10 - Adaptation to a new material morality

Summary

The ‘ordinariness’ of day-to-day practical society, left behind by mainstream vernacular poetry when symbolic language was elevated into the spiritual realm, became increasingly subject in the vernacular to prose-led analysis and classification. Even in the areas in which traditional, poetry-led, modes of thinking and feeling would have been strongest, such as the shared obligations of king and followers, new methodology was taking over. Alfred, for instance, clearly showed this trend when dealing with these mutual responsibilities in a passage he supplied on his own account in his vernacular prose version of the De consolatione Philosophiae. In connection with Boethius's assertion to ‘Philosophy’ that he had been little motivated by an ambition for mortal things but had desired material for action, the king made his spokesman, ‘Mind’, specify the essential needs of someone who is called upon to rule, as Alfred himself had been: ‘A king's material for ruling with’, Mind says, ‘is that he shall have his land fully manned: he must have men who pray, and soldiers and workmen … Also his material is that he shall have sustenance for those three orders; the sustenance consisting of land to dwell on, and gifts, and weapons, and food, and ale, and clothes, and everything those three orders require’ Alfred no longer attempted to embed the practical needs of society in the emotive language of age-old human ties, as poetic symbolic expression did, but instead provided an itemized list.