§ 2.

The middle of the seventh century was a very dark period throughout the West. The lingering rays of ancient culture had grown very faint in France, Italy, and Spain. Literary production had ceased in France since Gregory of Tours and his friend Venantius Fortunatus, the poet; in Spain, soon after Isidore of Seville, the Christian area had been narrowed by the Moslem invasion; in Italy, though the tradition of learning was never extinguished, yet no writer of eminence appeared for a long time after Gregory the Great. At such a time it was that the seed of learning found a new and fruitful soil among the Anglo-Saxon people; and they who had been the latest receivers of the civilising element, quickly took the lead in religion and learning.

In the year 668 three remarkable men came into Britain, These were Theodore, a Greek of Tarsus, who came as Archbishop of Canterbury; Hadrian, an African monk who had deprecated his own appointment to that office; and Biscop Baducing (called Benedict Biscop), an Angle of Northumbria, who had left his retreat in the monastery of Lerins, to guide and accompany the travellers into his native country.

This had risen out of an unforeseen event, and had almost the appearance of accident. But the consequences were great and far-reaching. Theodore organised the English Church upon lines that proved permanent. A new era was also inaugurated for literature and art. Literature was represented by Hadrian, who set up education at St. Augustine’s upon an improved plan; and art, especially in relation to religious and educational institutions—books, buildings, ritual—was the province of Benedict Biscop.

Up to this time education and literature had two rival sources, the old schools of Kent, and the schools of the Irish teachers. But from Hadrian’s coming a new literary era commences. For more than a hundred years our island was the seat of learning beyond any other country in the world of the West. Even Greek learning, extinct elsewhere, was revived for a time; and Bede, whose childhood had corresponded to the opening of this new activity, looked back on it when he was old as a glorious time, and he put it on record that he had known many scholars to whom both the Latin and Greek languages were as their mother tongue.

Of those who were formed in the school of Hadrian, the first and most conspicuous is Aldhelm. His rudimentary education must have been over before he knew Hadrian. The school of Maidulf gave him his boyish training at the monastery which was called after the Irish founder, and which has given name to the town of Malmesbury (Maidulfes burh). So Aldhelm stands between the two systems, the old Irish and the new Kentish. His preference was for the latter, but his works retain the characteristics of both. He has a love of grandiloquence which is both Keltic and Saxon, and a delight in alliteration which is more especially Saxon. His familiarity with the national poetry looms often through his Latin. But his proper characteristics, those whereby he fills a position altogether his own, are apart from these peculiarities. He is the scholar of the age, the type of that set whom Bede delighted to recall, who knew Latin and Greek like their mother tongue. He is the father of Anglo-Latin poetry. He made a zealous study of the Latin metres, and he commended the pursuit to other scholars. His Greek knowledge manifests itself everywhere: not always with a good effect, according to present taste; but in a manner which is of historical value as demonstrating his real familiarity with the Greek language.

Aldhelm’s great work, and the work which most conveys his interpretation of the spiritual conditions of his time, is his book, “De Laude Virginitatis,” in praise of Celibacy. But for the purposes of literary history, his artistic studies are of more importance than those which are strictly religious and ecclesiastical. Of the greatest interest for us are his Riddles. These are short Latin poems somewhat after the model of Symphosius, whose work he describes,[60] and whom he seems ambitious to outstrip. The riddles of Symphosius are uniformly of three hexameter lines, those of Aldhelm vary in length from four lines to sixteen; rarely more. The external structure is that of the Epigram, with the object speaking in the first person. The riddles both of Symphosius and Aldhelm are so closely identified with the vernacular riddles of the famous Exeter Song Book, that the reader may be glad of a specimen from each author. It should be premised that in each collection the subject stands as a title at the head of each piece. The subject of the sixteenth in Symphosius is the book-moth:—

DE TINEA.

Litera me pavit, nec quid sit litera novi,
In libris vixi nec sum studiosior inde,
Exedi musas nec adhuc tamen ipse profeci.

I have fed upon literature, yet know not what it is; I have lived among books, yet am not the more studious for it; I have devoured the Muses, yet up to the present time I have made no progress.

One of Aldhelm’s riddles is on the Alphabet; and this will be a fit specimen here, as containing something that is germane to the history of literature:—

Nos denæ et septem genitæ sine voce sorores,
Sex alias nothas non dicimus adnumerandas,
Nascimur ex ferro rursus ferro moribundæ,
Necnon et volucris pennâ volitantis ad æthram;
Terni nos fratres incertâ matre crearunt;
Qui cupit instanter sitiens audire, docemus,
Turn cito prompta damus rogitanti verba silenter.

