Anglo-Saxon Literature Part 7

Penalties for theft are graduated according to the quality of the person injured, _i.e._, according to the different orders of men in the body politic, each of whom has a separate value: king, n.o.ble, freeman, serf, slave. Such we may suppose to have been the primitive inst.i.tutes of the tribes in the old mother country on the Continent. But the code is headed by a captel, in which the property of the Church is valued beyond that of the king, and the same applies to the higher clergy. "Cap. 1.

The property of G.o.d and the Church, 12 fold; Bishop's property, 11 fold; Priest's, 9 fold [the same as the King's]; Deacon's, 6 fold; Clerk's, 3 fold." Next follows one that we may well suppose might have been the first of the pre-Christian code: "Cap. 2. If the king summon his people to him, and one there do them evil--double bot, and 50 shillings to the king." Bede mentions (ii., 5) these laws of aethelberht, and especially this feature of them, that they began with the protection of Church property. He also says, that the king const.i.tuted these laws according to Roman precedent (_juxta exempla Romanorum_), by which some have been led to expect that there would be an element of Roman law in them. The imitation consisted only in committing the laws to writing.

aethelberht died in 616, and then came a heathen reaction under his son Eadbald; but he was converted to Christianity in 618 by Bishop Laurentius. His son Erconbriht, who succeeded in 640, was the first king who dared to demolish the heathen fanes. Bede informs us that this king made a law for the observance of the Lenten fast; but no law of the kind appears until we come to the laws of Wihtred. Ecgbriht succeeded his father in 664, under whom the waning power of Kent rea.s.serted its former sway. To him succeeded first Hlothaere in 673, and then Eadric.

These two reigns were short, and the names of both the kings stand at the head of the next Kentish code.

The introductory sentence of this code was this:--"Hlothhaere and Eadric, kings of the men of Kent, enlarged the laws which their predecessors had made aforetime, with these dooms following":--

Cap. 8. If one man implead another in a matter, and he cite the man to a 'Methel' or a 'Thing', let the man always give security to the other, and do him such right, as the Kentish judges prescribe to them.

This code has a little series of laws concerning offences to the sense of honour, and consequent danger to the king's peace:--

Cap. 11. If in another's house one man calleth another man a perjurer, or a.s.sail him offensively with injurious words; let him pay a shilling to the owner of the house, and 6 shillings to the insulted man, and forfeit 12 shillings to the king.

Cap. 12. If a man remove another's stoup where men drink without offence, by old right he pays a shilling to him who owns the house, and 6 shillings to him whose stoop was taken away, and 12 shillings to the king.

Cap. 13. If weapon be drawn where men drink, and no harm be done; a shilling to the owner of the house, and 12 shillings to the king.

After a troublous time of encroachment from the side of Wess.e.x, the kingdom of Kent had again a time of honour, if not of absolute independence, under king Wihtred (691-725), who, in the preamble to his laws, is called the most gracious king of the Kentish folk (_se mildesta cyning Cantwara_). His laws are mostly ecclesiastical. The rights of the Church and of her ministers, the keeping of the Sunday, manumission of slaves at the altar, penalties for heathen rites, these subjects make the bulk of a code of 28 captels, of which the last four are about theft. The closing provision is characteristic of the state of society:

Cap. 28. If a man from a distance, or a stranger, go off the road, and he neither shout nor blow a horn, as a thief he is liable to be examined, or slain, or redeemed.

In the preamble this code is precisely dated on the 6th day of August in Wihtred's fifth year, which is 696. Also it mentions Berghamstyde, which seems to mean Berkhamstead (Herts), as the place of enactment, and Gybmund, bishop of Rochester, as having been present. Doubts have been cast upon the genuineness of this code, but it is defended in Schmid's introduction. This is the last of the laws of Kent.

The Kentish laws are found in a register of the twelfth century, which has a high character for fidelity. No doubt the substance of them is faithfully preserved. But they are not in the original Kentish dialect; they have been translated into West Saxon. The translation has not, however, obliterated all traces of the original; there are some peculiarities which survive, and which enable us to see through the present form those traces of a higher antiquity, which strengthen that confidence which the contents are calculated to inspire.

The Kentish dialect was the first literary form of the language of our Saxon ancestors. It has been thought that in the Epinal Gloss, of which a specimen will be given below, we have the best extant representation of this ancient dialect. Early in the ninth century we have some original doc.u.ments in the Kentish dialect, and these are our surest guides in judging of other specimens.[59]

The following extract is from a legal doc.u.ment of the year 832. Luba had made a deed of gift from her estate to the fraternity of Christ Church at Canterbury, and the following sanction was appended:

? Ic luba eamod G.o.des iwen as forecwedenan G.o.d ? as elmessan gesette ? gefestnie ob minem erfelande et mundlingham em hiium to cristes cirican ? ic bidde ? an G.o.des libgendes naman bebiade aem men e is land ? is erbe hebbe et mundlingham et he as G.o.d forleste o wiaralde ende se man se is healdan wille ? lestan et ic beboden hebbe an isem gewrite se him seald ? gehealden sia hiabenlice bledsung se his ferwerne oe hit agele se him seald ? gehealden h.e.l.le wite bute he to fulre bote gecerran wille G.o.de ? mannum uene ualete.

