by Will Durant
Bede, the servant of Christ, a priest of the monastery of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, which is at Wearmouth and Jarrow. Who, being born in the territory of that monastery, was delivered up by my kinsfolk, when I was seven years of age, to be brought up by the most reverend abbot Benedict [Biscop]; and from that time spending all the days of my life in the same monastery, I have applied all my diligence to the study of the Scriptures; and observing the regular discipline, and keeping the daily service of singing in the church, I have taken delight always either to learn, or to teach, or to write…. In the nineteenth year of my life I was made deacon; in my thirtieth I became a priest… and from that time until the fifty-ninth year of my age I have employed myself upon Holy Scripture, and in these following works …17
—all in Latin. They included Biblical commentaries, homilies, a chronology of world history, treatises on grammar, mathematics, science, and theology, and above all, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, or Church History of the English Nation (731). Unlike most monastic histories, this is no dry chronicle. Perhaps, towards the end, it is too heavy with miracles, and always it is innocently credulous, as befitted a mind immured from the age of seven; nevertheless it is a clear and captivating narrative, rising now and then to a simple eloquence, as in the description of the Anglo-Saxon Conquest.18 Bede had an intellectual conscience; he took great pains with chronology, and is generally accurate; he specified his sources, sought firsthand evidence, and quoted pertinent and available documents. “I would not,” he said, “that my children should read a lie”19—meaning, we hope, the 600 pupils whom he taught. He died four years after penning the above autobiography; and all the tenderness and faith of medieval piety are in its concluding lines:
And I beseech Thee, merciful Jesus, that to whom Thou hast of Thy goodness given sweetly to drink in the words of the knowledge of Thee, Thou wilt also vouchsafe, in Thy loving kindness, that he may one day come to Thee, the fountain of all wisdom, and stand forever before Thy face.
Bede notes that five languages were spoken in his England: English, British (Celtic), Irish, Pict (Scotch), and Latin. “English” was the language of the Angles, but it differed little from Saxon, and was intelligible to Franks, Norwegians, and Danes; these five peoples spoke varieties of German, and English grew out of German speech. As early as the seventh century there was a considerable Anglo-Saxon literature. We must judge it largely from fragments, for most of it perished when Christianity brought in the Latin script (replacing the runic characters of Anglo-Saxon writing), when the Danish Conquest destroyed so many libraries, and when the Norman Conquest almost swamped the English language with French words. Moreover, many of these Anglo-Saxon poems were pagan, and had been transmitted orally through generations of “gleemen” or minstrels who were a bit loose in life and speech, and whom monks and priests were forbidden to hear. It was probably an eighth-century monk, however, who wrote one of the oldest extant Anglo-Saxon fragments—a verse paraphrase of Genesis, not quite as inspired as the original. Interpolated into the poem is the translation of a German narrative of the Fall; here the verse comes to life, largely because Satan is represented as a defiant and passionate rebel; perhaps Milton found here a hint for his Lucifer. Some of the Anglo-Saxon poems are elegies; so “The Wanderer” tells of happy days gone by in the baronial hall; now the lord is dead, “all this firm-set earth becomes empty,” and “sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things”;20 not even Dante improved the expression of this idea. Usually these old poems sing blithely and lustily of war; the “Lay of the Battle of Maldon” (c. 1000) sees only heroism in the English defeat; and the old warrior Byrhtwold, standing over his slain lord, “taught courage” to the overwhelmed Saxons in words presaging Malory:
Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener, mood shall be the more, as our might lessens. Here our prince lies low, they have hewn him to death! Grief and sorrow forever on the man that leaves this war-play! I am old of years, but hence I will not go; I think to lay me down by the side of my lord, by the side of the man I cherished.21
The longest and noblest of the Anglo-Saxon poems, Beowulf, was composed, presumably in England, in the seventh or eighth century, and is preserved in a British Museum manuscript dating back to 1000. Its 3183 lines are apparently the complete work. The verse is rhymeless but alliterative antistrophic rhythm, in a West Saxon dialect quite unintelligible to us today. The story seems childish: Beowulf, prince of the Geats (Goths?) in southern Sweden, crosses the sea to free the Danish King Hrothgar from the dragon Grendel; he overcomes Grendel, and even Grendel’s mother; sails back to Geatland, and reigns justly for fifty years. A third dragon, a firedrake, now appears, and ravages the land of the Geats; Beowulf attacks it, and is seriously wounded, his comrade Wiglaf comes to his aid, and together they kill the beast. Beowulf dies of his wound, and is burned on a funeral pyre. The tale is not so naïve as this sounds; the dragons of medieval literature represent the wild beasts that lurked in the woods about the towns of Europe; the terrified imagination of the people might be forgiven for conceiving them fantastically; and it gratefully wove legends about the men who conquered such animals, and made the hamlets safe.
