooperated with the English in the campaign of 893 (or 894). That <mask> sent alms to Irish and Continental monasteries may be taken on Asser's authority. The visit of three pilgrim "Scots" (i.e., Irish) to <mask> in 891 is undoubtedly authentic.The story that, in his childhood, he was sent to Ireland

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 to be healed by Saint Modwenna may show <mask>'s interest in that island. Religion, education and culture

In the 880s, at the same time that he was "cajoling and threatening" his nobles to build and man the burhs, <mask>, perhaps inspired by the example of Charlemagne almost a century before, undertook an equally ambitious effort to revive learning. During this period, the Viking raids were often seen as a divine punishment, and <mask> may have wished to revive religious awe in order to appease God's wrath. This revival entailed the recruitment of clerical scholars from Mercia, Wales and abroad to enhance the tenor of the court and of the episcopacy; the establishment of a court school to educate his own children, the sons of his nobles, and intellectually promising boys of lesser birth; an attempt to require literacy in those who held offices of authority; a series of translations into the vernacular of Latin works the king deemed "most necessary for all men to know"; the compilation of a chronicle detailing the rise of <mask>'s kingdom and house, with a genealogy that stretched back to Adam, thus giving the West Saxon kings a biblical ancestry. Very little is known of the church under <mask>. The Danish attacks had been particularly damaging to the monasteries. Although <mask> founded monasteries at Athelney and Shaftesbury, these were the first new monastic houses in Wessex since the beginning of the eighth century.According to Asser, <mask> enticed foreign monks to England for his monastery at Athelney because there was little interest for the locals to take up the


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 monastic life. <mask> undertook no systematic reform of ecclesiastical institutions or religious practices in Wessex. For him, the key to the kingdom's spiritual revival was to appoint pious, learned, and trustworthy bishops and abbots. As king, he saw himself as responsible for both the temporal and spiritual welfare of his subjects. Secular and spiritual authority were not distinct categories for <mask>. He was equally comfortable distributing his translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care to his bishops so that they might better train and supervise priests and using those same bishops as royal officials and judges. Nor did his piety prevent him from expropriating strategically sited church lands, especially estates along the border with the Danelaw, and transferring them to royal thegns and officials who could better defend them against Viking attacks.Effect of Danish raids on education
The Danish raids had a devastating effect on learning in England. <mask> lamented in the preface to his translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care that "learning had declined so thoroughly in England that there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could understand their divine services in English or even translate a single letter from Latin into English: and I suppose that there were not many beyond the Humber either". <mask> undoubtedly exaggerated, for dramatic effect, the abysmal state of learning in England during his youth. That Latin learning had not been obliterated is evidenced by the presence in his court of learned Mercian and West Saxon clerics such as Plegmund,


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 Wæferth, and Wulfsige. Manuscript production in England dropped off precipitously around the 860s when the Viking invasions began in earnest, not to be revived until the end of the century. Numerous Anglo-Saxon manuscripts burnt along with the churches that housed them. A solemn diploma from Christ Church, Canterbury, dated 873, is so poorly constructed and written that historian Nicholas Brooks posited a scribe who was either so blind he could not read what he wrote or who knew little or no Latin."It is clear", Brooks concludes, "that the metropolitan church [of Canterbury] must have been quite unable to provide any effective training in the scriptures or in Christian worship". Establishment of a court school
<mask> established a court school for the education of his own children, those of the nobility, and "a good many of lesser birth". There they studied books in both English and Latin and "devoted themselves to writing, to such an extent ... they were seen to be devoted and intelligent students of the liberal arts". He recruited scholars from the Continent and from Britain to aid in the revival of Christian learning in Wessex and to provide the king personal instruction. Grimbald and John the Saxon came from Francia; Plegmund (whom <mask> appointed archbishop of Canterbury in 890), Bishop Wærferth of Worcester, <mask>tan, and the royal chaplains Werwulf, from Mercia; and Asser, from St David's in southwestern Wales. Advocacy of education in English

<mask>'s educational ambitions seem to have extended beyond the establishment of a court school. Believing that without

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texts: Christian wisdom there can be neither prosperity nor success in war, <mask> aimed "to set to learning (as long as they are not useful for some other employment) all the free-born young men now in England who have the means to apply themselves to it".Conscious of the decay of Latin literacy in his realm <mask> proposed that primary education be taught in English, with those wishing to advance to holy orders to continue their studies in Latin. There were few "books of wisdom" written in English. <mask> sought to remedy this through an ambitious court-centred programme of translating into English the books he deemed "most necessary for all men to know". It is unknown when <mask> launched this programme but it may have been during the 880s when Wessex was enjoying a respite from Viking attacks. <mask> was, until recently, often considered to have been the author of many of the translations but this is now considered doubtful in almost all cases. Scholars more often refer to translations as "Alfredian" indicating that they probably had something to do with his patronage but are unlikely to be his own work. Apart from the lost Handboc or Encheiridio, which seems to have been a commonplace book kept by the king, the earliest work to be translated was the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, a book greatly popular in the Middle Ages.The translation was undertaken at <mask>'s command by Wærferth, Bishop of Worcester, with the king merely furnishing a preface. Remarkably, <mask> – undoubtedly with the advice and aid of his court scholars – translated four works himself: Gregory the <mask>'s

