The foundation of The Hague as an " international city of peace and justice " was laid in 1899, when the world's first Peace Conference took place in The Hague on Tobias Asser's initiative, followed by a second in 1907.

A facsimile of the first page of the Cotton ms. of Asser's " Life of King Alfred ".

She is best known for Asser's story about a book of Saxon songs which she showed to Alfred and his brothers, offering to give the book to whoever could first memorise it, a challenge which Alfred took up and won.

Asser's response to Alfred's request was to ask for time to consider the offer, as he felt it would be unfair to abandon his current position in favour of worldly recognition.

Despite Asser's comment that the dyke ran " from sea to sea ", it is now thought that the original structure only covered about two-thirds of the length of the border: in the north it ends near Llanfynydd, less than five miles ( 8 km ) from the coast, while in the south it stops at Rushock Hill, near Kington in Herefordshire, less than fifty miles ( 80 km ) from the Bristol Channel.

Almost nothing is known of Asser's early life.

Asser may have been familiar with a work by St Jerome on the meaning of Hebrew names ( Jerome's given meaning for " Asser " was " blessed "), so it is possible that Asser's birth name was " Gwyn " ( or " Guinn "), which is Welsh for " blessed " ( or " blessedness ").

It is evident from Asser's account that he spent a good deal of time with Alfred: he recounts meeting Alfred's mother-in-law, Eadburh ( who is not the same Eadburh who died as a begger in Pavia ), on many occasions ; and says that he has often seen Alfred hunting.

Asser's predecessor as Bishop of Sherborne, Wulfsige, is known to have attested a charter sometime between 890 and 896.

A contemporary clue is found in Asser's own writing: he mentions that bishops of St David's were sometimes expelled by King Hyfaidd and adds that " he even expelled me on occasion ".

The date is known from Asser's mention of the king's age in the text.

However, it is also possible that Asser's inclusion of Welsh placenames simply reflects an interest in etymology or the existence of a Welsh audience in his own household rather than in Wales.

Asser's life is a one-sided treatment of Alfred, though since Alfred was alive when it was composed, it is unlikely to contain gross errors of fact.

In addition to being the primary source for Alfred's life, Asser's work is also a source for other historical periods, where he adds material to his translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

There is some evidence from early writers of access to versions of Asser's work, as follows:

He used material from a version of Asser's work which differs in some places from the Cotton manuscript and in some places appears to be more accurate, so it is possible that the copy used was not the Cotton manuscript.

It is possible that Giraldus had access to a different copy of Asser's work.

As a result, the text of Asser's Life is known from a multitude of different sources.

Stevenson, Asser's Life of King Alfred, together with the Annals of Saint Neots erroneously ascribed to Asser, is still the standard edition.

An important recent translation, with thorough notes on the scholarly problems and issues, is Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge.

More recently, in 1995, Professor Alfred P. Smyth argued that the Life is a forgery by Byrhtferth ( who simply ' adopted ' the name of the obscure Asser from the references to him in other records ), basing his case primarily on an analysis of Byrhtferth's and Asser's Latin vocabulary.

The strongest arguments for forgery are that a ) there is actually no new information in ' Asser ' that cannot be found in the surviving Anglo Saxon Chronicles, so that it is not contemporary with Alfred as it claims ; b ) that the Latin translation is simply lifted from the Chronicles ' narrative and interspersed with padding of no importance ; c ) that writing in Latin a contemporary narrative was anachronistic ; d ) that much of the alleged illness of Alfred in ' Asser ' is lifted from standard hagiographic conventions and similarly so are ' Asser's ' claims as to the educational development and attainments of Alfred ; and e ) that much of the dating in ' Asser ' uses the age of Alfred can be shown as incorrect and can be traced to the mis-datings in later rescensions of the Chronicles, so that ' Asser ' cannot have been a contemporary of Alfred.

Asser's Life omits any mention of internal strife or dissent in Alfred's own reign, though when he mentions that Alfred had to harshly punish those who were slow to obey Alfred's commands to fortify the realm, he makes it clear that Alfred did have to enforce obedience.

The debate caught the imagination of the popular press when Professor Smyth's book was published, fuelled by the former University of Kent historian's claim that the Cambridge ASNAC department knew Asser's life was a fake, but that they were happy to keep the myth going in order to avoid discrediting previous eminent historians from their university such as Frank Stenton and Dorothy Whitelock.

In 1603 the antiquarian William Camden published an edition of Asser's Life in which there appears a story of a community of scholars at Oxford, who were visited by Grimbald:

* The chronicler known as Florence of Worcester incorporated parts of Asser's Life into his chronicle, in the early 12th century ; again, he may have also used the Cotton manuscript.

