years of which we have here written, and it is fitting to briefly touch the points in Mercian history which belong to the interests of literature. We have seen that sometime after Penda's death Mercia became Christian. Wulfhere, his son-657-675, in the very years, that is, that vernacular literature began so bravely in Northumbria-founded a number of abbeys and monasteries. Medeshamstede-in the fen-country then subject to Mercia― may claim him as one of its patrons, but the whole story is mixed up with legend and forgery. Fable gathers also round other foundations attributed to him; but the growth of fable proves, at least, that centres of learning now arose in the heathen realm. Under Æthelred, who followed Wulfhere, the Mercian Church was organised. It ceased to have any Celtic elements. The King was a friend of Theodore and Wilfrid, and monasteries, in large numbers, were founded and endowed. With Ethelbald (716-757) his third successor, we touch literature more closely. Among the monasteries to which he was generous was that of Evesham, and Evesham was founded by Ecgwin, Bishop of Worcester. It is said, on the faith of two later biographies, that Ecgwin narrated his own life, and he has been called our first autobiographer, but, though it is right to record this, the thing is exceedingly questionable. Æthelbald was certainly mixed up with scholars, for Tatwine, Nothelm, and Cuthbert, all Archbishops of Canterbury and of Theodore's school, were connected with Mercia and perhaps appointed by the influence of the King. Moreover, Boniface and he were upon friendly terms, even though Æthelbald's life was morally disgraceful. The council at Clovesho, held in 747, was not only directed against the immoralities of the monasteries which seem to have lost in luxury all care for learning, but was also probably intended as a silent reproach to the King. We may also connect with his reign the story of Guthlac. The Life of Guthlac, written by Felix between the years 747 and 749, was contemporary with Æthelbald. We may, therefore, at least tend to accept the story told in it that when Æthelbald was young and an exile he was the friend and visited the hermitage of Guthlac, deep in the fen-country, on the site of which in later years rose the great Abbey of Crowland. This Life, however, is not a Mercian but an East Anglian book. It is dedicated by its writer, Felix, to Alfwold of East Anglia, and continues, after Baeda, the literature of biography among the English. The book lived, and was the cause of other literature. It was translated from Latin into Anglo-Saxon in the tenth or eleventh century. It formed the foundation of the second part of a poem attributed to Cynewulf, which, if it be by him, supplies us with the sole date which belongs to the life of that mysterious poet. The story brings into vivid light not only the scenery of the fencountry, but the character of the young atheling of the time when the influence of Christianity was still fresh, and acted on a national type lately emerged from heathendom.' The book represents Guthlac in contact with a great number of events important and unimportant, serious and ludicrous; and all of these, met in different ways by the saint, open out his pleasant character. Various persons are, moreover, brought into touch with him, and though the sketches of these persons are slight, they are clear-cut. Were it only for these sketches of our folk in the eighth century, the book ought to be more read than it is. It illustrates also the tender and colour-full 1 I give here the passage which describes the youth of Guthlac, his sudden conversion, and his resolve to go into hermitage, and the description of his voyage. I have translated it from the Anglo-Saxon version that the English colour may be felt. The historical value of the extract as a picture of the character of a young Englishman is great, but its worth as a piece of good literature is the main reason for which I quote it. The original Latin of the eighth century is often florid, pompous, and rhetorical, but the conception and arrangement of the life is good. It represents work done more in the manner of Ealdhelm than of Baeda. The Anglo-Saxon rendering is probably of the tenth or eleventh century. It is agreeably written, with a natural and happy turn of phrase, and represents very well the kind of work which a simplehearted monk of the new learning that started from Ælfred was capable of producing. The extracts then have the advantage of displaying something of the literary quality of two different centuries separated by perhaps two hundred years. But the events of the life described are of the eighth century. "When his strength waxed and he grew to manhood, he minded him of the strong deeds of the heroes and men of yore. Then, as though he had woke from sleep, his mood was changed, and he got together a mickle troop and host of his comrades and himself took to weapons. Then he wreaked his grudges on his foes and burnt up their Burh, and ravaged their towns, and far and wide he made a manifold slaughter, and slew and took from men their goods. ... For nine winters he carried on these raids, but it happened one night, on coming back from an outfaring, as he rested his weary limbs, that he thought over many things in his mind, and he was suddenly moved with the awe of God and his heart was filled within with ghostly love; and when he awoke, he thought on the old kings that were of yore who, through mindfulness of wretched death and the sore outgoing of a sinful life, forsook the world, and he saw of a sudden vanish away all the great wealth they had, and his own life hasten and hurry to an end, and he vowed to God that he would be his servant, and aris ing when it was day signed himself with the sign of Christ's rood." So he joined the monastery of Hrypadun, but after two years longed for the wilderness and a hermitage, and departing, heard of a vast desolation and was minded to dwell therein. The description of it is a clear picture of the watery places where Crowland grew into its later splendour. There is in Britain a fen of unmeasured mickleness that begins from the river Granta, not far from the city which is called Grantaceaster. There stretch out unmeasured marshes, now a swart waterpool, now foul running streams, and eke many islands and reeds, and hillocks, and thickets, and with manifold windings, wide and long, it spreads out up to the northern sea." 66 66 imagination with regard to the supernatural, of which Baeda is so full. "At Guthlac's birth" and I quote from the Anglo-Saxon version of the Latin men saw a hand of the fairest red hue coming out of the heavens, and it held a golden rood, and showed itself clear to many men, and bent forwards towards the door of the house wherein the child was born." Again, when the evil spirits have borne Guthlac to the very doors of hell and would fain