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texts: Pastoral Care, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, St. Augustine's Soliloquies and the first fifty psalms of the Psalter. One might add to this list the translation, in <mask>'s law code, of excerpts from the Vulgate Book of Exodus. The Old English versions of Orosius's Histories against the Pagans and Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People are no longer accepted by scholars as <mask>'s own translations because of lexical and stylistic differences. Nonetheless the consensus remains that they were part of the Alfredian programme of translation. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge suggest this also for Bald's Leechbook and the anonymous Old English Martyrology. The preface of <mask>'s translation of Pope Gregory the <mask>'s Pastoral Care explained why he thought it necessary to translate works such as this from Latin into English.Although he described his method as translating "sometimes word for word, sometimes sense for sense", the translation keeps very close to the original although, through his choice of language, he blurred throughout the distinction between spiritual and secular authority. <mask> meant the translation to be used, and circulated it to all his bishops. Interest in <mask>'s translation of Pastoral Care was so enduring that copies were still being made in the 11th century. Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy was the most popular philosophical handbook of the Middle Ages. Unlike the translation of the Pastoral Care the Alfredian text deals very freely with the original and, though the late Dr. G. Schepss showed that many of the additions to the

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texts: text are to be traced not to the translator himself but to the glosses and commentaries which he used, still there is much in the work which is distinctive to the translation and has been taken to reflect philosophies of kingship in <mask>'s milieu. It is in the Boethius that the oft-quoted sentence occurs: "To speak briefly: I desired to live worthily as long as I lived, and after my life to leave to them that should come after, my memory in good works." The book has come down to us in two manuscripts only.In one of these the writing is prose, in the other a combination of prose and alliterating verse. The latter manuscript was severely damaged in the 18th and 19th centuries. The last of the Alfredian works is one which bears the name Blostman ('Blooms') or Anthology. The first half is based mainly on the Soliloquies of St Augustine of Hippo, the remainder is drawn from various sources. The material has traditionally been thought to contain much that is <mask>'s own and highly characteristic of him. The last words of it may be quoted; they form a fitting epitaph for the noblest of English kings. "Therefore, he seems to me a very foolish man, and truly wretched, who will not increase his understanding while he is in the world, and ever wish and long to reach that endless life where all shall be made clear."<mask> appears as a character in the twelfth- or 13th-century poem The Owl and the Nightingale where his wisdom and skill with proverbs is praised. The Proverbs of Alfred, a 13th-century work, contains sayings that are not likely to have originated with <mask> but attest to


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texts: his posthumous medieval reputation for wisdom. The Alfred jewel, discovered in Somerset in 1693, has long been associated with King <mask> because of its Old English inscription AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN ('<mask> ordered me to be made'). The jewel is about  long, made of filigreed gold, enclosing a highly polished piece of quartz crystal beneath which is set in a cloisonné enamel plaque with an enamelled image of a man holding floriate sceptres, perhaps personifying Sight or the Wisdom of God. It was at one time attached to a thin rod or stick based on the hollow socket at its base. The jewel certainly dates from <mask>'s reign. Although its function is unknown it has been often suggested that the jewel was one of the æstels – pointers for reading – that <mask> ordered sent to every bishopric accompanying a copy of his translation of the Pastoral Care.Each æstel was worth the princely sum of 50 mancuses which fits in well with the quality workmanship and expensive materials of the <mask> jewel. Historian Richard Abels sees <mask>'s educational and military reforms as complementary. Restoring religion and learning in Wessex, Abels contends, was to <mask>'s mind as essential to the defence of his realm as the building of the burhs. As <mask> observed in the preface to his English translation of Gregory the <mask>'s Pastoral Care, kings who fail to obey their divine duty to promote learning can expect earthly punishments to befall their people. The pursuit of wisdom, he assured his readers of the Boethius, was the surest path to power: "Study wisdom, then, and, when you have

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 learned it, condemn it not, for I tell you that by its means you may without fail attain to power, yea, even though not desiring it". The portrayal of the West-Saxon resistance to the Vikings by Asser and the chronicler as a Christian holy war was more than mere rhetoric or propaganda. It reflected <mask>'s own belief in a doctrine of divine rewards and punishments rooted in a vision of a hierarchical Christian world order in which God is the Lord to whom kings owe obedience and through whom they derive their authority over their followers.The need to persuade his nobles to undertake work for the 'common good' led <mask> and his court scholars to strengthen and deepen the conception of Christian kingship that he had inherited by building upon the legacy of earlier kings including Offa, clerical writers including Bede, and Alcuin and various participants in the Carolingian renaissance. This was not a cynical use of religion to manipulate his subjects into obedience but an intrinsic element in <mask>'s worldview. He believed, as did other kings in ninth-century England and Francia, that God had entrusted him with the spiritual as well as physical welfare of his people. If the Christian faith fell into ruin in his kingdom, if the clergy were too ignorant to understand the Latin words they butchered in their offices and liturgies, if the ancient monasteries and collegiate churches lay deserted out of indifference, he was answerable before God, as Josiah had been. <mask>'s ultimate responsibility was the pastoral care of his people. Appearance and character

