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 English Literature 
 
 FROM THE BEGINNINGS 
 
 TILL AFTER 
 
 THE NORMAN CONQUEST 
 
 BY 
 
 STOPFORD A. BROOKE 
 
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 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 
 
 190T 
 
37 
 
 TV'E LIBRARY OF 
 00 "EGRESS, 
 
 Two CoHi E3 Received 
 
 NOV. 16 1901 
 
 COPVHJQHT ENTRY 
 
 CLAfS ^XXa H'> 
 
 COPY a 
 
 Copyright, 1901 
 By J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 
 
FROM THE BEGINNINGS 
 
 TILL AFTER 
 
 THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 
 
 HE first indwellers of the 
 islands we call Great Britain 
 and Ireland were a wild 
 folk, coming we know not 
 whence, who made rude stone 
 weapons of flint, lived by hunt- 
 ing, could make fires and gar- 
 ments of skin, and dwelt in caves. These Palaeo- 
 lithic people were succeeded by, or developed 
 into, a Neolithic race whose weapons, still of 
 stone, were now highly polished and skilfully 
 wrought. They began pastoral life in our 
 island, and settled finally into communities ; 
 and the large-chamber tombs under earth, or 
 their denuded remains, extending from Caith- 
 ness to Dorset, show that they occupied all 
 the habitable parts of the country. They were 
 a dark-haired, dark-eyed, short, brave, and con- 
 stant people ; and when they mingled afterwards 
 with the Celtic race, they left some traces of 
 their legends, religion, and law in the stories, 
 the manners, and the language of the Celts. 
 We may, with great probability, identify them 
 with the earliest Picts of history, and the 
 SiJures of South Wales were their descendants. 
 
 3 
 
It is only in folklore that we can hope to 
 recover something of the way they thought 
 and felt, but in the west of Ireland and 
 Scotland, in Wales, and in the Midland 
 Counties of England we still meet short, dark- 
 haired, long -skulled people who retain the 
 characteristics of this steady and valiant race. 
 It is not impossible that some of the elements 
 of their character and thought have entered 
 into and still influence English poetry. 
 
 How long they lived undisturbed does not 
 appear, but at last an Aryan folk, part of the 
 first Celtic migration, invaded our island, drove 
 back these Neolithic people to the west and 
 north, but mingled with them, and the farther 
 west and north they pushed the greater was 
 the admixture. This first Celtic race are named 
 the Goidels or the Gaels, and they colonised 
 not only Great Britain, but also the Isle of 
 Man, the Western Isles, and Ireland. They 
 have lasted down to our own day, and the 
 imaginative and enkindling spirit of their 
 thought, literature, and art, infused into the 
 English nature by intercourse and amalgama- 
 tion, have had an intermittent and spiritual 
 influence on the poetry and prose of England. 
 That influence was sometimes great, as at the 
 beginning of our literature. Sometimes it was 
 but little, but it always inspired when it came. 
 After King Alfred's days, and for a very long 
 time, it ceased to do more than now and again 
 to touch England; but it began to act on us 
 again at the end of the eighteenth century, and 
 at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of 
 the twentieth the Gaelic spirit is doing much 
 the same kind of work it did in England during 
 the seventh and eighth centuries. 
 
It entered northern England from Iona> 
 where Columba, bringing with him, and hand- 
 ing down to his successors, the poetry and 
 learning of Ireland, had set up his church and 
 dwelling. Oswald, King of Northumbria, who 
 had been educated at lona, summoned the 
 Celtic monks to convert his country in 634 ; 
 and Oswiu, also trained at lona, extended the 
 Irish influence until the whole of Northumbria 
 received the faith from Irish missionaries, and 
 set .up a number of civilising monasteries on 
 the Irish pattern. All the awakening and 
 inspiring emotions of religion, out of which 
 so much of literature is born, were kindled in 
 the north of England at the Irish fire. This 
 lasted untouched for thirty years ; and then, 
 alongside with the Celtic, the Latin forms of 
 learning and religion began to make their 
 way from Ripon, from Wearmouth, from 
 Hexham and Jarrow. The Celtic and the 
 Latin influences mingled. Meanwhile the 
 Irish impulse penetrated into Mercia and East 
 Anglia from the north ; and the communica- 
 tion between Ireland itself and England was 
 constant, each interchanging the results of their 
 work and knowledge. Even the south was not 
 exempt from the pressure of Irish wisdom. 
 The school at Canterbury in Theodore's days 
 was full of Irish scholars. * Whole fleets' of 
 students passed to and fro between Wessex 
 and Ireland. Men like Ealdhelm were trained 
 by Irish hermits who set up schools ; and 
 Glastonbury became a special centre of Irish 
 learning, legend, and song ; so that we may 
 even say that Dunstan, long years afterwards, 
 derived from the nest of Irish scholars who 
 were settled there part of the spirit which 
 
made his character, and began that Renais- 
 sance of English learning which Alfred had 
 failed, but so nobly failed, to establish. This 
 was the Goidelic invasion of England, and 
 its imaginative and formative powers ran 
 through all the poetry of Northumbria, and 
 stimulated the desires of Wessex and Mercia 
 to know, and to feel after, the unknown. 
 
 A second Wandering of the Celtic race 
 followed on the first, and some of its warriors, 
 settling in Gaul, were allured by the white 
 cliffs of England, and by the tales of sailors, 
 to cross the Channel. The first of these in- 
 vaders landed on the south-eastern coasts, 
 perhaps as early as 300 B.C., and drove back 
 the Goidels, as these had driven back the 
 Neolithic people, to the west and north. 
 The last of these Gaulish tribes who came to 
 our land were the Belgae. To all these men 
 of the second Celtic Wandering the name of 
 ^Brythons' has been given. When they had 
 banished the Goidels from about a third part 
 of Britain, the Romans checked their develop- 
 ment for a year or two in 55 B.C., but did not 
 come again for ninety years. During these 
 ninety years the Brythons pushed on till they 
 mastered the most of Britain, and even those 
 lands where the Goidels remained (Devon, 
 Cornwall, portions of Wales, Cumberland and 
 Westmoreland, and part of Lancashire) became 
 Brythonic in language, manners, and poetry. 
 North of the Solway and the Tweed the 
 Brythons also drove their way, but with less 
 force than in our England. They found them- 
 selves among a mixed people of Goidels and 
 Neolithic folk in the Lowlands ; and this 
 country, sometimes Brythonic, sometimes Goi- 
 
delic, ended by having in it an exceedingly 
 mixed race, made up of these two Celtic 
 strains dissolved in a Neolithic infusion ; but 
 the Brythonic element was master. Into the 
 north of Scotland the Brythons scarcely pene- 
 trated. But wherever they were, their language 
 prevailed. Later on they took the name of 
 Cymry, and the English called them the Welsh. 
 The fate they had given to the Goidels they 
 met with at the hands of the English; until, 
 after- a hundred and fifty years of war, the 
 Brythons only existed as a separate people in 
 Devonshire, Cornwall, Wales, and in Strath- 
 clyde ; that is, in the country which extended 
 from the Ribble through Cumberland and 
 Westmoreland to the Clyde. 
 
 The Cymry had a literature of their own, and 
 they sang in verse the fortunes of their strife 
 with the English, their own wars with one 
 another, the war-deeds of their chieftains, and 
 the tales of their families. Moreover, they 
 made a host of stories in prose in which they 
 embodied their myths and the legends of their 
 ancestral heroes. Four great bards are said 
 to have flourished among them in the later half 
 of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh 
 century. These were Aneurin, Taliessin, Lly- 
 warch Hen, and Merddin ; and we possess in 
 manuscripts which date from the twelfth to the 
 fourteenth century some of their poems, added 
 to and modernised. They sing the wars of the 
 northern Cymry with the Angles, and of the 
 Cymry of Whales with the West Saxons, in 
 poems by Taliessin and Llywarch Hen. These 
 poems are of the sixth century. In the seventh 
 the poets celebrated the great struggle between 
 the Northumbrians and Cadwallon and his son. 
 
This is the first period of Cymric poetry. 
 When the northern kingdom of the Cymry 
 decayed, and they emigrated to South Wales, 
 the old poetry was applied in the tenth cen- 
 tury to the new dwelling-place and the new 
 fortunes of the Cymry. This is the second 
 period. Later on a third school of literature 
 arose, poetic in North Wales, and of mythical 
 and romantic tales in South Wales ; and these 
 tales are at the root of a great deal of English 
 romance and song up to the present day. 
 A fourth school of poetry, imitative of the 
 old poetry of the north, continued under the 
 Norman- Welsh rule till the days of Henry the 
 Second, when the Black Book of Carmarthen 
 was made up of some of the ancient poetry. In 
 the following centuries the Red Book of Aneurin^ 
 the Book of Taliessin^ and the Book of Hergest 
 contained some also of the old poetry and 
 of its later imitations. These were mingled 
 with original work of a still later period. 
 
 There existed then, close to the border-land 
 between the English and the Cymry, a great 
 body of living and growing poetry, and of im- 
 aginative story-telling, which could hardly help 
 influencing the Border-English when, after the 
 first fierce years of the Conquest, the Welsh of 
 West Wales, of Wales, and of Cumbria were so 
 often either in alliance with the English or 
 amalgamated with them. The Celtic genius of 
 the Brythons stole in, year by year, into the 
 English of the Border, from Berwick to Carlisle, 
 from Carlisle to Chester, from Chester to 
 Bristol, and from Bristol to Glastonbury and 
 Exeter. When, after the Norman Conquest, the 
 Normans seized a good part of South Wales, 
 the Welsh imagination was interwoven with the 
 
Norman passion; and in days still later, after 
 the twelfth century, the fifth period of Welsh 
 poetry, developing itself in lyrics of love and 
 of nature, full of lonely and graceful sentiment, 
 had, as I believe, a well-marked influence on 
 the birth and growth of the earliest English 
 lyrics. As far as we can conjecture, the best 
 of these lyrics were born on the lands of the 
 Severn valley, and the first English poem of 
 imaginative importance after the Conquest — the 
 Brict of Layamon — arose in the heart of one 
 who dwelt at Areley, on the banks of the Severn. 
 There was no such amalgamation in the first 
 hundred and fifty years of the conquest of 
 Britain by the English ; the British were ruth- 
 lessly slain or driven away. Among those who 
 fled over-sea was the only literary man among 
 the Britons whose name has attained reputation. 
 This was Gildas, whose Latin book, De Excidio^ 
 describes the horrors of the first years of the 
 English invasion, and whose Epistola^ addressed 
 to the kings and priests of the Britons, is a 
 fierce and probably an exaggerated indictment 
 of their rule and their immoralities. Never- 
 theless, so far as his slight history goes, he is 
 a sound authority. When, weary of trouble, 
 he fled to Gaul, founded the Abbaye de Ruis, 
 and died, British culture also died with him. 
 He was not alone in his emigration. Hun- 
 dreds of Britons took flight from the English 
 sword, and out of this furious expulsion a 
 Brythonic colony arose in France which played 
 its own part in English literature. After the 
 battles of Aylesford and Crayford in 455-57, 
 and for fully a century and a half, the Britons 
 of the southern counties and of South Wales 
 emigrated to Armorica and made Brittany. 
 
10 
 
 In that little corner of France the Brythonic 
 traditions, legends, and myths, the imagina- 
 tive ballads and story-telling of this Celtic 
 race, lived on, and developed in freedom. 
 When the Arthurian legend, which probably 
 began among the northern Cymry (and the first 
 records of which are to be found embedded in 
 the compilation which goes under the name 
 of Nennius — the Historia Britonum\ came to 
 South Wales, it got from thence into Brittany, 
 was taken up by Breton bards, freshly worked 
 and added to, and then fell into the hands of 
 the Normans. The Normans, having brought 
 to bear upon it their formative genius, carried 
 it back to South Wales, and then to England ; 
 and it was first thrown into clear shape by a 
 dweller in Wales, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, 
 who composed into twelve Latin books his 
 History of the Brito?ts, which, begun in 1132, 
 took its final form in 1147. From that day 
 to this, for nearly eight hundred years, the 
 Brythonic story of Arthur has been one of 
 the master-subjects of imaginative literature in 
 England. This — the full tale of which belongs 
 to the next section of this book — is the last 
 thing to be said of the influence on English 
 literature of the Brythons, the children of the 
 second Celtic migration. 
 
 These two Celtic invasions, the Goidelic 
 and the Brythonic, were followed by another 
 invasion. When the Brythons had been 
 about four hundred years in Britain, the 
 Romans, under Claudius, came to stay, 
 ninety years after the invasion of Julius 
 Csesar in 55 B.C. Their occupation, which 
 lasted till a.d. 410, has had no power over 
 English literature. To some extent it had 
 
II 
 
 Christianised and Romanised the Brythons ; 
 but the Roman influence did not really touch 
 English literature till it came back with Chris- 
 tianity in the seventh century to England, and 
 linked a converted people to the long tradi- 
 tions, literature, law, and glory of pagan and 
 Christian Rome. But almost all the traces of 
 this early occupation of Britain by the Romans 
 were swept away by the hurricane of fire and 
 sword which the English, coming in the middle 
 of- the fifth century to conquer and to settle 
 the land, let loose on the provincial civilisation 
 of Britain. 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Before the Engilsb Invasion of Britain. 
 
 The first Engle-land extended from South 
 Sweden through Denmark and its islands to 
 the lands about the mouth of the Elbe. Its 
 indwellers were men of three tribes — the Jutes, 
 the Angles, and the Saxons — and their common 
 name and tongue was English. They lived 
 along the coast, and in their marshy settle- 
 ments fought on their western shores a fierce 
 battle with the encroaching sea ; but nature 
 was not so rough with them on the eastern 
 coasts of Denmark. They had the expansive 
 spirit which the sea encourages, and in their 
 rude but seaworthy ships sailed in all weathers 
 to ravage the neighboring coasts, terrible for 
 courage and activity, for cruelty and greed, 
 fearless of death and rejoicing in danger. 
 From the.Humber to Southampton they kept 
 the British coast in terror during the later 
 years of the Roman occupation. 
 
 Like other nations, they sang their battles 
 at the feast and celebrated their gods. They 
 
12 
 
 built up sagas of their ancestral heroes, and 
 most of their chiefs were also bards. The 
 older men, who did not go on piracy, farmed 
 the lands of their settlements, and agriculture 
 as well as war had its own songs. In these 
 lays of religion, of war and agriculture, English 
 poetry began in the ancient Engle-land while 
 Britain was still a Roman province. 
 
 Of this heathen poetry on the Continent we 
 have still some fragments left. Portions of 
 the mythical sagas, founded on the doings of 
 nature and of the ancestral heroes, lie em- 
 bedded in Beowulf, The Battle of Finnsburg 
 is the sole remnant of a series of sagas which 
 were made before the time when the Folk- 
 Wanderings began in 375. Waldhere^ the 
 fragment of a saga on the story of Walther 
 of Acquitaine, carries us back to the days 
 of the Theodoric cycle of tales. A poem 
 entitled Widsith retains verses which date 
 from the time when the English were still 
 fighting in their lands about the Eyder and 
 the Elbe. The Complaint of Deor belongs to 
 another world than that of our island, and we 
 possess in the scattered verses of the Charms 
 which the farmer sang as he ploughed and 
 swarmed his bees, and went on a journey and 
 exorcised the demons of cramp and fever, per- 
 haps the oldest remains of heathen song. 
 
 The Charm for Bewitched Land contains pure 
 heathen lines such as : 
 
 Hail be thou, Earth, mother of men. 
 
 Fruitful be thou in the arms of the God. 
 
 Be filled with thy fruit for the fare-need of men. 
 
 And the rites of the ploughing which are there 
 described are the old heathen rites of the farmer 
 
13 
 
 when he first drove his plough through the 
 acre. As we have them, they are Christianised, 
 but their pagan origin appears through the 
 Christian recension. In the Charm for the 
 Swarming of Bees^ gravel is thrown over the 
 bees, and the spell-master sings, * Let this earth 
 be strong against all wights whatever;' and to 
 the bees, * Sit ye. Victory-women, sink ye to 
 the earth.' But the Charm against a Sudden 
 Stitch is even closer to heathendom. The 
 Charm-doctor stands over the sick man with 
 his shield, guarding him from the darts of the 
 Witch Maidens, and describes their ride over 
 the hill and their flinging of spears, while he 
 charms out the javelin which has caused the 
 cramp. These are remnants as old as the 
 hills, fragments from the ancient Teutonic 
 lands before the English left them for Britain. 
 
 The earliest of the longer poems is Widsith^ 
 the Far-voyager. Its personal part, in which the 
 bard tells of himself and his wanderings, may 
 belong in its original form to the fifth century, 
 but many additions were afterwards made to 
 these ancient verses. Names of men much 
 earlier and later than the fifth century were 
 foisted in by later editors of the poem. The 
 real interest of the verses is not in these ques- 
 tionable matters, but in the proud and pleasant 
 account Widsith gives of himself as a wander- 
 ing minstrel, and of the honour and gifts 
 lavished on poets. We see him at the court 
 of Eormanric, singing his mistress Ealdhild's 
 praises over all lands. We hear him and his 
 mate Scilling singing in the hall while all the 
 lords are listening. He tells of the fighting 
 with the Huns in the Wistla woods, and he 
 ends by an outburst of pleasure in his art 
 
and in the honour it receives from all who 
 care for a noble fame. 
 
 The Scop (that is, the Shaper, the Poet), in 
 the Complaint of Deor^ is not so happy as 
 Widsith. He is no rover, but lives with his 
 lord, and has from him lands and wealth. But 
 his rival, Heorrenda, supplants him, and this 
 song is written to console his heart. Others, 
 Weland, Hild, Geat, Theodoric, suffered dread- 
 ful pain. ^This he overwent, so also will I,' 
 is the refrain of each verse. The allusions to 
 the sagas of Theodoric and Gudrun and 
 Eormanric prove that the English knew, as 
 WaldJiere also proves, the Germanic cycle of 
 stories. None of the examples are Christian, 
 but the poem suffers from a Christian interpola- 
 tion. It is a true lyric, with a * refrain' at the 
 end of each verse, and this is unique in Old 
 English poetry. 
 
