TO A.D. 901.] ALFRED'S BOËTHIUS. ASser. 35 on the imperishable; the third maintained that God is the chief good, and works no evil; the fourth, that, as seen from above, only the good are happy; and the fifth sought to reconcile God's knowledge of what is necessary with the freewill of mankind. The charm of a philosophic mind expressed through a pure strain of natural piety had made this dialogue between Philosophy and the Prisoner so popular that the Church justified its use of the volume in schools by claiming Boëthius as a Christian martyr. He was canonised as a saint in the eighth century, though in his book he turns from the depth of worldly calamity to explore all sources of true consolation, and does not name Christ. Alfred believed, as he was told, that Boëthius suffered as a Christian under Theodoric, and told it again when he gave the "Consolations of Philosophy" in English to his people. King Alfred also, with the same desire to give men inward strength, translated into English a famous book by Pope Gregory the Great. 66 This book, known as the Regula Pastoralis," showing what the mind of a true spiritual pastor ought to be, was made English as Gregory's Book on the Care of the Soul. It is in the preface to this that King Alfred tells of the decay of learning in his kingdom, and of his desire for its true restoration. 19. We cannot know with certainty whether much of the work ascribed to King Alfred was done by his own hand, or whether he may rather be said to have encouraged, by strong fellowship in industry, the labours of those good men whom he gathered to his court, and who worked under his direction, giving and receiving counsel, for the furtherance of his most royal enterprise. What we do know with certainty assures us that, although King Alfred lived a thousand years ago, a thousand years hence, if there be England then, his memory will yet be precious to his country. The oldest account of the Life of Alfred is that ascribed to his fellow-worker Asser, a Welsh monk of St. David's, who died Bishop of Sherborne. This Life comes down to us only in late manuscripts, with interpolations from a "Life of St. Neot," which probably was not written until sixty-four years after Asser's death. A manuscript as old as the tenth century existed until 1731, when it was burnt in the fire at the Cotton Library; but from printed references to its contents we learn that it did not contain those passages from the St. Neot's chronicle and idle legends which have caused some to deny that Asser could have been the writer of this Life. There are other reasons for believing that what we now receive as a Life of Alfred by Asser, his friend and fellow-worker, is really Asser's Life of him with later interpolations. 20. There is little to be said of our First English Literature after the time of King Alfred. Ethelwold became in 947 a monk at Glastonbury, when Dunstan, aged two-and-twenty, was made abbot there. Dunstan and Ethelwold sought the establishment of utmost strictness in monastic rule. Ethelwold restored the decayed abbey at Abingdon, became in 953 Bishop of Winchester, bought and rebuilt the ruins of Medeshamstead, now called Peterborough, and rebuilt Winchester Cathedral. Some fragments of First English in the chapter library at Gloucester have been partly published in fac-simile as Gloucester Fragments, and include a detail of miracles that preceded and directed the dedication, by Archbishop Dunstan, of Ethelwold's restored cathedral of Winchester to St. Swithin, who had been Bishop of Winchester a hundred years before. In aid of his own work as a Church reformer, Ethelwold translated into English Benedict's Rule of a Monastic Life. Dunstan wrote an adaptation of the same rule for the use of English monks, and also a large Commentary on the Benedictine Rule, doubtless from notes of the lectures given by him to his pupils in the monastery schools. 21. No vigour of independent genius was developed by this movement towards greater strictness of monastic rule. The best intellectual effort among us in the century following the death of Alfred took the same direction. Earnest and religious men felt in their youth an enthusiasm stirred by the re-founding of those monasteries in which they were trained; and, looking only to the farthest limit of their little world, they devoutly sought to raise their country by putting purer and intenser life into the men who were its teachers. But the nation was advancing, through much stir of blood, into a new age of its life, and could be little helped by a fixed reproduction of past forms. Alfred's grandson Athelstane, attacked by Danes from Ireland and Danes of the North of England, with allies from among the Gael and Cymry, overcame his enemies in the year 937 at the great battle of Brunanburh, a place unidentified, which may be Brunton, a few miles from Newcastle, by the Roman wall. This victory over Anlaf the Dane from Ireland, Constantine of Scotland, and Owen of Cumberland, caused the writer of the national record for the year 937 to break into song. TO A.D. 990.] BATTLE OF MALDON. ELFRIC. 37 The account given in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of The Battle of Brunanburh is a poem ; and a precedent having thus been established, scraps of verse of less mark occur now and then in the chronicle at the later dates 941, 942, 958, 973, 975, and 1002. Trouble with Danes continued, till there was more quiet in the reign of Edgar, who began to rule at the age of sixteen, and from the outset of his reign took Dunstan for chief counsellor. Edgar, therefore, supported the great efforts made for a revival of monasticism. He died in the year 975, after sixteen years of rule, and was called Lord of the whole Isle of Albion. Blending of all constituents of the great nation of the future was still going on. An England had been formed, and now came the foreshadowing of a Great Britain. The days of the first generations of English are therefore drawing to a close. Meanwhile Denmark, Sweden, and Norway had grown also into compact powers, and in the reign of Ethelred the Unready England was not merely disturbed by the Danes settled on her shores, but had to face their power as invaders. In the year 994 they attacked Ipswich, ravaged the surrounding country, and were met unsuccessfully at Maldon in Essex by the patriotic bands which had been trained and led by Byrhtnoth, who fell in the battle. There remains to us, nearly complete, a First English poem on The Battle of Maldon, or, as it is also called, The Death of Byrhtnoth, warm with the generous love of independence, and yet simply honest in its record of defeat, through which we feel, as it were, the pulse of the nation beating healthily. 