THE EIGHTH CENTURY.
The eighth century was in many ways a memorable one for Europe and
Asia. In the east it was the period of the greatest splendour of the
Caliphs of Baghdad; at Constantinople it saw the rule of the strong,
stern iconoclastic emperors who set the spiritual authority of the
popes at defiance; in Italy it beheld the downfall of Lombard rule, in
Spain the subjection of nine-tenths of the country to the domination of
the Moors.
Even more important than any of these events were the changes which
were going forward in the wide regions subject to the dominion of
the Franks. Here the star of the great Austrasian house, which was
represented by Charles Martel, Pippin and Charlemagne, was steadily
rising. In this century they shouldered aside the last feeble
representative of the Merovingian race, and seated themselves visibly
on that Frankish throne behind which they and their sires had stood
so long as mayors of the palace; and in the end, aspiring yet higher,
at the very end of the century the greatest of the race received the
imperial crown and was hailed as Carolus Augustus by the people of Rome
in the city of the Cæsars.
In this last series of events, as it happened, Englishmen self-exiled
from their country took a prominent part. Willibrord, the apostle
of the Frisians, baptised Pippin and foretold the exaltation of
his house. Wynfrith, otherwise known as Boniface, following in his
footsteps, persuaded or compelled Frisians, Thuringians and Hessians
to embrace that religion which his own forefathers had accepted only
three generations before, and with the religion induced them to accept
also the ecclesiastical discipline of Rome. In his later missionary
operations, gentle or forcible, he was strongly supported by the
Austrasian Pippin, whom he repaid for that support by crowning him
King of the Franks just half-way through the century. Moreover, it was
another Englishman, the Northumbrian Alcuin, head of the great school
for ecclesiastics attached to the church of York, who towards the
close of the century accepted Charlemagne’s invitation to take up his
abode at the Frankish court; became, so to speak, his literary prime
minister, and being full himself of the memories of classical Rome, had
no inconsiderable share in persuading his patron to revive the glories
of the great world-empire, to pass from the condition of a mere King of
the Franks into that of Roman Emperor.
Thus, in this eighth century the Anglo-Saxon race was in various ways
making its mark on Europe; and in our own island its literary history
during this period is not without interest; but politically the century
is one of the most sterile in all our annals. It was an age of little
men, of decaying faith, of slumberous inaction, or else of sanguinary
and chaotic strife. Northumbria especially, during this period, was
falling fast and far from her former high estate. Mercia and Wessex
were engaged in perpetual objectless war, not ennobled by any great
names or chivalrous deeds. Yet possibly even this dreary time was
looked back upon in the next century as a golden age, for it was,
almost till its close, unmarked by foreign invasion. In the year 793
a new and more disastrous chapter was opened by the appearance on the
horizon of the ships of the Vikings.
The unsatisfactory character of this portion of English history is
no doubt partly due to the fact that at an early stage we lose the
guidance of that great writer to whom we are indebted for almost all
that gives freshness and life to the preceding narratives. Bede, the
father of English history, finished his great work in 731, and died
four years later, in 735. Hitherto he has been speaking to us about
the lives of other men; it is now time to listen to what his disciples
have told us concerning his own. Born about the year 672, soon after
the death of Oswy, Bede was taken as a child of seven years old to the
newly founded monastery of Monkwearmouth, and there or in the sister
monastery of Jarrow he passed the rest of his life. He was thus not
only the child of the convent but in a pre-eminent degree the spiritual
heir of Benedict Biscop, the nobly born and cultured Northumbrian,
who had founded these two monasteries, had built in their precincts
two stately stone churches “after the manner of the Romans which he
always loved” (far superior doubtless to the uncouth wooden churches
which satisfied most of the Anglo-Saxon builders), had enriched their
libraries with precious manuscripts and pictures--the trophies of