 The two fragments of the poem of WaldJiere^ 
 found by Werlauff at Copenhagen, are made 
 from the original German seventh-century form 
 of the poem. The Christian and chivalric 
 elements of the later forms are entirely absent 
 in the verses we possess. Waldhere flies with 
 his love Hildeguthe fromi the Huns, and is 
 pursued by Gu there and Hagena. She en- 
 courages him to fight against twelve warriors 
 in our first fragment; the second is part of 
 the dialogue between Guthere and Waldhere. 
 
 The few lines we have of the Fight at 
 Finnsbiirg belong to an older cycle of saga 
 than that of Theodoric. There is another 
 portion of this Finn-saga in Beowulf and the 
 story there told either precedes or continues our 
 fragment. It is sung by the Scop at the feast 
 in Heorot, Hrothgar's hall. Finn, king of the 
 
■*•<. 
 
 15 
 
 North Frisians, has married Hildeburh, sister 
 of Hnaef. He invites Hnsef and his comrade 
 Hengest, with sixty men, meaning to slay them. 
 The verses describe the attack and defence of 
 the hall. It is a fierce, impassioned piece of 
 war-poetry. The related passage in Beowulf 
 describes the burning of Hildeburh's sons on 
 the pyre, and her bitter mourning for them, 
 and the vengeance taken on Finn. 
 
 These are our heathen fragments, all of them 
 so infiltrated with Teutonic saga that we believe 
 that the English, when they came to our land, 
 possessed and sang the great stories of their 
 Continental brethren. Of other stories, both 
 mythical and heroic, we have remains scattered 
 through Beowulf— \hQ myth of Scyld ; the story 
 of Heremod; the story of Thrytho, which 
 belongs to the ancient saga of Offa ; the story 
 of Ingeld and Froda and Freaware, which 
 was the origin of a whole circle of tales ; and, 
 oldest of all, the story of Sigmund, which after- 
 wards was developed into the great Volsunga- 
 Saga in the north, and in Germany into the 
 Nibelungen Lied. 
 
 Beowulf. 
 
 We have one great saga of our own — the Saga of 
 Beowulf. The poem of Beowulf^ as we possess it, 
 was probably composed into its present form in 
 the eighth century in England, we do not know 
 by whom ; and received, either then or afterwards 
 when it was put into the West Saxon dialect, the 
 addition, but in moderation, of certain Christian 
 elements. The story is, however, honestly heathen, 
 and its original lays arose on the Continent among 
 the English. They came to our England with 
 the Angles, were developed in Northumbria and 
 Mercia, and may have reached full saga propor- 
 
i6 
 
 tions in the seventh century. In the eighth (though 
 some make it later) one poet took up all the scat- 
 tered forms of it, wrought them into a whole, 
 gave them an ethical unity in the character of 
 Beowulf, the ideal hero and king, and filled the 
 complete poem with his own personality. 
 
 Beowulf seems to have been an historical person- 
 age of the sixth century, a Geat, and nephew of 
 Hygelac, who is the Chochilaicus whom Gregory 
 of Tours mentions as raiding the Frisian shore, and 
 slain by its defenders. Beowulf was present at 
 the battle, and avenged his lord's death. Hygelac 
 died in 520. Beowulf placed Hygelac's son on the 
 throne, and after his death reigned fifty years. 
 This brings the historic Beowulf up to about 570. 
 But this historic personage has not much to do 
 with the poem. Its main story (with folk-lore 
 admixtures from earlier and savage times) is the 
 transference to the hero of the mythical deeds of 
 Beowa, who is one of the presentations of the 
 Sun and the Summer, and whose fight with the 
 Winter and the Darkness, with the frost-giants, 
 the destroying sea and the poisonous mist of the 
 moorland, imaged in the poem by the monster 
 Grendel and the Dragon, was sung in the ancient 
 England over the sea. The destruction of Grendel 
 and his dam by Beowulf is said to be the destruc- 
 tion of the winter powers of the sea-coast as 
 they attack one of the Danish settlements which 
 felt alike the charging of the icy sea and the 
 deadly cold and venom of the fenland. The 
 story of Beowulf overcoming in his last fight the 
 Dragon is probably the story of the aging Summer 
 contending with the powers of incoming Winter, 
 who attempts to grasp the treasures of the harvest. 
 The Summer God saves the golden hoard, but dies 
 in the struggle. These myths are embodied in the 
 story of Beowulf, and through them his personality 
 is built up by the poet. He becomes the English 
 and North-Germanic ideal of a king, and the ideal 
 is historic. The manners and customs both in war 
 
17 
 
 and peace, the picture of the young men sailing on 
 adventure, the town with its hall and meadows and 
 garths, the etiquette and feast of the hall, the daily 
 doings of the settlement from morn to night, the 
 position of women, the home-life, the temper of 
 mind, the thoughts and feelings of our forefathers, 
 are all portrayed in this poem, and there are few 
 historical records so vivid and so interesting. It 
 is the book of our beginnings. It is also a great 
 sea-tale, fit for the origin of the poetry of the mis- 
 tress of the seas. 
 
 Bedwulf hears that Hrothgar is harried by a mons- 
 ter, Grendel, who haunts Heorot, the hall of the 
 folk, and devours Hrothgar's thanes. The distress- 
 ful tale thrills the hero with pity, and he sets sail to 
 help the Danish chief Arriving, he is told of Gren- 
 del, the man-beast of some folk-tale, the creature of 
 the mist and the stormy sea, strong as thirty men, 
 lonely and dreadful, greedy of blood, hating all joy, 
 who tears and eats his victims. Beowulf and his 
 men sleep in the hall, and Grendel, stalking over 
 the misty moors, strikes in the doors, and rends 
 one of Beowulf s men, but meets at last the grip 
 of the hero. In the fierce wrestle Grendel's arm 
 is torn away, and the monster flies through the 
 night to die. Next morning all is happiness at 
 Heorot ; the feast is held and gifts are given ; but 
 at night Grendel's dam comes to avenge her son, 
 and Hrothgar's best battle-man is torn in pieces 
 by the wolf-woman of the sea. 
 
 This is the re-creation in a later form of the 
 original myth — a separate and later lay. It is 
 now woven into the poem by the single writer of 
 the whole. Grendel's dam is a sea-monster, and 
 lives in a sea-cave ; her hands are armed with 
 claws ; her blood eats like fire ; she is even more 
 savage than her son. The place where she dwells 
 among the cliffs, in a gorge where the black waters 
 welter furiously, is as savage as her nature ; and 
 the description of it is the first of those natural 
 descriptions of wild scenery of which our modern 
 
 2 
 
i8 
 
 English poetry is so full. Beowulf plunges into 
 the sea, rises with the monster who has seized 
 him into her cave, slays her with a magic sword, 
 and returns triumphant with Grendel's head to 
 Hrothgar, who sends him home to Hygelac laden 
 with gifts and honour. This closes the first part 
 of the poem. The second part opens some fifty 
 years after, when Beowulf is an old man. He has 
 been long king of the country, and his people love 
 him. A Dragon, angry that his hoard is robbed, 
 flies forth to burn and ravage ; and Beowulf arms to 
 fight his last fight and to win the treasure for his 
 folk. Only one of his thanes comes to help him, 
 and in the battle he is wounded to the death. The 
 Dragon is slain, the treasure is won, and the hero 
 burned on a lofty pyre overlooking the sea. 
 
 The poem, many full accounts and translations 
 of which have been set forth, runs to 3183 lines, 
 and its manuscript is in the Cottonian Library in 
 the British Museum. It has been said to be an 
 epic, but it is more justly a narrative poem. It 
 has neither the unity, the weight, the continuity, 
 nor the mighty fates of an epic. Nevertheless it 
 reaches a spiritual unity from the consistency of 
 the hero's character developed from daring youth 
 to wise and self-sacrificing age. It reaches even 
 excellence in the clearness with which its portraits 
 are drawn and its natural scenery represented. 
 Our power of natural description in poetry begins 
 with Beowiclf. The verse has a fine ring in it ; 
 the tale, if we forget the bardic repetitions, is 
 simple, direct, and rapid ; and the spirit of it 
 is as bold and dashing as the stormy sea near 
 which all its actors live. Indeed, the presence 
 and power of the sea is everywhere felt in the 
 poem. Its close is the close of the heathen 
 poetry of England ; for, though its composition 
 into a whole belongs to Christian England, the 
 lays worked up in it go back to the seventh, and 
 some of them, it may be, to the sixth, century. 
 
19 
 
 The Embarking of Beowulf. 
 
 Then the well-geared heroes 
 Stepped upon the stem, while the stream of ocean 
 Whirled the sea against the sand. There into the ship's 
 
 breast 
 Bright and carved things of cost, carried then the heroes, 
 And their armour well-arrayed. And the men out 
 
 pushed 
 Their tight ocean- wood on adventure long desired. 
 Swiftly went above the waves, with a wind well fitted 
 Likest to a fowl, their Floater, with the foam around its 
 
 throat. 
 
 Till at last the Seamen saw the land ahead, 
 Shining sea-cliffs, soaring headlands, 
 Broad sea-nesses. So this Sailer of the sea 
 Reached the sea-way's end. 
 
 Beowulf and Breca at Sea. 
 
 When we swam on the Sound, our sword was laid bare. 
 Hard-edged in our hands ; and against the Hron-fishes 
 We meant to defend us ; nor might Breca from me 
 Far o'er the flood-waves at all float away, 
 Smarter on ocean ; nor would I from him. — 
 There we two together were tossed on the sea, 
 Five nights in all, till the flood apart drove us : 
 Swoln were the surges, of storms 'twas the coldest, 
 Wan waned the night, and the wind from the north, 
 Battling-grim, blew on us ; rough were the billows. 
 
 Then, eastward, came light. 
 
 Bright beacon of God ; the billows grew still. 
 And now I could see the sea-headlands shine, 
 The wind-swept rock-walls. Wyrd often delivers 
 An Earl yet undoomed if his daring avail. 
 
 Half-Heathen Poetry, 
 
 Elegies and Kiddles. 
 
 When the lays of Beowulf were made into a 
 poem Christianity had been long established in 
 England. It had come with Augustine in 597. 
 Its last conquest was the Isle of Wight in 686. 
 It took, therefore, ninety years to Christianise 
 
20 
 
 England. During that interval, and indeed for a 
 long time afterwards, a semi-heathenism prevailed. 
 Even in Cnut's reign we find the laws forbidding 
 the worship of heathen gods by the farmers and 
 labourers ; and it is more than probable that the 
 greater number of the warriors, bards, and chiefs 
 of the seventh and eighth centuries were only- 
 Christian in name, and followed their heathen 
 ways of thinking, feeling, and fighting. The 
 poetry composed by the bards in a chiefs fol- 
 lowing and by the wandering minstrels, outside 
 of the monastic influence, was not likely to be 
 influenced to any depth by Christianity. There are 
 a few examples of such poetry in the Exeter Book, 
 and five of them are of great interest — the Ruined 
 Burg, the Wanderer, the Seafarer, the Wifes 
 Complaint, and the Husband'^s Message. Along 
 with these we may place a number of the Riddles, 
 written, it is supposed, by Cynewulf when he was 
 a wild young poet at some noble's court, and which 
 treat of natural phenomena, of war and armour, of 
 the feast and the hall of the folk, of daily life in 
 the settlements, of hunting and cattle, of forest 
 and fish and bird. 
 
 The first five poems mentioned above may 
 fairly be called elegiac. They are full of regret 
 for the glory of the past and the sadness of 
 the present, and though we have no means of 
 dating them, I should be inclined to place them in 
 the first quarter of the eighth century. They are 
 devoid of Christian sentiment and doctrine. The 
 prologue and epilogue of the Wanderer, and the 
 long tag added to the Seafarer, are Christian, but 
 these are additions quite out of harmony with the 
 body of the poems. Where they were written is 
 also unknown. Some allot them to the south of 
 England and to the ninth century, others to Mercia. 
 I believe them to be Northumbrian, and to belong 
 to the beginning of the eighth century. Their 
 scenery is northern, their temper is northern ; and 
 even the Ruined Burs^, which mourns in solemn 
 
21 
 
 verse the vanished glory of a desolate city, and 
 is probably a description of the ruins of Bath, 
 may have been written by a Mercian poet educated 
 in the Northumbrian schools. Their most remark- 
 able quality, independent of their heathen dwelling 
 on Fate rather than on the will of God, is their 
 love of Nature — and this too has a heathen tinge. 
 They scarcely touch those softer aspects of the 
 earth and sea and sky which poetry distinctly 
 Christian loved to describe. They dwell on the 
 tempest and the fury of the waves, on the hail 
 lashing the broken fortress, on the thunder of the 
 ice and the deathfulness of the snow, on the 
 black caves in the forest and the cliffs white with 
 the frost. There are half-a-dozen of the Riddles 
 concerned with the terrible play of Nature in the 
 northern seas, in the storm-wearied sky, and in 
 the wild marsh and forest land. Our Nature- 
 poetry of the nineteenth century is a reversion to 
 this early English temper, and poetry of this kind 
 in the eighth or the ninth century is unique in 
 Teutonic literature of that time. Poetry of natural 
 description is to be found also in Welsh and Irish 
 song, and it is probable that the writing of it 
 in England is to be traced to the influence on 
 Northumbria and Mercia of the Celtic poets. But 
 I also believe — and the fact that the form of the 
 English Nature-poetry of this time is finer than 
 any Celtic work of the kind may be due to this 
 — that these northern poets were well acquainted 
 with Virgil ; moreover, neither in Irish nor Welsh 
 poetry of this period are there poems, such as the 
 three Riddles on the storms, which treat of Nature 
 alone, of Nature for her own sake. One of these is 
 placed among the extracts. The finest of them is a 
 long poem upon the Hurricane, impersonated as a 
 giant rising from his prison under the earth to work 
 his terrors on land and sea and in the sky ; and 
 in each of these realms it is described with so 
 much force, fire, and imagination that we know 
 
22 
 
 the poet had watched from point to point the 
 actual thing. 
 
 Of the Elegies the Wanderer is the best, but the 
 Seafarer is the most interesting. The Wanderef 
 describes the mournful fates of men, the ruin of 
 great towns and earls, friendships lost, departed 
 glory, the winter night and snow settling on the 
 world and on the heart of man. The Seafarer is 
 perhaps a dramatic dialogue between an old and 
 a young sailor, each telling of their terrible days 
 at sea, yet each confessing the wild fascination of 
 a sailor's life. The Husband^s Message, or rather 
 the Lover's Message, calls, in exile, on the sweet- 
 heart of the writer to join him in the foreign 
 land where he waits for her : * Come in the spring, 
 when the cuckoo calls from the cliff.' The Wife^s 
 Complaint tells of her banishment by false tongues 
 from her lord, and mourns her fate from the cave 
 in the wood where she dwells, but mourns the most 
 because she knows he loves her still, and suffers 
 from want of her tenderness. These two last 
 poems are the only poems in Old English which 
 touch upon the passion and subtlety of human 
 love. There may have been many more, but all 
 the poetry of which we have to speak in the 
 next section was written under the shadow of the 
 monasteries, and the subject of love is absent. 
 
 The Last Verses of the * Wanderer.' 
 
 Whoso then these ruined Walls wisely has thought over, 
 And this darkened life of man deeply has considered, 
 Sage of mood within, oft remembers, far away, 
 Slaughters cruel and uncounted, and cries out this 
 Word— 
 * Whither went the horse, whither went the man? 
 Whither went the Treasure-giver ? 
 
 What befell the seats of feasting? Whither fled the joys 
 
 in hall? 
 O, alas, the beaker bright ! O, alas, the byrnied warriors ! 
 O, alas, the people's pride ! Ah, how perished is that 
 
 Time! 
 
23 
 
 Veiled beneath Night's helm it lies, as if it ne'er had 
 
 been ! ' 
 Left behind them, to this hour, by that host of heroes 
 
 loved, 
 Stands the Wall, so wondrous high, with Worm-images 
 
 adorned ! 
 Strength of ashen spears snatched away the Earls, 
 Swords that for the slaughter hungered, and the Wyrd 
 
 sublime ! 
 See, the storms are lashing on the stony ramparts ; 
 Sweeping down, the snow-drift shuts up fast the Earth — 
 Woe and winter-terror when it wan ariseth ; 
 Darkens then the dusk of Night, from the nor'rard 
 
 driving 
 Heavy drift of hail for the harm of heroes. 
 
 All is full of trouble, all this realm of Earth ! 
 
 Doom of weirds is changing all the world below the 
 
 skies ; 
 Here our fee is fleeting, here the friend is fleeting. 
 Fleeting here is man, fleeting is the Kinsman ! 
 All the Earth's foundation is become an idle thing. 
 
 The Plough— Riddle xxii. 
 
 Nitherward my neb is set, deep inclined I fare ; 
 And along the ground I grub, going as he guideth me 
 Who the hoary foe of holt is, and the Head of me. 
 Forward bent he walks, he, the warden at my tail ; 
 Through the meadows pushes me, moves me on and 
 
 presses me. 
 Sows upon my spoor. I myself in haste am then. 
 
 Green upon one side is my ganging on ; 
 Swart upon the other surely is my path. 
 
 The Nightingale— Riddle ix. 
 
 Many varied voices voice I through my mouth. 
 
