Art. 6. THE ARTS IN EARLY ENGLAND.

The Arts in Early England. By G. Baldwin Brown. Four vols. Murray, 1903-1915.

AFTER the departure of the Romans from Britain, the glimmerings of light thrown by contemporary historians upon the affairs of this country become almost extinct. Recorded facts about the immigration of Jutes, Angles, and Saxons are few and imperfect. Modern methods of archæological research have proved a valuable complement to, or even substitute for, written records, when those are few or lacking, but it is only in recent years that Anglo-Saxon archæology has been placed on a scientific basis. The conclusions deducible are far from being yet completely drawn. Mr Thurlow Leeds, by his study of the 'saucer brooches,' has recently exemplified the broad historical results that can be obtained by a methodical examination of the characteristics and distribution of a single type of personal ornament. The field of research still awaiting cultivation is large. The material exists in considerable quantity, accessible though scattered, and fairly well published. For upward of a century Anglo-Saxon antiquities have been identified and treasured, so that the number known is now great.

We are deeply indebted to our pagan forefathers' habit of burying personal implements and treasures with the dead. The rifling of their tombs followed the introduction of Christianity, and went on as chance dictated throughout the Middle Ages, but many a cemetery escaped in whole or in part; and, where the gravemounds were small, they disappeared as noticeable features before many generations had succeeded. In parts of Kent and elsewhere in the south, settlements and cemeteries were mostly established upon high and relatively barren ground, which became common pasture when the lower forest or swamp-lands were reclaimed and turned into fertile farms. The spade, therefore, left such burials undisturbed; sheep and cattle grazed over the recumbent warriors and villagers of the immigration. Their age-long rest was at length interrupted in consequence of the enclosure of commons, and later the

making of railroads. Ground that had not been broken up for a thousand years and more was thus disturbed; and the arms, utensils, and ornaments of our forgotten ancestors were brought to light. Collections of such treasures began to be formed by systematic excavators in the latter part of the 18th century; and some of those collections, still bearing the labels originally attached to the objects composing them, may still be examined in local museums.

Douglas' Nenia Britannica' in 1793 was the first important publication of results, and is still a valuable work. Bryan Fausett's observations, made between the years 1757 and 1773, eventually also saw the light under the title Inventorium Sepulchrale.' Akerman's ‘Pagan Saxondom' was another important general work. All three were richly and well illustrated for their date. Papers in the publications of various archæological societies have appeared in great numbers; and by degrees the vagueness of the early students and excavators has been succeeded by a scientific method. It remained to coordinate the whole of this mass of material; and this has been the task which Professor Baldwin Brown has undertaken, and has been the first to undertake. Indeed, the scope of his work, not yet complete even in the four stout volumes now under consideration, is much larger than we have yet indicated, for he proposes to pass in review every work of Anglo-Saxon art of any importance, pagan or Christian, down to the time of the Norman conquest. Of the published volumes two are devoted to the arms and ornaments yielded by the pagan tombs; one volume to the existing remains of Saxon architecture, all of it of Christian date; and one (the first, which should, perhaps, have been the last) to the social life of the people. There still remain for future treatment the arts and crafts of Christian AngloSaxondom, and the whole mass of sculptured stones of contemporary date, in which Britain is richer than any other barbarian country. There are also the works of Celtic artists to be dealt with, though whether these fall within the Professor's scheme is not disclosed.

The volumes thus far published are obviously the result of many years' patient observation and research. They are widely comprehensive. The author appears to Vol. 228.-No. 452

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have examined every object of any importance recovered from Anglo-Saxon tombs, wherever preserved. He has also visited and generally planned almost every church either wholly or in surviving part of Saxon origin. He has himself photographed almost all the objects reproduced, some of them in colour; his 166 plates reproduce about 2000 of his photographs and form an unrivalled corpus of early English antiquities. The amount of travel involved was great, for Anglo-Saxon relics are scattered far and wide. Almost every local museum in England preserves a few; and there are many in private collections, all of which have been visited. The churches described number about 150. Prof. Baldwin Brown's work, therefore, is a monument of industry, and at the very least a body of materials of high value and completeness. It is safe to predict that for many years to come it must form the necessary foundation for all students of Anglo-Saxon antiquity. We may add that every reliance can be placed on the author's statements and observations, which his established accuracy and caution-his almost over-caution-guarantee.