I, Luba, the humble handmaid of G.o.d, appoint and establish these foresaid benefactions and alms from my heritable land at Mundlingham to the brethren at Christ Church; and I entreat, and in the name of the living G.o.d I command, the man who may have this land and this inheritance at Mundlingham, that he continue these benefactions to the world's end. The man who will keep and discharge this that I have commanded in this writing, to him be given and kept the heavenly blessing; he who hinders or neglects it, to him be given and kept the punishment of h.e.l.l, unless he will repent with full amends to G.o.d and to men. Fare ye well.

-- 2.

The middle of the seventh century was a very dark period throughout the West. The lingering rays of ancient culture had grown very faint in France, Italy, and Spain. Literary production had ceased in France since Gregory of Tours and his friend Venantius Fortunatus, the poet; in Spain, soon after Isidore of Seville, the Christian area had been narrowed by the Moslem invasion; in Italy, though the tradition of learning was never extinguished, yet no writer of eminence appeared for a long time after Gregory the Great. At such a time it was that the seed of learning found a new and fruitful soil among the Anglo-Saxon people; and they who had been the latest receivers of the civilising element, quickly took the lead in religion and learning.

In the year 668 three remarkable men came into Britain, These were Theodore, a Greek of Tarsus, who came as Archbishop of Canterbury; Hadrian, an African monk who had deprecated his own appointment to that office; and Biscop Baducing (called Benedict Biscop), an Angle of Northumbria, who had left his retreat in the monastery of Lerins, to guide and accompany the travellers into his native country.

This had risen out of an unforeseen event, and had almost the appearance of accident. But the consequences were great and far-reaching. Theodore organised the English Church upon lines that proved permanent. A new era was also inaugurated for literature and art. Literature was represented by Hadrian, who set up education at St. Augustine's upon an improved plan; and art, especially in relation to religious and educational inst.i.tutions--books, buildings, ritual--was the province of Benedict Biscop.

Up to this time education and literature had two rival sources, the old schools of Kent, and the schools of the Irish teachers. But from Hadrian's coming a new literary era commences. For more than a hundred years our island was the seat of learning beyond any other country in the world of the West. Even Greek learning, extinct elsewhere, was revived for a time; and Bede, whose childhood had corresponded to the opening of this new activity, looked back on it when he was old as a glorious time, and he put it on record that he had known many scholars to whom both the Latin and Greek languages were as their mother tongue.

Of those who were formed in the school of Hadrian, the first and most conspicuous is Aldhelm. His rudimentary education must have been over before he knew Hadrian. The school of Maidulf gave him his boyish training at the monastery which was called after the Irish founder, and which has given name to the town of Malmesbury (Maidulfes burh). So Aldhelm stands between the two systems, the old Irish and the new Kentish. His preference was for the latter, but his works retain the characteristics of both. He has a love of grandiloquence which is both Keltic and Saxon, and a delight in alliteration which is more especially Saxon. His familiarity with the national poetry looms often through his Latin. But his proper characteristics, those whereby he fills a position altogether his own, are apart from these peculiarities. He is the scholar of the age, the type of that set whom Bede delighted to recall, who knew Latin and Greek like their mother tongue. He is the father of Anglo-Latin poetry. He made a zealous study of the Latin metres, and he commended the pursuit to other scholars. His Greek knowledge manifests itself everywhere: not always with a good effect, according to present taste; but in a manner which is of historical value as demonstrating his real familiarity with the Greek language.

Aldhelm's great work, and the work which most conveys his interpretation of the spiritual conditions of his time, is his book, "De Laude Virginitatis," in praise of Celibacy. But for the purposes of literary history, his artistic studies are of more importance than those which are strictly religious and ecclesiastical. Of the greatest interest for us are his Riddles. These are short Latin poems somewhat after the model of Symphosius, whose work he describes,[60] and whom he seems ambitious to outstrip. The riddles of Symphosius are uniformly of three hexameter lines, those of Aldhelm vary in length from four lines to sixteen; rarely more. The external structure is that of the Epigram, with the object speaking in the first person. The riddles both of Symphosius and Aldhelm are so closely identified with the vernacular riddles of the famous Exeter Song Book, that the reader may be glad of a specimen from each author. It should be premised that in each collection the subject stands as a t.i.tle at the head of each piece. The subject of the sixteenth in Symphosius is the book-moth:--

DE TINEA.

