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BEOWULF; THE HERO-LIFE.

The Anglo-Saxon poetical narrative of “The Exploits of Beowulf” forms a striking contrast with the chronological paraphrase of Cædmon. Its genuine antiquity unquestionably renders it a singular curiosity; but it derives an additional interest from its representation of the primitive simplicity of a Homeric period—the infancy of customs and manners and emotions of that Hero-life, which the Homeric poems first painted for mankind:—that Hero-life of which Macpherson in his Ossian caught but imperfect conceptions from the fragments he may have collected, while he metamorphosed his ideal Celtic heroes into those of the sentimental romance of another age and another race.

The northern hordes under their petty chieftains, cast into a parallel position with those princes of Greece whose realms were provinces, and whose people were tribes, often resembled them in the like circumstances, the like characters, and the like manners. Such were those kinglings who could possess themselves of a territory in a single incursion, and whose younger brothers, stealing out of their lone bays, extended their dominion as “Sea-Kings” on the illimitable ocean.1 The war-ship and the mead-hall bring us back to that early era of society, when great men knew only to be heroes, flattered by their bards, whose songs are ever the echoes of their age and their patrons.

We discover these heroes, Danes or Angles, as we find them in the Homeric period, audacious with the self-confidence of their bodily prowess; vaunting, and talkative of their sires and of themselves; the son ever known by denoting the father, and the father by his marriage alliance—that primitive mode of recognition, at a period when, amid the perpetual conflicts of rival chieftains, scarcely any but relations could be friends; the family bond was a sure claim to protection. Like the Homeric heroes, they were as unrelenting in their hatreds as indissoluble in their partisanship; suspicious of the stranger, but welcoming the guest; we find them rapacious, for plunder was their treasure, and prodigal in their distributions of their golden armlets and weighed silver, for their egotism was as boundless as their violence. Yet pride and glory fermented the coarse leaven of these mighty marauders, who were even chivalric ere chivalry rose into an order. The religion of these ages was wild as their morality; few heroes but bore some relationship to Woden; and even in their rude paganised Christianity, some mythological name cast its lustre in their genealogies. In the uncritical chronicles of the middle ages it is not always evident whether the mortal was not a divinity. Their mythic legends have thrown confusion into their national annals, often accepted by historians as authentic records.2 But if antiquaries still wander among shadows, the poet cannot err. Beowulf may be a god or a nonentity, but the poem which records his exploits must at least be true, true in the manners it paints and the emotions which the poet reveals—the emotions of his contemporaries.

Beowulf,3 a chieftain of the Western Danes, was the Achilles of the North. We first view him with his followers landing on the shores of a Danish kingling. A single ship with an armed company, in those predatory days, could alarm a whole realm. The petty independent provinces of Greece afford a parallel; for Thucydides has marked this period in society, when plunder well fought for was honoured as an heroic enterprise. When a vessel touched on a strange shore, the adventurers were questioned “whether they were thieves?” a designation which the inquirers did not intend as a term of reproach, nor was it scorned by the valiant;4 for the spoliation of foreigners, at a time when the law of nations had no existence, seemed no disgrace, while it carried with it something of glory, when the chieftain’s sword maintained the swarm of his followers, or acquired for himself an extended dominion.

Beowulf was a mailed knight, and his gilded ensign hung like a meteor in the air, and none knew the fate it portended. The warder of the coast, for in those days many a warder kept “ocean-watch” on the sea-cliffs, takes horse, and hastens to the invader; fearlessly he asks, “Whence, and what are ye? Soonest were best to give me answer.”

The hero had come not to seek feud, nor to provoke insult, but with the free offering of his own life to relieve the sovereign of the Eastern Danes, whose thanes, for twelve years, had vainly perished, struggling with a mysterious being—one of the accursed progeny of Cain—a foul and solitary creature of the morass and the marsh. In the dead of the night this enemy of man, envious of glory and abhorrent of pleasure, glided into the great hall of state and revelry, raging athirst for the blood of the brave there reposing in slumber. The tale had spread in songs through all Gothland. This life-devourer, who comes veiled in a mist from the marshes, may be some mythic being; but though monstrous, it does little more than play the part of the Polyphemus of antiquity and the Ogre of modern fairyism.

