Thou should'st never see, then, anything more swift,though the sea within

Bade me wade the God of Heaven, bade me wend me hence

In the flood to fare-Nor so fearfully profound

Nor so mighty were the Ocean, that my mind should

ever waver

Into the abyss I'd plunge, if I only might Work the will of God!'

(From Genesis B.)

Prose from Elfred to the Conquest. Ælfred, though he began the prose of England, failed in establishing it. No results, save one, followed his work till ninety years had passed away. The one exception was the narrative in the Chronicle of the wars and government of Eadweard, Ælfred's son, 910-924. Ælfred's own work on the Chronicle ceased in 891. Another writer of vigour, earnestness, and conciseness told the story of the years from 894 to 897. From 897 to 910 the record is meagre, but a new life was given to the Chronicle by the narrative which began with 910. It may have been written by the same man who wrote of the years 894-97. His work ceases with the death of Eadweard, and it is the sole piece of secular prose which we possess at this date. From 925 to 940, during the reign of Æthelstan, the shallow records of the Chronicle are only once filled by the Song of Brunanburh (see page 24). From 940 to 975, during the reigns of Eadmund, Eadred, and Eadgar, the Chronicle contains nothing but short annual statements of leading events. Three small poems are inserted in it.

But

Secular prose then had died at Winchester. religious prose now began to rise again with the revival of monasticism, begun by Dunstan and nursed into life by King Eadgar. Dunstan, in whom Celtic and English elements mingle, set up a school at Glastonbury, and made his pupils love the arts of music, of poetry, of design and embroidery, of gold-working, painting, and engraving, in all of which he was himself a master. He sang the Psalms with his boys, developed church ritual and music, drew the Irish scholars to his help, made a fine library and treasury, and, having trained his monks in all the known branches of learning, sent them forth as missionaries of education to various parts of England. His best scholar, Ethelwold, was made head of the Abbey of Abingdon, refounded by King Eadred; and Ethelwold, who died in 904, soon made Abingdon as good a school as Glastonbury. It was his favourite pupil, Elfric, who created the new prose of England.

This revival of English prose kept step with the revival of monasticism. Monasticism had fallen into complete decay when Eadgar came to the throne in 959. Dunstan's effort, assisted as he was by Oswald of Ramsey and Odo of Canterbury, had

But

not pushed it far. Even the Rule itself of Benedict had slipped out of memory, and Oswald and Æthelwold had to go or send to Fleury to recover it. Eadgar threw himself eagerly into the movement, and Æthelwold, now Bishop of Winchester in 963, gave his full energy to the work. He cleared Winchester of the lazy secular clergy; he refounded Ely, Peterborough, and Thorney. No better work could be done for literature than this re-creation of the monasteries. Art, the science of medicine, the study of the Scriptures, of philosophy, of astronomy, and of literature, revived with their revival. The preaching and homilies of the monks brought religion as well as a kind of education to the people. And the new teaching was now given in the language of the people. At last the work of Ælfred began to produce its fruit.

Æthelwold loved his native tongue; King Ælfred's books were studied at Abingdon, and his principle-Teach Englishmen in English

was followed and established. The Blickling Homilies, nineteen of which exist, and probably the Homilies in the Vercelli Book belong to the early time of the monastic revival-from 960 to 990. They represent, with certain books mentioned by Ælfric and now lost, the transition between the prose of Ælfred and that of Elfric.

A new and more literary English prose now began with Elfric. He was born about 955, and educated at Winchester. Elfhead, Ethelwold's successor, sent him in 987 to teach and govern the new monastery of Cerne Abbas in Dorsetshire, and here he first followed King Alfred's plan, and translated Latin books into English for the use of the people. He returned to Winchester in 989, where he continued his work till the Thane thelmar, who had founded a Benedictine monastery at Eynsham, near Oxford, made him its abbot. There, in that quiet place, he lived, learning and teaching, until he died about 1022.

