Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  Bede’s library was itself formidable. It contained more than 130 texts, of which we may assume that a preponderant amount came from the collections of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow; the range of his reading was wide indeed, but his principal sources remain Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Gregory. In other words Bede was placing himself directly and deliberately in the tradition of European Christian exegesis. The example of Bede and his successors provides clear evidence that the English nation was an inalienable part of European culture and society, as much a beacon of Western Christendom as Rome or Seville. English learning affected scholars upon the European main-land, but in turn European art and literature came to Canterbury and Jarrow, Winchester and Ely, London and St. Albans. It was always thus. From the time of the Roman occupation, and perhaps earlier, England was an integral part of the culture and texture of Europe. In 314 the bishops of London, York and Lincoln attended a general council in Arles, while French ecclesiastics came to England to combat the English heresies of Pelagius. When Pope Gregory sent Augustine on his mission to England in 597, a connection was established that was not severed until the “submission of the clergy” to Henry VIII in the spring of 1532. The enterprise of the Greek Theodore and the African Hadrian has already been outlined; as Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore also reorganised the administration of the English Church. When we consider “Englishness,” therefore, it is best to understand from what sources it springs.

  The traffic was not in one direction only. It has been said that Boniface, a native of Credition in Devon, “had a deeper influence on the history of Europe than any other Englishman who ever lived.” 6 His missionary work in Hesse and Thuringia led to his veneration as the “Apostle of Germany”; his was a cultural as well as a spiritual enterprise, and Anglo-Saxon texts or illuminations were deposited in the cathedrals and monastic foundations that he established in Germany. There was a common culture. When the founder of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, Benedict Biscop, traveled back to Northumbria after a period in Rome he brought with him many rare books as well as silks and panel paintings from Italy; he created a library at Wearmouth which became the most important centre of learning in northern England. Bede could not have undertaken the tasks of his scholarship without the early benefactions of Biscop. Bede himself, in his Lives of the Abbots, describes the “great mass of books of every sort” with which Biscop returned, as well as sacred relics, “many holy pictures of the saints” and illustrations from the gospels which were placed around the basilica at Wearmouth. Biscop also brought back glaziers and masons from the continent and a “chief cantor” or singing master who taught the monks of England the rules of Roman plainchant. So at the same time as Bede was composing his ecclesiastical history of England, the joint monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow were being furnished and ornamented in the most modern European style.

  At the celebrated Synod of Whitby in 664 when the Celtic and Roman variants of Christianity were engaged in fierce debate, particularly over the dating of Easter and the nature of the “tonsure” or shaved head of the monk, the proponents of the Roman dispensation were successful; among them Wilfrid, a nobleman from Northumbria who had travelled extensively through the regions of the late Roman Empire, delivered the following rebuke to the old Celtic or British cause. “Do you think,” he said, “that a handful of people in one corner of the remotest of islands is to be preferred to the universal Church of Christ which is spread throughout the world?” 7 It was a defining moment and, under the aegis of the Abbess Hilda, the convocation of Whitby turned England firmly in the direction of Rome. Wilfrid’s message was in fact characteristic of English Catholicism, and its sentiments were repeated by Sir Thomas More during his trial for treason in Westminster Hall. “This realme, being but one member and smale parte of the Church, might not make a particuler lawe disagreable with the generall lawe of Christes Universall Catholike Churche.” Wilfrid and More, separated by almost nine hundred years, represent an authentic English sensibility. Both men were identified with a local area—Wilfrid was a native of Northumbria whose ministry was attended by “the goodwill of the whole Northumbrian people, high and low”8 while More was a quintessential Londoner admired and honoured by his fellow citizens—and yet both men considered their national identity within a larger force. Both men, incidentally, were beatified and canonised.

  The history of cross-fertilisation is a long one, and further examples may be adduced. In the eighth century “books actually made in the British Isles appear to have been taken to the continent in quite large quantities, and they were copied locally as far afield as Italy and Spain”;9 the same may be said of Anglo-Saxon sculpture. In Rome there was a special Saxon quarter, known as the Schola Saxonum . In the ninth century King Alfred imported both crafts-men and scholars from the continent of Europe, and his successors continued his example. The monastic reforms of the tenth century, springing from the Benedictine foundations of France and enjoining clear distinctions between the secular and spiritual life, in turn engendered a revival of monastic culture in England; monks were invited from Fleury and Cluny to encourage those of native birth. The tenth and eleventh centuries, as a result, were a period of vigorous activity; it is not surprising, therefore, that “the presence in England of foreign scholars was perhaps never so marked as during the eleventh century.” 10

  Yet one caveat may be entered here. In the “Regularis Concordia” of the late tenth-century Council of Winchester, effectively promulgating the monastic restoration of that period, the emphasis rests upon “one Rule and one country.”11 There always was a recognition of native or national values. Anglo-Saxon scribes continued to use and develop a specifically English script while employing the Carolingian minuscule for Latin texts, a development which is paralleled by the expansion of Old English prose and by the continuing life of the ancient alliterative patterns of verse. It has likewise been supposed that there was “a fairly reluctant acceptance of some styles and fashions; except in a number of more or less isolated cases, there was no wholesale adoption of continental modes.” 12 So there is, on the face of it, a paradox or at least a disparity between England as part of European civilisation and England as the burgeoning source of a native culture.

