During the long cruel wars against the Danish raiders and settlers (900-960) many monasteries were overthrown; others, like Abingdon, became poor neglected places; into others the kings and nobles placed their younger children, to live comfortably on the rents and revenues of the Church, and neglect prayer and books. Under Eadwig the Fair, St. Dunstan (born 925) appeared as a reformer, making the rule of the Church respected, and being therefore at feud with Eadwig, as Thomas à Becket was with Henry II. Under Edgar (957-975), peace was restored, and Dunstan could carry out reforms as Archbishop of Canterbury. He brought back from Flanders the new rule-of the Order of St. Benedict (which the monk in Chaucer despises as not up to date) for the strict living of monks, and was backed by Bishops Oswald and Æthelwald, men of learning and reformers of education.
New monasteries, which often had schools attached to them, were built, and old monasteries were restored. Dunstan was an artist (a picture of him as a monk is still preserved, and is said to have been drawn by himself). He was skilled in music and metalworking, and fond of the old Anglo-Saxon poetry. He has left no books of his own writing, but there are curious early Lives of him in Latin. As a boy he climbed in his sleep to the roof of a church; he used to see visions of people at the time of their deaths; a large stone is said to have flown at him of its own accord; and, before his death, his bed, with him in it, was slowly raised up in air, and softly let down again. According to these tales, Dunstan must have been a "medium"; there is nothing saintly in such prodigies. Like many people of genius who were not saints, he was of a visionary nature, though a thoroughly practical and energetic man.
Thus he, with Oswald, Bishop of Worcester, later Archbishop of York; Abbo; Æthelwold; Byrthferth; and others, introduced "regulars"—Benedictine monks—in place of married priests into the cathedrals, and encouraged schools and learning of all kinds. Æthelwold himself taught Latin to boys at Winchester, and had the Latin book of the rules of the Benedictine monks done into Anglo-Saxon. A set of Anglo-Saxon sermons survives from this age called "The Blickling Homilies" (from Blickling, a house of Lord Lothian, where the manuscript has been preserved). Homilies are simple statements of Scriptural facts for simple hearers. The preacher already addresses the congregation as "my dearest brethren" (mine gebrothra tha leofostan). "Bethlehem," says the preacher, "means being interpreted, the House of Bread, and in it was Christ, the true bread, brought forth." "The Divine nature is not mingled with the human nature, nor is there any separation: we might explain this to you by a little comparison, if it were not too lowly; see an egg, the white is not mixed with the yolk, yet it is one egg." The sermons (these quoted are by Ælfric) are all plain teaching for plain people, but there is a famous address by Bishop Wulfstan, encouraging the English, by Biblical examples of Hebrew fighting patriots, to defend themselves against the cruel heathen Danes (1014).
Ælfric.
In the school at Winchester Ælfric was trained (born 955?) and thence went to instruct the young monks in the abbey of Cerne in Dorset, where he preached homilies; he wrote them both in English and in Latin. His sermon on the "Holy Housel," that is the Holy Communion, contained ideas which the Protestants, at the Reformation, thought similar to their own, and they printed this homily. "All is to be understood spiritually." "It skills not to ask how it is done, but to believe firmly that done it is." The style of the prose is more or less alliterative, and a kind of rhythm is detected in some of the sermons, as if they were intended to be chanted.
The Latin grammars written by Ælfric do not concern English literature; his Dialogue (Colloquium) between a priest and a number of persons of various occupations, throws light on ways of living. He wrote Latin "Lives of Saints," and edited part of an English translation or paraphrase of the Bible, suitable as material for homilies. He produced many other theological works, and died about 102-(?) being Abbot of Eynsham in Oxfordshire.
The interest of Ælfric, Wulfstan, and the rest, for us, is that they upheld a standard of learning and of godly living, in evil times of fire and sword, and that English prose became a rather better literary instrument in their hands.
The "Leechdoms," and works on herb-lore and medicine of the period, partly derived from late Latin books, partly from popular charm songs, are merely curious; they are full of folk-lore. After the Conquest, Anglo-Saxon prose, save in the "Chronicle," was almost submerged, though, in poetry, there were doubtless plenty of popular ballads, for the most part lost or faintly traceable as translated into the Latin prose of some of the writers of history. There would be songs chanted among the country people about the deeds of Hereward the Wake and other popular heroes; minstrels, now poor wanderers, would sing in the farmhouses, and in the halls of the English squires, but not much of their compositions remains.
We have, however, a few famous brief passages of verse, like the poem of "The Grave," familiar through Longfellow's translation, and probably earlier than the Conquest. It is written on the margin of a book of sermons, and the author's mood is truly sepulchral. The "Rhymed Poem" is celebrated only because it is in rhyme, which was a novelty with a great future before it; it is older than 1046, its muse is that of moral reflection.
The one verse of a song of King Canute is handed down by a monkish chronicler who lived more than a century later. The king in a boat on the Ouse, near a church, bids his men row near the shore to hear the monks sing:—