English Lands Letters and Kings: From Celt to Tudor 5

English Lands Letters and Kings: From Celt to Tudor 5

And she offers to go.

 

But Harold, beckoning with a grand gesture of authority--

 

Not yet!

Stay! The king commands thee, woman!

 

And he turns to Aldwyth, from whose kinsmen he had expected aid--

 

Have thy two brethren sent their forces in?

 

_Aldwyth_--Nay, I fear not.

 

And Harold blazes upon her--

 

Then there’s no force in thee!

Thou didst possess thyself of Edward’s ear

To part me from the woman that I loved.

…

Thou hast been false to England and to me!

As--in some sort--I have been false to thee.

Leave me. No more.--Pardon on both sides.--Go!

 

_Aldwyth_--Alas, my lord, I loved thee!

O Harold! husband! Shall we meet again?

 

_Harold_--After the battle--after the battle. Go.

 

_Aldwyth_--I go. (_Aside._) That I could stab her standing there!

(_Exit Aldwyth._)

 

_Edith_--Alas, my lord, she loved thee.

 

_Harold_-- Never! never!

 

_Edith_--I saw it in her eyes!

 

_Harold_-- I see it in thine!

And not on thee--nor England--fall God’s doom!

 

_Edith_--On _thee_? on me. And thou art England! Alfred

Was England. Ethelred was nothing. England

Is but her king, as thou art Harold!

 

_Harold_-- Edith,

The sign in Heaven--the sudden blast at sea--

My fatal oath--the dead saints--the dark dreams--

The Pope’s Anathema--the Holy Rood

That bow’d to me at Waltham--Edith, if

I, the last English King of England----

 

_Edith_-- No,

First of a line that coming from the people,

And chosen by the people----

 

_Harold_-- And fighting for

And dying for the people----

Look, I will bear thy blessing into the battle

And front the doom of God.

 

And he did affront it bravely; and the arrow did slay him, near to the

spot where the Saxon standard flew to the breeze on that fateful day.

 

The play from which I have quoted may have excess of elaboration and an

over-finesse in respect of details: but there are great bold reaches of

descriptive power, a nobility of sentiment, and everywhere tender and

winning touches, which will be very sure to give to the drama of Tennyson

permanence and historic dignity, and keep it always a literary way-mark

in the fields we have gone over. The scene of that decisive contest

is less than a two hours’ ride away from London (by the Southeastern

Railway) at a village called Battle--seven miles from the coast line at

Hastings--in the midst of a beautiful rolling country, with scattered

copses of ancient wood and a great wealth of wild flowers--(for which the

district is remarkable) sparkling over the fields.

 

The Conqueror built a great abbey there--Battle Abbey--whose ruins are

visited by hundreds every year. A large portion of the old religious

house, kept in excellent repair, and very charming with its growth of ivy

and its embowering shade, is held in private hands--being the occasional

residence of the Duke of Cleveland. Amid the ruins the usher will guide

one to a crypt of the ancient chapel--whose solid Norman arches date back

to the time of the Conqueror, and which is said to mark the very spot

on which Harold fell, wounded to the death, on that memorable day of

Hastings.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER II.

 

 

I recur a moment to what was said in our opening talk--as a boy will

wisely go back a little way for a better jump forward. I spoke--the

reader will remember--of ringing, Celtic war-songs, which seemed to be

all of literature that was drifting in the atmosphere, when we began:

then there came a gleam of Christian light and of monkish learning thro’

St. Augustine in Southern England; and another gleam through Iona, and

Lindisfarne, from Irish sources; then came Cædmon’s Bible singing,--which

had echo far down in Milton’s day; next the good old Beda, telling the

story of these things; then--a thousand years ago,--the Great Alfred,

at once a book-maker and a King. Before him and after him came a dreary

welter of Danish wars; the great Canute--tradition says--chirping a song

in the middle of them; and last, the slaughter of Hastings, where the

Saxon Harold went down, and the conquering Norman came up.

