English literature, from the beginning to the Norman conquest

Preface

This book is necessarily, as far as the chapter on King Alfred, a recast of my previous book on Eai'ly English Literature up to the Days of Alfred. That book, in two volumes, was too expensive and too long for students in schools. I chose to write it at that length, and I am glad I did so. I was enabled to introduce a great deal of correlative matters which I thought were needed to bring the literature into touch with the history of the country ; and in order to give life, colour, and reality to a time so far away, and in which so little interest is taken by the English public. But having tried to do this, I have now left out these correlative matters ; shortened the whole of the history up to Alfred ; rewritten it, and rearranged it. Of course, some of the older book remains mixed up with the new ; — those parts of it especially which give an account of the poems. The translations, though carefully revised, are the same ; but many of them have been omitted. I have written about King ^Elfred at a length somewhat out of proportion with the rest of the book, but the freshly awakened interest of the public in his life and character induced me to give a full account of all that was personal in his literary work. The chapters from " Alfred " to the end of the book carry the history of Anglo-Saxon or Old English Literature up to the Conquest. A concluding chapter sketches the tale of Old English as far as the beginning of the thirteenth century. The Appendix consists of translations of some remarkable Anglo-Saxon poems ; and I have

VI PREFACE

to thank Miss Kate Warren for her excellent translation in full of the " Battle of Maldon," as well as for the Index and the Bibliography, which, to my pleasure, she undertook. My gratitude is also due to Professor John Rhys and to Professor Ker for their kind answers to a number of questions.

STOPFORD A. BROOKE.

SCHAFFHAUSEN, iyd August 1898.

Chapter I The Relation Of Early Britain To English Literature

The land in which English literature has grown into the mighty tree which now spreads its branches over so many peoples was for many centuries unconscious of any English footfall. Its first indwellers, at a time when it formed part of a continent stretching far into the Northern and Western seas, lived in caves or in trees or in rude huts made of boughs, and saw the great glaciers of the quaternary age push from the mountains into the plains, retreat, advance again, and pass away. Their climate was cold and wet. A short warm summer was succeeded by a long winter. Heavy and constant mist hung over the stagnant fens and woods and the icy gorges of the hills, but the men enjoyed the hunting and fishing by which they lived. They learned at last to smite the flints and chert into axe, spear, and arrow-heads ; they invented the bow ; they made their knives of flakes of flint, and as time went on fitted these weapons into rude handles of horn and bone. Skins, roughly sewn together with sinews, clothed them ; they could make the fire by which they cooked the beasts they slew, but they had no domestic animals. Nor were they, after some centuries had

B " I

THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN gone by, without pleasure in the work of their hands. They drew, incising the handles of bone and horn, the figures of the beasts they hunted — the stag, the reindeer, the hairy mammoth, and the bison. These were the Paleolithic tribes of pre-historic Britain, and they were contemporary at their beginning with the cave lion and hyaena, with a sabre-toothed tiger, with the brown and the grizzly bear, with a woolly rhinoceros and three kinds of elephant, with the great urus, the elk, and the bison, and with other animals existing at the present day.

No one can tell how long this people lasted, nor what space of time separates them from the Neolithic tribes whose remains we find in caves, in tombs, and in the lake-dwellings which, as their civilisation grew, they learnt how to build. It is possible that the people we call Neolithic were the direct and developed descendants of the Palseolithic folk. The glaciers had now gone ; the land had risen and was divided from the continent by the Channel. The more ancient and the more savage animals had disappeared. The urus, the brown bear, the great stags, the reindeer, remained among the mountain valleys and the northern moors ; and the wild boar, the wolf, the fox, the wild cat, and a host of the beasts of flood and field haunted in va'st numbers the thick, dark, monstrous woods. The climate was warmer and more damp. The lowlands were half water, — out-spreading fens, and swamps, and chains of lakes. The estuaries, like that of the Thames, opened out into leagues of morass and sand. The icecarved mountains were bare and inaccessible, but all along the coast where the fens did not encroach, in the hidden creeks and reedy isles, on the edges of the lakes, on the knolls in the fens, by the river-channels, and on the low dry downs and rocky plateaux, lived and hunted a short, black-haired, dark-skinned, dark- eyed race, with an oval face and a long and narrow skull, who had with them domesticated animals. Their weapons were of bone and flint, chert and greenstone, polished and carefully wrought, not rough like those of their predecessors.

