A HANDBOOK

OF

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

CHAPTER 1.

FROM A.D. 600 TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST.

600-1066.

1. THE COMING OF THE ENGLISH.-2. THE OLD ENGLISH LANGUAGE, ITS DIA. LECTS AND VERSIFICATION.-3. THE EPIC POETRY.-4. THE INTRODUCTION OF CHRISTIANITY AND LEARNING.-5. RELIGIOUS POETRY.-6. LYRIC AND SHORTER POEMS.-7. THE PROSE WRITINGS.

1. The Coming of the English.-There is a strange appropriateness in the fact that the poem which perhaps contains the oldest verse of the wide-spread English race should be a record of wanderings. It bears the name of Widsis-the Far-Journeyer. 'Always wandering with a hungry heart,' this old English scóp, like Tennyson's Ulysses, could not 'rest from travel,' and in the bald lines of his verse he 'unlocks his word-hoard' to tell how he had

travelled through strange lands, and learnt Of good and evil in the spacious world,

Parted from home friends and his kindred dear.

These 'home friends' were those of the mainland, for the poem in its earliest portions goes back to the days when the English tribes dwelt on and near the Cimbrian peninsula. To this day between the Fiord of Flensborg and the river Slei in East Sleswig the little district of Angeln preserves the name of the Angles; northward were the Jutes, while to the south along the coast and

As to the conflicting views in regard to the date of Widst, see Stopford Brooke's History of Early English Literature, 1893, i. 323–326.

inland dwelt the more widely spread Saxons. These restless Teutonic seamen in their 'foamy-necked bark journeyed over the sea waves most like a bird,' to borrow the phraseology of Beowulf, till they beheld the sea-cliffs gleam, the lofty downs, and the great headlands,' and were early led to seek a new field for plunder in Roman Britain. Like the Danes of later days, long before they came to settle they came to spoil. By A.D. 286 an imperial fleet, large enough to encourage its commander to revolt and proclaim himself Emperor, had to be fitted out to stay their ravages; a 'Count of the Saxon Shore' had to be appointed to defend the coasts, and nine castles, that of Richborough among them, lined the shores from the Wash to Sussex. Such attacks, however, were but piratical raids, and the Coming of the English' is connected with the great wave of Teutonic invasion which swept not only over distant provinces but over Italy itself. Four hundred years before Christ, Brennus the Gaul had uttered Væ victis over a conquered Rome; not till eight centuries later (A.D. 410) did the city again fall beneath a foreign foe. Then the spoilers were Teutons; the West Goths, under Alaric. Not even the plaintive 'groans of the Britons' could now draw help from desolated Italy for a remote province; and enervated by nearly four centuries of Roman rule, Britain was left defenceless against the Picts and Scots of the North. In despair, King Vortigern called in the Teutonic seamen, and our Old English Chronicle under the year 449 thus sets forth the result:-The king bade them fight against the Picts; and they did so and had victory wheresoever they came. They sent then to Angeln and bade them send further help, and bade them tell the nothingness of the Britons and the goodness of the land. They therefore sent them more help. Then came men from three tribes of Germany, from Old Saxons, from Angles and Jutes.' To these we may add the Frisians, many of whom are known to have accompanied the other tribes.

2. The Old English Language, its Dialects and versification. All these tribes spoke the same Anglo-Frisian language with slight differences of dialect,' and all agreed in calling their common language English (O.E. Englisc), i.e. Anglish, because the Angles were for a long time the dominant tribe.'* The name Anglo-Saxon was applied to the people, not to the language; originally, indeed, it was but a name to distinguish the 'English' Saxons from the Saxons of the mainland, and the growing tendency to discard its usage in favour of that of Old' or 'Oldest English' is one of many signs of the revived interest in the history of our early speech and

Hy. Sweet, New English Grammar, Pt. I. 1892, p. 214.

literature. Modern English, indeed, differs much from its earliest form, but our grammar still remains thoroughly Teutonic, while, in spite of all additions to our vocabulary, the great majority of the words we use are of similar origin. Old English, like Latin or German, was a highly inflected language; but even in its earliest known form its inflectional system begins to show signs of decay. Some of the case-endings seen in the cognate Gothic and Icelandic are already gone; the gender distinctions in the plural of adjectives, also seen in both these languages, have disappeared; and very early the tendency to use compound forms for the past and future tenses is noticeable. The stages of inflectional change cannot of course be sharply defined, but convenience demands approximate division, and the retention of the name 'English' throughout is an obvious advantage for marking the unity of our linguistic history.*

As has been stated, it was the Anglian tribes which first assumed supremacy; and it was also in the North that our early poetry was produced. The coming of the Danes swept away the northern centres of learning, and when literature revived it was under the West-Saxon Alfred; thus the Wessex dialect henceforth became the official and practically the literary language of England. In it the older poems were re-copied, and they now remain to us only in their southern dress, though the language often retains traces of the original northern. But West-Saxon writers from King Alfred to Abbot Ælfric still called their language English.

