English Lands Letters and Kings: From Celt to Tudor 3

English Lands Letters and Kings: From Celt to Tudor 3

Within him boiled his thoughts about his heart;

Without, the wrathful fire pressed hot upon him--

He said,--‘This narrow place is most unlike

That other we once knew in heaven high,

And which my Lord gave me; tho’ own it now

We must not, but to him must cede our realm.

Yet right he hath not done to strike us down

To hell’s abyss--of heaven’s realm bereft--

Which with mankind to people, he hath planned.

Pain sorest this, that Adam, wrought of Earth

On my strong throne shall sit, enjoying Bliss

While we endure these pangs--hell torments dire,

Woe! woe is me! Could I but use my hands

And might I be from here a little time--

One winter’s space--then, with this host would I--

But these iron bands press hard--this coil of chains--

…

 

There is but one known MS. copy of this poem. It is probably of the

tenth, certainly not later than the eleventh century, and is in

the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It is illuminated, and some scenes

represented seem to have been taken from the old miracle plays.[9] It was

printed in 1655: in this form a copy is said to have reached the hands

of Milton, through a friend of the printer: and it may well be that the

stern old Puritan poet was moved by a hearing of it,--for he was blind at

this date,--to the prosecution of that grand task which has made his name

immortal.

 

 

_Beda._

 

We might, however, never have known anything of Cædmon and of Saint

Hilda and all the monasteries north and south, except for another worthy

who grew up in the hearing of the waves which beat on the cliffs of

north-eastern England. This was Beda,--respected in his own day for his

industry, piety, straightforward honesty--and so followed by the respect

of succeeding generations as to get and carry the name of the _Venerable_

Beda. Though familiar with the people’s language,[10] and with Greek,

he wrote in monkish Latin--redeemed by classic touches--and passed his

life in the monastery at Jarrow, which is on the Tyne, near the coast

of Durham, a little to the westward of South Shields. An ancient church

is still standing amid the ruins of the monastic walls, and a heavy,

straight-backed chair of oak (which would satisfy the most zealous

antiquarian by its ugliness) is still guarded in the chancel, and is

called Beda’s Chair.

 

Six hundred pupils gathered about him there, in the old days, to be

taught in physics, grammar, rhetoric, music, and I know not what besides.

So learned and true was he, that the Pope would have called him to

Rome; but he loved better the wooded Tyne banks, and the gray moorlands,

and the labors of his own monastery. There he lived out an honest, a

plodding, an earnest, and a hopeful life. And as I read the sympathetic

story of its end, and of how the old man--his work all done--lifted up

a broken voice--on his last day--amidst his scholars, to the _Gloria

in Excelsis_--I bethink me of his last eulogist, the young historian,

who within a few months only after sketching that tender picture of his

great forerunner in the paths of British history, laid down his brilliant

pen--his work only half done, and died, away from his home, at Mentone,

on the shores of the Mediterranean.

 

 

_King Alfred._

 

A half century after the death of Beda began the Danish invasions,

under which, monasteries churches schools went down in a flood of blood

and fire. As we read of that devastation--the record covering only a

half-page of the old Saxon Chronicle (begun after Beda’s time)--it seems

an incident; yet the piratic storm, with intermittent fury, stretches

over a century and more of ruin. It was stayed effectively for a time

when the great Alfred came to full power.

 

I do not deal much in dates: but you should have a positive date for

this great English king: a thousand years ago (889) fairly marks the

period when he was in the prime of life--superintending, very likely,

the building of a British fleet upon the Pool, below London. He was born

at Wantage, in Berkshire, a little to the south of the Great Western

Railway; and in a glade near to the site of the old Saxon palace, is

still shown what is called Alfred’s Well. In the year 1849 his birthday

was celebrated, after the lapse of a thousand years--so keen are these

British cousins of ours to keep alive all their great memories. And

Alfred’s is a memory worth keeping. He had advantages--as we should

say--of foreign travel; as a boy he went to Rome, traversing Italy and

the Continent. If we could only get a good story of that cross-country

trip of his!

