Such exploits as those which he had performed conferred, in those days, upon the hero who performed them, a very high distinction, the luster of which seems not to have been at all tarnished in the opinions of mankind by any ideas of the violence and wrong which the commission of such deeds involved.
Alfred's dominions were now left once more in peace, and he himself resumed again his former avocations.

But a very short period of his life, however, now remained.

Hastings was finally expelled from England about 897.

In 900 or 901 Alfred died.

The interval was spent in the same earnest and devoted efforts to promote the welfare and prosperity of his kingdom that his life had exhibited before the war.
He was engaged diligently and industriously in repairing injuries, redressing grievances, and rectifying every thing that was wrong.
He exacted rigid impartiality in all the courts of justice; he held public servants of every rank and station to a strict accountability; and in all the colleges, and monasteries, and ecclesiastical establishments of every kind, he corrected all abuses, and enforced a rigid discipline, faithfully extirpating from every lurking place all semblance of immorality or vice.