Alfred judged that decades of Viking raiding had gutted English learning so thoroughly that, by his own account in the preface to his translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, he could recall no priest south of the Thames able to render a Latin letter into English at the start of his reign. His response was a personal program of translation, undertaken with scholars he drew to his court from Mercia, Wales and the European mainland, among them Asser, who later wrote his biography, and the Continental clerics Grimbald and John.
Alfred himself is credited with rendering Gregory's Pastoral Care, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, Augustine's Soliloquies and the first fifty psalms into Old English, adapting rather than simply translating, and inserting his own reflections into Boethius in particular. He had copies of the Pastoral Care sent to every bishopric in his kingdom, each accompanied by a costly pointer, an aestel, for following the text, and he required that free-born young men with the means to pursue it be taught to read English, with those destined for holy orders continuing on to Latin. Behind the program lay a stated conviction that wisdom given by God had been squandered through neglect, and that a kingdom without learned priests and lawgivers could not hold itself together, spiritually or politically, against renewed attack. Monasteries he founded at Athelney and Shaftesbury, though never richly endowed, were part of the same rebuilding, an attempt to restore a religious infrastructure that Viking raids on unprotected monastic houses had done much to destroy.