In this newer work, Smyth makes no significant additions to his earlier arguments save attributing the Vita to Byrhtferth alone. Keynes, in a detailed and measured refutation of Smyth's argument, concluded in the summer of 1996 that Smyth had failed to show any evidence or reason why the Vita ought to be classed a forgery. The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) hosted in late 1995 and early 1996 an exchange of terse notices between, on the one hand, Professor Simon Keynes of Trinity College, Cambridge and Michael Lapidge of Notre Dame (then Erlington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge), and on the other hand, Smyth, then a professor of medieval history and Master of Keynes College at the University of Kent. For a variety of reasons, not least of which was Smyth's charge of an academic conspiracy to hide these facts from the public, this book did not appeal to its reviewers. 1000, and attributed it to Ramsey's prolific monk Byrhtferth or his circle.

Smyth placed the composition of the Vita, which he now considered a later forgery, near the Huntingdonshire abbey of Ramsey c. In KA, Smyth contested Asser's authorship and dismissed the Vita as appropriate evidence for understanding this ninth-century king. Both works focus on the Res Gestae Aelfredi (or Vita Aelfredi), a biography of King Alfred (reigned 871-99) long ascribed, but not without unease, to the Welsh Bishop Asser (d. The Medieval Life reproduces, often verbatim, an argument Smyth set out in his King Alfred the Great (Oxford, 1995 hereafter KA). This book is the next sortie in Alfred Smyth's sustained attack against positions held by some of the most formidable scholars ever known to Anglo-Saxon studies.

Alfred the Great by Asser