A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  Later generations took as given the platform of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom Alfred had rescued and upon which they built the kingdom of England. Comparisons are often made between Charles the Great and Alfred the Great, so it is worth noting that whereas the successors of Charles, the Carolingians, fragmented his empire, Alfred’s successors strengthened the ties that united his kingdom and created an English ‘empire’ in Britain. Whether because of childhood memories of public inscriptions in Rome, or because he knew of the Latin-literate public policy of Carolingian Europe, or, more probably, because of his own passion for learning, Alfred profoundly believed that exploitation of the power of the written word, above all the ‘Englisce’ written word – whether in charters, the Guthrum treaty, the law code, the Chronicle or the translations of those books ‘needful to know’ – was indispensable to good government. In the words of Simon Keynes,

  Soldier, law-maker, statesman, educator, and scholar, not to mention ship-builder . . . all were . . . inseparable [from] his determination to discharge the responsibilities of his high office for the good of his subjects and in the service of God.33

  9

  LITERATURE, LEARNING, LANGUAGE AND LAW IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

  Bede wrote in Latin, Europe’s language of learning, and pre-Conquest England produced many other fine Latinists whose work will be mentioned. But the chief theme of this chapter is English and its pioneering achievement as Europe’s first vernacular to evolve from the oral tradition into a fully articulate vehicle for all the categories of high civilization – literature, learning, law, administration and historical writing. Thus a language that begins to emerge as a distinct branch of the Germanic group about the fifth century would outmatch even Old Irish and Welsh in the range of its applications, as well as proving their equal in the glories of its literature. The tradition was on an upswing even as it was blotted out. To judge from the surviving manuscripts, the decades before Hastings saw a surge in the number of books produced in the vernacular.1 Many were older titles but the quantity indicates an increase in the reading population.

  In addition to the Beowulf manuscript itself, as many as 300 manuscripts and texts survive, despite a tragic fire in the year 1731 that consumed much of the great collection of medieval manuscripts assembled by Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631), a founder member with William Camden of the original Society of Antiquaries. One of the manuscripts destroyed was the epic fragment known as the Battle of Maldon, an account of a heroic defeat at the hands of Danish raiders during the reign of Æthelred ‘the Unready’ (see chapter 11). Shortly before the great fire David Casley, deputy keeper of the collection, had made a careful line by line copy of the manuscript fragment. Thanks to him we have what scholars consider a sound version of this masterpiece of alliterative Old English verse, the last in the Germanic heroic tradition and, in short, the culmination of the spirit of Beowulf itself. Other superb poetry includes the old heroic poem Widsith and one commemorating the great victory at Brunanburh found in the Chronicle. Of the prose there is, of course, the Chronicle itself, the English language law ‘codes’ of most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, translations of scholarly texts and books of the Latin Bible texts, such as the interlining of the Latin text of the Lindisfarne Gospels with an English translation, the issue of government writs in the language of the people, and even word games or ‘riddles’ written in English. We start with the poetry.

  Old English poetry

  The characteristic verse idiom in Old English poetry comprises the measured line divided into two balanced half-lines, each with a minimum of four syllables, in which syllable length and stress are swung together by alliterative patterns. Such alliteration, which seems ideally adapted to declamation in an oral tradition, is to be found in other early Germanic languages. The Anglo-Saxon poet attempting Latin verse met with problems of metrical versification that did not confront his Continental counterparts for whom the Latin language was still a living tradition. Aldhelm, England’s earliest poet in Latin, produced some fine work in the language, but equally from time to time deployed his native alliterative idiom in the language of the church.

  According to a story that was still going the rounds four hundred years later, Aldhelm, a Wessex nobleman and first bishop of Sherborne (705–9), was wont to take his stand on a bridge at a river crossing near his church, harp in hand, and sing to his congregation hurrying homewards after mass, hoping to hold their interest in things spiritual with words from scripture tagged into popular songs. Aldhelm in his minstrel mode reveals a world where the vernacular tradition of the gleomen or scops (minstrels) was shared as part of a common culture by noble, churchman and commoner.

