There thou art fast detained
And death hath the key
Loathsome is that earth-house
And grim within to dwell,
And worms shall divide thee.
From the death of Alfred (901) to the Norman Conquest (1066) there was monkish work done in shape of Homilies, Chronicles, grammars of Latin and English—the language settling more and more into something like a determined form of what is now called Anglo-Saxon. But in that lapse of years I note only three historic incidents, which by reason of the traditions thrown about them, carry a piquant literary flavor.
Canute and Godiva.
The first is when the famous Canute, king of both England and Denmark, and having strong taste for song and music and letters, rows by the towers of a great East-England religious house, and as he drifts with the tide, composes (if we may trust tradition) a snatch of verse which has come down to us in a thirteenth century form, about the pleasant singing of the Monks of Ely. Wordsworth has embalmed the matter in one of his Ecclesiastic Sonnets (xxx.):
A pleasant music floats along the mere,
From monks in Ely chanting service high,