Litera me pavit, nec quid sit litera novi, In libris vixi nec sum studiosior inde, Exedi musas nec adhuc tamen ipse profeci.

I have fed upon literature, yet know not what it is; I have lived among books, yet am not the more studious for it; I have devoured the Muses, yet up to the present time I have made no progress.

One of Aldhelm's riddles is on the Alphabet; and this will be a fit specimen here, as containing something that is germane to the history of literature:--

Nos denae et septem genitae sine voce sorores, s.e.x alias nothas non dicimus adnumerandas, Nascimur ex ferro rursus ferro moribundae, Necnon et volucris penna volitantis ad aethram; Terni nos fratres incerta matre crearunt; Qui cupit instanter sitiens audire, docemus, Turn cito prompta damus rogitanti verba silenter.

We are seventeen sisters voiceless born; six others, half-sisters, we exclude from our set; children of iron by iron we die, but children too of the bird's wing that flies so high; three brethren our sires, be our mother as may; if any one is very eager to hear, we tell him, and quickly give answer without any sound.[61]

Aldhelm is the first of the Anglo-Latin poets, and he was a cla.s.sical scholar at a time when to be so was a great distinction. Both in prose and verse, his style has the faults which belong to an age of revived study. His love of learning, his keen appreciation of its beauty and its value, have tended to inflate his sentences with an appearance of display. His poetic diction is simpler than that of his prose; but here, too, he is habitually over-elevated, whence he becomes sometimes stilted, and oftentimes he drops below pitch with an inadequate and disappointing close. But we must honour him in the position which he holds. He is the leader of that n.o.ble series of English scholars who represent the first endeavouring stage of recovery after the great eclipse of European culture.

There is nothing of his remaining in the vernacular; but that he was an English poet we have testimony which, though late, is not to be disregarded. William of Malmesbury quotes a book of King Alfred's, which said that Aldhelm had been a peerless writer of English poetry: and he adds, moreover, that a popular song, which had been mentioned by Alfred as Aldhelm's, was still commonly sung in his own time--that is, in the twelfth century.

Attempts have been made to identify some of our extant Anglo-Saxon literature with a name so eminent. In 1835 the Anglo-Saxon Psalter of the Paris ma.n.u.script was first printed at Oxford, and as this book gives a hundred of the Psalms in vernacular poetry, the suggestion that they might be Aldhelm's, though modernised, had rhetorical attractions for the editor (Thorpe), and supplied him with material for a few rather idle sentences of his Latin preface. In 1840 Jacob Grimm edited (from Thorpe's editio princeps) two poems of the Vercelli book, the "Andreas"

and the "Elene;" and in his preface he sought to fix this poetry upon Aldhelm by a line of argument altogether fallacious, as was afterwards shown by Mr. Kemble in his edition of the "Andreas" for the aelfric Society.

That which we have to show for this period in the native Kentish dialect is less ambitious, but it will not be despised by the considerate reader. In the beginnings of learning, when students had not the apparatus of grammars and dictionaries, which now, being common, are almost as much a matter of course as any gift of nature, it was necessary for students to make lists of words and phrases for themselves, and after a while a few of these would be thrown together, and would be reduced to alphabetical order for facility of reference. It is to such a process as this that we owe the Glossaries which form an interesting branch of Anglo-Saxon literature. The Epinal Gloss is the oldest of these, and it is very valuable because of the archaic forms of many of the words. A selection is here given by way of specimen:--[62]

EPINAL GLOSS.

(_Cooper, Appendix B, p. 153._)

_Alba spina_, haegu thorn (hawthorn).

_Aesculus_, boecae (beech).

_Achalantis, luscina_ netigalae (nightingale).

_Acrifolus_, holegn (holly).

_Alnus_, alaer (alder).

_Abies_, saeppae (fir).

_Argella_, laam (loam).

_Accitulium_, geacaes surae (sorrel).

_Absintium_, uuermod (wormwood).

_Alacris_, snel (swift, German _schnell_).

_Alveus_, stream rad (stream-road = channel).

_Aquilae_, segnas (military standards).

_Anser_, goos (goose).

_Beta_, berc, _arbor_ (birch).

_Ballena_, hran (whale).

_Buculus_, rand beag (buckler).

_Berruca_, uueartae (wart).

_Cados_, ambras (casks).

_Chaos_, duolma (confusion, error).

_Cicuta_, hymblicae (hemlock).

_Cofinus_, mand (hamper).

_Fulix_, ganot, dop aenid (gannet, dip-chick).

_Filix_, fearn (fern).

_Fasia.n.u.s_, uuor hana (pheasant).

_Fungus_, suamm (German _schwamm_).