 

We know little more than that he came to high honor at Rome, was anointed

king there, before yet he had come to royalty at home. He makes also a

second visit in company with his father Ethelwolf: and on their return

Ethelwolf relieves the tedium of travel by marrying the twelve-year old

daughter of Charles the Bald of France. Those were times of extraordinary

daring.

 

The great king had throughout a most picturesque and adventurous life: he

is hard pushed by the Danes--by rivals--by his own family; one while a

wanderer on the moors--another time disguised as minstrel in the enemy’s

camp; but always high-hearted, always hopeful, always working. He is

oppressed by the pall of ignorance that overlays the lordly reach of his

kingdom: “Scarce a priest have I found,” says he, “south of the Thames

who can render Latin into English.” He is not an apt scholar himself, but

he toils at learning; his abbots help him; he revises old chronicles, and

makes people to know of Beda; he has boys taught to write in English;

gives himself with love to the rendering of Boëthius’ “Consolation of

Philosophy.” He adopts its reasoning, and plants his hope on the creed--

 

1st. That a wise God governs.

 

2d. That all suffering may be made helpful.

 

3d. That God is chiefest good.

 

4th. That only the good are happy.

 

5th. That the foreknowledge of God does not conflict with Free-will.

 

These would seem to carry even now the pith and germ of the broadest

theologic teachings.

 

It is a noble and a picturesque figure--that of King Alfred--which we

see, looking back over the vista of a thousand years; better it would

seem than that of King Arthur to weave tales around, and illumine with

the heat and the flame of poesy. Yet poets of those times and of all

succeeding times have strangely neglected this august and royal type of

manhood.

 

After him came again weary Danish wars and wild blood-letting and

ignorance surging over the land, save where a little light played

fitfully around such great religious houses as those of York and

Canterbury. It was the dreary Tenth Century, on the threshold of which

he had died--the very core and kernel of the Dark Ages, when the wisest

thought the end of things was drawing nigh, and strong men quaked with

dread at sight of an eclipse, or comet, or at sound of the rumble of an

earthquake. It was a time and a condition of gloom which made people

pardon, and even relish such a dismal poem as that of “The Grave,”

which--though bearing thirteenth century form--may well in its germ have

been a fungal outgrowth of the wide-spread hopelessness of this epoch:--

 

For thee was a house built

Ere thou wert born;

For thee was a mold meant

Ere thou of mother cam’st.

But it is not made ready

Nor its depth measured,

Nor is it seen

How long it shall be.

Now I bring thee

Where thou shalt be

And I shall measure thee

And the mold afterward.

Doorless is that house

And dark is it within;

There thou art fast detained

And death hath the key

Loathsome is that earth-house

And grim within to dwell,

And worms shall divide thee.

 

From the death of Alfred (901) to the Norman Conquest (1066) there was

monkish work done in shape of Homilies, Chronicles, grammars of Latin

and English--the language settling more and more into something like a

determined form of what is now called Anglo-Saxon. But in that lapse

of years I note only three historic incidents, which by reason of the

traditions thrown about them, carry a piquant literary flavor.

 

 

_Canute and Godiva._

 

The _first_ is when the famous Canute, king of both England and Denmark,

and having strong taste for song and music and letters, rows by the

towers of a great East-England religious house, and as he drifts with the

tide, composes (if we may trust tradition) a snatch of verse which has

come down to us in a thirteenth century form, about the pleasant singing

of the Monks of Ely. Wordsworth has embalmed the matter in one of his

Ecclesiastic Sonnets (xxx.):

 

A pleasant music floats along the mere,

From monks in Ely chanting service high,

While as Canute the king is rowing by;

My oarsman, quoth the mighty king, draw near

That we the sweet songs of the monks may hear.

He listens (all past conquests and all schemes

Of future vanishing like empty dreams)

Heart-touched, and haply not without a tear,

The royal minstrel, ere the Choir is still,

While his free barge skims the smooth flood along