Certain passages of the poem are incongruously Christian, as if some kindly monkish editor had sought to preserve a heathen masterpiece by inserting here and there a pious line. But the tone and incidents are purely pagan. It was life and love and battle on the earth that interested these “fair women and brave men,” not some strifeless* paradise beyond the grave. At the outset, when the Danish king Scyld is buried in the Viking style, in a boat pushed crewless out to sea, the author adds: “Men cannot tell for a truth who received that burden.” But it was not a gay paganism. A somber tone pervades the poem, and enters even into the feasting in Hrothgar’s hall. Through the lilt and sigh of the flowing lines we catch the plaint of the gleeman’s harp.
Then Beowulf sat down on a seat by the wall … he talked of his wound, of the hurt sore unto death; he knew well that he had ended his days…. Then men bold in battle rode about the burial mound; They were minded to utter their grief, to lament the King, to make a chant and speak of the man; they exalted his heroic life, and praised his valorous deeds with all their strength…. They said that among the kings of the world he was the mildest of men and most kindly, most gentle to his people, and most eager for praise…. Thus it is fitting that a man should extol his friendly lord … and should love him heartily, when he must needs depart from his body and pass away.22
Beowulf is probably the oldest extant poem in the literature of Britain; but Caedmon’s (d. 680) is the oldest name. We know him only through a pretty passage in Bede. In the monastery of Whitby, says the Ecclesiastical History, 23 was a simple brother who found it so hard to sing that whenever his turn came to chant he fled to some hiding place. One night as he lay asleep in his stable lair, it seemed to him that an angel appeared and said: “Caedmon, sing me something!” The monk protested that he could not; the angel commanded; Caedmon tried, and was startled at his success. In the morning he recalled the song, and sang it; thereafter he lisped in numbers, and turned Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospels into verse “put together,” says Bede, “with very great sweetness and pricking of the heart.” Nothing remains of them except a few lines translated into Latin by Bede. A year later Cynewulf (b. o. 750), minstrel at a Northum -brian court, tried to realize the story by versifying divers religious narratives—“Christ,” “Andreas,” “Juliana”; but these works, contemporary with Beowulf, are by comparison dead with rhetoric and artifice.
Literary prose comes later than poetry in all literatures, as intellect matures long after fancy blooms; men talk prose for centuries “without knowing it,” before they have leisure or vanity to mold it into art. Alfred is the first clear figure in the prose literature of England; his translations and prefaces were eloquent through simple sincerity; and it was he who, by dint of editing and adding, transformed the “Bishop’s Roll,” kept by the clerk
s of Winchester cathedral, into the most vigorous and vivid sections of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle—the first substantial work of English prose. His teacher Asser may have written most of the Life of Alfred; perhaps it is a later compilation (c. 974);24 in any event it is an early instance of the readiness with which Englishmen used English instead of Latin for works of history or theology, while the Continent still blushed to write such dignities in the “vulgar” speech.