five journeys to Rome--and had imported artisans from Gaul to teach
the Anglo-Saxon the hitherto unknown mystery of the manufacture of
glass. It is an interesting fact that of both these two foundations of
Benedict Biscop some vestiges still remain, almost unique specimens
of early Anglo-Saxon art. In the porch of the parish church of
Monkwearmouth are some cylindrical “baluster-shafts,” and some slabs
covered with beautiful Anglo-Saxon knot-work. In the parish church
of Jarrow, surrounded as it now is by smoking furnaces and clanging
steam-hammers, there are portions of a wall undoubtedly anterior to the
Norman conquest, and possibly belonging to the very fabric which, as
an inscription tells us, was dedicated in the fifteenth year of king
Egfrid and the fourth year of abbot Ceolfrid (probably 685). Under this
abbot, who ruled Wearmouth as well as Jarrow, Bede spent more than
thirty years of his life, the years of boyhood, youth and early middle
age. With him, according to the pathetic story already related, he
probably sustained as a boy of fourteen the whole burden of chanting
the antiphones, when all the rest of the choir were laid low by the
terrible pestilence. By him doubtless his studies were directed in
later life, when as a studious youth he entered the convent library and
began to pore over the manuscripts, sacred and profane, the splendid
copies of the Vulgate, the treatises of the Fathers, the poems of
Lucretius, Horace, Ovid and Virgil, wherewith the literary enthusiasm
of Benedict had enriched his monastery.
In 716 the abbot Ceolfrid, in the seventy-fifth year of his age,
resigned his office and started on a pilgrimage to Rome. He travelled
slowly, and had only reached the city of Langres in Champagne, when the
weakness of age conquered him, and he lay down and died. His attempted
pilgrimage has, however, a special interest for us, since it has
recently been discovered that one of the manuscripts which he took with
him on his journey as an offering to the Holy Father was none other
than the celebrated Codex Amiatinus, now preserved in the Laurentian
Library, at Florence and, by the admission of all scholars, the chief
authority for the text of Jerome’s great translation of the Scriptures.
Bede survived his old preceptor nearly twenty years, following up with
patient industry the literary career upon which Ceolfrid had started
him. In 731 he completed the great work on _The Ecclesiastical History
of the English Nation_, which has made his name immortal; but besides
this he wrote a vast number of treatises: on _The Interpretation of
Scripture_, on _The Nature of Things_, on _Grammar_ and on _Astronomy_,
and two chronological works entitled _De Temporibus_ and _De Temporum
Ratione_. His books show an especial interest in the computation of
time, the natural result of his study of the great Easter controversy,
the echoes of which must have been still resounding in the days of
his childhood. He was unquestionably the most learned man of his
age, perhaps one might safely say the most learned man of the early
Middle Ages. He was--what even the great Pope Gregory was not--a Greek
scholar; and his Latin style, formed doubtless on a careful study of
the classical authors in the library of the convent, is eminently pure,
and free from turgidity and affectation. His history, in fact, comes
as a delightful surprise to the student who has had to struggle with
the barbarous Latinity of papal epistles, or the astounding grammatical
blunders of Bede’s Frankish counterpart, Gregory of Tours. All this
intellectual attainment on the part of the monk of Jarrow is the more
surprising when we remember how short was the interval which separated
him from actual barbarism. Bede’s father possibly, his grandfather
almost certainly, were rude illiterate pagans; yet we find their near
descendant writing Latin which might almost have passed muster at the
court of Augustus, and by his saintly life and happy death illustrating
the noblest qualities of the Christian character.
Bede’s life ended on May 9, 735. Though the story of his death is one
of the best known in English history, it may hardly be omitted here.
For some months before the end he had suffered much from difficulty
of breathing. The long and weary night watches were gladdened with
psalmody; sometimes with the repetition of his own Anglo-Saxon verses,
one of which may be thus translated:--
Let not man take thought too deeply
Ere his last and lonely journey.
Ponder as he may, he knows not
What of good and what of evil
Shall befall his parting spirit.
