RANK LINK 5

Alfred's Translation of theConsolation and the Three Estates

King Alfred's translations are discussed briefly by Trapp in Medieval English Literature World and are available in Alfred the Great by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge.

On Alfred's use of the three estates see Keynes and Lapidge, (298 note 6) which identifies Alfred's as the first use of the commonplace. Compare the reference in Whitelock, The Beginnings of English Society (66). (on reserve)

• What is the context in which Alfred uses this idea? Is he simply talking about the kinds of men that the king needs to have around him? Can you see some evidence in another text, the Preface to Alfred's Pastoral Care, that the three estates work together--that the learned are as necessary as the military?
• What significance do Whitelock and/or Keynes and Lapidge attach to this model? Do they seem to think it is socially significant, that it had real meaning for Alfred's world; or is it instead a literary idea?
• What about the effect of this model at the end of the Colloquy? This text is available in the TEXT section of Seafarer. It is unusual in its use of "dialogue" format and its use of role playing (with students representing (remember: re-presenting, presenting again) the duties of various workers. If you have a text of the Colloquy at hand (it's in the course packet, taken from Crossley-Holland's anthology, 220), make some notes here about what the text says, in its concluding section, about this kind of social order.

This is a text that aims to teach, but it does so in a different way than that which the Preface to the Pastoral Care employs--one is clearly didactic, the other more immediate and indirect.

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