In the timber-palace chambers were but small and few, and the guests of the petty sovereign slept in the one great hall, under whose echoing roof the Witenagemot assembled, and the royal banquet was held; there each man had his “bed and bolster” laid out, with his shield at his head, and his helmet, breastplate, and spear placed on a rack beside him—“at all times ready for combat both in house and field.”

This scene is truly Homeric; and thus we find in the early state of Greece, for the historian records this continual wearing of armour, like the barbarians, because “their houses were unfenced, and travelling was unsafe.”5

The watchman of the seas leaves not the coast, duteous in his lonely cares; while Beowulf, with his companions, marches onwards. They came to where the streets were paved; an indication in that age of a regal residence. The iron rings in their mailed coats rang as they trod in their “terrible armour.” They reach the king’s house; they hang up their shields against the lofty wall. They seat themselves on a bench, placing in a circle their mailed coats, their bucklers, and their javelins. This warlike array called forth an Ulysses, “famed for war and wisdom;” they parley; the thane hastens to announce the warlike but the friendly visitor; and the hero, so famed for valour, yet would not obtrude his person, standing behind the thane, “for he knew the rule of ceremony.” The prince of the East Danes joyfully exclaims, that “he had known Beowulf when a child; he remembered the name of his father, who married the only daughter of Hrethel the Goth. It is said that he has the strength of thirty men in the grip of his hand. God only could have sent him.”

Beowulf, he whose beautiful ship had come over “the swan-path,” may now peacefully show himself in his warlike array. Beowulf stood upon the dais; his “sark of netted mail” glittered where the armourer’s skill had wrought around the war-net. Here we discover the ornamental artist as in the Homeric period. He found the prince of the East Danes, “old and bald” like Priam, seated among his earls. Our hero, whom we have observed so decorous in “his rule of ceremony,” now launches forth in the commendation of his own prowess.

He who had come to vanquish a fiend exulted not less in a swimming-match in the seas, “when the waves were boiling with the fury of winter,” during seven whole days and nights, combating with the walruses.

The exploits of Beowulf are of a supernatural cast; and this circumstance has bewildered his translator amid mythic allusions, and thus the hero sinks into the incarnation of a Saxon idol—a protector of the human race. It is difficult to decide whether the marvellous incidents be mythical, or merely exaggerations of the northern poetic faculty. We, however, learn by these, that corporeal energies and an indomitable spirit were the glories of the hero-life; and the outbreaks of their self-complacency resulted from their own convictions, after many a fierce trial.

Such an heroic race we deem barbarous; but what are the nobler spirits of all times but the creatures of their age? who, however favoured by circumstances, can only do that which is practicable in the condition of society.

Henforth, the son of Eglaff, sate at the feet of the king; jealousy stirred in his breast at the prowess of “the proud seafarer.” This cynical minister of the king ridicules his youthful exploits, and sarcastically assured the hero, that “he has come to a worse matter now, should he dare to pass the space of one night with the fiend.” This personage is the Thersites of our northern Homer—

With witty malice studious to defame, Scorn all his joy, and laughter all his aim.

And like Thersites, the son of Eglaff receives a blasting reproach:—“I tell thee, son of Eglaff, drunken with mead, that I have greater strength upon the sea than any other man. We two (he alludes to his competitor), when we were but boys, with our naked swords in our hands, where the waves were fiercest, warred with the walruses. The whale-fish dragged me to the bottom of the sea, grim in his gripe; the mighty sea-beast received the war-rush through my hand. The sea became calm, so that I beheld the ocean promontories, as the light broke from the east. Never since have the sea-sailors been hindered of their way; never have I heard of a harder battle by night under the concave of heaven, nor of a man more wretched on the ocean-streams. Of such ambushes and fervour of swords I have not heard aught of thee, else had the fiend I come to vanquish never accomplished such horrors against thy prince. I boast not, therefore, son of Eglaff! but never have I slaughtered those of my kin, for which hast thou incurred damnation, though thy wit be good.”

