CHAPTER IX

THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY

WHEN, after the year 613, the Conquest was practically complete, the English had settled down over all the open country into an agricultural life, family by family, kinsfolk by kinsfolk, collected into hamlets round the heads of their houses. They hedged and ditched their villages, built their farm-steads, each with its garth and outhouses, laid out the arable land and the meadow outside the hedge, organised their village government, and established the places where the folk met for religious worship and for council. As to the RomanBritish cities which they had sacked and burned, these remained in ruins, to be haunted by the owl and the fox. A long time passed by before this agricultural people cared to live in towns. They were like the Douglas; they liked better to hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak.

There was no further war with the Welsh, except upon the marches of the north, west and south, or when a Welsh king like Cadwallon united his forces with a king like Penda against another English king. The wars which were now waged by the English were those of English king with English king for over-lordship. Even amidst these wars agriculture went steadily on, and the arts of peace were developed in home and village life. The English forged the ploughshare rather than the sword. They built weirs, and fished, and set up water-mills by the rivers. Boat-building, brewing, leather-tanning, pottery, dyeing, weaving, the working of gold and silver, and embroidery, grew and soon began to flourish. The days of merchandise succeeded the days of piracy and plunder; life became gentler, nearer in spirit to the homes of England as we now conceive them. The main struggle was closed.

1 Mills.- Corn was usually ground by the women in stone querns, but we find water-mills in a problematical charter of 838 (Ecgberht). "Et unam molinam in torrente qui dicitur holan beorges burna."-Earle's Charters, p. 288.

There are many records in Anglo-Saxon poetry which have to do with this daily life of the people-life inland, life on the seaboard, life on the sea, customs and manners, implements, hunting, tilling, and war. Of war and arms I have already written. This chapter and that which follows it are intended to bring forward such of these records as have a literary interest of their own, and will at the same time illustrate the English settlement as well as the English life on the sea. Most of them belong to a time when Christianity had been thoroughly established, but the manner of life and the matters mentioned in them were much the same in the sixth and seventh as in the eighth and ninth century. The fresh gentleness which Christianity added scarcely touches the things which are here discussed. Being thus independent of date, it is more convenient to bring these records together under such a title as The settlement of the English, in poetry.

These records are found in short poems, such as the Riddles of Cynewulf, and in scattered lines in the midst of longer poems. To turn aside and notice them in the midst of the general history of literature would confuse the main narration. To omit them, on the other hand, would be to leave out some striking pieces of early English poetry. But I hope my readers will understand that these chapters are not intended to be a treatise on the Settlement, or an attempt to discuss all that pertains to the manners and customs of the English. Such a treatise belongs to the historian and the antiquarian, and has been admirably done by others. My object is to set in this framework the descriptions of the early English life, of its habits and way of thinking which are to be found in the poetry of Northumbria, and I shall not travel beyond this aim. I say the poetry of Northumbria, because I believe it was in that part of England that poets chiefly wrote; and the scenery, the manners, the spirit of the people described in such records as the Riddles, belong rather to the Angles than to the Jutes or Saxons.

Inland, then, in the seventh century, the Angles were settled along the rivers, on the plains overlooked by moor and down, by the sea, and among the fens. Their hamlets rose on the site of the Roman villas, on either side of the Roman roads, wherever the Romans had drained the marshes, in every fertile vale or plain where the provincials had cultivated the land. The masses of forest country, the moors and mountains were left unoccupied by this agricultural people and were haunted by giant and elf and monster. But when

the better sites were filled, the land, as the English pushed their advance by the water-paths, was cultivated up to the edge of the forest-waste, and day by day the axe and the plough wore their way into it and reclaimed it. The poorer and the more outcast set up their solitary huts on the banks and islands of the fens, and made a precarious living by fishing and trapping. They were, in fact, squatters; and it was only afterwards when pieces of the folk-land were allotted to the king's comrades and others that these men might come into employment on an estate.1

Of the kind of scenery among which these settlers in the fens lived we have a slight sketch in the sixty-first riddle of Cynewulf. It tells of a desert place near the shore, traversed by a channel up which the tide flowed, and where the reeds grew which were made into the Reed-Flute, which is the answer to the riddle. I translate the whole. The picture, at the end, of the lover talking in music to his sweetheart, music that none understood but she, is full of human feeling, but the point on which I dwell is the scenery. It is that of a settlement where only a few scattered huts stood amid the desolate marsh. Such, at first, were the homes of the Gyrwas among the fens. It is the Reed that speaks

by the sea-wall near,

On the sand I stayed,
All beside the surge-inflowing!
Where I first was fastened.
Watched among the waste
But the brown-backed billow,

Firm I sojourned there,
Only few of men

where I wonnèd on the earth.
at each break of day,

With its water-arms enwrapt me! Little weened I then,
That I ere should speak, in the after days,

Mouthless o'er the mead-bench.

Only for us two, utter boldly there,

Message in my speech, so that other men
Would not be aware 2 of my words to thee.