 Cunning are the notes I sing, and incessantly I change 
 
 them. 
 Clear I cry and loud ; with the chant within my head ; 
 Holding to my tones, hiding not their sweetness. 
 I, the Evening-singer old, unto earls I bring 
 
24 
 
 Bliss within the burgs, when I burst along 
 With a cadenced song. Silent in their dwellings 
 They are sitting, bending forwards. Say what is my 
 name. 
 
 The Iceberg— Riddle xxxiv. 
 
 Came a wondrous wight o'er the waves a- faring, 
 Comely from his keel called he to the land. 
 Loudly did he shout, and his laughter dreadful was, 
 Full of terror to the Earth ! Sharp the edges of his 
 
 swords. 
 Grim was then his hate. He was greedy for the 
 
 slaughter, 
 Bitter in the battle work ; broke into the shield -walls. 
 Rough and ravaging his way ; and a rune of hate he 
 
 bound. 
 Then, all-skilled in craft, he said, about himself, his 
 
 nature — 
 * Of the maiden kin is my mother known ; 
 Of them all the dearest, so that now my daughter is 
 Waxen up to mightiness.' 
 
 Caedinon and the Christian Poetry. 
 
 The distinctive Christian poetry begins before the 
 date of the Elegies and the Nature-Riddles — in the 
 seventh century, with Caedmon of Whitby. He is the 
 first English poet whose name we know, . and it 
 stands at the head of the long and glorious muster- 
 roll of English singers. We have worn Apollo's 
 laurel for 1200 years. Csedmon began to make 
 verse, we may fairly saf, between 660 and 670. 
 We know the date of his death — 680 ; and we are 
 told that he was somewhat advanced in years when 
 the gift of song came upon him. We first find 
 him as a secular attendant of the monastery of 
 Hild, an abbess of royal blood, who had set up 
 her house of God on the lofty cliff which rises 
 above the little harbour where the Esk meets the 
 gray waters of the German Ocean. Whitby is its 
 Danish name ; in the days of B^da it was called 
 Streoneshalh. Caedmon was born a heathen if 
 he was English ; but if, as some think from his 
 
25 
 
 name, he was a Celt, he was born a Christian 
 The monastery in which he afterwards became a 
 monk was founded on the Celtic pattern — one of 
 the children of lona — and he was early imbued 
 with the Celtic spirit. Existing Celtic hymns, such 
 as Colman's, may have been placed before him 
 by the Irish monks as models for his poetry. 
 But, for all this, his tongue was English and 
 his poems were made in English. Whatever the 
 Irish spirit did for him, the ground of his work 
 was English. 
 
 B^da tells the story of Caedmon's birth as a 
 poet. One night, having the care of the cattle, he 
 fell asleep in the stable, and One came to him and 
 said, * Caedmon, sing me something.' ' I know not 
 how to sing,' he replied, * and for this cause left I 
 the feast.' * Yet,' said the divine visitant, ' you must 
 sing to me.' * What shall I sing ? ' said Caedmon. 
 * Sing,' the other replied, ' the beginning of created 
 things.' And immediately Caedmon began a hymn 
 in praise of the World's Upbuilder, and awakening, 
 remembered what he had sung, and told the Town- 
 Reeve of his gift, who brought him to Hild ; and, 
 becoming a monk, he continued in the abbey till 
 he died with joy and in peace, singing, day by 
 day, all the Scripture history, and of the Judg- 
 ment-day. ' Others after him,' said Baeda, ' tried 
 to make religious poems, but none could compare 
 with him.' 
 
 His poetry had then made a school which was 
 doing similar work to his when Baeda, fifty 
 years after Caedmon's death, was finishing his 
 Ecclesiastical History. Of what kind that work 
 was we have no certain knowledge. The 
 poems attributed to Caedmon by Junius in the 
 manuscript called the Jiinian Ccedmon have been 
 assigned by critics to different writers. Only one 
 of them — Genesis A — is thought by a few to be 
 possibly from his hand. If so, he wrote the thing 
 in two distinct manners — partly in a mere para- 
 phrase of the Biblical story, dull, unilluminated 
 
26 
 
 by any imagination ; and partly in imaginative 
 episodes, in which the Fall of the rebel angels, 
 the Flood, the battles of Abraham, and the 
 story of Hagar and of Isaac are imaginatively 
 treated as heroic tales, in the manner of a 
 heathen saga, and with English feeling. It is 
 to be hoped that some day we shall get evidence 
 to prove that these fine, bold episodes are from 
 Ca^dmon's hand. The only verses we know to 
 be his are transferred into Latin by Baeda, and 
 we have a Northumbrian version of them in an 
 old MS. of the Historia Ecclesiastica. They are 
 the short hymn which he is said to have sung 
 on awakening from his dream. Their hymnic form 
 suggests to critics that Caedmon's work was mainly 
 a series of heroic hymn-like lays on the subjects of 
 the Old and New Testament, tinged with the colours 
 of the Nature and the hero myths. It may be that 
 we have the remains of one of these in the poem, 
 portions of which are carved in runic letters on the 
 Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire. The lines sing of 
 ' Jesus, the yoiing Hero, who was God Almighty, 
 who girded Himself and stepped up, full of courage, 
 on the gallows for the sake of man.' And as He lies 
 there, the Sacred Rood speaks : * Lifted on high, I 
 bore the Lord of the heavenly realm, and trembled, 
 all besteamed with blood. Pierced with spears and 
 sore pained with sorrows, I beheld it all. They laid 
 Him, limb-wearied, in the grave.' If this fragment 
 be really Csedmon's work, it fills us with deep regret 
 that we have lost his other poems — lost a poetry so 
 close to the heroic manner, so filled with the spirit 
 of that heathen vigour and passion which his life 
 had seen and known. At any rate, we owe him a 
 great debt. He bridged the river between the 
 pagan and the Christian poetry. He showed to his 
 folk how the new material of Christianity could be 
 used by the bards of England. He made a great 
 school of poetry. He made Cynewulf possible. 
 He is the first EngHsh poet in our England. The 
 royal line of England goes back to Cerdic, the still 
 
27 
 
 more royal line of English poets goes back to 
 Ca^dmon. 
 
 The poetry of the School of Caedmon belongs to 
 the end of the seventh and the beginning of the 
 eighth century. Some of these poems are in the 
 Exeter Book. They are short hymnic songs of praise. 
 There is the Song of the Three Children^ adapted 
 in the seventh century from the Apocrypha j and 
 following it, the Prayer of Azarias. These were 
 joined together, and furnished in later times with 
 a conclusion, celebrating the deliverance of the 
 three children. As the capacity for writing poetry 
 grew, other forms were developed — poems of a half- 
 epic character, and narrative poems with episodes 
 like heathen lays inserted on a background of 
 narrative. Of these two kinds of poetry, which 
 ran together, the Exeter Book contains three — 
 Genesis A^ Exodus^ and Daniel j and in the manu- 
 script which contains Beowulf there is another — 
 fudith. These probably belonged to Northumbria. 
 Whether any long poems were written in the 
 middle and south of England at this time we do 
 not know ; but we do know that the family lay and 
 the war-song were made and sung everywhere, and 
 we have a pleasant story which tells how Ealdhelm, 
 Bishop of Sherborne, who died in 709, was ac- 
 customed on his preaching tours to stand like a 
 gleeman on the bridge or the public way, and to 
 sing songs, it may be his own, to the people flock- 
 ing to the fairs, that he might draw them to him 
 to hear the Word of God. This is the only thing 
 we know of poetry in the south of England at this 
 time. 
 
 Genesis A is in the Junian manuscript. This 
 manuscript was found by Archbishop Ussher, and 
 sent by him to Francis Du Jon (Junius), who 
 printed it at Amsterdam some time after 1650, and 
 published it as the work of Caedmon, because its 
 contents and its beginning agreed with Basda's 
 account of C^dmon's work. It is now at the 
 Bodleian, and is a small folio of 229 pages, in two 
 
28 
 
 handwritings, the first of the tenth century, and 
 illustrated with rude pictures. The first contains 
 the Genesis^ the Exodus^ and the Daniel j the 
 second the poems and fragments of poems gener- 
 ally classed under the title of Christ and Satan. 
 The Genesis is now divided into two parts, called 
 A and B j and Genesis B and the Christ a7td Satan 
 are now placed by the critics in the ninth and tenth 
 centuries. 
 
 Genesis A is the first of the three poems belong- 
 ing to the Casdmon School. It consists of the first 
 234 lines of the Genesis^ and of the lines from 852 
 to the close. [The lines between 234 and 852 are 
 Genesis B^ The early poem has many archaic 
 elements, drawn from Teutonic ideas of the uni- 
 verse — ancient Nature-myths. Its account of 
 Abraham's war is alive with heathen lust of battle 
 and vengeance ; and Abraham and his comrades 
 speak like an English earl and his thanes in 
 counsel. When the poet comes to gentler matters 
 the spirit of the poem is changed. The Christian 
 sentiment for soft landscape, its love of animals, 
 and its tender domestic feeling touch the verse, 
 in a pathetic mingling, with grace and delicacy. 
 The account of the Creation tells of the Hollow 
 Chasm, black in everlasting night — the vast 
 Abrupt that was before the earth and stars were 
 made ; then of the birth of ocean and of light, 
 and of Day flying from the Dark, and of Morn- 
 ing striding over earth and repelling the Night ; 
 then of Man's creation, and of the winsome water 
 washing the happy lands, and of earth made lovely 
 with flowers — and the lines are full of the new 
 kindliness which, unlike the heathen poetry, loved 
 the beauty and softness of the earth and sky. 
 Mere paraphrase follows, and then the poetic 
 work is again taken up in the episode of the 
 Flood, which is told by one who had seen the rain 
 of tempest and heard the sounding of the sea, 
 and, it may be, from the height of the abbey 
 cliff, watched the sailors drive their barks into 
 
29 
 
 the harbour. Another weary piece of paraphrase 
 brings us to Abraham's story, his visit to Egypt, 
 his war with the kings of the East, Hagar's 
 dehverance, and the sacrifice of Isaac. The 
 episode is well invented, and developed with great 
 freedom from its original. The war is English 
 war. Abraham acts and talks like an English 
 earl ; the raid of the Eastern kings is like a raid of 
 the Picts into Northumbria ; the tie of comradeship 
 between Abraham and Aner, Mamre and Eshcol, is 
 the same as that between Beowulf and his thanes, 
 between Byrhtnoth and his followers ; the joy in 
 the vengeance taken is fiercely northern. * No 
 need,' cries Abraham, ' to fear any more the fight- 
 ing rush of the Northmen. The carrion-birds, 
 splashed with their blood and glutted with their 
 corpses, are sitting now on the ledges of the hills.' 
 Dialogue, which belongs to the whole of the 
 episodes and gives them life and movement, is 
 largely used in the story of Hagar, and almost 
 suggests the drama. The sacrifice of Isaac is full 
 of Teutonic touches — the bale-fire, the white-haired 
 gold-giver girding his gray sword on him, the sun 
 stepping upwards, the high wolds where the pyre 
 is made, the vivid reality of a Northman's human 
 sacrifice ; and the poem ends with the cry of 
 God : * Pluck the boy away living from the pile of 
 wood.' 
 
 The Exodus is a complete whole. It is not 
 troubled by paraphrase. The writer uses the greatest 
 freedom with his subject, inventing, expanding, 
 elaborately exalting his descriptions ; beginning 
 with the death of the first-born, and ending with 
 the triumph over Pharaoh. War and the array 
 of battle give him great pleasure. He describes 
 Pharaoh's host on their march with vigour and 
 fire ; and the marshalling of Israel before the 
 passage of the sea is full of poetic pleasure. In 
 both passages, what an English host was like at 
 the beginning of the eighth century is exactly 
 detailed. The great war, however, is the war of 
 
30 
 
 God against the Egyptians, His menace of their 
 host on the march, His use against them of the 
 blackness of tempest, the charging waves, the 
 bloody flood. These were God's ancient swords. 
 Many times the poet describes the overwhelm- 
 ing. It is forcible — over forcible ; but young 
 poetic life is in it. And the poem closes with 
 the Song of victory and the plunder of the dead 
 Egyptians. 
 
 Judith^ in the manuscript which contains Beowulf^ 
 is probably of the same cycle as the Exodus — a 
 poem of the middle of the eighth century. Like 
 the Exodus^ the poem is conceived as a Saga, 
 to be sung before the warriors in camp as well as 
 the monks in the refectory. It seems to have been 
 in twelve books, for our manuscript contains a few 
 lines of Section ix., and the whole of Sections x., 
 xi., and xii. Section x. begins with the feast of 
 Holofernes and the leading of Judith to his tent. 
 He reels into his bed, drunken and shouting. 
 ' Avenge, O God !' she cries, * this burning at my 
 heart ;' and the slaughter of the heathen chief 
 is told with accurate delight. Book xi. brings 
 us to Bethulia. Judith calls on all the burghers 
 to arm for battle, and again English war is 
 described. The warriors, bold as kings, run 
 swiftly to the carnage, showers of spears fall on 
 the foes, and the sword-play is fierce among the 
 doomed. The gaunt wolf, the raven, and the 
 dusky eagle rejoiced on that day. The twelfth 
 book tells of the surprise of the Assyrian host, 
 their flight, and the gathering of the spoil ; and 
 Judith ends it with the praise of God. She 
 towers over the whole, a noble and heroic figure, 
 fit to receive and wear her spoil — the sword and 
 helm, war-shirt and gems, of Holofernes. 
 
 The Daniel closes this earliest cycle of Chris- 
 tian poetry. It has no literary quality — a mere 
 monkish paraphrase of the book as far as the 
 feast of Belshazzar. The school of Caedmon had 
 reached its decay. 
 
31 
 
 The poetry of that school took its materials from 
 the Old Testament. Christ was celebrated in it 
 as the Creator, the great warrior who overthrew 
 the rebel angels, the Egyptians, the Assyrians. 
 It was eminently English ; it was eminently objec- 
 tive. The personality of the poet does not intrude 
 into the poems. 
 
 The second school of Christian poetry is clearly 
 divided from its predecessor. Cynewulf was its 
 founder and its best artist. Its subjects are 
 drawn from the New Testament and the martyr 
 stories and legends of the Church of Rome. 
 It is more Latin in feeling than English. Christ 
 is celebrated, not as the God of the Jews 
 who destroys His foes, but as the Saviour of 
 the world of men for whom He dies, and the 
 Judge who is to come. The note of it is a 
 note of sorrow on the earth, but of joy to be 
 in heaven. In the life to come is the rapture 
 which fills the hymns of Cynewulf And, finally, 
 the poetry almost ceases to be objective. The 
 personal passion of the poet enters into every 
 subject, and runs like a river through every 
 poem. Even the natural description is touched 
 with its colour. 
 
 Abraham's Battle with the Elamites. 
 
 So they rushed together. Loud were then the lances, 
 Savage then the slaughter-hosts. Sadly sang the wan 
 
 fowl, 
 All her feathers dank with dew, 'midst the darting of the 
 
 shafts, 
 Hoping for the corpses. Then the heroes hastened 
 In their mighty masses, and their mood was full of 
 
 thought. 
 
 Hard the play was there, 
 Interchanging of death-darts, mickle cry of war ! 
 Loud the clang of battle ! With their hands the heroes 
 Drew from sheath their swords ring-hilted, 
 Doughty of the edges. 
 
32 
 
 In the camps was clashing 
 Of the shields and shafts, of the shooters falling ; 
 Brattling of the bolts of war ! Underneath the breast 
 
 of men 
 Grisly gripped the sharp-ground spears 
 On the foemen's life. Thickly fell they there 
 Where, before, with laughter, they had lifted booty. 
 
 {Genesis, 11. 1982-2060.) 
 
 The Approach of Pharaoh. 
 
 Then they saw 
 Forth and forward faring, Pharaoh's war array, 
 Gliding on, a grove of spears ; glittering the hosts ! 
 Fluttered there the banners, there the folk the march 
 
 trod. 
 Onwards surged the war, strode the spears along, 
 Blickered the broad shields ; blew aloud the trumpets. 
 Wheeling round in gyres, yelled the fowls of war, 
 Of the battle greedy ; hoarsely barked the raven. 
 Dew upon his feathers, o'er the fallen corpses ; 
 Swart that chooser of the slain ! Sang aloud the wolves 
 At the eve their horrid song, hoping for the carrion. 
 Kindless were the beasts, cruelly they threaten ; 
 Death did these march-warders, all the midnight through. 
 Howl along the hostile trail — hideous slaughter of the 
 
 host. 
 
 Cynewulfi 
 
 Cynewulf, with whom the second period of Old 
 English poetry begins, was, in the opinion of a 
 large number of critics, a Northumbrian, but some 
 think him to have been Mercian. It is difficult 
 to conceive how a poet so well acquainted with 
 the sea and the coasts of the sea should have 
 written in Mercia. A Mercian might have been 
 acquainted with the sea, but not impassioned by 
 it, as Cynewulf proves he is. Moreover, the sad- 
 ness of his poetry, the constant regret for vanished 
 glory, does not suit the life in Mercia at this time, 
 when, from 718 to 796, ^thelbald and Offa had 
 made Mercia the greatest kingdom in England ; 
 but does suit the life in Northumbria when, from 
 
33 
 
 7 SO to 790, that kingdom had fallen into anarchy 
 and decay. There are other critics who place him 
 much later than the eighth century. 
 
 We know the name of the poet, and something 
 of his life and character. He has signed his name 
 in runic letters to four of his poems. His riddHng 
 commentary on these runes gives personal details 
 of parts of his life. His youth, he says, *was 
 radiant.' He was sometimes attached as a Scop 
 to a chieftain ; sometimes he played the part of 
 a wandering singer. He had received many gifts 
 for his singing, then fallen into need ; had known 
 the griefs of love, and lived the wild life of a 
 young poet ; so that, when looking back on his 
 youth, he thinks of himself as stained with many 
 sins. Then the scenery of his life changed. Some 
 heavy misfortune fell on him, and he tells us then 
 that his repentance was deep. In his sorrow for 
 sin he had a vision of the Cross, and felt the 
 blessing of forgiveness. His 'gift of song' that 
 he had lost in his remorse and fear returned 
 to him, and then he began to write his Christian 
 poetry. In that poetry we read his sensitive, im- 
 passioned, self-contemplative character. He is as 
 personal as Milton or Cowper ; but, unlike Cowper, 
 he passes from religious sorrow into religious peace, 
 and the poems written in his old age are full of 
 contented aspiration for the better kingdom. 
 