In this state of imperfect civilization, we discover already a right conception of the female character. At the banquet the queen appears; she greeted the young Goth, bearing in her own hand the bright sweet liquor in the twisted mead-cup. She went among the young and the old mindful of their races; the free-born queen then sate beside the monarch. There was laughter of heroes. A bard sung serene on “the origin of things,” as Iopas sang at the court of Dido, and Demodocus at that of Alcinous. The same bard again excites joy in the hall by some warlike tale. Never was banquet without poet in the Homeric times.

Here our task ends, which was not to analyse the tale of Beowulf, but solely to exhibit the manners of a primeval epoch in society. The whole romance, though but short, bears another striking feature of the mighty minstrel of antiquity; it is far more dramatic than narrative, for the characters discover themselves more by dialogue than by action.

The literary history of this Anglo-Saxon metrical romance is too remarkable to be omitted. It not only cast a new light on a disputed object in our own literary history, but awoke the patriotism of a foreign nation. Beowulf had shared the fate of Cædmon, being preserved only in a single manuscript in the Cottonian Library, where it escaped from the destructive fire of 1731, not, however, without injury. In 1705, Wanley had attempted to describe it, but he did not surmount the difficulty. Our literary antiquaries, with Ritson for their leader, stubbornly asserted that the Anglo-Saxons had no metrical romance, as they opined by their scanty remains. The learned historian of our Anglo-Saxons, in the progress of his ceaseless pursuit, unburied this hidden treasure—which at once refuted the prevalent notions; but this literary curiosity was fated to excite deeper emotions among the honest Danes.

The existing manuscript of “The Exploits of Beowulf” is of the tenth century; but the poem was evidently composed at a far remoter period; though, as all the personages of the romance are Danes, and all the circumstances are Danish, it may be conjectured, if it be an original Anglo-Saxon poem, that it was written when the Danes had a settlement in some parts of Britain. At Copenhagen the patriotism of literature is ardent. The learned there claimed Beowulf as their own, and alleged that the Anglo-Saxon was the version of a Danish poem; it became one of the most ancient monuments of the early history of their country, and not the least precious to them for its connexion with English affairs. The Danish antiquaries still amuse their imagination with the once Danish kingdom of Northumbria, and still call us “brothers;” as at Caen, where the whole academy still persist in disputations on the tapestry of Bayeux, and style themselves our “masters.”

It was, therefore, a national mortification to the Danes that it was an Englishman who had first made known this relic; and further, that it existed only in the library of England. The learned Thorkelin was despatched on a literary expedition, and a careful transcript of the manuscript of Beowulf was brought to the learned and patriotic Danes. It was finished for the press, accompanied by a translation and a commentary, in 1807. At the siege of Copenhagen a British bomb fell on the study of the hapless scholar, annihilating “Beowulf,” transcript, translation, and commentary, the toil of twenty years. It seemed to be felt, by the few whose losses by sieges never appear in royal Gazettes, as not one of the least in that sad day of warfare with “our brothers.” Thorkelin was urged to restore the loss. But it was under great disadvantages that his edition was published in 1815. Mr. Kemble has redeemed our honour by publishing a collated edition, afterwards corrected in a second with a literal version. Such versions may supply the wants of the philologist, but for the general reader they are doomed to be read like vocabularies. Yet even thus humbled and obscured, Beowulf aspires to a poetic existence. He appeals to nature and excites our imagination—while the monk, Cædmon, restricted by his faithful creed, and his pertinacious chronology—seems to have afforded more delight by his piety than the other by his genius—and remains renowned as “the Milton of our forefathers!”

1 See the curious delineation of the Vikings of the North, in Turner’s “Hist. of the Anglo-Saxons,” i. 456, third edition.

2 Mr. Kemble, the translator of Beowulf, has extricated himself out of an extraordinary dilemma. The first volume, which exhibits the Anglo-Saxon text, furnished in the preface, with an elaborate abundance, all the historical elucidations of his unknown hero. Subsequently when the second volume appeared, which contains the translation, it is preceded by “A Postscript to the Preface,” far more important. Here, with the graceful repentance of precipitate youth, he moans over the past, and warns the reader of “the postscript to cut away the preface root and branch,” for all that he had published was delusion! particularly “all that part of my preface which assigns dates to one prince or another, I declare to be null and void!” The result of all this scholar’s painful researches is, that Mr. Kemble is left in darkness with Beowulf in his hand; an ambiguous being, whom the legend creates with supernatural energies, and history labours to reduce to mortal dimensions.

