1See the curious delineation of the Vikings of the North, in Turner’s “Hist. of the Anglo-Saxons,” i. 456, third edition.2Mr.Kemble, the translator ofBeowulf, has extricated himself out of an extraordinary dilemma. The first volume, which exhibits the Anglo-Saxon text, furnished in the preface, with an elaborate abundance, all the historical elucidations of his unknown hero. Subsequently when the second volume appeared, which contains the translation, it is preceded by “A Postscript to the Preface,” far more important. Here, with the graceful repentance of precipitate youth, he moans over the past, and warns the reader of “the postscript to cut away the preface root and branch,” for all that he had published was delusion! particularly “all that part of my preface which assigns dates to one prince or another, I declare to be null and void!” The result of all this scholar’s painful researches is, that Mr. Kemble is left in darkness with Beowulf in his hand; an ambiguous being, whom the legend creates with supernatural energies, and history labours to reduce to mortal dimensions.The fault is hardly that of our honest Anglo-Saxon, as trustful of the Danes as his forefathers were heretofore. It is these, our old masters, who, with Count Suhm, the voluminous annalist of Denmark, at their head, have “treated mythic and traditional matters as ascertained history. It is the old story of Minos, Lycurgus, or Numa, furbished up for us in the North.” What a delightful phantasmagoria comes out while we remain in darkness! But a Danish Niebuhr may yet illuminate the whole theatre of this Pantheon.3These Teutonic heroes were frequently denominated by the names of animals, which they sometimes emulated: thus, the hero exulting in bone and nerve was known as “the Bear;” the more insatiable, as “the Wolf;” and “the Wild Deer” is the common appellative of a warrior. The term “Deer” was the generic name for animal, and not then restricted to its present particular designation.“Rats and Mice, and suchsmall Deer,”baffled our Shakspearean commentators, who rarely looked to the great source of the English language—the Anglo-Saxon, and, in their perplexity, proposed to satisfy the modern reader by a botch of their own—and readgeerorcheer. Percy discovered in the old metrical romance of “Sir Bevis of Southampton,” the very distich which Edgar had parodied.—Warton, iii. 83.4Thucydides, Lib. i.5Thucydides.
1See the curious delineation of the Vikings of the North, in Turner’s “Hist. of the Anglo-Saxons,” i. 456, third edition.
2Mr.Kemble, the translator ofBeowulf, has extricated himself out of an extraordinary dilemma. The first volume, which exhibits the Anglo-Saxon text, furnished in the preface, with an elaborate abundance, all the historical elucidations of his unknown hero. Subsequently when the second volume appeared, which contains the translation, it is preceded by “A Postscript to the Preface,” far more important. Here, with the graceful repentance of precipitate youth, he moans over the past, and warns the reader of “the postscript to cut away the preface root and branch,” for all that he had published was delusion! particularly “all that part of my preface which assigns dates to one prince or another, I declare to be null and void!” The result of all this scholar’s painful researches is, that Mr. Kemble is left in darkness with Beowulf in his hand; an ambiguous being, whom the legend creates with supernatural energies, and history labours to reduce to mortal dimensions.
The fault is hardly that of our honest Anglo-Saxon, as trustful of the Danes as his forefathers were heretofore. It is these, our old masters, who, with Count Suhm, the voluminous annalist of Denmark, at their head, have “treated mythic and traditional matters as ascertained history. It is the old story of Minos, Lycurgus, or Numa, furbished up for us in the North.” What a delightful phantasmagoria comes out while we remain in darkness! But a Danish Niebuhr may yet illuminate the whole theatre of this Pantheon.
3These Teutonic heroes were frequently denominated by the names of animals, which they sometimes emulated: thus, the hero exulting in bone and nerve was known as “the Bear;” the more insatiable, as “the Wolf;” and “the Wild Deer” is the common appellative of a warrior. The term “Deer” was the generic name for animal, and not then restricted to its present particular designation.
“Rats and Mice, and suchsmall Deer,”
baffled our Shakspearean commentators, who rarely looked to the great source of the English language—the Anglo-Saxon, and, in their perplexity, proposed to satisfy the modern reader by a botch of their own—and readgeerorcheer. Percy discovered in the old metrical romance of “Sir Bevis of Southampton,” the very distich which Edgar had parodied.—Warton, iii. 83.
4Thucydides, Lib. i.
5Thucydides.
THE ANGLO-NORMANS.
TheAnglo-Saxon dominion in England endured for more than five centuries.
A territorial people had ceased to be roving invaders, but stood themselves in dread of the invasions of their own ancient brotherhood. They trembled on their own shores at those predatory hordes who might have reminded them of the lost valour of their own ancestors. But their warlike independence had passed away. And, as a martial abbot declared of his countrymen, “they had taken their swords from their sides and had laid them on the altar, where they had rusted, and their edges were now too dull for the field.”1They could not even protect the soil which they had conquered, and often wanted the courage to choose a king of their own race. Sometimes they stood ready to pay tribute to the Dane, and sometimes suffered the throne to be occupied by a Danish monarch. In a state of semi-civilization their rude luxury hardly veiled their unintellectual character. Feeble sovereigns and a submissive people could not advance into national greatness.
When the Duke of Normandy visited his friend and kinsman, Edward the Confessor, he beheld in England a mimetic Normandy; Norman favourites were courtiers, and Norman soldiers were seen in Saxon castles. Edward, long estranged from his native realm, had received his education in Normandy; and the English court affected to imitate the domestic habits of these French neighbours—the great speaking the foreign idiom in their houses, and writing in French their bills and accompts.2Already there was a faction of Frenchified Saxons in the court of the unnational English sovereign.
