Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

“ Men of many different races must have been among the ancestors of both the earlier and later Anglo-Saxon people.
In the eighth and ninth centuries three kingdoms in England bore the Saxon name, as mentioned by Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle—viz., Essex, Sussex, and Wessex—and one province, Middlesex. As will be seen when considering the evidence relating to the settlers in various parts of England, it does not follow that these several parts of our country which were called after the Saxon name were colonized by people known as Saxons in Germany. ”

“ They will amply repay him for his trouble, if he takes any interest in the early history of England, or in the general construction of authentic history of any kind. He will see plagarisms without end in the Latin histories, and will be in no danger of falling into the errors of Gale and others; not to mention those of our historians who were not professed antiquaries, who mistook that for original and authentic testimony which was only translated. It is remarkable that the "Saxon Chronicle" gradually expires with the Saxon language, almost melted into modern English, in the year 1154. ”

“ It is scarcely open to doubt that a large amount of Anglo-Saxon narrative poetry has perished. Several historical poems and ballads of the tenth and eleventh centuries, now lost, can be traced in texts of the Saxon Chronicle and in Latin works [1] . Attempts have been made also to show that narrative poems were used by the compilers of the early part of the Chronicle and by several Latin histories referring to the same period, but the evidence adduced is very doubtful. ”

“ This little volume, now presented to the indulgence of the reader, is the third of a series intended to illustrate the history and manners of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, whom a great historian very appropriately names "The Old English:" it does not claim the merit of deep research, only of an earnest endeavour to be true to the facts, and in harmony with the tone, of the eventful period of "The Norman Conquest." ”

“ Whatever there is in the English character of persistence, obstinacy, patience, industry, sobriety, love of freedom, we are accustomed to attribute to our Anglo-Saxon descent. In religion, arts, learning, literature, culture, we owe little or nothing to the Anglo-Saxon. ”

“ And that summer king Alfred went out to sea with a fleet, and fought against the forces of seven ships, and one of them he took, and put the rest to flight.
A. 876. This year the army stole away to Wareham, a fortress of the West-Saxons. And afterwards the king made peace with the army; and they delivered to the king hostages from among the most distinguished men of the army; and then they swore oaths to him on the holy ring, which they never before would do to any nation, that they would speedily depart his kingdom. ”

“ Our poetry and our ordinary language is tinged with heathen ideas even in modern times.
Still more interesting, however, are those relics of yet earlier social states, which we find amongst the Anglo-Saxons themselves. The production of fire by rubbing together two sticks is a common practice amongst all savages ”

“ When the Saxons once turned their attention to letters, none of the barbarous nations excelled them—the progress made during the reign of Alfred, we again repeat, is marvellous.
Nothing can be more primitive than our Anglo-Saxon poetry. Every line bears the stamp of originality. The praise of brave warriors is ever the subject. ”

“ Thus the Anglo-Saxons, before the great exodus from Denmark and North Germany, appear as a race of fierce, cruel, and barbaric pagans, delighting in the sea, in slaughter, and in drink. They dwelt in little isolated communities, bound together internally by ties of blood, and uniting occasionally with others only for purposes of rapine. ”

“ The truth is, that among all those who have achieved great prominence in the English-speaking world, the Anglo-Saxon type is conspicuous by its absence. Nine times in ten, when a man boasts of “Anglo-Saxon” pluck, enterprise, ability, and progress, he himself is not of that type of man, and nine-tenths of the incidents he cites were brought about through the pluck, enterprise, ability and progress which came from mixed blood. ”

“ Anglo-Saxon lads, peacefully sleeping in the harbor of a Latin nation, had been treacherously blown up, and at the sight of that which was thicker than water in the hold of the Maine, the Anglo-Saxons of the world got still closer together. ”

“ WITH the origin of any nation its early institutions must necessarily have been closely connected. Some of the most interesting traces of Anglo-Saxon life may he followed as far back as the time of the settlement. The changes which time has brought about in the early institutions that came into England with our tribal forefathers make it difficult to form an accurate estimate of them from the knowledge we have of the organization that prevailed during the later part of the Old English period. ”

“ But few of the civilized nations of Europe possess works which will bear comparison with those produced by our early Saxon writers; nor has any other of the Gothic tribes, from350 which our old Germanic language sprung, a literature of so old a date, that in any way approaches to the perfection attained by the early Anglo-Saxons. ”

“ From what we have seen, in the course of the preceding chapters, society seems for a long time to have been at a standstill among the Anglo-Saxons, as though it had progressed as far as its own simple vitality would carry it, and wanted some new impulse to move it onwards. By the entrance of the Normans, the Saxon aristocracy was destroyed ”

“ The History of Anglo-Saxon England.—The first task of the Anglo-Saxons after settling in England was to subdue the British, the race that has given King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table to English literature. By 600 A.D., after a century and a half of struggle, the Anglo-Saxons had probably occupied about half of England.
They did not build on the civilization that Rome had left when she withdrew in 410, but destroyed the towns and lived in the country. The typical Englishman still loves to dwell in a country home. ”

“ The Anglo-Saxon put on the new civilization and institutions brought him by the Conquest, as he would an embroidered garment; but the man within the garment, though modified by civilization, has never essentially changed. ”

“ To the Anglo-Saxon blood we may doubtless attribute our general sobriety, steadiness, and persistence; our scientific patience and thoroughness; our political moderation and endurance; our marked love of individual freedom and impatience of arbitrary restraint. ”

“ The Anglo-Saxons, when they settled in Eastern and Southern Britain, were a horde of barbarous heathen pirates. They massacred or enslaved the civilised or half-civilised Celtic inhabitants with savage ruthlessness. They burnt or destroyed the monuments of Roman occupation. ”