 

 

_Geoffrey of Monmouth._

 

We start to-day with an England that has its office-holding and governing

people speaking one language--its moody land-holders and cultivators

speaking another--and its irascible Britons in Wales and Cumbria and

Cornwall speaking yet another. Conquered people are never in much mood

for song-singing or for history-making. So there is little or nothing

from English sources for a century or more. Even the old Saxon Chronicle

kept by monks (at Peterboro in this time), does not grow into a stately

record, and in the twelfth century on the year of the death of King

Stephen, dies out altogether.

 

But there is a Welsh monk--Geoffrey of Monmouth[13]--living just on

the borders of Wales, and probably not therefore brought into close

connection with this new Norman element--who writes (about one hundred

years after the Conquest) a half-earnest and mostly-fabulous British

Chronicle. He professes to have received its main points from a

Walter--somebody, who had rare old bookish secrets of history, derived

from Brittany, in his keeping. You will remember, perhaps, how another

and very much later writer--sometimes known as Geoffrey Crayon--once

wrote a History of New York, claiming that it was made up from the MSS.

of a certain Diedrich Knickerbocker: I think that perhaps the same sense

of quiet humor belonged to both these Geoffreys. Certainly Geoffrey of

Monmouth’s Chronicle bears about the same relation to British matters

of fact which the Knickerbocker story of New York bears to the colonial

annals of our great city.

 

The fables which were told in this old Monmouth Chronicle are more

present in men’s minds to-day than the things which were real in it:

there was, for instance, the fable about King Lear (who does not know

King Lear?): then, there were the greater fables about good King Arthur

and his avenging Caliburn (who does not know King Arthur?). These two

stories are embalmed now in Literature, and will never perish.

 

 

_King Arthur Legends._

 

Those Arthur legends had been floating about in ballad or song, but

they never had much mention in anything pretending to be history[14]

until Geoffrey of Monmouth’s day. There is nothing of them in the Saxon

Chronicle: nothing of them in Beda: King Alfred never mentions King

Arthur.

 

But was there ever a King Arthur? Probably: but at what precise date is

uncertain: probable, too, that he had his court--as many legends run--one

time at Caerleon, “upon Usk,” and again at Camelot.[15] Caerleon is

still to be found by the curious traveller, in pleasant Monmouthshire,

just upon the borders of Wales, with Tintern Abbey and the grand ruin

of Chepstow not far off; and a great amphitheatre among the hills (very

likely of Roman origin) with green turf upon it, and green hillsides

hemming it in--is still called King Arthur’s Round Table.

 

Camelot is not so easy to trace: the name will not be found in the

guide-books: but in Somersetshire, in a little parish, called “Queen’s

Camel,” are the remains of vast entrenchments, said to have belonged to

the tourney ground of Camelot. A little branch of the Yeo River (you will

remember this name, if you have ever read Charles Kingsley’s “Westward,

Ho”--a book you should read)--a little branch, I say, of the Yeo runs

through the parish, and for irrigating purposes is held back by dykes,

and then shot, shining, over the green meadows: hence, Tennyson may say

truly, as he does in his Idyls of the King--

 

“They vanished panic-stricken, like a shoal

Of darting fish, that on a summer’s morn

Adown the crystal dykes at _Camelot_,

Come slipping o’er their shadow, on the sand.”

 

There are some features of this ancient fable of King Arthur, which are

of much older literary date than the times we are now speaking of. Thus

“the dusky barge,” that appears on a sudden--coming to carry off the

dying King,--

 

“----whose decks are dense with stately forms,

Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream--by these

Three queens with crowns of gold, and from them rose

A cry that shivered to the tingling stars----”

 

has a very old germ;--Something not unlike this watery bier, to carry

a dead hero into the Silences, belongs to the opening of that ancient

poem of Beowulf--which all students of early English know and prize--but

which did not grow on English soil, and therefore does not belong to

our present quest.[16] The brand Excalibur, too, which is thrown into

the sea by King Arthur’s friend, and wh