 The Riddles, it is generally understood, contain 
 a great deal of his early work before his con- 
 version. If they are his, they tell us that he 
 knew some Latin and had lived in monasteries, 
 probably as a scholar ; was a lover of natural 
 scenery, of animals and birds ; was eager in the 
 works of war, and had sung the sword, the spear, 
 the war-shirt, and the bow ; had watched with an 
 observant eye the village and the town on the 
 edge of the woods, the river, the mill, the loom, 
 the gardens, the domestic animals. Moreover, he 
 had seen and described, with a young man's joy 
 in the tempest, the cliffs and shore white with 
 
34 
 
 the leaping waves, the ships labouring in the 
 mountainous sea, the folk-halls burning in the gale, 
 the woods ravaged by the lightning and the black 
 rain. All this and much more is celebrated in the 
 Riddles. With his love of impersonation, he per- 
 sonified far more than his riddle-making prede- 
 cessors, Ealdhelm, Symphosius, and Tatwine, the 
 subjects of his enigmas. When he makes the 
 Iceberg ride like a Viking over the waves, and 
 charge, breaking his enemies' ships, with fierce 
 singing and laughing, to the shore, we feel that he 
 could scarce carry further imaginative personation 
 of natural phenomena. Yet he is so particular 
 in observation of Nature that he devotes three 
 separate Riddles to the description of three several 
 kinds of tempest, and they are done with imagi- 
 native intensity, nor is the phrase exaggerated. 
 
 The Riddles are in the Exeter Book^ in three 
 divisions. There are ninety-five of them, but these 
 are combined into eighty-nine. There were prob- 
 ably a hundred. Those written by Ealdhelm and 
 others before Cynewulf's time were in Latin ; these 
 are in English verse, with the exception of the 
 eighty-sixth, which is in Latin. As the name 
 Lupus is in it, it is supposed that Cynewulf thus 
 recorded his name. 
 
 When we meet Cynewulf again he is all 
 changed. He has suffered sore trouble, and is 
 overwhelmed with sorrow for sin ; and we possess, 
 mingled up with the runes of his name, his record 
 of misery in the Juliana^ the first, probably, of 
 his signed poems. Here, as an example both of 
 the fashion of his signature and of his penitence, 
 is the passage : 
 
 Sorrowful are wandering 
 C and Y and N ; for the King is wrathful, 
 God of conquests giver. Then, beflecked with sins, 
 E and V and U must await in fear 
 What, their deeds according, God will doom to them 
 For their life's reward. L and F are trembling, 
 Waiting, sad with care. 
 
35 
 
 The Juliana is in the Exeter Book^ and Cyne- 
 wulf has worked up the legend of this virgin and 
 martyr in a series of episodes so abrupt, so full 
 of repetition, with so awkward a hand, that it 
 plainly suggests a beginner's work in a new 
 method. From a wild young poet to a sad peni- 
 tent, from versing of war and love and nature to 
 versing a pious legend, are not transitions which 
 are easily made, nor is the work done in such a 
 transition imaginative. We may say the same of 
 the first part of the St Guthlac^ which he has 
 not signed, but which we think was written in this 
 transition period. It rests on traditions of the 
 saint, and is a lifeless piece of writing. 
 
 In the Crist^ which is the next signed poem, 
 Cynewulf has passed through this transition time, 
 and attained ease, life, and eagerness in his art ; 
 recovered his imaginative power, his passion, and 
 his descriptive force. Here, for the first time in 
 his Christian work, he reaches originality, his true 
 method and fit material. The Crist is not the 
 translation of a legend ; it is freshly invented ; 
 and Cynewulf is always at his best when he 
 is inventing, not imitating. The sorrow for his 
 sinful life continues, but it is now mingled with 
 the peace which comes of realised forgiveness. ' I 
 have sailed on wind-swept seas,' he cries, 'over 
 fearful surges, but now my ship is anchored in 
 the haven to which the Spirit-Son of God has 
 brought me home.' 
 
 The Crist is in the Exeter Book. It was scattered 
 in fragmentary pieces through this book, but has 
 now been brought together. It consists of three 
 parts. The first celebrates the Nativity, the second 
 the Ascension, the third the Day of Judgment, and 
 the poem closes at line 1663. The series of can- 
 tatas into which the first part is set are remarkable 
 not only for the rushing praise with which each of 
 them ends, but also for a dramatic dialogue, almost 
 like the dialogue in the Miracle-Plays, between a 
 choir of men and women from Jerusalem and Mary 
 
36 
 
 and Joseph. It reads like a prediction of the 
 medieval mysteries. In the second part there is 
 a finely conceived scene, set in the vast of space, of 
 Christ returning to His Father's home, leading all 
 the Old Testament saints up out of Hades, and of 
 the meeting with Him and them of the host of 
 heaven who have poured from the gates to wel- 
 come the new-comers. The third part of the poem 
 begins with the gathering of the angels and the 
 saints on Mount Zion. A noble description follows 
 of the Angels of the four trumpets summoning 
 the dead. Christ appears in a blazing light, and 
 the universe melts in conflagration. Only Mount 
 Zion remains, and the throne, and the dead, small 
 and great, before it. Then, with its root on the 
 mount and its top in heaven, a mighty Cross is 
 upraised, wet with the blood of the King, but 
 so brilliant that all shade is drowned in its 
 crimson light. This fine conception is Cynewulf s 
 own, and in its description, and in that of the 
 great conflagration, the power he showed in the 
 Riddles reaches its highest point. The poem ends 
 with a picture of the saints in the perfect land. 
 
 The Crist was followed by the Ph(£nix and the 
 second part of the Guthlac. Neither of these 
 are signed by Cynewulf, but the majority of 
 scholars allot them to him. The Ph(jenix is in the 
 Exeter Book^ and its source is a Latin poem by 
 Lactantius. This original is left at line 380 ; the 
 rest is an allegory of the Resurrection, in which 
 not only Christ but all the souls of the just are 
 symbolised by the rebirth of the Phoenix. The first 
 part describes the paradisiacal land — the equiva- 
 lent of the Celtic land of eternal youth — in which 
 the Phoenix dwells, and the description is famous 
 in Old English work. Then the enchanted life 
 of the bird is told with all Cynewulfs love of 
 animals, of lovely woodland places, of the glory 
 of the sunrising and the sunset, and of sweet sing- 
 ing ; and then the flight of the bird to the Syrian 
 land, its burning, its resurrection, and the return 
 
37 
 
 to its Paradise for another thousand years. The 
 allegory follows. 1 1 is plain from the joyousness, 
 the exultation of this poem, and its rapturous 
 praise, that Cynewulf had fully recovered from his 
 spiritual misery, and was happy in faith and hope. 
 
 The second part of Guthlac^ which Cynewulf 
 now added, as I think, to the first part, has for 
 its subject the death of Guthlac, and is told in 
 the manner of the saga stories. I have conjec- 
 tured that Cynewulf, who in the previous poems 
 had avoided the heroic and mythical terms of the 
 heathen poetry, as he would be likely to do after 
 his conversion from a life he held in horror, now 
 felt his religious being so firmly set that he 
 allowed himself to recur to the poetic fashions 
 of his youth. At any rate, in this poem and in the 
 later poems he sings the Christian battle with 
 death, the victory of Jesus over evil, the legends 
 of the Church, with a full use of the old heroic 
 strain, of the Nature-myths, and of the terms of 
 heathen war. Guthlac stands on his hill, like a 
 Viking, as if on Holmgang, to meet the assaults of 
 Satan and his * smiths of sin ;' to stand against 
 Death, that greedy warrior ; and dies in triumph. 
 A pillar of light rises from his corpse, and the 
 heavenly host bursts into rapturous singing to 
 welcome him. All England trembles with joy. 
 It is an unfinished poem, but there is no better 
 work in Old English poetry. 
 
 A fragment of a Descent into Hell also belongs 
 to this poet, and is written with the same trick of 
 dialogue and the same enthusiasm as the Crist^ 
 and in the same heroic manner as the Guthlac. 
 This poem also is not signed. 
 
 There are two signed poems yet to be spoken 
 of, and two unsigned, which many critics have 
 allotted to Cynewulf The two signed poems are 
 the Fates of the Apostles and the Elene, The two 
 unsigned are the Andreas and the Dream of the 
 Rood. No discussion has gathered round the 
 Elene. It is plainly Cynewulfs. A great deal 
 
38 
 
 of discussion has gathered round the Dream of the 
 Rood. Again and again it has been claimed for 
 Cynewulf; again and again the claim has been 
 denied. The same may be said with regard to 
 the Andreas. As to the Fates of the Apostles.^ 
 most people think the signature makes it plainly 
 his ; but the date of its production and whether it 
 stands alone or is an epilogue to the Andreas 
 are matters still in discussion. The best thing 
 this short treatise can do is to leave these critical 
 matters, and to speak of the poems themselves. 
 If the Fates of the Apostles be bound up with 
 the Andreas^ and if Cynewulf wrote the Andreas.^ 
 it is here, after the second part of Guthlac^ that 
 we may best place these poems. 
 
 The Fates of the Apostles is in the Vercelli Book^ 
 and the personal passage (if it really belong to that 
 poem) contains Cynewulfs name. The work of 
 the apostles is told as if it were the expedition 
 of English ^Ethelings against their foes. ' Thomas 
 bore the rush of swords ; Simon and Thaddeus 
 were quick in the sword-play.' This heroic cry is 
 equally strong in the Andreas ; but the manner 
 of the whole poem does not resemble the other 
 work of Cynewulf. It has many lines which recall 
 Beowulf and the writer seems to have read that 
 poem. If it is by an imitator of Cynewulf, the 
 imitator was capable of as good work as Cynewulf ; 
 and he loves the grim sea-coasts and the stormy 
 sea as much as Cynewulf. It would be pleasant 
 to think that there were two such good men at 
 this time writing together. 
 
 The A7idreas is in the Vercelli Book., and tells 
 from the Acts of St A?tdrew and St Matthew, 
 of which there is a Greek manuscript at Paris, 
 the adventures of the two apostles among the 
 Mermedonians, a cannibal Ethiopian tribe. The 
 apostles, the angels, even Christ Himself, are all 
 English in speech, and the scenery is English. 
 There is, of course, nothing English in the original. 
 The change is a deliberate addition made by 
 
39 
 
 the writer. As literature, the irnportant part of 
 the poem is the voyage of St Andrew and his 
 thanes with Christ and two angels, their conversa- 
 tion, the description of the storm, their landing on 
 the coast. All this is done in heroic fashion ; the 
 breath of the sea fills it ; the natural description 
 is terse and observant, and the talk is imagina- 
 tively treated. We feel as if we were sailing in 
 a merchant-boat of the eighth century between 
 Whitby and the Tyne. Landing, Andrew delivers 
 Matthew, suffers three days' martyrdom, and then, 
 after a mighty flood and tempest of fire has 
 destroyed his foes, converts the rest, founds a 
 church, and sails away. 
 
 There is no doubt of the authorship of the 
 Elene^ which Cynewulf wrote when he was 'old 
 and ready for death in my frail tabernacle.' It 
 is the last of the signed poems. He was now a 
 careful artist. ' I've woven craft of words,' he 
 says, 'culled them out, sifted night by night my 
 thoughts.' He then recalls the story of his life 
 while he signs his name in runes. It is the chief 
 biographical passage in his work, and it ends with 
 a fine description of the storm-wind hunting in 
 the sky. The poem is in the Vercelli Book — 
 1320 lines. The subject is the Finding of the 
 True Cross by the Empress Helena. The battle 
 of Constantine with the Huns and the voyage of 
 Helena are the best parts of the poem. They 
 are insertions by Cynewulf into the Latin life of 
 Cyriacus, Bishop of Jerusalem, which (in the Acta 
 Sanctorum^ May 4) is the source of the poem. 
 The battle is done with the full heroic spirit. The 
 sea-voyage breathes of his delight in the doings 01 
 ships and of the ocean. The ancient saga-terms 
 strengthen and animate his verse, and the poet 
 seems to write like a young man. His metrical 
 movement is steadier here than in the other poems. 
 He uses almost invariably the short epic line into 
 the usage of which English poetry had now drifted. 
 Rhyme, also, and assonance are not infrequent. 
 
40 
 
 The poets, it is plain, had now formulated rules 
 for their art. Had Northumbrian poetry lasted, it 
 might have become as scientific as the Icelandic. 
 
 The last poem belonging to Cynewulf or his 
 school is the Dream of the Rood, which is found in 
 the Vercelli Book. Its authorship is unknown, 
 but many scholars give it to Cynewulf. I believe 
 it to be his last poem, his farewell ; and that he 
 worked it up from that early ' Lay of the Rood ' 
 written, it is supposed, by Caedmon, and a portion of 
 which is quoted on the Ruth well Cross. Cynewulf 
 wished to record before he died the vision of the 
 Cross which converted him. He found this poem 
 of Caedmon's, and wrought it up into a description 
 of his vision, inserting the * long epic lines ' in 
 which it was written. Then he wrote a beginning 
 and end of his own in his ' short epic ' line. This 
 theory — it is no more — accounts for the difficulties 
 of the poem. 
 
 It begins by describing how he saw at the dead 
 of night a wondrous Tree, adorned with gems, 
 moist with blood ; and how, as he looked on it, 
 heavy-hearted with sin, it began to tell its story. 
 
 I was hewed down in the holt, and wrought into 
 shape, and set on a hill, and the Lord of all folk 
 hastened to mount on me, the Hero who would save 
 the world. Nails pierced me ; I was drenched with the 
 Hero's blood, and all Creation wept around me. Then 
 His foes and mine took Almighty God from me, and men 
 made His grave, and sang over Him a sorrowful lay. 
 
 The old poem, thus worked up into Cynewulf's 
 new matter, may be distinguished by its long epic 
 lines from the newer matter, which is written in the 
 short epic line. When the dream is finished, Cyne- 
 wulf ends with a long passage so like the rest of 
 his personal statements, so steeped in his individu- 
 ality as we know it from his signed poems, so 
 pathetic and so joyous, that it is hard to understand 
 how the poem can be attributed to any one but 
 Cynewulf. * Few friends are left me now,' he 
 
41 
 
 says ; * they have fared away to their High Father. 
 And I bide here, waiting till He on whose Rood 
 I looked of old shall bring me to the happy place 
 where the High God's folk are set at the evening 
 meal.' And with that the poetry and the life of 
 Cynewulf close. 
 
 The time is coming when his name will be more 
 highly honoured among us, and his poetry better 
 known. He had imagination ; he anticipated, at a 
 great distance, the Nature-poetry of the nineteenth 
 century, especially the poetry of the sea ; his personal 
 poetry, full of religious passion both of penitence 
 and joy, makes him a brother of the many poets 
 who in England have written well of their own heart 
 and of God in touch with it. His hymnic passages 
 of exultant praise ought to be translated and loved 
 by all who cherish the Divine praise which from 
 generation to generation has been so nobly sung 
 by English poets. The heroic passages in his 
 poems link us to our bold heathen forefathers, 
 and yet are written by a Christian. Their spirit is 
 still the spirit of England. But his greatest hero 
 was Jesus Christ. Cynewulf was, more than any 
 other Old English poet, the man who celebrated 
 Christ as the Healer of men, and, because He was 
 the Healer, the Hero of the New Testament. 
 
 The other remains of English poetry which we 
 possess in the Exeter and Vercelli Books^ and 
 which were written before the revival of literature 
 under Alfred, belong more to the history of criti- 
 cism than literature. They were written at various 
 dates during the eighth and ninth centuries. For 
 our purpose it will almost suffice to name the best 
 of them. One of them is a short Physiologus^ a 
 description of three animals — the Panther, the 
 Whale, and the Partridge — followed by a religious 
 allegory based on the description. The Panther 
 symbolises Christ, the Whale the devil. There 
 are two didactic poems, the Address of a Father 
 to a Son^ and of the Lost Soul to its Body. There 
 are two other poems on the Gifts of Men and the 
 
42 
 
 Fates of Men^ the latter of which treats its subject 
 with so much originaUty that it has been given 
 to Cynewulf. Both contain passages which tell us 
 a good deal about the arts and crafts of the 
 English, and about various aspects of English 
 scenery. The Gnomic Verses — folk proverbs and 
 maxims, short descriptions of human life and of 
 natural events — are in four collections, three in 
 the Exeter Book and one in the Cotton MS. 
 at Cambridge. Many of these are interesting. 
 Some have come down from heathen times ; some 
 are quotations from the poets ; others tell of war, 
 of courts, of women, of games, of domestic life. 
 They would have interested Alfred ; and it is 
 probable that, collected at York, they were edited 
 in Wessex in Alfred's time. The Ru?te Song 
 is an alphabet of the Runes, with attached 
 verses, such as we still make at the present 
 day on the letters of the alphabet. There are 
 two dialogues between Solo7non and Saturnus^ 
 in which Christian wisdom in Solomon and the 
 heathen wisdom of the East in Saturnus contend 
 together in question and answer. Such dialogues 
 became frequent in medieval literature, but changed 
 their form. Marculf takes the place of Saturn, and 
 represents the uneducated peasant or mechanic, 
 whose rustic wit often gets the better of the king 
 and the scholar. But there is no trace of this 
 rebellion against Church and State in the English 
 dialogues. With them we may close the poetry 
 of the ninth century. A few years after the death 
 of Cynewulf the Danish terror began. Literature 
 decayed ; men had not the heart to write poetry ; 
 and when, shortly after 867, the 'army' (which 
 had already ravaged East Anglia and the greater 
 part of Mercia) stormed York and destroyed every 
 abbey and seat of learning from the Humber to 
 the Forth, the poetry of Northumbria passed away. 
 We may say that the farewell of Cynewulf in the 
 Dream of the Rood was the dirge of Northumbrian 
 song. 
 
