Page:Source Problems in English History.djvu/33

 the vikings had encountered since their more wide-spread and purposeful efforts to colonize and conquer the south. Before his reign ended the tide had turned and the chances were much more than even that the hopeful beginnings of medieval civilization would be preserved. Probably at not many times in history has more depended upon a single great spirit than in certain dark weeks and months of this ninth-century English reign.

I. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. “This is the oldest historical work written in any Germanic language, and is the basis of most of our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon history from the year 732 onward.” For perhaps two centuries before Alfred, one or more brief local annals, written in Latin, appear to have been kept in quite strictly contemporaneous fashion. Under some unknown influence these became expanded and developed about 855, shortly before the death of Alfred’s father. Again there was a striking development late in Alfred’s reign (893), and clearly under his influence. The record for 893–897 is particularly full and intelligent. It seems very probable that Alfred was the first to conceive the idea of a national chronicle written in the vernacular; and writers inspired and directed by him appear to have used what previously existing material they could obtain for writing up and making the new chronicle complete down to their time. Bede’s great history was the main source to 732. From then to the middle of the ninth century they used the meager but more contemporaneous Latin annals. But even for the period of Alfred’s public