  The scop (pronounced ‘shop’, with a short vowel sound), a bardic minstrel who might be in regular service with one lord or travel from one mead-hall court to another, was the guardian of the ancient Germanic oral tradition. Writing about AD 100, the Roman historian Tacitus knew of the Germans’ ‘old songs’ (carmina antiqua). According to the Beowulf poet, the din of carousing and banqueting daily shook the walls of King Hrothgar’s Heorot Hall. We may have a hint of the effect from the writings of Adelard of Bath, a twelfth-century English scholar and musician at the court of Henry I’s Queen Matilda, who was descended from the old English royal line. According to Louise Cochrane, Adelard recalled how once, when he was playing the stringed cithara before the queen, a little boy among the courtiers became so carried away by the rhythm of the music that he enthusiastically waved his arms about, making the company laugh out loud. Anyone who has heard performances of medieval minstrel music will know the pulsating and rowdy rhythmic effects possible on early stringed instruments.

  Presumably the hubbub subsided when the scop swept his lyre, which since the time of Homer down to the histrions (epic ballad singers) of the Balkans has been the instrument of the bard, to begin his ‘clear song’. Among the treasures revealed at the Prittlewell excavation were the shadow remnants of such an instrument imprinted in the earth. Instrument-builder Zachary Taylor lovingly and meticulously recreated the ancient lyre. The original must have been highly valued for Taylor discovered it had been fractured at some time and painstakingly repaired with gold and silver rivets. Its musical quality was surely much diminished but, like Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell, cracked beyond restoration, its aura was irreplaceable. The ‘clear song’ might be the bard’s version of a traditional lay, a section of an epic featuring the deeds of ancestors of those present, or an ode improvised to celebrate the occasion.

  We know something about the life of the scop from a poem that survives as part of a tenth-century collection called the Exeter Book. Named after its fictional author, Widsith (literally ‘wide [or far] traveller’) tells of visits to the mead halls of heroes and kings of the pagan past (from the fourth to the sixth centuries), and of the rich gifts the poet was given. It refers to Offa of Angeln, claimed as an ancestor by the great eighth-century king of Mercia, and Widsith was also at the court of Eormanric, king of the Ostrogoths (Ermanaric, who ruled vast tracts of modern Ukraine in the 370s), who gave him a precious arm-ring. Widsith presented it to his own lord, who in turn conferred lands upon him.

  The tone of the Widsith poem is distinctly upbeat. By contrast, the forty-two lines of Deor, also about a scop, are a lament for the loss of a lord’s favour, the poet’s dismissal from court and the loss of his lands. He recalls the misfortunes of legendary figures from the Germanic past and reflects in a stoical refrain that, just as their troubles passed, so will his. Like Widsith, Deor’s lament is a glimpse of the aristocratic Anglo-Saxon lifestyle; both remind us that the bardic verse central to the cultural life of the warrior nobility belonged to a largely oral tradition, of which only a fragment survives in the literary record. And central to the imaginative life of such traditions is the performance in the present, which relies on the memory, the skill and the inventive genius of an unlettered artist with words.

  Noble (whether literate or non-literate) and peasant shared common cultural
conventions (as we shall note, there is good evidence that many nobles were literate, from the late eighth century onwards at least). The villager, too, had his feastings, though not perhaps to match the mead hall. As the evening advanced the harp (perhaps that of some more prosperous farmer) began to circulate and any member of the party who could not provide a song, accompanied or not, was poor company indeed. One of the best-known stories in Bede tells how a farm-hand called Caedmon became a poet. Because he was no singer he would get up and leave the table as he saw the harp on its way. One night, having quit the feast as usual and tidied out the animal byre, he curled up on the straw and went to sleep. He dreamed that a man stood beside him and called him by name: ‘Caedmon, you shall sing a song for me about the Creation of all things.’ Inspired, the illiterate labourer improvised a poem that told how ‘the Lord of Glory . . . [made] . . . Middle Earth for men, to be their mansion.’2