He wept with his weeping disciples; then he changed to rejoicing and
gave thanks to God for all, even for his chastisements. “As Ambrose
said, so can I say, too, ‘I have not so lived that I need be ashamed
to abide longer with you; yet neither do I fear to die, for we have a
good Lord’.” In the intervals of sacred song he continued his literary
labours, dictating to a youth by his bedside a translation of the early
chapters of John’s gospel, together with some extracts from a treatise
by Isidore of Seville. This latter was probably one of the Spanish
bishop’s scientific works, for Bede said: “I do not want my lads to
read that which is false, nor that after my death they should spend
fruitless labour on this thing”. The amanuensis said, “There is yet one
chapter of the book which thou art dictating, but I think it too hard
work for thee”; but Bede answered, “No, it is easy; take thy pen and
write speedily”. When the dictation was all-but ended, he distributed
his little treasures, spices, napkins and incense, among his friends in
the monastery. Then said the scribe, “There is yet one more sentence
not written down”. This was dictated. The scribe said, “It is done”.
“Thou hast said truly,” answered Bede. “It is finished. Help me to sit
in yonder place where I have been wont to pray, that sitting there I
may call upon the name of the Father.” And thus, seated on the pavement
of his cell and chanting with laboured breath the _Gloria Patri_, the
father of English history passed away.
In connexion with the name of Bede, allusion must be made to one or
two of his contemporaries who made this period illustrious in the
history of English literature. The herdsman-poet Caedmon has already
been mentioned in connexion with the conference at Whitby. The date of
his death is not recorded, but it probably occurred before the close
of the seventh century. Though recent criticism has thrown some doubt
on his authorship of the poems which were formerly attributed to him,
there can be no doubt that his was a great name in the young literature
of the Anglo-Saxon race, and if Bede, though writing in Latin, may be
considered as standing by the fountain-head of English prose, Caedmon
must be allowed to hold the same place in relation to English poetry.
Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury and first bishop of Sherborne, was
probably considered by his contemporaries the greatest scholar of
his age. Like so many of the great ecclesiastics of this period,
Aldhelm was of noble birth, a kinsman, said some, of King Ine himself.
Trained in the monastic school of Hadrian at Canterbury he imbibed
from his Italian instructors a large amount of classical learning,
but not that purity of taste which caused his younger contemporary
Bede to use his learning with discretion. Whatever may have been his
literary failings, there was a fascination about his personal presence
and an earnestness in his religious character which won for him a
large number of loyal disciples, enabled him to develop the little
community gathered by an Irish saint into the famous monastery of
Malmesbury, and made him the literary apostle of Wessex. According
to his great panegyrist, William of Malmesbury, he combined in his
style the excellencies of various nations. Some fastidious readers
in the twelfth century found his works heavy reading. “Unreasonable
judges are they,” said William, “who do not know that every nation
has its own different style of writing. For the Greeks write in an
involved style, the Latins in a guarded one, the Gauls write with
splendour, the English with pomp.... But if you will carefully read
Aldhelm’s writings you will think him a Greek by the acuteness of his
intellect, a Roman by his brilliancy, and an Englishman by his pomp.”
The “pomposity,” or in other words, the turgidity of his style has been
found quite intolerable by later scholars, but was probably considered
an enviable gift by his countrymen, only just emerged from barbarism.
At any rate even to the pompous and somewhat pedantic churchman much
may be pardoned in consideration of the charming anecdote, related on
the authority of King Alfred, that Aldhelm in his younger days seeing
the “semi-barbarous” people accustomed, as soon as Mass was finished,
to stream away to their houses without listening to the words of the
preacher, took his station on the bridge by which they needs must
pass and there sang merry ballads of his own composition, till he had
gained the ear of the hurrying crowd, after which he changed his
tune, gradually interwove with his song the words of Scripture, began
to speak to them of serious things, and, in short, won back to sanity
and devotion the citizens whom he might vainly have endeavoured to
coerce by the terrors of excommunication. Aldhelm was chosen Bishop of
Sherborne in 705 and died in 709.
