killed, came back to their "Dominus vobiscum." Wounded soldiers were tended in religious houses; for these were the only hospitals, the monks the only surgeons and physicians; and such patients told exciting tales of crime and adventure from their sick-beds. After all, the holiest and wisest of these monks were men with interests and passions none the weaker for the unnatural life they led. The march in a circle round one threshing-ground of meditation, always pounding on the same unlucky sheaves of corn, till some of the corn had been already beaten into flour and trodden into mud, had not eternal charms. As intelligent men, therefore, they fastened upon details of the outer world, and would have done so if its movements had not interested nearly the material well-being of their houses. With some such apology for the change as that which we have found Orderic making to himself and his readers at St. Evroult,* they abated in their zeal for abstract meditation, that had become but little better than as the churning of sand, and their lettered companions were converted into chroniclers who would lay in the cream for future churning. We know how many and great changes the Norman Conquest of England brought with it, and, in foregoing pages, we have seen, almost to monotony, in how many monasteries the pens of priests were busily recording events as they happened. Again, then, almost the whole substance of our literature consists of record. But it is now the more exact record of men civilised by some experience. Only in few cases were the Anglo-Norman chronicles produced by writers who sought literary fame. Every great monastic house had its own chronicler. Usually the chronicler told what he knew, and grafted his account of what seemed to him or his house the most interesting facts of his own times on a record of preceding history, which he *"E. W." III. 52. 66 sometimes compiled and abridged from several authorities, sometimes abridged from one authority, sometimes copied unaltered from some other writer and adopted as his own. Thus it was not by fraud that Simeon of Durham, who had no thought whatever of a future place in literary history, took to himself the chronicle of Turgot.* The chronicler, writing for his own religious house, commonly gave chief prominence to its ecclesiastical affairs. As a chronicle grew -the book that all in the monastery who read anything were sure to read—it would repeat for convenience old information within its pages, new information would be contributed from different sources, and perhaps inserted by several hands. A copy of the chronicle of one monastery, thus composite, would be made perhaps for some other religious house, which would interpolate details more peculiarly interesting to itself, and would proceed to add according to its own editor's view of what was interesting to his particular circle of readers. We may use the word historiographer instead of editor, but these old chroniclers were none the less in every respect, for the reading public in connection with the monastery schools, the journalists of their own day; and the long file of Chronicles and Memorials of the Middle ages now being issued by our Government, under direction of the Master of the Rolls,† is not a dry mass of tediousness, but might be regarded as a file of the journals of the middle ages, out of which it would be easy to fill a broadsheet of extracts with home and foreign intelligence, criminal reports, state papers of the day, obituary notices of kings and great men written just after their death, and a few passages of editorial comment on contemporary events, that would look very much like leading articles. In the use of the numerous chronicles heretofore pub. * "E. W." III. 27. In this year, 1888, the series has nearly reached its hundred and seventieth volume. lished, now being issued, or yet lying unprinted, precisely the same sort of care is necessary that will be necessary for those who consult hereafter our own newspaper records. There is great need of discrimination between passages in which the monastic editor gave the fresh information of our own reporter" and those in which he simply copied matter out of other journals. If a passage written in Bede's journal has been copied and recopied generation after generation through a score of chronicles, until it reappears, let us say, in Matthew Paris, the authorities for the fact, of which nominal evidence has been thus multiplied, are not Bede and Matthew Paris, with or without the intervening score of chroniclers. The single authority is Bede. References in Hume's History of England, and in other works, bear frequent witness to the want of discrimination with which any chronicler is cited as an authority for any fact included in his pages. There was no guide but long and laborious study to an easy discrimination of authority in reading these medieval chronicles before the appearance, as a very essential part of the Government issue of Chronicles and Memorials, of Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy's Catalogue of the Materials of History.* Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of British Kings was continued to the year 1156, by his neighbour and Caradoc of contemporary, Caradoc of Llancarvan; and Llancarvan. copies of this history are said to have been then kept in the abbeys of Conway and Stratflur, and from that date until 1270 yearly augmented after the manner of the Saxon Chronicle, the two abbeys comparing notes every third year. Transcripts were made in Wales of these collections, and * “A Descriptive Catalogue of Materials relating to the History of Great Britain and Ireland to the end of the Reign of Henry VII." Vol. I., Parts I., II. (1862), extends to the Norman Conquest. Vol. II. (1865) covers the period from 1066 to 1200. Vol. III. (1871) continues the list to the year 1327. Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy died in 1878. there are said to have been a hundred such copies extant when Humphrey Lloyd, a worthy student of Cymric antiquities, translated the book, with additions from Matthew Paris and Nicholas Trivet, into English. Humphrey Lloyd dying, the copy of his translation was purchased by Sir Henry Sidney, then Lord President of Wales, and he, desiring its publication, entrusted to Dr. David Powell the labour of preparing it for press. Collating the work, then, with three copies of the Cymric book, adding also, with a mark to denote the addition, and a change of type, what he thought fit from other Chronicles and from the Cymric or British Book of Pedigrees, Dr. Powell, in 1584, published the work thus ascribed to Caradoc of Llancarvan, with a dedication to Sir Henry's son, "the right worshipful Sir Philip Sidney, Knight," as "The History of Cambria, now called Wales: a Part of the most famous Yland of Brytaine, written in the Brytish language above two hundreth yeares past: translated into English by H. Lhoyd, Gentleman: corrected, augmented, and continued out of Records and best approoued Authors by David Powel, Doctor in divinitie." Of this book there have been several editions. * To Caradoc of Llancarvan there is ascribed also a short extant Life of Saint Gildas, but the editor of the first printed copy of this work shows reasonable ground for believing that it was written before Geoffrey of Monmouth had taught Welshmen to magnify King Arthur. That hero of Geoffrey's romance is introduced simply as a petty king of Devonshire and Cornwall, who is frequently routed by his rival, Huel, on whom higher praise is lavished by the writer. Since, however, Huel, son of Nan, King of Scotland, was one of the three-and-twenty brothers of Gildas, of course the saint's biographer exalted him. It is *The Rev. Joseph Stevenson, by whom it is prefixed to his edition of Gildas for the English Historical Society. further urged however that King Arthur is said to have been unable for a year to discover that Guenever was at Glastonbury after her elopement, that he found an equal in the seducer Meluas King of Somersetshire, made a disgraceful peace with him, and received Guenever back. Certainly this does not seem to be the King Arthur of a man who thought it worth while to continue Geoffrey of Monmouth's British History. And yet the MS. (in Corpus Christi Coll. Cam.), which is of the twelfth century, ends with a couplet that decisively names Caradoc of Lancarvan as the author.* The poetry of Stephen's reign reproduced only upon the old ground in the north of England a dull Latin Laurence Cadmon in Laurence, a monk of Durham, who of Durham. was at one time of his life a chaplain at court, favoured by the king, and who died Prior of Durham in 1154. He died in France on his way back from Rome. His paraphrase is called the 'Hypognosticon,' and it consists of nine books of fluent hexameters and pentameters. Six of the books versified the chief events of the Old Testament, with divers digressions; the seventh book was given to praises of the Virgin Mary; the eighth contained only a brief sketch of Gospel history; and the ninth, a catalogue of saints and martyrs, among whom Cuthbert of Durham is made prominent. The first book was written at Durham; the others were written at court, and contain occasional reflections on court life. An imitation in prose and verse of the great work of Boëthius is another of Prior Laurence's works; "Consolation for the Death of a Friend" is its title. He wrote also a prose Life of St. Bridget, divers short rhetorical exercises, with, according to the Annals of Durham, a Rhythm on Christ and His Disciples, and a poem on the *Nancarbanensis dictamina sunt Caratoci Qui legat, emendat, placet illi compositori. |