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There is a consensus going back to the tenth century that King Alfred personally translated a number of substantial texts from Latin into English. Though views have changed from time to time about the exact list, especially in the last fifty years, the current consensus is that he composed the extant translations of Gregory the Great's Cura pastoralis, Boethius' De consolatione Philosophic, Augustine's Soliloquiae, and the first fifty psalms, as well as instigating the extant translations by others of Orosius' Historia, Gregory's Dialogi, and probably Bede's Historia ecclesiastica. To that most commentators would add Alfred's lawcode, or at least the lengthy introduction to it, and perhaps his will as compositions by the king himself.1 Alfred's acknowledgement in his prose preface to the Pastoral Care that he had the help of four named clerics in interpreting the Latin, and the later claim by William of Malmesbury that one of them, Asser, had explained the sense of the De consolatione Philosophiae to him in simpler words,2 has prompted many discussions about the degree of responsibility others may have had, and there has been often fierce argument about whether the king could write or had to dictate his translations.3 Most scholars have however taken the view that, whatever help he may have had in interpreting the Latin texts, the contemporary prefaces are right in claiming that the king himself composed the words on the page, either by dictation or with pen in hand, and that the works reflect his language and his mind. Patrick Wormald expressed the view as follows in his entry on King Alfred in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in 2004:
There is no good reason to doubt that the four books that stand in his name, plus one other, were in a real sense composed by him: these are his law book, together with more or less free translations of Pope Gregory's Book of Pastoral Rule, of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, of Augustine's Soliloquies, and of the first fifty psalms. The only books for centuries either way to express the ideas of a secular monarch, they on their own establish that there was something extraordinary about Alfred. ... What gives Alfred's movement its unique distinction is his own part in it. No Carolingian...