The names just mentioned are those of men of a somewhat earlier
generation than Bede, and belong, in fact, rather to the seventh
century than to the eighth. Not so with the last upon our list,
Cynewulf, who was born not many years before the death of Bede and
whose literary activity was displayed in the latter half of the eighth
century. We have in this poet a remarkable instance of a man whose very
existence had been forgotten by his countrymen, and whose name, till
a few years ago, was absent from the most carefully written histories
of our literature. In the year 1857, however, a German professor[110]
discovered Cynewulf’s name in a charade prefixed to a collection of
Anglo-Saxon riddles. The clue thus followed led to other discoveries,
and now by the general consent of scholars many poems formerly
attributed to Caedmon are reclaimed for his fellow-Northumbrian
Cynewulf. The Riddles which are sometimes attributed to this poet
are considered by those who have studied them to show, amid much
misplaced ingenuity, considerable sensitiveness to the beauties of
Nature, and some power of description of the battle and the banquet.
It is interesting to observe how rapidly in these early Middle Ages a
literary fashion spread from country to country over the whole west
of Europe. Almost at the same time when the Northumbrian poet was
composing his curious poetical riddles, Paul the Lombard and Peter of
Pisa were discharging at one another acrostic riddles and enigmatic
charades at the court of Charlemagne.
The most important of all the poems which have been conjecturally
assigned to this author is the beautiful “Vision of the Holy Rood,”
some lines of which are carved upon the Ruthwell Cross still existing
in Dumfriesshire. In this poem the author describes the appearance
to him in a dream of the holy wood which had once been a tree in the
forest, and was then cut down and fashioned into a cross for the
punishment of criminals, but received with awe upon its arms the
sacred body of the Lord of mankind. The Rood speaks:--
Then the young hero, who was mightiest God,
Strong and with steadfast mind,
Up to the cross with steps unfaltering trod
There to redeem mankind.
I trembled, but I durst not fail,
I on my shoulders bare the glorious King.
They pierce my sides with many a darksome nail,
And on us both their cruel curses fling.
The death, the burial and the resurrection of the Lord are related in
a similar strain of reverent compassion for the Almighty Sufferer, and
the Rood finally charges the poet to reveal the vision to all men,
inasmuch as the day is coming when Christ will ask who there is that
for His name will taste of bitter death as He did on the cross.
There is something which must needs move our sympathy when we see
the passion of pitying love with which these simple-hearted sons of
warriors received the story of the suffering Saviour. But, as has been
already said, the tide of religious emotion which had flowed so freely
in the seventh was already beginning to ebb in the eighth century. This
decay of religious life in England, or at any rate in Northumbria, is
vouched for in the memorable letter which Bede wrote shortly before
his death to his friend Egbert, who had just been consecrated bishop
and was shortly to become Archbishop of York. The letter itself is a
model of wise exhortation, boldly but respectfully tendered by an aged
saint to a man, his junior in years but his superior in ecclesiastical
rank. Bede is evidently sure of the goodness of his pupil’s intentions,
but anxious lest he should not have sufficient force of character to
make head against the corruption of the times. Ever since the death of
King Aldfrid, which happened thirty years before (705), the decline
in morals had gone on at a rapid pace. He holds the bishops largely
responsible for this degeneracy. They have insisted on retaining
dioceses larger than any one man could possibly administer. They have,
for filthy lucre, given their consent to all sorts of grants which
should never have been made. They and their clergy have clutched
eagerly at the shepherd’s hire, leaving the flock unfed. “There are,
as we hear, many farms and villages on lonely mountains or in brambly
wildernesses, in which for many years the face of a priest has never
been seen, and neither baptisms nor confirmations are ever performed,
and yet not one of the dwellers in such places is ever allowed to
escape from the payment of church-dues.”