There is another passing sketch of the same kind of scenery in the twenty-third riddle, when men come riding to the seachannels on war-horses. The flood is too deep, and the press of the tide between the steep banks too strong for their passage. They mount a strange wain, proudly carrying their spears on

1 Kemble quotes a passage from a translation of St. Augustine's Soliloquia, which illustrates the text: But it pleaseth every man, when he hath built himself some cottage on his lord's laen, with his assistance, for a while to take up his rest thereon, and hunt and fowl and fish, and in divers ways provide for himself upon the laen, both by sea and land, until the time when, by his lord's compassion, he can earn a bocland and eternal inheritance." - Kemble, vol. i. p. 312.

2 Literally, "Should not repeat our words."

their gray war-stallions. The answer to the riddle is obscure (Prehn thinks it to be the Month), but the scenery is clear. It is of a broad, deep-ditched channel, the stream of which in the fen-lands meets the rough incoming of the tide.' Near such a place on the shore where it fell to the sea Cynewulf would see the sight he describes in another riddle, "wood enrotten, heaps of weed, lying, flung together, vilely on the earth"; and more inland, in the hollows of the earth, "the black-faced fen that smelt so evilly of filth, where the fen-frogs swiftly leaped into the dark water," where the Elk-sedge, as the Rune Song sings, "waxed in the water, wounding and burning" every man who touched it. We are brought into another part of the country, probably the borders of Cumbria, where in riddle lxxi. the Ox speaks, and tells how weary he was among the rough paths of the border moorland. "I was silent," the Ox says (and it is in Cynewulf's manner to sympathise in this fashion with the suffering and joy of animals); "I never told any man when the point of the goad was bitter to me, but I was

"With the swart herdsman.
Wended Welsh marches,

Bound 'neath a yoke-beam."

Farther I journeyed, wandered the moors

The swart herdsman is a Welsh slave. Swart is the usual epithet of the Welsh as against the fairer Englishman. In another riddle (xiii.) a "black-haired Welshwoman presses and shakes the ox-hide." Also in riddle liii. the "Welshwoman of dark tresses" carries to and fro the buckets from the well, and in another we hear of the "swart thegn with the dusky face" who works with the student in the monastery. Evidently in Northumbria there was a crowd of Welsh used as servants in the farmhouses and the convents of the eighth century.

A great part of the country was forest, that is, wood and wild land, heath and moor, and a supernatural terror brooded over it. In the moor-pools dwelt the water-elves, and in the wreathing mists and driving snow on the fells men saw mighty moorgangers stalking, fiends of the lonely places, such as their fathers saw in the land from which they came. Grendelsmere was not a name given without reason. "The Thyrs"-that is the giant "dwells alone in the fen," that is, in the morasses of the mountains. Dark elves haunted also the hills and moors. We hear of beorg-aelfen, dun-aelfen, muntaelfen. The howling of the wolves filled these waste hills at night, and many a wanderer,

-

1 The stream shall in the waves, in the sea-floods mingle. - Gnomic Verses.

lost on them, was devoured. the poem on the Fates of men, "the grizzly heath-tramper; his mother shall wail his death." In the caves of the moor-cliffs the outlaw lurked, as Grettir did in Iceland, and the British who fled from the sacking of the towns took refuge in them, and miserably starved and died. Sometimes in Christian times the hermit seeking a religious solitude exiled himself among these solitudes. The demons, who have taken the place of the giant and the elf, contend with him for the possession of these green hills which they grieve to leave, and reproach him bitterly for depriving them of their homes, as Caliban reproaches Prospero. In the same wild solitudes lived the Dragon of our forefathers' imagination, couched over his hoard of gold, terrible in the dreadful recesses of the cave

"Him shall the wolf eat," says

Horridus horriferas spelunca cumbo latebras

a phrase of Eusebius which is not apart from the lines in the Gnomic Verses: "The Dragon will dwell in the barrow on the hill, old, and proud of his treasures." Even down to Shakspere ran the tradition

Like to a lonely dragon, that his fen

Makes fear'd, and talk'd of more than seen.

Coriolanus, Act iv. Sc. i.

The pathless woodland was, however, nearer to the life of the English than the moor. A great number of the settlements were on the outskirts of the wood forest. It was covered with beech1 and oak, ash and maple, linden and birch. Alders clung to the banks of its streams and pools. A thick undergrowth of thorn and holly blocked it up and climbed the ledges of the cliffs within it, where the great birds of prey had their home. The English likened this vast covering of forests to curly locks upon the head and shoulders of Earth. In the Riddle on Creation Earth has no need of wimple or cape

For upon me wonderfully
So that on my shoulders
Curly locks full curiously.

waxeth on my head,
they may shimmer bright,

This is paralleled by the Icelandic imagery, and we ourselves may compare Keats' lovely phrase of the pines

1 Earle shows very good reason for his belief, not only that the beech existed in these times, but also the fir, though Cæsar had denied both these trees to Britain. Geologists would not agree with Cæsar, who must have been misinformed.-Land Charters, p. 474.