Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days Part 2

There is a lovely account of St Bede's last days handed down to us in a letter written by his pupil Cuthbert, to another of his pupils, Cuthwin.

Cuthwin had written, telling Cuthbert how he was diligently saying Ma.s.ses, and praying for their "father and master, Bede, whom G.o.d loved,"

and Cuthbert is glad to answer his fellow-student's enquiries as to the departure of that "dear father and master."

His death-illness began "a fortnight before the day of Our Lord's Resurrection," and lasted till Holy Thursday. All the time he was full of joy and thanksgiving. Cuthbert says he has never seen any man "so earnest in giving thanks to the living G.o.d."

He made a little poem in English about the absolute importance of everybody considering, before his departure, what good or ill he has done, and how his soul is to be judged after death. "He also sang antiphons," says Cuthbert, "according to our custom and use." Cuthbert gives one of them, which is the lovely antiphon to the "Magnificat" at second Vespers on Ascension Day.

His work went on during his illness. He was making a translation of part of St John's Gospel into English, "for the benefit of the Church," and was working at "Some collections out of the 'Book of Notes' of Bishop Isodorus, saying, 'I will not have my pupils read a falsehood, nor labour therein without profit after my death.'" As the time went on his difficulty of breathing increased, and last symptoms began to appear; but he dictated cheerfully, anxious to do all that he could. On the Wednesday he ordered them to write with all speed what he had begun; and then "we walked till the third hour with the relics of saints, according to the custom of that day."

Then one of them said, "Most dear Master, there is still one chapter wanting: do you think it troublesome to be asked any more questions?" He answered, "It is no trouble. Take your pen, and make ready, and write fast."

After this he distributed little gifts to the priests, and spoke to all, asking that Ma.s.ses and prayers might be said for him. His desire was, like St Paul's, to die and be with Christ: Christ Whom he had so loved, and at Whose feet he had laid all his gifts and all his learning.

"One sentence more," said the boy, was yet to be written. The Master bad him write quickly. "The sentence is now written," said the boy. And the dear Saint knew that the end was come, and asked them to receive his head into their hands. And there sitting, facing the holy place where he had been used to pray, he sang his last song of praise, "Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost," and "when he named the Holy Ghost he breathed his last and so departed to the Heavenly Kingdom."

St Bede was buried at Jarrow, but his relics were afterwards taken to Durham by a priest named Elfrid, and laid by St Cuthbert's side. In the twelfth century a glorious shrine was built over these relics by the Bishop of Durham, Hugh Pudsey: a shrine that, like many another, was destroyed in the sixteenth century uprising of the king of the country against the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

CHAPTER V

King Alfred, first layman to be a great power in literature; man of action; of thought; of endurance. Freedom first great possession; afterwards learning and culture. Alfred a loyal Son of the Church.

Founder of English prose. Earliest literature of a nation in verse; why. Influence of Rome on Alfred.

"Let us praise the men of renown," says Holy Scripture (Ecclesiasticus, 44), "and our fathers in their generations.... Such as have borne rule in their dominions, men of great power and endued with their wisdom ...

ruling over the present people, and by the strength of wisdom instructing the people in most holy words."

We have to think now of a man of renown who bore rule in his dominions; a man of great power, and endued with wisdom; who by strength and wisdom instructed his people in most holy words. We have hitherto spoken of work done in the dedicated life of religion: to-day we direct our attention to the work of a great layman; the first English layman whom we know to have been a great power in literature; less as a "maker,"

poet or proseman, than as an opener out to "makers" of precious store; a helper and encourager; a fellow-student; a learner and a teacher of whom it could be said, as Chaucer says of his Clerk of Oxford, "gladly would he learn and gladly teach."

[Ill.u.s.tration: STATUE OF KING ALFRED, BY H. THORNEYCROFT, R.A. [_Page 48_]

It would not, I think, be possible for English people to over-estimate the value of the gift G.o.d gave them in KING AELFRED. That is really the right way to spell his name, but as to most people it looks unfamiliar, we will adopt the more usual spelling and write of him as Alfred.

We think of him in various aspects: first as the strong, brave man who did so much toward making n.o.ble history for time to come, by his own action, guided by his piety and devotion. His earliest work was to fight for the gaining of freedom and unity for his people, and this work went over many years. When there was an interval of peace, and when a more settled peace had been won, he worked hard to gain for them the freedom of the mind which can never exist where ignorance is reigning. Freedom is the first great possession; afterwards we seek for learning and culture. People who may be called away at any moment to fight for life or liberty cannot do much in the way of quiet study; and while the Danes were not yet finally repulsed or bound by treaty, the great work of Alfred in civilizing England had to remain in suspense.