His first book, Homilia Catholica, 990-94, is dedicated to Archbishop Sigeric, and consists of two collections of homilies, forty in each collection, on the Sundays and feast-days of the year. A small number of them are in alliterative verse. Then he composed the Grammar and the Glossary, which were probably followed by the Colloquium. As the Homilies addressed the people, these books addressed the pupils at the school of Winchester. The Colloquium is a discourse on the occupations of the monks and on various states of life; and as one of the manuscripts has an English transla tion over its lines, it becomes a kind of vocabulary. It was re-done by another Elfric, one of his scholars, Ælfric Bata, with appendices. The lives of the saints, Passiones Sanctorum, another set of homilies, followed in 996. Other works of less importance were now taken up; but, urged thereto by Thane Ethelweard, he began to translate the Bible, part of which, from Genesis xxiv to the end of Leviticus, Ethelweard had given to

another hand.

The beginning, then, of Genesis was done by Elfric, with Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Esther, Job, and Judith. The books are not literally translated; parts are omitted, and parts are thrown into homiletic form. Elfric used the same liberties with the Bible which Elfred had used with Boethius and Orosius; and he gave this work the same patriotic tinge as Elfred had given to his translation of Orosius. The heroic sketches he made out of the Bible of the warriors of Israel not only taught the people the sacred history, but were also applied by him to encourage Englishmen against their foes. 'I have set forth Judith,' he says, 'in English for an example to you men that ye may guard your country against her foes;' and he closes the Homilies with a hymn of praise to God for the great men in all history who had borne witness to the faith, and among them to Ælfred, Æthelstan, and Eadgar, the noble champions of England.

The Canones Ælfrici, which followed his translations of the Bible, were written about the year 1000. They were in Latin and addressed to the clergy. In 1006 or 1007, when he was Abbot of Eynsham, he made a book of extracts from the writings of his master, Æthelwold-De Consuetudine Monachorum; addressed a homily on forgiveness to his friend Wulfgeat, a royal thane at Ilmington; another on chastity to Thane Sigeferth; and about the same time, 1008, composed a treatise Concerning the Old and New Testament, which was a practical introduction to the study of the Scriptures. Then, turning from English to Latin prose, he wrote a sympathetic life of his master, Vita Ethelwoldi, and a Sermo ad Sacerdotes for Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, about 1014-16; and Wulfstan made him turn it into English. Other homilies, needless to record, he also made, and then died quietly between 1020 and 1025.

Elfric was the Bæda of his time. He was the assimilator, collector, and distributor of learning, not its creator. He had no originality, but he loved his work and his country. The principles of education which Ælfred had established he carried out steadily. He trained the people as well as the clergy in their duties, in the history of the Church abroad and at home; and his charming character, full of moral dignity, tact, gentle charity, and wisdom in affairs, recommended and enhanced his books and letters. In one thing he was original-in his style. He made a new, a lighter, more musical, more lissome prose. He fitted English to take up the number of new subjects which were soon to engage the interests of the country. We cannot tell what English prose might have become had this modern style been developed. But the Danish invasion checked and the Norman Conquest paralysed it for a long time. Elfric's English prose had, however, one great fault. It became more and more alliterative-that is, it was prose written in poetic form. This manner, chiefly practised in

his Homilies, may have been used to please the people and for their sake, but it injures the life of prose, and, when continued, kills it.

The creation of this new, popular, and flexible prose was one result of Ælfric's work. Another result was the increase of learning and of a higher life among the clergy. The Archbishops Sigeric and Wulfstan, the Bishops Wulfsige and Kenulf, were inspired by him, and they begged him to write such books in English as would enable them to teach their clergy the rudiments of learning and the practice of a holy life. And the effort was not in vain. The clergy began to have a higher ideal of their profession, and to follow it; and so many small books on various ecclesiastical and theological matters were put forward in the eleventh century that it is plain the English clergy at the Conquest were not so ignorant as the Normans declared them to be.

A third result of Elfric's work was the creation of a small literary class among the nobles, some of whom now became learners and patrons of literature. Æthelweard, probably the writer of the Chronicle which bears his name, a royal thane, urged Elfric to write and began his translation of the Bible. Ethelmær, his son, was Ælfric's close friend and patron, and brought him into friendship with Wulfgeat, Sigweard, and Sigeferth, also nobles, for whom he wrote books. It is clear that the class Ælfred was unable to touch had now begun to be a cultivated class.