They were hunters, but they mingled the mere hunting life of the savage with pastoral employments. Living at first in caves, they finally settled into hamlets or into lake-dwellings built on piles. They kept sheep and cattle, wove a rude cloth for garments, and made pottery and ornaments. Sometimes they buried their dead in caves, but they came to bury them in large-chambered tombs, under long barrows and mounds of earth, lined with stones ; and the greater number of "standing stones," "stone circles," and the rude burial huts built of great blocks of rock, 1 which are the denuded remnants of these tombs, attest their reverence for the dead, and their activity. These barrows occur over our land from Dorset to the Yorkshire Wolds, and from the Wolds to Caithness, and they prove that this people occupied the whole country. They also lived over the length and breadth of Ireland. Some think that they came from North Africa across Spain, and the Basque people are certainly their descendants ; others think that some of them came from Spain to Ireland, and thence made their way to Britain, but it is also maintained that they came across the north of Europe. They were not an Aryan race, but they are of a very enduring type. Even now, we meet their descendants in the west of Ireland, and traces of their nature-myths, their religion, and their customs enter into the Irish mythology — sombre and grim traditions, as of those who had come out of the "night-country." Their Irish tribal names, so far as we have been able to isolate them, have to do with gloom and mist, as dark as their eyes and hair. In Wales, the main body of the Silures, small men, dark, and of a courageous nature, belonged, as well as other scattered folk in North Wales, to this Neolithic people. Men have also traced strange out-crops of this swarthy race in the midland and south-western counties of England, even in the present day. Beyond the English and Scottish border, and on it, they were less got rid of by the Celtic invaders and more mingled with them. A separate body of them, after much admixture, isolated themselves

1 In French archaeology these are called menhirs, cromlechs, and dolmens ; but in England we call the pile of three or four upstanding stones with a flat rock resting on them, a cromlech, not a dolmen.

in Galloway. On the west coast and islands of Scotland, they lasted, and kept up their tribal life alongside of the Scots from Ireland, the Brythons, and afterwards the English. But the larger number of them settled in the Northern Highlands ; and the description which Scott gives in the Legend of Montrose of the " Children of the Mist " may serve to paint what this fine and steady-hearted race would become when, left to its wild instinct for liberty, it was hunted like a beast of the field. The Celtic races owed much to these predecessors, more perhaps than we imagine, and through the Celt the English may have assimilated some of the elements of the nature of the Neolithic race. There are certain weird, primaeval, unaccountable, dark, sometimes monstrous conceptions in our nature-poetry which may have their far-off roots in the dim world the Neolithic people made for their imagination. The next race which invaded our island, and who, it is supposed, established settlements from Sweden to Spain, were tall men, round faced, with short round skulls, stoutly built, light haired, with probably gray eyes. It is still debated whether they were or not an Aryan race. Some scholars call them Celtic — the earliest band of the Celtic migrations. Others consider them to be of a Finnish or Ugrian type. They were warriors and hunters, and their weapons of battle and chase were at first of stone, shaped with great skill and highly polished. But when they came to our land they had learnt how to make bronze weapons, and are the first men of the bronze age in this country. But they were much more than warriors and hunters. They established some kind of commerce with the continent, and they kept flocks and herds. Their stone querns prove that they had some knowledge of agriculture. Their persons were decorated with gold and silver ornaments, with amber, jet and glass beads and necklaces. They beat gold wire into their swords, wore a woven cloth, and made good pottery, — vases, cups, food-dishes, and incense-burners. They dwelt in communities and continued, like the Neolithic folk, the building of large, underground, chambered tombs. They set up temples, perhaps like Stonehenge, to their gods. But their barrows, which are crowded round Salisbury Plain, are not long but round and shaped like a bowl. Lastly they mixed with, rather than conquered, the Neolithic people. This type may also be distinguished, it is said, in various parts of England to the present day. 1

