Thomas Hodgkin

“ We now pass on to the other writer of British origin who dealt with the history of the Anglo-Saxon conquest—namely, Nennius. If one has to speak in rather severe terms of the literary quality of this writer’s work and of the value of his testimony as a historian, it must be remembered in extenuation of his many faults that he lived at a time and in a nation in which literary excellence and the acquisition of accurate knowledge of the past were made well-nigh impossible by the hard pressure of daily life, brutalised and barbarised as it was by perpetual wars both from without and from within. ”

“ Yet, remembering that we have dwelling close beside us and mingling their blood with ours a gallant little people who own no descent from the Anglo-Saxon invaders, and remembering also how magical was the effect on all the barbarian races, of contact with the all-transmuting civilisation of Rome, we cannot surely leave altogether untold the story of those five centuries during which our country was known to the rest of Europe not as Anglia but as Britannia. ”

“ But he seems also to have been through life a man of nervous, perhaps even of hysterical, temperament, renowned and envied for his power of shedding copious floods of tears; a man who saw visions and dreamed dreams; and, above all, a man who believed himself to be engaged in a perpetual personal encounter with the Prince of Darkness, who was to him as real and familiar a presence as the ealdorman of Mercia or the canonici of Glastonbury. ”

“ Some fastidious readers in the twelfth century found his works heavy reading. “Unreasonable judges are they,” said William, “who do not know that every nation has its own different style of writing. For the Greeks write in an involved style, the Latins in a guarded one, the Gauls write with splendour, the English with pomp.... But if you will carefully read Aldhelm’s writings you will think him a Greek by the acuteness of his intellect, a Roman by his brilliancy, and an Englishman by his pomp.” ”

“ Two years after Olaf’s expulsion from the kingdom he returned (1030) , but fell in battle with his own hostile countrymen. When the inevitable reaction in favour of his memory set in, his body was carried to Trondhjem and buried under the high altar of the cathedral church. Miracles soon began to be wrought by his relics: there was a tide of pity and remorse for their fallen hero in the hearts of his people, who found themselves harshly dealt with by their Danish rulers. Before long Norway recovered her independence, and then Olaf was universally recognised as not only patriot but saint. ”

“ Sprung from one of the oldest and proudest families of Rome, yet nephew by marriage of the peasant-soldier Marius, Cæsar, the high-born democrat, possessed in his own person that combination of qualities which has ever been found most dangerous to the rule of a narrow and selfish oligarchy. The outworn machine which men still called the Roman republic was obviously creaking towards an utter breakdown, and must soon, if the provinces were not to be bled to death by greedy senators, be replaced by the government of a single man, whether that man were called king, or general, or dictator. ”

“ Is not everything in the relation between the races and kingdoms of Britain vague, ill-defined, anarchic? The Danes make a frith and break it; the West Saxons establish some kind of supremacy over the Mercians; Edward’s personal rule is advanced as far as the Humber; he becomes thereby undoubtedly the most powerful man in Britain; Scots, Northumbrians and Britons of Strathclyde take note of the fact and desire to become allies—we may safely say subject-allies—of so mighty a prince, whom they accordingly take “as father and as lord”. ”

“ There was evidently something in the character of the Celtic bishop which won for him more than the veneration, the love, of the Anglian king. Aidan was a man of absolute simplicity of character, intent on one purpose alone, that of spreading the Christian faith in the kingdom of Northumbria, utterly indifferent to wealth, and fame, and power, and yet without that harshness and austerity which the men of one idea so often display, and which made many of the noblest of medieval saints unloveable. ”

“ In the twentieth law we are introduced to “a foreigner or other stranger”—probably in most cases a Welshman—pushing towards us through a trackless forest. “Comest thou peaceably?” is evidently the question that rises to the lips of the Saxon ceorl as he sees the figure in outlandish garb dimly moving through the trees. If the stranger would dispel suspicion he must either wind his horn or shout at frequent intervals; otherwise the West Saxon may assume that he is a thief and either slay him or capture and hold him to ransom. ”

“ We should perhaps do wisely in mistrusting a good deal that is told us about the glory and the greatness of the reign of Edgar. After all, it was in that king’s days that traitors such as Elfric and Edric were growing up into maturity. Had Edgar left the country a really strong, well-organised state, it could hardly have gone down so speedily before the assaults of the sea-rovers. Probably the new and nobler life breathed into the Saxon people by the great Alfred lasted during the reigns of Edward and Athelstan and not much longer. ”

“ From the unfulfilled vow of pilgrimage, from the journey of the two bishops to Rome, and from the reply of the venerable Leo, sprang that noble sanctuary, the name of which will endure as long as men speak the English language, the great Abbey of Westminster.
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The internal history of England during the twenty-two years of Edward’s reign is chiefly a record of the struggles of two or three great nobles for supremacy in his councils. It is true that some measures were taken for lightening the burdens of the people. ”

“ Another Harold and another Hakon followed in quick succession, sometimes owning, sometimes rejecting, the over-lordship of Denmark. At the period which we have now reached, the rising star is that of Olaf Tryggvason, great-grandson of Fair-hair, not yet king of Norway but a great and popular Viking, whose name will be heard with terror in Essex and in Kent, in Sussex and in Hampshire. ”