43 
 
 At the Judgment-Day. 
 
 Deep creation thunders, and before the Lord shall go 
 
 Hugest of upheaving fires o'er the far-spread earth ! 
 
 Hurtles the hot flame, and the heavens burst asunder, 
 
 All the firm-set flashing planets fall out of their places. 
 
 Then the sun that erst o'er the elder world 
 
 With such brightness shone for the sons of men 
 
 Black-dark now becomes, changed to bloody hue. 
 
 And the moon alike, who to man of old 
 
 Nightly gave her light, nither tumbles down : 
 
 And the stars also shower down from heaven. 
 
 Headlong through the roaring lift, lashed by all the 
 
 winds. 
 
 (From the Crist.) 
 
 The Bliss of Heaven. 
 
 There, is angels' song ; there, enjoyment of the blest ; 
 There, beloved Presence of the Lord Eternal, 
 To the blessed brighter than the beaming of the Sun ! 
 There is love of the beloved, life without the end of 
 
 death ; 
 Merry there man's multitude ; there unmarred is youth 
 
 by eld ; 
 Glory of the hosts of Heaven, health that knows not 
 
 pain ; 
 Rest for righteous doers, rest withouten strife, 
 For the good and blessed ! Without gloom the day. 
 Bright and full of blossoming ; bliss that 's sorrowless ; 
 Peace all friends between, ever without enmity ; 
 Love that envieth not, in the union of the saints, 
 For the happy ones of Heaven ! Hunger is not there 
 
 nor thirst. 
 Sleep nor heavy sickness, nor the scorching of the Sun ; 
 Neither cold nor care ; but the happy company, 
 Sheenest of all hosts, shall enjoy for aye 
 Grace of God their King, glory with their Lord. 
 
 (From the Crist.) 
 
 St Guthlac dies and is received into Heaven. 
 
 Then out-streamed a Light 
 Brightest that of beaming pillars ! All that Beacon fair. 
 All that heavenly glow round the holy home, 
 Was up-reared on high, even to the roof of Heaven, 
 From the field of earth, like a fiery tower, 
 
Seen beneath the sky's expanse, sheenier than the sun, 
 Glory of the glorious stars ! Hosts of angels sang 
 Loud the lay of Victory ! In the lift the ringing sound 
 Now was heard the heaven under, raptures of the Holy 
 
 Ones! 
 So the blessed Burgstead was with blisses filled, 
 With the sweetest scents, and with skiey wonders. 
 With the angels' singing, to its innermost recesses ; 
 Heirship of the Holy One ! 
 
 More onelike it was. 
 And more winsome there, than in world of ours 
 Any speech may say ; how the sound and odour, 
 How the clang celestial, and the saintly song 
 Heard in Heaven were — high-triumphant praise of God, 
 Rapture following rapture. 
 
 All our island trembled. 
 All its Field-floor shook. 
 
 (From the Guthlac.) 
 
 Latin Writers liefore ^Elfred. 
 
 When Augustine landed in Thanet in 597 and 
 made Canterbury the first Christian town, he 
 brought with him, to add to the development of 
 English literature, the power, the wisdom, the amal- 
 gamating force, and the long traditions of Rome. 
 But at first, though the Roman missionaries in- 
 fluenced the English thought, they did not use 
 the English language. All that they wrote they 
 wrote in Latin. The Celtic Church encouraged 
 the. English to shape their thought and feeling 
 in their own tongue ; the Roman Church dis- 
 couraged this ; and the south of England, where 
 Rome was supreme as a teacher, did not till the 
 days of Alfred produce any important literature 
 in English. 
 
 The Latin literature of the south began with 
 Theodore of Tarsus, who was made Archbishop of 
 Canterbury in 669. Benedict Biscop, a Northum- 
 brian scholar, came with him from Rome ; and 
 Benedict, going to his home, was the proper founder 
 of Latin literature in Northumbria. Hadrian, Theo- 
 dore's deacon, joined in 671, and with his help 
 
45 
 
 Theodore set on foot the school of Canterbury, 
 which soon became the centre of southern learning. 
 Wessex and Kent now produced their own scholars, 
 and their bishops were men who loved and 
 nourished education. Daniel of Winchester was 
 a wise assistant of Baeda ; but the man who best 
 represents the knowledge and literature of the 
 south was Ealdhelm, who, educated by Mailduf, 
 an Irishman, and also at Canterbury, became 
 Abbot of Malmesbury and Bishop of Sherborne. 
 He may have helped to compile the Laws of Ine^ 
 King of Wessex, and he made some English 
 songs ; but his chief work was in Latin, and it 
 was the Latin of a scholar who knew the Roman 
 classics. He wrote Latin verse with ease, and trans- 
 lated into hexameters the stories of his prose trea- 
 tise De laudibus Virginitatis. His Latin Riddles 
 sent to Aldfrith of Northumbria were used by 
 Cynewulf. His correspondence was extensive, and 
 the letters to English and Welsh kings, to monas- 
 teries abroad, are as honourable to him as his letters 
 to the abbesses and nuns, who in those days had 
 learnt Latin, are charming, gay, and tender. His 
 style is swollen, fantastic, and self-pleased, but the 
 goodness and grace of the man shine through it. 
 He was the last of the Wessex scholars who at this 
 time did any literary work. 
 
 Ability and intelligence in Wessex were more em- 
 ployed in organisation of the Church and in mis- 
 sionary enterprise than in writing. Theodore brought 
 the whole Christianity of England into unity. Wini- 
 fried or Boniface, who brought Central Germany 
 into obedience to the Roman See ; Willibald, one 
 of our first pilgrims to Palestine ; LuUus, Arch- 
 bishop of Mainz, who has left us a correspon- 
 dence which proves his influence over the growth 
 of Christianity and learning in England and Eu- 
 rope, were all West Saxons. But after the middle 
 of the eighth century active literary life died in 
 Wessex, and when Alfred came to the throne in 
 871, there was not a single priest left who could 
 
46 
 
 understand their service books or put them into 
 English. 
 
 The history of Latin literature in the Mid- 
 England kingdom of Mercia is even of less im- 
 portance than it is in Wessex. Under ^thelbald 
 the country seems to have won a reputation for 
 learning ; and Ecgwin, Bishop of Worcester, is 
 said to be our first autobiographer. The Life of St 
 Guthlac, written by Felix of Crowland for an East 
 Anglian king, in outpuffing Latin, is the only work 
 we know of. But vEthelbald and his successor 
 Offa were munificent to monasteries ; and the 
 school at Worcester was the last refuge of learn- 
 ing, when its cause was lost all over England in 
 the ninth century. 
 
 The career of Latin literature in Northumbria 
 was more continuous and more important than it 
 was in Wessex or Mercia. The names of many of 
 its scholars were known over the world, and are 
 famous to this day. Northumbrian scholarship 
 founded a great school, almost a university, at 
 York, from which flowed the learning which, 
 received and cherished by Charles the Great, 
 produced an early Renaissance in Europe. The 
 story of its rise and its fall belongs to York. The 
 story of its growth and development belongs to 
 Wearmouth and J arrow. 
 
 Christianity reached York in the year 627, when 
 Paullinus baptised Eadwine. But after Eadwine's 
 death Northumbria relapsed into heathenism, 
 Paullinus fled, and Latin literature was stifled in 
 its birth. Literature and religion again took fresh 
 life under Oswald in 634, but they were now in 
 Celtic, not in Roman hands. The monasteries 
 set up were ruled by Celtic monks from lona ; 
 the bishops came from the same place ; the kings 
 and princes of the Northumbrian house were, for 
 the most part, educated at lona, spoke Irish, and 
 knew the poetry and learning of Ireland. And the 
 Irish, accustomed to praise God and their heroes 
 and saints in their own tongue, encouraged the 
 
47 
 
 Northumbrians to write in their own tongue. The 
 first literature of Northumbria was in EngHsh. 
 
 Rome was naturally unsatisfied with this pre- 
 dominance of the Celtic Church ; Northumbria 
 must be drawn into the Latin fold ; and Theodore, 
 Wilfrid, and others, with Prince Alchfrith, fought 
 their battle so well that in 664, at the Synod of 
 Whitby, Northumbria joined the Latin Church. 
 And now, though the Celtic influence lasted for 
 many years, Latin learning, which had begun in 
 Ripon and Hexham, took deep root in the north. 
 Benedict Biscop, who had been at Rome with 
 Theodore, built in 674 the monastery of St Peter 
 at Wearmouth, and in 682 the sister house at 
 Jarrow. He and the large libraries he collected 
 for these abbeys were the real foundation of 
 the Latin literature and learning of the north. 
 Scholars and writers soon began to multiply. 
 Wilfrid's .biography — the first written in England 
 — was done by his friend Eddius Stephanus about 
 709. The Life of St Cuthbert was written at 
 Lindisfarne. Wilfrid's closest friend, Acca, Bishop 
 of Hexham, increased the library which John of 
 Beverley had ministered to. These are the chief 
 names of the early Latin writers of the north. 
 
 But the learning was scattered. It was gathered 
 together and generalised by Baeda of Jarrow. He 
 is the master of the time, and his books became 
 not only the sources of English, but of European 
 learning. To this day his name is revered ; he is 
 still called the * Venerable Bede ; ' all the science, 
 rhetoric, grammar, theology, and historical know- 
 ledge of the past which he could attain he 
 absorbed, edited, and published. He increased 
 in his Homilies and Connnentaries the religious 
 literature of the world ; he made delightful biog- 
 raphies, and he wrote the Ecclesiastical History 
 of the English Nation with skill and charm. It is 
 our best authority. His first books, on the scien- 
 tific studies of the time, were written between 700 
 and 703. They were followed by a primer of the 
 
48 
 
 history of the world — De sex cetatibus ScbcuU-, 
 707 ; by the Commentaries on almost all the books 
 of the Old and New Testaments, and these 
 range over many years after 709 ; by the Lives 
 of Cuthbert and the Abbots of Wearmouth and 
 J arrow ^ j 16-20 ; and by the De Temporum ratione 
 in 726. The Ecclesiastical History was finished 
 in 731, and his last work, the Letter to Egbert^ 
 was done in the year of his death, 735. These 
 thirty-five years were thus filled with that learn- 
 ing and teaching and writing in which he had 
 always great delight ; and the little cell at Jarrow, 
 whence he rarely stirred, was continually visited by 
 men of many businesses and of all ranks in life. 
 He kept in touch with all the monasteries of 
 England, and with many in Europe. Even so far 
 away as Rome he had scholars who worked for 
 him among the archives. His greatest book is 
 the Ecclesiastical History. He took so much 
 pains to make it accurate, and to write nothing 
 without consulting original and contemporary 
 authorities, that the modern historical school 
 claim him as their own. He shows in the book 
 that power of choice and rejection of material 
 so necessary for a historian ; and, what chiefly 
 concerns us here, he filled it with a literary charm 
 and beauty of statement when the subject per- 
 mitted this self-indulgence. It is here that his 
 personality most appears ; that we feel his happy, 
 gentle, loving, and simple nature. His character 
 adorns his style. The stories which embellish the 
 book have a unique clearness and grace, a vivid 
 grasp of character, a human tenderness, which 
 makes us feel at times as if we were present with 
 him in his room at Jarrow and listening to his 
 charitable voice. Cuthbert, one of his pupils, gives 
 an account of his fair death in his cell among his 
 books ; and it is pleasant to think that the last 
 work on which he was engaged on the day of his 
 departure was a translation into English of the 
 Gospel of St John, and that almost his last speech 
 
49 
 
 was the making of a few English verses, for, 
 indeed, he was learned in English songs. (There 
 is a translation from Basda's History at page 53.) 
 
 The seat of learning at Baeda's death was trans- 
 ferred from Jarrow to York, where Ecgberht, 
 Baeda's pupil, became an archbishop. The school 
 he established at York may almost be termed a 
 university. The education given was in all the 
 branches of learning then known, in Ethica, 
 Physica, and Logica. The library was the largest 
 and the best outside of Rome, and was more useful 
 than that at Rome. The arts were not neglected. 
 The Latin Fathers ; the Roman poets, gram- 
 marians, orators ; the Natural History of Pliny, 
 some of the Greek Fathers, and the Scriptures, 
 were studied by a host of scholars from Ireland, 
 Italy, Gaul, Germany, and England. When 
 Ecgberht died ^Elberht succeeded him, and 
 with Alcuin's help increased the library and de- 
 veloped the education given in the schools. In 
 770 York and its library and schools was the centre 
 of European learning. ^Iberht's greatest friend 
 was Alcuin (Eng. Ealhwine), the finest scholar 
 York produced, and the last. His classical was 
 as good as his patristic learning. His style has 
 earned him the name of the Erasmus of his cen- 
 tury. He loved Virgil so well that pious persons- 
 reproached him for it. His reputation came ta 
 the ears of Charles the Great, who was then start- 
 ing the education of his kingdoms ; and Alcuin, 
 who had met Charles at Pavia about 780, and again 
 at Parma in 781, left England — though he revisited 
 it in 790-92 — to remain on the Continent till his 
 death in the abbey of St Martin of Tours in 804. 
 He left many books behind him — learned, theo- 
 logical, and virtuous. Of his Latin poems, that 
 dedicated to the history of the great men of the 
 school of York is the best. The Letters — more 
 than three hundred — which he wrote to Charles and 
 to most of the important personages in England and 
 Europe, have the best right to the name of litera- 
 
50 
 
 ture, and prove how wide was his influence, and 
 how useful his work to the centuries that followed. 
 He brought all the scholarship of England to the 
 empire of the greatest man in Europe, whose 
 power sent it far and wide. And he did this at the 
 very time when its doom had begun to fall upon it in 
 England. Alcuin himself heard of the ravaging of 
 Lindisfarne by the Vikings in 793, and of the attack 
 in the following year on Wearmouth, and cried out 
 with pity and sorrow. The years that followed 
 were years of decay. Northumbria was the prey 
 of anarchy from 780 to 798. The six years of quiet 
 that followed were years in which the school of 
 York, weakened by Alcuin's absence, sickened and 
 failed. In 827 Ecgberht of Wessex put an end to 
 the separate kingdom of Northumbria. In 867 the 
 Danish * army ' invaded the north, conquered York, 
 settled there, and destroyed every abbey, both in 
 Deira and Bernicia. Bishoprics, libraries, schools 
 were all swept away. A little learning may have 
 crept on in York, for the town was not destroyed, 
 and it again flourished under Danish rule. Only 
 one poor school of learning remained in that part of 
 Mercia which w^as finally saved by ^Elfred from the 
 Danes. Worcester was the last refuge of the faded 
 learning of Northumbria ; and when Alfred began 
 the revival of education in England, collected the 
 old poetry, attempted to restore monastic leisure 
 and scholarship, and himself, having learnt Latin, 
 originated English prose by the translation of Latin 
 books, it was from Worcester that he fetched the 
 only Englishmen who could help him in his work. 
 
 iElfred. 
 
 Alfred, whose character was even greater than 
 his renown as warrior, ruler, and lawgiver, was also 
 a king in English literature. With him, at Win- 
 chester, began the prose-writing of England. His 
 books were chiefly translations, but they were 
 interspersed with original work which reveals to 
 
51 
 
 us his way of thinking, the temper of his soul, 
 the interests of his searching inteUigence, and his 
 passion for teaching his people all that could then 
 be known of England, of the history of the world, 
 of religion, and of the Divine Nature. They ap- 
 pealed to the clergy, to the people, to scholars, to 
 the warriors and sailors of England. Their aim 
 was the education of his countrymen. 
 
 Bom at Wantage in 849, he was the youngest 
 son of ^thelwulf, and the grandson of the great 
 Ecgberht. Rome, whither he went at the age of 
 four years, and then again when he was six years 
 old, made its deep impression on him. He stayed 
 on his return at the court of Charles the Bald, and 
 heard, no doubt, of the education which Charles the 
 Great had given to the empire, for when he under- 
 took a similar task in England he followed the 
 methods and the practice of the emperor. When 
 he arrived in England he sought for teachers, but 
 found- none. When he was twenty years old he 
 heard with indignant sorrow of the destruction of 
 all learning in England by the Danes ; and the 
 lover of learning as well as the patriot was 
 whetted into wrath when, on the height of Ash- 
 down, he and his brother ^Ethelred drove the 
 Danes down the hill with a pitiless slaughter. Not 
 long after this battle he became King of Wessex in 
 871. The work by which he made his kingdom 
 belongs to history. It was only in 887 that he 
 began his literary labour in a parenthesis of quiet. 
 But he had made preparations for it beforehand. 
 He had collected round him whatever scholars 
 were left in England. They were few, — Werfrith, 
 Bishop of Worcester ; Denewulf, of the same town ; 
 Plegmund, vEthelstan, and Werwulf, all three from 
 Mercia. With these he exhausted England. Then 
 he sent to Flanders for Grimbald, whom he made 
 Abbot of Winchester ; and to Corvei in West- 
 phaHa for John the Old Saxon, whom he placed 
 over his monastic house at Athelney. But his 
 closest comrade in this work was Ass«r of St 
 
52 
 
 David's, whom he induced to stay with him for six 
 months in the year, who taught him Latin, and 
 whose Latin Life of the king is, with all its inter- 
 polations and errors, our best authority. The first 
 thing they did together was Alfred's Hand-book. 
 When Asser quoted or ^Elfred read out of the Bible 
 or the Fathers any passage which interested the 
 king, it was written down and translated into 
 English in the note-book which the king kept in his 
 breast. It was a book, then, of religious extracts, 
 with here and there an illustration or a remark of 
 Alfred's added in his own words. This Hand-book^ 
 begun in November 887, was set forth for the use 
 of the people in English in 888. The loss of it is a 
 great misfortune. 
 
