Gold embroidery work was, of course, one of the most highly prized and rewarded skills of the time and one for which the English were particularly renowned.
As for the upbringing of children, the ideas expressed in one of the gnomic poems (essentially collections of sententious utterances) were positively advanced even by twentieth-century standards:
One shall not rebuke a youth in his childhood, until he can reveal himself. He shall thrive among the people in that he is confident.
The history of education in Anglo-Saxon England divides into five periods: the conversion period, when missionaries from both Rome and Ireland brought learning and books with them; the first high period of the Church, when Alcuin, an English missionary at the court of Charlemagne, recalled regretfully the richness of the library of York Minster that he had left behind and of which Alfred was thinking when he remembered the churches filled with treasures and books; the first Danish invasions, in which so many of those books and treasures were plundered or destroyed; the beginning of the revival of learning under Alfred, and the gradual building up again of libraries and teachers during the peaceful times of Athelstan and Edgar; and then the second wave of Viking invasions under Æthelred, less destructive than the first but bad enough. At least Cnut was a devout Christian and his father Sweyn Forkbeard nominally one – Æthelred never had to answer the unanswerable question his forefather Alfred was faced with: how can you trust the oaths of pagans to whom nothing is sacred, not even their own gods?
The first and most important educational necessity throughout these centuries was to train recruits for the priesthood and the cloister. That the various minster schools succeeded in this is indicated by the number of English missionaries who went to convert the heathen on the Continent, such as St Boniface, or were sent for to take education and civilization to foreign schools, as Alcuin was recruited by Charlemagne. These men were accustomed to send back to England for books unavailable to them where they were working; English book production was clearly of a high standard. Boniface wrote to ask the Abbess Eadburh to copy St Peter’s epistles for him in gold. This would presumably be for ceremonial occasions, but more workaday books were in demand also. Dorothy Whitelock listed the writings that were then available in England:
They were, of course, familiar with the Bible and the writings of the Christian Fathers, and with the Christian poets, Juvencus, Prudentius, Sedulius, Prosper, Fortunatus, Lactantius, and Arator. Bede makes use of a number of historical writings, of Josephus, Eusebius (in Latin translation from the Greek), Orosius, Cassiodorus, Gregory of Tours, etc., and of saints’ lives such as Paulinus’s Life of Ambrose, Possidius’s Life of Augustine, Constantius’s Life of Germanus. Of classical authors, both Bede and Aldhelm knew Virgil and Pliny at first hand, and Aldhelm used Lucan, Ovid, Cicero, and Sallust. Citations of other authors occur, but could have been taken from the works of Isidore of Seville, or from the Latin grammarians, of whom a really remarkable number were available in England already in the seventh century. Some very rare works had already found their way to England, and one, the grammar of Julian of Toledo, owes its preservation to this circumstance, for all surviving manuscripts go back to an English copy.xli
And the English monastics were not just reading these books, they were writing new works for themselves. Bede’s and Aldhelm’s works were produced at this period.
