in history can be called unfortunate, that just as England reached this point, and under the supremacy of Ecgberht might have won the peace which literature requires for her steady growth, the Danes broke in and swept away a harvest which might have ripened to a full ear.

CHAPTER XIII

THE RISE OF LITERATURE

Wessex and Mercia

THE previous chapters have discussed the way of life of the English so far as it is represented in their literature before 800. A good deal of their poetry has been used in illustration, and has left, I trust, on the minds of the readers of this book, a distinct impression of their manner of thought when under those manifold emotions received from man and nature the shaping of which in musical words, when it is done lawfully and beautifully, is poetry.

These discussions have been general, and the quotations taken from poems which were written as far as we know during the seventh and eighth centuries. It will be fitting now, even at the risk of some repetition, to give a clear account, in order, of the rising of literature in our land after the coming of Christianity, and of the circumstances which surrounded and influenced its youth. This naturally falls into two distinct parts literature in the South and literature in the North. The former may be more briefly dismissed than the latter. It rose rapidly with the arrival at Canterbury of Theodore and Hadrian; it decayed as rapidly after the death of Ealdhelm in 709. Moreover, it can scarcely be called English literature. What remains to us is wholly Latin, and might be left altogether aside in this history were it not that it has a certain bearing on the vernacular literature of Northumbria. In the North, on the contrary, our chief interest is in the vernacular poetry, and it ran, we may roughly say, a course of a hundred years. Caedmon began to write about the year 670, one year later than the coming of Theodore to Canterbury. The probable date of Cynewulf's last poem lies somewhere between 770 and 790.

The two literatures then began together, but their course was very different. The vernacular literature of the North

grew into a flourishing manhood; the Latin literature of the South perished in its youth. Literature in the South was an exotic, and it died because it was an alien. Literature in the North was of native growth; and it died from an alien blow. Its murderers were the Danes. In the ninth century, then, literature, north and south, had perished. The time came when below and above the Humber England's voice was as silent as the grave. Then the South again took up the pen it had dropped, and Ælfred restored not only the native, but the Latin literature of England. As yet, however, the time of Ælfred is far away, and I turn to the history of literature in Wessex and Mercia, from the coming of Augustine to its silence from 597 to the death (if I have to choose a date) of Ethelhard of Canterbury in 805. After that I shall tell the history, in order, of Northumbrian literature till its overthrow by the Danes.

one at

The books Augustine brought to England were a Bible in two volumes, a Testament, a Psalter, an exposition of the Gospels and Epistles, a book of martyrs and some apocryphal lives of the Apostles. Fresh books arrived in 601, and it is said that two of these MSS. of the Gospels still exist Corpus, Cambridge, the other at the Bodleian.' Shortly after the baptism of 10,000 (?) persons in the Swale on Christmas Day 597, the place where the cathedral rose was occupied, and the abbey of SS. Peter and Paul (St. Augustine's) was founded. It became the seat of the first learning and literature that Rome carried to this land, and the books Augustine brought over were enshrined in it. The first library was begun, and with it the first schools. We cannot, however, say for certain that the Latin Mission at once founded schools in Kent, though Baeda says, speaking of thirty years later, that the wish of Sigeberht to have schools in East Anglia, such as he had seen in Gaul, was carried into effect by Bishop Felix, after the pattern of the schools in Kent. What is interesting is a conjecture of Earle's that there may have been Roman schools of grammar still existing in Canterbury when Augustine arrived. If Canterbury was not wholly destroyed

1 If the illuminated MS. of the Gospels in Latin now in C.C. College be in reality that sent by Gregory to Augustine, as Wanley thought, it is a great treasure. Professor Westwood thinks that the drawings are the oldest remains of Roman pictorial art in this country, and, with the exception of a fourth century MS. at Vienna, the oldest he can discover anywhere.

The MS. of the Gospels in the Bodleian, which Westwood also declares is one of the oldest Roman MSS. in this country, is rubricated, but is without miniatures.

by the invaders, it is just possible that the Roman schools may have been spared.