 The collection of the laws of ^thelberht, Ine, and 
 Offa, with laws of his own, into a Law-book was the 
 next work yElfred undertook, and it was probably 
 completed in 888. But the work of collection had 
 most likely been begun in 885 or 886, for William 
 of Malmesbury says that it was composed amid the 
 noise of arms and the braying of the trumpets — 
 that is, during the short struggle with the Danes in 
 885-86, when Alfred secured London for his king- 
 dom. The book was then in hand for more than two 
 years. By this time he was acquainted with Latin, 
 and as the clergy were the teachers of the people, 
 the first book he translated was for their benefit. 
 It was the Cura Pastoralis^ the Herdsman's Book, 
 of Gregory the Great, a manual of the duties of 
 the clergy, the description of the ideal of a Christian 
 priest ; and a copy was sent ' to every bishop's seat 
 in my kingdom,' probably in the year 890. The 
 book is the book of a beginner in translation. It 
 is more close to its author than the other transla- 
 tions. Several paragraphs in the Preface seem to 
 speak of the work as the first translation he issued. 
 No long original matter is inserted ; but the well- 
 known Preface is from Alfred's own hand, and it 
 is the beginning of English prose literature. It 
 breathes throughout of the king's character. It 
 
53 
 
 sketches the state of learning in England when he 
 came to the throne, and we realise from it how 
 much he did for literature, and the difficulties with 
 which he had to contend. Its style is curiously 
 simple and fresh, and it succeeds in its patriotic 
 effort to be clear. It is plain here, as in his other 
 writings, that ^Elfred said to himself, ' I will try 
 to make the most ignorant understand me.' 
 
 So many translations of this Preface have been 
 published that it does not seem necessary to insert 
 any quotation from it, but at the end Alfred has 
 added some verses of his own, and their simplicity, 
 their faint imaginative note, their personal and 
 tender religious feeling, their being perhaps the first 
 verses that he wrote, induce me to paraphrase 
 them : 
 
 These are the waters which the God of hosts pro- 
 mised for our comfort to us dwellers on the earth, and His 
 will is that these ever-living waters should flow into all 
 the world from all who truly believe in Him ; and their 
 well-spring is the Holy Ghost. Some shut up this 
 stream of wisdom in their mind so that it flows not 
 everywhere in vain, but the well abides in the breast of 
 the man, deep and still. Some let it run away in rills 
 over the land, and it is not wise that such bright waters 
 should, noisy and shallow, flow over the land till it 
 becomes a fen. But now draw near to drink it, for 
 Gregory has brought to your doors the well of the Lord. 
 Whoever have brought a water-tight pitcher, let him fill 
 it now, and let him come soon again. Whoever have a 
 leaky pitcher, let him mend it, lest he spill the sheenest 
 of waters and lose the drink of life. 
 
 The second book y^lfred translated was Baeda's 
 Ecclesiastical History of the E?iglish^ 8 90-9 1 . It was 
 done not only to instruct the clergy in the history 
 of their Church, but also the people in the history 
 of their own land. It omits several chapters of the 
 original, and the king adds nothing of his own. 
 We may wonder why he gave no particular account 
 in it of the history of Church and State in Wessex, 
 but this curious omission may be explained by the 
 
54 
 
 fact that in 891 he had begun to work up the 
 English Chronicle into a national history, and did 
 not care to write two accounts of the same matter. 
 
 A certain portion of the Chronicle already existed. 
 This was probably made by Bishop Swithun of 
 Winchester shortly after the death of ^thelwulf, 
 and runs up to the year 855. It took the meagre 
 annals made at Winchester as its basis, filled 
 them from tradition back to Hengest, and then 
 told at some length the wars and death of 
 ^thelwulf. Alfred, finding this account, caused it 
 to be carefully investigated and written up to date, 
 with a full history of his wars with the Danes. 
 The style of this history is of the same kind 
 throughout, and it is more than probable that 
 it was the work of his own hand. Condensed, 
 bold, rough, and accurate, it is a fine beginning 
 of the historical prose of England. This is the 
 manuscript of the Annals of Winchester, pre- 
 sented by Archbishop Parker to the library of 
 Corpus Christi at Cambridge, and the copy is in 
 one handwriting. 
 
 The next book the king translated, about 891-93, 
 was the History of the World by Orosius. That 
 history was written in 418 at the suggestion of 
 St Augustine. It was the standard historical 
 authority during the Middle Ages, and Alfred 
 edited it to teach his people all that was known 
 of the world beyond England. He left out what 
 he thought needless for them to know, and he filled 
 it up from his own knowledge with matters of 
 interest to Englishmen and with comments of his 
 own. Among these was a full account of the geog- 
 raphy of Germany, and of the countries where 
 the English tongue had been spoken of old. To 
 this he added the personal tales of two voyagers, 
 Ohthere and Wulfstan, who had sailed along 
 the coasts of Norway and the German shores of 
 the Baltic. Ohthere had made two voyages, 
 one northward as far as the mouth of the 
 Dwina where it poured into the White Sea, the 
 
55 
 
 other down the eastern coast of Denmark till 
 he saw the Baltic running upwards into the 
 land ; and the king adds, * He had gone by the 
 lands where the Engle dwelt before they came 
 hither.' Wulfstan, starting from Haithaby, the 
 capital of the old Engle-land, went for seven days 
 and nights along the German coast till he reached 
 the Vistula. These journeys the king, sitting in 
 his chamber in the royal house, wrote down, prob- 
 ably from the dictation of the mariners. It is a 
 pleasant scene to look upon. The style of this 
 writing is, as usual, concise, simple, and straight- 
 forward, with a touch of personal pleasure in it. 
 
 These translations were the work of about five 
 years, from 888 to 893. In the latter year he was 
 interrupted by the invasion of the Viking Hasting 
 and the rising of the Danelaw. This was the 
 last effort of the Danes against him, and in 897 
 he had completely crushed it by the capture of 
 the Danish fleet. From that date till his death 
 in 901 he had the stillness he loved, and he 
 returned to his literary work. The book he now 
 undertook to translate (897-98) was the De Con- 
 solatione PhilosophicE^ which Boethius had written 
 in prison to comfort his heart. It is a dialogue 
 between him and Philosophy, who consoles him 
 for trouble by proving that the only lasting happi- 
 ness is in the soul. The wise and virtuous man 
 is master of all things. The book is the final 
 utterance of heathen Stoicism, but was so near 
 to the conclusions of Christianity that the Middle 
 Ages believed the writer to be a Christian ; and 
 his book was translated into the leading lan- 
 guages of Europe. Its serious, sorrowful, but 
 noble argument suited well with the circumstances 
 of Alfred's life and with his spiritual character. 
 He added to Boethius long passages of his own ; 
 and the fifth book is nearly altogether rewritten by 
 the king. He filled the Stoic's thought with his 
 own profound Christianity, with solemn passages 
 on the Divine Nature and its relation to man's will 
 
56 
 
 and fate, with aspiring hopes and prayers. Many 
 inserted paragraphs have to do with his own hfe, 
 with the government of his kingdom, with his 
 thoughts and feehngs as a king, with his scorn of 
 wealth and fame and power in comparison with 
 goodness. He stands in its pages before us, a 
 noble figure, troubled, but conqueror of his 
 trouble ; master of himself ; a lover of God and 
 his people, dying, but with a certain hope of 
 immortal peace. 
 
 Whether he or another translated into English 
 verse the Metra with which Boethius interspersed 
 his prose is not as yet settled by the critics. If we 
 believe the short poetical prologue to the oldest of 
 the manuscripts, the English version of the Metra 
 in poetry is the work of the king, and it would 
 illustrate his intellectual activity if we could be sure 
 he translated them into verse. But we do not 
 know. Nor do we know for certain what else he 
 did before his death. It is more or less agreed 
 that he made a translation which we possess of the 
 Soliloquia of St Augustine, and the Preface to this 
 book by the writer is a pathetic farewell to his work 
 as a translator, and a call to others to follow his 
 example for the sake of England. Its parabolic 
 form makes it especially interesting. A letter of 
 St Augustine's, De Videndo Deo^ is added to the 
 Dialogue between St Augustine and his Reason. 
 The English translation of the whole is divided 
 into three dialogues, and the first two are called a 
 ' Collection of Flowers.' The third dialogue closes 
 with ' Here end the sayings of King Alfred,' and 
 the date is probably 900. 
 
 His last work — and it fits his dying hand — was a 
 translation of the Psalms of David. It is supposed, 
 but very doubtfully, that we have in the first fifty 
 psalms of the Paris Psalter this work of Alfred's. 
 He did not live to finish it. In 901 this noble 
 king, the 'Truth-teller,' 'England's Darling,' 'the 
 unshakable pillar of the West Saxons, full of jus- 
 tice, bold in arms, and filled with the knowledge 
 
57 
 
 that flows from God,' passed away, and was laid 
 to rest at Winchester. 
 
 Only two books not done by himself were, as 
 far as we know, set forth in his reign. One was 
 the Dialogues of Gregory^ translated, by Alfred's 
 request, by Werfrith, Bishop of Worcester. Alfred 
 wrote the Preface, and it breathes throughout of 
 his kingly character. The other was the Book of 
 Martyrs^ a year's calendar of those who had wit- 
 nessed to the Faith. It does not follow that no 
 other books but these were written during his reign 
 in • English, but it is probable that Alfred stood 
 almost alone as an English writer. Asser's Life 
 of the king was in Latin. On the whole Alfred's 
 efforts to make a literary class, even the schools he 
 established for that purpose, were a failure. It was 
 not till nearly a hundred years after him that the 
 work he did for English bore fruit in the revival of 
 English prose by ^Elfric. 
 
 Alfred was not a literary artist, but he had the 
 spirit of a scholar. His desire for knowledge was 
 insatiable. His love of the best was impassioned. 
 It is a pity Asser did not bring him into contact 
 with Virgil and the rest of the great Romans. But 
 England had the first claim on him, and he col- 
 lected with eagerness the English poems and songs. 
 He translated from Baeda his country's history ; he 
 himself shaped a national history ; he collected and 
 arranged the English laws of his predecessors, and 
 he added new laws of his own and his Witan's. 
 He taught his people the history of other lands. 
 He had as great an eagerness to teach as to learn. 
 He was not only the warrior, the law-giver, the 
 ruler, but the minister of education. And the style 
 in which he did his work reveals the simple, 
 gracious, humble, loving character of the man. It 
 is steeped in his natural personality, and it charms 
 through that more than through any literary ability. 
 It is always clear ; its aim is to be useful to his 
 people ; and it gains a certain weight and dignity 
 from his long experience in public affairs, in war 
 
S8 
 
 and policy. The impression he has made on 
 England is indelible, and his spirit has not ceased 
 to move among us. 
 
 -asift-ed and the Work of a King*. 
 
 Reason ! indeed thou knowest that neither greed nor 
 the power of this earthly kingdom was ever very pleasing 
 to me, neither yearned I at all exceedingly after this 
 earthly kingdom. But yet indeed I wished for material 
 for the work which it was bidden me to do, so that I 
 might guide and order with honour and fitness the power 
 with which I was trusted. Indeed thou knowest that no 
 man can show forth any craft ; can order, or guide any 
 power, without tools or material — material, that is, for 
 each craft, without which a man cannot work at that 
 craft. This is then the material of a king and his tools, 
 wherewith to rule — That he have his land fully manned, 
 that he have prayer-men, and army-men, and workmen. 
 Indeed thou knowest that without these tools no king 
 can show forth his craft. This also is his material — That 
 he have, with the tools, means of living for the three 
 classes — land to dwell upon, and gifts, and weapons, 
 and meat, and ale, and clothes, and what else the three 
 classes need. ... 
 
 And this is the reason I wished for material wherewith 
 to order (my) power, in order that my skill and power 
 should not be forgotten and hidden away, for every work 
 and every power shall soon grow very old and be passed 
 over silently, if it be without wisdom ; because whatsoever 
 is done through foolishness no one can ever call work. 
 Now would I say briefly that I have wished to live 
 worthily while I lived, and after my life to leave to men 
 who should come after me my memory in good deeds. 
 
 (From the De Consolatione Philosophice.^ 
 
 -Alfred's Preface to the 'De Consolatione.* 
 
 King Alfred was the translator of this book, and 
 turned it from Latin into English as it is now done. 
 Sometimes he set down word for word, sometimes 
 meaning for meaning, as he could translate most plainly 
 and clearly in spite of the various and manifold worldly 
 cares which often occupied him in mind and body. 
 These cares, which in his days came on the kingship he 
 
59 
 
 had undertaken, are very hard for us to number. And 
 yet, when he had learned this book and turned it from 
 Latin into the English tongue, he then wrought it 
 afterwards into verse, as it is now done. And now he 
 begs, and for God's sake prays every one whom it may 
 please to read the book, that he pray for him, and that 
 he blame him not if he understood it more rightly than 
 he (the king) could. For every one, according to the 
 measure of his understanding and leisure, must speak 
 what he speaketh and do what he doeth. 
 
 -Alfred's Prayer. 
 
 Lord God Almighty, shaper and ruler of all creatures, 
 
 I pray Thee for Thy great mercy, and for the token of 
 
 the holy rood, and for the maidenhood of St Mary, and 
 
 for the obedience of St Michael, and for all the love of 
 
 Thy holy saints and their worthiness, that Thou guide 
 
 me better than I have done towards Thee. And guide 
 
 me to Thy will to the need of my soul better than I can 
 
 myself And stedfast my mind towards Thy will and 
 
 to my soul's need. And strengthen me against the 
 
 temptations of the devil, and put far from me foul lust 
 
 and every unrighteousness. And shield me against my 
 
 foes, seen and unseen. And teach me to do Thy will, 
 
 that I may inwardly love Thee before all things with a 
 
 clean mind and clean body. For Thou art my maker 
 
 and my redeemer, my help, my comfort, my trust, and 
 
 my hope. Praise and glory be to Thee now, ever and 
 
 ever, world without end. Amen. 
 
 {De Cons., Bk. v.) 
 
 Poetry from iClfred to the Conquest. 
 
 During the reign of Alfred poetry was not 
 altogether neglected in Wessex. It is more than 
 probable that it was at the king's instance that the 
 poetry of Northumbria was collected and translated 
 into the dialect of Wessex, in which dialect we now 
 possess it. Among the rest we may surely count 
 the lost poems of Caedmon of which Alfred had 
 read when he translated the Ecclesiastical History. 
 Then also, Genesis A, whether by Caedmon or not, 
 now appeared in West Saxon. Now, there was a 
 great gap^ in the manuscript after the line 234, 
 
6o 
 
 and some copyist of the poem inserted, in order 
 to fill up the space, Hnes 235-851, out of an Old 
 Saxon poem (it is supposed) which had been trans- 
 lated into West Saxon. It is thought from certain 
 similarities in diction, manner, and rhythm that 
 this Old Saxon poem (some lines of which, 
 identical with corresponding lines in the West 
 Saxon insertion, have been lately discovered) 
 was written by the writer of the Heliand or 
 by some imitator of his in Old Saxony. At any 
 rate this poem was brought to England, translated, 
 and a portion of it, relating to the Fall of Man, was 
 used to fill up the gap in Genesis A. We call this 
 portion Genesis B^ and it differs from the earlier 
 Genesis not only in manner, metre, and language, 
 but in sentiment and thought. 
 
 It opens with the fall of the rebel angels already 
 told in Genesis A. Lucifer, * beauteous in body, 
 mighty of mind,' seems to himself to be equal 
 with God, and his pride is injured by the. creation 
 of man. And the fierce soliloquy into which his 
 insolent Teutonic individuality outbreaks is one 
 of the finest passages in Anglo-Saxon poetry. He 
 is flung into hell, and hafted down by bars across 
 his neck and breast in the centre of that abyss 
 of pain — swart, deep-valleyed, swept at morn by 
 north-east wind and frost, and then by leaping 
 flame and bitter smoke. ' Oh, how unlike,' he 
 cries, ' this narrow stead to that home in heaven's 
 high kingdom which of old I knew ! Adam holds 
 my seat ; this is my greatest sorrow ! But could 
 I break forth for one short winter hour with all my 
 host — but God knew my heart, and forged these 
 gratings of hard steel, else an evil work would 
 be between man and me. Oh, shall we not have 
 vengeance ! Help me, my thanes ; fly to earth ; 
 make Adam and Eve break God's bidding ; bring 
 them down to hell ; then I shall softly rest in my 
 chains.' One of his thanes springs up, and beating 
 the fire aside, finds Adam at last and Eve standing 
 beside the two trees in Eden. The temptation 
 
6i 
 
 follows, and it is subtly borne. Adam rejects it ; 
 Eve yields, and after a whole day persuades 
 Adam to eat the fruit. Then the scornful fiend 
 breaks into a wild cry of satisfied vengeance. 
 ' My heart is enlarged. I have never bowed the 
 knee to God. O Thou, my Lord, who liest in 
 sorrow, rejoice now, laugh, and be blithe ; our 
 harms are well avenged.' 
 
 Adam and Eve are left conscious of their fall. 
 Their love is not shattered ; there is no mutual 
 reproach. Eve's tenderness is as deep as Adam's 
 repentance, and they fall to prayer. This is the 
 close of Genesis B. It is full of Teutonic feeling. 
 The fierce individuality ; the indignant pride ; the 
 fury for vengeance, the joy of its accomplishment ; 
 the close comradeship between the lord and his 
 thanes ; the tenderness and devotion of the 
 woman ; the reverence of the man for the woman ; 
 the intensity of the repentance — may all be 
 matched from the Icelandic sagas, and they prove 
 that the spirit which afterwards made those sagas 
 was alive in England in the ninth and tenth 
 centuries. 
 
