Even scholars have to learn to live with a historical phenomenon like King Alfred of the West Saxons (871–99), and of more besides. Some modern scholars find this more uncomfortable than their predecessors. What follows is by way of personal (perhaps over-personal) reflection of what I have come, over half a lifetime of teaching and reading, to think about this extraordinary man. It is also my chance to expand a bit on the entry for King Alfred in theNew Dictionary of(British)National Biographythat it was my awesome responsibility to compose. And perhaps, anyway for the time...

On November 1, 1881, the English historian, Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–92), began a series of lectures in the Library Hall of Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York State.² An interview, published earlier that Fall byThe New York Herald, October 8, 1881, to coincide with Freeman’s arrival in America, gives us a pen-portrait of the great man.The Herald’s London correspondent had met the historian shortly before his departure from England, and the article gives us something of his character. ‘Mr Freeman,’ we are told,

is a man of very diffident manners, and, if I may use such irreverent...

A fragment of a plea from the court of the archbishop of Canterbury, remanded from the vacant see of Chichester around the year 1200, summarizes the collection of testimony in a marriage suit. The survivinginquisitioreads in part:

[The witnesses] all say the same thing about the affinity, to wit, that Agnes, the wife of Stephen, was formerly the wife of Elias, a cook. And Isabel, once the concubine of Stephen, was the daughter of Elias’ mother’s sister.¹

Thirteen people affirm this, states the record, which goes on to assert: ‘The whole neighborhood testifies to this, and it is...

In hisThe English Church, 940–1154, Henry Loyn remarked that central features of the Church in England and Normandy in the eleventh century were Ottonian.² When it came to a subject as quintessentially central to his interests as the making of Domesday Book, Henry’s instincts again told him to look for Continental parallels.³ Henry always insisted that English and British history be taught and written against a European canvas. This fundamental belief was the stimulus forThe Reign of Charlemagnewhich he and John Percival published in 1975.⁴ It shaped the syllabus which we taught at the then University...

There is good reason to include Thomas Becket in discussions of later twelfth-century military history. The implication of Henry II in the murder of Archbishop Becket in 1170 forced the king to enter into protracted negotiations with the papacy of Alexander III, which seemed inclined towards placing England under censure and perhaps even excommunicating the monarch himself. Two distinct yet related events resulted from this lengthy dispute with the Church, both having military implications. The first was Henry’s submission to the will of Alexander in 1172, as the dialogue between papal legates and the king’s representatives ended with the signing...

The outcome of the battle of Hastings saw many momentous changes for England. It heralded a new king, a new dynasty, and arguably a new government and culture. Wace records how these circumstances were first celebrated. With Harold dead and his standard on the ground ‘Duke William asked for his own banner to be carried to the place where the standard had been and had it raised on high there; that was a sign that he had conquered …’¹ To all intents and purposes, the Anglo-Norman realm was ushered in with the wave of a flag.

This may sound somewhat...

Queen Sybil (or Sibyl or Sibylla) of Jerusalem, queen in her own right, married a man who was thoroughly hated by some of her most powerful and influential nobles, lost her kingdom to the Muslim ruler Saladin, and died in a siege camp with her children, leaving her husband without a claim to the throne. In terms of rulership, her reign was a disaster. However, the thirteenth-century description of her quoted above in the title to this article makes no allusion to these military failures. Sybil was a noble woman or wife (asfemmecan mean either) and a good...

Western Europeans came to know about Prester John in a crusading context. Edessa, the first city in the east to be captured by the crusaders, had been reconquered by Zengi of Mosul in 1144. In the following year the historian Otto of Freising met at the papal court Hugh, the Catholic bishop of Jabala in the principality of Antioch, who related how ‘not many years ago a certain John, king and priest, living in the furthest lands of the east beyond Persia and Armenia’, who was a Nestorian Christian, as were his subjects, had made war on the Samiardi, kings...