push him in, the Apostle Bartholomew comes down to help him: "Then suddenly came down the indweller of heaven, the holy Apostle, with heavenly brightness and glory shining, amidst the dim darkness of swart hell; and the accursed ghosts could not abide there for the fairness of the holy Comer, and hid themselves in the darkness. But when Guthlac saw his faithful friend, he was very blithe with ghostly bliss and heavenly delight." Then at the command of the Apostle, the devils bear Guthlac back to his hermitage with gentleness. "So they brought him back with all mildness, and on their wings they bore him that he could not have been borne more pleasantly in a ship. Now, when they came in the midst of the highness of the lift, there came towards him a heap of holy spirits, and they all sang and said, 'Ibunt de virtute in virtutem,' et reliqua-that is, in English-Holy men shall go from strength to strength.' When it began to dawn they set him down, and as he was about to fulfil his morning-prayer-tide to God, he saw two of the cursed spirits weeping and wailing greatly, and when he asked why, they answered, 'We two weep because our power is all broken through thee'. . . and they went off as smoke before his face." Picture after picture; there is a savour of Dante in it! The love of animals also appears, that frequent virtue of the mediæval saint, out of which has grown so much charming literature. The ravens of the fen are at his command, and the fishes and the wild beasts. When Wilfrith, his friend, was talking to him of the spiritual life, two swallows came suddenly flying in, and behold they upraised their song rejoicingly, and after that, perched without fear on the shoulders of the holy man, and again uplifted their song and often lit on his breast and arms and knees. Now when Wilfrith, long wondering, beheld the birds, he asked why the fowls of the wild waste sat on him and were so tame. And Guthlac said, "Hast thou never learnt, brother Wilfrith, in holy writ, that the wild deer and the wild birds were the nearer to him who hath led his life after the will of God?" In the place where Guthlac had lived, Crowland drew the This is patronage of Æthelbald and after him of Offa, who, beginning his reign (757) over Mercia in some obscurity, had become, before his death in 796, the greatest king that England had as yet seen; but whose power went out, after his death, like a dying candle. We might imagine that this great prince whose charters are "more numerous than those of any other king of his age," who was the friend of learned persons like Alcuin, who had relations of close correspondence with the court of Charles at a time when Charles was patronising and advancing learning, would have created around him some kind of literature. so natural a conjecture that some persons have either asserted or suggested it. Professor Earle conjectures that Hygberht, the sole Archbishop of Lichfield, whom Offa set up as a rival of Canterbury, was the writer of the existing poem of Beowulf. Others seem to suggest that Cynewulf was a Mercian or of a Mercian school. But there is no evidence of any literary school, capable of producing poems like Beowulf and the Elene, in the court or kingdom of Offa. The fabulous tales, however, which had collected round the ancient hero of the continental England, round Offa the son of Wermund — tales which were part of a legend common to England and Scandinavia - were mixed up with Offa of Mercia. They make him thus one of the subjects of literature, but they obscure all his early history. His life was a life of wars and eager policy. His patronage of the Church was for his own ends, and St. Albans was founded by him as a make-weight against an immoral life which had, by the evil example it gave, a bad effect on the monasteries and therefore upon their learning. At his death Mercia lost all power, and in 828 it was swallowed up by Ecgberht. Not many years after Ecgberht's death, the whole of Mercia was fought over by the heathen. All the monasteries perished; learning and the materials of learning were for the most part destroyed. Middle as well as Southern England was drowned in ignorance.1 Yet we must not forget that the popular lays, the ballads, and the war-songs still continued. The wandering minstrel still went from hamlet to hamlet; the Scôp still made his verses in the camp, and the legend which tells how Ælfred sang to the harp in the tents of his foes, tells us that when the Muse has been driven from the seats of learning, she finds a shelter among the people. 1 The western part of Mercia was not, however, harried so mercilessly as the rest of it. There seems to have lingered there some of the means for building up, when peace came, a new home for learning. In 873 Werfrith was made Bishop of Wor ester, and he seems to have been able to establish a school in that city, and to develop it after the peace of Wedmore. But this, and the help he gave to Ælfred, does not belong to the present history. CHAPTER XIV LITERATURE IN NORTHUMBRIA Ir was in Northumbria that English literature, as distinguished from Latin literature in England, arose, and it reached in that northern land a remarkable and varied development. It was also in the same region that Latin learning and literature, written by English folk, attained its highest excellence, The English literature began with Caedmon of Whitby, and he created, as we hear from Baeda, a school of poetry, and this is one of the earliest vernacular literatures of which we know in modern Europe. The Latin literature is fully represented by the work of Baeda, and his work was the greatest done in Europe at the time, and may be said to be the foundation or impulse of all mediæval learning. Thus in the seventh century, in our own land, the dance of the modern Muses began. Those of them who recited their thoughts in the Latin tongue -the Muse of History and of divine Philosophy - ceased in England after a brief period their noble speech, but found their voice afresh, when many centuries had passed, in our native tongue. Those who sang in English, the Muses of Poetry of epic, tragic and lyric strains, sang for too short a time in the ears of all, then also ceased or seemed to cease in England. Their song was still heard, but only on the lips of warriors and wandering bards, in camp and village. Lowlier and lowlier was its sound, but its hour came at last. Again the Muses took up the English lyre for all the world to hear, and their first strains were coincident with the time of the Great Charter. As the people grew in freedom and in power so swelled the Muses' voice, ever louder and sweeter and in more varied music, from century to century, until the present hour. - It is the beginning of this poetic life in our own England which we have now to consider. Its early life in Northumbria lasted not much more than a century, from about 670 to |