  The same conditions will present themselves throughout this book. There is at this early stage no need to reconcile them, except to notice the degree of absorption or assimilation present within the English sensibility. It has often been described as a mixed or mongrel kind, a hybrid like the people from which it derives, but it is distinctive precisely because of its willingness to adapt and to adopt other influences. The sensibility is as heterogeneous as its literature, as varied and various as the grand houses or cathedrals which were constructed piece by piece. It has been said that its uniqueness lies in the sum of its differences, but the real process is one of adoption and transformation where two hitherto incompatible influences—in the period under review they may be named as the Celtic and the Classical—are somehow amalgamated and thereby enlarged within a common sensibility. There is conflation and elaboration, not division or reduction. Thus the architecture of the Normans was incorporated and transcended by the English Romanesque, a transformation described by one historian as occurring “on the foundations . . . established by Alfred, Dunstan, Aethelwold, and others in Wessex.” 13 The origins of the English sensibility are once again traced far back.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Song of the Past

  Bede was the true begetter of English history, precisely because of his innate antiquarianism and his obsession with past times. In his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum he “likes to speak of relics of the past, of British defences, of Roman earthworks and walls, of ruined churches, of Horsa’s tomb, and so forth.”1 Like Stukeley and Aubrey, almost a thousand years later, he was already possessed by a vision of English antiquity among old stones and broken monuments; like other Anglo-Saxons before him he wondered at the spectacle of dilapidated temples or ruined towns. Antiquarianism, in England, h
as always been compounded by a vision of Englishness itself; it is not a question of nationalism, which is often mistakenly introduced as an explanation or an easy device, but rather of the sentiment that in the relics of the past there is some inkling of what England is “really like.” Antiquarians are in this respect often political radicals appealing, for example, to Saxon liberties as opposed to a corrupt Hanoverian polity.

  Bede also possessed this indigenous fervour; his introduction of Old English place-names is one example, but he also elucidates the figures of English myth and folklore. He gives the names of the months according to “antiqui Anglorum populi,” and gives English annotations of Latin terms. His national instincts—one might almost describe them as an unacknowledged atavism—resemble those of the church builders and scribes who persisted with a recognisably insular tradition despite the presence and influence of continental models. So Bede charted the movements of the English sea and of the English seasons; he prepared an English translation of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer; he sang native songs. And yet his greatest contribution to national historiography was undoubtedly the History which he composed in Latin; he has been described as “the first Englishman who understood the past and could view it as a whole.” 2 In similar spirit he was the first Englishman to render the past intelligible and accessible, not only to his contemporaries but to all the generations of historians who have succeeded him. Some of those historians, like Gibbon and Trevelyan, have paid tribute to his powers, principally because he lent English history the coherence and consistency of art. His sources included calendars and chronicles, hagiographies and commentaries, annals and compilations, histories and even oral testimony, all of them purified and elevated by his rigorous style.

  Bede’s History is in five books, commencing with the topography of Britain and its earliest inhabitants but ending with a brief prayer to Jesus after its conclusion in 731. The “matter of Britain” is seen within the context of the Roman Empire and of European history, but this does not distract Bede’s attention from the manifold details of his own country; he alludes to Orosius and Pliny and Solinus but then mentions the defensive stakes along the Thames, “which can still be seen” seven hundred years after Caesar’s invasion, or interjects: “I heard this from a man still living.” He narrates the life and death of Alban, and relates them to the town of St. Albans where miraculous healings occur “to this day”; he refers to the “cities, forts, bridges and paved roads” of England and to the violent dynastic struggles of its rulers. There are dreams and battles, invasions and miracles, all manifested within the history of the salvation of a barbaric people.

  Like the monastic illuminators of his period he was always glimpsing the numinous background of human events; he seems obsessed with the precise date of Easter, the subject of one of the most perplexing debates of the period, but only because that day prefigures the resurrection and final judgement. In his narrative the human figures are seen in outline or in rhetorical attitudes, and the events are often couched in the form of allegory; the purpose of his book is moral and eschatological, for the English are the race chosen by God. This was one of Bede’s most enduring themes, and one of his most persuasive legacies. John Milton declared that England was the “Elect Nation,” a prophecy that William Blake endorsed in Jerusalem; the oratorios of Handel were celebrated in part because the history of the Hebrews was seen as a template of English history; in the psalm settings of William Byrd’s “Jerusalem” is also a synonym of England, while the dedication to the King James Bible refers to “our Sion.”

