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Notwithstanding their general rehabilitation of the work, however, neither critic is prepared to trust it implicitly. Plummer says (p. 52): ‘On the whole, then, Asser is an authority to be used with criticism and caution; partly because we have always to be alive to the possibility of interpolation, partly because the writer’s Celtic imagination is apt to run away with him.’ And thus Stevenson (p. cxxx): ‘The work still presents some difficulties. Carelessness of transcription may possibly explain those that are merely verbal, but there still remain certain passages that lay the author open to the charge of exaggeration, such as his mention of gold-covered and silver-covered buildings, if that be the literal meaning of the passage, and his statement that Alfred might, if he had chosen, have been king before his elder brother Æthelred, with whom, it is clear, he was on most intimate terms.’

The style of the book is not uniform. The passages translated from the Chronicle are simpler, while in the more original parts the author displays an unfortunate tendency to a turgid and at times bombastic manner of writing. Indeed, it displays, in many passages, the traits of that Hesperic Latinity which, invented or made fashionable in the sixth century, probably by a British monk in the southwestern part of England, was more or less current in England from the time of Aldhelm until the Norman Conquest. This Hesperic, or Celtic, Latinity has been compared to the mock euphuism of Sir Piercie Shafton in Scott’s Monastery (Professor H.A. Strong, in American Journal of Philology 26. 205), and may be illustrated by Professor Strong’s translation into English of certain sentences from the Hisperica Famina, the production, as it is believed, of the monk referred to above: ‘This precious shower of words glitters, by no awkward barriers confining the diction, and husbands its strength by an exquisite balance and by equable device, trilling sweet descant of Ausonian speech through the speaker’s throat by this shower of words passing through Latin throats; just as countless swarms of bees go here and there in their hollow hives, and sip the honey-streams in their homes, and set in order, as they are wont, their combs with their beaks.’