Even amid poetry and war men and women found time and spirit to give form to significance, and beauty to things of use. Alfred established a school of art at Athelney, brought to it from all quarters monks skilled in arts and crafts, and “continued, during his frequent wars,” says Asser, “to teach his workers in gold, and his artificers of all kinds.”25 Dunstan, not content with being both a statesman and a saint, worked cleverly in metal and gold, was a good musician, and built a pipe organ for his cathedral at Glastonbury. Art work in wood, metal, and cloisonné enamel was carried on; gem-cutters joined with carvers to make the jeweled and sculptured crosses of Ruthwell and Bewcastle (c. 700); a famous equestrian statue of King Cadwallo (d. 677) was cast in brass near Ludgate; women made coverlets and tapestries and embroideries “of a most delicate thread”;26 the monks of Winchester illuminated with radiant color a tenth-century benedictional. Winchester itself and York built stone cathedrals as early as 635; Benedict Biscop brought the Lombard style to England from the church that he built at Wearmouth in 674; and Canterbury rebuilt in 950 the cathedral that had survived from Roman times. We know from Bede that Benedict Biscop’s church was adorned with paintings made in Italy, “so that all who entered, even if ignorant of letters, whichever way they turned, should either contemplate the ever-lovely aspect of Christ and His saints … or, having the Last Judgment before their eyes, might remember to examine themselves more strictly.”27 In general the seventh century saw an exuberance of construction in Britain; the Anglo-Saxon Conquest was complete, the Danish had not begun; and architects, who had heretofore built in wood, now had the resources and spirit to raise great shrines in stone. Yet it must be confessed that Benedict imported his architects, glassmakers, and goldsmiths from Gaul; Bishop Wilfrid brought sculptors and painters from Italy to decorate his seventh-century church at Hexham; and the beautifully illuminated Gospel Book of Lindisfarne (c. 730) was the work of Irish monks transplanted by the eremitical or missionary zeal to that bleak isle off the Northumberland coast. The coming of the Danes ended this brief renascence; and not until the sound establishment of Cnut’s power did English architecture resume its climb to majesty.
3. Between Conquests: 1016–11066
Cnut was more than a conqueror; he was a statesman. His early reign was tarnished with cruelty: he banished the children of Edmund Ironsides, and had Edmund’s brother murdered to forestall an Anglo-Saxon restoration. But then, noting that the widow and sons of King Ethelred were alive at Rouen, he cut many knots by offering Emma his hand in marriage (1017). She was thirty-three, he twenty-three. She consented, and at one stroke Cnut secured a wife, an alliance with Emma’s brother the Duke of Normandy, and a safe throne. From that moment his reign became a blessing for England. He brought under discipline the disorderly nobles who had broken the unity and spirit of England. He protected the island from further invasion, and gave it twelve years of peace. He accepted Christianity, built many churches, raised a shrine at Assandun to commemorate the Anglo-Saxons, as well as the Danes, who had fought there, and himself made a pilgrimage to Edmund’s tomb. He promised to follow the existing laws and institutions of England, and kept his word with two exceptions: he insisted that county government, which had been debased by autocratic nobles, should be under his own appointees; and he replaced the archbishop with a lay minister as chief counselor to the Crown. He developed an administrative staff and civil service that gave unprecedented continuity to the government. After the insecure early years of his rule, nearly all his appointees were Englishmen. He labored constantly in the tasks of state, and repeatedly visited every part of his kingdom to supervise the administration of justice and the execution of the laws. He came in as a Dane, and died as a Englishman. He was King of Denmark as well as of England, and in 1028 he became also King of Norway; but it was from Winchester that he ruled this triple realm.
The Danish Conquest continued that long process of foreign invasion and racial mixture which culminated in the Norman Conquest and finally produced the English people. Celt and Gaul, Angle and Saxon and Jute, Dane and Norman, mingled their blood, in marriage or otherwise, to transform the undistinguished and uninitiative Briton of Roman days into the vocal buccaneers of Elizabeth’s time, and the silent world conquerors of later centuries. The Danes, like the Germans and the Norse, brought into England an almost mystic love of the sea, a willingness to accept its treacherous invitation to adventure and trade in distant lands. Culturally, the Danish invasions were a blight. Architecture marked time; the art of illumination decayed from 750 to 950; and the intellectual progress so promoted by Alfred was checked, even as in Gaul Norse raids were canceling the labors of Charlemagne.
Cnut might have repaired more of the damage his people had wrought had he been granted a longer life. But men wear out rapidly in war or government. Cnut died in 1035, aged forty. Norway at once threw off the Danish yoke; Harthacnut, Cnut’s son and appointed heir, had all he could do to protect Denmark against Norwegian invasion; another son, Harald Harefoot, ruled England for five years, then died; Harthacnut ruled it for two years, and passed away (1042). Before his death he summoned from Normandy the surviving son of Ethelred and Emma, and recognized this Anglo-Saxon stepbrother as heir to the English throne.