The fault is hardly that of our honest Anglo-Saxon, as trustful of the Danes as his forefathers were heretofore. It is these, our old masters, who, with Count Suhm, the voluminous annalist of Denmark, at their head, have “treated mythic and traditional matters as ascertained history. It is the old story of Minos, Lycurgus, or Numa, furbished up for us in the North.” What a delightful phantasmagoria comes out while we remain in darkness! But a Danish Niebuhr may yet illuminate the whole theatre of this Pantheon.

3 These Teutonic heroes were frequently denominated by the names of animals, which they sometimes emulated: thus, the hero exulting in bone and nerve was known as “the Bear;” the more insatiable, as “the Wolf;” and “the Wild Deer” is the common appellative of a warrior. The term “Deer” was the generic name for animal, and not then restricted to its present particular designation.

“Rats and Mice, and such small Deer,”

baffled our Shakspearean commentators, who rarely looked to the great source of the English language—the Anglo-Saxon, and, in their perplexity, proposed to satisfy the modern reader by a botch of their own—and read geer or cheer. Percy discovered in the old metrical romance of “Sir Bevis of Southampton,” the very distich which Edgar had parodied.—Warton, iii. 83.

4 Thucydides, Lib. i.

5 Thucydides.

THE ANGLO-NORMANS.

The Anglo-Saxon dominion in England endured for more than five centuries.

A territorial people had ceased to be roving invaders, but stood themselves in dread of the invasions of their own ancient brotherhood. They trembled on their own shores at those predatory hordes who might have reminded them of the lost valour of their own ancestors. But their warlike independence had passed away. And, as a martial abbot declared of his countrymen, “they had taken their swords from their sides and had laid them on the altar, where they had rusted, and their edges were now too dull for the field.”1 They could not even protect the soil which they had conquered, and often wanted the courage to choose a king of their own race. Sometimes they stood ready to pay tribute to the Dane, and sometimes suffered the throne to be occupied by a Danish monarch. In a state of semi-civilization their rude luxury hardly veiled their unintellectual character. Feeble sovereigns and a submissive people could not advance into national greatness.

When the Duke of Normandy visited his friend and kinsman, Edward the Confessor, he beheld in England a mimetic Normandy; Norman favourites were courtiers, and Norman soldiers were seen in Saxon castles. Edward, long estranged from his native realm, had received his education in Normandy; and the English court affected to imitate the domestic habits of these French neighbours—the great speaking the foreign idiom in their houses, and writing in French their bills and accompts.2 Already there was a faction of Frenchified Saxons in the court of the unnational English sovereign.

William the Norman surveyed an empire already half Norman; and in the prospect, with his accustomed foresight, he mused on a doubtful succession. A people who had often suffered themselves to fall the prey of their hardier neighbour, lie open for conquest to a more intelligent and polished race.

The victory of Hastings did not necessarily include the conquest of the people, and William still condescended to march to the throne under the shadow of a title. After a short residence of only three months in his newly-acquired realm, “the Conqueror” withdrew into his duchy, and there passed a long interval of nine months. William left many an unyielding Saxon; a spirit of resistance, however suppressed, bound men together, and partial insurrections seemed to be pushing on a crisis which might have reversed the conquest of England.3

During this mysterious and protracted visit, and apparent abandonment of his new kingdom to the care of others, was a vast scheme of dominion nursed in the councils of Norman nobles, and strengthened by the boundless devotion of hardy adventurers, who were all to share in the present spoliation and the future royalty? In his prescient view did William there anticipate a conquest of long labour and of distant days; the state, the nobles, the ecclesiastics, the people, the land, and the language, all to be changed? Hume has ventured to surmise that the mind of the Norman laboured with this gigantic fabric of dominion. It is probable, however, that this child of a novel policy was submitted to a more natural gestation, and expanded as circumstances favoured its awful growth. One night in December the King suddenly appeared in England, and soon unlimited confiscations and royal grants apportioned the land of the Saxons among the lords of Normandy, and even their lance-bearers. It seemed as if every new-comer brought his castles with him, so rapidly did castles cover the soil.4 These were strongholds for the tyrant foreigner, or open retreats for his predatory bands; stern overlookers were they of the land!

