TRANSLATION. At this time Hengest and Æsc his son fought against the Britons at the place which is called Crayford, and there slew four thousand men. And then the Britons they forsook Kent-land, and with much dismay fled to London-town. SECTION 2. THE NORMAN PERIOD (1066–1350). In the year 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, brought an army over to England, defeated King Harold at Hastings in Sussex, and had himself crowned King of England. The Normans, who formed the greater portion of his army, were originally, as the name itself implies, North-men, or inhabitants of the North of Europe (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), who had settled in France about the year 950. During their sojourn in France, they had unlearned their own language, and had adopted that of their French neighbors. Thus it happened, that, for a long time after the Norman conquest, the king, nearly all his nobles and knights, and all the leading men among the clergy, spoke in French, and wrote either in French or in Latin, having no more knowledge of the tongue of the natives than was required to make their orders intelligible to the peasants who worked for them, and often not even so much as that. During the whole of this period, what literature there was was for the most part composed by the clergy; for very few of the laity could read and write. The clergy alone had leisure and opportunity for accumulating that acquaintance with the works of previous thinkers, and that knowledge of past transactions, without one or the other of which, nothing can be done in theology, philosophy, or history. St. Anselm (an Italian by birth, but holding the see of Canterbury under William II. and Henry I.) was the first who endeavored to clothe religious doctrines in philosophical formulas. The famous Abelard, a Frenchman, asserted the identity of faith and reason, a doctrine from which the inference is easy, that what is inconsistent with reason can be no part of the true faith. St. Bernard, who flourished in the first half of the twelfth century, eloquently combated this view. The scholastic philosophy founded by Peter Lombard, author of "The Book of Sentences," a work which appeared at Paris in 1151, soon engrossed all the most powerful thinkers in Europe. Several of the leading "school-men " Alexander Hales, styled "the Irrefragable," Duns Scotus, "the Subtle Doctor," and William of Occam, "the Invincible Doctor " were natives of the British Isles. But all their works were written in Latin; great part of their lives was spent abroad; and the influence which they exerted, besides that it extended quite as much to foreign countries as to England, was almost confined to members of their own profession. It will not be expected, therefore, that, in a work of a purely elementary character, any detailed account of their writings can be given. In the department of science, a great light appeared in England in the thirteenth century. This was Roger Bacon, a friar in the Franciscan monastery at Oxford, who in his Opus Majus ("Greater" or "Principal Work "), propounds most enlightened views upon the value of experiment as a means of arriving at physical truth. He was encouraged by the high-minded Pope Clement IV., but condemned and imprisoned under his narrow-minded successor, Nicholas. In truth, he was so far in advance of his age, that his scientific researches communicated no stimulus, and found no imitators. The historians, too, were all ecclesiastics, and wrote in Latin. William of Malmesbury, the first competent historian since the time of Bede, wrote a "History of the Kings of England," which comes down to the year 1142. Geoffrey of Monmouth, who lived about the same time, is the author of a well-known fabulous "History of the Britons," from which the romancewriters drew the materials for their poems about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Among many other names, we shall only mention that of Matthew Paris, a monk of St. Albans, the author of a voluminous and valuable chronicle, coming down to the year 1259. Lay writers in this period confined themselves to poetry; not that they had the monopoly of that. Numbers of witty, satirical, and sometimes coarse poems, were written in Latin, by priests or monks. But our business is only with what was written in the vernacular languages. Before the Normans came over to England, many poets had appeared in France, and a considerable taste for literature, especially for poetry, had sprung up in that country. In their new homes, the Normans did not lose this taste: on the contrary, poets and minstrels were more and more appreciated and caressed; and even one of our kings, Richard I., was proud to rank himself among their number. Few laymen knew how to read in those times: so the custom was for minstrels and reciting poets to stroll about the country from castle to castle, repeating at each, to a delighted audience, long passages from historical or romantic poems, generally with musical accompaniment. But these poems were all in French, and therefore we have no direct concern with them; it was necessary, however, to say something about them, because the first rude literary attempts in English, after the Conquest, were all either imitations or trans lations of these French pieces. Romances and versehistories were the chief productions of those ages. Romances were originally so called because they were written in the Romance tongue, that is, the dialect which the Roman occupation of Gaul (France) had caused to grow up out of the gradual corruption of the Latin language, and its adulteration with foreign words. Many of the tales with which story-books make us familiar in our childhood, as that of Guy of Warwick and the Dun Cow, or that of Roland and Oliver, or that of Bevis of Hampton, were originally French romances, composed at the period I am speaking of: they were then translated into English verse, and, after being told in many different ways, have at last made their appearance in our popular story-books. Of the verse-histories in English, the earliest known was written by a Worcestershire monk called Layamon: it is called the "Brut," that is, the chronicle, and is a free translation of a French verse-history of England, written by one Richard Wace. Another work of the same kind is the rhyming chronicle of Robert Manning, of which a specimen will be given presently. Besides these pieces, a few ballads and hymns have come down to us. In all these, and also in the versehistories, except that of Layamon, many French words occur, the inevitable consequence of the daily intercourse and close contact of two populations, one speaking French, the other English. In the next period, we shall see this process going on still more actively. Speaking of himself as an author, Layamon, who flourished in the reign of John, or about the year 1200, thus writes: "He wonede at Ernleie Wid than gode cnihte, Uppen Sevarne; Ther heo bokes radde. Hit com him on mode, Wat the men i-hote weren, The Englene lond Ærest afden After than flode, That mid ham there weren." 1 The following is a literal translation: "He dwelt at Ernley, with the good knight, upon the Severn; pleasant it seemed to him there; close by Radistone: there he books read. It came into his mind, and in his thought, that he would of England the exact story tell; what the men were called, and whence they came, who first occupied the English land, after the flood that from God came, that quelled [killed] all here that it found quick [alive], except Noe and Sem, Japhet and Cam [Ham], and their four wives that were with them there." Robert Manning's English, as will be seen, is of a much more advanced character. The following passage is from the opening of the second part of his chronicle, which was composed about the year 1330: "Lordynges that be now here, If ye wille listene and lere [learn] All the story of Inglande, Als [as] Robert Mannyng wryten [written] it fand, And on Inglysch has it schewed, 1 Extracted, with a few slight corrections, from Craik's Outlines of the History of the English Language. |