History, save in the description by Latin writers of the rude tribes in the interior of Britain, is silent of these two races, the second of which, until more evidence is brought to prove it to be Celtic, we may believe to be as pre-Celtic and non-Aryan as the first. Though history is silent concerning them, they have left traces behind them of their occupation of the country in the myth and legend of the Celtic races which succeeded them, and mingled with them. Old words, not Celtic, in the Celtic tongue, some place-names, some personal names of Celtic heroes, some sculptured stones with unknown designs and unknown alphabetical signs, some strange customs, chiefly of inheritance, are found among the Celts and derive from their predecessors.

How long these races lived undisturbed from without cannot be known, but they were at last broken into by the first great Celtic migration, which, coming along the southern shores of the Baltic between the forest and the sea, passed down the Rhine and the Moselle, and a part of which crossed the narrow seas to our land. This people established itself during some centuries over

1 It has been sought to mark out, with greater definition, these pre-Celtic peoples. M. de Jubainville, speaking of France, arranges them in this manner, (i) The quaternary man. (2) A people who lived in caves, had no knowledge of the metals, and hunted the reindeer. (3) A more civilised folk who knew something of the metals, who could make drawings on horn and bone, who built megalithic monuments, who buried their dead in cabanes f uner aires {dolmens — our cromlechs). (4) A still more civilised folk who burned their dead, put the ashes into urns, and hid them under tumuli. (5) The Celts or Gauls, an aristocratic race, who enslaved the conquered; with long iron swords and war chariots, who buried but did not burn their dead. For a Celt to burn his dead was to do them dishonour. (6) The Roman period. (7) The Frank. Such a division might do for Britain also, if we divide the Celts into two related races, the Goidels and the Brythons (Gauls), and read the English for the Frank.

the habitable parts of England, Ireland, and Scotland, driving the Neolithic folk before them to the remoter lands, but also absorbing them in their progress. It may be that a number of them landed first in Ireland, and afterwards crossed the Irish Channel into Wales. Such Irish immigration has taken place in historic times. It is probable it also took place in pre-historic times. These are the Gaelic or Goidelic tribes. Their occupation of the country lasted for some centuries. Meanwhile a new migration of the Celtic hordes had begun. This Second Wandering, as it poured down towards Western Europe, took a more southward direction than the first. When it reached the Alps, some of the folk descended into Italy or went eastward by the Danube ; but others, crossing the mountains, made their way into the regions we call Gaul and Spain. Those of them who finally settled on the northern coasts of Gaul, either pushed from behind, or eager for adventure and land, or lured by the shimmer of the white cliffs in the morning sun and by the mysterious legends of a land of the happy dead, which, in the elder days, gathered round our islands, made their way over the straits, perhaps as early as 300 B.C., and fell upon the Goidels of the south-eastern shores. We call this second people of the Celts Brythons. Like the English afterwards, they first settled themselves in Kent and round the mouths of the Thames. Like the English also, their immigration was gradual. They came, one relay after another, and the Goidels were only slowly driven back before them. The last who arrived, about 100 b.c, if not earlier, were the Belgae. When the Romans came first, 55 B.C., these tribes certainly held all the south-eastern districts, and those along the east coast as far as the Wash; but they probably held also the land east of the Trent, the Avon, the Parret, and the Stour of Dorsetshire — that is, nearly half of our England. During the ninety years between the invasion of Julius Caesar and the fresh conquests under Claudius, 43 a.d., the Brythons pushed steadily on, and the whole country, with a few exceptions, fell under their power. These exceptions were the counties of Devon and Cornwall, all

South Wales, west of the Severn and south of the Teme and the Wyre, North Wales and Anglesea from the river Mawddach to the Dee, Cumberland and Westmoreland and part of Lancashire. In these lands the Goidels remained, mixed more or less with the Neolithic races which preceded them. But even this remnant of the Goidels became, as time went on, Brythonic in language, manners, and customs, so that we may say that at last no tribes existed in England and Wales speaking the Goidelic tongue.

