us high above the level of the men about him, full of devotion, gentleness, and simplicity. In him, as in Cynewulf, the stern submission to an unknown weird is lost in the joyous acceptance of a larger hope. Well might he repeat in his last illness that sentence of St. Ambrose: "I have not lived so as to be ashamed to live among you ; nor am I afraid to die, because we have a good God." The meaning and influence of such a life grows clearer, as we read in the unaffected words of one of his disciples the story of the master's death. With failing breath he had toiled through the day, dictating his translation of St. John's Gospel, and as the day closed, his work was done. At twilight, amid his weeping scholars, his face turned toward the oratory where he was wont to pray, with "great tranquillity" his soul went out from among them.*

The conditions which had lifted Northumbria into intellectual leadership, and which had made Bede the teacher of the Western world, were The coming roughly broken. From the time of of the Danes. Bede's death, the once powerful kingdom of Northumbria was shaken by treason and anarchy, a prey to lawlessness, plague, and famine. Toward the close of the century (cir. 789) northern England is in the clutches of a new peril. Danish marauders swarm southward from their northern fiords, and the newly gained civilization of England is menaced by a fresh inrush of heathenism. The rich and defenseless

* See Green's History of the English People, vol. i. p. 67. The story is originally told by Cuthbert in his letter to Cuthwine.

religious houses were shining marks for plunder. Of the monasteries at Jarrow and Holy Isle only the shattered walls were left. Early in the century following the Danes closed in on England with a yet fiercer persistence. Northumbrian learning was blotted out; the Abbey of Whitby was demolished. Another band sacked Croyland, Peterborough, Huntingdon, and Ely. At last heathenism was confronted and beaten back by the steadfast heroism of Alfred (Battle of Edington, 878).

Under the treaty of Wedmore which followed (879), the south was secured to the English only by yielding the north to the invaders, and Northumbria lay prostrate under the heel of the barbarian.

Revival of

under Alfred.

Learning, thus stifled in the north, ose in the south into a new prominence under the unwearying and comprehensive energy of Alfred. learning When the king came to the throne he saw the great seats of learning destroyed, scholarship nearly extinct, and the whole people sinking back into ignorance. Not many north of the Humber, and hardly a man south of it, could understand the Latin service book, or translate a Latin letter. Alfred threw himself into the task of educational reform. He gathered learned men about him from many parts of Britain and from countries over sea: Asser the Welshman, Grimbald,* from the country of the Franks. He rebuilt monasteries; he founded a school at his court for the young nobles. He labored for the better training of the

* Grimbald, or Grimbold, is supposed to have come from the Flemish monastery of St. Omer.

priesthood, on whom the intellectual as well as spiritual life of the country mainly rested. But his hopes for education, with a breadth of popular sympathy wonderful in those rude times, reach far beyond the limits of the clerical class. It is his wish that all the children of freemen of sufficient means, shall at least learn to read and write English. The motive back of his own writings is his desire to raise the general standard of education. He laments that as Latin is almost the sole language of scholarship, learning is locked up from the English reader. With a beautiful humility he becomes himself a pupil that he may be the teacher of his people as he is their ruler and defender. To meet the general need, he makes free renderings from the Latin, amplifying, explaining, and adapting them to the popular mind. In this way he prepared the Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius, a heathen philosopher of the fifth and sixth centuries, a book full of lofty reflections, and much read during the Middle Ages. He also translated the Pastoral Care of Pope Gregory the Great, a book designed to show what the ideal priest should be, and sent a copy to the bishop of every diocese. General history was furnished by his rendering of a popular work by Orosius, a Spanish monk, and the past of England by a translation of the Ecclesiastical History of Bede. It was in Alfred's reign, and probably under his direct influence and supervision, that the Annals or Chroni- The "Chroncle, brief historical records which monks had noted down in certain monasteries from a very early period, were given a fuller and less fragmen

icle."

tary form. This Chronicle remains a wonderful monument to early English patriotism. Professor Earle thinks that the English began this practice of jotting down important contemporary events at least as early as the seventh century. However this may be, we have in the Chronicle a history, a considerable portion of which is contemporaneous, which stretches from the invasion of Cæsar in 55 B. c. to the death of Stephen, A. D. 1154. "From Alfred's time the narrative continues sometimes full, sometimes meager, sometimes a dry record of names and dates, sometimes rising to the highest flight of the prose picture or the heroic lay, but in one shape or other never failing us, till the pen dropped from the hand of the monk of Peterborough, who recorded the coming of Henry of Anjou."* At times, as though the Chronicler had grown restive under the restraints of the less impassioned medium, the prose gives way to verse. The chant of battle rises in the song on the victory at Brunanburh, or, as in the poem on the death of King Edgar, we find the song of mourning. However direct a share Alfred may have taken in the editing of the Chronicle, its improvement is naturally related to that elevation of English prose into a literary importance which is one of the glories of his reign. To Alfred the necessity for his work as a translator was doubtless a matter for regret; to him it meant the decline of Latin learning; to us it means also the beginning of English prose. As the history of English poetry reaches back to that great era when

Growth of

English prose.

* E. A. Freeman, Encyclopædia Britannica, title "England."

Northumbrian scholarship was paramount in the west, the rise of English prose dates from the court of Alfred at Winchester.

The century and a half which lies between the death of Alfred and the Norman Conquest (901-1066) produced little of sufficient value from.

From Alfred

a purely literary aspect to detain the to the Norman general reader. Yet certain features of Conquest. the period must be fixed in the mind if we would not lose our hold on the continuity of England's mental growth. Although the country ceded to the Danes by the Peace of Wedmore (879) was gradually won back under Alfred's successors, Edward the Elder (901-925) and Athelstane (925-940), Wessex and the south retained that literary and political supremacy which Alfred had begun. After the ravages and final settlement of the Danes, the bril liant literary activity of the north seems to have been extinguished, and for more than three centuries after the death of Alcuin (804) the pathetic silence that settles down on Northumbria remains almost unbroken. In the south alone, where the effects of Alfred's practical enthusiasm still lingered, we find the traditions of culture and the signs of some literary activity. This southern learning and literature was chiefly associated with great religious foundations and with the history of the Church. The men who rise into literary prominence are chiefly ecclesiastical dignitaries: Dunstan (924-988), Abbot of Glastonbury, and afterward Archbishop of Canterbury; Ethelwold (908 (?)-984), Bishop of Winchester; Ælfric (fl. 1006), Abbot of Eynsham