The Norman lords had courts of their own; sworn vassals to their suzerain, but kinglings to the people. Sometimes they beheld a Saxon lord, whose heart could not tear itself from the lands of his race, a serf on his own soil; but they witnessed without remorse the rights of the sword. Norman prelates were silently substituted for Saxon ecclesiastics, and whole companies of claimants arrived to steal into benefices or rush into abbeys. It was sufficient to be a foreigner and land in England, to become a bishop or an abbot. Church and State were now indissolubly joined, for in the general plunder each took their orderly rank. It was the triumph of an enlightened, perhaps a cunning race, as the Norman has been proverbially commemorated, over “a rustic and almost an illiterate generation,” as the simplicity of our Saxon prelates, who could not always speak French, is described by Ordericus Vitalis, a monk who, long absent from England, wrote in Normandy. Ingulphus, the monk of Croyland, though partial to “the Conqueror,” however, honestly confesses that when the English were driven from their dignities, their successors were not always their superiors.

All who were eager to court their new lords were brought to dissemble their native rusticity. They polled their crowns, they cut short their flowing hair, and throwing aside the loose Saxon gown, they assumed the close vest of the more agile Norman. “Mail of iron and coats of steel would have better become them,” cried an indignant Saxon. We have seen what a martial Saxon abbot declared to the Conqueror, while he mourned over his pacific countrymen. This was the time when it was held a shame among Englishmen to appear English. It became proverbial to describe a Saxon who ambitioned some distinguished rank, that “he would be a gentleman if he could but talk French.”

Fertile in novelties as was this amazing revolution, the most peculiar was the change of the language. The style of power and authority was Norman; it interpreted the laws, and it was even to torment the rising generation of England; children learned the strange idiom by construing their Latin into French, and thus, by learning two foreign languages together, wholly unlearned their own. Not only were they taught to speak French, but the French character was adopted in place of their own alphabet. It was a flagrant instance of the Conqueror’s design to annihilate the national language, that finding a College at Oxford with an establishment founded by Alfred to maintain divines who were “to instruct the people in their own vulgar tongue,” William decreed that “the annual expense should never after be allowed out of the King’s exchequer.”5

The Norman prince on his first arrival could have entertained no scheme of changing the language, for he attempted to acquire it. The secretary of the Conqueror has recorded that when the monarch seemed inclined to adopt the customs of his new subjects, which his moderate measures at first indicated, the Norman prince had tried his patience and his ear to babble the obdurate idiom, till he abhorred the sound of the Saxon tongue. If because the Conqueror could not learn the Saxon language he decided wholly to abolish it, this would seem nothing more than a fantastic tyranny; but in truth, the language of the conquered is usually held in contempt by the conquerors for other reasons besides offending the delicacy of the ear. The Normans could not endure the Saxon’s untunable consonants, as it had occurred even to the unlettered Saxons themselves; for barbarians as their hordes were when they first became the masters of Britain, they had declared that the British tongue was utterly barbarous.6

But not at his bidding could the military chief for ever silence the mother-tongue. Enough for “this stern man” to guard the land in peace, while every single hyde of land in England was known to him, and “put at its worth in HIS BOOK,” as records the Saxon chronicler. The language of a people is not to be conquered as the people themselves. The “birth-tongue” may be imprisoned or banished, but it cannot die—the people think in it; the images of their thoughts, their traditional phrases, the carol over the mead-cup, and their customs far diffused, survived even the iron tongue of the curfew.

The Saxons themselves, who had chased the native Britons from their land, still found that they could not suppress the language of the fugitive people. The conquerors gave their Anglo-Saxon denominations to the towns and villages they built; but the hills, the forests, and the rivers retain their old Celtic names.7 Nature and nationality will outlast the transient policy of a new dynasty.

The novel idiom became the language of those only with whom the court-language, whatever it be, will ever prevail—the men who by their contiguity to the great affect to participate in their influence. In that magic circle of hopes and fears where royalty is the sole magician of the fortunes of men, the Conqueror perpetuated his power by perpetuating his language. Ignorance of the French tongue was deemed a sufficient pretext for banishing an English bishop pertinacious in his nationality, who had for a while been admitted to the royal councils, but whose presence was no longer necessary to the dominant party.