  Bede quotes a snatch of the song in a Latin version, and then explains that he can only give the gist of it because poetry ‘cannot be translated literally from one language into another without losing much of its beauty and dignity’. The remark is a measure of the standing of the English language in Bede’s world, but more so of Bede himself. Outside the British Isles, it would have been unheard of for a Latin-literate cleric to accord equivalence of status to a work in the vernacular. But then Bede was not only in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, he also, we are told, wrote English devotional poetry. Caedmon’s original Anglo-Saxon is to be found added on to Latin manuscripts of Bede’s great History, copied shortly after his death. Impressed by the peasant poet, St Hild of Whitby, that great lady, invited Caedmon to join her community and he became, in effect, the house specialist hymn-writer. Once a passage of the Latin scriptures was explained to him, he could produce a moving and delightful English song. Many lay people were converted to ‘heavenly things’ as a result.

  Conversely, many Anglo-Saxon churchmen hankered after the Old English, and therefore pagan, secular tradition. The church synod of 747 fulminated against monasteries that encouraged ‘versifiers and harpists’ to visit, as well as priests who delivered their sermons in the manner of a scop delivering an epic. Perhaps such priests were only doing their best to make Christianity ‘relevant to contemporary concerns’. Presumably St Aldhelm at least would have approved.

  For even bishops were not immune to the charms of the vernacular tradition. The Exeter Book, copied about 975 and the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry to have survived, is so called because it was donated to Exeter’s cathedral library in the eleventh century by Bishop Leofric. Of Cornish extraction, despite his English name, Leofric was educated in Lotharingia and became chaplain to Edward the Confessor in exile in France. He returned with the king in 1041 and was appointed bishop of Cornwall, where his family had an estate at Tregear, and Devon. He reconstituted the region’s two sees, at St Germans and Crediton, as one at the Benedictine monastery within the burh of Exeter. Under him the Exeter cathedral library was noted for its scriptorium and ranked fourth in size in England after Canterbury, Salisbury and Worcester.

  The Exeter Book opens with three poems concerning the life of Christ, including the Ascension by a poet whose name, Cynewulf, appears in runic characters in three other Old English poems. One of these, Elene, in the collection known as the Codex Vercellensis, is an account of the finding of the True Cross by St Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine the Great and traditionally associated with Britain.

  Most of the Exeter Book poems are religious but, in addition to Widsith, there are a few outstanding pieces, lyrical or elegiac in mood, that can reach across the centuries to stir the reader today, when family breakdown and exile affect so many lives. In The Wife’s Lament a woman tells of her misery and grief at being separated from her husband to satisfy the honour of his kin, while in The Husband’s Message a man begs his wife to remember her former vows of love and join him overseas where he has found a new home.

  Two other poems are more ambitious in theme and so more profound in their effect. Later hauntingly adapted as a radio play, Seafarer almost anticipates elements of the story of the Flying Dutchman, as it tells of a seemingly endless trek across dark and hostile wastes of sea, through wind-blown ice sprays and the cries of seabirds. It laments ‘the mead hall and the laughter of men’ that symbolize the good life of the soul in this world – the world that the poet has lost. Wanderer, explicitly the lament of an exile, regretting the happiness of the life that is gone and bemoaning the cold and friendless present, is a reflection on the state of the Christian soul resistant to the mercy of God in this transient world. Both poems interweave the realities of the quotidian and the spiritual life; in both the world of the poet is the world of lordship and loyalty. In Wanderer, indeed, the real plight of a friendless but above all lord-less man seems almost to outweigh the allegorical spiritual plight of a soul without God. These two works offer us a glimpse of that wanderlust that brought the Anglo-Saxons to England in the first place, and led many to venture overseas to the Continent. As in the minstrel life of Widsith, the setting is the aristocratic world of the Beowulf poet. It is a world where the queen presides over the feasting of the warriors and even serves them at table. Judith, the text of which survives in the Beowulf manuscript, is a verse adaptation of the apocryphal Book of Judith, which tells how a beautiful Jewish widow slew Holofernes, commander of an Assyrian army, and so ensured the defeat of the invaders. As the Old English poem develops the story, whereas the original was a widow who disarmed her enemy with her beauty and cut off his head as he lay asleep, the patriot heroine of this poem is a warrior virgin triumphant in battle. Pauline Stafford suggests it may have been a tribute to the warlike Æthelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, a star of the next chapter.

