In the internal affairs of his kingdom he was
chiefly governed by the advice of the great ecclesiastic and statesman,
with whose name our readers will shortly become familiar.
Upon the morning after the arrival of Elfric in London, Edwy, the young
prince, and his new companion, sat in a room on the upper floor of the
palace, which had but two floors, and would have been considered in
these days very deficient in architectural beauty.
The window of the room opened upon the river, and commanded a pleasant
view of the woods and meadows on the Surrey side, then almost
uninhabited, being completely unprotected in case of invasion, a
contingency never long absent from the mind in the days of the sea kings.
A table covered with manuscripts, both in Latin and Anglo-Saxon,
occupied the centre of the room, and there Elfric was seated, looking
somewhat aimlessly at a Latin vocabulary, while Edwy was standing
listlessly at the window. The "library," if it deserved the name, was
very unlike a modern library; books were few, and yet very expensive, so
that perhaps there was no fuller collection in any layman's house in the
kingdom. There were Alfred's translations into Anglo-Saxon, the
"_Chronicle of Orosius_," or the history of the World; the "_History of
the Venerable Bede_," both in his original Latin and in English;
Boethius on the "_Consolations of Philosophy_;" narratives from ancient
mythology; extracts from the works of St.
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