[141] See Prof. Dietrich in Haupt’s “Zeitschrift,” xi.
[142] Prof. Stephens, “Tvende Olde-Engelske Digte,” Kiobenhavn, 1853.
[143] “The Riming Poem,” Cod. Exon. ed. Thorpe, p. 352.
[144] Stubbs, “St. Dunstan,” Preface.
CHAPTER XII.
THE NORMAN CONQUEST AND AFTER THAT.
The first of these chapters took a brief survey of the literature that preceded and elevated the Anglo-Saxon literature: this concluding chapter must be still briefer in sketching the manner of its decline. It would be true to say that the Norman Conquest dealt a fatal blow to Anglo-Saxon literature; but it would also be true to say that the cultivation of Anglo-Saxon literature never came to an end at all. I will presently endeavour to reconcile this seeming contradiction; but first I have some little remainder to tell of the main narrative.
There are two small sets of writings which have not yet been described. These are the liturgical and scientific remains. Of liturgical, we have the “Benedictionale of Æðelwold,”[145] and we have the so-called “Ritual of Durham,” with its interlinear Northumbrian gloss. But the most famous book of this kind is that which is called “The Leofric Missal,” because Leofric, the first Bishop of Exeter (of Crediton, 1046-1050; of Exeter, 1050-1072) gave it to his cathedral. It is now in the Bodleian Library. “It is one of the only three surviving Missals known to have been used in the English Church during the Anglo-Saxon period,” the other two being the Missal of Robert of Jumièges, Archbishop of Canterbury, now in Rouen Library, and the “Rede Boke of Darbye,” in the Parker Library at Cambridge.[146]
It may seem almost idle to talk of the “scientific” remains of Anglo-Saxon times. For Science, in its grandest sense,—the recognition of constant order in nature and the reign of law,—had not yet dawned upon the world. Science, in this sense, dates only from the seventeenth century, and its patriarchal names are Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. But, nevertheless, the earlier and feebler efforts at the explanation of phenomena have a real and a lasting value for human history, and what they lack in scientific quality has somehow the effect of throwing them all the more into the arms of the literary historian.
There is, however, one small Anglo-Saxon writing which needs not this apology, and which may be considered as a real contribution even to science. I mean the Geography which King Alfred inserted into his translation of Orosius. All our other scientific relics are but compilation and translation in the primitive paths of Medicine, and Botany, and Astronomy.