North of the Solway and the Tweed the country was less exclusively Brythonic. The Goidels in Scotland were even more mixed with the Neolithic tribes than in Wales ; and into this admixture the Brythons drove their way, penetrating from the East in wedges into the Goidels northwards and westwards, either subduing them or intermingling with them, or living in alliance with them. So it came to pass that the three races — the Neolithic folk (who may be said to represent the Picts of history), the Goidels, and the Brythons — ran in and out of one another over the southern half of Scotland, like the changing patterns in a kaleidoscope made by three differently colored pieces of glass. The Brythons were thickest in the east. The Neolithic people concentrated themselves in Galloway and the western isles, but the Goidels were so dominant among them that their speech and traditions became in time Goidelic. In the northern isles and Highlands the Neolithic people were most numerous, but they also, partly influenced by the invading Scots from Ireland, adopted, as the centuries went on, the customs and speech of the Goidels. At last Scotland broke into two main divisions. The Highlands became Goidelicised. The Lowlands, with the exception of Galloway, were rapidly becoming Brythonised, when the victory which made Kenneth MacAlpin (844-860) King of the Picts introduced again the Goidel elements, and by the time of the Norman Conquest the Lowlands were probably Goidelicised again. But this was after the time of which we speak. At present, we may sum up the whole by saying that those who spoke Goidel, and became at one with the Goidel strain, existed in the north of Scotland, in Galloway, in the Isle of Man, and in Ireland. The rest of England, Scotland, and Wales spoke the Brythonic tongue, and, though largely mixed with Goidels and Neolithic folk, had all become or were becoming Brythons in name and manners.

Into this heterogeneous mass of three or perhaps four races, two pre-Celtic, two Celtic, and the last two infiltrated by the Roman law, language, and custom, the English in the fifth century began to push their plough. During the first hundred years of their conquest their main policy was destruction, 1 and they almost blotted out the Roman and Brythonic civilisation from Kent to Devonshire ; from the eastern counties to an east-curving line drawn from Chester to Bristol ; from the Humber to the Forth, and thence westward over more than half of Northern England and the Lowlands to the borders of the kingdom of Strathclyde. Their policy of destruction was then followed by a policy of amalgamation, whenever they took any new portions of the Brythonic lands into their power. At last the pure Brythons were isolated into three places — into Cornwall, into our Wales, and into Cumbria — and the name adopted by the Brythons of Wales and Cumbria was Cymry, that is, " fellow-countrymen."

This general sketch of the localisation in Great Britain and Ireland of the various races which occupied the country, and of their intermingling, is of more use to a history of English literature than one would at first imagine.

( Questions of race are often questions of literature. They cannot, it is true, provide us with certainties, only with conjectures ; but good conjectures, subject to strict experiment, may lead to certainties ; and problems — such as the fuller growth of early English poetry in the North rather than in Wessexor Mercia ; the remarkable development of the ballad poetry of the sixteenth,

1 The Brythons were by no means all destroyed. From the first years of the Conquest, and for more than a century after, a large proportion of them emigrated to Armorica. Moreover, as the Brythonic women were kept for slaves, the English blood was from the beginning mixed with a Celtic strain. The admixture increased to the west and north.

seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, chiefly in the wild marchland of the Border ; why the English lyric poetry began, with few exceptions, near the Welsh border ; how it happened that the later poetry of natural description had a more original and earlier beginning in Scotland than in England, and yet was only brought to its finest form in England ; and many other problems belonging to the introduction of fresh elements into our poetry are, not completely, but partly solved by the distribution of races in this country, and by our knowledge of the characteristics of these races.