But the greatest scandal of all in Bede’s day seems to have been the
foundation of pseudo-monasteries by noble and wealthy laymen, who
intended anything rather than the leading of a life of religious
austerity. Intent apparently on securing the creature-comforts which
a well-endowed monastery afforded; intent also on escaping under the
pretence of a religious life the duties of military service for their
king and country, these pseudo-abbots would obtain a large grant of
land from the king, and would there rear their unholy convents, in
which, freed from all laws, human or divine, they would live their
lives of licentious ease, waited on by troops of menial monks, who had
generally been themselves expelled from genuine monasteries, by reason
of their irregular lives. Nay, sometimes these impostors would go even
further, and persuade a foolish king to grant them a piece of land
adjoining the first donation, and would there erect a nunnery in which
their wives might, without taking any regular vows, pretend to be the
guides and rulers of maidens vowed to Christ.
These abuses had gone so far that the service of the state was
seriously impaired thereby. The lavish grants of land, both to the
genuine and the sham monasteries, had so impoverished the king that
he had no reserve land, from which to reward the sons of his thegns
or poor soldiers who had served him well in war. Hence these young
men either sped across the seas to countries which held out the hope
of a better career, or, being unable to marry, abandoned themselves
to illicit love and sank down into the lowest depths of sloth and
immorality. Bede’s recommendation was that as there were so many of
these places which were profitable neither to God nor man, with no true
service to God performed in them, and quite useless for the defence
of the realm, they, or at any rate one of them, should be seized and
converted into the seat of a new and much-needed bishopric. Such a
deed, far from being blamable as sacrilege, would deserve the praise
due to a most virtuous action. Subjection of all monasteries to some
external supervision and control; the suppression of as many as
possible of those nests of hypocrisy and vice, the sham monasteries;
and the formation of many new bishoprics--these were the remedial
measures which lay nearest to the heart of Bede. Whether Archbishop
Egbert, a noble and pure-minded man, friend of one king (Ceolwulf) and
brother of another (Eadbert), was able to carry into effect any of
Bede’s reforms it is impossible to say; but the subsequent course of
Anglo-Saxon history seems to point to a negative conclusion. It was,
perhaps, partly in these paradises of sin, in the pseudo-monasteries
of England, that the virility of the nation was sapped and the way
prepared for so many a miserable surrender to the Danish invaders.
In the general decline of morals during the eighth century NORTHUMBRIA
was especially conspicuous, if we may draw any conclusion from
its political history. In the course of that century fifteen
kings swayed the sceptre, and of these, five were deposed, five
murdered, two voluntarily abdicated the throne. It is no wonder that
Northumbria, once so glorious, now became the basest of the kingdoms;
that Charlemagne, on hearing of one of these murders, called the
Northumbrian Angles “a perfidious and perverse nation, worse than the
pagans, murderers of their lords”; or that the northern kingdom was
found utterly unable to cope with the storm of Danish invasion when it
beat upon its shores. It would serve no good purpose to give the names
and dates of accession of all these kings, most of whom are to us mere
names in an arid chronicle, but we may single out for special notice
two who reigned in the first half of the century, Ceolwulf and Eadbert.
Ceolwulf, a descendant of Ida but not of Oswald’s line, in the words
of William of Malmesbury “mounted the trembling summit of the kingdom”
in the year 729. He is memorable for us as the friend of Bede and
the sovereign to whom he showed and dedicated his _Ecclesiastical
History_; and for his liberality to the Church he was looked upon with
much favour by ecclesiastics. But the throne did not cease to tremble
when he ascended it. In 731 he was taken prisoner, no doubt, by some
of his rebellious subjects, was forcibly tonsured and consigned to a
monastery. He was, however, soon restored to his kingdom and reigned,
it would seem, with comparative tranquillity for six years, during
which time he must have received and may have read the _Ecclesiastical
History_. In 737 “thinking it contrary to the gravity of the Christian
character to be immersed in worldly affairs,” he abdicated the kingdom
and became a monk at Lindisfarne. The abdication and the monastic
profession were this time probably voluntary. The rare sanctity which
he displayed in the convent procured for him the honour of burial near
the tomb of St. Cuthbert and miracles were believed to be wrought at
his grave.
