A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (38 page)

Presumably the hubbub subsided when the
scop
swept his lyre, which since the time of Homer down to the histrions (epic ballad singers) of the Balkans has been the instrument of the bard, to begin his ‘clear song’. Among the treasures revealed at the Prittlewell excavation were the shadow remnants of such an instrument imprinted in the earth. Instrument-builder Zachary Taylor lovingly and meticulously recreated the ancient lyre. The original must have been highly valued for Taylor discovered it had been fractured at some time and painstakingly repaired with gold and silver rivets.
Its musical quality was surely much diminished but, like Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell, cracked beyond restoration, its aura was irreplaceable. The ‘clear song’ might be the bard’s version of a traditional lay, a section of an epic featuring the deeds of ancestors of those present, or an ode improvised to celebrate the occasion.

We know something about the life of the
scop
from a poem that survives as part of a tenth-century collection called the Exeter Book. Named after its fictional author,
Widsith
(literally ‘wide [or far] traveller’) tells of visits to the mead halls of heroes and kings of the pagan past (from the fourth to the sixth centuries), and of the rich gifts the poet was given. It refers to Offa of Angeln, claimed as an ancestor by the great eighth-century king of Mercia, and Widsith was also at the court of Eormanric, king of the Ostrogoths (Ermanaric, who ruled vast tracts of modern Ukraine in the 370s), who gave him a precious arm-ring. Widsith presented it to his own lord, who in turn conferred lands upon him.

The tone of the
Widsith
poem is distinctly upbeat. By contrast, the forty-two lines of
Deor
, also about a
scop
, are a lament for the loss of a lord’s favour, the poet’s dismissal from court and the loss of his lands. He recalls the misfortunes of legendary figures from the Germanic past and reflects in a stoical refrain that, just as their troubles passed, so will his. Like
Widsith, Deor’s
lament is a glimpse of the aristocratic Anglo-Saxon lifestyle; both remind us that the bardic verse central to the cultural life of the warrior nobility belonged to a largely oral tradition, of which only a fragment survives in the literary record. And central to the imaginative life of such traditions is the performance in the present, which relies on the memory, the skill and the inventive genius of an unlettered artist with words.

Noble (whether literate or non-literate) and peasant shared common cultural conventions (as we shall note, there is good evidence that many nobles were literate, from the late eighth century onwards at least). The villager, too, had his feastings, though not
perhaps to match the mead hall. As the evening advanced the harp (perhaps that of some more prosperous farmer) began to circulate and any member of the party who could not provide a song, accompanied or not, was poor company indeed. One of the best-known stories in Bede tells how a farm-hand called Caedmon became a poet. Because he was no singer he would get up and leave the table as he saw the harp on its way. One night, having quit the feast as usual and tidied out the animal byre, he curled up on the straw and went to sleep. He dreamed that a man stood beside him and called him by name: ‘Caedmon, you shall sing a song for me about the Creation of all things.’ Inspired, the illiterate labourer improvised a poem that told how ‘the Lord of Glory . . . [made] . . . Middle Earth for men, to be their mansion.’
²

Bede quotes a snatch of the song in a Latin version, and then explains that he can only give the gist of it because poetry ‘cannot be translated literally from one language into another without losing much of its beauty and dignity’. The remark is a measure of the standing of the English language in Bede’s world, but more so of Bede himself. Outside the British Isles, it would have been unheard of for a Latin-literate cleric to accord equivalence of status to a work in the vernacular. But then Bede was not only in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, he also, we are told, wrote English devotional poetry. Caedmon’s original Anglo-Saxon is to be found added on to Latin manuscripts of Bede’s great
History
, copied shortly after his death. Impressed by the peasant poet, St Hild of Whitby, that great lady, invited Caedmon to join her community and he became, in effect, the house specialist hymn-writer. Once a passage of the Latin scriptures was explained to him, he could produce a moving and delightful English song. Many lay people were converted to ‘heavenly things’ as a result.