It is impossible to know how far learning reached the lay population in the eighth and ninth centuries. There may have been, probably were, noblemen and women who were literate and could read Latin as well as English. Many of the most famous founders of monasteries, such as Benedict Biscop, the founder of Bede’s monastery of Jarrow/Monkwearmouth, and a noted buyer of books, must have come into this category; many, like him, must have entered monasteries or taken holy orders later in life. If there had been no tradition at all of lay education, Alfred would hardly have lamented in his letter on the state of learning in England (?890s) that there were now few people north or south of the Humber who could even read English or translate a letter from Latin into English, or make use of the books that remained. It is not entirely clear from his letter whether he is thinking of clerics or laypeople or both. He may have been thinking primarily of priests or monks; but if he had been thinking only of the clergy, his programme of translations into English of the books that were most necessary for all men to know would look rather strange. He would never have supposed that it would have been sufficient for a priest or a monk to know only these particular books and only in English. Their needs would have been far more extensive. His programme of translation, as well as his own words, ‘all men’, imply a determination to reach the laity. Asser, one of the scholars whom Alfred recruited to make his court a centre of learning, speaks in his life of Alfred of the king’s children being educated
in company with all the nobly born children of virtually the entire area, and a good many of lesser birth as well. In this school, books in both languages – that is to say, in Latin and English – were carefully read; they also devoted themselves to writing, to such an extent that, even before they had the requisite strength for manly skills (hunting, that is, and other skills appropriate to noblemen), they were seen to be devoted and intelligent students of the liberal arts.xlii
We may well suspect that Asser is laying it on a little lavishly here, but even allowing for exaggeration, his specific mention of other noble children and some of lesser birth makes it fairly clear that, in theory at least, Alfred’s conception of education was not limited to the Church and that the origins of comprehensive education may be found in England nearly two hundred years before the conquest.
There is no such direct testimony of the state of general literacy as Alfred provides in his letter from the reigns of his immediate successors, but there is little doubt that many could and did read. Professor James Campbell comments:
The use of written English went with a considerable degree of lay literacy; no doubt as both cause and effect. Æthelweard’s translation of the Chronicle was the first book written by an English nobleman and, for nearly four centuries, the last. Two of Ælfric’s theological treatises were written for thegns. The relative abundance of inscriptions, not only on churches but also on, for example, brooches and rings, is suggestive. A layman who learned to read in the Confessor’s reign would be able to make out his father’s will, the king’s writs, the boundary clause of a charter, or a monastery’s inventories. In Henry II’s day, mere literacy would have won him none of these advantages. If he wanted them he had to learn Latin. There is no doubt that some did so; but it would be unwise to be confident that they were more numerous than those who were literate in English a century or more earlier. If the late Anglo-Saxon state was run with sophistication and thoughtfulness, this may very well be connected with the ability of many laymen to read.xliii
In addition to these legally useful documents, the religious texts available to the Anglo-Saxon layman in English would have included the Gospels, the psalms, the Hexateuch, the creed, the confessional formulae, homilies and the lives of the saints. Ælfric’s translation into English of the Old Testament was commissioned by a nobleman. Perhaps he wanted to have it read to him in his own tongue; but possibly he wanted to be able to read it himself. It is worth remembering that, from the earliest period, the various codes of laws had all been written in English, implying an ability in those who were not Latinists to read them. After a papal council at Rheims in 1050, King Edward ordered that a record of what had been said and done there should be written in English and a copy kept in the king’s treasury. This would not be necessary for the clergy and could therefore only have been designed for the convenience of laymen. There is a tradition that King Harold owned books – not just religious books, which any pious man might have, but books on hawking – which has caused his biographer to hazard the cautious guess that he may have been literate. It would be more surprising if he had not been. He had been virtually running the highly sophisticated Anglo-Saxo
n state of which Professor Campbell speaks for years before he was crowned; a state in which, since at least the days of Alfred, one of the primary instruments of government was the royal writ, which recipients were expected to be able to read. His sister, the queen, had received an excellent education at the abbey of Wilton, where there was a school for aristocratic young ladies, and one may assume that her younger sister, Gunnhild, who later took the veil, had been similarly educated; it would be strange if less trouble had been taken over the education of the boys of the family. We know from the anonymous author of the Vita Ædwardi that Godwin took care to have his sons trained in all the accomplishments that would make them useful to their king. Indeed, Frank Barlow has pointed out that, of all the English kings after Cnut, Harold was the only one who received a political education suitable for the office.xliv There is no evidence either way for Duke William’s literacy. One of his biographers asserts categorically that he was not and that all his sons were similarly illiterate.xlv The Norman court, he points out, was not a centre of culture. Orderic Vitalis writes of his having witnessed a charter by making a cross.xlvi Indeed, the point has been made by David Bates that, ‘for almost the first century of its existence, the government of the Norman rulers was illiterate’xlvii – a circumstance that considerably complicates the writing of its history during that period. After Hastings, the new regime was to be much distressed to discover the extent to which English was used for the everyday affairs of church and state; the Normans made haste to substitute Latin, which their own clerks were able to understand.