The chosen successor of Ceolwulf was his cousin Eadbert (737–58),
a strong and strenuous ruler who once more pushed the Northumbrian
border far into Scotland, adding a part of Ayrshire to his dominions,
and so impressing the surrounding states with the terror of his name
that the Angles of Mercia, the Picts, the Scots and the Britons of
Strathclyde, all remained at peace with him during the greater part
of his reign and delighted to do him honour. By a combination of
circumstances, probably unique in English history, the brother of this
powerful king was Egbert, archbishop of York (734–66), the prelate to
whom Bede addressed the letter of counsel just quoted. Egbert’s tenure
of the see was in itself memorable. He was the first occupant of that
see after Paulinus to hold the rank of archbishop and to receive his
_pallium_ from the pope. He did for the church library at York what
Benedict had done for Jarrow and Wearmouth, obtaining for it large
stores of precious manuscripts and laying the foundation of that great
ecclesiastical school the glory of which culminated in Alcuin. As for
his brother, King Eadbert, his fame spread far and wide, and in him the
glory of Oswald and of Oswy seemed about to be revived. But towards
the close of his reign his fortune changed. In the year 756, when he
had been nineteen years on the throne, he, in alliance with the King
of the Picts, led an army against the strong city of Alclyde, the
modern Dumbarton, which was the capital of the kingdom of Strathclyde.
The allied operations were at first successful. Alcuith surrendered
on August 1, but only nine days later almost the whole of Eadbert’s
army perished in its march through Perthshire. We have no hint of the
cause of the disaster, but we may, if we like, imagine a well-planned
ambuscade in some Perthshire glen, an anticipation by nearly a thousand
years of the battle of Killiecrankie.
Was it depression of spirits at this lamentable change in his
fortunes, or was it merely that weariness of reigning which overcame
so many Anglian kings, that drove Eadbert into the monastery? In the
twenty-first year of his reign, notwithstanding the earnest dissuasion
of his neighbour-kings, some of whom, we are told, offered to add
part of their realms to his if he would continue to reign, Eadbert,
“for the love of God, and desiring to take the heavenly country by
storm, received on his head St. Peter’s tonsure,” and handed over his
kingdom to his son Oswulf. He continued in his religious seclusion for
ten years till his death in 768, and was buried at York in the same
_porticus_ of the church which held his brother, the archbishop, who
had died two years before him. There is some reason to suppose that
after the unfortunate issue of Eadbert’s campaign in 756, the border of
Bernicia being withdrawn a long way to the south, the capital of that
kingdom was transferred from Bamburgh to Corbridge in the valley of
the Tyne, some seventy miles south-west of Bamburgh. Corbridge was the
Corstopitum of the Romans, a station on the northern Watling Street,
and still shows some interesting relics of Roman occupation. About the
same time we find indications that Cataractonium, now Catterick, the
most northerly Roman station within the limits of Yorkshire, became a
royal residence, perhaps as a supplemental palace to that at Eburacum.
Thus we see that even four centuries after the departure of the legions
the charm of Roman civilisation still lingered round the places where
they had dwelt, though these are represented in our own day by villages
whose very names are obscure except to antiquaries.
In the latter half of the century the lawful line of Northumbrian
kings, the sons of Ida, was frequently broken by usurpers of unknown
lineage, chief among whom were a certain Ethelwald Moll and his son
Ethelred. The latter, an _impiissimus rex_, in the language of the
chronicler, reigned from 774 to 779, was expelled in the latter year,
and returned in 790 to wreak vengeance on the princes of the lawful
line. The two sons of his predecessor, when apparently little more than
children, were lured from their sanctuary in the cathedral at York by
promises of safety and protection, and were drowned in Windermere by
order of the usurper. Their cousin Osred, who had for a short time
worn the crown, was similarly enticed from the Isle of Man, captured
and slain. Ethelred sought to strengthen himself by an alliance with
Offa, the powerful King of Mercia, whose daughter Elfleda he married
at Catterick in 792, the year of Osred’s murder. But for all his
precautions he could not escape the usual fate of Northumbrian kings.