Conversely, many Anglo-Saxon churchmen hankered after the Old English, and therefore pagan, secular tradition. The church synod of 747 fulminated against monasteries that encouraged
‘versifiers and harpists’ to visit, as well as priests who delivered their sermons in the manner of a scop delivering an epic. Perhaps such priests were only doing their best to make Christianity ‘relevant to contemporary concerns’. Presumably St Aldhelm at least would have approved.

For even bishops were not immune to the charms of the vernacular tradition. The Exeter Book, copied about 975 and the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry to have survived, is so called because it was donated to Exeter’s cathedral library in the eleventh century by Bishop Leofric. Of Cornish extraction, despite his English name, Leofric was educated in Lotharingia and became chaplain to Edward the Confessor in exile in France. He returned with the king in 1041 and was appointed bishop of Cornwall, where his family had an estate at Tregear, and Devon. He reconstituted the region’s two sees, at St Germans and Crediton, as one at the Benedictine monastery within the burh of Exeter. Under him the Exeter cathedral library was noted for its scriptorium and ranked fourth in size in England after Canterbury, Salisbury and Worcester.

The Exeter Book opens with three poems concerning the life of Christ, including the
Ascension
by a poet whose name, Cynewulf, appears in runic characters in three other Old English poems. One of these,
Elene
, in the collection known as the Codex Vercellensis, is an account of the finding of the True Cross by St Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine the Great and traditionally associated with Britain.

Most of the Exeter Book poems are religious but, in addition to
Widsith
, there are a few outstanding pieces, lyrical or elegiac in mood, that can reach across the centuries to stir the reader today, when family breakdown and exile affect so many lives. In
The Wife’s Lament
a woman tells of her misery and grief at being separated from her husband to satisfy the honour of his kin, while in
The Husband’s Message
a man begs his wife to remember her former vows of love and join him overseas where he has found a new home.

Two other poems are more ambitious in theme and so more profound in their effect. Later hauntingly adapted as a radio play,
Seafarer
almost anticipates elements of the story of the Flying Dutchman, as it tells of a seemingly endless trek across dark and hostile wastes of sea, through wind-blown ice sprays and the cries of seabirds. It laments ‘the mead hall and the laughter of men’ that symbolize the good life of the soul in this world – the world that the poet has lost.
Wanderer
, explicitly the lament of an exile, regretting the happiness of the life that is gone and bemoaning the cold and friendless present, is a reflection on the state of the Christian soul resistant to the mercy of God in this transient world. Both poems interweave the realities of the quotidian and the spiritual life; in both the world of the poet is the world of lordship and loyalty. In
Wanderer
, indeed, the real plight of a friendless but above all lord-less man seems almost to outweigh the allegorical spiritual plight of a soul without God. These two works offer us a glimpse of that wanderlust that brought the Anglo-Saxons to England in the first place, and led many to venture overseas to the Continent. As in the minstrel life of
Widsith
, the setting is the aristocratic world of the
Beowulf
poet. It is a world where the queen presides over the feasting of the warriors and even serves them at table.
Judith
, the text of which survives in the
Beowulf
manuscript, is a verse adaptation of the apocryphal
Book of Judith
, which tells how a beautiful Jewish widow slew Holofernes, commander of an Assyrian army, and so ensured the defeat of the invaders. As the Old English poem develops the story, whereas the original was a widow who disarmed her enemy with her beauty and cut off his head as he lay asleep, the patriot heroine of this poem is a warrior virgin triumphant in battle. Pauline Stafford suggests it may have been a tribute to the warlike Æthelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, a star of the next chapter.

