It is an index perhaps of changing historiographical trends that the importanceof Alfred's illnesses in the moulding of his outlook, both as a layman and as aking, now hardly needs to be emphasized. In the course of the 1990s, Alfredbecame gradually better understood as a man of the 890s. Yet Victorian sensibilitieshave died hard. Both Plummer and Stevenson detected an ‘atmosphereof morbid religiosity’ in Asser's account of Alfred's illnesses in ch. 74,and both refused to associate this atmosphere with the ‘historical Alfred’, inview of his well-attested military successes. The recent resurrection of thisapproach by Alfred Smyth has only served, however, to emphasize the need for greater sensitivity to the ideals and expectations of the society within whichAlfred was operating. Smyth's unsuccessful attempt to expose Asser's Life as alater forgery relies heavily upon his assumption that the text is a work of hagiography,because it supposedly portrays Alfred as ‘a saintly king, wrapt up inprayer [sic], and enduring some form of physical disease’. It should thereforebe stressed that royal sanctity was an entirely posthumous phenomenon inAnglo-Saxon England, and, in the case of kings, nearly always acquired throughan appropriate manner of death.