In 796 he was slain “by his own people” at Corbridge.
The man who sat upon “the trembling throne” at the end of the century
was a certain ealdorman named Eardulf, who six years before his
accession had had a narrow and, as some men thought, miraculous escape
from death. The tyrant Ethelred, whose anger he had somehow incurred,
ordered him to be executed outside the gates of the monastery of Ripon.
The monks with solemn chants bore his body to the church for burial and
left it for the night at the lych-gate. There soon after midnight some
faithful follower found him still alive and helped him to escape. His
resurrection seems to have been concealed from Ethelred, and, as has
been said, the year 800 found him reigning as king over Northumbria.
* * * * *
From Northumbria we turn to the central kingdom of MERCIA. The eighth
century was the time of the greatest glory of that kingdom, and for
many years it seemed as if from that quarter rather than from Wessex
would come the needed consolidation of England; as if Lichfield, rather
than Winchester or even London, might be the destined capital of the
country. It was chiefly under two kings, Ethelbald and Offa, whose
united reigns occupied eighty years (from 716 to 796), that Mercia
attained this high position. Penda’s grandson, Ceolred, King of Mercia,
died insane in 716, being thus punished, according to St. Boniface,
for the sins which he had committed in defrauding the Church of her
possessions and making the vowed virgins of her convents minister
to his lusts. He was succeeded by a remote relation, Ethelbald,
who was not a lineal descendant of Penda, and whom, jealous of his
great qualities, Ceolred had driven forth from his court. In his
fugitive wanderings Ethelbald had visited more than once the far-famed
sanctuary of Crowland,[111] where amidst the vast fens of Lincoln and
Cambridgeshire, dotted over with desolate forest-islands, the holy
man Guthlac, the Cuthbert of Mercia, had made for himself a hermit’s
retreat, and, with only two servants for his companions in that
infinite loneliness, had practised austerities surpassing those of
the hermits of the Thebaid. Guthlac had the usual experiences of the
fever-stricken solitary, being assailed at night by demons with great
heads, hideous faces, long horse-like teeth and horrible harsh voices,
which croaked forth temptation, in the language not of the Angle but of
the Briton. This sorely buffeted but eminently holy man, who died in
714 at the age of forty-one, and whose life in the wilderness lasted
only fifteen years, had during that term acquired great renown as a
saint. His fame spread far and wide through Mercia, and people of
all ranks flocked to him for healing or for counsel. Among these was
the outcast Ethelbald, to whom Guthlac predicted that he should soon
without strife possess the Mercian throne, a prophecy which was shortly
fulfilled when his cousin and enemy was stricken with madness, while
sitting at the banquet with his _gesiths_ all round him.
Ethelbald swayed the sceptre of Mercia for forty-one years (716–57).
He was evidently a strong and strenuous, if somewhat unscrupulous
ruler. In the early part of his reign he had so completely cowed Wessex
and conquered the other four southern kingdoms, that Bede, writing
the concluding paragraphs of his history in 731, could say: “All
the southern provinces up to the boundary of the Humber, with their
respective kings, are subject to Ethelbald, King of the Mercians”. In
733 we find him capturing Somerton, the chief town of the Sumorsaetas;
in 740 he turns his arms northwards and takes advantage of Eadbert’s
absence on his Pictish campaign to ravage Northumbria. But in his
last years fortune frowned upon him. In 750 Cuthred II., King of
Wessex, apparently an active and valiant man, rose in rebellion, and
in 752 won a great victory over Ethelbald at Burford on the slopes of
the Cotswolds, putting him to ignominious flight. Never apparently
did Mercia recover the supremacy over Wessex which she lost on that
battlefield, and in 757 Ethelbald, who must have been an unpopular
master of his household, perished by a night attack of his own guards.