Finally there is a collection of ‘riddles’ – poems, mostly short, designed for social entertainment in mead hall or refectory. Perhaps Aldhelm’s Latin short puzzle poems or
enigmata
hold the key.
Somewhat bookish and intended as exercise texts for the teaching of poetic forms, they were, he said, modelled on joke verses extemporized in late classical times as entertainments at drinking parties. Other churchmen, including an archbishop of Canterbury and St Boniface, were inspired by Aldhelm’s example to pass an idle hour composing such word games, though they rarely produced results to divert a party of serious drinkers – even if Boniface did send the cathedral monks at York two tuns of wine for ‘a merry day with the brethren’ (see
chapter 5
). The Exeter Book vernacular riddles describe everyday objects in allusive, sometimes opaque, lines demanding to be deciphered. In Anglo-Saxon England, what had pleased the ancient Romans became – in that jewelled world of swords, shields and goblets – a crafted form of entertainment where those objects and many others asked a festive audience to guess their names. As well as mundane, the object of a riddle could be serious: as likely a book of the Gospels as a weathervane, a shield, animals or birds. Number 55 muses on the paradox that the Cross, once the punishment of thieves, is fit to be adorned in gold and jewels. Sometimes they remind us of Robert Frost’s dictum that poetry begins in delight but can end in wisdom. And sometimes they don’t! Number 54 concerns the churning of butter – in which the serving man is ‘one moment forceful . . . the next . . . knocked quite up, blown by his exertion’.
³
Some 700 years later Henry Purcell was setting drinking ‘catches’ that might have caught the occasional mood ‘down Exeter way’. One thinks in particular of the footman and scullery maid assembling a kitchen broom: he, called John, with ‘a thing that is long’; she, called Mary, with ‘a thing that is hairy’.

The Vercelli Book, despite its scholarly Latin title of Codex Vercellensis, is another Old English manuscript held in another cathedral library, this time that of Vercelli in Piedmont, where it was discovered in the 1820s. Apparently in English use in the eleventh century, although written in the tenth, it could have been in the baggage of one of the party that accompanied Bishop Ulf of
Dorchester, one of Edward the Confessor’s Norman appointees, when he attended the church council in that city in 1050. The anthology comprises prose (a life of St Guthlac and twenty-three homilies) and poetry, including the complete text of
The Dream of the Rood
, fragments of which are found carved on the Ruthwell Cross (see
chapter 3
).

The fragments of a poem inscribed on a cross in the seventh century written down in a tenth-century manuscript encapsulate the basic problems of dating most Anglo-Saxon verse. The age of a manuscript in which a work survives is not, evidently, a guaranteed indicator of even the approximate date of composition. Things are further complicated by the fact that the poems we have survive as the result of chance events and are isolated copies made in transmission stretching over generations, probably across dialect boundaries and in any case exploiting archaisms of language for poetic effect. It may well be that the oldest of the long poems are those on biblical themes, notably the
Genesis, Exodus
and
Daniel
in the so-called Junius Manuscript, now in Oxford’s Bodleian Library (MS. Junius 11). Bede noted these very biblical themes as ones that Caedmon sang about, so Junius 11 was once known as the ‘Caedmon manuscript’. It is in any case a remarkable production, evidently designed from the start as an illustrated book, the text written first and blanks left for illustrations. The project was never completed but more than fifty line drawings by two artists depict such scenes as God the Creator enthroned above Chaos before the Beginning of the World.

Old English Prose

Anglo-Saxon England [provides] the leading example of a vernacular culture worthy of the name in the whole of western Europe. French and German did not achieve a like status of literary quality and use till the twelfth century, whereas Old English had [before that time] reigned for hundreds of years.
⁴

And nowhere in western Europe does another national tradition, not even the rich vein of Old Irish and Middle Irish literature, with its annals such as the
Annals of Ulster
, have a documentary source to equal the
Anglo-Saxon Chonicle
for extent and detail. From the opening sentence of the Genealogical Preface to the (Ā) manuscript commonly known as the Parker Chronicle (‘In the year of Christ’s Nativity 494, Cerdic and Cynric his son landed at Cerdicsora with five ships’), to its last, the election in 1154 of William of Waterville to be abbot of Peterborough Abbey, as recorded in the (E) manuscript commonly called the Laud Chronicle, the various versions of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
provide an almost unbroken sequence of annals over a span of 660 years. From the 890s the writers are sometimes contemporaries of the events they describe: we are told, for example, that Abbot William ‘has made a good beginning’ and, with the writer, hope that ‘Christ [may] grant that he end as well’.