William the Norman surveyed an empire already half Norman; and in the prospect, with his accustomed foresight,he mused on a doubtful succession. A people who had often suffered themselves to fall the prey of their hardier neighbour, lie open for conquest to a more intelligent and polished race.
The victory of Hastings did not necessarily include the conquest of the people, and William still condescended to march to the throne under the shadow of a title. After a short residence of only three months in his newly-acquired realm, “the Conqueror” withdrew into his duchy, and there passed a long interval of nine months. William left many an unyielding Saxon; a spirit of resistance, however suppressed, bound men together, and partial insurrections seemed to be pushing on a crisis which might have reversed the conquest of England.3
During this mysterious and protracted visit, and apparent abandonment of his new kingdom to the care of others, was a vast scheme of dominion nursed in the councils of Norman nobles, and strengthened by the boundless devotion of hardy adventurers, who were all toshare in the present spoliation and the future royalty? In his prescient view did William there anticipate a conquest of long labour and of distant days; the state, the nobles, the ecclesiastics, the people, the land, and the language, all to be changed? Hume has ventured to surmise that the mind of the Norman laboured with this gigantic fabric of dominion. It is probable, however, that this child of a novel policy was submitted to a more natural gestation, and expanded as circumstances favoured its awful growth. One night in December the King suddenly appeared in England, and soon unlimited confiscations and royal grants apportioned the land of the Saxons among the lords of Normandy, and even their lance-bearers. It seemed as if every new-comer brought his castles with him, so rapidly did castles cover the soil.4These were strongholds for the tyrant foreigner, or open retreats for his predatory bands; stern overlookers were they of the land!
The Norman lords had courts of their own; sworn vassals to their suzerain, but kinglings to the people. Sometimes they beheld a Saxon lord, whose heart could not tear itself from the lands of his race, a serf on his own soil; but they witnessed without remorse the rights of the sword. Norman prelates were silently substitutedfor Saxon ecclesiastics, and whole companies of claimants arrived to steal into benefices or rush into abbeys. It was sufficient to be a foreigner and land in England, to become a bishop or an abbot. Church and State were now indissolubly joined, for in the general plunder each took their orderly rank. It was the triumph of an enlightened, perhaps a cunning race, as the Norman has been proverbially commemorated, over “a rustic and almost an illiterate generation,” as the simplicity of our Saxon prelates, who could not always speak French, is described by Ordericus Vitalis, a monk who, long absent from England, wrote in Normandy. Ingulphus, the monk of Croyland, though partial to “the Conqueror,” however, honestly confesses that when the English were driven from their dignities, their successors were not always their superiors.
All who were eager to court their new lords were brought to dissemble their native rusticity. They polled their crowns, they cut short their flowing hair, and throwing aside the loose Saxon gown, they assumed the close vest of the more agile Norman. “Mail of iron and coats of steel would have better become them,” cried an indignant Saxon. We have seen what a martial Saxon abbot declared to the Conqueror, while he mourned over his pacific countrymen. This was the time when it was held a shame among Englishmen to appear English. It became proverbial to describe a Saxon who ambitioned some distinguished rank, that “he would be a gentleman if he could but talk French.”
Fertile in novelties as was this amazing revolution, the most peculiar was the change of the language. The style of power and authority was Norman; it interpreted the laws, and it was even to torment the rising generation of England; children learned the strange idiom by construing their Latin into French, and thus, by learning two foreign languages together, wholly unlearned their own. Not only were they taught to speak French, but the French character was adopted in place of their own alphabet. It was a flagrant instance of the Conqueror’s design to annihilate the national language, that finding a College at Oxford with an establishment founded by Alfred to maintain divines who were “to instruct the people in their own vulgar tongue,” William decreed that “theannual expense should never after be allowed out of the King’s exchequer.”5
The Norman prince on his first arrival could have entertained no scheme of changing the language, for he attempted to acquire it. The secretary of the Conqueror has recorded that when the monarch seemed inclined to adopt the customs of his new subjects, which his moderate measures at first indicated, the Norman prince had tried his patience and his ear to babble the obdurate idiom, till he abhorred the sound of the Saxon tongue. If because the Conqueror could not learn the Saxon language he decided wholly to abolish it, this would seem nothing more than a fantastic tyranny; but in truth, the language of the conquered is usually held in contempt by the conquerors for other reasons besides offending the delicacy of the ear. The Normans could not endure the Saxon’s untunable consonants, as it had occurred even to the unlettered Saxons themselves; for barbarians as their hordes were when they first became the masters of Britain, they had declared that the British tongue was utterly barbarous.6
But not at his bidding could the military chief for ever silence the mother-tongue. Enough for “this stern man” to guard the land in peace, while every single hyde of land in England was known to him, and “put at its worth inHIS BOOK,” as records the Saxon chronicler. The language of a people is not to be conquered as the people themselves. The “birth-tongue” may be imprisoned or banished, but it cannot die—the people think in it; the images of their thoughts, their traditional phrases, the carol over the mead-cup, and their customs far diffused, survived even the iron tongue of the curfew.
The Saxons themselves, who had chased the native Britons from their land, still found that they could not suppress the language of the fugitive people. The conquerorsgave their Anglo-Saxon denominations to the towns and villages they built; but the hills, the forests, and the rivers retain their old Celtic names.7Nature and nationality will outlast the transient policy of a new dynasty.