Alongside the literacy or otherwise of the laity in England was something that is much more easily estimated: their affection for the old Germanic heroic poems and lays. This was one of the most lasting gifts that they brought from their continental homelands and it endured right up to the conquest. Of all the countries of Europe at that time, England was far ahead in having a flourishing vernacular literature, much of which is unfortunately lost, though enough has survived to give us a feeling for its quality. Before 1066, there was little to challenge it, apart from the Celtic literature of Ireland and Wales and the French chansons de geste, the stories of heroic deeds, of which there were probably once many, though few, and those mostly considerably later, have survived. The Chanson de Roland is the most important early example to survive and cannot much pre-date the conquest in its present form. There had certainly been vernacular poetry on heroic subjects in Germany, but it was mainly oral; only scraps and shards of this have survived in written form, such as the tantalizingly short piece of the heroic poem Hildebrand. The great age of the Icelandic sagas came well after the conquest.
England, on the other hand, had the distinction of having poems not just of heroic deeds but also of a more reflective nature, asking the questions that good poetry has always asked about the unfathomable mystery of existence. It is miraculous that we have as much of it as we do: the odds must always have been heavily against its survival. In its original form, when the Anglo-Saxons first came to England, it must have been a purely oral tradition that they brought with them. When a more literate age arrived with the conversion, it was highly unlikely that the monks, then the only literate people, would have given priority to committing the pagan songs of pagan gods and heroes to paper. (Though it is a mistake to exaggerate the prudishness of the cloister; Professor Campbell has pointed out that a tenth-century transcription of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, the part concerned with the techniques of seduction, may well be in the hand of St Dunstan.) But the songs did somehow survive, indeed they must have flourished, and even in monasteries they must have had a following, or Alcuin would not have asked the Abbot of Lindisfarne his indignant question, Quid enim Hinieldus cum Christo?, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’ Ingeld, prince of the Heathobards, makes a brief appearance in Beowulf, the only surviving Anglo-Saxon epic, in one of its many digressions through old Germanic legend. Freawaru, daughter of Hrothgar, the King of the Danes, is given to him in marriage to heal the breach between his people and hers. But, prophesies Beowulf, the peace offering will surely turn sour, when the Heathobards see the daughter of their enemy at the feast, and indeed the blood feud breaks out again even more strongly with Ingeld torn between love for his bride and his duty of revenge and loyalty to his people. The fact that he could be referred to so allusively, both in Beowulf and in Alcuin’s letter, implies the existence at some time of many well-known songs or poems about Ingeld and the Danish/Heathobard feud, so that the hearers or readers of Beowulf would quickly pick up the allusion.
There is a similar reference in Beowulf to the story of a fight at Finnesburg, of which we have confirmation in a mere fifty lines of another poem on the subject; the fragment of vellum on which it was originally written has vanished since it was transcribed in the seventeenth century but, to judge by what we have, it must have been a poem of considerable distinction, though probably shorter than Beowulf. The fragment describes the resumption of another blood feud; the young prince, trapped in the hall of his host, sees lights in the night sky and warns his followers that they signal the advance of enemies:
Here there is no dawn from the east, here no dragons fly,
It is not the horns of this hall that burn,
They come to attack us. Birds sing,
The grey wolf howls, wooden war-gear echoes,
Shields receive the spear. Now shines the moon,
Wandering beneath the clouds; now arise deeds of woe
That will work harm to our people.
