THE VENERABLE BEDE-THE DANES-KING ALFRED * 283 as its outer form is concerned, becomes the work of his hands. A school is established, which the Venerable Bede attends, where he learns Greek, for the first time. taught in England, and with it imbibes a taste for science and letters. Bede passes his life at the monastery of Jarrow, gathers six hundred pupils about him, becomes, as Burke calls him, "the father of English literature," and dies in 755, translating the Gospel of St. John into the vernacular. But upon his death the kingdom of Northumbria, in which he lived, is desolated by incessant wars, the land is laid waste, his scholars are dispersed, and nothing is left of his work but the fortyfive volumes which attest his industry, and a name which glorifies his age.† Later on, in 800, just as the English are becoming one nation, the Danes come in, as utterly heathen and as savage and ferocious as the followers of Hengist and Horsa. They at once wipe out almost all of civilization above the Thames.§ In about seventy years they become masters of the land. Then King Alfred appears on the scene, a man who, seen through the dim mist of tradition, is one of the world's heroes. He roused the people against the Danes, founded a kingdom in the lower part of the island, established peace in his realm, reduced the laws to system, and became the teacher of his people. Alfred did all that he could to correct and *Green's "Short History," p. 65. Gneist, i. 42. + Idem, p. 74. § Ranke, i. 17; Green's "Short History," pp. 78, 79, 82. Gneist, i. 105. Ranke, the great German historian, pays this tribute to Bede and Alfred. "The first German who made the universal learning derived from antiquity his own was an Anglo-Saxon, the Venerable inform the ignorance of his countrymen, to which they had been reduced by the Danish conquest. When he began to reign, he could find scarcely a priest in the kingdom able to render the Latin service into English. For the benefit of the common people he translated several Latin works, with annotations which sound of the primer. He established schools at court, where the sons of the nobility were instructed in the rudiments of learning; and, taking an idea from Roman jurisprudence, he codified the laws, prefacing them, after the Puritan fashion, with the Ten Commandments and a portion of the law of Moses. Alfred dies, and under one of his successors the Danish portions of the country are brought into complete subjection.* Then follow a few years of peace and national prosperity. But again civil war breaks out, and the heathen Danes reappear in new and greater hordes. They march through the land amid the light of blazing towns and homesteads, and in the end put their own ruler on the throne.+ Cnut proves a wise and beneficent monarch, and for twenty years gives the country peace. But he dies in 1035, and under his ty rannical and incapable successors there ensues a reign of blood, which prepares the way for the coming of a greater conqueror than the Dane. And now what was the condition of the Anglo-Saxons after a residence of six centuries in England? In some important particulars, as we have seen, they certainly had retrograded. The old idea of personal freedom had largely disappeared. The land now, in Bede; the first German dialect in which men wrote history and drew up laws was likewise the Anglo-Saxon."-Ranke, i. 13. * Aethelstan, 924-941. + Green, p. 91. THE ANGLO-SAXONS AS ENGLISHMEN-THEIR VIRTUES 285 stead of being the domain of freemen, had become the home of nobles and their retainers, beneath whom was a race of serfs.* Still, many of the early ideas prevailed among the body of the people, to come to maturity at a later day. Aside from their passion for warfare, and their drunkenness to which latter vice they, like the Netherlanders, have always been addicted-the English were a moral race. If they had no respect for beauty, they loved truth. This, with courage and fidelity, they held in supreme honor. Dwelling apart, not sensuous, inclined to melancholy, taking his pleasure sadly, as Froissart afterwards said of him, the Englishman built up the modern idea of home and family, in which the wife is the presiding deity. In the early days upon the Continent, she was her husband's companion in his wanderings; now that he had settled down to cultivate the soil, and had embraced Christianity, she became the manager of his household. The wife lived for her husband and children-a narrow, confined existence perhaps, but one which will breed heroes.‡ *"The strength of the freedom of the common people, the selfrespect, and the martial excellence of the Angle-Saxon ceorl diminished from century to century, in spite of the guardian power which the king wielded.”—Gneist, i. 108. As this writer has pointed out, the chief outward survival of the past was the preservation of the old Germanic judicial system which still surrounded personal freedom with protecting barriers (p. 113). As law was then administered this was not much, but it was something. + Gneist, p. 114. Alfred thus describes her for his countrymen: "The wife now lives for thee-for thee alone. She has enough of all kind of wealth for the present life, but she scorns them all for thy sake alone. She has forsaken them all, because she has not thee with them. Thy absence makes her think that all she possesses is naught. Thus, for Courage, fidelity, respect for truth, and love of home are great virtues, and in time will make the English the master race of the world; but they are virtues, after all, which are found among barbaric tribes. We can trace their originals in the picture which Tacitus draws of the ancient Germans in their native wilds. Of civilization the people had but a tinge, and that was derived from Rome and Roman Christianity. For the six centuries after the landing of Hengist and Horsa on the shores of Britain the history of England is almost a dead level, broken here and there by little hillocks, which seem to promise progress.* The progress, however, did not fol low, for in the middle of the eleventh century only about a third of the soil is under cultivation, and that of the rudest kind; the old Roman influence is gone for ever; the new Romish churches and abbeys have been largely demolished; the great scholars are dead, the schools dispersed, and learning well-nigh extinguished. The one great result which has been accomplished for the future in all these years, apart from the introduction of a rude form of Christianity, is the substantial consolidation into one people of the heterogeneous mass of the early conquerors.† love of thee she is wasted away, and lives near death from tears and grief."-Quoted by Taine, “English Literature." *The chief eminence appears in the eighth century, when the kingdom of Northumbria had its famous schools at York and Jarrow, and was the intellectual centre of Western Christian Europe. Green, p. 72. But this period was brief. The English system was strong in the cohesion of its lower organism-the association of individuals in the township, in the hundred, and in the shire. On this better-consolidated substructure was superimposed the better-consolidated Norman superstructure. Stubbs, i. 278. THE NORMANS AND THEIR CIVILIZATION 287 We are still in a very dark valley, but before us at length rises a lofty, brilliant mountain; it is the Norman Conquest, which, bringing with it for a time the civilization of the Continent, becomes the most important event in English history.* The Normans proper were descended from the Northmen, or Scandinavians, who founded the kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. They have been called pirates, and such they were; but they were of a very different type from the early Saxons or the vulgar pirates of a later day. Their corsairs were, in fact, the merchants of the North, combining, according to the custom of the times, commerce with piracy. That they should have made such rapid development after they settled in France, formerly seemed something like a miracle, but the miraculous element is ràpidly passing out of history. In this case, recent investigations show that long before the Normans left their Northern home they, too, had been brought into contact with the great reservoirs of civilization to which modern Europe owes so much. Sailing up the Dwina and the Oder, and then down the Volga and the Dnieper, they had for ages been in communication with Constantinople and the regions about the Black Sea and the Caspian. Thence they had brought back spices, pearls, silks, and linen garments. All this may seem strange enough to those who have been accustomed to regard the country about the Baltic as an unexplored wilderness of barbarism until a recent date. But it must be remembered that until about the tenth century the only communication *"The will of destiny cannot be gainsaid. Just as Germany, without its connection with Italy, so England, without its connection with France, would never have been what it is.”—Ranke, i. 38. |