Читать книгу History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne - Andrew Lang, Robert Kirk - Страница 23

Books written on English soil in the Latin language are no part of English literature. It is necessary, however, to notice them, because they testify to the knowledge and taste of the educated; while the ideas expressed in Latin reached the less instructed people through sermons and in conversation, and through the translations into Anglo-Saxon which were directed and in part executed by King Alfred.

Though written by a native of our island we may omit the Latin book of Gildas, of about 516-570, for he was a Briton of the Romanized sort, who fled to Brittany. His book, where it does not contain mere lamentations, gives a kind of history, very vague, of events in the country, and of the sins and crimes of the British princes down to about 550. Such as the information was, Bede, the great early Anglo-Saxon historian, used it, as did the author of "The History of the Britons" attributed to Nennius (say 800), who, like Gildas, mentions the battle of Badon hill, but, unlike Gildas, brings in King Arthur. As we shall see later, Bede does not mention Arthur.

Leaving these vague British writers in Latin, we come to Bede.