Asser wrote of <mask>


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 in his Life of King <mask>,

It is also written by Asser that <mask> did not learn to read until he was 12 years old or later, which is described as "shameful negligence" of his parents and tutors. <mask> was an excellent listener and had an incredible memory and he retained poetry and psalms very well.A story is told by Asser about how his mother held up a book of Saxon poetry to him and his brothers, and said; "I shall give this book to whichever one of you can learn it the fastest." After excitedly asking, "Will you really give this book to the one of us who can understand it the soonest and recite it to you?" <mask> then took it to his teacher, learned it, and recited it back to his mother. <mask> is noted as carrying around a small book, probably a medieval version of a small pocket notebook, that contained psalms and many prayers that he often collected. Asser writes: these "he collected in a single book, as I have seen for myself; amid all the affairs of the present life he took it around with him everywhere for the sake of prayer, and was inseparable from it." An excellent hunter in every branch of the sport, <mask> is remembered as an enthusiastic huntsman against whom nobody's skills could compare. Although he was the youngest of his brothers, he was probably the most open-minded.He was an early advocate for education. His desire for learning could have come from his early love of English poetry and inability to read or physically record it until later in life. Asser writes that <mask> "could not satisfy his craving for what he desired the most, namely the liberal


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 arts; for, as he used to say, there were no good scholars in the entire kingdom of the West Saxons at that time". Family

In 868, <mask> married Ealhswith, daughter of a Mercian nobleman, Æthelred Mucel, Ealdorman of the Gaini. The Gaini were probably one of the tribal groups of the Mercians. Ealhswith's mother, Eadburh, was a member of the Mercian royal family. They had five or six children together, including Edward the Elder who succeeded his father as king; Æthelflæd who became lady of the Mercians; and Ælfthryth who married Baldwin II, Count of Flanders.<mask>'s mother was Osburga, daughter of Oslac of the Isle of Wight, Chief Butler of England. Asser, in his Vita Ælfredi asserts that this shows his lineage from the Jutes of the Isle of Wight. Osferth was described as a relative in King <mask>'s will and he attested charters in a high position until 934. A charter of King Edward's reign described him as the king's brother – mistakenly according to Keynes and Lapidge, and in the view of Janet Nelson, he probably was an illegitimate son of King <mask>. Death and burial

<mask> died on 26 October 899 at the age of 50 or 51. How he died is unknown, but he suffered throughout his life with a painful and unpleasant illness. His biographer Asser gave a detailed description of <mask>'s symptoms, and this has allowed modern doctors to provide a possible diagnosis.It is thought that he had either Crohn's disease or haemorrhoids. His grandson King Eadred seems to have suffered from a similar illness. <mask> was temporarily buried at the Old Minster in Winchester with his wife


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texts: Ealhswith and later, his son Edward the Elder. Before his death he ordered the construction of the New Minster hoping that it would become a mausoleum for him and his family. Four years after his death, the bodies of <mask> and his family were exhumed and moved to their new resting place in the New Minster and remained there for 211 years. When <mask> Conqueror rose to the English throne after the Norman conquest in 1066, many Anglo-Saxon abbeys were demolished and replaced with Norman cathedrals. One of those unfortunate abbeys was the very New Minster abbey where <mask> was laid to rest.Before demolition, the monks at the New Minster exhumed the bodies of <mask> and his family to safely transfer them to a new location. The New Minster monks moved to Hyde in 1110 a little north of the city, and they transferred to Hyde Abbey along with <mask>'s body and those of his wife and children, which were interred before the high altar. In 1536, many Roman Catholic churches were vandalized by the people of England spurred by disillusionment with the church during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. One such Catholic church was the site of <mask>'s burial, Hyde Abbey. Once again, <mask>'s place of rest was disturbed for the now 3rd time. Hyde Abbey was dissolved in 1538 during the reign of Henry VIII, the church site was demolished and treated like a quarry, as the stones that made up the abbey were then re-used in local architecture. The stone graves housing <mask> and his family stayed underground, and the land returned to farming.These graves remained intact until 1788 when the site

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Alfred
William the
Alfred
Alfred
Alfred
Alfred
Alfred
Alfred


title: Alfred the Great

texts: was acquired by the county for the construction of a town jail. Before construction began, convicts that would later be imprisoned at the site were sent in to prepare the ground, to ready it for building. While digging the foundation trenches, the convicts discovered the coffins of <mask> and his family. The local Catholic priest, Dr. Milner recounts this event:Thus miscreants couch amidst the ashes of our Alfreds and Edwards; and where once religious silence and contemplation were only interrupted by the bell of regular observance, the chanting of devotion, now alone resound the clank of the captives chains and the oaths of the profligate! In digging for the foundation of that mournful edifice, at almost every stroke of the mattock or spade some ancient sepulchre was violated, the venerable contents of which were treated with marked indignity. On this occasion a great number of stone coffins were dug up, with a variety of other curious articles, such as chalices, patens, rings, buckles, the leather of shoes and boots, velvet and gold lace belonging to chasubles and other vestments; as also the crook, rims, and joints of a beautiful crosier double gilt.The convicts broke the stone coffins into pieces, the lead, which lined the coffins, was sold for two guineas, and the bones within scattered around the area. The prison was demolished between 1846 and 1850.Further excavations were inconclusive in 1866 and 1897. In 1866, amateur antiquarian John Mellor claimed to have recovered a number of bones from the site which he said were those of <mask>. These came into the possession of