To the successors of the Norman William it might appear that the English idiom was wholly obliterated from the memories of men; not one of our monarchs and statesmen could understand the most ordinary words in the national tongue. When Henry the Second was in Pembrokeshire, and was addressed in English—“Goode olde Kynge,” the King of England inquired in French of his esquire what was meant? Of the title of “Kynge,” we are told that his majesty was wholly ignorant! A ludicrous anecdote of the chancellor of Richard the First is a strange evidence that the English language was wholly a foreign one for the English court. This chancellor in his flight from Canterbury, disguised as a female hawker, carrying under his arm a bundle of cloth, and an ell-measure in his hand, sate by the sea-side waiting for a vessel. The fishermen’s wives inquired the price of the cloth; he could only answer by a burst of laughter; for this man, born in England, and chancellor of England, did not know a single word of English! One more evidence will confirm how utterly the Saxon language was cast away. When the famous Grosteste, bishop of Lincoln (who would no doubt have contemned his Saxon surname of “Great-head”), a voluminous writer, once condescended to instruct “the ignorant,” he wrote pious books for their use in French; the bishop making no account of the old national language, nor of the souls of those who spoke it.

When the fate of conquest had overthrown the national language, and thus seemed to have bereaved us of all our literature, it was in reality only diverging into a new course. For three centuries the popular writers of England composed in the French language. Gaimar, who wrote on our Saxon history; Wace, whose chronicle is a rhymed version of that of Geoffry of Monmouth; Benoit de Saint Maur (or Seymour); Pierre Langtoft, who composed a history of England; Hugh de Rotelande (Rutland), and so many others, were all English; some were descendants from Norman progenitors, but in every other respect they were English. Some were of a third generation.

Our Henry the Third was a prodigal patron of these Anglo-Norman poets. This monarch awarded to a romancer, Rusticien de Pise, who has proclaimed the regal munificence to the world, a couple of fine “chateaux,” which I would not, however, translate as has been done by the English term “castles.” Well might a romancer so richly remunerated promise his royal patron to finish “The Book of Brut,” the never-ending theme to the ear of a British monarch who, indeed, was anxious to possess such an authentic state-paper. Who this Rusticien de Pise was, one cannot be certain; but he was one of a numerous brood who, stimulated by “largesses” and fair chateaux, delighted to celebrate the chivalry of the British court, to them a perpetual fountain of honour and preferment. We may now smile at the Count de Tressan’s querulous nationality, who is indignant that the writers of the French romances of the Round Table show a marked affectation of dwelling on everything that can contribute to the glory of the throne and court of England, preferring a fabulous Arthur to a true Charlemagne, and English knights to French paladins.8 When Tressan wrote, this striking circumstance had not received its true elucidation; the hand of these writers had only flowed with their gratitude; these writers composed to gratify their sovereign, or some noble patron at the English court, for they were English natives or English subjects, long concealed from posterity as Englishmen by writing in French. It had then escaped the notice of our literary antiquaries at home and abroad, that these Englishmen could have composed in no other language. How imperfect is the catalogue of early English poets by Ritson! for it is since his day that this important fact in our own literary history has been acknowledged by the French themselves, who at length have distinguished between Norman and Anglo-Norman poets. M. Guizot was enabled by the French government to indulge his literary patriotism by sending a skilful collector to England to search in our libraries for Norman writings; and we are told that none but Anglo-Norman writers have been found—that is, Englishmen writing on English affairs, and so English that they have not always avoided an unguarded expression of their dislike of foreigners, and even of Normans!