“ His books show an especial interest in the computation of time, the natural result of his study of the great Easter controversy, the echoes of which must have been still resounding in the days of his childhood. He was unquestionably the most learned man of his age, perhaps one might safely say the most learned man of the early Middle Ages. He was—what even the great Pope Gregory was not—a Greek scholar; and his Latin style, formed doubtless on a careful study of the classical authors in the library of the convent, is eminently pure, and free from turgidity and affectation. ”

“ When we examine carefully the pleadings on both sides we see that the disputants are not so far apart as they suppose themselves to be. No one denies that the general framework of society in Anglo-Saxon Britain, like the language, was Teutonic, or that the masters of the land were English and looked upon the Romanised Celts whom they called Wealas as an alien and inferior race. But, on the other hand, Freeman himself admits, though reluctantly, that the majority of the British women would be spared to be the wives or concubines of the invaders, and nearly all the slaves to be their thralls. ”

“ The utter demoralisation of king and people, the apparent rottenness of the body politic, as manifested in the course of the struggle, abate much of our first feeling of patriotic regret for the Norman conquest, suggesting as they do the reflection that these Saxons, if left to themselves, would never have made a strong and stable nation. Much as we condemn the conduct of Ethelred, we may be inclined to conjecture that all the mischief was not wrought in his reign. ”

“ Fearing lest the child, dying unbaptised, should become “the devil’s man,” a priest hastily baptised it, the minstrel standing god-father, and giving it the name Magnus in honour of Carolus Magnus, “the king whom he knew to be the best man in all the world”. (And this was full two centuries after the death of Charlemagne.) The anger of the awakened king, when he learned what had happened during his slumbers, was charmed away by the smooth-tongued Sigvat. Thus did the name Magnus enter not only into the dynastic lists, but into the common family nomenclature of Norway and Iceland. ”

“ Doubtless Cadwallon keenly resented the position of inferiority to which his nation had been reduced by Ethelfrid’s great victory of Chester, which shut them off from Strathclyde, as Ceawlin’s victory of Deorham had shut them off from Devon and Cornwall. When Edwin, once Cadvan’s humble guest, had become the mightiest prince in Britain, Cadwallon, unwilling to accept his yoke, had taken refuge—so say the Welsh annals—in Ireland. ”

“ In the year 78, the Emperor Vespasian appointed as his legatus the most celebrated and probably the greatest of the governors of Britain, Gnæus Julius Agricola. Verging as he was upon his fortieth year he was in the very prime of his matured and disciplined strength. He knew Britain well, having served when quite a young man as tribune (a rank nearly corresponding to our lieutenant) under Suetonius Paulinus, and having probably heard the clamour of the barbarian multitude who crowded round the chariot of Boadicea. ”

“ The right, and more than the right, the sacred duty, of vengeance was handed on from father to son, and the circle widened from kinsman to kinsman, till the terrible blood-feud was like to destroy a tribe or even a nation. Then at some period far back in the ages, the idea was conceived of exorcising the spirit of revenge by the wand of pecuniary compensation. Let the relatives of a murdered man receive a wer, a payment in money, proportioned to his rank and position in the tribe, and, the family honour being thus satisfied, let them forego the right to revenge. ”

“ As it is impossible to give here anything like a complete digest of the Anglo-Saxon laws, we may leave unnoticed the ordinances for the repression of crime—especially the crime of theft—which constitute the larger part of the document before us, and may confine our attention to those paragraphs which deal with the tenure of land and with the ranks and orders in the West Saxon state.
In all the earlier stages of a nation’s life, before the people have begun to flock into great cities, there is no subject of more vital importance than the relation of the Folk to the Land. ”

“ But out of this welter of warring ambitions and treasons sometimes fomented by the liege-lord in Paris who had sworn to protect him, the young duke gradually grew up a bold, athletic, soldierly man; chaste and clean-living, though himself the child of illicit love; devout, though when occasion arose he could defy the thunders of the Church; beyond everything self-centred and capable of holding on through long years to an ambitious project once formed with infinite patience, and of carrying it into bloody effect without a shadow of remorse. ”

“ If the thirty years’ war in the seventeenth century left deep scars on the face of Germany, which were still visible after the lapse of two hundred years, we must surely believe that the wounds inflicted by the incessant ravages and harryings of the Danes for more than thirty years were also deep and long lasting. ”

“ Nor is the controversy even yet ended; for the enthusiastic championship of the great historian of the Norman Conquest has not unnaturally provoked an equally vigorous storm of censure. To the present writer he does not appear a high-minded patriot, nor yet, considering the age in which he lived, a detestable villain. Hard, grasping, capable, remorseless, intent on the aggrandisement of his family, and by no means successful in forming their characters, he nevertheless may be credited with a certain amount of love for his country, and for the Anglo-Danish race which now peopled it. ”

“ The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the great historical monument of our race in its youthful days, and probably owes its original inception to the wise encouragement of Alfred. As that great prince ruled in the later years of the ninth century it is plain that the interval between the historian and the events recorded is even greater in the case of the Chronicle than in that of Bede. To a considerable extent the early annals in the Chronicle are founded upon Bede’s history, and so far we may safely neglect them since they add nothing to the evidence already before the court ”