The mass of the people were also educated by the great body of homilies which Ælfric had written for them; and the legends of the saints and the tales of the martyrs, going hand-in-hand with the saga stories over England, awakened the imagination of the farmer and the peasant.

Then, too, the monasteries, under his influence, now became the home of learned men who wrote on science as well as on theology. Byrchtfercth, of the monastery at Ramsey, was a well-known mathematician; and his commentaries on the scientific works of Bæda, and his Life of Dunstan, prove his literary activity. The varied knowledge shown in these books, which date before 1016, makes it almost certain that he was the writer of a Hand-book in English which discusses the alphabets and subjects belonging to natural philosophy. Then a number of medical books were published in this eleventh century. The Læce-Boc of the tenth century was re-edited, with many interesting additions; the Herbarium Apuleii, the Medicina de Quadrupedibus, and others of the same kind show how active were the dispensaries of the monasteries. Many religious books- translations of the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Pseudo-gospels, Biographies of the Fathers, of the martyrs, of saints, and a number of sermons-belong also to the first half of the eleventh century. Certain books of a proverbial and ethical tendency-a Dialogue between Salomo and Saturnus, another between

the life of Alexander-the Letters of Alexander to Aristotle from India and the Wonders of the East -were also made, and brought with them the air and the scenery of a new world. They are put into excellent English-the last fine English of the times before the Conquest, the last fruit, with the exception of the Chronicle, of the tree which Ælfred had planted; and which, when it grew again above the soil, bore so changed an aspect that its original planters would not have recognised it. Its roots were the same; its branches and foliage were different. Ælfred would have been puzzled to read the English in which the Ancren Riwle (the Rule of Anchoresses) was written in the reign of Henry III. It was the first Middle English Prose.

The English of the Chronicle illustrates this transition. The Chronicle is the continuous record of English history in English prose, and it passes undisturbed through the Norman Conquest up to the death of Stephen. Its Winchester Annals practically cease in 1005, or even earlier. They were preserved in Canterbury from 1005 to 1070, but there are only eleven entries during these sixtyfive years, and these were made after the Conquest, at the election of Lanfranc as archbishop. The rest of these Annals is written in Latin, and they end with the consecration of Anselm. What Winchester dropped Worcester continued. Worcester Annals were carefully kept to the year 1079. If they were continued to 1107, that continuation was merged in the Annals of Peterborough. The Worcester Annals of the Chronicle are written in the English of Ælfric, and were probably done by Bishop Wulfstan, who held the see from 1062 to 1095, and by Colman, his chaplain, who wrote the bishop's life in English.

The

The Peterborough Annals were only fully edited after the rebuilding of the monastery in 1121. This fine and full edition of the Chronicle was made up out of the Annals of Winchester, Worcester, and Abingdon, and was then continued probably by one hand to the year 1131. Another hand, using a more modern English, carried it on from 1132 to 1154, when it closed with the accession of Henry II. The records at Worcester and Peterborough are not unworthy of the first records at Winchester. The Wars of Harold and the Fight at Stamford Bridge are boldly and picturesquely written. Even more picturesque is the account another writer gives of Senlac, and of William's stark, cruel, and just rule. This writer had lived at William's court, and we trace in his finer historical form that he had studied the Norman historians. The Peterborough scribe who followed him is rather a romantic than a national historian, and loves his monastery more than his nation. The second scribe of Peterborough, who probably composed his work in 1150-54, is well known for his pitiful and patriotic account of the miseries of England under the oppression of the Norman nobles. When in 1154 the Chronicle was closed, the Norman chroniclers took up the history of

England and wrote it in Latin; but the English Chronicle remains for English literature the most ancient and venerable monument of English prose.

After the Conquest.

