1、,The Introduction of the King Alfred,刘胜超申由甲黄斌,First、King Alfred and His ContributionsSecond、 Religion and CultureThird、 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,He was King of Wessex from 871 to 899.Alfred is noted for his defense of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of southern England against the Vikings,becoming the only En
2、glish king to be accorded the epithet 0“the Great“.Alfred was the first King of the West Saxons to style himself “King of the Anglo-Saxons“.Details of his life are described in a work by the Welsh scholar and bishop,Asser.Alfred was a learned man who encourged education and improved his kingdoms leg
3、al system and military structure.Alfred is a Catholic and an Eastern Orthodox Church saint and is commonly regarded as a hero of the Christian Church in the Anglican Commounion,with a feast day of 26 October.,Alfred defeated the Danes and reached a friendly agreement with them in 879.The Danes gaine
4、d control of the north and east,while he ruled the rest.He also converted some leading Danes into Christians. He founded a strong fleet and is known as “the father of the British navy“.He reorgnized the Saxon army,making it more effficient.He translated a Latin boook into English.He also established
5、 schools and formulated a legal system.All this earns him the title “Alfres the Great“.,2、Religion and CultureIn the 880s,Alfred was “cajoling and threatening“ his nobles and man to learn,perhaps inspired by the example of Charlemagne a century before,who undertook an equally ambitious effort to rev
6、ive learning.It 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 schoool to educate his own childre,the sons of his nobles,and intellctually promising boys of lesser birth;an attempt to req
7、uire 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 Alfreds kingdom and house;and the issuance of a law code that presented the West
8、Saxons as a new people of Israel and their king as a just and divinely-inspired law-giver.,The building,Alfreds restoration entailed reoccupying and refurbishing the nearly deserted Roman walled city , building quays along the Thames ,and laying a new city street plan. It is probably at this point t
9、hat Alfred assumed the new royal style of king of the Anglo-Saxons.,3、Anglo-Saxon ChronicleThe Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of annals in Old English chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons.The annals were initially created late in the 9th century,probably in Wessex,during the reign of A
10、lfred the Great.Multiple manuscript copies were made and distributed to monasteries across England and were independently updated.In one case,the chronicle was still being actively updates in 1154.,Nine manuscripts survive in whole or in part,though not all are of equal historical valuble and none o
11、f them is the original version.The oldest seems to have been started towards the end of Alfreds reign,while the most recent was written at Peterborough Abbey after a fire at that monastery in 1116.Almost all of the material in the chronicle is in the form of annals,by year;the earliest are dated at
12、60 BC,and historical materical follows up to the year in which the chronicle was written,at which point contemporary records begin.These manuscripts collectively are known as the anglo-Saxon Chronocle. seven of the nine surviving manuscripts and fragments now reside in the British Library.The remaining two are in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the Parker Library of College,cambridge.,Thanks!,