22. These were the days of outward tumult in which Ælfric wrote his Homilies. Ælfric was one of the first pupils of Ethelwold at Abingdon. When Ethelwold became Bishop of Winchester, Ælfric acted as chief of the teachers in his diocese, and wrote for the use of schools a lively little book of Latin Colloquy. It was afterwards enlarged and republished by Ælfric Bata, who had himself been taught Latin by it at Winchester. Latin being in his time, and long before and after, spoken and written as the common language of the learned, colloquy was a common way of teaching. Ælfric represents in his dialogue pupils, who beg to be taught, answering questions as to their respective trades; and thus he brings out in a few pages a very large number of words that would be used by them in talk over the daily business of life. Ælfric wrote also for his pupils a Glossary in Latin and English. He was removed from Winchester to the Abbey of Cerne in Dorsetshire by the wish of its founder, and there it [A.D. 990 was that, at the request of the founder's son, Ælfric produced his Homilies, compiled and translated from the Fathers, in two sets each of forty sermons. The first set was completed in the year 990, and is a harmony of the opinions of the Fathers on all points of faith, as the English Church of his time accepted them. It was made public by the authority of Sigeric, then Archbishop of Canterbury. The other set tells of the saints whom the Church then revered. Elfric also began a translation, in abridgment, of the Bible into English, and completed in this way the whole Pentateuch, as well as the Book of Job. About the year 1005 Elfric became an abbot; and 1006 was the year of the death of Alfric, Archbishop of Canterbury, with whom the Ælfric of literature has, by mistake, usually been identified. 23. Some months after the death of Ethelred, Canute King of Denmark was also King of England. A monk of Ely, who wrote, after 1166, a history of his church, records a scrap of song said to be of Canute's composing. When he was going by boat to Ely to keep a Church festival, he ordered his men to row slowly and near shore, that he might hear the psalms of the monks; then he called to his companions to sing with him, and invented on the spot a little song: "Merie sungen the Muneches binnen Ely And here ye thes Muneches sang. And hear ye the song of the monks).' With other following words, said to have been still remembered and sung a hundred years after the Conquest. Earl Godwin was a strong man in the days of Canute's two weak Danish successors; and after the death of Hardicanute, in 1042, he led the English party, and secured for his countrymen an English king in Edward the Confessor, who in 1045 married the great Earl's daughter Edith. The story of First English Literature ends with the work of an unknown writer, who knew intimately Harold and Tostig, who was a loving dependant on their sister Edith, by whom he had first been saved from want, and who wrote in Latin prose, intermixed with verse, a Life of Edward the Confessor, which he dedicated to his patroness when she was Edward's widow. This writer was an honest man and clever, with personal affection for Earl Godwin and his TO A.D. 1066.] THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 39 household added to his patriotic sympathies. He put his heart into a narrative of those events before the Norman Conquest in which Godwin and his sons Harold and Tostig were chief actors. CHAPTER III. ENGLISH. TRANSITION 1. DURING the four centuries from Cædmon to the Conquest, the language of books written in English may be said to have been fixed. Among the First English themselves, mixtures or race and tribe from the Continent varied in different parts of the country, and in each place the constituents and the proportions of the mixture were shown by the form of speech. Our provincial dialects were thus established. Then, as now, the spoken language of the country had its local differences, only more strongly marked than they now are; and the untaught multitude was careless about grammar, while the cultivated class, which produced books, maintained in them a standard of the language, being careful to preserve accuracy in use of inflexion, discrimination of gender, and upon all other such points. Even the vocabulary of First English literature remained for those four centuries very uniform; so that, with a few traces of provincialism which may point towards the birthplace of a writer, and perhaps some looseness of grammar towards the close of the period, during the four centuries of First English Literature all English thought written in English may be said to have come down to us in one language as fixed as that which we now speak. But during the three centuries from the Conquest to the time of Chaucer there was continuous change. The language then was in transition to the later form, in which again it became fixed. In race the Normans were another combination of the English elements. Even the part of France on which they had established themselves was Teutonized before they came to it, for it was that which had in Cæsar's time a population traceable to a Teutonic immigration, and to which there had come in the fifth century the Franks-Teutons again. As far as concerned race only, there was quite as much of original kindred in the |