The study of Anglo-Saxon antiquity cannot be pursued alone. It is a branch of the antiquities of the barbarian invaders of the Roman Empire. Jutes, Angles, and Saxons came from the Continent and must be followed back to their homes. Influences and imports from Europe also followed and affected them after their settlement in England. The author's Rhind Lectures, delivered in 1909, are proof of the width of his study of the whole subject of Teutonic art, and show him wandering far afield, again with his camera, examining at first hand the treasure of Petrossa at Bucarest, a shield at Copenhagen, mosaics at Ravenna, Gothic buckles at Kiev and Odessa, a sword at Stockholm, jewellery at Petrograd, Buda-Pesth, Breslau, Innsbruck, or Paris. Thus equipped he could see in every object handled its broad relations to the civilisation of its day and the streams of past tradition-Persian, Roman, Teutonic, Celtic-which helped to determine its form.

The only general criticism the present reviewer has to make is that, after so much and such unexampled study and mature reflexion, the Professor did not frankly and fully accept his own conclusions, but preferred to

make the reader travel with him along the road by which he arrived at them. Thus we are taken to church after church and shown its plan and details; and only at the end of the volume is its chronological position revealed. Had the book been written in the reverse order it would have been much easier to read and understand. The best attainable chronological treatment is always the clearest. The group of approximately seventh-century churches might have been treated together, and their common features made the startingpoint instead of the conclusion. These volumes would then have been handier for reference and more lucid as text-books.

The earliest identified burial in England of a Teutonic immigrant of importance is that of a chieftain and his wife, unearthed at Dorchester-on-Thames. The buckles and other ornaments found upon them, though generally attributed to the fifth century, may even date back into the fourth; and it is possible that the warrior may not have been an invader but a barbarian chief in the service of the Romans. Similar grave furniture has been found in Gaul with the bones of such auxiliaries. In any case the Dorchester warrior stands apart from the ordinary run of invaders and immigrants of the fifth and sixth centuries. Their remains, when grouped according to place of discovery, fall into stylistic divisions which exemplify so many art-provinces. The most distinct of these is the land of the Jutes-Kent, the Isle of Wight, and the Meon Valley in Hampshire. In Kent we meet with a people, or at least an aristocracy, artistically superior to the rest of the Teuton invaders. No such sharp line of division can be drawn between Angles and Saxons as between both of them and Jutes. The ornaments of the last-named closely resemble those admired by the Franks; and the cemeteries, for example, at Selzen on the Rhine and in the neighbourhood of Namur yield objects similar to those found in Kent. It is therefore concluded that the Jutes cannot have come to England direct from the neighbourhood of the Danish peninsula, but must have crossed from the Low Countries, and may have included a contingent of Frankish stock.

The grave-goods of Angles and Saxons may be closely

paralleled by those of Scandinavia and North German cemeteries. A common and prominent feature is the 'long brooch,' a massive safety-pin with a history reaching back to about 1000 B.C. or earlier, when some bronze-age genius first bent a long wire pin approximately double and twisted the head about into a catch by which the point could be caught. The brooch affected by Angles and Saxons has forgotten all about the wire from which it was drawn, and is a massive and ugly thing, about six inches in length and vaguely cruciform in shape. Such brooches are common in Scandinavia and reach back there to an earlier date than in England. They differ in form and ornament, according to both locality and date, but the fundamental resemblance is always maintained.

In the fifth century traces of Roman tradition are common in barbarian goods. Thus there are buckles and brooches incised all over with notch-shaped grooves bent about in spirals and the like, a style of decoration which was provincial-Roman in origin. Peculiar brooches of almost identical form have been found, for instance, in Hanover and Bedfordshire, and flat buckles in Gaul, Germany, and London (probably fourth century). This notch-grooving was also applied to other forms of long and round brooches, especially to those saucer-shaped embossed brooches so popular with the West Saxons. Objects of Roman workmanship are rarer in pagan graves in England than would have been expected of such systematic looters, but a few are found. It is even more surprising that so little trace of the work of the Celtic artificers of Britain should survive in tombs of the fifth and sixth centuries; and this is the more curious when it is remembered that the traditions of the pre-Roman Celtic school were actually maintained throughout the periods of Roman occupation and the invasions, and re-emerged in full perfection on the enamelled Anglo-Saxon bronze bowls of the seventh century, and in the wonderful Celtic manuscripts made in that and the succeeding centuries of revival.

By the sixth century the barbarian style was firmly established in the west of Europe. We need not here linger to trace its origins. Suffice it to say that the region inhabited for a time by the Goths north of the