A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  Old English Prose

  Anglo-Saxon England [provides] the leading example of a vernacular culture worthy of the name in the whole of western Europe. French and German did not achieve a like status of literary quality and use till the twelfth century, whereas Old English had [before that time] reigned for hundreds of years.4

  And nowhere in western Europe does another national tradition, not even the rich vein of Old Irish and Middle Irish literature, with its annals such as the Annals of Ulster, have a documentary source to equal the Anglo-Saxon Chonicle for extent and detail. From the opening sentence of the Genealogical Preface to the (Ā) manuscript commonly known as the Parker Chronicle (‘In the year of Christ’s Nativity 494, Cerdic and Cynric his son landed at Cerdicsora with five ships’), to its last, the election in 1154 of William of Waterville to be abbot of Peterborough Abbey, as recorded in the (E) manuscript commonly called the Laud Chronicle, the various versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provide an almost unbroken sequence of annals over a span of 660 years. From the 890s the writers are sometimes contemporaries of the events they describe: we are told, for example, that Abbot William ‘has made a good beginning’ and, with the writer, hope that ‘Christ [may] grant that he end as well’.

  But the Chronicle (perhaps ‘Chronicles’ is better, as there are a number of different copies and independent variants) tends to favour the house of Wessex, not surprisingly, if indeed the so-called ‘common stock’ of the various texts originated in the late ninth century at the instigation of King Alfred (see chapter 8). Between 892 and 975 copies were made and continued at various centres – Winchester up to the year 1001, Canterbury, Abingdon, Worcester and Peterborough – which vary in local emphasis and material. For example, at some time in the eleventh century the Winchester copy (sometimes known as the Parker Chronicle after Archbishop Matthew Parker of Canterbury) was moved to Canterbury, and its new continuators inserted various items relating to Kentish history for earlier years. There are various fragments of other versions and some passages are in Latin. But these are a small percentage of the whole. It has been described as

  a diary whose entries were made year by year instead of day by day . . . There are many years for which no entries were made at all . . . and [many] . . . which record the barest details of battles and of the succession of kings and bishops. But at other times . . . the Chronicle expands into a full and detailed narrative of enthralling interest and of the highest historical value.5

  As an ordered presentation of a sequence of events it compares poorly with some of the Continental Latin annals and there are times when it breaks away from the strict historical narrative in digressions that, if published together, could make a varied and fascinating anthology. For the year 755 [757] a dramatic account of a murderous attack by elements hostile to King Cynewulf of Wessex on his royal love nest has been called the first short story in English. There are incisive pen-portraits, including one of William the Conqueror, and snaps of reportage like the slaughter of monks at Glastonbury in 1083. The Chronicle even includes one of the pinnacles of Anglo-Saxon poetry, a majestic fragment commemorating the military epic of the victory at Brunanburh (937). But it is, before all, an evolving work of English prose. A recent analysis has proposed that its many scribes aimed at a style with a hidden numerological element patterned on contemporary theories of structures seen to lie behind the Biblical writings.6 To the Anglo-Saxons themselves, one imagines, more important than the Chronicle were the various Biblical texts available to them in their own language for centuries. The first of these biblical translators was the Venerable Bede himself. At his death he was working on an English version of St John’s Gospel and we know from one of his letters that he had provided English translations of basic texts such as the Lord’s Prayer to priests who had no Latin, so that they could teach them to their congregations.

  Ælfric, a distinguished scholar born about 950 and as prolific as Bede, wrote mainly in the vernacular. In him Anglo-Saxon prose achieved its zenith of stylistic beauty and clarity of expression. Sometimes he adapts rhetorical devices from classical Latin authors to great effect; at others his flowing prose rhythms follow the alliterative verse patterns of Anglo-Saxon verse. He influenced writers of Old English well into the twelfth century.

