Alfred was also very careful in the government of his Kingdom, especially in seeing that justice was properly administered.  So men said of him in their songs, much as they had long before said of King Edwin in Northumberland, that he hung up golden bracelets by the roadside, and that no man dared to steal them.  In his collection of laws, he chiefly put in order the laws of the older Kings, not adding many of his own, because he said that he did not know how those who came after him might like them.

King Alfred was very attentive to religious matters, and gave great alms to the poor and gifts to churches.  He also founded two monasteries; one was for nuns, at Shaftesbury in Dorsetshire, of which he made his own daughter, Aethelgifu, abbess.  The other was for monks at Athelney; you can easily see why he should build it there.  He also sent several embassies to Rome, where he got Pope Marinus to grant certain privileges to the English School at Rome; the Pope also sent him what was thought to be a piece of the wood of the True Cross, that on which our Lord Jesus Christ died.  He also sent an embassy to Jerusalem, and had letters from Abel the Patriarch there.  And what seems stranger than all, he sent an embassy all the way to India, with alms for the Christians there, called the Christians of Saint Thomas and Saint Bartholomew.

Lastly, there seems some reason to think that the Chronicle began to be put together in its present shape in Alfred’s time, and that it was regularly gone on with afterward, so that from the time of Alfred onward we have a history which was regularly written down as things happened.

All these things happened mainly in the middle years of the reign of Alfred, when there was so much less fighting than there was before and after, and when some years seem to have been quite peaceable.  Guthorm Aethelstan and his Danes in East-Anglia were for some years true to the treaty of Wedmore, and the other Danes seem just now to have been busy in invading Gaul and other parts of the continent rather than England.  Also King Alfred had now got a fleet, so that he often met them at sea and kept them from landing.  This he did in 882, and we do not find that any Danes landed again in England till 885.  In that year part of the army which had been plundering along the coast of Flanders and Holland came over to England, landed in Kent, and besieged Rochester.  But the citizens withstood them bravely, and Alfred gathered an army and drove the Danes to their ships.  They seem then to have gone to Essex and to have plundered there with their ships, getting help from the Danes who were settled in East-Anglia, or at least from such of them as still were heathens.  Alfred’s fleet however quite overcame them and took away their treasure, but his fleet was again attacked and defeated by the East-Anglian Danes.  It would seem that in some part of this war Guthorm Aethelstan was helped by Hrolf, otherwise called Rollo, the great Northern chief.