masks: Alfred Alfred


title: Alfred the Great

texts:
 the vicar of nearby St Bartholomew's Church who reburied them in an unmarked grave in the church graveyard. Excavations conducted by the Winchester Museums Service of the Hyde Abbey site in 1999 located a second pit dug in front of where the high altar would have been located, which was identified as probably dating to Mellor's 1866 excavation. The 1999 archeological excavation uncovered the foundations of the abbey buildings and some bones, suggested at the time to be those of <mask>; they proved instead to belong to an elderly woman. In March 2013, the Diocese of Winchester exhumed the bones from the unmarked grave at St Bartholomew's and placed them in secure storage. The diocese made no claim that they were the bones of <mask>, but intended to secure them for later analysis, and from the attentions of people whose interest may have been sparked by the recent identification of the remains of King Richard III.The bones were radiocarbon-dated but the results showed that they were from the 1300s and therefore not of <mask>. In January 2014, a fragment of pelvis that had been unearthed in the 1999 excavation of the Hyde site, and had subsequently lain in a Winchester museum store room, was radiocarbon-dated to the correct period. It has been suggested that this bone may belong to either <mask> or his son Edward, but this remains unproven. Legacy

Though Henry VI of England attempted unsuccessfully to have <mask> canonized by Pope Eugene IV in 1441, he was venerated sometimes in the Catholic Church. The current "Roman Martyrology" does not mention <mask>. The Anglican Communion


title: Alfred the Great

texts:
 venerates him as a Christian hero, with a Lesser Festival on 26 October, and he may often be found depicted in stained glass in Church of England parish churches. <mask> commissioned Bishop Asser to write his biography, which inevitably emphasised <mask>'s positive aspects.Later medieval historians such as Geoffrey of Monmouth also reinforced <mask>'s favourable image. By the time of the Reformation, <mask> was seen as a pious Christian ruler who promoted the use of English rather than Latin, and so the translations that he commissioned were viewed as untainted by the later Roman Catholic influences of the Normans. Consequently, it was writers of the 16th century who gave <mask> his epithet as "the Great", not any of <mask>'s contemporaries. The epithet was retained by succeeding generations who admired <mask>'s patriotism, success against barbarism, promotion of education, and establishment of the rule of law. A number of educational establishments are named in <mask>'s honour:
 The University of Winchester created from the former King Alfred's College, Winchester (1928 to 2004)
 Alfred University and Alfred State College in Alfred, New York; the local telephone exchange for Alfred University is 871 in commemoration of the year of <mask>'s ascension to the throne. Additionally, the mascot of Alfred University is named Lil' Alf and is modeled after the king
 The University of Liverpool created a King <mask> Chair of English Literature

 King <mask>'s Academy, a secondary school in Wantage, Oxfordshire, the birthplace of Alfred
 King's Lodge School in Chippenham, Wiltshire, so

masks: Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred Alfred


title: Alfred the Great

texts:
 named because King <mask>'s hunting lodge is reputed to have stood on or near the site of the school
 The King Alfred School and Specialist Sports Academy, Burnham Road, Highbridge, so named due to its rough proximity to Brent Knoll (a Beacon site) and Athelney
 The King Alfred School in Barnet, North London, UK
 King <mask>'s house in Bishop Stopford's School at Enfield
 King Alfred Swimming Pool & Leisure complex in Hove, Brighton UK

The Royal Navy named one ship and two shore establishments HMS King Alfred, and one of the early ships of the U.S. Navy was named USS Alfred in his honour. In 2002, Alfred was ranked number 14 in the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide vote.Statues

Southwark
A statue of <mask> <mask> located in Trinity Church Square, Southwark is considered to be the oldest outdoor statue in London, and part of it has been found to date to Roman times. The sculpture was thought medieval until 2021 conservation work. The lower half was then discovered to be Bath Stone and part of a colossal ancient sculpture dedicated to the goddess Minerva. It is typical of the 2nd Century, dating to around the reign of Hadrian. The older half is likely to have been carved by a continental craftsman used to working with British stone. Winchester

A bronze statue of <mask> Great stands at the eastern end of The Broadway, close to the site of Winchester's medieval East Gate. The statue was designed by Hamo Thornycroft, cast in bronze by Singer & Sons of Frome and erected in 1899 to mark one thousand years since <mask>'s death.The statue is placed on a

masks:
Alfred
Alfred
Alfred the
Great
Alfred the
Alfred


title: Alfred the Great

texts:
 pedestal consisting of two immense blocks of grey Cornish granite. Pewsey

A prominent statue of King <mask> <mask> stands in the middle of Pewsey. It was unveiled in June 1913 to commemorate the coronation of King George V.