  Ælfric was educated at the monastic school in Winchester, under Bishop Æthelwold. When he was about twenty he was sent as an instructor to the monastery at Cerne Abbas in Dorset and then, in 1005, appointed as abbot of the newly founded minster at Eynsham, Oxfordshire, where he spent the rest of his life. The foundation was new, but its buildings were on a site settled since the Bronze Age – possibly a place of traditional sacred associations. He wrote a Latin grammar in English, which aimed in part to explain Old English and was also a handbook to the speaking of Latin. This Colloquy takes the form of conversations between the teacher and his pupil, a monastic novice, and various lay people such as farm-workers, hunters and merchants. One suggestion is that it might have been intended as a sort of play, to be acted by the children of the cloister. Ælfric’s very lively dialogues tell us a good deal about the life in early eleventh-century England and also about the man himself – obviously an alert observer, fascinated by the world about him. He also wrote many books in English and sermons based on the writings of the Church Fathers, among them Bede. He wrote in English, he tells us, because other writers in that language often contained errors that could mislead ‘unlearned men’ who could not check the Latin. One of his ‘Catholic Homilies’ is an Easter sermon about the presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the communion service. The debate had been running in Latin theological texts for more than a century and continued well after Ælfric’s time. A formulation of the Roman Catholic doctrine of ‘transubstantiation’ (a term first used in the twelfth century) was given in the documents of the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent (1545–63). According to John Godfrey, in his book The Church in Anglo-Saxon England, ‘it is impossible to square Ælfric’s teaching with that later defined by the Roman Catholic Church’ and just three years after the final session of Trent a ‘modern English’ version of the Easter sermon was published with the approval of Anglican bishops, though it is equally difficult to make it ‘square’ with the Anglican Article concerned with the doctrine. Be that as it may, it is hardly surprising that the Post-Reformation Protestant church in England cherished what they called ‘A Testimonie of Antiquitie’, written by an Englishman in English. Perhaps of more interest to us is the fact that Ælfric tackled such abstract and elusive concepts in his native tongue at all. No doubt he felt, in his awkward Anglo-Saxon way, that a central article of Faith enjoined on all Christians should be explicable in the language of the believer.

  Another matter of great importance to him was the question of the plight of the Christian soul in the afterlife, awaiting the Day of Judgement or Doomsday. Debate on the matter went back at least as far as St Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century. Related questions were the meaning of ‘Paradise’: was it to be identified [typologically] with the Garden of Eden as an equivalent of heaven, as St Augustine had held, or was it a location distinct from both Eden and heaven. In touching on such matters, Ælfric was working in a tradition of Anglo-Saxon theology stretching back to Bede’s Latin ‘Vision of Drythelm’ and other ideas of an ‘interim paradise’, which fed into the formulation of the doctrine of Purgatory in the twelfth century.7 Ælfric produced at least forty lives of saints and planned an English version of the Old Testament (part translation/part commentary), of which the first seven books were completed.

  Although prompted by a request from a West Saxon aristocrat for an English translation of the book, it was turned out as a sermonwriter’s reference crib, written in the end, like all but one of Ælfric’s works, as a text to aid his fellow clerics, above all the ill-educated parish clergy. This tradition stretched back to Alfred and his conviction that a well-grounded clergy was the life-blood of a vigorous church and that, in turn, was the guarantee of a vigo
rous and healthy nation. Such a view of the role of the church seems bizarre in today’s secular Britain, but in the tenth century it was received wisdom throughout Europe. The difference was that in England the church establishment respected its front-line troops, the parish priests, and that, while many bewailed their lack of Latin (as no doubt Peter Cook’s E. L. Wistey would have done), others in typically English fashion not only offered them a helping hand through the difficulties of the alien language used by the church, as Ælfric did in his Colloquy, but also took immediate practical steps to instruct the priests in a language they could understand – their own.

