Da wæs corn dære and flesc and cæse and butere for nan ne was o de land. Wrecce men sturven of hungaer, sume ieden on ælmes de waren sum wile rice men, sume flugen ut of lande. Wæs nævre gæt mare wreccehed on land, ne nævre hethen men werse ne diden dan hi diden. Gif twa men oder iii coman ridend to an tun, al de tunscipe flugæn for heom wenden æt hi wæron ræveres. De biscopes and lered men heom cursede ævre, oc was heom naht dar of, for hi weron al forcursæd and forsuoren and forloren. De erthe ne bar nan corn, for de land was al fordon mid suilce dædes, and hi sæden openlice Sæt Xrist slep and his halechen. Suile and mare danne we cunnen saien we Volenden xix wintre for ure sinnes.

Then was corn dear, and flesh, and cheese, and butter, for there was none in the land. Wretched men starved with hunger; some went begging who were once rich men; some fled out of the land. There was never yet more wretchedness in the land, nor ever did heathen men do worse than these. If two or three men came riding to a town, all the township fled before them; they thought they were robbers. The bishops and learned men evermore cursed them; but this was nothing, for they were all accursed, and forsworn, and reprobate. The earth bore no corn, for the land was all ruined with such deeds, and men said openly that Christ slept and his holy ones. Such things and more than we can say we suffered nineteen winters for our sins.

REMAINS OF SAXON LITERATURE.

LIKE the Hebrew writings, the greater part of the Saxon literature is anonymous. Of all the writers in the Saxon Chronicles, not one can be identified with certainty. 'Beowulf' is the work of an unknown author, and it has been doubted if Cædmon is really the name of a man and not rather a name suggestive of the Scriptural character of his work. Poems were written by a Cynewulf, but who he was and when he lived is quite uncertain. Hence there is often great doubt as to the exact date to be assigned to any work, and the difficulty is increased.

by the fact that Northumbrian literature perished with the inroads of the Danes, and Northumbrian works are preserved only in a later and West-Saxon form.

About 1050 Leofric, bishop of Exeter, gave to the cathedral library a gift of books, and among them '1 mycel Englisc boc be gehwylcum dingum on leoðwisan geworht,' that is, 'One large English book about various things in lay [song] wise wrought.' This is the famous Codex Exoniensis' still preserved at Exeter, and so often referred to. The manuscript is in ten books, and it contains many poems, most of them of a religious character, such as A Dialogue between the Virgin Mary and Joseph,' Song of the Three Children,' The Last Judgment.' Perhaps the most interesting are The Traveller's Song' and The Phoenix.' The former is not much more than a catalogue of tribes and places, but it is believed to be a work of the fifth century, and, if so, is the most ancient relic of the kind that we possess; the latter is a poem of much beauty, and is thought to be the work of Cynewulf.

6

In 1832 Dr. Blume discovered at Vercelli a book filled mainly with Saxon homilies, but also containing a small number of religious poems of great beauty. The chief of these are A Legend of St. Andrew,' 'A Dream of the Holy Rood,' and 'Elene, or the Invention of the Holy Cross,' and they are for the most part, if not all, the work of Cynewulf.

Archbishop Parker in Elizabeth's time was a great collector of Saxon books, and he gave to Corpus Christi College, in Cambridge, the celebrated 'Winchester Chronicle,' and a fine copy of King Alfred's laws.

Sir Robert Cotton was a still greater collector, and to him we owe all the Saxon Chronicles save two, 'Beowulf,' a fragment of a noble poem on the story of Judith, part of the works of Elfric, the Lindisfarne Gospels of the ninth, and a Psalter of the tenth century.

To Archbishop Laud we owe the famous 'Peterborough Chronicle,' and some of the works of Elfric. To Christopher Lord Hatton (time of Charles II.) we owe Alfred's translation of the Pastoral Care,' and the translation of Gregory's Dialogues' with Alfred's preface.

To Franciscus Junius, a celebrated scholar of Charles II.'s time, we owe the Cadmon, and a Psalter of the tenth century.

In 1851 there was brought to light a book of Saxon homilies of a generation earlier than Elfric from the library of Blickling Hall, in Norfolk.

In 1860 a valuable fragment of an epic poem on King Waldhere was discovered at Copenhagen on some scraps of vellum taken from book-backs.

INFLUENCE OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST.

IN the eleventh century English literature languished. The Winchester Chronicle' has for this period but a few meagre entries; Ælfric was gone and no one had arisen to compare with him in learning or eloquence, and Cynewulf's poems and the great songs of the 'Chronicle' belonged to an age that had passed away.

The exhausting struggle with the Danes in the early

years of the century, and in later years the growing intercourse with Normandy were doubtless the chief causes of this stagnation. Edward the Confessor's tastes and sympathies were French, as was natural for one whose youth was spent in Normandy in the closest friendship and relationship with its rulers, and as far as might be he surrounded himself with Norman councillors, both in Church and State. Then came the great shock of the Norman Conquest, and within a short time scarcely an Englishman was left as bishop or abbot or great noble, and the native literature had no longer any recognition in the king's court or in those of his great barons.

The language could not die while the bulk of the people remained the same, but it underwent a great change. Old English was a highly inflected language, and its system of case-endings was especially elaborate. These inflections were gradually falling away under the influence of natural laws, and we can see that the language of Elfric is simpler and more modern than that of Alfred.

But now this slow and natural change was enormously quickened, and all these sounding terminations that make so handsome a figure in Saxon courts-the -AN, the -UM, the -ERA and -ENA, the -IGENNE and -IGENDUM—all these, superfluous as bells on idle horses, were laid aside when the nation had lost its old political life and its pride of nationality, and had received leaders and teachers who spoke a foreign tongue.'1

From this time three languages existed side by side within the kingdom-Latin, the language of the clergy

1 Earle.

and the learned; French, that of polite intercourse; and English, that of the mass of the people. The famous Abbot Samson, of St. Edmundsbury (Carlyle's' Past and Present'), could preach in three languages, and, sturdy Englishman as he was, he preferred a certain man to be one of his chief tenants because he could speak no French.

During the reigns of the first six or eight kings after the Conquest, Latin was the language used in nearly all public documents, and it was probably chosen as being the common language of Western Christendom, while French would have been the badge of conquest. Then, from the beginning of the reign of Edward I. onward, for about eighty or ninety years French took the place of Latin, till at last it also yielded before the English, which once more had gained supremacy.

The final victory of English was somewhat retarded by the vanity of men and the usage of grammar schools, for we are told Children in scole beth compelled, agines the usage and maner of alle other naciouns, for to leve her owne langage, and for to constrewe her lessouns and her thingis a Frensch, and haveth siththe that the Normans come first into England. Also gentil mennes children beth ytaught for to speke Frensch from the tyme that thei beth rokked in her cradel and kunneth speke and playe with a childes brooche. And uplondish men wole likne hemself to gentil men, and fondeth with great bisynesse for to speke Frensch for to be the more ytold of.' (Higden's Polychronicon,' translated from Latin into English by John of Trevisa, in 1385.)

Trevisa adds: This maner is siththe som del ychaun