THE FIRST ENGLISH

II

answered that they had been taken by surprise, and that the invaders ought to re-embark, retire nine waves, and try whether they could make good their landing in fair fight. The Milesians agreed that this was just, and did try back. We are not bound to believe that such things were ever done; enough for us that there is the temper of the people indicated by the character of its inventions. And they are suggestions of a chivalrous ideal in old days of savage artist life, when the Celt was a pagan gentleman very much in the rough; savage times when, says another of these old tales, the Ulster men mixed the brains of their slain enemies with lime, and played with the hard balls they made of them. Such a brainstone is said to have gone through the skull of Conchobar, who lived afterwards seven years with two brains in his head, always sitting very still, because it would be death to shake himself. The Ollamh of old told, doubtless, this story with a roguish twinkle of the eye that has descended to his children's children.

The self-sacrificing zeal that entered into the religion of the Celts bore fruit in the first Christianising of the English.

CHAPTER 11.

THE FORMING OF THE PEOPLE: FIRST ENGLISH.

1. THE First English, who are commonly known by the schoolname of Anglo-Saxons, but who called themselves, as we call ourselves now, the English people (Englisc folc), were formed by a gradual blending of Teutonic tribes. They came, at different times and in different generations, from different parts. of the opposite coast. On our eastern shores, from the Moray Firth to below Whitby, the land lay readiest of access to men from the opposite side of the North Sea, among whom Scandinavians were numerous; accordingly, the Scandinavian element is chiefly represented in the character, form, face, and provincial dialects of our north country. The part of our east coast belonging now to Lincolnshire was readiest of access to the Danes; and in Lincolnshire the Danish element is strongly represented. Farther south, our coast was opposite the Frisian settlements; therefore, among the immigrants over the North Sea to Southern England, the Frisians, forefathers of the

modern Dutchmen, would predominate. Adventurers of many tribes might join in any single expedition. When they had formed their settlements, the Teutonic spirit of co-operation, and the social progress that came of it, produced changes of home, intermarriages, community of interests, community of speech in a language proper to the cultivated men of the whole country. This manner of speech, First English (or Anglo Saxon), was not brought complete from any place upon the Cortinent, but it was formed here by a fusion of the closelyrelated languages or dialects of the Teutonic immigrants. The Teutons of the coast being chiefly the Low Germans, our first English were chiefly a Low German people. The language formed by them, and written with care as they advanced in culture, was mainly Frisian in structure. They called it English. It was English. Let us call it, then, First English, and avoid the confusion of ideas produced by giving it—as if it were the language of another people-the separate name of Anglo-Saxon. Their educated men wrote it with much regard to uniformity of practice and grammatical accuracy. The main body of the people spoke it, as they still do, with less regard to grammar, and with great diversities of vocabulary, idiom, and pronunciation. Those diversities are still sharply defined, though in the course of centuries they have been softened by continuance of free communication, and by intermarriage between men and women of all English provinces. The provincial dialects still bear very distinct witness to the original diversity of the Teutonic colonists; but these differences are not expressed by the Latin words, Anglus and Saxo. Anglus was only a Latin form of Englisc (pronounced English), the name by which the people called itself; and Saxon was the name which others gave to them. This might readily come into some formal use in the south, where Church-bred statesmen had a Roman education; but in the north it might be less familiar, because there the first educated priestly class was not formed on the Roman model. Thus Bede, a north countryman, tells of English or Angle settlements in his own part of the country; but, being informed by a southern correspondent of the Saxon settlements of Southern England, supposes that the difference of word means difference of people. Difference there was—in the north were more Scandinavians, in the south more Frisians—but they all took English for their common name; and when they were first incidentally called Anglo-Saxons by Bishop Asser, the biographer of King

A. D. 600-700]

BEOWULF

13

Alfred, the compound word was not meant to represent a race compounded of Angles and of Saxons, but the English part of that great Teutonic population which there was a growing tendency among foreign writers to call, without discrimination of tribes, by the common name of Saxon. Anglo-Saxons meant, therefore, those Saxons who called themselves the Angles; but Angle is no more than an imperfect re-translation of the Latinised name of the English.

2. Many Celts in our island had been converted to the Christian faith when the last strong settlements were being established here by pagan Teutons. The Teutonic settlers brought with them battle-songs and a heroic legend of a chief named Beowulf. This legend was afterwards put into First English verse, probably in the seventh century, perhaps earlier or later, and remains to us, under the name of its hero, one of the earliest monuments of English literature; a poem of 6,357 short lines, the most ancient heroic poem in any Germanic language. Its hero sails from a land of the Goths to a land of the Danes, and there he frees a chief named Hrothgar from the attacks of a monster of the fens and moors, named Grendel. Afterwards he is himself ruler, is wounded mortally in combat with a dragon, and is solemnly buried under a great barrow on a promontory rising high above the sea. "And round about the mound rode his hearth-sharers, who sang that he was of kings, of men, the mildest, kindest, to his people sweetest, and the readiest in search of praise." In this poem real events are transformed into legendary marvels; but the actual life of the old Danish and Scandinavian chiefs, as it was first transferred to this country, is vividly painted. It brings before us the feast in the mead-hall, with the chief and his hearth-sharers, the customs of the banquet, the rude beginnings of a courtly ceremony, the boastful talk, reliance upon strength of hand in grapple with the foe, and the practical spirit of adventure that seeks peril as a commercial speculation-for Beowulf is undisguisedly a tradesman in his sword. The poem includes also expression of the heathen fatalism, "What is to be goes ever as it must," tinged by the energetic sense of men who feel that even fate helps those who help themselves, or, as it stands in Beowult that "the Must Be often helps an undoomed man when he is brave."