Wantage
A statue of <mask> <mask>, situated in the Wantage market place, was sculpted by Count Gleichen, a relative of Queen Victoria, and unveiled on 14 July 1877 by the Prince and Princess of Wales. The statue was vandalised on New Year's Eve 2007, losing part of its right arm and axe. After the arm and axe were replaced, the statue was again vandalised on Christmas Eve 2008, losing its axe. Alfred University, New York

The centerpiece of Alfred University's quad is a bronze statue of the king, created in 1990 by then-professor William Underhill. It features the king as a young man, holding a shield in his left hand and an open book in his right.Cleveland, Ohio
A marble statue of <mask> <mask> stands on the North side of the Cuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio. It was sculpted by Isidore Konti in 1910. Chronology

Notes

Citations

Sources

  — "Note: This electronic edition [of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle] is a collation of material from nine diverse extant versions of the Chronicle. It contains primarily the translation of Rev. James Ingram, as published in the [1847] Everyman edition". It was "Originally compiled on the orders of King <mask> <mask>, approximately A.D. 890, and subsequently maintained and added to by generations of anonymous scribes until the middle of the 12th

masks:
Alfred the
Great
Alfred the
Great
Alfred the
Great
Alfred the
Great


title: Mike Temwanjera

texts:
<mask>  (born 21 May 1982) is a Zimbabwean former professional footballer who usually played as a centre forward, but also as a second striker. A member of FC Vaslui from January 2007 until summer 2014, he was one of the team's longest serving players, second in scoring during Vaslui's spell in Liga I, with 39 goals. He also appeared once for the Zimbabwe national team. Club career
Temwanjera was born Harare, Zimbabwe. CAPS United
Until 2003 Temwanjera played with CAPS United, traditionally one of the strongest teams in the Zimbabwe Premier Soccer League. FK Javor
In 2003 Temwanjera came to Serbia for trials with FK Javor Ivanjica, a club that six months earlier had imported two of his CAPS United colleagues, Leonard Tsipa and Blessing Makunike. The season that he arrived, Javor had just been relegated from the top league, so Temwanjera played in the Serbian Second League during his first two seasons.It was at the end of the 2004–05 season that Javor returned to the First League of Serbia and Montenegro. In the 2005–06 season, Temwanjera played 26 matches and scored 3 goals. However, the club finished 12th and was relegated again. Borac Čačak
In the summer of 2006, the league in Serbia was renamed the SuperLiga. FK Javor was playing in the Serbian First League, formerly known as Second League. Temwanjera's performances in the previous season has caught the attention of some top league clubs, and in July he signed with FK Borac Čačak. By the end of the first half of the 2006–07 Serbian SuperLiga, Temwanjera had played 16 matches and scored 3 goals, and the club was having a mediocre season.During one march, discontented supporters shouted racially


title: Mike Temwanjera

texts: manager, in Vaslui's 3–1 home win over Astra Ploieşti. On 7 November, he scored the winning goal against Ceahlăul Piatra Neamţ. On 23 November, Temwanjera scored Vaslui's first goal, from the 2–0 home league win against CFR Cluj, helping his team winning the eighth match in a row. On 27 February 2010, he suffered a meniscal laceration, in the 2–1 home league win against Pandurii Târgu Jiu, which forced him out from the field for almost nine months. On 4 November 2010, <mask> was awarded "Sportsman of the Year in Vaslui", for his entire activity for the club. After being sidelined for nine months, he returned for Vaslui's 3–1 league win over Pandurii Târgu Jiu on 26 November, coming as a late substitute for Yero Bello. On 12 April 2011, he was in the startup team against Gloria Bistriţa, for the first time since February 2010, and he managed to score Vaslui's only goal.Late in April, following his Romanian citizenship request, he stated "My future is tied with this town. I am happy here, and I want to end my career in the yellow-green shirt, when the time will come." On 9 May, in a league game against Astra Ploieşti, he was sent off for a bad foul on Alexandru Măţel. He was punished with a two-match ban with two rounds to spare, meaning that <mask>'s season was over. On 24 July 2011, played his 100th Liga I match, in Vaslui's opening game against Rapid București. He is only the second Vaslui player, to achieve this feat, joining Bogdan Buhuş. On 18 August, Temwanjera scored his first goal of the season as he netted Vaslui's first in a 2–0 home win over Sparta Prague, helping his team qualifying for the first time in the UEFA Europa League's Group

masks: Mike Temwanjera


title: Mike Temwanjera

texts:
 Stages.Three days later, he scored his first league goal of the season, in a 2–1 home defeat against newly promoted Ceahlăul Piatra Neamţ. One week later, he scored the 2–1 winning goal for Vaslui, against FC Braşov. On 11 September, he scored the equaliser against Dinamo București, counting his third league goal in a row. Vaslui went on winning with 3–1. Four days later, he won a penalty that gave Vaslui a 2–1 lead in the first match from the group stages of UEFA Europa League against Lazio, after Wesley converted from the spot. The game eventually ended a 2–2 draw. He scored his second goal in UEFA Europa League against FC Zurich in 2–2 draw.On 7 May 2012, he scored a hattrick against Gaz Metan Mediaş.He ended the season with a total of 7 goals in Liga I. International career
Temwanjera made his debut for the Zimbabwe national team in 2005 while playing with FK Javor in a friendly game against Zambia. It remained his only international appearance. Personal life
His brother David and Jealous Wilson, are also footballers too. Career statistics