The novel idiom became the language of those only with whom the court-language, whatever it be, will ever prevail—the men who by their contiguity to the great affect to participate in their influence. In that magic circle of hopes and fears where royalty is the sole magician of the fortunes of men, the Conqueror perpetuated his power by perpetuating his language. Ignorance of the French tongue was deemed a sufficient pretext for banishing an English bishop pertinacious in his nationality, who had for a while been admitted to the royal councils, but whose presence was no longer necessary to the dominant party.
To the successors of the Norman William it might appear that the English idiom was wholly obliterated from the memories of men; not one of our monarchs and statesmen could understand the most ordinary words in the national tongue. When Henry the Second was in Pembrokeshire, and was addressed in English—“Goode olde Kynge,” the King of England inquired in French of his esquire what was meant? Of the title of “Kynge,” we are told that his majesty was wholly ignorant! A ludicrous anecdote of the chancellor of Richard the First is a strange evidence that the English language was wholly a foreign one for the English court. This chancellor in his flight from Canterbury, disguised as a female hawker, carrying under his arm a bundle of cloth, and an ell-measure in his hand, sate by the sea-side waiting for a vessel. The fishermen’s wives inquired the price of the cloth; he could only answer by a burst of laughter; for this man, born in England, and chancellor of England, did not know a single word of English! One more evidence will confirm how utterly the Saxon language was cast away. When the famous Grosteste, bishop of Lincoln (who would no doubt have contemned his Saxon surname of “Great-head”), a voluminous writer, once condescendedto instruct “the ignorant,” he wrote pious books for their use in French; the bishop making no account of the old national language, nor of the souls of those who spoke it.
When the fate of conquest had overthrown the national language, and thus seemed to have bereaved us of all our literature, it was in reality only diverging into a new course. For three centuries the popular writers of England composed in the French language. Gaimar, who wrote on our Saxon history; Wace, whose chronicle is a rhymed version of that of Geoffry of Monmouth; Benoit de Saint Maur (or Seymour); Pierre Langtoft, who composed a history of England; Hugh de Rotelande (Rutland), and so many others, were all English; some were descendants from Norman progenitors, but in every other respect they were English. Some were of a third generation.
Our Henry the Third was a prodigal patron of these Anglo-Norman poets. This monarch awarded to a romancer, Rusticien de Pise, who has proclaimed the regal munificence to the world, a couple of fine “chateaux,” which I would not, however, translate as has been done by the English term “castles.” Well might a romancer so richly remunerated promise his royal patron to finish “The Book of Brut,” the never-ending theme to the ear of a British monarch who, indeed, was anxious to possess such an authentic state-paper. Who this Rusticien de Pise was, one cannot be certain; but he was one of a numerous brood who, stimulated by “largesses” and fair chateaux, delighted to celebrate the chivalry of the British court, to them a perpetual fountain of honour and preferment. We may now smile at the Count de Tressan’s querulous nationality, who is indignant that the writers of the French romances of the Round Table show a marked affectation of dwelling on everything that can contribute to the glory of the throne and court of England, preferring a fabulous Arthur to a true Charlemagne, and English knights to French paladins.8When Tressan wrote, this striking circumstance had not received its true elucidation; the hand of these writers had only flowedwith their gratitude; these writers composed to gratify their sovereign, or some noble patron at the English court, for they were English natives or English subjects, long concealed from posterity as Englishmen by writing in French. It had then escaped the notice of our literary antiquaries at home and abroad, that these Englishmen could have composed in no other language. How imperfect is the catalogue of early English poets by Ritson! for it is since his day that this important fact in our own literary history has been acknowledged by the French themselves, who at length have distinguished between Norman and Anglo-Norman poets. M. Guizot was enabled by the French government to indulge his literary patriotism by sending a skilful collector to England to search in our libraries for Norman writings; and we are told that none but Anglo-Norman writers have been found—that is, Englishmen writing on English affairs, and so English that they have not always avoided an unguarded expression of their dislike of foreigners, and even of Normans!
It is worthy of observation, that even those Norman writers who came young into England soon took the colour of the soil; and what rather surprises us, considering the fashion of the court at that period, studied the original national language, translated our Saxon writings, and often mingled in their French verse phrases and terms which to this day we recognise as English. Of this we have an interesting evidence in an Anglo-Norman poetess, but recently known by the name of “Marie de France;” yet had she not written this single verse accidentally—
Me nummerai par remembrance,Marie ai num, si sui de France—
Me nummerai par remembrance,
Marie ai num, si sui de France—
we should from her subjects, and her perfect knowledge of the vernacular idiom of the English, have placed this Sappho of the thirteenth century among the women of England. This poetess tells us that she had turned into her French rhymed verse the Æsopian Fables, which one of our kings had translated into English from the Latin. This royal author could have been no other than Alfred, to whom such a collection has been ascribed. We learn from herself the occasion of her version. Her task wasperformed for a great personage who read neither Latin nor English; it was done for “theloveof the renowned Earl William Longsword”—
——Cunte Willaume,Le plus vaillant de cest Royaume.
——Cunte Willaume,
Le plus vaillant de cest Royaume.