“ The aim of this volume is “to bring all the English-speaking peoples together by enabling them to realize their own characteristics.” And to this end the author “has covered the ground that the Anglo-Saxon occupies in anthropology, history, economics, art, theology, and everything else.... The privileged classes of England are a Latin survival, and so is the ‘boss’ of American politics. Nevertheless, Americans, Australians, and other Anglo-Saxons are far ahead of Great Britain in their progress towards true Anglo-Saxonism ”

“ We must remember that in past ages the Anglo-Saxon stood in the market-place in Rome chained and in slavery, that blue eyes and flaxen hair marked the savage, and dark complexion and black eyes the civilised man. ”

“ As in the times of the early Saxon kings, the cause breeding destruction was the widening distance between the king and the people. In those earlier times the people unresistingly lapsed into decadence, but the Anglo-Saxon had learned much since then, and it was not so safe to degrade him and trample on his rights. ”

“ Those who have known them can only regret that a strong, picturesque, and admirable type of Anglo-Saxon has disappeared forever from the ranks of our great family, unpainted by a single master-hand of contemporary date. ”

“ We claim to lead civilisation. Is this assumption justified? The history of our lives from our national birth until the present time must be appealed to. [4] It is perhaps true that we have not always lived up to our ideals, but these ideals have never been destroyed. They may have been obscured, but the clouds which covered them have lifted again, and they have reappeared in their original vigour and beauty. It seems to be a marked characteristic of an Anglo-Saxon to propagate and push his principles everywhere. ”

“ Our own history tells us so little of the details of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, that we have to call in what we know of the manners of their Teutonic neighbours and Scandinavian relatives to help us to understand it. ”

“ More important still, during the war, there were times when we realized that Anglo-Saxondom was threatened with an eclipse of glory and influence. A thing is never so precious as when you are faced with losing it. ”

“ The persistence of the strong shows itself in the prevalence of the leading qualities of her dominant strains of blood, and it is well for England that her gentle blood flows in all her ranks and in all her classes. When we consider with Demolins 'what constitutes the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon,' we shall find his descent from the old nobility, 'Saxon and Norman and Dane,' not the least of its factors. ”

“ On the contrary, in view of its excellent communications, it is a country where the conquest by the early settlers might be expected to have been most thorough. Whether the Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire brunettes are partly due to the settlement of Wends and Norwegians of the dark type, as now suggested, or to some other cause, the British theory as a complete explanation. in view of the facts, appears improbable. The chief lines of the Anglo-Saxon advance during the early settlement were the navigable rivers and the Roman roads. ”

“ The farther the human mind strays from the ever-living God as a spirit, the nearer it approximates to the beasts; and as the mental controls the physical, so ignorance and brutality are depicted upon the countenance.
As the African by his fall has lost those qualities [Pg 86] that adorn the visage of man, so the Anglo-Saxon, by his rise in the scale of humanity, has improved his features, enlarged his brain, and brightened in intellect.
Let us see how far history will bear us out in this assertion. We all acknowledge the Anglo-Saxon to be the highest type of civilization. ”

“ One of the sermons bears the date of 971 imbedded in its context; and this, 214which is probably the lowest date of the book, is twenty years before the Homilies of Ælfric appeared. Speaking of that frequent topic of the time, the end of the world, which is to take place in the Sixth Age, the preacher says:—
Perhaps there is no book which has been published in the present generation that has done so much for the historical knowledge of Anglo-Saxon literature. ”

“ During that century England produced most of those saintly kings and queens whose names still enrich the calendar of the Anglo-Saxon Church, sovereigns who ruled their kingdoms with justice, lived in mortification, went on pilgrimages, died in cloisters. ”

“ If any trust at all can be placed in the legends, a lull in the conquest followed the first settlement, and for some fifty years the English—or at least the West Saxons—were engaged in consolidating their own dominions, without making any further attack upon those of the Welsh. ”

“ And it is a fact of great interest that much the most striking and important work in this direction has been done by the Anglo-Saxon race, in many respects the most enterprising and progressive race upon the face of the earth. ”

“ The unifying force to-day is the Anglo-Saxon, who to the genius of the Roman for conquest and government, and to the genius of the Greek for letters and art, has added the genius of the Phœnician for commerce and the genius of the Hebrew for religion. Here we touch the secret of his ascendancy. The Anglo-Saxon civilization is Christian. His [Pg 14] language is becoming the universal language. His institutions are becoming the universal institutions. His ships carry the passengers and produce of the world. His capital dominates commerce. London is the clearing-house of the world. ”

“ In blood, it is probable that the importance of the Anglo-Saxon element has been generally over-estimated. It has been too usual to speak of England as though it were synonymous with Britain, and to overlook the numerical strength of the Celtic population in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland. It has been too usual, also, to neglect the considerable Danish, Norwegian, and Norman element, which, though belonging to the same Low German and Scandinavian stock, yet differs in some important particulars from the Anglo-Saxon. ”

“ On the whole, then, Anglo-Saxon poetry exhibits the limitations of a culturally early age, but it manifests also a degree of power which gives to Anglo-Saxon literature unquestionable superiority over that of any other European country of the same period. ”

“ It has been usual to represent the English conquest of South-eastern Britain as an absolute change of race throughout the greater part of our island. The Anglo-Saxons, it is commonly believed, came to England and the Lowlands of Scotland in overpowering numbers, and actually exterminated or drove into the rugged west the native Celts. The population of the whole country south of Forth and Clyde is supposed to be now, and to have been ever since the conquest, purely Teutonic or Scandinavian in blood, save only in Wales, Cornwall, and, perhaps, Cumberland and Galloway. ”