Club

Honours
Vaslui
Liga I Runner-up: 2011–12
Cupa României Runner-up: 2009–10
UEFA Intertoto Cup Winner: 2008

References

External links

1972 births
Living people
Sportspeople from Harare
Association football forwards
Zimbabwean footballers
Zimbabwe international footballers
CAPS United players
FK Javor Ivanjica players
FK Borac Čačak players
FC Vaslui players
<mask>a
Serbian SuperLiga players
Liga I players
<mask>a
Zimbabwean expatriate footballers
Expatriate footballers in Serbia
Expatriate footballers in Romania
Zimbabwean expatriate sportspeople in Romania
Expatriate footballers in Thailand
Zimbabwean

masks:
Mike Temwanjer
Mike Temwanjer


title: Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau

texts:
<mask>, Count of Mirabeau (9 March 17492 April 1791) was a leader of the early stages of the French Revolution. A noble, he had been involved in numerous scandals before the start of the Revolution in 1789 that had left his reputation in ruins. Nonetheless, he rose to the top of the French political hierarchy in the years 1789–1791 and acquired the reputation of a voice of the people. A successful orator, he was the leader of the moderate position among revolutionaries by favoring a constitutional monarchy built on the model of Great Britain. When he died (of natural causes), he was a great national hero, even though support for his moderate position was slipping away. The later discovery that he was in the pay of King Louis XVI and the Austrian enemies of France beginning in 1790 brought him into posthumous disgrace. Historians are deeply split on whether he was a great leader who almost saved the nation from the Terror, a venal demagogue lacking political or moral values, or a traitor in the pay of the enemy.Family history

The family of Riqueti, with possible distant origins in Italy, became wealthy through merchant trading in Marseilles. In 1570, Jean Riqueti bought the château and seigniory of Mirabeau, which had belonged to the great Provençal family of Barras. In 1685, <mask> Riqueti obtained the title "marquis de Mirabeau". His son, Jean Antoine, grandfather of <mask> <mask>, served with distinction through all the later campaigns of the reign of Louis XIV. At the Battle of Cassano (1705), he suffered a neck wound so severe that he had to wear a silver stock ever after. Because he tended to be blunt and

masks:
Honoré Gabriel Riqueti
Honoré
Honoré
Gabriel Riqueti


texts:
 tactless, he never rose above the rank of colonel. On retiring from the service, he married Françoise <mask>, with whom he had three sons: Victor (marquis de Mirabeau), Jean Antoine (bailli de Mirabeau) and Louis Alexandre (comte de Mirabeau).<mask> <mask>, comte de Mirabeau, was the son of Victor. Early life
<mask>-<mask> was born at Le Bignon, near Nemours, the eldest surviving son of the economist <mask> Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, and his wife Marie-Geneviève <mask>. He was also the fifth child and second son of the couple. When he was three years old, a virulent attack of smallpox left his face disfigured. This, combined with Mirabeau's resemblance to his maternal ancestors and his fondness for his mother, contributed to his father's dislike of him. At the age of five, his father had him sent to the strict boarding school of Abbé Choquart in Paris by the false name of "Pierre-Buffière" according to estate possessed by his mother. Destined for the army, at age eighteen, he entered the military school in Paris in the regiment of Berri-Cavaleria at Saints.Of this school, which had Joseph-Louis Lagrange for its professor of mathematics, there is an amusing account in the life of Gilbert Elliot, who met Mirabeau there. On leaving school in 1767, he received a commission in a cavalry regiment that his grandfather had commanded years before. Mirabeau's love affairs are well-known, owing to the celebrity of the letters to Marie Thérèse <mask>, his "Sophie". In spite of his disfigurement (or perhaps because of it), he won the heart of the lady to whom his colonel was attached; this led to such scandal that his father

masks:
de Castellane
Honoré
Gabriel Riqueti
Honoré
Gabriel Mirabeau
Victor de
de Vassan
de Monnier


texts: obtained a lettre de cachet, and Mirabeau was imprisoned in the Île de Ré. On being released, the young nobleman obtained leave to accompany the French expedition to Corsica as a volunteer. During the Corsican expedition, Mirabeau contracted several more gambling debts and engaged in another scandalous love affair. However, he proved his military genius in the Corsican expedition, and also conducted a thorough study of the island during his stay.The study was most likely factually incorrect, but his desire to learn of a country that had been previously unstudied emphasizes <mask>'s endless curiosity and inquisitiveness, particularly into the traditions and customs of society. Mirabeau learned the value of hard work in the French army. This aspect of Mirabeau's personality contributed to his popular success in later years, during the Revolution. After his return, he tried to keep on good terms with his father, and in 1772 he married a rich heiress, Marie–Marquerite–Emilie <mask>, daughter of the marquis de Marignane. Emilie, who was 18 years old, was apparently engaged to a much older nobleman, the Comte <mask>. Nonetheless, Mirabeau pursued her for several months, expecting that their marriage would benefit from the money that the couple would receive from their parents. After several months of failed attempts at being introduced to the heiress, Mirabeau bribed one of the young lady's maids to let him into her residence, where he pretended to have had a sexual encounter with Emilie.To avoid losing face, her father saw that they got married just a couple of days afterwards. <mask> received a small allowance of 6,000