It is believed that Asser's Life was originally written in 893 ; however, no contemporary manuscript survives.

According to Bishop Asser's Life of King Alfred Chippenham was, under Alfred's reign, a royal vill ; historians have also argued, from its proximity to the royal forests at Melksham and Barden, that it was probably a hunting lodge.

Osburh's existence is known only from Asser's Life of King Alfred.

Osburh was the daughter of Oslac ( who is also only known from Asser's Life ), King Æthelwulf's pincerna ( butler ), an important figure in the royal court and household.

That Alfred sent alms to Irish and Continental monasteries may be taken on Asser's authority.

That copy was destroyed in a fire in 1731, but transcriptions that had been made earlier, together with material from Asser's work which was included by other early writers, have enabled the work to be reconstructed.

The dyke has not been dated by archaeological methods, but most historians find no reason to doubt Asser's attribution.

However, Keynes & Lapidge in their notes to Asser's Life of King Alfred the Great refer to a " mysterious ' Wulfthryth regina '", and Sean Miller in his Oxford Online DNB article on Æthelred does not mention her.

Stevenson, Asser's Life of King Alfred.

Æthelbald then married his father's widow, Judith, to Asser's horror.

Fortuitously this was early attached to a very notable manuscript, Asser's Life of King Alfred, which undoubtedly assisted its survival.

A short passage making this claim was interpolated by William Camden into his 1603 edition of Asser's Life.

Several kings, including Hywel ap Rhys of Glywysing and Hyfaidd of Dyfed ( where Asser's monastery was ), had submitted to Alfred's overlordship in 885.

Asser's prose style has been criticised for weak syntax, stylistic pretensions, and garbled exposition.

Aug. 4, 1821, nearly a century after Benjamin Franklin founded the Pennsylvania Gazette -- a century during which it had undergone several changes in ownership and a few brief suspensions in publication -- this paper made its first appearance as the Saturday Evening Post.

In my recollection, there was a long interval between the death of the officer and the appearance of the first of the retreating redcoats, and in that interval the dust cloud over the road seems to hover indefinitely.

They are the only poems that he rearranged as a group between their first appearance ( in Satires Of Circumstance ) and the publication of the Collected Poems.

Since the mid 1950s, when urethane foam first made its appearance in the American market, growth has been little short of fantastic.

Two days later, some 30 of them had struck at a convoy off Bougie, sinking a troopship -- and it had been that very night that the Me-210 had made its first appearance.

But then, Mario Lanza was no common singer, and his whole career, public and non-public, was studded with the kind of unconventional happenings that terminate with the appearance of his first `` recital '' only when he has ceased to be a living voice.

It was a vivid, sharp February morning that Johnnie first made his appearance in my back yard, bringing some stuff Dad had ordered.

The period 2700 – 2300 BC saw the first appearance of the Sumerian abacus, a table of successive columns which delimited the successive orders of magnitude of their sexagesimal number system.

Poirot's first appearance was in The Mysterious Affair at Styles ( published 1920 ) and his last in Curtain ( published 1975, the year before Christie died ).

Her first appearance was in a short story published in The Sketch magazine in 1926, " The Tuesday Night Club ", which later became the first chapter of The Thirteen Problems ( 1932 ).

Her first appearance in a full-length novel was in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930.

Although popular from her first appearance in 1930, Jane Marple had to wait thirty-two years for her first big-screen appearance.

* 1521 – Martin Luther's first appearance before the Diet of Worms to be examined by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the other estates of the empire.

He is best known for his appearance in Plato's Symposium, which describes the banquet given to celebrate his obtaining a prize for his first tragedy at the Lenaia in 416.

Alaric's first appearance was as the leader of a mixed band of Goths and allied peoples who invaded Thrace in 391, who were stopped by the half-Vandal Roman General Stilicho.

# Where the appearance of the first object forces one's mind to think about the second one.

But the unexpected fall of Arkona had terrified the garrison, which surrendered unconditionally at the first appearance of the Danish ships.

Dedicated anti-tank vehicles made their first major appearance in the Second World War as combatants developed effective armored vehicles and tactics.

He appointed seventy-two abbreviators, of whom twelve were of the upper, or greater, and twenty-two of the lower, or lesser, presidency ( Parco ), and thirty-eight examiners on first appearance of letters.

In 1984, she released another pop-oriented Christian hit, Straight Ahead, earning Grant her first appearance at the Grammy Awards show in 1985.

This was the composer's first on-stage appearance in 12 years ; the hall was packed.