ALDHELM, BEDA, ALCUIN

35

with more or less of a library appended, and in some cases a centre for the multiplication of books and the study of calligraphy. When (A.D. 668) Theodore came over from Rome as archbishop, he established schools at Canterbury, which imparted not only religious but secular knowledge. There Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, and afterwards Bishop of Sherborne, received his education, and qualified himself to write Latin books which, though of little value in our day, gained him the fame of extensive learning in that darkest hour of Europe's intellectual night. "The leader of that noble series of English scholars who represent the first endeavouring stage of recovery after the great eclipse of European culture" (Earle). The vernacular poems attributed to him by Alfred, which he is said to have recited in public to allure men to listen to his preaching, are unfortunately lost. A more famous author and ecclesiastic, Beda the Venerable, owed his erudition to the library with which his tutor, Benedict Biscop, had enriched the monastery of Jarrow, where Beda's blameless and laborious life was chiefly spent. That this library, to collect which Benedict had thrice travelled to Rome, must have been extensive is apparent from the numerous quotations from obscure writers made in Beda's works: and his own writings contributed not a little to increase it. So active was his pen that he himself enumerates thirty-seven distinct books of his own, besides his great ecclesiastical history. Whether as a commentator on Scripture, or as a retailer of general information, Beda is little more than a compiler; his life of St. Cuthbert convicts him of gross credulity; of his history much might be said if our theme were Anglo-Latin literature. Though not an English author, Beda stands forth as a great English man of letters; more decisively, perhaps, the first scholar of his day than any one has been after him. He probably stood alone among his countrymen for his knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, and the extent of his acquaintance with the Latin classics. Writing, however, entirely in Latin, except for a translation of the Gospel of St. John left unfinished and unfortunately lost, he could effect nothing for the English language, and the first period of Anglo-Saxon literature closed without any noticeable progress towards the formation of a school of prose composition. One man who might perhaps have promoted it, if he had remained in England, was drawn away by the offers of Charlemagne to spread the light of education in France. By inviting (782) Alcuin, head of the great ecclesiastical school at York, to organise instruction in his own dominions, Charlemagne deprived

The Caedmon Cross at Whitby Abbey

England of a great scholar, but it is very doubtful whether the Latin teacher would ever have become the English author. Alcuin, as teacher and writer, did much for the instruction of the clergy both at home and abroad, and cannot have been wholly without influence on the laity; but the idea that Latin letters should be made accessible to the Saxon in his own language, and thus become the nucleus of a vernacular literature, was reserved for a greater than Alcuin-King Alfred.

CHAPTER II

FROM THE DANE TO THE NORMAN

850-1066

EVERY nation, with but two exceptions-and these placed at opposite Latin influpoles of the world of culture-has been indebted to its neighbours or its ence on Anglo-Saxon predecessors for the development and refinement of its literature. The literature literature even of India intimates acquaintance with Greek examples; and the only two from which similar indications are absent, or where at least they are unimportant, are the strongly contrasted literatures of Greece and China. The indigenous literature of China remained long exempt from all possibility of foreign influence, for the simple reason that no people known to the Chinese possessed any literary faculty, or, consequently, any power of modifying the intellectual productions of their neighbours: and when at length the Chinese came into contact with civilisations other than their own, prescription and self-esteem had hardened the naturally stolid genius of the nation into absolute impenetrability by extraneous influence. With the Greeks it was far otherwise, no people could be intellectually more flexible and sensitive, and yet, while borrowing freely in every other department, their literature remained entirely their own. Nothing can convey a higher idea of the unique gifts of this marvellous race. Were modern literatures restricted to their strictly national elements little indeed would remain of any of them. Hardly any nation could have stood in more need than the Anglo-Saxons of intellectual regeneration by the inoculation of imported culture. The Anglo-Saxon's distinguishing virtue was solidity, his distinguishing vice sluggishness. The type of his unimproved condition is that so admirably embodied by Sir Walter Scott in Athelstan the Unready, brave and sturdy, bulky in thew and sinew, a doughty champion if he can once be got into fighting trim, but so stolid and unimpressionable as to be made captive ere he has even thought of drawing his sword. We are uncomfortably reminded every day how nearly this description still answers to our national character, while the originality and occasional extravagance of our literature for the last four centuries attest how profoundly, in spite of persistent survivals, this character has been modified.