masks:
Mirabeau
de Covet
de Valbelle
Mirabeau


texts: livres from his father, but never received the expected dowry from the marquis. Mirabeau, who was still facing financial trouble and increasing debt, could not keep up with the expensive lifestyle to which his wife was accustomed, and their extravagances forced his father to send him into semi-exile in the country, where he wrote his earliest extant work, the Essai sur le despotisme. The couple had a son who died early, mostly due to the poor living conditions they were experiencing at that time. Then his wife asked for judicial separation in 1782. She was defended by Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, who later became one of the editors of the Civil Code. Mirabeau defended his own cause in this trial but lost, holding resentment against Portalis forever.Mirabeau's violent disposition led him to quarrel with a country gentleman who had insulted his sister, and his exile was changed by lettre de cachet into imprisonment in the Château d'If in 1774. In 1775 he was transferred to the castle of Joux, where he was not closely confined, having full leave to enter the town of Pontarlier. In a house of a friend he met Marie Thérèse <mask>, known as "Sophie", and the two fell in love. He escaped to Switzerland, where Sophie joined him; they then went to the United Provinces, where he lived by writing hack work for the booksellers; meanwhile Mirabeau had been condemned to death at Pontarlier for sedition and abduction, and in May 1777 he was seized by the Dutch police, sent to France and imprisoned by a lettre de cachet in the castle of Vincennes. The early part of his confinement is marked by indecent letters to Sophie (first


texts:
 published in 1793 by Pierre Louis Manuel), and the obscene Erotica biblion and Ma conversion. In Vincennes, he met the <mask> Sade, who was also writing erotic works; however the two disliked each other intensely. It was in these writings, however, that Mirabeau developed experience as an orator.He learned how to curb his natural eloquence and his dialectic became firm, commanding and moving. The prison in which he was held was the first platform to hear his voice. Later during his confinement, he wrote Des Lettres de Cachet et des prisons d'état, published after his liberation (1782). It exhibits an accurate knowledge of French constitutional history, skillfully marshaled to demonstrate that the system of lettres de cachet was not only philosophically unjust but constitutionally illegal. It shows, though in a rather diffuse and declamatory form, wide historical knowledge, keen philosophical perception, and genuine eloquence, applied to a practical purpose, which was the great characteristic of Mirabeau, both as a political thinker and as a statesman. Before the French Revolution

His release from Vincennes in August 1782 began the second period of Mirabeau's life. Mirabeau not only succeeded in reversing the sentence of death against him, but also got an order for Sophie's husband to pay the costs of the whole legal proceedings.It was thought <mask> would come out of the lawsuit in Aix ruined:  his past convictions in prison, scandalous relationships with women, and the bad relationship with his father the Marquis all gave him a terrible reputation among judges and adversaries. However, despite being condemned by the

masks:
Marquis de
Mirabeau


texts: judge, his reputation was greatly enhanced in the eyes of the public. He had withered his opponents, crushed the opposing lawyer and turned the cards in his favor regarding the death sentence. From this day forward, <mask> became regarded as a man of the people. Upon his release, he found that his Sophie had consoled herself with a young officer, after whose death she had committed suicide. From Pontarlier he went to Aix-en-Provence, where he claimed the court's order said that his wife should return to him. She naturally objected, and he finally lost in the third appeal of the case when Emilie's father produced to the court compromising letters from Mirabeau addressed to the marquess.Mirabeau then intervened in the suit between his father and mother before the parlement of Paris and attacked the ruling powers so violently that he had to leave France and return to the Dutch Republic, where he tried to live by writing. For a period he was employed by the publisher Marc-Michel Rey. About this time he met <mask> Nehra, the daughter of Willem van Haren, a Dutch statesman and political writer. She was an educated, refined woman capable of appreciating Mirabeau's good points. His life was strengthened by the love of Mme <mask>, his adopted son, <mask> Montigny, and his little dog Chico. After a time in the Dutch Republic he went to England, where his treatise on lettres de cachet was much admired after it was translated into English in 1787. He was soon admitted into the best Whig literary and political society of London through his old school friend Gilbert Elliot, who had become a leading Whig member of parliament.Of all

