CHAPTER XI
The literature of one people owes a debt to that of others. Help-bringers. Great work of Benedictine monks. Our debt to Ireland. The English Chronicle's account of the Martyrdom of St Ælfeah.
The literature of a country is not merely what the men and women born in it have written. The thought of one people is fed, or enlarged, or in some way strengthened by the thought of other peoples; and the literature of the times we are speaking of could not have been what it was, had it not had other sources than these purely English to draw from. And, of all kinds of help-bringers, we owe much to the monks, and chiefly the great Benedictine order. King Alfred had to do his work at a time when things were at a low ebb in the English monasteries. You will remember how he bewailed the poor state of learning in England, and the ignorance of the clergy; a state very different indeed from that of the old days of St Bede and Alcuin. After Alfred's time there came a revival—and revival in life means revival in work. So we get much good prose literature, and, through the monks, note well, we have it, fed from whatever old lore was then to be got at.
I have reminded you of England's great debt to Ireland through St Aidan and others. I must tell you of a record of St Bede's, which shows how gladly Ireland in old days, as ever, shared the priceless gift which she of all countries, received with the most passionate entireness and held with the most unswerving steadfastness. It was in the year 664 that there was a great pestilence, raging both in England and Ireland. At the time there were many Englishmen in Ireland who had gone there, "either for the sake of divine studies, or of a more continent life"; some of them, he says, became monks, and others devoted themselves to study, "going about from one master's cell to another." "The Scots (that is the Irish) willingly received them all, and took care to supply them with food, as also to furnish them with books to read, and their teaching, gratis."
Where should we be but for the work done in the monasteries? How can we be grateful enough for what went on there in the way of thought, research and the collecting of materials, in addition to the work of teaching: all fed by the life of prayer and praise and self-denial? Let us try to think about the quiet, patient work of scholars and students; about their noting of so many facts and detailing of them. Let us think of the beginnings of English history and literature; of the writing of precious manuscripts; the careful copying of them; each of them taking so much time to complete and being so costly in production, especially when there was added to care and skill the artistic beauty of decoration and illumination.
From these quiet abodes of the piety that transfused itself through loving toil and discipline, light streamed forth to go on shining and shining, on through the long centuries to come.
We must now have a look into the pages of the great English Chronicle which we should not possess had it not been for these good monks, and we will take the account of the martyrdom of Archbishop Ælfeah, whom you know best under the Latinized form of his name, Alphege. His heavenly birthday was the 19th of April. The king who is spoken of was Æthelred who was called the Unready, which word means without counsel, and then of ill-counsel. You know how we talk of "ill-advised" conduct or speech. There is a fourteenth century poem which speaks of Richard the Second as "redeless." And, because there is no such thing as being neutral; because, if we are not good, we are bad, the word got the meaning of foolish or worse. Freeman, the great historian says that Æthelred "was perhaps the only thoroughly bad king among all the Kings of the English of the West Saxon line; he seems to have been weak, cowardly, cruel, and bad altogether."
As long as St Dunstan lived, Æthelred was not so bad as he afterwards became. We must remember what a bad mother Æthelred had in Ælfthryth, or Elfrida, who was an evil wife to her first husband, and most probably caused the murder of the king her step-son, the son of King Edgar, who was her second husband. This was the Edward known as St Edward the Martyr.
The story of Ælfeah comes under the year a.d. 1011. "In this year sent the king and his witan to the (Danish) army, and desired peace, and promised them tribute and food on condition that they ceased from their harrying. They had then overrun East Anglia, and Essex, and Middlesex, and Oxfordshire, and Cambridgeshire, and Hertfordshire; and south of Thames, all Kent and Sussex, and Hastings, and Surrey, and Berkshire, and Hampshire, and much of Wiltshire. All these misfortunes befell us through ill counsel, that they were not in time (either) offered tribute or fought against, but when they had done the greatest ill, then peace and truce were made with them. And nevertheless for all the truce and tribute, they went flockmeal everywhere and harried and robbed and slew our poor folk. And then, in this year, between the nativity of St Mary and St Michael's Mass, they sat round Canterbury and came into it through treachery, because Ælfmaer betrayed it, whose life the Archbishop Ælfeah had before saved. And there they took the Archbishop Ælfeah, and Ælfweard, the king's reeve, and Abbot Ælfmaer, and Bishop Godwin. And Abbot Ælfmaer they let go away. And they took there within all the clergy, and men and women: it was untellable to any man how much of the folk there was. And they were afterwards in the town as long as they would. And when they had thoroughly surveyed the city then went they to their ships and led the Archbishop with them. Then was he a captive who erewhile had been the head of the English race and of Christendom.[[I]] There might then be seen misery there where oft erewhile men had seen bliss, in that wretched city whence had first come to us Christendom and bliss before God and before the world.