ago. Posterity rightly gave him the surname of "the Great," as he is
one of the comparatively few great men of all time. E.A. Freeman, the
noted historian of the early English period, says of him:--

"No man recorded in history seems ever to have united so many
great and good qualities... A great part of his reign was taken up
with warfare with an enemy [the Danes] who threatened the national
being; yet he found means personally to do more for the general
enlightenment of his people than any other king in English history."

After a Danish leader had outrageously broken his oaths to Alfred, the
Dane's two boys and their mother fell into Alfred's hands, and he
returned them unharmed. "Let us love the man," he wrote, "but hate his
sins." His revision of the legal code, known as _Alfred's Laws_, shows
high moral aim. He does not forget the slave, who was to be freed
after six years of service. His administration of the law endeavored
to secure the same justice for the poor as for the rich.

Alfred's example has caused many to stop making excuses for not doing
more for their kind. If any one ever had an adequate excuse for not
undertaking more work than his position absolutely demanded, that man
was Alfred; yet his ill health and the wars with the Danes did not
keep him from trying to educate his people or from earning the title,
"father of English prose." Freeman even says that England owes to
Alfred's prose writing and to the encouragement that he gave to other
writers the "possession of a richer early literature than any other
people of western Europe" and the maintenance of the habit of writing
after the Norman conquest, when English was no longer used in courtly
circles.