But Edward the Confessor (1042-66) was as much of a foreigner as any Dane. Carried to Normandy by his father at the age of ten, he had passed thirty years at the Norman court, brought up by Norman nobles and priests, and trained to a guileless piety. He brought to England his French speech, customs, and friends. These friends became high officials and prelates of the state, received royal grants, built Norman castles in England, showed their scorn for English language and ways, and began the Norman Conquest a generation before the Conqueror.
Only one Englishman could compete with them in influencing the mild and malleable King. Earl Godwin, governor of Wessex, and first counselor of the realm under Cnut, Harald, and Harthacnut, was a man of both wealth and wisdom, a master of patient diplomacy, of convincing eloquence and administrative skill; the first great lay statesman in English history. His experience in the government gave him an ascendancy over the King. His daughter Edith became Edward’s wife, and might have made Godwin grandfather to a king; but Edward begot no children. When Godwin’s son Tostig married Judith, daughter of the count of Flanders, and Godwin’s nephew Sweyn became ruler of Denmark, the Earl had forged by marriages a triple alliance that made him the strongest man in northern Europe, far more powerful than his King. Edward’s Norman friends roused him to jealousy; he deposed Godwin; the Earl fled to Flanders, while his son Harold went to Ireland and raised an army against the Confessor (1051). The English nobles, resenting the Norman ascendancy, invited Godwin to return, and pledged him the support of their arms. Harold invaded England, defeated the King’s troops, ravaged and plundered the southwest coast, and joined his father in an advance up the Thames. The populace of London rose to acclaim them; the Norman officials and prelates fled; a Witenagemot of English nobles and bishops gave Godwin a triumphant reception; and Godwin resumed his confiscated property and his political power (1052). A year later, exhausted with tribulation and victory, he died.
Harold was appointed Earl of Wessex, and succeeded in some measure to his father’s power. He was now thirty-one, tall, handsome, strong, gallant, reckless; merciless in war, generous in peace. In a whirlwind of bold campaigns he conquered Wales for England, and presented the head of the Welsh chieftain Gruffydd to the pleased and horrified King (1063). In a gentler phase of his impetuous career he poured out funds to build the abbey church a
t Waltham (1060), and to support the college that grew out of the cathedral school. All England beamed upon the romantic youth.
The great architectural event of Edward’s reign was the beginning (1055) of Westminster Abbey. While living in Rouen he had become familiar with the Norman style; now, in commissioning the abbey that was to be the shrine and tomb of England’s genius, he bade or let it be designed in Norman Romanesque, on the same lines as the magnificent abbey church which had been started only five years before at Jumièges; here again was a Norman conquest before William. Westminster Abbey was the beginning of an architectural efflorescence that would give England the finest Romanesque buildings in Europe.
In that abbey Edward was laid to rest early in the fateful year 1066. On January 6 the assembled Witenagemot elected Harold king. He had hardly been crowned when news came that William, Duke of Normandy, claimed the throne and was preparing war. Edward, said William, had in 1051 promised to bequeath him the English crown in gratitude for thirty years of protection in Normandy. Apparently the promise had been made,28 but Edward, regretting or forgetting it, had, shortly before his death, recommended Harold as his successor; in any case such a promise had no validity unless approved by the Witan. But, said William, Harold, on a visit to him at Rouen (date now unknown), had accepted knighthood from him, had become William’s “man,” owed him submission according to feudal law, and had promised to recognize and support him as heir to Edward’s throne. Harold admitted this pledge.29 But again no oath of his could bind the English nation; the representatives of that nation had freely chosen him for its king; and Harold now resolved to defend that choice. William appealed to the Pope; Alexander II, counseled by Hildebrand, condemned Harold as a usurper, excommunicated him and his adherents, and declared William the lawful claimant of the English throne; he blessed William’s proposed invasion, and sent him a consecrated banner and a ring containing, within a diamond, a hair of St. Peter’s head.30 Hildebrand was glad to set a precedent for the papal disposition of thrones and deposition of kings; ten years later he would apply the precedent to Henry IV of Germany; and it would come in handy in 1213 with King John. Lanfranc, Abbot of Bec, joined William in calling the people of Normandy—indeed of all countries—to a holy war against the excommunicated king.