CHAPTER XXI NORTHUMBRIAN LITERATURE OTHER THAN ENGLISH From 670 to the death of Baeda —735 THE death of Oswiu and the accession of Ecgfrith in 670 are probably coincident with the first verses by which Caedmon began the religious poetry of England and founded the school of whose writings I have now given an account. About the same date, or a little before it, the Latin learning and literature of Northumbria began, and it flourished till the coming of the Danes. The history of this is, as far as the death of Baeda, the subject of this chapter. English poetry has two distinct periods, the first of which belongs to the time of the glory of Northumbria, and the second to the time of its anarchy and decay. The first is bound up with the school of Caedmon, and may be said to close with the death of Baeda. The second, hereafter to be treated, may be collected round the name of Cynewulf. One is unconscious of sorrow and regret; the other is deeply conscious of both. There was then a division of sentiment, answering partly to a change in the fortunes of the kingdom, which breaks into two branches English Verse in Northumbria. There is no such break in the history of Latin literature in the North. It was only slowly affected by the internal troubles of the kingdom. Pursued in its monastic centres, apart from the strife of kings and pretenders, by men whom all sides honoured, concentrated finally in the ecclesiastical and political capital of the North where it was safest from disturbance and most easily patronised, it lived through all the anarchy, and may even have continued a miserable existence after the Danes had taken and settled in York. York was its last refuge. It may be said to have begun in the reign of Ecgfrith, when Wilfrid obtained possession of the See of York, when he built new churches at Ripon and Hexham and founded their libraries, and when Benedict Biscop set up his monastery of Wearmouth in 674. Benedict, however, far more than Wilfrid, was the real founder of the Latin school; the true source of all that Northumbrian learning which, passing through Baeda and the scholars of York, restored to life, by English voices, the letters and sciences of Europe. He had brought to Northumbria the knowledge and arts he had acquired at Rome, and the methods of teaching he had practised with Theodore at Canterbury. In a few years, as we have already seen, he had collected two brother libraries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, founded one great school in these monasteries, and started science and literature on the path over which his scholar Baeda led them to a greater glory. In a long life he was never inactive in the cause of learning and beauty. Architecture, painting, music, glassmaking, embroidery were part of his religion. When ill and sleepless, he lessened the weariness of the night and soothed his pain by the reading of the Scriptures, and chiefly of the patience of Job. He was half palsied, and no wonder, for he had made five times that terrible journey to Rome, the woes of which seemed, however, as nothing to the eagerness of this great collector. No man did more for the materials of Northumbrian learning, and it is not uninteresting to contrast this impassioned traveller with his scholar Baeda, who never left, save for a visit or two to York, the shelter of his monastery. When Benedict Biscop died in 690, Aldfrith was reigning, and this king's West Saxon and Irish learning gave a fresh impulse to Northumbrian culture.1 He had a ready inspirer and helper in Abbot Ceolfrid, Biscop's successor at Wearmouth and Jarrow. The school of Ceolfrid became famous. The Pope asked his advice on ecclesiastical questions. Naiton, King of the Picts, desired a letter from him concerning the Roman tonsure and time of celebrating Easter, and this tractate, which Baeda gives in full, places him with justice among clear and vigorous writers. Baeda himself wrote his life, and a delightful piece of literature it is. There is no better picture of the daily life of an English monastery. Both he and King Aldfrith are further connected by their literary relation to the book in which Adamnan of Iona gave 1 Aldfrith, we are told by Baeda in the Life of Cuthbert, "in insulis Scotorum ob studium literarum exulabat" "in regionibus Scotorum lectioni operam dabat"—" "ipse ob amorem sapientiae spontaneum passus exilium." Malmesbury (26) gives the same testimony, and Eddius calls him rex sapientissimus. Wilfrid trained him also, and he was a fellow-pupil of Ealdhelm. an account of Arculf's journey to the Holy Land, the first of those books which in this country awakened the desire of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Arculf, shipwrecked on the west coast, found his way to Iona, and dictated to Adamnan his voyage and adventures. Adamnan, who had been the tutor of Aldfrith, brought him the book, sure of his interest and patronage. The King received it eagerly, sent it on to Ceolfrid, had many copies made of it, and dispersed them about Northumbria. The book is still preserved, and became popular in Europe through Baeda's abridgment of it, and through the extracts he made from it in the Ecclesiastical History. Ceolfrid also saw Adamnan and received him at Wearmouth on his second visit to Northumbria. It may be that Adamnan mingled with the discussion which then converted him to the observance of the Roman Easter some account of the Life of St. Columba which he compiled at Iona in the last decade of the seventh century. Baeda, however, does not seem to have been acquainted with this important book. Some time later, after 709, Wilfrid's biography was written by his well-tried friend and companion, Eddius Stephanus. This book, composed in an excellent style, is of the greatest help to the history of the Northumbrian Church in the seventh century. It is worthy also of other remembrance, because it is the first biography written in England1— the first of a class of literature in which, though rarely, we have excelled. Another name of this time, linked to Hild, whose scholar he was; to Wilfrid, for he became Bishop of Hexham and of York; to Theodore, under whom he studied; and to Baeda, whom he ordained; is John of Beverley, whom we remember best from the fair minster which in after ages bore his name. He loved magnificence when he played the great bishop's part, but he loved solitude even more. The man of the world was frequently merged in the anchorite. He had a solitary oratory on the top of the Earn's-Howe, a hill on the Tyne, to which he often retired from Hexham. It is curious to meet this reversion to the Celtic feeling of his youth, and we owe to it the founding of Beverley. In a region, as desolate then as it is now thickly populated, John chose in the midst of the woods and waters of Underwood a solitary meadow with a tiny church, round which