There to redeem mankind.
I trembled, but I durst not fail,
I on my shoulders bare the glorious King.
They pierce my sides with many a darksome nail,
And on us both their cruel curses fling.
The death, the burial and the resurrection of the Lord are related in a similar strain of reverent compassion for the Almighty Sufferer, and the Rood finally charges the poet to reveal the vision to all men, inasmuch as the day is coming when Christ will ask who there is that for His name will taste of bitter death as He did on the cross.
There is something which must needs move our sympathy when we see the passion of pitying love with which these simple-hearted sons of warriors received the story of the suffering Saviour. But, as has been already said, the tide of religious emotion which had flowed so freely in the seventh was already beginning to ebb in the eighth century. This decay of religious life in England, or at any rate in Northumbria, is vouched for in the memorable letter which Bede wrote shortly before his death to his friend Egbert, who had just been consecrated bishop and was shortly to become Archbishop of York. The letter itself is a model of wise exhortation, boldly but respectfully tendered by an aged saint to a man, his junior in years but his superior in ecclesiastical rank. Bede is evidently sure of the goodness of his pupil’s intentions, but anxious lest he should not have sufficient force of character to make head against the corruption of the times. Ever since the death of King Aldfrid, which happened thirty years before (705), the decline in morals had gone on at a rapid pace. He holds the bishops largely responsible for this degeneracy. They have insisted on retaining dioceses larger than any one man could possibly administer. They have, for filthy lucre, given their consent to all sorts of grants which should never have been made. They and their clergy have clutched eagerly at the shepherd’s hire, leaving the flock unfed. “There are, as we hear, many farms and villages on lonely mountains or in brambly wildernesses, in which for many years the face of a priest has never been seen, and neither baptisms nor confirmations are ever performed, and yet not one of the dwellers in such places is ever allowed to escape from the payment of church-dues.”
But the greatest scandal of all in Bede’s day seems to have been the foundation of pseudo-monasteries by noble and wealthy laymen, who intended anything rather than the leading of a life of religious austerity. Intent apparently on securing the creature-comforts which a well-endowed monastery afforded; intent also on escaping under the pretence of a religious life the duties of military service for their king and country, these pseudo-abbots would obtain a large grant of land from the king, and would there rear their unholy convents, in which, freed from all laws, human or divine, they would live their lives of licentious ease, waited on by troops of menial monks, who had generally been themselves expelled from genuine monasteries, by reason of their irregular lives. Nay, sometimes these impostors would go even further, and persuade a foolish king to grant them a piece of land adjoining the first donation, and would there erect a nunnery in which their wives might, without taking any regular vows, pretend to be the guides and rulers of maidens vowed to Christ.
These abuses had gone so far that the service of the state was seriously impaired thereby. The lavish grants of land, both to the genuine and the sham monasteries, had so impoverished the king that he had no reserve land, from which to reward the sons of his thegns or poor soldiers who had served him well in war. Hence these young men either sped across the seas to countries which held out the hope of a better career, or, being unable to marry, abandoned themselves to illicit love and sank down into the lowest depths of sloth and immorality. Bede’s recommendation was that as there were so many of these places which were profitable neither to God nor man, with no true service to God performed in them, and quite useless for the defence of the realm, they, or at any rate one of them, should be seized and converted into the seat of a new and much-needed bishopric. Such a deed, far from being blamable as sacrilege, would deserve the praise due to a most virtuous action. Subjection of all monasteries to some external supervision and control; the suppression of as many as possible of those nests of hypocrisy and vice, the sham monasteries; and the formation of many new bishoprics—these were the remedial measures which lay nearest to the heart of Bede. Whether Archbishop Egbert, a noble and pure-minded man, friend of one king (Ceolwulf) and brother of another (Eadbert), was able to carry into effect any of Bede’s reforms it is impossible to say; but the subsequent course of Anglo-Saxon history seems to point to a negative conclusion. It was, perhaps, partly in these paradises of sin, in the pseudo-monasteries of England, that the virility of the nation was sapped and the way prepared for so many a miserable surrender to the Danish invaders.
In the general decline of morals during the eighth century Northumbria was especially conspicuous, if we may draw any conclusion from its political history. In the course of that century fifteen kings swayed the sceptre, and of these, five were deposed, five murdered, two voluntarily abdicated the throne. It is no wonder that Northumbria, once so glorious, now became the basest of the kingdoms; that Charlemagne, on hearing of one of these murders, called the Northumbrian Angles “a perfidious and perverse nation, worse than the pagans, murderers of their lords”; or that the northern kingdom was found utterly unable to cope with the storm of Danish invasion when it beat upon its shores. It would serve no good purpose to give the names and dates of accession of all these kings, most of whom are to us mere names in an arid chronicle, but we may single out for special notice two who reigned in the first half of the century, Ceolwulf and Eadbert.