[A.D. 845 a little one for a big one." Such stories indicate lively familiarity of intercourse between the king and the philosopher. Erigena was distinguished for his knowledge of Greek, and he translated for Charles into Latin certain works ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, a traditional convert of St. Paul's, and first Bishop of Athens. These were mystical, half Platonic writings, first produced at an Eastern Church conference in the year 532, and there used to support opinions which the theologians of the Western Church denounced as heretical as soon as Erigena's translation made the nature of the teaching known. Erigena produced also a great work of his own in Latin On the Division of Nature, in the form of dialogue between pupil and master, which, placing reason higher than authority, set out with the doctrine that there is a perfect harmony between reason and revelation; and that all philosophy tends to a knowledge of the unity of the Creator, in whom all things begin and end. Evil, Erigena taught, being the opposite to the eternal God, could not be eternal. A vice," he said, " is a spoilt virtue that can have no separate existence." In eternal fire he saw a material adaptation of spiritual thought to the unstrengthed faith, and he idealised some parts of Old Testament story into spiritual symbols. The pure study of Plato, the quick fancy, the bold speculation, brought John Scotus Erigena within the censure of the Pope and of two councils; but as long as Charles the Bald lived, there was shelter in his court. When Charles the Bald died, in 877, Erigena returned to England; and it is said that, about the year 884, when he was teaching in the monastery at Malmesbury, his pupils attacked his theology by stabbing him to death with the pointed iron styles used for school writing.

16. About this time, perhaps, there was produced by a Celtic writer a Latin History of the Britons. In a prologue which began to appear before the twelfth century copies of the history, its author's name is said to be Nennius. Nothing is known of Nennius, and the date of his writing is variously inferred from internal evidence to have been 796, or 800, or 879, or 980. This history tells of the contests of the Britons with the Romans and the Saxons. It derives their name from Brutus, a Roman Consul, and it thus names King Arthur to recite his twelve great battles against the Saxons :-"There it was that the magnanimous Arthur, with all the kings and military force of Britain, fought against the Saxons. And though there were many more noble than himself, yet he was twelve times chosen their commander,

TO A.D. 884.]

NORMANS 'or danes.

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and as often conqueror." Here follow the old names of 'the places where the twelve battles were fought-1, at the mouth of the river Gleni ; 2, 3, 4, 5, by the river Dulas, in the region Linius; 6, by the river Bassas; 7, in the wood Celidon; 8, near Gurnion Castle, where, it is said, Arthur bore the image of the Virgin on his shoulders; 9, at Caer Leon; 10, by the river Trat Treuroit; 11, on the mountain Breguoin; and, 12, a severe battle in which Arthur penetrated to the hill of Badon (Bath? Badbury Hill, Dorsetshire? Bowden Hill, on the Avon, near Linlithgow?). "In this engagement,” adds Nennius, "nine hundred and forty fell by his hand alone, no one but the Lord affording him assistance." No more is said about King Arthur in this early history, and when he is there spoken of it is in association with the year 452. The history of Nennius was ascribed in some manuscripts to Gildas, in whose name there remains a slighter British chronicle, and who is said to have been a fellow pupil of Llywarch Hen, and a brother of Aneurin. But the writer of this chronicle or The Subjection of Britain was evidently not one of the Cymry; he speaks of them with contempt, under the cloak of brotherly reproof. He was a monk of Teutonic race, who lived before the writer of that history ascribed to Nennius in which King Arthur is first mentioned. The two chronicles differ much in spirit, and cannot be by the same writer. In Gildas, who has been sometimes confounded with Nennius, there is no mention of Arthur. But the history of Nennius has some importance in our literature, as evidence that a tradition of King Arthur and his twelve great battles was extant among us in King Alfred's time.

17. In the year of the death of Erigena, 884, Alfred was king of England; indeed, it is he who is said to have invited Erigena back to his own country. When Alfred became king, in 871, the same races which, by their settlements three or four centuries earlier had laid the foundations of England, were again descending on the coasts of the North Sea and the Atlantic. They spread their ravages from Friesland to Aquitaine, and pushed inland by way of the Rhine, the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne. In England they were called the Danes, in France the Normans. In 845 Regner Lodbrok and his Danes entered Paris, and took for ship's timber the beams of the church or St. Germain-des-Prés. These bold seafarers had long occupied Shetland, Orkney, and the Hebrides, and formed settlements in Ireland, which in 852 obeyed a chief of their own, who ruled in Dublin. There were minor chiefs of the same race ruling in

Waterford and Limerick. In 860 one of the northern Vikings, on his way to the Faroe Islands, discovered Iceland. In and after 870 Iceland was colonised by northmen of mark, whose power at home was being crushed by Harold Harfagr, then making himself paramount in Norway. These men took with them to Iceland the old language, customs, and traditions of their country, which have there suffered less change than on the mainland.

In the autumn of 866 the Danes occupied in strength part of our eastern coast, and in the following spring they plundered and burnt churches and monasteries of East Anglia. The Abbess Hilda's was among the monasteries burnt in 867, and it was then that a Danish settlement gave to the place, formerly called, from its sacred treasures, Streoneshalh, the name it has since borne-Whitby; "by" being the commonest of those endings which denote a Danish settlement.