We love to think that Alfred's wars were not to greaten himself, but to set his country free. Then, as later on, if I may quote what I have elsewhere said, the English

Had fought for their G.o.d-given birthright, their country to have and to hold, And not for the l.u.s.t of conquest, and not for the hunger of gold.

There is another aspect in which we may look at this great King; we think of him not only as a doer but as a sufferer; and not only as an endurer of disappointment, a bearer of toil, difficulty, trouble, but as one who bore in his body a "white martyrdom" of great pain, perhaps even anguish; and this for some twenty years.

Alfred was always a loyal son of the Church. His father, aethelwulf, sent him to Rome when he was quite a little boy, and Pope Leo IV was G.o.dfather to him at his Confirmation, and, on hearing the report of aethelwulf's death, consecrated him as king, as he had been asked to do.

But aethelwulf did not die for a little time after, and took Alfred for a second visit to Rome. Each of Alfred's three brothers reigned a short time before he became King of Wess.e.x in 871. In that same year he fought no fewer than nine battles against the Danes, besides making sundry raids upon them. It is well to be a good fighting man where need is, and it is well to use the qualities that go to the making up of the good fighting man to meet the difficulties that beset the path of duty and the way of progress. Courage, strength, generosity, perseverance, these are needed for all work alike in peace and war.

Alfred was familiar in his youth with English songs, and most probably knew the old Norse sagas; but he had to learn Latin in his later life.

We must remember that most of the literature which Alfred could get at was locked up in Latin; even the invaluable Church History of St Bede needed a translator's key; and it was Alfred who first applied this key to it.

When we think of the prose written in England in early days, we are thinking of the work of scholars, in a grand language that had done growing; a language that was to be in Western Christendom the language of religion, the language of the altar, for how long a time who can know? the language that gave birth to other languages, as its literature so powerfully influenced both theirs and that of others not descended from it. Not yet was the time for a great prose literature in England, such as grew up many a year ago, and is going on in our own days.

The earliest literature of a people is almost invariably in verse: the literature that comes from the heart of a people, and is not the production of a few learned folk. In early days, there was little reading or writing, except in the shelter of the great monasteries. The common folk-literature, which is a very precious thing, is preserved, in such times as we are thinking of, in people's memories, and circulated by recitation, this recitation being accompanied by music or by rhythmical movements of the body. We all know how much easier it is to remember a page of verse than a page of prose. Thus, the form that could most easily be carried in the memory and recited, would naturally be the first to flourish.

We have seen something of early English religious poetry in Caedmon's work and that of his followers; and next we shall come back to poetry with Cynewulf, who made great and holy verse.

But beside such work as these poems which were written by cultivated men, many poems and fragments of verse were floating about the land, come over from the old native country with the first Angles and Saxons who made their home in Britain. These were dear to the people and dear, as we shall see, to the greatest among their kings, Alfred, who was, we may say, the founder of English prose. It was not English prose as we know English prose, because the language was then more like German than anything else; but it was prose in the native tongue, and this was a good and great thing to begin.

In our grat.i.tude to Alfred, we must not forget our grat.i.tude to the English scholars of older days, none of whom had put us under so great a debt as our dear old Benedictine of Jarrow.

A later writer than St Bede, though not so great as he, was Alcuin of York, who was invited by no less a man than Charlemagne to teach his children, and who became, as it has been phrased, a sort of Minister of Public Education in his empire.

Alcuin was good as well as great, and I will give you a little instance of the rightness of his thought. In a Dialogue which he wrote, in his teaching days, he supposes Prince Pepin to ask the question, "What is the liberty of man?" and the answer is, "Innocence."

But the evil days of invasion and war and trouble had swept learning from its northern home; and Alfred's work was to bring it back to another part of England.

CHAPTER VI

Decay of learning in England. Revival under Alfred. His translations.

Edits English Chronicle. His helpers. Some of his sayings.

Missionary spirit. "Alfred commanded to make me."

We cannot forget the impression that must have been made upon Alfred by his stay in Rome, young as he was at the time, he being in the centre of royal state while there, and also being himself a royal child to whom much would be told and under whose notice much would be brought; and who, from his position, would be expected to mark and remember much.

Long afterwards, he would recall the magnificence he had seen, and a.s.sociate it with the glories of the double history of Rome; Rome pagan and Rome Christian: Rome, the great conqueror and law-giver, spiritual as well as temporal. Very often, after Alfred was king, he sent over emba.s.sies and gifts to Rome, loving her, and reverencing her as it was meet he should. The Holy Father granted him certain privileges for the English school at Rome, and sent him a piece of the wood of the Holy Cross.

