2
e is portrayed as rather a portly monk in this story, but his effigy in Winchester Cathedral shows him as a very slight man. There is another story about him which makes him out to be rather a small man, who couldn't reach the key-hole of the cathedral, which obligingly slid down for him. Anyway, the story is a good one, and you will enjoy it.
This website is called Athelstane, after Alfred's grandson, so we were interested to transcribe this story. NH
______________________________________________________________________
THE KING'S SONS, BY GEORGE MANVILLE FENN.
CHAPTER ONE.
SONS OF THE KING.
The sun shone down hotly on the hill-side, and that hill was one of a range of smooth rolling downs that ought to have been called ups and downs, from the way they seemed to rise and fall like the sea on a fine calm day.
Not quite, for at such a time the sea looks as blue as the sky above it, while here on this particular hot day, though the sky was as blue as a sapphire stone, the hills were of a beautiful soft green, the grass being short and soft, and as velvety as if Nature had been all over it regularly with her own particular mowing-machine.
But the only mowing that had been done to that grass was by the cropping teeth of the many flocks of sheep whose fleeces dotted the downs with soft white where they nibbled away, watched by the shepherds in their long smock frocks with turn-down collars and pleatings and gatherings on breast and back, and slit up at the sides from the bottom so as to give the men's legs room to move freely when they ran after a restive sheep to hook him with the long crook they carried and bring him kicking and struggling by hook or by crook to the grass.
It was just over a thousand years ago, and, in spite of all the changes fashion has made, plenty of shepherds and farm labourers still wear the simple old Saxon dress then worn by King Eth