3 - Fix the Date

Summary

We can easily picture the historian as he stumbles about in the past, stubbing his toe on the hard facts if he doesn’t watch out. I wish to inquire whether the historical fact is really as hard and stable as it is often supposed to be.

— Carl Becker

It is generally agreed that no one has ever edited medieval texts more beautifully or gracefully than Stubbs; no one has more unblinkingly adhered to the knowable ‘fact.’

— Robert Brentano

Abstract

This chapter constitutes a case history of how, thanks to scholarship, a cult can collectively construct a hard fact. Because Victorian historians relied on strict chronology as an antidote to hagiography, they elected the Old English Chronicle to replace Asser’s hagiographic Latin Life of Alfred as the prime reliquary for the cult of the historical Alfred. Plummer found Alfred’s true birthdate not in the Life but the Chronicle. This dialectic of hagiography and chronology illuminates how and why the question of the legendary Alfred’s historical birthdate was first posed in 1876 by the nouveau riche autodidact Henry Howorth in his intense controversy with the aristocratic Roman Catholic Bishop William Clifford and then professionally, but shortsightedly, resolved by Plummer in 1901.

Keywords: papal infallibility, Vatican I, antiquarianism, Bishop William Stubbs, Henry Howorth, Bishop William Clifford

Harmony from dissonance

One can start with a thrill of emotion. One can start with a legend. Or one can start with a hard fact.

The challenge of reaching consensus on how old Alfred was when he went to Rome in 853 played a crucial (now long forgotten) role in establishing the relation between the Life and the Chronicle. In 1889 Stubbs suggested ca. 842 as a plausible date for Alfred’s birth, making it easier to suspend disbelief in Asser’s stories of Alfred’s childhood. The context in which the question of Alfred’s true birthdate was posed by Stubbs and then definitively but defectively answered by Plummer illuminates the dialectic of hagiography and chronology in the cult of Alfred the Great.

In 1901 Plummer changed Alfred’s canonical birthdate from 849 to 848. The 849 date came from the Life, 848 from the Chronicle. On the face of it, Plummer’s change in chronology looks trivial.