 The second part of the poems which pass under 
 the name of Caedmon, and which had the name of 
 Christ a?id Satan^ are now allotted by the majority 
 of critics to the tenth century, and, presumably, 
 to Wessex. Their simple, direct, and passionate 
 elements, their imaginative grasp of their subjects, 
 seem more Northumbrian than West Saxon, and 
 this is not an impossible opinion. They are now 
 divided into three poems or fragments of poems, 
 the first of which is called the Fallen Angels^ the 
 second the Harrowing of Hell, and the third the 
 Te7nptation. The character of Satan in them 
 differs greatly from that in Ge?tesis A or B, and 
 so does the description of hell. The bond of 
 comradeship between his thanes and Satan has 
 perished, but not that between Christ and His 
 thanes. Satan, in an agony of longing for heaven, 
 repents, but no mercy is given to him. Dialogue 
 
62 
 
 enlivens the poems, and their exultant bursts of 
 religious praise recall the spirit of Cynewulf. The 
 personages are drawn with much humanity. The 
 descriptions are vivid and imaginative. We see 
 Satan wandering and wailing in his misty hall, 
 the weltering sea of fire outside, the cliffs and 
 burning marl of hell, the fiends flying before 
 Christ when He comes to break down the gates. 
 We watch the good spirits in Hades lifting 
 themselves, leaning on their hands when He came ; 
 their ascent with Him to the feast in the heavenly 
 burg, and the fall of Satan from the Mount of 
 Temptation through a hundred thousand miles to 
 the abyss of hell. 
 
 These are the last religious poems before the 
 Conquest which show any traces of imaginative or 
 original power. The rest of which we know seem 
 to be the dry and lifeless productions of monks in 
 the cloisters, and are nothing better than alliterative 
 prose. There are a crowd of versions of the Creed, 
 the Lord's Prayer, and the Canticles. The Last 
 Judgment, a poem from which Wulfstan quotes in 
 a homily of loio ; a saints' calendar entitled the 
 Menologium, a metrical translation of fifty psalms, 
 scattered through a service book ; the translation 
 of the Metra of Boethius, if Alfred did not do it ; a 
 poem advising a gray-haired warrior to a Christian 
 life, and another urging its readers to prayer, 
 almost exhaust the religious poetry of the tenth 
 and eleventh centuries before the Conquest. With 
 the exception of a few lines describing in the 
 Menologium the coming of summer, they are 
 totally devoid of any literary value. Religious 
 poetry had died. 
 
 But this was not the case with secular poetry. 
 Ballads and war-songs on any striking story of the 
 lives of kings or chiefs, dirges at their deaths, were 
 made all over England. The old sagas were put 
 into new forms ; the country families and the 
 villages had their traditionary songs. None of 
 these are left with the exception of the Battle 
 
63 
 
 of Brunanburh and the Battle of Maldon^ and a 
 few fragments inserted in the Chronicle. A few 
 prose records, also, in the Chronicle are supposed 
 to be taken from songs current at the time. More- 
 over, it is plain from the statements of Henry of 
 Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury that they 
 used ballads of this time in their histories. More- 
 over, the old sagas were sung by wandering min- 
 strels at every village fair, in the halls of the burgs, 
 in the tents and round the bivouacs of the soldiers ; 
 and the chieftain's bard, after every deed of war, 
 sang the doings and the deaths of the warriors 
 when the feast was set at night. There may have 
 been other poems of a more thoughtful character, 
 like the Rhyjne-Poem in the Exeter Book^ which 
 belongs to the tenth century. It is the only poem 
 in the English tongue which is written in the 
 Scandinavian form called Runhenda^ in which 
 the last word of the first half of the verse is 
 rhymed, in addition to the usual alliteration, with 
 the last word of the second half This form 
 was used by Egill Skallagrimsson, the Icelandic 
 skald, in the poem by which he saved his life from 
 Erik Blood-Axe in 938. Egill was twice in 
 England, and was a favourite of King ^thelstan. 
 It is supposed that he made known this form 
 of poetry to the writer of the Rhyme-Song^ and 
 this supposition is the origin of the date assigned 
 to it — 940-50. It is worth little in itself, and its 
 subject is one common to English song — the 
 contrast between a rich and joyous past and 
 a wretched present. 
 
 It is pleasant to turn from it to the noble songs 
 of Brnnauburli and Maldon. At Brunanburh, in 
 the year 937, England, under ^thelstan, Alfred's 
 grandson, vindicated her short-lived unity against 
 the Danes, the Welsh, and the Scots, under Anlaf 
 the Dane and Constantinus the king of the Scots. 
 The song, recast by Tennyson, is no unworthy 
 beginning of the war-poetry of England. Its 
 
64 
 
 patriotism is as haughty as that of the * Fight 
 at Agincourt,' the 'Battle of the Bahic,' and the 
 * Charge of the Light Brigade.' It resembles 
 them, also, in its rough and clanging lines, in 
 its singing and abrupt stanzas. Its English style 
 is excellent, and it has the old heathen ring. It 
 gives us a high idea of the value of the lost 
 battle-songs of Old England. 
 
 The Figlit at MaMon is of a different character. 
 It is not so much of a composition. It reads as 
 if it were written by an eyewitness. It uses the 
 heroic terms ; the warriors challenge one another 
 as they do in the sagas, as they have done since 
 the days of Homer. The tie that knitted chief to 
 thane and thane to chief is as keenly dwelt on as 
 it is in Genesis and in Beowulf. The rude cries of 
 defiance are like those in the Fight at Fiftnsburg. 
 The charge of cowardice, of faithlessness to their 
 oath of service, which is made against those who 
 flee the fight might have been written by one who 
 had read the similar passage in Beowulf. The 
 boasting and praise of those who died defending 
 their lord might also be drawn from Beowulf It 
 is clear that this poem, written at the end of the 
 tenth century — in 991 — is as frankly heroic as any 
 heathen poem. The old spirit lived on in the songs 
 of war. 
 
 The battle is fought on the east of England, in 
 the estuary of an Essex river. A roving Viking 
 band, sailing up the river Panta, land on the spit 
 of ground that divides the stream into two branches. 
 On the northern shore lay Maldon, and Earl 
 Byrhtnoth comes to do battle with the pirates. 
 The tide is full, and for a long time the ford is 
 impassable. The two bands shoot at one another 
 with arrows. At last the ebb allowed them to 
 meet at the ford and on the bank, where Byrht- 
 noth, in his chivalry, permitted them to land. But 
 the Danes were too many for the English, and 
 the great Earl died on the field. And his thanes, 
 
65 
 
 save a few cowards, died round him, fighting to 
 the last. 
 
 His death-song is not like that of Beowulf. 
 For the first time in English battle - poetry the 
 chieftain dies with a Christian cry upon his lips. 
 It is the beginning of a new element in the 
 poetry of war. He dies as the knights die in 
 the Chansons de Geste. Their last words are a 
 prayer to Christ. We seem to feel in this 
 change the breath of a new life, of a new world 
 — of the life and world of romance. After 
 this poem silence follows. The Fight at Maldon 
 is the last song of the war-poetry of England 
 before the Conquest. Not till long after the 
 Conquest did it rise again, and then it rose 
 almost a stranger to the ancient English ways. 
 The Celtic and the Norman spirit had transformed 
 it ; but deep below, and lasting through centuries 
 of English song, the strong, constant, deep-rooted 
 elements of the Teutonic race lay at the founda- 
 tion of the English poetry of physical and moral 
 battle. 
 
 Eve, after she has eaten of the Tree of 
 Knowledg'e. 
 
 Sheener to her seemed all the sky and earth ; 
 
 All this world was lovelier ; and the work of God, 
 
 Mickle was and mighty then, though 'twas not by man's 
 
 device, 
 That she saw (the sight) — but the Scather eagerly 
 Moved about her mind. 
 
 *• Now thyself thou mayest see, and I need not speak it — 
 O thou, Eve the good, how unlike to thy old self 
 Is thy beauty and thy breast since thou hast believed my 
 
 words. 
 
 Light is beaming 'fore thee now, 
 Glittering against thee, which from God I brought, 
 White from out the Heavens. See thy hands may 
 
 touch it ! 
 Say to Adam then, what a sight thou hast, 
 And what powers — through my coming ! ' 
 
66 
 
 Then to Adam wended Eve, sheenest of all women, 
 Winsomest of wives, e'er should wend into the world, 
 For she was the handiwork of the heavenly King. 
 
 Of the fruit unblest 
 Part was hid upon her heart, part in hand she bore. 
 * Adam, O my Lord, this apple is so sweet. 
 Blithe within the breast ; bright this messenger ; 
 'Tis an Angel good from God ! By his gear I see 
 That he is the errand-bringer of our heavenly King ! 
 
 I can see Him now from hence 
 Where Himself He sitteth, in the south-east throned. 
 All enwreathed with weal ; He who wrought the world. 
 And with Him I watch His angels, wheeling round about 
 
 Him, 
 In their feathered vesture, of all folks the mightiest, 
 Winsomest of war-hosts ! Who could wit like this 
 Give me, did not God Himself surely grant it me ? 
 
 Far away I hear — 
 
 And as widely see — over all the world, 
 
 O'er the universe widespread ! — All the music mirth 
 
 In the Heavens I can hear ! — In my heart I am so clear. 
 
 Inwardly and outwardly, since the apple I have tasted. 
 
 See ! I have it here, in my hands ; O my good Lord ! 
 
 Gladly do I give it thee ; I believe from God it comes ! ' 
 
 Repentance of . Adam and Eve. 
 
 * Thou mayst it reproach me, Adam, my beloved. 
 
 In these words of thine ; yet it may not worse repent 
 
 thee, . 
 Rue thee in thy mind, than -it rueth me in heart.' 
 Then to her for answer Adam spoke again — 
 
 * O if I could know the All-Wielder's will. 
 
 What I for my chastisement must receive from Him, 
 Thou should'st never see, then, anything more swift, — 
 
 though the sea within 
 Bade me wade the God of Heaven, bade me wend me 
 
 hence 
 In the flood to fare — Nor so fearfully profound 
 Nor so mighty were the Ocean, that my mind should 
 
 ever waver — 
 Into the abyss I'd plunge, if I only might 
 Work the will of God ! ' 
 
 (From Genesis B.) 
 
67 
 
 Prose from JElfred to the Conquest. 
 
 Alfred, though he began the prose of England, 
 failed in establishing it. No results, save one, 
 followed his work till ninety years had passed 
 away. The one exception was the narrative in 
 the Chronicle of the wars and government of 
 Eadweard, Alfred's son, 910-924. Alfred's own 
 work on the Chronicle ceased in 891. Another 
 writer of vigour, earnestness, and conciseness told 
 the story of the years from 894 to 897. From 
 897 to 910 the record is meagre, but a new life 
 was given to the Chronicle by the narrative 
 which began with 910. It may have been 
 written by the same man who wrote of the 
 years 894-97. His work ceases with the death of 
 Eadweard, and it is the sole piece of secular prose 
 which we possess at this date. From 925 to 940, 
 during the reign of ^thelstan, the shallow records 
 of the Chronicle are only once filled by the Song 
 of Brunanburh (see page 24). From 940. to 975, 
 during the reigns of Eadmund, Eadred, and 
 Eadgar, the Chronicle contains nothing but short 
 annual statements of leading events. Three small 
 poems are inserted in it. 
 
 Secular prose then had died at Winchester. But 
 religious prose now began to rise again with the 
 revival of monasticism, begun by Dunstan and 
 nursed into life by King Eadgar. Dunstan, in 
 whom Celtic and English elements mingle, set 
 up a school at Glastonbury, and made his 
 pupils love the arts of music, of poetry, of 
 design and embroidery, of gold-working, painting, 
 and engraving, in all of which he was himself 
 a master. He sang the Psalms with his boys, 
 developed church ritual and music, drew the Irish 
 scholars to his help, made a fine library and 
 treasury, - and, having trained his monks in all 
 the known branches of learning, sent them forth 
 as missionaries of education to various parts of 
 England. His best scholar, ^thelwold, was 
 made head of the Abbey of Abingdon, re- 
 
68 
 
 founded by King Eadred ; and ^thelwold, who 
 died in 904, soon made Abingdon as good 
 a school as Glastonbury. It was his favourite 
 pupil, ^Ifric, who created the new prose of 
 England. 
 
 This revival of English prose kept step with the 
 revival of monasticism. Monasticism had fallen 
 into complete decay when Eadgar came to the 
 throne in 959. Dunstan's effort, assisted as he was 
 by Oswald of Ramsey and Odo of Canterbury, had 
 not pushed it far. Even the Rule itself of Benedict 
 had slipped out of memory, and Oswald and ^thel- 
 wold had to go or send to Fleury to recover it. But 
 Eadgar threw himself eagerly into the movement, 
 and ^thelwold, now Bishop of Winchester in 963, 
 gave his full energy to the work. He cleared Win- 
 chester of the lazy secular clergy ; he refounded 
 Ely, Peterborough, and Thorney. No better work 
 could be done for literature than this re-creation of 
 the monasteries. Art, the science of medicine, the 
 study of the Scriptures, of philosophy, of astro- 
 nomy, and of literature, revived with their revival. 
 The preaching and homilies of the monks brought 
 religion as well as a kind of education to the 
 people. And the new teaching was now given in 
 the language of the people. At last the work of 
 vElfred began to produce its fruit. 
 
 yEthelwold loved his native tongue ; King 
 Alfred's books were studied at Abingdon, 
 and his principle — Teach Englishmen in English 
 — was followed and established. The Blickling 
 Homilies^ nineteen of which exist, and probably 
 the Homilies in the Vercelli Book belong to the 
 early time of the monastic revival — from 960 to 
 990. They represent, with certain books men- 
 tioned by ^Ifric and now lost, the transition be- 
 tween the prose of _/Elfred and that of ^Ifric. 
 
 A new and more literary English prose now 
 began with iElfric. He was born about 955, and 
 educated at Winchester. ^Ifhead, ^thelwold's 
 successor, sent him in 987 to teach and govern 
 
69 
 
 the new monastery of Cerne Abbas in Dorset- 
 shire, and here he first followed King Alfred's 
 plan, and translated Latin books into English 
 for the use of the people. He returned to Win- 
 chester in 989, where he continued his work 
 till the Thane ^thelmaer, who had founded a 
 Benedictine monastery at Eynsham, near Oxford, 
 made him its abbot. There, in that quiet place, 
 he hved, learning and teaching, until he died 
 about 1022. 
 
 His first book, HomilicB Catholicce^ 990-94, is 
 dedicated to Archbishop Sigeric, and consists of 
 two collections of homilies, forty in each collection, 
 on the Sundays and feast-days of the year. A small 
 number of them are in alliterative verse. Then he 
 composed the Grammar and the Glossary^ which 
 were probably followed by the Colloquium. As 
 the Homilies addressed the people, these books 
 addressed the pupils at the school of Winchester. 
 The Colloquium is a discourse on the occupations 
 of the monks and on various states of life ; and as 
 one of the manuscripts has an English transla- 
 tion over its lines, it becomes a kind of vocabulary. 
 It was re-done by another ^Ifric, one of his 
 scholars, ^Ifric Bata, with appendices. The lives 
 of the saints, Passiones Sanctorum^ another set of 
 homilies, followed in 996. Other works of less 
 importance were now taken up ; but, urged thereto 
 by Thane ^thelweard, he began to translate 
 the Bible, part of which, from Genesis xxiv. to 
 the end of Leviticus, ^thelweard had given to 
 another hand. The beginning, then, of Genesis 
 was done by ^Ifric, with Numbers, Deuteronomy, 
 Joshua, Judges, Esther, Job, and Judith. The 
 books are not literally translated ; parts are 
 omitted, and parts are thrown into homiletic form. 
 yElfric used the same liberties with the Bible which 
 Alfred had used with Boethius and Orosius ; and 
 he gave this work the same patriotic tinge as 
 Alfred had given to his translation of Orosius. 
 The heroic sketches he made out of the Bible of 
 
70 
 
 the warriors of Israel not only taught the people 
 the sacred history, but were also applied by him 
 to encourage Englishmen against their foes. * I 
 have set forth Judith^ he says, ' in English for an 
 example to you men that ye may guard your 
 country against her foes ; ' and he closes the 
 Homilies with a hymn of praise to God for the 
 great men in all history who had borne witness to 
 the faith, and among them to Alfred, ^thelstan, 
 and Eadgar, the noble champions of England. 
 
 The Canones ^Ifrici^ which followed his transla- 
 tions of the Bible, were written about the year looo. 
 They were in Latin and addressed to the clergy. 
 In .1006 or 1007, when he was Abbot of Eynsham, 
 he made a book of extracts from the writings of 
 his master, ^Ethelwold — De Consuetudine Monach- 
 orum ; addressed a homily on forgiveness to his 
 friend Wulfgeat, a royal thane at Ilmington ; 
 another on chastity to Thane Sigeferth ; and 
 about the same time, 1008, composed a treatise 
 Concerning the Old and New Testament^ which 
 was a practical introduction to the study of the 
 Scriptures. Then, turning from English to Latin 
 prose, he wrote a sympathetic life of his master. 
 Vita jEthelwoldi^ and a Sermo ad Sacer dotes for 
 Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, about 10 1 4-1 6 ; 
 and Wulfstan made him turn it into English. 
 Other homilies, needless to record, he also 
 made, and then died quietly between 1020 and 
 1025. 
 