Four other subjects, on each of which a little book might be written, remain to be b^efly treated in this introduction, (i) The y first of these is the early condition of the country, and how far irv bore on literature. History, before the time of Caesar, is almost silent with regard to Britain. We know, however, that Timseus, the Sicilian historian, who flourished 350-326 B.C., was aware of the British tin trade ; and Pytheas, his contemporary, whose Travels were set forth shortly after 330 B.C., eight years after the death of Aristotle, speaks, in the fragments which alone remain of his book, of the Cornish miners bringing their tin eastward along the coast, storing it in an island, 1 and exchanging it for goods with the Gauls of the continent. This intrepid voyager of Marseilles, who seems to have sailed as far as the Northern seas until he touched the ice, landed twice on the south-eastern coasts of our island, and found the inhabitants fairly civilised by their trading.

Posidonius, who voyaged to Britain about 90 B.C., visited Cornwall ; and Diodorus Siculus, probably quoting Posidonius, gives an account of the tin trade between Britain and Gaul, in which the tin brought from Belerion (Cornwall) was carried to an island called Ictis (Vectis?), and from thence to Gaul and the mouth of the Rhone. The inhabitants, he says, are fond of strangers ; and, from their intercourse with foreign merchants, are civilised in their manner of life. The nature of the other trades we learn from Strabo, who wrote about 1-19 a.d. The Britons

1 Some suppose this island to be Thanet, and others, more probably, that it was the Isle of Wight. I daresay both islands were used.

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V io THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN chap.

exported corn, cattle, gold, silver, iron, skins, slaves, and dogs. They imported, among other things, " ivory bracelets and necklaces, red amber beads, vessels of glass, and such-like trumpery." Caesar mentions the tin of the interior, and speaks of copper as , one of the British imports.

South-eastern and south-western Britain had thus reached a somewhat civilised manner of life when Caesar came to Britain. In fact, whatever civilisation the Gauls had reached in contact with the Greek and the Roman they carried with them into Britain, and we hear even of a rude luxury and splendour in the dress and manners of the Brythons. Inland, however, where the Goidels yet roamed and fought, the men had not passed beyond the pastoral stage. They were as wild as the Highlandmen of the seventeenth century, and lived in much the same way. They grew no corn, were clad in skins, and painted themselves for love and war. The further men were from the coasts the less was civilisation possible, not only from the absence of tradeinfluences, but also from the condition of the country.

Before the Romans came, far the greater portion of Britain was uninhabitable, a desolation of vast woods full of sleepy swamps into which the choked-up rivers spread; huge tracts of bleak moorland covered with low scrub and heather and dry grass ; and in every hollow deep and treacherous bogs, while rugged and pathless labyrinths of rocks led up to the higher mountains. The interior was wholly unexplored. Over it the wolves ranged in packs and ran down the stags ; the wild swine fed in thousands on the acorns and mast of the oak and beech forests ; the whitemaned urus ran through the glades among the tangled undergrowth of yew and holly and wild briars, and the wild, small black cattle, short horned and with close-curled manes, herded on the hills. The bear still lingered in the deepest recesses of the forests, and in the caves of the northern mountains. The reindeer was still to be found in Scotland. The beavers built their dams across the rivers ; hosts of the smaller wild beasts, the fox, the weasel tribe, the badger, the otter, the wild cat, devoured one another ; and enormous flocks of land and waterbirds hunted their prey in the woods and over the widespread marshes. The forests in many places approached the coast, and left only a narrow strip of land fit for the dwelling of man. Elsewhere, the tides carried the sea, especially on the eastern shores, far into the land, making waste leagues of reedy fen over which the cold or clammy mists rose and fell in the sunless summers, and where the winters settled down as grim as death. Men lived only on the outskirts of these ragged solitudes of forest and fen, on the fringe of coast, along the rivers, in sparse glades of the woods, on the hills and downs, and on the ridges and moors of chalk, granite, limestone, and sandstone that rose above the levels of the steaming forest land.

