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William NorthÆLFRIC (ca. 945–ca. 1015)
Abbot of Eynsham, sometimes called “Grammaticus”
(“the grammarian”), the greatest writer of English prose
before the Norman Conquest and the leading scholar of
his day. His contributions to the literary and religious
life of 10th-century England mirror the achievements of
his more illustrious predecessors from the 8th and 9th
centuries, Bede and King Alfred the Great. Like Bede,
whom he often consulted as a source, Ælfric produced
a substantial body of homiletic and hagiographic writ-
ings. But following the example of King Alfred, Ælfric
broke away from Latin, the traditional language of the
church, and wrote primarily in English in order to reach
a wider audience.
There seems little reason to doubt Ælfric’s largely
unnoticed autobiographical statement in his Grammar
that he studied under and was ordained by Dunstan,
a key fi gure in the Benedictine Reform who became
archbishop of Canterbury in 960 and who is widely
credited with restoring monastic life after its virtual
demise by the middle of the 10th century (“If you were
to say, ‘Who taught you?’ I would say ‘Dunstan.’ ‘Who
ordained you?’ ‘He ordained me.’”). If this statement is
true, Ælfric’s date of birth would almost certainly have
to be placed some ten years earlier than the date of 955
given in virtually all other standard biographical refer-
ences. No doubt surrounds Ælfric’s later studies with
another leading fi gure of monastic reform, Æthelwold,
at the Benedictine monastery at Winchester. In 987,
three years after Æthelwold’s death, Ælfric obtained
a position as monk and masspriest at Cernel Abbey in
what is now Cerne Abbas, Dorset. Within a few years
he had achieved a reputation as the preeminent literary
fi gure of the Benedictine revival.
At Cernel Ælfric developed a remarkable and in-
novative “rhythmical prose” style, admirably suited
for oral delivery, that resembles OE verse in its use of
paired phrases linked by alliteration but differs from it in
matters of tone, style, diction, and metrical constraints.
Ælfric avoids, for example, the use of the kenning,
kend heiti, ókend heiti, and other metaphoric state-
ments commonly associated with OE heroic poetry and
strives instead for “ordinary English speech” (usitatam
Anglicam sermocinationem). Hickes praised Ælfric’s
prose as purus, suavis, et regularis (“pure, smooth,
and orderly”), and W.P. Ker hailed Ælfric as “the great
master of prose in all its forms.” Yet his considerableskills as a prose stylist were undoubtedly of secondary
importance to Ælfric, whose central and abiding literary
concern (as John Pope has noted) was the instruction
of the adult laity, most of whom knew no Latin, in the
Christian faith.
Ælfric’s seven chief works—two volumes of Catholic
Homilies or Sermones catholici, two additional sets
of homilies based in part on his previous writings,
De temporibus anni, the Grammar, and the lives of
Saints—form a reasonably complete educational pro-
gram aimed at providing the spiritual instruction Ælfric
deemed necessary for salvation. His literary canon
builds upon the program of learning instituted by King
Alfred a century earlier but differs from that program
by virtue of its more tightly focused spiritual emphasis,
its greater comprehensiveness, and its stricter accuracy
in rendering Latin texts.
Ælfric reveals the impetus for his literary career by
quoting in the preface to his fi rst major work Christ’s
great commission to his disciples “to instruct and teach
all people the things that he himself had taught them”
(Matt. 28:19–20); Ælfric apparently patterned his life
and writings not only upon this injunction but also upon
the more dire scriptural text he cites in the same breath,
namely that the Lord’s servants must themselves face
perdition if they fail to warn and exhort the unrighteous
(Ezek. 33:8). This divine mandate lends to Ælfric’s liter-
ary activities a spirit of personal mission and urgency,
and this same spirit informs the inchoate program of
instruction promulgated by King Alfred, which Ælfric
both emulates and augments in his own writings. Ælfric
borrows from King Alfred the revolutionary idea of us-
ing the vernacular to broaden the reach of instruction
to “all people,” which in practice meant reaching out to
the uneducated majority of his countrymen who knew
no Latin.
Yet Ælfric—traditional, conservative, and orthodox
by temperament—proved a somewhat reluctant revolu-
tionary. He persistently worried about the appropriate-
ness of making Latin texts generally available to the
laity, who might, for example, misconstrue scripture
and believe that they might have four wives just as the
patriarch Jacob did. Ælfric vowed on several occasions
that he would cease from translating lest the pearls of
Christ fall into disrespect, yet at the end of his career
he apparently accepted the usefulness of his writings
and, far from retracting them, conveniently enumer-
ated them and in effect canonized them in the Letter
to Sigeweard.
In addition to following Alfred’s lead in translating,
Ælfric turned to other sources of inspiration, such as
Augustine’s De catechizandis rudibus and De doctrina
christiana, for more detailed guidance in establishing the
range of texts and the survey of doctrine needed to fulfi ll
the catechetical dimensions of Christ’s commission toADAM OF BREMEN