We are seventeen sisters voiceless born; six others, half-sisters, we exclude from our set; children of iron by iron we die, but children too of the bird’s wing that flies so high; three brethren our sires, be our mother as may; if any one is very eager to hear, we tell him, and quickly give answer without any sound.[61]

Aldhelm is the first of the Anglo-Latin poets, and he was a classical scholar at a time when to be so was a great distinction. Both in prose and verse, his style has the faults which belong to an age of revived study. His love of learning, his keen appreciation of its beauty and its value, have tended to inflate his sentences with an appearance of display. His poetic diction is simpler than that of his prose; but here, too, he is habitually over-elevated, whence he becomes sometimes stilted, and oftentimes he drops below pitch with an inadequate and disappointing close. But we must honour him in the position which he holds. He is the leader of that noble series of English scholars who represent the first endeavouring stage of recovery after the great eclipse of European culture.

There is nothing of his remaining in the vernacular; but that he was an English poet we have testimony which, though late, is not to be disregarded. William of Malmesbury quotes a book of King Alfred’s, which said that Aldhelm had been a peerless writer of English poetry: and he adds, moreover, that a popular song, which had been mentioned by Alfred as Aldhelm’s, was still commonly sung in his own time—that is, in the twelfth century.

Attempts have been made to identify some of our extant Anglo-Saxon literature with a name so eminent. In 1835 the Anglo-Saxon Psalter of the Paris manuscript was first printed at Oxford, and as this book gives a hundred of the Psalms in vernacular poetry, the suggestion that they might be Aldhelm’s, though modernised, had rhetorical attractions for the editor (Thorpe), and supplied him with material for a few rather idle sentences of his Latin preface. In 1840 Jacob Grimm edited (from Thorpe’s editio princeps) two poems of the Vercelli book, the “Andreas” and the “Elene;” and in his preface he sought to fix this poetry upon Aldhelm by a line of argument altogether fallacious, as was afterwards shown by Mr. Kemble in his edition of the “Andreas” for the Ælfric Society.

That which we have to show for this period in the native Kentish dialect is less ambitious, but it will not be despised by the considerate reader. In the beginnings of learning, when students had not the apparatus of grammars and dictionaries, which now, being common, are almost as much a matter of course as any gift of nature, it was necessary for students to make lists of words and phrases for themselves, and after a while a few of these would be thrown together, and would be reduced to alphabetical order for facility of reference. It is to such a process as this that we owe the Glossaries which form an interesting branch of Anglo-Saxon literature. The Epinal Gloss is the oldest of these, and it is very valuable because of the archaic forms of many of the words. A selection is here given by way of specimen:—[62]

EPINAL GLOSS.

(Cooper, Appendix B, p. 153.)

Alba spina, haegu thorn (hawthorn).
Aesculus, boecae (beech).
Achalantis, luscina netigalæ (nightingale).
Acrifolus, holegn (holly).
Alnus, alaer (alder).
Abies, saeppae (fir).
Argella, laam (loam).
Accitulium, geacaes surae (sorrel).
Absintium, uuermod (wormwood).
Alacris, snel (swift, German schnell).
Alveus, stream rad (stream-road = channel).
Aquilæ, segnas (military standards).
Anser, goos (goose).
Beta, berc, arbor (birch).
Ballena, hran (whale).
Buculus, rand beag (buckler).
Berruca, uueartæ (wart).
Cados, ambras (casks).
Chaos, duolma (confusion, error).
Cicuta, hymblicae (hemlock).
Cofinus, mand (hamper).
Fulix, ganot, dop aenid (gannet, dip-chick).
Filix, fearn (fern).
Fasianus, uuor hana (pheasant).
Fungus, suamm (German schwamm).
Fragor, suoeg (swough, sough).
Finiculus, finugl (fennel).
Follis, blest baeelg (blast-bellows).
Glarea, cisil (pebble, cf. Chesil Bank).
Hibiscum, biscop uuyrt (marsh mallow).
Horodius, uualh hebuc (foreign hawk).
Hirundo, sualuuae (swallow).
Intestinum, thearm (German Darm).
Jungetum, risc thyfil (jungle).
Inprobus, gimach (troublesome).
Iners, asolcaen (lazy).
Inter primores, bituien aeldrum (among the chief men).
Juris periti, red boran (counsellors).
Invisus, laath (loath).
Iuuar (= jubar), leoma, earendil (gleam, beacon, crest).
Ignarium, al giuueorc (fire-work).
Ibices, firgen gaett (mountain goats, chamois).
Lunules, mene scillingas (coins or bracteates on a necklace).
Lucius, haecid (hake, German Hecht).
Lolium, atae (oats).
Limax, snel (snail).
Ligustrum, hunaeg sugae (honeysuckle).
Manipulatim, threatmelum (in bands).
Manica, gloob (glove).
Mascus, grima (mask).
Malva, cotuc, geormant lab (mallow).
Mars, Tiig (cf. Tuesday).
Ninguit, hsniuuith (snoweth).
Nigra spina, slach thorn (sloe-thorn).
Nanus, duerg (dwarf).
Olor, aelbitu (the elk, wild swan).
Piraticum, uuicing sceadan (pirates).
Pares, uuyrdae (Fates).
Perna, flicci (flitch).
Pictus acu, mið naeðlae sasiuuid (embroidered).
Pronus, nihol (perpendicular).
Pollux, thuma (thumb).
Quoquomodo, aengiþinga (anyhow).
Rumex, edroc.
Ramnus, theban (thorn).
Salix, salch (sallow).
Sturnus, staer (starling).
Titio, brand (firebrand).
Tignarius, hrofuuyrcta (roofwright).
Vadimonium, borg (pledge, security).