In 876, when our Alfred, aged twenty-seven, had been for five years an unlucky king, with Healfdene strong at the head of his Danes in the North of England, and Guthrum in the South, Rolf (called also Rollo and Rou) entered the Seine. He and his brother Gorm had, like others, contended with their own king at home. Gorm had been killed, and Rolf had gone into independent exile as a bold adventurer by sea. He had sought prizes in England and Belgium before he went up the Seine, and was then invited to take peaceful occupation of Rouen. In 879 King Alfred obtained peace by his treaty with Guthrum. Thirtytwo years afterwards, in 911, the land of the Normans, afterwards called Normandy, was yielded to Rollo and his followers.

Thus we see that King Alfred in his struggle with the Danes was battling only with one part of a great movement akin to that which had first brought the English into Britain; and that the foundation of Normandy about ten years after King Alfred's death, is but another of its incidents, although an incident of first importance in the history of Europe.

18. King Alfred having secured some peace with the new settlers on his coast, proceeded to restore strength to his people with the help of the best advisers he could gather to his court. Churches and monasteries had suffered for their wealth, but their plunder and destruction meant also destruction of their schools. "There are only a few," said Alfred, "on this side of the Humber who can understand the Divine service, or even translate a Latin letter into English; and I believe not many on

TO A.D. 901.]

TRANSLATIONS OF BEDE AND OROSIUS.

33

the other side of the Humber either. They are so few, indeed, that I cannot remember one south of the Thames when I began to reign." Alfred re-established monasteries, and took pains to make them efficient centres of education for his people. Partly because the knowledge of Latin had to be recovered, partly because good knowledge is most widely diffused through a land when it is written in the language of the people, Alfred made, or caused to be made for him, translations of the books which had been most valued when they were among the Latin textbooks of the days of Bede and Alcuin. One of these was Bede's Ecclesiastical History, or History of England, translated into English without any of the added information with which it could have been enriched. Perhaps a reverence for Bede's work caused Alfred to present it to his countrymen without change or addition.

The same feeling would not stand in the way of a free handling of the Universal History of Orosius. This had been the accepted manual in monastery schools for general history from the Creation to A.D. 416. Its author was a Spanish controversial Christian of the fifth century, and it was written at the suggestion of St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine was himself writing "De Civitate Dei" to sustain the faith of Christians who had seen Alaric sack Rome, by showing from Church history that the preaching of the Gospel could not add to the world's misery. He suggested to Orosius, who just then came to consult him on some question of heresy, that he might show from profane history the same thing for the reassurance of the faithful. Orosius produced, therefore, in Latin, a dull book, written, as Pope Gelasius I. said, "with wonderful brevity against heathen perversions," and it became in the monastery schools the chief manual of universal history. King Alfred, in giving a free translation of it to his people, cleared the book of Church controversy, omitted, altered, and added, with the sole purpose of producing a good summary of general history and geography. He made these three special additions:—1. Much from the knowledge of his own time on the geography of Europe, which he called Germania, north of the Rhine and Danube. 2. A geographical sketch of two voyages: one from Halgoland on the coast of Norway, round the North Cape into the White Sea; the other from Halgoland to the Bay of Christiania, and thence to Slesvig ; these being taken from the lips of Ohthere, a rich Norwegian,. who made voyages for love of adventure and discovery, for the

D

sake also of taking walrus and for whale-fishing. 3. A geographical sketch of a voyage in the Baltic from Slesvig to Truso in Prussia, taken from the lips of Wulfstan, who was perhaps a Jutlander, and who enriched his dry detail with a lively account of the manners and customs of the Esthonians.

King Alfred's other work in aid of a right knowledge of history was, probably, the establishment of that national record of events which was kept afterwards for a long time from year to year, and is now commonly known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It begins, after a brief account of Britain, with Cæsar's invasion; is in its earlier details obviously a compilation, and that chiefly from Bede, but begins to give fuller details after the year 853; and so, from a date within Alfred's lifetime, begins to take rank rank with Bede as one of the great sources of information on the early history of England. It may be supposed that, for the keeping.of this annual record of the nation's life, local events were reported at the headquarters of some one monastery in which was a monk commissioned to act as historiographer; that at the end of each year this monk set down what he thought most worthy to be remembered, and that he then had transcripts of his brief note made in the scriptorium of his monastery, and forwarded to other houses for addition to the copies kept by them of the great year-book of the nation. Geoffrey Gaimar, writing in the twelfth century, says that King Alfred had at Winchester a copy of a chronicle fastened by a chain, so that all who wished might read. In some such way as this the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was kept up until the time of the Norman Conquest, and for three generations after that. Its last record is of the accession of Henry II. in the year 1154.

King Alfred not only tried to make his countrymen acquainted with the world in which they lived, but he sought also to aid each in acquiring a firm rule over the world within himself. For this reason he turned into English the famous Latin work of Boëthius, the last man of genius produced by ancient Rome. Boëthius, a Roman senator, lost the favour of Theodoric by a love for his country, which his enemies called treason, was imprisoned, and from prison led to execution, about the year 525. In prison he wrote his noble work called The Consolations of Philosophy, in five books of prose, mixed with verse. The first of its five books recognised as the great source of consolation that a wise God rules the world; the second argued that man in his worst extremity possesses much, and ought to fix his mind