Who would calculate the “largesse” “Count William,” this puissant Longsword, cast into the lap of this living muse when she offered all this melodious wisdom; whose beautiful simplicity a child might comprehend, but whose moral and politic truths would throw even the Norman Longsword into a state of rational musing? Her “Lais,” short but wild “Breton Tales,” which our poetess dedicated to her sovereign, our Henry the Third, are evidence that Marie could also skilfully touch the heart and amuse the fancy.
In her poems, Marie has translated many French terms into pure English, and abounds with allusions to English places and towns whose names have not changed since the thirteenth century. Her local allusions, and her familiar knowledge of the vernacular idiom of the English people, prove that “Marie,” though by the accident of birth she may be claimed by France, yet by her early and permanent residence, and by the constant subjects of her writings, her “Breton Tales,” and her “Fables” from the English, by her habits and her sympathies, was an Englishwoman.
At this extraordinary period when England was a foreign kingdom, the English people found some solitary friends—and these were the rustic monk and the itinerant minstrel, for they were Saxons, but subjects too mean and remote for the gripe of the Norman, occupied in rooting out their lords to plant his own for ever in the Saxon soil.
The monks, who lived rusticated in their scattered monasteries, sojourners in the midst of their conquered land, often felt their Saxon blood tingle in their veins. Not only did the filial love of their country deepen their sympathies, but a more personal indignation rankled in their secret bosoms at the foreign intruders, French or Italian—the tyrannical bishop and the voluptuous abbot. There were indeed monks, and some have been our chroniclers, base-born, humiliated, and living in fear, whoin their leiger-books, when they alluded to their new masters, called them “the conquerors,” noticed the year when some “conqueror” came in, and recorded what “the conquerors” had enacted. All these “conquerors” designated the foreigners, who were the heads of their houses. But there were other truer Saxons. Inspired equally by their public and their private feeling, these were the first who, throwing aside both Latin and French, addressed the people in the only language intelligible to them. The patriotic monks decided that the people should be reminded that they were Saxons, and they continued their history in their own language.
This precious relic has come down to us—the “Saxon Chronicle”9—but which in fact is a collection of chronicles made by different persons. These Saxon annalists had been eye-witnesses of the transactions they recorded, and this singular detail of incidents as they occurred without comment is a phenomenon in the history of mankind, like that of the history of the Jews contained in the Old Testament, and, like that, as its learned editor has ably observed, “a regular and chronological panorama of a people described in rapid succession by different writers through many ages in their ownVERNACULAR LANGUAGE.” The mutations in the language of this ancient chronicle are as remarkable as the fortunes of the nation in its progress from rudeness to refinement; nor less observable are the entries in this great political register from the year One of Christ till 1154, when it abruptly terminates. The meagreness of the earlier recorders contrasts with the more impressive detail of later enlarged and thoughtful minds. When we come to William of Normandy, we have a character of that monarch by one who knew him personally, having lived at his court. It is not only a masterly delineation, but a skilful and steady dissection. The earlierSaxon chronicler has recorded a defeat and retreat which Cæsar suffered in his first invasion, which would be difficult to discover in the Commentaries of Cæsar.
The true language of the people lingered on their lips, and it seemed to bestow a shadowy independence to a population in bondage. The remoter the locality, the more obdurate was the Saxon; and these indwellers were latterly distinguished as “Uplandish” by the inhabitants of cities. For about two centuries “the Uplandish” held no social connexion; separated not only by distance, but by their isolated dialects and peculiar customs, these natives of the soil shrunk into themselves, intermarrying and dying on the same spot; they were hardly aware that they were without a country.
It was a great result of the Norman government in England that it associated our insular and retired dominion with that nobler theatre of human affairs, the Continent of Europe. In Normandy we trace the first footings of our national power; the English Sovereign, now a prince of France, ere long on the French soil vied in magnitude of territory with his paramount Lord, the Monarch of France. Such a permanent connexion could not fail to produce a conformity in manners; what was passing among our closest neighbours, rivals or associates, was reflected in the old Saxon land which had lost its nationality.