masks:
Mirabeau
Madame de
de Nehra
Lucas de


texts: his English friends, none seem to have been as close to him as Lord Shelburne and Sir Samuel Romilly. Romilly was introduced to <mask> by Sir Francis D'Ivernois, who undertook the translation of Mirabeau's Considérations sur l'ordre de Cincinnatus into English. The Considérations was one of several works that Mirabeau wrote in the year 1785, and it is a good specimen of his method. He had read a pamphlet published in America attacking the order, founded in 1783 as a bond of association between officers who had fought in the American Revolutionary War against Britain. The arguments struck him as true and valuable, so he rearranged them in his own fashion, and rewrote them in his own oratorical style. He supplemented the work with materials provided personally by Benjamin Franklin, who shared Mirabeau's opinions on the topic, but was not in a position to criticize the "noble order" espoused by the Society of the Cincinnati directly, because he was serving as the United States Minister to France at the time. Several other pamphlets Mirabeau wrote in 1785 attacked financial speculation.Among those, De La Caisse d'Escompte was prescient in that it correctly predicted the risky nature and ultimate demise of the French "Discount Bank." This book, which condemned the fiscal politics of the state as going against the interest of the public, was among the influential literature critical of the French government in the years leading up to the French Revolution. He soon found that such work did not pay enough to keep his retinue, and so he sought employment from the French foreign office, either as a writer or a diplomat. He first


texts: sent Mme <mask> to Paris to make peace with the authorities, and then returned himself with hopes of getting a job through an old literary collaborateur of his, Durival, who was at this time director of finance at the department of foreign affairs. One of this official's functions was to subsidize political pamphleteers, and Mirabeau hoped to be so employed. However, he ruined his chances with a series of writings on financial questions. On his return to Paris he had become acquainted with Étienne Clavière, the Genevese exile, and a banker named Panchaud.From them he learnt about the abuse of stock-jobbing, and seizing their ideas he began to regard stock-jobbing, or agiotage (known in English as "arbitrage"), as the source of all evil, and to attack in his usual vehement style the Banque de St-Charles and the Compagnie des Eaux. This pamphlet brought him into controversy with Pierre Beaumarchais, who certainly did not get the best of it, but it lost him any chance of employment with the government. His abilities were too great, however, to be overlooked by the foreign minister Charles Gravier, Comte <mask>gennes. After a preliminary trip to Berlin in early 1786, he was dispatched that July on a mission to the royal court of Prussia. Upon his return in January, Mirabeau published a full account in his Secret History of the Court of Berlin (1787). This account denounced the Prussian court as scandalous and corrupt, described the dying King <mask> the Great as weak and overly emotional, and labeled Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of <mask> the Great and a guest of the French court, as narrow-minded and incompetent. He

masks:
de Nehra
de Ver
Frederick
Frederick


texts: also wrote contemptuously of Prussia's principal ministers Ewald Friedrich, Count von Hertzberg, and Joachim von Blumenthal.The resulting uproar was an extreme embarrassment for the French government, which quickly censored the book, but could not prevent its widespread notoriety. <mask>'s episode provided inspiration to many more radical publishers who came to regard Mirabeau as a leader of the coming revolution. During his journey to Germany, he had made the acquaintance of Jakob Mauvillon, an expert on Prussia whose expertise Mirabeau made use of in his De la monarchie prussienne sous Frédéric le Grand (London, 1788). In 1788, Mirabeau was approached and asked to offer himself as a candidate for secretary to the Assembly of Notables, which the King Louis XVI had just convened as a method to circumvent the opposition of the parlements to crown initiatives seeking to reform France's tax structure. His chance to be a leading voice in France as it faced political ferment seemed to be fading as he turned down the crown offer, explaining his reasoning in a letter of 18 April 1788 to the minister Montmorin. In this affair he had sought to bring his name before the public by publishing another financial work, the Dénonciation de l'agiotage, however, it had contained diatribes that harmed his chance to serve as secretary, and led him to retire to Tongeren. He further injured his prospects by publishing the reports he had sent back to France during his secret mission to Berlin.But 1789 was at hand; the Estates-General was summoned, and the French Revolution broke out soon afterward. As a result, Mirabeau was able to exploit a


texts: the people of France better than the British House of Commons represented the common people of Great Britain. According to a story contained in the Mémoires of the duchesse d'Abrantes, Mirabeau's first thought of becoming a minister can be traced to May 1789, when Queen Marie Antoinette allegedly tried to bribe him. He refused the bribe, but expressed his wish to be a minister. The indignation with which the queen rejected the idea may have made him consider the Duke of Orléans, a cousin of Louis XVI, as a possible constitutional king, because his title would of necessity be parliamentary. But the weakness of the Duke of Orléans was too palpable, and Mirabeau expressed his utter contempt for him. He also attempted to form an alliance with the <mask> la Fayette, but the two could not agree on a personal level, and Lafayette had his own theories about a new French constitution.Mirabeau tried for a time to act with Jacques Necker, the French finance minister, and obtained the sanction of the Assembly for Necker's financial scheme, not because it was good, but because, as he said, "no other plan was before them, and something must be done." The Comte de la Marck was a close friend of the queen, and had been elected a member of the Estates-General. His acquaintance with Mirabeau, begun in 1788, ripened during the following year into a friendship, which La Marck hoped to turn to the advantage of the court. After The March on Versailles of 5 October 1789, he consulted Mirabeau as to what measures the king ought to take, and Mirabeau, delighted at the opportunity, drew up his recommendations. His Mémoire offers insight into