The Norman Conquest put an end to Old English literature. When that literature arose again its language and its spirit were transformed. Old English had become Middle English. Its prose, which was religious, had been profoundly changed by the Norman theology and the Norman enthusiasm for a religious life. Its poetry, equally touched by the Anglo-Norman religion and love of romance, adopted as its own the romantic tales, melodies, manners, and ways of thinking which came to it from France, both in religious and in story-telling poetry. But this change took nearly a century and a half before it began to bear fruit. During those long years of transition little English work was done, and none of it could be called literature. Old English writings, such as the Homilies of Elfric and the Translations of the Gospels made in the eleventh century, and now called the Hatton Gospels, were copied and modernised. Monasteries, remote from Norman interests, still clung to, and made their little manuals and service books in, the English tongue. English prose was just kept alive, but only like a man in catalepsy.

English poetry had a livelier existence; but we have no remains of the songs which were sung throughout the country, and which kept alive in the soul of franklin, peasant, and outlaw the glories and heroes of the past. We know that these were made and sung from the Norman chroniclers who used them, and from suggestions of them in the Brut of Layamon. Lays were made after the Conquest of the great deeds of Hereward, and are used in the Latin life of that partisan. Even in the twelfth century, songs were built on the old sagas, such as those which celebrated Weland and Wade, his father; and sagas like Horn, Havelok, Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, and Waltheof, which took original form in English in the thirteenth century, existed as popular lays in the eleventh and twelfth. The noble figure of Ælfred appears again in the poem entitled the Proverbs of Elfred, an ethical poem of sententious sayings, varying forms of which arose in the twelfth century.

Old English poetry, having neither rhyme nor a fixed number of syllables, depended on accent and alliteration. Every verse was divided into two halfverses by a pause, and had four accented syllables, the number of unaccented syllables being indifferent; and the two half-verses were linked together by alliteration. The two accented syllables of the first half and one of the accented syllables of the second half began with the same consonant, or with vowels which were generally different from one

another. But often there was only one alliterative letter in the first half-verse; and the metre was further varied by the addition of unaccented syllables. The lays made after the Conquest illustrate the transition from the old alliterative metre to the short line and rhyme which were soon established by the Anglo-Normans when they began to write in English. The Poema Morale (of which an account will be found below, with specimens, at

page 40) is thought by some to have first taken shape early in the twelfth century. In that case, it and other twelfth-century poems of little account bring us still nearer to Middle English poetry, if they do not form part of it; but it is best, when we speak of literature, to make Middle English poetry properly begin with the first noble piece of poetic literature, with the Brut of Layamon, at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

STOPFORD A. BROOKE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The MS. of Beowulf is in the Cottonian Library in the British Museum, and Judith is in the same MS. The Exeter Book is in the library of Exeter Cathedral, and was placed there by Bishop Leofric in 1071. It contains the Riddles, the Elegies, the Crist, the St Guthiac, the Phænix, the Juliana, the Widsith, the Complaint of Deor, and other poems. It is a kind of anthology. The Vercelli Book, found at Vercelli in 1822, contains, interspersed among homilies, the Andreas, the Fates of the Aposties, the Dream of the Rood, the Elene, and two unimportant poems. The Junian MS. of the so-called Cadmonian poems is in the Bodleian. The Fight at Finnsburg was found on the cover of a MS. of Homilies at Lambeth, Waidhere on two vellum leaves at Copenhagen; the Battle of Brunanburk is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the Battle of Maldon in a copy of the original MS. made by Hearne. Only one MS. of each of these poems exists.

Of Ælfred's translations we have many MSS.-three of the Cura Pastoralis, five of Bæda's History, two of the Orosius, two of the De Consolatione, four of the Laws. The Soliloquia are in the MS. containing Beowulf. Of Elfric's works there are many MSS. Seven MSS. of the English Chronicle exist. MS. A, the Parker MS. written at Winchester, is at Cambridge: MS. B is at the British Museum, and was made at Canterbury; MS. C is at the British Museum, and is an Abingdon MS.; MS. D, also at the Museum, is the Worcester Chronicle; MS. E, now at the Bodleian (the Laud MS.), was done at Peterborough; MS. F, at the British Museum, was probably kept at Canterbury; MS. G, also probably kept at Canterbury, is at the British Museum, and is likely to be a copy of MS. A.