1Speed, 441. This was said to “the Conqueror,” and this Abbot of St. Alban’s paid dearly for the patriotism which had then become treason.2A circumstance which Milton has recorded.3Our great lawyers probably imagined that the honour of the country is implicated in the title usually accorded to William the Norman;Spelman, the great antiquary, andBlackstone, the historian and the expounder of our laws, have absolutely explained away the assumed title of “the Conqueror” to a mere technical feudal term of “Conquestor, or acquirer of any estate out of the common course of inheritance.” The first purchaser (that is, he who brought the estate into the family which at present owns it) was styled “the Conqueror,”and such is still the proper phrase in the law of Scotland.Ritsonis indignant at what he calls “a pitiful forensic quibble.”But another great lawyer and lord chancellor, the sedateWhitelocke, positively asserts that “William only conquered Harold and his army; for he never was, norpretended to be, the conqueror of England, although thesycophant monks of the timegave him that title.”—Whitelocke’s “Hist. of England,” 33.In a charter, granting certain lands for the church of St. Paul’s, which Stowe has translated from the record in the Tower, William denominates himself, “by the grace of God,King of Englishmen” (Rex Anglorum), and addresses it “to all his well-belovedFrench and English people, greeting.”—Stowe’s “Survey of London,” 326, Edit. 1603. Did William on any occasion declare that he was “the Conqueror” as well as the sovereign of England? When William attempted to learn the Saxon language, it is obvious that he did not desire to remind his new subjects that he ruled as Voltaire sang of his hero,——————————qui regna sur la France,Par droit de Conquête et par droit de Naissance.4The final history of these citadels may illustrate that verse of Goldsmith which reminds us—“To fly fromPETTY TYRANTS—tothe Throne!”In the short space of seventy years the owners of those castles bearded even majesty itself; these lords, by their undue share of power, were in perpetual revolt; till two royal persons, though opposed to each other, Stephen and Maude, decreed for their mutual interest the demolition of fifteen hundred and fifteen castles. They were razed by commission, or by writs to the sheriffs; and a law was further enacted that “none hereafter, without license, should embattle his house.” And thus was broken this aristocracy of castles. See two dissertations on “Castles,” by SirRobert Sutton, and byAgard; “Curious Discourses by Eminent Antiquaries,” i. 104 and 188.This number of castles seems incredible; possibly many were “embattled houses.” My learned friend, the Rev. Joseph Hunter, an antiquary most versant in manuscripts, inclines to think there may be some scriptural error of the ancient scribe, who was likely to add or to leave out a cipher, without much comprehension of the numerals he was transcribing without a thought, like what happened to the eleven thousand virgins of St. Ursula.5Speed, 440.6A curious fact discovered by Mr. Turner in a Cottonian manuscript has brought this circumstance to our knowledge. In a grant of land in Cornwall, an Anglo-Saxon king, after mentioning the Saxon name of the place, adds, “which the inhabitants there called,barbarico nomine, by the barbarous name of Pendyfig;” which was the British or Welsh name.—“Vindication of the Ancient British Poems,” 8.7Camden has noticed this striking circumstance in his “Britannia.” See also Percy’s Preface to Mallett’s “Northern Antiquities,” xxxix.8See his Preface to the prose romance of “La Fleur des Batailles.”9Miss Gurney, who has honourably been hailed as “the Elstob of her age,” privately printed her own close version of the “Saxon Chronicle” from the printed text, 1810. Happy lady! who, when sickness had made her its prisoner, opened the “Saxon Chronicle;” and she learned that she might teach the learned.The Rev. Dr.Ingram, principal of Trinity College, Oxon, has since published his translation, accompanied by the original, a collation of the manuscripts, and notes critical and explanatory. 1823. 4to. A volume not less valuable than curious.
1Speed, 441. This was said to “the Conqueror,” and this Abbot of St. Alban’s paid dearly for the patriotism which had then become treason.
2A circumstance which Milton has recorded.
3Our great lawyers probably imagined that the honour of the country is implicated in the title usually accorded to William the Norman;Spelman, the great antiquary, andBlackstone, the historian and the expounder of our laws, have absolutely explained away the assumed title of “the Conqueror” to a mere technical feudal term of “Conquestor, or acquirer of any estate out of the common course of inheritance.” The first purchaser (that is, he who brought the estate into the family which at present owns it) was styled “the Conqueror,”and such is still the proper phrase in the law of Scotland.Ritsonis indignant at what he calls “a pitiful forensic quibble.”
But another great lawyer and lord chancellor, the sedateWhitelocke, positively asserts that “William only conquered Harold and his army; for he never was, norpretended to be, the conqueror of England, although thesycophant monks of the timegave him that title.”—Whitelocke’s “Hist. of England,” 33.
In a charter, granting certain lands for the church of St. Paul’s, which Stowe has translated from the record in the Tower, William denominates himself, “by the grace of God,King of Englishmen” (Rex Anglorum), and addresses it “to all his well-belovedFrench and English people, greeting.”—Stowe’s “Survey of London,” 326, Edit. 1603. Did William on any occasion declare that he was “the Conqueror” as well as the sovereign of England? When William attempted to learn the Saxon language, it is obvious that he did not desire to remind his new subjects that he ruled as Voltaire sang of his hero,—
—————————qui regna sur la France,Par droit de Conquête et par droit de Naissance.
—————————qui regna sur la France,
Par droit de Conquête et par droit de Naissance.
4The final history of these citadels may illustrate that verse of Goldsmith which reminds us—
“To fly fromPETTY TYRANTS—tothe Throne!”
In the short space of seventy years the owners of those castles bearded even majesty itself; these lords, by their undue share of power, were in perpetual revolt; till two royal persons, though opposed to each other, Stephen and Maude, decreed for their mutual interest the demolition of fifteen hundred and fifteen castles. They were razed by commission, or by writs to the sheriffs; and a law was further enacted that “none hereafter, without license, should embattle his house.” And thus was broken this aristocracy of castles. See two dissertations on “Castles,” by SirRobert Sutton, and byAgard; “Curious Discourses by Eminent Antiquaries,” i. 104 and 188.
This number of castles seems incredible; possibly many were “embattled houses.” My learned friend, the Rev. Joseph Hunter, an antiquary most versant in manuscripts, inclines to think there may be some scriptural error of the ancient scribe, who was likely to add or to leave out a cipher, without much comprehension of the numerals he was transcribing without a thought, like what happened to the eleven thousand virgins of St. Ursula.
5Speed, 440.
6A curious fact discovered by Mr. Turner in a Cottonian manuscript has brought this circumstance to our knowledge. In a grant of land in Cornwall, an Anglo-Saxon king, after mentioning the Saxon name of the place, adds, “which the inhabitants there called,barbarico nomine, by the barbarous name of Pendyfig;” which was the British or Welsh name.—“Vindication of the Ancient British Poems,” 8.
7Camden has noticed this striking circumstance in his “Britannia.” See also Percy’s Preface to Mallett’s “Northern Antiquities,” xxxix.