the river Hull, delaying its speed, had been dammed by the beavers who afterwards gave the spot its name. 1 Another biography, and written about the same time, is the Life of St. Cuthbert by a nameless writer, which was done and kept at Lindisfarne, and which Baeda used. Here, as he had done at Hexham and York, he kept up a school of learning, to which a host of persons, both lay and clerical, resorted.1 One other name is sufficiently bound up with literature to be mentioned here Acca, Wilfrid's closest friend, the most devoted supporter of his plans. Wilfrid nominated him to be Abbot of Hexham just before his death. In the same year, 709, he became bishop, and he ruled the See for twentythree years. He was as fond of architecture as of music. He finished the three churches near Hexham which Wilfrid had begun. Baeda praises his skill in ecclesiastical music. He was another of the great collectors of books; the library at Hexham was famous. If he did not write himself, he caused others to write. It was he who urged Eddius to compose the Life of Wilfrid. He pressed Baeda to begin a commentary on St. Luke; and Baeda addressed to him his commentary on St. Mark, a poem on the Last Day, and perhaps the Hexameron. These are the chief names among a number of persons who spread Latin learning and literature at this early time over Northumbria. That learning, however, if it were to attain consistence and directive power, needed to be gathered together and generalised by a man of some genius. In Baeda of Jarrow the man was found. He made in himself a reservoir into which all the isolated streams of learning flowed. He added to them waters of his own which he had drawn from all the then known sources of learning in the past, and he distributed in channels hewn by himself all that he had collected, not only over England but, after his death, over Europe. And this was done just in time. The knowledge Baeda left behind him was concentrated in the mind of Alcuin, and reached the court and kingdom of Charles the Great exactly at the right moment - when Charles was extending his power far and wide, when he desired to unite his various tribes and peoples by an intellectual as well as a spiritual force. It was a great work, but the means whereby it was done had been stored up in the studious years which Baeda had filled at Jarrow with unremitting work. The chief information which we have of his life is given by himself at the end of the Ecclesiastical History. "Baeda, a servant of God and priest of the monastery of the blessed apostles, Peter and Paul, which is at Wearmouth and Jarrow, who, being born in the lands of the same monastery, was, at seven years old, handed over to be educated by the most reverend Abbat Bene 1 Baeda's tale of one of John's miracles gives us a vivid picture of a part of the life of these schools attached to a monastery. -Book v. c. vi. 2 dict, and afterwards by Ceolfrid; and, passing all the rest of my life in that monastery, wholly gave myself to the study of Scripture, and to the observance of the regular discipline and of daily chanting in the church, and had always great delight in learning and teaching and writing. When I was nineteen years old, I received deacon's orders, and when I was thirty those of the priesthood, and both were conferred on me by Bishop John and by order of Abbat Ceolfrid. From which time till I was fifty-nine years of age, I made it my business, for the use of me and mine, to gather together out of the writings of the venerable Fathers, and to interpret, according to their sense, these following pieces:" and here follows a list 1 I quote here the admirable summary of the means of education which fell to the lot of Baeda in Bishop Stubbs' article in the Dict. Eccles. Biography: "Under the liberal and enlightened administration of Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrith, Bede enjoyed advantages which could not perhaps have been found anywhere else in Europe at that time; perfect access to all the existing sources of learning in the West. Nowhere else could he acquire at once the Irish, the Roman, the Gallican, and the Canterbury learning; the accumulated stores of books which Benedict had bought at Rome and Vienne; or the disciplinary instruction drawn from the monasteries of the Continent as well as from the Irish missionaries. Amongst his friends and instructors were Trumbert, the disciple of St. Chad, and Sigfrid, the fellow-pupil of St. Cuthbert under Boisil and Eata; from these he drew the Irish knowledge of Scripture and discipline. Acca, Bishop of Hexham and pupil of St. Wilfrid, furnished him with the special lore of the Roman school, martyrological and other; his monastic learning, strictly Benedictine, came through Benedict Biscop, through Lerins and the many continental monasteries his master had visited; and from Canterbury, with which he was in friendly correspondence, he probably obtained instruction in Greek, in the study of the Scriptures, and other more refined learning. His own monastery was a place of rest and welcome for all learned strangers, such as Abbot Adamnan." I must mention a second time, in this connection, the literary friends whom he quotes as his authorities at the beginning of the Ecclesiastical History. Albinus, Hadrian's pupil; Nothhelm, who worked for him at Rome; Daniel of Winchester, and Forthhere of Malmesbury, who brought to him, I suppose, the works of Ealdhelm, which had their own influence on Northumbrian literature; Esi from East Anglia; Cynibert from Lindsey; the monks of many monasteries, and chiefly those of Lastingham who gave him the traditions of Cedda and Ceadda-poured each their knowledge into Baeda's ear. Kings gave him their friendship-Aldfrith and Ceolwulf to whom he dedicates his history. He had friends and correspondents in various parts of Europe, and a host of visitors going and coming for many years filled the cell at Jarrow with the experience of many men and many lands. 2 It is said that he declined to be made Abbot of Wearmouth on the ground that the care of a great house distracted the mind from the pursuits of learning. 8 The list of works seems to be "with some important exceptions, in the reverse order of their composition." The first written are probably the Ars Metrica, the De Natura rerum, and the De Temporibus, and their proper date is from 700-703. These were followed by the De Sex ætatibus saeculi — an admirable primer of the history of the world-written to be read to Wilfrid about the year 707. The Commentaries on almost all the Books of the Old and New Testaments are after 709; for they are dedicated to Acca, Bishop of Hexham, who succeeded Wilfrid in that year. They range over many years. The Lives of Cuthbert and of the Abbats of Wearmouth and Jarrow were probably written between 716 and 720. The De Temporum ratione is dated |