  The exception among Ælfric’s programme of texts for priests was a biblical treatise designed as a layman’s guide to the Old and New Testaments. A long preface addresses the thegn (with estates near Eynsham) who had prompted the book and who apparently had been pestering him for yet more English books. One glimpses an educated reading public among the higher ranks of Anglo-Saxon society and indeed Ealdorman Æthelweard (d. c. 998), the man who had commissioned Ælfric’s Bible version, and was the author of the Latin Chronicon, based on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (see chapter 5). Claiming descent from King Alfred’s brother Æthelred I, he wrote the book for his German cousin, abbess Matilda of Essen, about the year 980. He praised their ancestors’ skill in turning books from the ornate Latin tongue into English, so that not just scholars but any lay person who may read it could, in a measure, hear the ‘tearful passion’ of the book of Boethius brought to life in their own language.

  After 1066 the writing of English continued for some time. As we have noted, the Peterborough version of the Chronicle was kept up until 1154: for the best part of ninety years this great Benedictine house on the edge of the Fens, last shrine of the arm of St Oswald, continued its record of national events in the language of the subject people. Of the other five versions extant not one runs later than 1070. The Peterborough continuation, kept up with annual entries to 1136, and intermittently thereafter, seems almost like a gesture of defiance to the alien regime.

  The English allegiance was evidently very strong at the abbey. In 1066 Abbot Leofric (nephew, by the way, of Earl Leofric and his wife Godiva of Coventry), went with Harold’s army to Hastings, dying a week after the battle. The monks immediately elected an Englishman named Brand as his successor – and intrepidly paid homage to Edgar the Ætheling of the royal house of Wessex as the next king. Eventually William angrily agreed to Abbot Brand’s installation but imposed on Peterborough the highest rate of military levy on its income of any abbey in the kingdom. With the death of Brand in 1069, the Norman king imposed a Norman abbot, Thuroldus of Fécamp – ‘more a man of war than a man of god’. And yet as late as 1098 the monks of Peterborough were still petitioning to be allowed to appoint an Englishman. Then on the night of 4 August 1116, the Eve of the Feast of St Oswald, a fire destroyed most of the abbey buildings, including the library, and consumed the old Chronicle manuscript. Some five years later the work of restoring the text began. The decision to undertake this work is surely significant. The story of Old England was by now an antiquarian’s memory, but the abbot of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, was approached for the loan of a Kentish Chronicle (now lost). Thus Peterborough could be brought up to date for the eleventh century and then the Chronicle was continued by various scribes for the next half century. Admittedly there may have been motives other than pure antiquarianism and patriotism at work. The updating scribe for the earlier periods took the opportunity of inserting various entries that (we have seen) notably favoured the abbey!

  The language of Old English

  While King Alfred’s charters called him King of the Anglo-Saxons in the later part of his reign, he called the language that he spoke and wrote Englisc; the Latin scholars of the realm called it lingua Anglica or lingua Saxonica; we, today, call it Anglo-Saxon or Old English. Along with Old High German, Old Saxon and Old Frisian it forms a sub-group of the Indo-European family of languages (the ties with Old Frisian were so close that some scholars talk of an Anglo-Frisian language). The differences between the language spoken by the original invaders and that of the English subjects of William the Conqueror were considerable and there were also important differences between three broad dialect areas: Kent, East Anglian and Saxon. The most notable was West Saxon, which, having some features and loan words from Anglian and other dialects, became the principal literary language of the surviving collections of Anglo-Saxon writings, both prose and verse. We do not know when Beowulf was first declaimed in some noble mead hall, nor how long an oral tradition preceded the Beowulf manuscript through which it came down to us, but that manuscript is in the West Saxon literary language. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle shows the evolution of that language from Early up to Late West Saxon, the form used by Ælfric.

  Compared with the West Saxon legacy, the literary survivals from other dialect areas are meagre indeed. Among them is the mid-tenth century Late Northumbrian version of the text interlined between the stately lines of the Latin of the Lindisfarne Gospels, ‘the oldest surviving translation of the Gospels into the English language’. Maybe so, but was there not perhaps some antiquarian aesthete among the community of St Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street who fumed, necessarily in silence, at the insult offered to the majestic calligraphy by the somewhat spidery hand of Brother Aldred? We know the translator’s name because he himself records it, eager, it would seem, to associate himself with the genius of the illuminator, Bishop Eadfrith, now dead more than two centuries. Aldred was hardly a model of the monastic virtue of humility (after all, the bishop had not seen fit to record his own name in the holy book), yet but for him one genius of the western artistic tradition would still be anonymous.

