into the West Saxon dialect. One famous passage deserves quotation: "So seems the life of man, O King, as a sparrow's flight through the hall when you are sitting at meat in winter-tide, with the warm fire lighted on the hearth, but the icy rain without. The sparrow flies in at one door and tarries for a moment in the light and heat of the hearth fire, and then flying forth from the other vanishes into wintry darkness whence it came. So tarries for a moment the life of man in our sight, but what is before it, what after it, we know not. If this new teaching tells us aught certainly of these, let us follow it." This is spoken by a counsellor of a heathen king as he listens to one of the monkish missionaries. Bede is in fact mainly a repository of stories of the conversion of Britain to Christianity and of the early history of the church upon the island.

Learning in the south centered about the court of Alfred the GREAT (849–901), who, after his wars with the Danes, made of his little kingdom of Wessex a center of enlightenment, a point of light in the darkness of the Dark Ages. He succeeded in establishing out of the West Saxon dialect something like a national language through which he brought to his people translations of various works from the Latin. Perhaps the most representative of these works which were fostered by the great king was a translation of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae by the last of the pagan philosophers, a fragment of moral reflection composed while the author was a prisoner and awaiting the summons of death. This little book, describing what should be one's personal conduct in the midst of affliction, had a considerable vogue among Christian teachers and received an especial recommendation from the clergy. It was peculiarly suited to

the little kingdom just now struggling against the darkness of barbarism. In the hope of bringing spiritual comfort to those about him, Alfred translated Pope Gregory's Curia Pastoralis, writing a preface of his own, the only bit of writing known to have come from the hand of the king. This remained as a kind of spiritual guide for his clergy, then in great need of comfort after the exhaustion of the Danish wars. The last of the works of Alfred's reign was the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a history, carried on by the monks in the various monasteries, and in part fostered by Alfred himself, recounting in the native dialect Anglo-Saxon history from the Roman conquest until after the Norman invasion.

King Alfred's work as a civilizing influence did not, however, stop with these few literary efforts. He was an organizer of schools and a patron of learning, doing whatever was in his power to create a genuine cultural life. Unfortunately for the progress of enlightenment, the wars of the following centuries pretty well obliterated his noble endeavor to bring to his land the fruits of knowledge.

The prose of the period, which was not extensive, ministered principally to the obvious spiritual needs of a people just emerging from the turmoil of the Danish wars. Its chief interest to us is historical as revealing the aspirations toward a fuller life on the part of the few men who preserved learning for the next generations. In this civilizing work the Church proved herself a chief influence.

T

CHAPTER II

THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD

ENGLAND BETWEEN THE CONQUEST AND 1300

HE two centuries after the Norman Conquest may

be called the Period of Confusion. During this time the Norman lords, through the establishment of the feudal system and the division of the land among themselves, definitely gained possession of the country. The conquered Saxons either retreated to outlying strongholds and, like Hereward the Wake, held their conquerors at bay; or submitted and gradually gained wealth and

power.

During this period too the Catholic Church won its hold upon the life of the western world. The Crusades arose, profoundly affecting the social life and the intellectual horizons of men. Chivalry, under the influence of feudalism and the Church, flourished as the ideal code of morals and etiquette for the knight, who became the dominant figure in the society of the period. Finally, the great universities, Oxford and Cambridge, came into existence in the thirteenth century and became centers of the learning of the age.1

By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the opposing elements of English society had begun to fuse, though

1 A brief study of each of these four medieval institutions-feudalism, the Church, Chivalry, and the universities-will be found in the Appendix. Though not strictly a part of literary history, they are yet important if the student would comprehend the social background of the Middle Ages.

neither a national language nor a national literature existed for more than a century and a half after this time. Chaucer's preponderant influence as a great poet at the English court finally made the West Midland dialect the accepted language of conqueror and conquered alike.

EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE

During the long night after the Conquest, before a common language marked the fusion of discordant elements into a national life, whatever literature there was remained chiefly a foreign product. The new kings of England and their followers were more French than English in temper and tongue, for they held vast estates in the country they had been used to call home, and their intellectual interests all lay there. The faint spirit of learning which did last through this trying period was preserved from the ignorance and the violence of the times by the pious monks in the monasteries, who spent their lives copying and illuminating manuscripts with loving care. In this way the writings of the Fathers of the Church were saved from destruction, saints' legends and moral homilies were compiled, and a record of events was laboriously kept as news filtered into the monasteries along the highways of travel. These stations on the long route through the country became the hospices or asylums where the weary traveler might find rest and refreshment and a change of horses for his further journey. Here, too, occurred an exchange of news concerning the world at large, and a record was made of events both present and of the past from which later historians must draw for a knowledge of the time. These works were at first

edited in the monkish Latin which served the writers as their sole medium of expression. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, however, was continued in a modified vernacular until 1154, when the turbulence of Stephen's reign silenced even this modest record in the native tongue.

One of the services these monkish scholars performed was the preservation of the semi-mythical legends of the early history of Britain. Particularly is this true of the large mass of Arthurian material that had been stored up across the borders of Wales. One Welshman, GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH, is notable for his treatment of King Arthur as a great conqueror, the Historia Britonum including the Life and Prophecies of Merlin, “A chronicle of British Kings, from Brut to Uther's rayne," as the poet Spenser describes it. It also contains the legends of King Lear, of Cymbeline, and that of "Sabrina fair," employed by Milton in Comus. Robert of Gloucester and Matthew Paris were other chroniclers of the century, the latter a keen critic of events and champion of the rights of the people.

Very nearly the first work written in another language than the Latin of the monasteries was the Brut of a certain monk who called himself LAYAMON. It is composed in rude alliterative verses in an early English, a transitional form between Anglo-Saxon and later forms of the language. In more than thirty thousand lines hardly fifty Norman words are to be found. It purports to be a history of England from the fall of Troy to the year 689; a certain Brutus, grandson of Aeneas, had been banished from Italy and made his way to England, where he became the mythical founder of New Troy, or London. King Arthur is depicted as the great fairy king organizing the Round Table. Thus just before the first as