Page "Alfred the Great" Paragraph 56

In the 880s, at the same time that he was " cajoling and threatening " his nobles to build and man the burhs, Alfred, perhaps inspired by the example of Charlemagne almost a century before, undertook an equally ambitious effort to revive learning.

It entailed the recruitment of clerical scholars from Mercia, Wales and abroad to enhance the tenor of the court and of the episcopacy ; the establishment of a court school to educate his own children, the sons of his nobles, and intellectually promising boys of lesser birth ; an attempt to require literacy in those who held offices of authority ; a series of translations into the vernacular of Latin works the king deemed " most necessary for all men to know "; the compilation of a chronicle detailing the rise of Alfred's kingdom and house ; and the issuance of a law code that presented the West Saxons as a new people of Israel and their king as a just and divinely inspired law-giver.