  The legacy of Bede, therefore, was a long one; a religious view of history prevailed until the end of the seventeenth century, while nineteenth-century historians such as Acton and Macaulay employed the secular religion of Whiggism to fashion their narratives. Bede promulgated the important lesson that only a defining vision can properly order an historical narrative, and that good histories can be formulated only by good writers. History is an art, in other words, and cannot be finally distinguished from drama or from fiction.

  Bede in part took his account of early Britain from the narratives of an earlier historian, Gildas, whose writing is suffused with biblical imagery and Christian lamentation. The works of Bede and Gildas may not be “true” histories, any more than Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution are “true” histories, but the power of their writing commanded assent for many years.

  Gildas was a Briton whose sixth-century De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae(a history of England from the Roman conquest to his own time, with a lament on the evils of his day) was composed in Latin for a European audience, but it has its touches of native poetry. England is an island “stiff with icy cold,” whose faithlessness may cause it to be “totally enveloped in thick darkness of black night.” The nation, invaded by Picts and Scots, lies like a fallen warrior “stunned and groaning” in the very mouths of enemies who resemble “wolves rabid with deepest hunger.” The defeated Britons flee “to mountainous regions, overhanging hills, fortified crags, and to most dense forests and marine rocks.” 3 As in Saxon poetry, the landscape is always bleak. Gildas employs a deliberately plangent and embellished style, with exclamations and rhetorical questions, designed as much to edify and admonish as to inform. He was not above invention either, since he saw no point in spoiling a good story or ruining an interesting moral. But he was so powerful a writer that many of his more notable misrepresentations were accepted until recent times. It was Gildas who promulgated the myth that the Romans and the British Celts were thoroughly at odds with each other, distinct and separate races, whereas the archaeological evidence suggests prolonged intermingling. And yet Gildas’s spiritual fervour was so great that he was revered as a saint and prophet as well as an historian, while at the same time he created an historical myth or model which survived for five hundred years.

  Certainly it was maintained by the ninth-century historian Nennius, who borrowed from both Bede and Gildas, thus continuing the tradition of religio-historical writing which dominated English historiography at least until the publication in 1670 of Milton’s History of England.

  Nennius collected “The Matter of Britain” from many sources, but not the least of his virtues lies in his account of King Arthur. The Arthurian legends came to dominate the concept of Englishness, but Nennius obtains the prize as the first “historian” to describe this notorious if ultimately elusive king. He also lists a number of “marvels” to be seen in England—among them a hot pool in Bath which changes its temperature according to the wishes of the bather, and wells of salt near Droitwich. The love of the marvellous may again be a national trait.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which recorded events in England from the beginning of the Christian era to 1154, is filled with wonders—the sign of the cross is seen upon the face of the moon, dragons fly through the air, fiery flashes light up the landscape—while its unadorned transcript of events is interlaced with cadences and images that might have been taken out of contemporaneous epic poetry. Its narrative of the Mercian or Northumbrian poet Cynewulf and his rivalry with Cyneheard, dated 757, “has often been called the first story in English” and is closely related “to a completely lost oral-prose tradition” in the manner of “Icelandic saga,”4 which suggests that the island was once full of sounds and sweet airs. The first story in English may have seemed like a song.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Lives of Others

  If Bede fashioned a history for England, he also populated it with characters; as well as an historian he was a biographer who helped to create a form that has exercised a peculiar fascination over the English imagination ever since. There had been earlier “lives of the saints.” There were lives of Cuthbert and of Columba, of Wilfrid and of Guthlac, all of them related to the same essential hagiographic pattern, beginning with a miraculous birth and ending with a calm or visionary death. It has been estimated that, before 900, some six hundred diffe
rent lives were being read throughout the country.

  The popularity of English biography can be dated quite accurately, therefore, particularly in the lives of saints associated with a specific locality or region. St. Cuthbert dwelled upon Farne Island, a desolate spot close to Lindisfarne, while St. Guthlac withdrew to Crowland in the Lincolnshire fens; here by prayer and miracle they were able to control their environment, as if their attachment to a certain area lent them special powers. It was another way of asserting the spirit of place.

  These first English lives borrow themes and techniques from the secular poetry of their period, suggesting once more that the concept of form is a fluid one. Biography is as much an aspect of literature as epic verse. The landscape of the Guthlac biographies (there are two separate texts) is that of a “wide wilderness” populated by fantastic demons and is not dissimilar to that of Beowulf; Guthlac himself is “steadfast in truth” just like the hero of the epic poem, and is deemed to be a warrior for Christ of the same heroic temper as those who fight in secular verse. This mingling of biography and fiction seems to spring naturally from English writing; a survey of sixteenth-century literature, for example, has recently concluded that a “notable feature of later English experiments with form” is “the blurring of the boundaries between legend and history.”1