There is a pretty story told of Alfred's early learning to read English verse. Even if it is not true, it points to his love of English, as well as learning; a love which never left him. He wanted English to be taught in schools, and he loved the old poems. We owe to him the translation of the account of the first English poet, Caedmon, from which I have quoted in my first chapter. But rightly, he felt the very great importance of learning Latin, and so he learned it himself, and made others learn it too.

When Alfred came to the throne, he tells us, learning had fallen away so utterly in England that there were very few of the clergy, on the south side of the Humber, who could understand the Latin of their Ma.s.s-books, and he thinks not many beyond the Humber. This state of things was very different from that of old times when the clergy were "so keen about both teaching and learning and all the services they owed to G.o.d": very different from St Bede's time, and the days when Northumbria was a centre of learning and culture. Alfred was to create a new centre, not in the North but in Wess.e.x. Later on, the centre of learning and cultivation was s.h.i.+fted to the East Midlands, whose dialect became the language of England, and whose great poet, Chaucer, was the greatest English poet before Spenser and Shakespere.

In his studies Alfred was helped by various friends, the chief of whom was a Welsh Bishop, named a.s.ser. So greatly did Alfred value a.s.ser that he wanted him to live altogether at Court; but a.s.ser felt, it is to be supposed, that this would not be right, and arranged to spend half his time in Wales and half with the King. From him we learn a great deal about Alfred.

One of the Latin books translated by Alfred--perhaps the first--was called the "Pastoral Care" ("Cura Pastoralis"). It was written by St Gregory the Great, and was intended for the clergy as a guide to their duties. The king had a copy sent to every bishopric. He called it the Herdsman's Book, or Shepherd's Book. Sending all these copies made of course a great deal of work for scribes or "bookers," as we may render the old "boceras," the copyists who had to write out all their books by hand.

As various books had been turned into the "own tongue" of various nations, so would Alfred give to his people in their "own tongue" books of help, of knowledge, of wisdom. This is how Alfred tells us he worked.

"I began to turn into English the book which in Latin is named 'Pastoralis,' and in English 'Shepherd's Book'; sometimes word for word, sometimes meaning for meaning, as I had learned it from Plegmund, my Archbishop, and a.s.ser my Bishop, and from Grimbold, my Ma.s.s-priest, and from John, my Ma.s.s-priest."

At the end of the translation, Alfred put some little verses of his own.

Alfred as we have seen, translated St Bede's History, omitting many chapters which contained things he may be supposed to have thought were not of general interest. He also edited the English, usually called the Anglo-Saxon, Chronicle, which begins with the invasion of Julius Caesar, and ends with the accession of Henry II. There are a good many MSS. of it, the earliest of which ends with the year 855. We owe this work, as we owe so much beside, to the care of the monks who wrote it, adding to it probably, year by year, sometimes giving poetry as well as prose. It contains several poems, among them the vigorous lay of the Battle of Brunanburh, fought in 937 by Athelstane against the Scots and Danes.

You will find a rendering of it among Tennyson's poems, made by him from a prose translation of his son's. This editing of the A.S. Chronicle was very important work, work that has helped generations of history-writers and students. Where should we be without these Histories? How much of it Alfred actually did himself we do not know: we may suppose he had a good deal to do with the chronicling of the events of his own reign. I wonder whether it was he that wrote how three bold Irishmen came over from Ireland in a boat without any rudder, having stolen away from their country, "because they desired for the love of G.o.d to be in a state of pilgrimage, they recked not where." They had a boat made of "two hides and a half," and provisions for a week. They got to Cornwall on the seventh day, and soon after went to Alfred. We have no account of their visit to the King, but I think he would have welcomed them right warmly, and loved to hear how big souls ride in little c.o.c.klesh.e.l.ls. We know their names at least: Dubslane, Macbeth, and Maclinnuim. And immediately after this record we are told something that must also in a different way have greatly interested Alfred. "And Swifneh, the best teacher among the Scots (Irish) died."

Another book that Alfred translated was the History written by a Spanish priest called Orosius, a disciple of St Augustine's (of Hippo), which "was looked upon as a standard book of universal history." Alfred by no means gave a literal translation, but used great freedom, and omitted some things and put in others which he judged of greater interest and importance for Englishmen. Alfred enlarged the account of Northern Europe, which he knew a great deal of. He also added the accounts of the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, the former of whom got round the north of Scandinavia and explored the White Sea. Wulfstan's voyage also was of importance. Both these men told Alfred their stories, and he incorporated them in the History. They came to see him, and Ohthere gave him teeth of the walrus, and no doubt Alfred listened to all they told him, with the keenest interest.