It is still more interesting to know that not long after Augustine came, in 597, the Witan was held which enacted the first code of ancient laws that we possess written in our mother tongue. The title of this code runs thus: "This be the dooms that Æthelbriht, King, ordained in Augustine's days." They were written in Roman letters, and this is what Baeda means when he says that they were "according to the Roman precedent" (juxta exempla Romanorum). They are the first piece of written English of which we hear.1 We do not, however, possess them in the original Kentish dialect, but in a West Saxon translation, and in a register that dates from the twelfth century. This Kentish dialect2 is, then, the first vehicle of English prose, and the schools of Kent were the rude cradle of English learning. However, there was very little care for English. All the archbishops up to the death of Honorius in 653 were Italian; and neither understood the English character nor could sympathise with any vernacular poetry. A certain amount of Art was, however, introduced in these first fifty years. Architecture, after the Roman model, began. Canterbury Cathedral was built of stone, in imitation of the Basilica of St. Peter, and Honorius introduced the Roman music. He was succeeded by Frithona (Deus Dedit), an Englishman, after whose death no archbishop was elected for four years. Then the election was put into the hands of Pope Vitalian, who sent Theodore of Tarsus, and Hadrian, an African monk of the Nisidan monastery, the first as archbishop, the second as his deacon, to England. Both were admirable scholars, and with them left an English scholar then staying

1 In 673 the next Kentish code appeared. "Hlothhaere and Eadric, kings of the men of Kent, enlarged the laws their predecessors had made," etc.; and in 696 King Withred (691-725) se mildesta cyning Cantwara — "set forth more dooms."

2 It is thought that the Epinal Glossary best represents the Kentish dialect. It is of the seventh century; an English-Latin Dictionary. There are also six documents of the first half of the ninth century which are written in this dialect (Codex Dipl. 226, 228, 229, 231, 235, 238.-Kemble). There is, too, a Psalter, with a gloss, now supposed to be a Kentish gloss. The Palæographical Society declares that this Psalter is of the year 700, and the gloss late in the ninth or at the beginning of the tenth century. Professor Westwood called it the Psalter of St. Augustine. It is plainly written in England and not in Rome, and is sometimes called the Surtees Psalter. It is worth while to record these remains of the Kentish dialect, because "from this dialect the West Saxon was developed; in other words, it is the earliest form of that imperial dialect in which the great body of extant Old English literature is preserved. Nevertheless, the Kentish did not ripen into the maturer outlines of the West Saxon dialect without the intervention of a third dialect, etc. etc."-Earle, A.-S. Literature, p. 97.

in Rome, Benedict Biscop. In May 669 Theodore was enthroned at Canterbury. Immediately after his enthronement he visited the English kingdoms, and he began to make English the tongue of Christianity by commanding that every father should take care that his children be taught to say the Creed and the Lord's Prayer in the vulgar tongue.' At the same time he took possession of St. Augustine's monastery, made it a school of learning, and set over it, till Hadrian's arrival in 671, Benedict Biscop. When Hadrian came, Theodore determined to make the English clergy a body of scholars. Day by day a greater number of disciples gathered into Canterbury from Ireland as well as England. "Streams of knowledge," says Baeda, "daily flowed from Theodore and Hadrian to water the hearts of their hearers." This was the true beginning of literature in the south of England.

There were classes for ecclesiastical music, arithmetic, and astronomy; for caligraphy and illuminating books; for medical subjects, for composition, especially for the making of Latin verse. Greek and Hebrew formed part of the instruction; the Latin writers were read. Rhetoric, theology, and the related subjects were taught; and Theodore's reputation for ecclesiastical learning and canon law extended over Europe. Some record of this learning soon appeared, and was stored in the library. This was the Penitential of Theodore, drawn up by some priest from Theodore's oral answers to questions concerning discipline; the first book of the kind published by authority in the Western Church, and "the foundation," Hook says, "of all the other 'libelli penitentiales' in England." Thus Canterbury became not only a centre of scholarship but a producer of books; and from this time there was no need to seek for learned foreigners to fill the bishops' chairs in the English kingdoms, or to instruct the people. The land had its own scholars, and soon taught its teachers.

Brihtwald, the next archbishop, is only interesting to us because he studied his own tongue. "He was a man," says Baeda, "whose knowledge of the Greek, Latin, and Saxon learning and language was manifold and thorough." Tatwine, who succeeded him in 731, was a scholar of Theodore, and was "splendidly versed in Holy writ." A few ænigmata in Latin

1 Nor do I like to omit, as having some relation at least to English literature, the Ten Articles which Theodore drew up for signature by the bishops at the Council of Hertford in 673. This is "the first constitutional measure of the collective English race: no act of secular legislation can be produced parallel to it before the reign of Ælfred or rather of his son Edward." - Stubbs' Dict. Christ. Biog., Art. Theodorus.