The remains of our early literature are but fragmentary. Beo• Various divisions of English into 'periods' have been from time to time proposed, but there is an increasing and healthy tendency to adopt the names 'Old,' ' Middle,' and 'Modern' English. These correspond with those adopted for other languages, and as technical names there can be little doubt as to their advisability, although in general speech other names may be and are at times employed. An astronomer may still speak of the sun rising,' or a chemist of 'sulphuric acid' instead of hydric sulphate, and similarly the terms AngloSaxon' and 'Early English' may be used; but this in no way detracts from the value of a more systematic terminology. The technical use of the name AngloSaxon for the dialect of Wessex, as adopted by Professor Skeat and some others, seems but a kind of 'half-way house.' It limits a term which was popularly used in a wider sense before the study of our older dialects was recognised; and it departs from the otherwise uniform territorial nomenclature adopted for these dialects--the Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and Wessex.

The following subdivisions are those proposed by Dr. Sweet (New English Grammar, 1892), and when it is remembered that all such dates are at best but approximate, it will be seen that his scheme presents several advantages :—

I. Old English

c. Transition O. E. (Eng. of Layamon) 1100-1200 a. Early M. E. (Eng. of Ancren Riwle') 1200-1300

II. Middle Englishb. Late M. E. (Eng. of Chaucer)

III. Modern English

c. Transition M. E. (Eng, of Caxton). (a. Early Mod. E. (Tudor Eng. : Eng, of Shakespeare)

1300-1400 1400-1500

1500-1650

b. Late Mod. English

1850

wulf is preserved in a single manuscript: the Bodleian Library contains the solitary copy of the Cadmonian poems: the 'great English book on various subjects wrought in verse' given by Leofric, first Bishop of Exeter (1050–1072), to his Cathedral library, where it still remains, contains in most cases the only existing copies of other poems. In 1822 a volume of six poems was discovered at Vercelli, in North Italy: a fragment of the Fight at Finnsburg was found a century ago on the cover of a book in Lambeth Library: in 1860 two leaves of the lost epic Waldere were found at Copenhagen. On such slender threads has the life of our old literature hung. But if this is so in regard to the literature as a whole, much more is it so in regard to our dialects. For the study of these—so important philologically and phonetically if not on the purely literary side-we are dependent upon scraps of verse, inscriptions, charters, and the fortunate ignorance which led to interlining Latin books with English translations, or to crude glossaries or dictionaries. Of the early Northumbrian dialect in which our poetry was chiefly composed, less than thirty lines remain in the manuscript versions of Cadmon's Hymn,' Bæda's 'Death-song,' and a metrical riddle found at Leyden. To these must be added a few inscriptions, of which the chief is that on the tall stone cross behind the pulpit at Ruthwell church, overlooking the Solway Firth, close by the early home of Carlyle and the last home of Burns. In the interlinear glosses of the Durham Gospels and the 'Ritual' are preserved very pure examples of late Northumbrian (950–1000). The Mercian dialect of middle England is best represented in its early form by the 'Vespasian Psalter,'* and by a glossary preserved at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: while an interlinear gloss on the Rushworth Gospel of St. Matthew shows the dialect in its later form. Kentish is seen, in part at least, in the glossaries at Erfurt and Epinal, the former of which probably dates from the beginning of the eighth century; also in numerous charters. Glosses, charters, and the Proverbs of Solomon' show its later form. West Saxon first appears in a charter of 778, while some contemporary MSS. of King Alfred's works fortunately exist. The homilies of Elfric show the later form of this dialect in a very pure state, but most of the late West Saxon MSS. exhibit a great mixture of forms.t

• In the library of Sir Rob. Cotton, now in the British Museum, the shelves were originally named after the busts of the Roman Emperors placed over them The Museum still keeps this nomenclature. Thus the MS. of Beowulf is 'Vitellius A. xv.,' so called after Vitellius. Similarly with the 'Vespasian' version of the Psalms.

† Dr. Hy. Sweet edited for the Early English Text Society in 1885 all these