It is the combination of the small natural details (the alarmed birds singing, the moon shining erratically through the clouds) with the more standard descriptions of heroic lays (the wolf howling, the sound of spear on shield) that gives it its peculiarly evocative magic. But what is common to all the surviving Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry – Beowulf, the remains of Finnesburh and Waldere, the remnant of a poem on Walther of Aquitaine (and also in the remnant we have of the Old High German Hildebrand) – is a dignity of proportion and style that gives it its indubitably epic stature. Beowulf being received by Hrothgar at Heorot is fully comparable to Odysseus at the court of Alcinous. Heroic epic rarely springs, fully formed, from the head of an original poet; generations of shorter, possibly cruder lays and songs on its subject herald its appearance. Many generations of legends and shorter poems on the subject of Beowulf and his exploits, now lost, must have preceded and generated the epic we have now. Not all would have been in English, but some undoubtedly were.
Beowulf itself (probably dating from the eighth century in its present form) has only survived through a series of happy accidents, the last being the rescue in 1731 of the only surviving manuscript (though in a damaged form) from the disastrous fire in the Cottonian Library in Ashburnham House, Westminster, in which it was then held. As with so much else of the civilization of the Anglo-Saxons, we are tormented by our ignorance of what has been lost, as well as grateful for the little that has been saved. Not all of what has endured is on the epic scale or concerns blood feuds and monsters. Among the rest is something that at that date was peculiar to England – as far as we know, that is, since again we can never know what has been lost of the work of other countries – and that is poetry of a more reflective nature. Most of it has a peculiarly elegiac or lyrical character. Some are shorter poems reflecting on the human condition, the loss of a lord, a wife deserted by her husband, a husband who has made good overseas sending for his wife. Many mourn the transitory nature of worldly happiness, such as The Ruin, in which the poet broods over the remains of what was probably an ancient Roman city, possibly Bath, or The Wanderer in which the narrator laments:
A wise man may grasp how ghastly it shall be
When all this world’s wealth standeth waste
Even as now, in many places over the earth,
Walls stand, wind beaten,
Heavy with hoar frost; ruined habitations. . .
The maker of men has so marred this dwelling
That human laughte
r is not heard about it
And idle stand these old giant works.
How that time is gone, he mourns, vanished beneath the shadow of night, as though it had never been. But if the predominant mood of Anglo-Saxon poetry was elegiac, it was flexible enough to serve other purposes: to depict the frenzy of battle, as when the sparks from the clashing swords blaze ‘as if all Finnesburh were aflame’ or to portray the almost Miltonic ambition and resentment of Satan in the retelling of the Genesis story (‘I could be God as well as He’). The Old English Genesis may have been a biblical story, but Satan, declaring war on heaven, does so in the old Germanic heroic spirit:
Strong comrades, bold-hearted heroes, stand by me, who will not fail me in the fight; they, brave men, have chosen me for their master. With such can a man lay a plan, carry it out with such companions in war. They are keen in their friendship to me, loyal in their hearts; I can be their leader, rule in this kingdom. Thus it seems not right to me that I need flatter God any whit for any benefit; no longer will I be his follower.xlviii
But he finds himself in another land, ‘void of light and teeming with flame, a great peril of fire’, many hundreds of years before Milton described a later Satan’s ‘darkness visible’.
There are quantities of riddles, a verse form in which even monks thought it permissible to indulge (which is presumably why so many, comparatively speaking, have survived) and which frequently illuminates life in Anglo-Saxon England. This riddle has more modern resonances:
The monster came sailing, wondrous along the wave; it called out in its comeliness to the land from the ship; loud was its din; its laughter was terrible, dreadful on earth; its edges were sharp. It was malignantly cruel, not easily brought to battle but fierce in the fighting; it stove in the ship’s sides, relentless and ravaging. It bound it with a baleful charm; it spoke with cunning of its own nature: ‘My mother is of the dearest race of maidens, she is my daughter grown to greatness, as it is known to men, to people among the fold, that she shall stand with joy on the earth in all lands.’xlix
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