It is worthy of observation, that even those Norman writers who came young into England soon took the colour of the soil; and what rather surprises us, considering the fashion of the court at that period, studied the original national language, translated our Saxon writings, and often mingled in their French verse phrases and terms which to this day we recognise as English. Of this we have an interesting evidence in an Anglo-Norman poetess, but recently known by the name of “Marie de France;” yet had she not written this single verse accidentally—

Me nummerai par remembrance, Marie ai num, si sui de France—

we should from her subjects, and her perfect knowledge of the vernacular idiom of the English, have placed this Sappho of the thirteenth century among the women of England. This poetess tells us that she had turned into her French rhymed verse the Æsopian Fables, which one of our kings had translated into English from the Latin. This royal author could have been no other than Alfred, to whom such a collection has been ascribed. We learn from herself the occasion of her version. Her task was performed for a great personage who read neither Latin nor English; it was done for “the love of the renowned Earl William Longsword”—

——Cunte Willaume, Le plus vaillant de cest Royaume.

Who would calculate the “largesse” “Count William,” this puissant Longsword, cast into the lap of this living muse when she offered all this melodious wisdom; whose beautiful simplicity a child might comprehend, but whose moral and politic truths would throw even the Norman Longsword into a state of rational musing? Her “Lais,” short but wild “Breton Tales,” which our poetess dedicated to her sovereign, our Henry the Third, are evidence that Marie could also skilfully touch the heart and amuse the fancy.

In her poems, Marie has translated many French terms into pure English, and abounds with allusions to English places and towns whose names have not changed since the thirteenth century. Her local allusions, and her familiar knowledge of the vernacular idiom of the English people, prove that “Marie,” though by the accident of birth she may be claimed by France, yet by her early and permanent residence, and by the constant subjects of her writings, her “Breton Tales,” and her “Fables” from the English, by her habits and her sympathies, was an Englishwoman.

At this extraordinary period when England was a foreign kingdom, the English people found some solitary friends—and these were the rustic monk and the itinerant minstrel, for they were Saxons, but subjects too mean and remote for the gripe of the Norman, occupied in rooting out their lords to plant his own for ever in the Saxon soil.

The monks, who lived rusticated in their scattered monasteries, sojourners in the midst of their conquered land, often felt their Saxon blood tingle in their veins. Not only did the filial love of their country deepen their sympathies, but a more personal indignation rankled in their secret bosoms at the foreign intruders, French or Italian—the tyrannical bishop and the voluptuous abbot. There were indeed monks, and some have been our chroniclers, base-born, humiliated, and living in fear, who in their leiger-books, when they alluded to their new masters, called them “the conquerors,” noticed the year when some “conqueror” came in, and recorded what “the conquerors” had enacted. All these “conquerors” designated the foreigners, who were the heads of their houses. But there were other truer Saxons. Inspired equally by their public and their private feeling, these were the first who, throwing aside both Latin and French, addressed the people in the only language intelligible to them. The patriotic monks decided that the people should be reminded that they were Saxons, and they continued their history in their own language.

This precious relic has come down to us—the “Saxon Chronicle”9—but which in fact is a collection of chronicles made by different persons. These Saxon annalists had been eye-witnesses of the transactions they recorded, and this singular detail of incidents as they occurred without comment is a phenomenon in the history of mankind, like that of the history of the Jews contained in the Old Testament, and, like that, as its learned editor has ably observed, “a regular and chronological panorama of a people described in rapid succession by different writers through many ages in their own VERNACULAR LANGUAGE.” The mutations in the language of this ancient chronicle are as remarkable as the fortunes of the nation in its progress from rudeness to refinement; nor less observable are the entries in this great political register from the year One of Christ till 1154, when it abruptly terminates. The meagreness of the earlier recorders contrasts with the more impressive detail of later enlarged and thoughtful minds. When we come to William of Normandy, we have a character of that monarch by one who knew him personally, having lived at his court. It is not only a masterly delineation, but a skilful and steady dissection. The earlier Saxon chronicler has recorded a defeat and retreat which Cæsar suffered in his first invasion, which would be difficult to discover in the Commentaries of Cæsar.

The true language of the people lingered on their lips, and it seemed to bestow a shadowy independence to a population in bondage. The remoter the locality, the more obdurate was the Saxon; and these indwellers were latterly distinguished as “Uplandish” by the inhabitants of cities. For about two centuries “the Uplandish” held no social connexion; separated not only by distance, but by their isolated dialects and peculiar customs, these natives of the soil shrunk into themselves, intermarrying and dying on the same spot; they were hardly aware that they were without a country.