[When Modern English was beginning to show its full powers in the hands of the early Elizabethan writers, the oldest stage of the tongue was almost forgotten, save for the little knowledge required by those whose business it was to spell out and interpret Anglo-Saxon charters and the like. At the Reformation AngloSaxon religious literature was looked up for controversial purposes; Archbishop Parker gathered and edited MSS., and greatly promoted Saxon' studies. Verstegen shows he knew some AngloSaxon in his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities (1606); and Spelman was driven to make his Glossarium (Part I. 1626) by the difficulties he met in studying our oldest laws. Francis Junius, or Du Jon, a Continental Protestant who settled in England in 1621, devoted himself to the study of Anglo-Saxon and the cognate Teutonic tongues, edited the so-called Cadmon and other Old English books, and gave his name to the Junian MS. Hickes, the nonjuring bishop, published the first edition of his Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic Grammar in 1689; and all students of early English history owe a debt of gratitude to Thomas Hearne, who studied and preserved antiquities.' Percy in his Reliques takes no cognis ance of the oldest poetry. Warton's History of English Poetry (vol. i. 1774) professedly begins with the close of the tenth century; but what he says by way of introduction on the three successive 'dialects of Saxon'-British Saxon (till the Danish occupation),

Danish Saxon ('British Saxon corrupted by the Danes'), and Norman Saxon (Danish Saxon adulterated with French)-shows how far he was to seek in this field; 'the spurious Cadmon's beautiful poetical paraphrase of the Book of Genesis' he names as written in Danish Saxon. Gray's knowledge of Icelandic and his interest in Welsh poetry and in 'Ossian' make it certain that, had he carried out his projected History of Poetry, the section on what he called 'the introduction of the poetry of the Goths into these islands by the Saxons and Danes' would have received fuller attention than heretofore. Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Extracts (first of many editions, 1783) does not include this period within its scope. The first edition of Ellis's Specimens of the Early English Poets (1790) has nothing earlier than Surrey and Wyatt; but the 1801 edition gives not only Middle English poems, but the old song of Brunanburh, with a literal translation, and the ingenious rendering made by Hookham Frere, when an Eton schoolboy, into Rowleylike fourteenth-century English. In the notes Ellis accepts for Anglo-Saxon words derivations from Chaldaic' and Latin as unhesitatingly as from Gothic.' Rask the Dane put the study on a sounder philological footing by his Grammar (1817), which Thorpe translated; and the works of Thorpe, Bosworth, and Kemble in the first half of the century revived in the English people interest in their old language and literature. Conybeare's Specimens of Anglo-Saxon Peetry appeared in 1826. Campbell begins his Specimens of the British Poets (7 vols. 1819) with Chaucer and the King's Quair; and in the earlier issues and reprints of this Cyclopædia (1844-74) Anglo-Saxon literature was dismissed in less than three pages.

For further study the reader may be referred to English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest (1898), by the writer of the preceding section of this work, Dr Stopford A. Brooke, or to his History of Early English Literature (2 vols. 1892), which describes and appreciates still more fully the whole of the Anglo-Saxon literature down to the accession of Alfred; to Professor Earle's little handbook (1884); to Wülker's Grundriss der Angelsächsischen Litteratur (1885); to the first volume of Ten Brink's History of English Literature (1877; transl. 1887); to the relevant parts of Professor Henry Morley's First Sketch, English Writers, and Library of English Literature, of Jusserand's History of the Literature of the English People (1896; transl. 1895), of Taine's History of English Literature (1863-64; transl. 1871), and of Wülker's Englische Litteraturgeschichte (1896); to Grein's Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Prosa und Poesie, as re-edited by Wülker (1881-97); to the American Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (3 vols. 1883-88); to Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Readers, and Zupitza's; to the Grammar by Sievers, and Bosworth's Dictionary as edited by Toller. A bibliography giving the editions and translations of the various Anglo-Saxon works will be found in Dr Stopford Brooke's English Literature to the Conquest: thus there are five or six English editions of Beowulf, and as many translations, including the verse translation by William Morris.-ED.]