  Finally there is a collection of ‘riddles’ – poems, mostly short, designed for social entertainment in mead hall or refectory. Perhaps Aldhelm’s Latin short puzzle poems or enigmata hold the key. Somewhat bookish and intended as exercise texts for the teaching of poetic forms, they were, he said, modelled on joke verses extemporized in late classical times as entertainments at drinking parties. Other churchmen, including an archbishop of Canterbury and St Boniface, were inspired by Aldhelm’s example to pass an idle hour composing such word games, though they rarely produced results to divert a party of serious drinkers – even if Boniface did send the cathedral monks at York two tuns of wine for ‘a merry day with the brethren’ (see chapter 5). The Exeter Book vernacular riddles describe everyday objects in allusive, sometimes opaque, lines demanding to be deciphered. In Anglo-Saxon England, what had pleased the ancient Romans became – in that jewelled world of swords, shields and goblets – a crafted form of entertainment where those objects and many others asked a festive audience to guess their names. As well as mundane, the object of a riddle could be serious: as likely a book of the Gospels as a weathervane, a shield, animals or birds. Number 55 muses on the paradox that the Cross, once the punishment of thieves, is fit to be adorned in gold and jewels. Sometimes they remind us of Robert Frost’s dictum that poetry begins in delight but can end in wisdom. And sometimes they don’t! Number 54 concerns the churning of butter – in which the serving man is ‘one moment forceful . . . the next . . . knocked quite up, blown by his exertion’.3 Some 700 years later Henry Purcell was setting drinking ‘catches’ that might have caught the occasional mood ‘down Exeter way’. One thinks in particular of the footman and scullery maid assembling a kitchen broom: he, called John, with ‘a thing that is long’; she, called Mary, with ‘a thing that is hairy’.

  The Vercelli Book, despite its scholarly Latin title of Codex Vercellensis, is another Old English manuscript held in another cathedral library, this time that of Vercelli in Piedmont, where it was discovered in the 1820s. Apparently in English use in the eleventh century, although written in the tenth, it could have been in the baggage of one of the party that accompanied Bishop Ulf of Dorchester, one of Edward the Confessor’s Norman appointees, when he
attended the church council in that city in 1050. The anthology comprises prose (a life of St Guthlac and twenty-three homilies) and poetry, including the complete text of The Dream of the Rood, fragments of which are found carved on the Ruthwell Cross (see chapter 3).

  The fragments of a poem inscribed on a cross in the seventh century written down in a tenth-century manuscript encapsulate the basic problems of dating most Anglo-Saxon verse. The age of a manuscript in which a work survives is not, evidently, a guaranteed indicator of even the approximate date of composition. Things are further complicated by the fact that the poems we have survive as the result of chance events and are isolated copies made in transmission stretching over generations, probably across dialect boundaries and in any case exploiting archaisms of language for poetic effect. It may well be that the oldest of the long poems are those on biblical themes, notably the Genesis, Exodus and Daniel in the so-called Junius Manuscript, now in Oxford’s Bodleian Library (MS. Junius 11). Bede noted these very biblical themes as ones that Caedmon sang about, so Junius 11 was once known as the ‘Caedmon manuscript’. It is in any case a remarkable production, evidently designed from the start as an illustrated book, the text written first and blanks left for illustrations. The project was never completed but more than fifty line drawings by two artists depict such scenes as God the Creator enthroned above Chaos before the Beginning of the World.