8See his Preface to the prose romance of “La Fleur des Batailles.”
9Miss Gurney, who has honourably been hailed as “the Elstob of her age,” privately printed her own close version of the “Saxon Chronicle” from the printed text, 1810. Happy lady! who, when sickness had made her its prisoner, opened the “Saxon Chronicle;” and she learned that she might teach the learned.
The Rev. Dr.Ingram, principal of Trinity College, Oxon, has since published his translation, accompanied by the original, a collation of the manuscripts, and notes critical and explanatory. 1823. 4to. A volume not less valuable than curious.
THE PAGE, THE BARON, AND THE MINSTREL.
Whenlearning was solely ecclesiastical and scholastical, there were no preceptors for mankind. The monastery and the university were far removed from the sympathies of daily life; all knowledge was out of the reach of the layman. It was then that the energies of men formed a course of practical pursuits, a system of education of their own. The singular institution of chivalry rose out of a combination of circumstances where, rudeness and luxury mingling together, the utmost refinement was found compatible with barbaric grandeur, and holy justice with generous power. In lawless times they invented a single law which included a whole code—the law of knightly honour.L’Ordenne de Chevalerieis the morality of knighthood, and invests the aspirant with every moral and political virtue as every military qualification.1
Destitute of a national education, the higher orders thus found a substitute in a conventional system of manners. Circumstances, perhaps originally accidental, became customs sealed with the sign of honour. In this moral chaos order marshalled confusion, as refinement adorned barbarism. A mighty spirit lay as it were in disguise, and it broke out in the forms of imagination, passion, and magnificence, seeking their objects or their semblance, and if sometimes mistaken, yet still laying the foundations of social order and national glory in Europe.
A regular course of practical pursuits was assigned to the future noble “childe” from the day that he left the parental roof for the baronial hall of his patron. In these “nurseries of nobility,” as Jonson has well described such an institution, in his first charge as varlet or page, the boyof seven years was an attendant at the baron’s table, and it was no humiliating office when the youth grew to be the carver and the cupbearer. He played on the viol or danced in the brawls till he was more gravely trained in “the mysteries of woods and rivers,” the arts of the chase, and the sciences of the swanery, and the heronry, and the fishery; the springal cheerily sounded a blast of venery, or the falconer with his voice caressed his attentive hawk, which had not obeyed him had he neglected that daily flattery.
At fourteen the varlet became an esquire, vaulting on his fiery steed, and perfecting himself in all noble exercises, nicely adroit in the science of “courtesie,” or the etiquette of the court; and already this “servant of love” was taught to electLa dame de ses pensées, and wore her favour and her livery for “the love of honour, or the honour of love,” as Sir Philip Sydney in the style of chivalry expressed it.
At the maturity of twenty and one years the late varlet, and now the esquire, stood forth a candidate to blazon his shield by knighthood—the accomplished gentleman of these Gothic days, and right learned too, if he can con his Bible and read his romance. Enchanting mirror of all chivalry! if he invent songs and set them to his own melodies. Yet will the gentle “batchelor” he dreaming on some gallant feat of arms, or some martial achievement, whereby “to win his spurs.” On his solemn entrance into the church, laying his sword upon the altar, he resumed it by the oath which for ever bound him to defend the church and the churchmen. Thus all human affairs then were rounded by the ecclesiastical orbit, out of which no foot dared to stray. All began and all ended as the romances which formed his whole course of instruction—with the devotion which seemed to have been addressed to man as much as to Heaven.
After the termination of the Crusades, the grand incident in the life of theBaronwas a pilgrimage to the holy city of Jerusalem; what the penitent of the Cross had failed to conquer, it seemed a consolation to kneel at and to weep over: a custom not obsolete so late as the reigns of our last Henries; and still, though less publicly avowed, the melancholy Jerusalem witnesses the Hebrew and theChristian performing some secret vow, to grieve with a contrition which it seems they do not feel at home.
In these peregrinations a lordly Briton might chance to find some French or Italian knight as rash and as haughty; it was a law in chivalry that a knight should not give way to any man who demanded it as a right, nor decline the single combat with any knight under the sun; a challenge could not therefore be avoided. But apas d’armeswas not always a friendly invitation, for often under the guise of chivalry was concealed the national hostility of the parties.