  It seems the Anglo-Saxons introduced runes to Britain (their alphabet of some thirty plus characters is larger than that of Old Norse, which appears about 800). Even so it survives in only a few inscriptions, such as the poetic fragment of the Dream of the Rood on the Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire. The Latin alphabet in the elegant script brought to England by the Irish missionaries of the early seventh century was more usually employed both for English and Latin works. Was the art of writing in Old English invented by an Italian cleric in the early seventh century? A few runic characters were taken over for sounds for which the Romans had no letter. Thorn (þ) and eth (ð) were used for the th sound in think and then, and a third letter called wynn, confusingly similar to the Latin p, for the ‘w’ sound. There were a few other characters including ‘7’, an equivalent of the ampersand for the Old English ‘and’.

  The study of the evolution of both literary style and fashions in handwriting is an academic specialization all of its own. For example, if we look at the ‘Parker’ manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, we find that the long first section, which starts with the year 494 and ends in the year 891, is written in a single hand. The records for the next 180 years down to the last entry in 1070 are made in a succession of hands, more or less contemporary with the events they describe, which makes it possible to trace the changes in official script and the introduction of new vocabulary. As to pronunciation, refined comparative studies of variant patterns of spellings and mis-spellings led one scholar to the conclusion that they were probably the result of dictation and, moreover, the result of a ‘Welshman dictating to an English scribe’.8

  Runic characters, it is believed, were originally devised for engraving on wood. If so they take us back to what one might call the prehistory of book production. As is well known, both the English word ‘book’ and the German word Buch share a common root with the word for the beech tree (Buche in German). What is perhaps not so generally remembered is that the Latin word liber, ‘a book’ (French livre), has as its primary meaning ‘the inner bark of a tree; from the use of this in writing’.9 Thus the ancestors of Caesar appear to have used the same basic writing support as did the ancestors of Bede. However, their Mediterranean alphabet was utterly different from the Norse script, even though this in fact o
riginated in the south. The decision, taken presumably about the year 600 in Kent, to render the language of the newly converted Germanic peoples of Britain into written form, for recording in Roman style the Laws of King Æthelberht, meant devising a written alphabetic equivalent of Anglo-Saxon. This in turn ‘involved the transformation of sound into writing and required informed decisions on spelling and grammar’.10 Some clerics may of course have taken the trouble to master runes and there is some evidence for familiarity with the runic script among the lay educated classes of society. Runic inscriptions are found on a few Anglo-Saxon coin issues and there are runic signs scribbled in the margins next to some of the Exeter Book riddles, as if intended as clues to the solutions. But at a time when, as Robert Runcie observed, ‘everyone wanted to be Roman’, the Latin alphabet was bound to prevail.

  Latin: learning and literature

  Anglo-Saxon men and women of letters produced a wide range of works in Latin, the language of the Church and Continental officialdom. In fact, it was one specialized item in this category, namely ‘the Latin land charter (technically, diploma) and the associated vernacular documents dealing with land and property’, that, in the words of Susan Kelly, provided ‘the primary and most accessible record of the interaction between early Anglo-Saxon society and the written word’.11

  Compared with the veil of printed matter – books, newspapers, public notices, advertisements, DIY instructions, football programmes, legal documentation, etc. – through which we tend to see our world, in Anglo-Saxon England even an educated layman or woman could pass from one year’s end to the next with barely sight of a page of script. And when one did confront the written word it was more likely to be a land deed, or perhaps a relative’s last will and testament, than a book of verse or a page of history. Few if any outside the church read for business or pleasure. There were (worldly) churchmen too, one suspects, for whom documents of law might hold greater treasures even than Holy Writ. For ‘unlike its Italian models which originated in lay society . . . the early Anglo-Saxon diploma is essentially an ecclesiastical document’ drafted in a bishop’s or monastery’s scriptorium.