 ^Ifric was the Baeda of his time. He was the 
 assimilator, collector, and distributor of learning, 
 not its creator. He had no originality, but he 
 loved his work and his country. The principles of 
 education which Alfred had established he carried 
 out steadily. He trained the people as well as the 
 clergy in their duties, in the history of the Church 
 abroad and at home ; and his charming character, 
 full of moral dignity, tact, gentle charity, and wisdom 
 in affairs, recommended and enhanced his books 
 and letters. In one thing he was original — in his 
 
71 
 
 style. He made a new, a lighter, more musical' 
 more lissome prose. He fitted English to take 
 up the number of new subjects which were soon 
 to engage the interests of the country. We cannot 
 tell what English prose might have become had 
 this modern style been developed. But the Danish 
 invasion checked and the Norman Conquest para- 
 lysed it for a long time. ^Elfric's English prose 
 had, however, one great fault. It became more 
 and more alliterative — that is, it was prose written 
 in poetic form. This manner, chiefly practised in 
 his Homilies^ may have been used to please the 
 people and for their sake, but it injures the life 
 of prose, and, when continued, kills it. 
 
 The creation of this new, popular, and flexible 
 prose was one result of ^Elfric's work. Another 
 result was the increase of learning and of a 
 higher life among the clergy. The Archbishops 
 Sigeric and Wulfstan, the Bishops Wulfsige and 
 Kenulf, were inspired by him, and they begged 
 him to write such books in English as would 
 enable them to teach their clergy the rudiments of 
 learning and the practice of a holy life. And the 
 effort was not in vain. The clergy began to have 
 a higher ideal of their profession, and to follow 
 it ; and so many small books on various ecclesias- 
 tical and theological matters were put forward in 
 the eleventh century that it is plain the English 
 clergy at the Conquest were not so ignorant as 
 the Normans declared them to be. 
 
 A third result of ^Ifric's work was the creation 
 of a small literary class among the nobles, some 
 of whom now became learners and patrons of 
 literature, ^thelweard, probably the writer of the 
 Chronicle which bears his name, a royal thane, 
 urged ^Ifric to write and began his translation 
 of the Bible, ^thelmasr, his son, was ^Ifric's 
 close friend and patron, and brought him into 
 friendship with Wulfgeat, Sigweard, and Sigeferth, 
 also nobles, for whom he wrote books. It is clear 
 that the class ^Elfred was unable to touch had now 
 begun to be a cultivated class. 
 
72 
 
 The mass of the people were also educated by 
 the great body of homilies which ^Ifric had written 
 for them ; and the legends of the saints and the 
 tales of the martyrs, going hand-in-hand with the 
 saga stories over England, awakened the imagina- 
 tion of the farmer and the peasant. 
 
 Then, too, the monasteries, under his influence, 
 now became the home of learned men who wrote 
 on science as well as on theology. Byrchtfercth, 
 of the monastery at Ramsey, was a well-known 
 mathematician ; and his commentaries on the 
 scientific works of Bseda, and his Life of Dunstan, 
 prove his literary activity. The varied knowledge 
 shown in these books, which date before 1016, 
 makes it almost certain that he was the writer 
 of a Hand-book in English which discusses the 
 alphabets and subjects belonging to natural 
 philosophy. Then a number of medical books 
 were published in this eleventh century. The 
 LcEce-Boc of the tenth century was re-edited, 
 with many interesting additions ; the Herbarium 
 Apuleii^ the Medicina de Quadrupedibus^ and 
 others of the same kind show how active were 
 the dispensaries of the monasteries. Many reli- 
 gious books — translations of the Psalms, the 
 Gospels, and the Pseudo-gospels, Biographies of 
 the Fathers, of the martyrs, of saints, and a 
 number of sermons — belong also to the first half 
 of the eleventh century. Certain books of a 
 proverbial and ethical tendency— a Dialogue be- 
 tween Salomo a7id SaturnuSy another between 
 the Emperor Adrianus and Ritheus^ a selection 
 from the Disticha of Cato — illustrate that English 
 love for sententious literature which had arisen 
 long before Alfred, and which was afterwards, in 
 the Proverbs of j^lfred^ connected with his name. 
 The Glossaries^ in which the Latin is explained 
 by English words, show how much ^Ifric had 
 brought Latin into English learning. The Ritual 
 of Durham now added to itself a Northumbrian 
 gloss. The splendid Evangelium of Lindisfarne 
 
73 . 
 
 was now interlineated, and so were the Rushworth 
 Gospels. 
 
 There was, then, no Httle Hterary activity in the 
 first half of this century. But it would have been 
 much greater had not England again been fighting 
 for her life with the Danes. In loio Thurkill began 
 those dreadful raids in which East Anglia, Oxford- 
 shire, Buckingham, Bedford, Northampton, Wilt- 
 shire, and other parts of Wessex were ravaged and 
 plundered, and ^Elfhead, Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, was murdered in his burning town. Wulfstan, 
 Archbishop of York 1002-23, heard of these horrors, 
 and his Serino Liipi (he called himself Lupus) ad 
 Anglos qiiando Dani iJiaxi7ne per seciiti sunt eos^ in 
 which he tells the tale of the invasion, and blames 
 the sins and cowardice of the English, places him 
 among the prose-writers of England. Some other 
 homilies he wrote, but the passion and indignation 
 with which he filled this sermon, and its weighty 
 and vigorous English, isolate it from the rest. He 
 sits closest to ^Ifric, who saw along with him the 
 outbreak of the Danish storm. 
 
 During the Danish rule over England no fresh 
 literature was produced, but the coming of the Nor- 
 mans with Edward the Confessor not only strength- 
 ened the tendency, which had begun under ^Ifric, 
 to write in Latin rather than in English, but also in- 
 troduced, and for the first time into English, tales 
 from the East already tinged with the thoughts, 
 feelings, colour, and life which were to grow into 
 the full body of medieval Romance. The history 
 of Apollo7iius of Tyre^ used by Shakespeare in the 
 play of Pericles^ was now rendered into English 
 prose out of the Latin translation of the late Greek 
 story. Two other translations out of the Latin re- 
 productions of the Greek legends of the life of 
 Alexander — the Letters of Alexa7tder to Aristotle 
 from Indiu and the Wonders of the East — were 
 also made, and brought with them the air and 
 the scenery of a new world. They are put into 
 excellent English — the last fine English of the 
 
74 
 
 times before the Conquest, the last fruit, with the 
 exception of the Chronicle^ of the tree which Alfred 
 had planted ; and which, when it grew again above 
 the soil, bore so changed an aspect that its original 
 planters would not have recognised it. Its roots 
 were the same ; its branches and foliage were dif- 
 ferent. Alfred would have been puzzled to read the 
 English in which the Ancren Riwle (the Rule of 
 Anchoresses) was written in the reign of Henry III. 
 It was the first Middle English Prose. 
 
 The English of the Chronicle illustrates this 
 transition. The Chronicle is the continuous record 
 of Enghsh history in English prose, and it passes 
 undisturbed through the Norman Conquest up to 
 the death of Stephen. Its Winchester Annals 
 practically cease in 1005, or even earlier. They 
 were preserved in Canterbury from 1005 to 1070, 
 but there are only eleven entries during these sixty- 
 five years, and these were made after the Conquest, 
 at the election of Lanfranc as archbishop. The 
 rest of these Annals is written in Latin, and they 
 end with the consecration of Anselm. What 
 Winchester dropped Worcester continued. The 
 Worcester Annals were carefully kept to the year 
 1079. If they were continued to 1 107, that continu- 
 ation was merged in the Annals of Peterborough. 
 The Worcester Annals of the Chronicle are written 
 in the English of ^Ifric, and were probably done 
 by Bishop Wulfstan, who held the see from 1062 
 to 1095, and by Colman, his chaplain, who wrote 
 the bishop's life in English. 
 
 The Peterborough Annals were only fully edited 
 after the rebuilding of the monastery in 1121. 
 This fine and full edition of the Chronicle was made 
 up out of the Annals of Winchester, Worcester, 
 and Abingdon, and was then continued probably 
 by one hand to the year 1131. Another hand, 
 using a more modern English, carried it on from 
 1 132 to 1 1 54, when it closed with the accession of 
 Henry II. The records at Worcester and Peter- 
 borough are not unworthy of the first records at 
 
75 . 
 
 Winchester. The Wars of Harold and the Fight 
 at Stamford Bridge are boldly and picturesquely 
 written. Even more picturesque is the account 
 another writer gives of Senlac, and of William's 
 stark, cruel, and just rule. This writer had lived at 
 William's court, and we trace in his finer historical 
 form that he had studied the Norman historians. 
 The Peterborough scribe who followed him is 
 rather a romantic than a national historian, and 
 loves his monastery more than his nation. The 
 second scribe of Peterborough, who probably com- 
 posed his work in 1150-54, is well-known for his 
 pitiful and patriotic account of the miseries of 
 England under the oppression of the Norman 
 nobles. When in 11 54 the Chronicle was closed, 
 the Norman chroniclers took up the history of 
 England and wrote it in Latin ; but the English 
 Chronicle remains for English literature the most 
 ancient and venerable monument of English 
 prose. 
 
 After the Conquest. 
 
 The Norman Conquest put an end to Old 
 English literature. When that literature arose 
 again its language and its spirit were transformed. 
 Old English had become Middle English. Its 
 prose, which was religious, had been profoundly 
 changed by the Norman theology and the Norman 
 enthusiasm for a religious life. Its poetry, equally 
 touched by the Anglo-Norman religion and love of 
 romance, adopted as its own the romantic tales, 
 melodies, manners, and ways of thinking which 
 came to it from France, both in religious and 
 in story-telling poetry. But this change took 
 nearly a century and a half before it began 
 to bear fruit. During those long years of tran- 
 sition little English work was done, and none 
 of it could be called literature. Old English 
 writings, such as the Ho7nilies of ^Elfric and the 
 Translations of the Gospels made in the eleventh 
 century, and now called the Hatton Gospels^ were 
 
76 
 
 copied and modernised. Monasteries, remote from 
 Norman interests, still clung to, and made their 
 little manuals and service books in, the English 
 tongue. English prose was just kept alive, but 
 only like a man in catalepsy. 
 
 English poetry had a livelier existence ; but we 
 have no remains of the songs which were sung 
 throughout the country, and which kept alive in the 
 soul of franklin, peasant, and outlaw the glories and 
 heroes of the past. We know that these were 
 made and sung from the Norman chroniclers who 
 used them, and from suggestions of them in the 
 Brut of Layamon. Lays were made after the 
 Conquest of the great deeds of Here ward, and are 
 used in the Latin life of that partisan. Even 
 in the twelfth century, songs were built on the old 
 sagas, such as those which celebrated Weland and 
 Wade, his father ; and sagas like Horn^ Havelok^ 
 Bevis of Ha7npto7i^ Guy of Warwick^ and Waltkeof 
 which took original form in English in the 
 thirteenth century, existed as popular lays in the 
 eleventh and twelfth. The noble figure of Alfred 
 appears again in the poem entitled the Proverbs of 
 j^lfred^ an ethical poem of sententious sayings, 
 varying forms of which arose in the twelfth 
 century. 
 
 Old English poetry, having neither rhyme nor a 
 fixed number of syllables, depended on accent and 
 alliteration. Every verse was divided into two half- 
 verses by a pause, and had four accented syllables, 
 the number of unaccented syllables being indif- 
 ferent ; and the two half- verses were linked together 
 by alliteration. The two accented syllables of the 
 first half and one of the accented syllables of the 
 second half began with the same consonant, or with 
 vowels which were generally different from one 
 another. But often there was only one alliterative 
 letter in the first half-verse ; and the metre was 
 further varied by the addition of unaccented syl- 
 lables. The lays made after the Conquest illustrate 
 the transition from the old alliterative metre to the 
 
short line and rhyme which were soon estabhshed 
 by the Anglo-Normans when they began to write 
 in English. The Poetna Morale is thought by 
 some to have first taken shape early in the twelfth 
 century. In that case, it and other twelfth-century 
 poems of little account bring us still nearer to Mid- 
 dle English poetry, if they do not form part of it ; 
 but it is best, when we speak of literature, to make 
 Middle English poetry properly begin with the first 
 noble piece of poetic literature, with the Brut of 
 Layamon, at the beginning of the thirteenth cen- 
 tury. 
 
 STOPFORD A. BROOKE. 
 
 Bibliography. — The MS. of Beowulf is in the Cottonian 
 Library in the British Museum, and Judith is in the same MS. 
 The Exeter Book is in the library of Exeter Cathedral, and was 
 placed there by Bishop Leofric in 1071. It contains the Riddles, 
 the Elegies, the Crist, the St Guthlac, the Phoenix, the Juliana, 
 the Widsith, the Complaint of Deor, and other poems. It is a 
 kind of anthology. The Vercelli Book, found at Vercelli in 1822, 
 contains, interspersed among homilies, \)ix& Andreas, the Fates of the 
 Apostles, the Dream, of the Rood, the Elene, and two unimportant 
 poems. The Jtcnian MS. of the so-called Csedmonian poems is in 
 the Bodleian. The Fight at Finnsburg was found on the cover of 
 a MS. of Homilies at Lambeth, Waldhere on two vellum leaves at 
 Copenhagen ; the Battle of Brunanburh is in the Anglo-Saxon 
 Chronicle, and the Battle of Maldon in a copy of the original MS. 
 made by Hearne. Only one MS. of each of these poems exists. 
 
 Of iElfred's translations we have many MSS. — three of the 
 Cura Pastoralis, five of Bcsda's History, two of the Orosius, two 
 of the De Consolatione, four of the Laws. The Soliloquia are 
 in the MS. containing Beowulf Of iElfric's works there are many 
 MSS. Seven MSS. of the English Chronicle exist. MS. A, the 
 Parker MS. written at Winchester, is at Cambridge ; MS. B is at 
 the British Museum, and was made at Canterbury ; MS. C is at 
 the British Museum, and is an Abingdon MS. ; MS. D, also at the 
 Museum, is the Worcester Chronicle ; MS. E, now at the Bodleian 
 (the Laud MS.), was done at Peterborough ; MS. F, at the British 
 Museum, was probably kept at Canterbury ; MS. G, also probably 
 kept at Canterbury, is -at the British Museum, and is likely to be a 
 copy of MS. A. 
 
 [When Modern English was beginning to show its full powers 
 in the hands of the early Elizabethan writers, the oldest stage 
 
 LefC. 
 
78 
 
 of the tongue was almost forgotten, save for the little knowledge 
 required by those whose business it was to spell out and interpret 
 Anglo-Saxon charters and the like. At the Reformation Anglo- 
 Saxon religious literature was looked up for controversial pur- 
 poses ; Archbishop Parker gathered and edited MSS., and greatly 
 promoted ' Saxon ' studies. Verstegen shows he knew some Anglo- 
 Saxon in his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in A ntiquities 
 (1606) ; and Spelman was driven to make his Glossariuin (Part I. 
 1626) by the difficulties he met in studying our oldest laws. Francis 
 Junius, or Du Jon, a Continental Protestant who settled in England 
 in 1621, devoted himself to the study of Anglo-Saxon and the cog- 
 nate Teutonic tongues, edited the so-called Caedmon and other Old 
 English books, and gave his name to the Junian MS. Hickes, the 
 nonjuring bishop, published the first edition of his Anglo-Saxon and 
 Moeso-Gothic Grammar in 1689 ; and all students of early English 
 history owe a debt of gratitude to Thomas Hearne, ' who studied 
 and preserved antiquities.' Percy in his Reliques takes no cognis- 
 ance of the oldest poetry. Warton's History of English Poetry 
 (vol. i. 1774) professedly begins with the close of the tenth century ; 
 but what he says b}'- way of introduction on the three successive 
 ' dialects of Saxon ' — British Saxon (till the Danish occupation), 
 Danish Saxon (' British Saxon corrupted by the Danes'), and Nor- 
 man Saxon (' Danish Saxon adulterated with French') — shows how 
 far he was to seek in this field ; ' the spurious Csedmon's beautiful 
 poetical paraphrase of the Book of Genesis' he names as written 
 in Danish Saxon. Gray's knowledge of Icelandic and his interest 
 in Welsh poetry and in ' Ossian ' make it certain that, had he carried 
 out his projected History of Poetry^ the section on what he called 
 * the introduction of the poetry of the Goths into these islands 
 by the Saxons and Danes ' would have received fuller attention 
 than heretofore. Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Extracts (first of 
 many editions, 1783) does not include this period within its scope. 
 The first edition of Ellis's Speci^netis of the Early English Poets 
 (1790) has nothing earlier than Surrey and Wyatt ; but the 1801 
 edition gives not only Middle English poems, but the old song of 
 Brunanburh, with a literal translation, and the ingenious rendering 
 made by Hookham Frere, when an Eton schoolboy, into Rowley- 
 like fourteenth-century English. In the notes Ellis accepts for 
 Anglo-Saxon words derivations from ' Chaldaic ' and Latin as 
 unhesitatingly as from 'Gothic' Rask the Dane put the study 
 on a sounder philological footing by his Grammar (1817), which 
 Thorpe translated ; and the works of Thorpe, Bosworth, and Kemble 
 in the first half of the century revived in the English people interest 
 in their old language and literature. Conybeare's Specijiie-ns of 
 Anglo-Saxon Poetry appeared in 1826. Campbell begins his 
 Specimens of the British Poets (7 vols. 18 19) with Chaucer and 
 the Kings Qicair ; and in the earlier issues and reprints of this 
 Cyclopaedia (1844-74) Anglo-Saxon literature was dismissed in less 
 than three pages. 
 
 For further study the reader may be referred to English Literature 
 from the Beginning to the Norma-.t Conquest (1898), by the writer 
 of the preceding section of this work, Dr Stopford A. Brooke, or 
 to \\\s History of Early English x.iterature (2 vols. 1892), which 
 describes and appreciates still more fi lly the whole of the Anglo-Saxon 
 
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