But when no crusade nor pilgrimage in the East, nor predatory excursion in the West, nor even the blazonry of a tournament, which fed his eyes with a picture of battle, summoned to put on his mail-coat, how was the vacant Lord to wear out his monotonous days in his castle of indolence? The domestic fool stood beside him, archly sad, or gravely mirthful, as his master willed, with a proverb or a quip; and, with his licensed bauble, was the most bitterly wisest man in the castle. Patron of the costly manuscript which he could not himself read, the romancer of his household awaited his call; the great then had fabulators or tale-tellers, as royalty has now, by title of their office—its readers. But this Lord was too vigorous for repose, and the tranquillity of chess was too trying for his brain; the chess-board was often broken about the head of some mute dependent, or perchance on one who returned the dagger for the board. There was little peace for his restlessness, when, weary in his seat, his priceless Norway hawk perched above his head,2and his idle hounds spread over the floor, ceaselessly reminded him of those wide and frowning forests which were continually encroaching on the tillage of the contemned agriculturist, offering a mimetic war, not only against the bird and the beast, but man himself; for the lairs of the forest concealed the deer he chased, and often the bandit who chased the Lord—the terrible Lord of this realm of wood and water, where, whoever would fowl a bird or strike abuck, might have his eyes torn from their sockets, or on the spot of his offence mount the instant gallows.3
There was a disorderly grandeur about the castellated mansion which should have required the ukase of this Sovereign of many leagues, surrounded by many hundreds of his retainers; but rarely the cry of the oppressed was allowed to disturb the Lord, while all within were exact in their appointments, as clock-work movements which were wound up in the government of these immense domestic establishments. Great families had their “household books,” and in some the illegible hand of the lordly master himself, when the day arrived that even barons were incited to scriptural attempts, may yet be seen.4These nobles, it appears, were more select in their falconer and theirchef de cuisinethan in their domestic tutor, for such there was among the retainers of the household. This humiliated sage, indeed, in his own person was a model for the young varlets, on whom it was his office to inculcate that patient suppleness and profound reverence for their Lord and their superiors, which seemed to form the single principle of their education. At this period we find a domestic proverb which evidently came from the buttery. As then eight or ten tables were to be daily covered, it is probable the chivalric epicures sometimes found their tastes disappointed by the culinary artists; it would seem that this put them into sudden outbreakings of ill-humour, for the proverb records that “the minstrels are often beaten for the faults of the cooks.”
Too much leisure, too many loungers, and the tedium of prolonged banquets, a want of the pleasures of the luxurious sedentary would be as urgent as in ages more intellectual and refined; those pleasures in which we participate though we are passive, receiving the impressions without any exertion of our own—pleasures which make us delighted auditors or spectators. The theatre was not yet raised, but the listlessness of vacuity gave birth to all the variegated artists of revelry. If they had not comedy itself, they abounded with the comic, and without tragedy the tragic often moved their emotions. Nor were they even then without their scenical illusions, marvels which came and vanished, as the Tregetour clapped his hands—enchantments! which though Chaucer opined to be only “natural magic,” all the world tremblingly enjoyed as the work of devils; a sensation which we have totally lost in the necromancy of our pantomimes. And thus it was that in the illumed hall of the feudal Lord we discover a whole dramatic company; which, however dissimilar in their professional arts, were all enlisted under the indefinite class ofMinstrels; for in the domestic state of society we are now recalling, the poetic minstrel must be separated from those other minstrels of very different acquirements, with whom, however, he was associated.
There were minstrels who held honourable offices in the great households, sometimes chosen for their skill and elocution to perform the dignified service of heralds, and were in the secret confidence of their Lord; these were those favourites of the castle, whose guerdon was sometimes as romantic as any incident in their own romance.
No festival, public or private, but there the minstrel poet was its crowning ornament. They awakened national themes in the presence of assembled thousands at the installation of an abbot, or the reception of a bishop.5Often, in the Gothic hall, they resounded some lofty “Geste,” or some old “Breton” lay, or with some gayer Fabliau, indulging the vein of an improvvisatore, altering the old story when wanting a new one. Delightful rhapsodists, or amusing tale-tellers, combining the poetic withthe musical character, they displayed the influence of the imagination over a rude and unlettered race—
——They tellen TalesBoth ofWEEPYINGand ofGame.
——They tellen Tales
Both ofWEEPYINGand ofGame.
Chaucer has portrayed the rapture of a minstrel excited by his harp, a portrait evidently after the life.
Somewhat helispedfor his wantonnessTo make the English swete upon his tonge;And in his Harping when that he had songe,His Eyen twinkled in his Hed aright,As don the Sterrés in a frosty night.
Somewhat helispedfor his wantonness
To make the English swete upon his tonge;
And in his Harping when that he had songe,
His Eyen twinkled in his Hed aright,
As don the Sterrés in a frosty night.
The minstrel more particularly delighted “the Lewed,” or the people, when, sitting in their fellowship, the harper stilled their attention by some fragment of a chronicle of their fathers and their father-land. The family harper touched more personal sympathies; the ancestral honours of the baron made even the vassal proud—domestic traditions and local incidents deepened their emotions—the moralising ditty softened their mind with thought, and every county had its legend at which the heart of the native beat. Of this minstrelsy little was written down, but tradition lives through a hundred echoes, and the “reliques of ancient English poetry,” and the minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and some other remains, for the greater part have been formed by so many metrical narratives and fugitive effusions.
There were periods in which the minstrels were so highly favoured that they were more amply rewarded than the clergy—a circumstance which induced Warton to observe with more truth than acuteness, that “in this age, as in more enlightened times, the people loved better to be pleased than to be instructed.”6Such was their fascination and their passion for “Largesse!” that they were reproached with draining the treasury of a prince. It is certain that this thoughtless race have suffered from the evil eye of the monkish chroniclers, who looked on the minstrels as their rivals in sharing the prodigality of the great; yet even their monkish censors relented whenever these revellers appeared. It was a festive day among somany joyless ones when the minstrel band approached the lone monastery. Then the sweet-toned Vielle, or the merry Rebeck, echoed in the hermit-hearts of the slumbering inmates; vaulters came tumbling about, jugglers bewitched their eyes, and the grotesque Mime, who would not be outdone by his tutored ape. Then came the stately minstrel, with his harp borne before him by his smiling page, usually called “The Minstrel’s Boy.” One of the brotherhood has described the strolling troop, who
Walken fer and wyde,Her, and ther, in every syde,In many a diverse londe.
Walken fer and wyde,
Her, and ther, in every syde,
In many a diverse londe.