It was a great result of the Norman government in England that it associated our insular and retired dominion with that nobler theatre of human affairs, the Continent of Europe. In Normandy we trace the first footings of our national power; the English Sovereign, now a prince of France, ere long on the French soil vied in magnitude of territory with his paramount Lord, the Monarch of France. Such a permanent connexion could not fail to produce a conformity in manners; what was passing among our closest neighbours, rivals or associates, was reflected in the old Saxon land which had lost its nationality.

1 Speed, 441. This was said to “the Conqueror,” and this Abbot of St. Alban’s paid dearly for the patriotism which had then become treason.

2 A circumstance which Milton has recorded.

3 Our great lawyers probably imagined that the honour of the country is implicated in the title usually accorded to William the Norman; Spelman, the great antiquary, and Blackstone, the historian and the expounder of our laws, have absolutely explained away the assumed title of “the Conqueror” to a mere technical feudal term of “Conquestor, or acquirer of any estate out of the common course of inheritance.” The first purchaser (that is, he who brought the estate into the family which at present owns it) was styled “the Conqueror,” and such is still the proper phrase in the law of Scotland. Ritson is indignant at what he calls “a pitiful forensic quibble.”

But another great lawyer and lord chancellor, the sedate Whitelocke, positively asserts that “William only conquered Harold and his army; for he never was, nor pretended to be, the conqueror of England, although the sycophant monks of the time gave him that title.”—Whitelocke’s “Hist. of England,” 33.

In a charter, granting certain lands for the church of St. Paul’s, which Stowe has translated from the record in the Tower, William denominates himself, “by the grace of God, King of Englishmen” (Rex Anglorum), and addresses it “to all his well-beloved French and English people, greeting.”—Stowe’s “Survey of London,” 326, Edit. 1603. Did William on any occasion declare that he was “the Conqueror” as well as the sovereign of England? When William attempted to learn the Saxon language, it is obvious that he did not desire to remind his new subjects that he ruled as Voltaire sang of his hero—

—————————qui regna sur la France, Par droit de Conquête et par droit de Naissance.

4 The final history of these citadels may illustrate that verse of Goldsmith which reminds us—

“To fly from PETTY TYRANTS—to the Throne!”

In the short space of seventy years the owners of those castles bearded even majesty itself; these lords, by their undue share of power, were in perpetual revolt; till two royal persons, though opposed to each other, Stephen and Maude, decreed for their mutual interest the demolition of fifteen hundred and fifteen castles. They were razed by commission, or by writs to the sheriffs; and a law was further enacted that “none hereafter, without license, should embattle his house.” And thus was broken this aristocracy of castles. See two dissertations on “Castles,” by Sir Robert Sutton, and by Agard; “Curious Discourses by Eminent Antiquaries,” i. 104 and 188.

This number of castles seems incredible; possibly many were “embattled houses.” My learned friend, the Rev. Joseph Hunter, an antiquary most versant in manuscripts, inclines to think there may be some scriptural error of the ancient scribe, who was likely to add or to leave out a cipher, without much comprehension of the numerals he was transcribing without a thought, like what happened to the eleven thousand virgins of St. Ursula.

5 Speed, 440.

6 A curious fact discovered by Mr. Turner in a Cottonian manuscript has brought this circumstance to our knowledge. In a grant of land in Cornwall, an Anglo-Saxon king, after mentioning the Saxon name of the place, adds, “which the inhabitants there called, barbarico nomine, by the barbarous name of Pendyfig;” which was the British or Welsh name.—“Vindication of the Ancient British Poems,” 8.

7 Camden has noticed this striking circumstance in his “Britannia.” See also Percy’s Preface to Mallett’s “Northern Antiquities,” xxxix.

8 See his Preface to the prose romance of “La Fleur des Batailles.”

9 Miss Gurney, who has honourably been hailed as “the Elstob of her age,” privately printed her own close version of the “Saxon Chronicle” from the printed text, 1810. Happy lady! who, when sickness had made her its prisoner, opened the “Saxon Chronicle;” and she learned that she might teach the learned.

The Rev. Dr. Ingram, principal of Trinity College, Oxon, has since published his translation, accompanied by the original, a collation of the manuscripts, and notes critical and explanatory. 1823. 4to. A volume not less valuable than curious.