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Few texts are more familiar to students of Old English than the preface that King Alfred wrote for his vernacular translation of the Pastoral Care by Pope Gregory the Great. As Alfred explains in the preface, this translation, which he prepared with the help of four of his leading churchmen-Plegmund, archbishop of Canterbury, Asser, bishop of St. David's, and the priests Grimbald and John-was to be one element in the major program of educational reform that the king instituted to remedy the decline in the level of clerical learning that had beset England since the Vikings began their raids on the country. Alfred's program was to include translations of "certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know." Gregory's Pastoral Care, whose primary purpose was to offer advice to those who would be shepherds of souls but which also provided valuable guidance and insights for secular administrators, was almost certainly the first book to be translated under Alfred's program; the vernacular version can be dated to ca. 890.
Alfred remarks at the end of his preface that he is dispatching copies of the Old English Pastoral Care to every bishopric in his kingdom. Six manuscripts of the Pastoral Care survive today; of these, two date from Alfred's own time, and are in radically different states of preservation. London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius B. xi-apparently the master copy kept at Alfred's royal scriptorium to serve as the exemplar for making the copies sent out around the kingdom-suffered catastrophic damage, first in the Cotton Library fire of 1731, then in a fire at the British Museum bindery in 1864. It has been reduced to a fragment consisting of five badly burned leaves, while one complete, undamaged leaf that was removed from the manuscript before the Cotton fire is now in Kassel, Landesbibliothek, MS Anhang 19. The other ninth-century copy, now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 20, is complete apart from the loss of one leaf; its first page is reproduced here.1
Hatton 20 is the copy that Alfred sent to Worcester. This is shown by the directive added in capitals at the top of the first page, "DEOS BOC SCEAL TO WIOGORA CEASTRE" (This book is to go to Worcester), as also by...