The original scene of the story of this poem was probably a corner of that island of Sæland upon which now stands the

capital of Denmark, the corner which lies opposite to Gothland, the southern promontory of Sweden. But if so, he who in this country told the old story in English metre did not paint the scenery of Sæland, but that which he knew. A twelve-mile walk by the Yorkshire coast, from Whitby northward to the top of Bowlby Cliff, makes real to the imagination all the country of Beowulf as we find it in the poem. Thus we are almost tempted to accept a theory which makes that cliff, the highest on our eastern coast, the ness upon which Beowulf was buried, and on the slope of which—Bowlby then being read as the corrupted form of Beowulfes-by-Beowulf once lived with his hearthsharers. High sea-cliffs, worn into holes or "nickerhouses many," with glens rocky and wooded running up into great moors, are not characters of the coast of Sæland opposite to Sweden, but they are special characters of that corner of Yorkshire in which the tale of Beowulf seems to have been told as it now comes to us in First English verse.

To the same part of England, and to a date between the years 670 and 680, certainly belongs the other great First English poem, known as Cædmon's "Paraphrase," a paraphrase of some parts of the Bible story. This poem arose out of the Christianising of the English of the north by Celtic missionaries.

3. There are doubtful traditions which even brought the Apostle Paul to Britain; which found this country a first bishop in Aristobulus, one of the seventy disciples whom St. Paul mentions in his Epistle to the Romans; and made a King Lucius who died A.D. 201, the first Christian King, founder also of the first church, St. Martin's, at Canterbury.

But we know more certainly from the evidence of Eusebius, towards the beginning, and of Chrysostom, towards the close of the fourth century, that Christian teachers then visited Britain and made converts. Alban is said to have been the first British martyr, and the date assigned to his martyrdom is the year 305. In 314 three British bishops were among those present at the Council of Arles. British bishops were also at the Council of Rimini, in 359. Between the years 394 and 415, a British Christian scholar, of independent mind and earnest piety, named Morgan, or Morgant (who transformed his Cymric name, which means one born by the sea-shore," into its classical synonym, Pelagius), maintained opinions upon sundry points which were hotly opposed by the Augustine of the primitive Church, and by the great body of the Roman clergy, as the Pelagian heresy,

66

TO A.D. 605]

COLUMBA. AUGUSTINE

15

Patricius, the St. Patrick of the Irish, was Morgan's contemporary, but a younger man, born on the Clyde, near Dumbarton, in the year 372, and active during the former half of the fifth century. His work among the Gaelic Celts aided the efforts of the small communities of Celtic missionaries, called Culdees. St. David, who is remembered as the most famous teacher of the Welsh, was an austere and able priest of the school of the Egyptian monks, son of a Cymric prince, and by tradition uncle to King Arthur. He was at work during the former half of the sixth century. But the chief missionary work was then being done by the Culdees of the Irish Church. Columba, an Irish abbot of royal descent, after founding monasteries in the North of Ireland, passed in the year 563 to Scotland, and for the next thirty-four years laboured there as a missionary on the mainland and in the Hebrides, making his headquarters upon one of the Hebrides, the rocky island of Iona. Iona then became the most important of the Culdee missionary stations. It was not until Columba had been thus at work for three and thirty years that Pope Gregory I. sent the Italian Augustine into this country, where he acted as a missionary from Rome to the South of England, and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Celtic missionaries had then been at work for generations among the English of the north. They had received their own teaching rather from the Eastern than from the Western Church, and followed, therefore, the practice of the Eastern Church in fixing the time for Easter, and in points of ceremonial wherein that Church differed from the Church of Rome. As the influence of teachers from Rome spread northward, hot conflict was raised between the teachers of the south and of the north upon these points of ceremonial. They appeared more vital questions to the Rome-bred clergy than to those trained in the schools of the Culdees, at Iona or at Lindisfarne. In the year 634 Oswald became king over the rude population of Deivyr and Bryneich, among whom there had been that early fusion of Celts with the incoming English settlers which is referred to by Aneurin in the Gododin (ch. i. § 7). King Oswald sent for missionaries to Iona.

This was two years after the death of the Arabian prophet, Mahomet.

The first of the teachers who came from Iona to the North. umbrians went back and made hopeless report of the people.