The Romans, under Agricola and after his time, wrought a great change on this condition. Where they settled, the rivers were embanked, the morasses bridged, the fens drained ; the trees felled along the roads, the woods cleared back from the river valleys, the valleys made fit for tillage and pasture. Agriculture increased, great corn-fleets carried the produce of Britain to the provinces on the continent, the deep grass of the river valleys nourished vast herds of cattle, the hills were covered with thousands of sheep, the export of wool was immense. Gold, silver, and iron were sent out of the country, and the tall, powerful hunting dogs of Britain were imported by the wealthy Romans. Yet scarcely a sixth of the land was redeemed. When the English came, the forest-land opposed their advance continually. The fen-lands of the east and the wide marshes of Somerset remained desolate. The great woods of Andred, of Arden, of Dean, and of many others were still huge wastes where only the outlaw lived. Wales was one enormous woodland. Even in Elizabeth's time a third of England was waste land.

f The constant presence of this wild country has had a remarkable influence on literature. That influence is strongest where the Celtic element is strongest in our folk, and it appears among such folk as a love of wild nature. The early English poetry of

THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN

Northumbria is full of the sentiment of the savage weather and storm-lashed cliffs of the sea-coasts, and of the passion of the furious sea. The poem of Layamon, written on the Welsh border, is alive with the natural description of the wild scenery which the poet loved. The work of the Lancashire poet who wrote Sir G-awayne and the Grene Knight is equally full of the love of the rocks and hills and woodland of that Celtic country. When the description of nature in the reigns of Henry VII. and VIII. is conventional in England, it is passionate and done directly from nature in Scottish poetry. Spenser's special pleasure in uninhabited forests and lonely streams, swift rivers and rugged mountains, came partly of his stay in Lancashire and of his life in Ireland. Nor is it without significance that the love of nature for its own sake in modern English poetry began in the eighteenth century from Scotland, and that the great nature-poetry of the nineteenth century was born and grew into strength in the heart of a Cumbrian poet.

The wild country acted differently on the German side of the English race. It was felt, not as a thing to be loved, but to be feared. The solitary moors, the cruel woods, the fens where the wild birds cried like demons, the black morass, are alive in early English literature with the evil-bringing powers of nature. Monsters like Grendel haunted the misty moors and the black seapots where the waves boiled ; the dragon lurked in the fen or in the caves of the rocks ; hateful phantoms rode on the storm clouds or lay in wait for the traveller when he crossed the swollen stream or passed the gray stones on the heath. \A whole world of fearful imagination was born which has never left our literature. A ^ ut °^ both, out of the Celtic love and the German fear of wild nature, has grown at last the modern poetry of nature, a mingled web of love and awe. ' And between both, and also influencing modern poetry, was all the romance of the wildwood which collected itself in story and ballad round the life of the bold outlaw in the forests, and was mingled with the gaiety of the fairy crew that danced by moonlight in the pleasant glades. I

(2) The second subject of which a sketch is here to be given V is the Roman occupation, and how far it influenced our literature. On such a land as I have described the Romans came for the first time with Julius Caesar in 55 B.C., and then again the year after; and the noble defence of south-eastern England made against them by Cassivelaunos in his stronghold of Verulam is not unremembered in literature. Nor has Caratacos missed in letters the tribute due to his courage and his patriotism. He, leading the Silures, of a sturdier temper than the Celtic tribes, defended the northern and midland parts of Britain against the legions of the Emperor Claudius, when, ninety years after Caesar's landing, the Romans made the south-east of the island into a province of the empire. In Nero's reign, Suetonius Paulinus took and sacked the island of Mona, slew the Druid bands and cut down their sacred groves. But he had left the east of Britain unprotected, and Boadicea (Boudicca), Queen of the Iceni, raised the country to avenge her bitter wrongs, and destroyed with terrible slaughter London, Verulam, and Camalodunon, but was at last defeated and died of poison. These two events have often been celebrated by English poetry. Cowper sang, with his own melodious grace, the British Queen in her wrath and sorrow. One of Tennyson's daring experiments in metre sang of the Druids, the Brythonic gods, the yellowhaired queen, the bloody vengeance which she took, and invented her prophecy of the fall of Rome and the glory of England.