In this glossary we see the preparation for our modern Latin-English dictionaries. Already, as early as the reign of Augustus, the foundation of the Latin dictionary was laid by Verrius Flaccus, but his dictionary would naturally consist of Latin words with Latin explanations. But in the seventh century there was a demand for Latin vocabularies, with equivalents in the vernacular languages; and here, in the Epinal Glossary, we have the earliest known example of such a work. At first such glossaries would be merely lists of words formed in the course of studying some one or two Latin texts, and in process of time would follow the compilation of several such glossaries into one, until, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, we find vocabularies of some compass (as Ælfric’s), and by the fifteenth century we have such bulky dictionaries as the “Catholicon” and the “Promptorium Parvulorum.”

We will close this chapter with specimens of the “Psalter of St. Augustine,” which received an Anglo-Saxon gloss (dialect Kentish[63]) at the end of the ninth, or early in the tenth century. The book has been already described above, p. [33].

PSALM XLIX. (L.), 7:—“Hear, O my people,” &c.

geher folc min ond sprecu to israhela folce ond ic cythu the thætte god god thin ic eam
7. Audi populus meus et loquar Israhel et testificabor tibi quoniam Deus Deus tuus ego sum
na les ofer onsegdnisse thine ic dregu the onsegdnisse soth thine in gesihthe minre sind aa
8. Non super sacrificia tua arguam te holocausta autem tua in conspectu meo sunt semper
ic ne on foo of huse thinum calferu ne of eowdum thinum buccan
9. Non accipiam de domo tua vitulos neque de gregibus tuis hircos
for thon min sind all wildeor wuda neat in muntum ond oexen
10. Quoniam meæ sunt omnes feræ silvarum jumenta in montibus et boves
ic on cneow all tha flegendan heofenes ond hiow londes mid mec is
11. Cognovi omnia volatilia cæli et species agri mecum est
gif ic hyngriu ne cweothu ic to the min is sothlice ymb hwerft eorthan ond fylnis his
12. Si esuriero non dicam tibi, meus est enim orbis terræ et plenitudo ejus
ah ic eotu flæsc ferra oththe blod buccena ic drinco
13. Numquid manducabo carnes taurorum aut sanguinem hircorum potabo
ageld gode onsegdnisse lofes ond geld tham hestan gehat thin
14. Immola Deo sacrificium laudis et redde Altissimo vota tua
gece mec in dege geswinces thines thæt ic genere thec ond thu miclas mec
15. Invoca me in die tribulationis tuæ ut eripiam te et magnificabis me

D I A P S A L M A.

to thæm synfullan sothlice cweth god for hwon thu asagas rehtwisnisse mine ond genimes cythnisse
16. Peccatori autem dixit Deus Quare tu enarras justitias meas et adsumes testamentum
mine thorh muth thinne
meum per os tuum
thu sothlice thu fiodes theodscipe ond thu awurpe word min efter the
17. Tu vero odisti disciplinam et projecisti sermones meos post te
gif thu gesege theof somud thu urne mid hine ond mid unreht hæmderum dæl thinne thu settes
18. Si videbas furem simul currebas cum eo et cum adulteris portionem tuam ponebas
muth thin genihtsumath mid nithe ond tunge thin hleothrade facen
19. Os tuum abundavit nequitia et lingua tua concinnavit dolum
sittende with broether thinum thu teldes ond with suna moeder thinre thu settes eswic
20. Sedens adversus fratrem tuum detrahebas et adversus filium matris tuæ ponebas scandalum
thas thu dydes ond ic swigade thu gewoendes on unrehtwisnisse thæt ic wære the gelic
21. Hæc fecisti et tacui existimasti iniquitatem quod ero tibi similis
ic threu thec ond ic setto tha ongegn onsiene thinre Ongeotath thas alle tha ofer geoteliath dryhten
Arguam te et statuam illa contra faciem tuam (22.) intelligite hæc omnes qui obliviscimini Dominum
ne hwonne gereafie ond ne sie se generge
ne quando rapiat et non sit qui eripiat
onsegdnis lofes gearath mec ond ther sithfet is thider ic oteawu him haelu godes
23. Sacrificium laudis honorificabit me et illic iter est in quo ostendam illi salutare Dei