As we have seen, animosities of race and memories of conflict deprived the Anglo-Saxons of the vivifying influence which their Celtic neighbours

might otherwise have exerted upon their literature, and threw them back upon their Latin instructors and the pupils trained by these in the monasteries. Some of the monasteries, especially Lindisfarne and York, were genuine seats of learning. The importance of York in the eighth century may be gathered from the description of its pupil and professor Alcuin, and still more from the renown he had gained in it which induced. Charlemagne to summon him to become one of the chief ministers of

culture in France. The monastic course of instruction, while serviceable to learning, could do little to aid vernacular studies or develop any germs of literary genius which it might find existing, nor could it implant any of its own. Anglo-Saxon was as yet in too rude a condition to assimilate Latin models, and Latin was the only language in which the literary class, apart from the makers of minstrelsy, cared to express itself. The overwhelming majority of this class being clerical, its aims were chiefly didactic, and it probably occurred to few that the vernacular speech could be applied to any other purpose than that of instructing the ordinary man in his duty by means of homilies to be read to him, not by him. Although Mercia and Wessex had successively held the primacy among Anglo-Saxon states,

although the speech of Wessex was the most developed among Anglo-Saxon dialects, the native language and literature at the beginning of the ninth century still remain torpid for want of an impulse, and the force that then arrived to break up the stolidity of Anglo-Saxon existence threatened to sweep away civilisation and national life along with it.

invasions

The epic of Beowulf has already acquainted us with Scandinavian Danish monarchs in the south of Sweden in the sixth century, whose spirit of enterprise carried their marauding expeditions as far as Friesland. From the early part of the sixth until near the end of the eighth century a pause takes place; we hear little of Scandinavian piracies, and the AngloSaxons are left to fight their battles among themselves, although Scandinavian auxiliaries would have been welcome to the weaker party, and would have been afforded great opportunities for conquest at the expense of both. In 787, however, a plundering Danish expedition landed in Dorsetshire; in 793 Lindisfarne Abbey, the Mecca of Northumbria, was burned; and by 830 the Scandinavian chieftains, probably impelled by the pressure of population, had organised their strength for systematic naval forays. They especially directed their attacks against Northumbria, the part of the island nearest their own habitations, and against the south-west, where the remnant of the ancient British population, still independent, or imperfectly subdued, was ready to side with them. The political events of the early part of the century should have augmented the Anglo-Saxon power of resistance; for Egbert, King of Wessex, had gradually pushed his conquests to the point of gaining recognition as "overlord" of the entire English part of the island. But his authority was rather nominal than real, there was little actual cohesion among his subjects, and the Danes, to employ the collective appellation commonly bestowed upon all Scandinavian invaders, though frequently defeated, were still more frequently victorious. And whereas the defeats they might sustain merely preluded their reappearance in some other quarter, every victory was signalised by the destruction, if not of a town or city, at least of a group of churches or monasteries, the sole asylums of literature and culture in a rude age. The influence of a milder religion, unaccompanied as yet by any sentiment of chivalry, had enfeebled the national vigour, not so much from any real incompatibility between the precepts of religion and the duty of selfdefence, as by the gradual and almost imperceptible transformation of a military into a monastic ideal of life. The Saxons fought bravely in particular instances, but never achieved the universal national uprising which could alone have delivered them from their enemy. The valour of the Danes, on the other hand, amounted to absolute contempt for death: and their strength and numbers may be estimated by the stupendous rampart of their raising which yet draws a semicircle around Flamborough Head. The Danish origin of this mighty work has been questioned, but without reason; the builders, whoever they were, could have had no other objects than those of protecting their booty and their vessels drawn up, as the