The easy life of these ambulatory musicians, their ample gratuities, and certain privileges which the minstrels enjoyed both here and among our neighbours, corrupted their manners, and induced the dissipated and the reckless to claim those privileges by assuming their title. A disorderly rabble of minstrels crowded every public assembly, and haunted the private abode. At different periods the minstrels were banished the kingdom, in England and in France; but their return was rarely delayed. The people could not be made to abandon these versatile dispensers of solace, amid their own monotonous cares.
At different periods minstrels appear to have been persons of great wealth—a circumstance which we discover by their votive religious acts in the spirit and custom of those days. The Priory of St. Bartholomew in Smithfield, in 1102, was founded by “Rahere,” the king’s minstrel, who is described as “a pleasant-witted gentleman,” such as we may imagine a wealthy minstrel, and moreover “the king’s,” ever to have been.7In St.Mary’s Church at Beverley, in Yorkshire, stands a noble column covered with figures of minstrels, inscribed, “This Pillar made the Minstrels;” and at Paris, a chapel dedicated to St. Julian of the Minstrels, was erected by them, covered with figures of minstrels bearing all the instruments of music used in the middle ages, where the violin or fiddle is minutely sculptured.8
If in these ages of romance and romancers the fair sex were rarely approached without the devotion of idolatry, whenever “the course of true love” altered—when the frail spirit loved too late and should not have loved, the punishment became more criminal than the crime; for there was more of selfish revenge and terrific malignity than of justice, when autocratical man became the executioner of his own decree. The domestic chronicles of these times exhibit such harrowing incidents as those ofLa Châtelaine de Vergy, where suddenly a scene of immolation struck through the devoted household; or that of “La Dame du Fayel,”9who was made to eat her lover’s heart. And those who had not to punish, but to put to trial, the affections of women who were in their power, had their terrible caprices, a ferocity in their barbarous loves. Year after year the Gothic lord failed to subdue the immortalised patience of Griselda, and such was our “Childe Waters,” who put to such trials of passion, physical and mental, the maiden almost a mother. Inthe fourteenth century, one century later than the histories of the “Châtelaine” and the “Dame,” either the female character was sometimes utterly dissolute, or the tyranny of husbands utterly reckless, when we find that it was no uncommon circumstance that women were strangled by masked assassins, or walking by the riverside were plunged into it. This drowning of women gave rise to a popular proverb—“It is nothing! only a woman being drowned.” La Fontaine, probably without being aware of this allusion to a practice of the fourteenth century, has preserved the proverbial phrase in his “La Femme noyée,” beginning,
Je ne suis pas de ceux qui disent ce n’est rien,C’est une Femme qui se noye!10
Je ne suis pas de ceux qui disent ce n’est rien,
C’est une Femme qui se noye!10
The personages and the manners here imperfectly sketched, constituted the domestic life of our chivalric society from the twelfth century to the first civil wars of England. In this long interval few could read; even bishops could not always write; and the Gothic baron pleaded the privilege of a layman for not doing the one nor the other.
The intellectual character of the nation can only be traced in the wandering minstrel and the haughty ecclesiastic. The minstrel mingling with all the classes of society reflected all their sympathies, and in reality was one of the people themselves; but the ecclesiastic stood apart, too sacred to be touched, while his very language was not that either of the noble or of the people.
A dense superstition overshadowed the land from the time of the first crusade to the last. It may be doubtful whether there was a single Christian in all Christendom, for a new sort of idolatry was introduced in shrines, and relics, and masses; holy wells, awful exorcisms, saintly vigils, month’s minds, pilgrimages afar and penances at home; lamp-lighting before shrines decked with golden images, and hung with votive arms and legs of cripples who recovered from their rheumatic ails. The enthusiasm for the figure of the cross conferred a less pure sanctity on that memorial of pious tribulation. Everywhere it was placed before them. The crusader wore that sign on his right shoulder, and when his image lay extended on his tomb, the crossed legs were reverently contemplated. They made the sign of the cross by the motion of their hand, in peril or in pleasure, in sorrow and in sin, and expected no happy issue in an adventure without frequently signing themselves with the cross. The cross was placed at the beginning and at the end of their writings and inscriptions, and it opened and closed the alphabet. The mystical virtues of the cross were the incessant theme of the Monachal Orders, and it was kissed in rapture on the venal indulgence expedited by the papal Hierophant. As even in sacred things novelty and fashion will perversely put in their claim, we find the writers and sculptors varying the appearance of the cross; its simple formbecame inclosed in a circle, and again varied by dots.11The guardian cross protected a locality; and in England, at the origin of parishes, the cross stood as the hallowed witness which marked the boundaries, and which it had been sacrilege to disturb. It was no unusual practice to place the sign at the head of private letters, however trivial the contents, as we find it in charters and other public documents. In one of the Paston letters, the piety of the writer at a much later period could not detail the ordinary occurrences of the week without inserting the sacred letters I.H.S.; and similar invocations are found in others.12
The material symbol of Christianity had thus been indiscriminately adopted without conveying with it thevirtues of the Gospel. The cross was a myth—the cross was theFetish13of an idolatrous Christianity—they bowed before it, they knelt to it, they kissed it, they kissed a palpable and visible deity; never was the Divinity rendered more familiar to the gross understandings of the vulgar; and in these ages of unchristian Christianity, the cross was degraded even to a vulgar mark, which conveniently served for the signature of some unlettered baron.