Notwithstanding his early friendship for St. Guthlac, Ethelbald was
not a pious nor even a moral king. There is preserved a remarkable
letter addressed to him by St. Boniface,[112] in which the apostle
of Germany, while praising the vigour and justice of his government,
rebukes him for his outrageous profligacy, and expresses his fear that
some great national judgment, like the Moorish conquest of Spain,
will fall upon the kings and peoples of England for their luxury and
immorality--a remarkable prophecy, as it must have seemed to later
generations, of the Danish ravages.
After a short interval of unrest the Mercian throne was filled by
Offa, a distant relation of Ethelbald, who reigned for nearly forty
years (757–96), and who in some ways seems to deserve the title of the
greatest of Mercian kings. The everlasting contest with Wessex was
renewed, and Offa’s victory at Bensington in Oxfordshire (779) did
something towards obliterating the disgrace of Burford and probably
gave what is now the county of Oxford to the middle kingdom. From
various causes Offa had now acquired so great a predominance that he
was able to carry into effect a change in the ecclesiastical geography
of England which was little less than a revolution. This was the
creation of a new archbishopric for the Midlands. We may imagine that
he reasoned in this wise: “Northumbria has now its archbishopric at
York. The archbishop of Canterbury is too much overshadowed by the
greatness of my rival of Wessex. Why should not I, the most powerful
king in Britain, have an archbishop of my own here in Mercia?”
This reasoning prevailed. In 787 a synod, ever after known as “the
contentious synod,” was held at Chelsea, and thereat, we are told,
seven out of the twelve dioceses of the southern province were
placed under the archbishop of Lichfield, being rent away from their
dependence on Canterbury. The meaning of this change is obvious. There
were now three great English kingdoms: Northumbria, Wessex and Mercia,
and three corresponding archbishoprics, York, Lichfield and Canterbury.
The Thames was the boundary between the central and southern provinces,
except that Essex with Middlesex was included in the latter. East
Anglia was evidently, in ecclesiastical matters as well as in things
political, subject to Mercia, a fact which accounts for the abrupt
entry in the Chronicle for 792[113] (794): “Offa, King of the
Mercians, ordered the head of Ethelbert, King [of the East Angles],
to be struck off”. The new ecclesiastical arrangement lasted for only
sixteen years. In 803 Offa’s successor Cenwulf voluntarily restored all
the metropolitan rights of the see of Canterbury.
There is one still existing memorial by which the name of Offa yet
survives in the mouths of men. This is Offa’s Dyke (called by the Welsh
_Clawdd Offa_), a great earthen rampart flanked by a ditch, which ran
from the mouth of the Dee to the mouth of the Wye, a distance of some
130 miles, and divided the territories of the Mercians from those of
the Welsh. For a considerable portion of its course this rampart is
still visible, in some places only as a low bank but in others showing
a height of 30 feet to the summit of the mound from the bottom of the
ditch on its western side. It nearly corresponds with the present
boundary between England and Wales, except that it cuts off from
England a portion of Hereford and the whole of Monmouth. In part of its
course it is duplicated by another embankment called Wat’s Dyke, about
three miles to the east of it, and this work also, in the belief of
some antiquaries, belongs to the age of Offa. Though we are distinctly
told, on good authority, that the object of this huge work was military
defence, it is probable that, like the _Vallum_ in Northumberland and
the _Pfahlgraben_ in Germany, it was also a geographical boundary, and
served a useful purpose in time of peace, as marking the limit of two
rival jurisdictions and clearly indicating to which of them pertained
the duty of punishing robbery or murder committed on either side of the
border. This dyke probably commemorates the result of the “Devastation
of the southern Britons wrought by Offa” which is noted by the
_Cambrian Annals_ under the years 778 and 784; and the effect of these
campaigns seems to have been to push back the Welsh frontier from the
Severn to the Wye--no unimportant augmentation of the Mercian kingdom.
The diplomatic correspondence of the period shows us how large loomed
the figure of Offa in the eyes of his contemporaries. Pope Hadrian I.
in writing to Charlemagne calls him absolutely “rex Anglorum,” and
at the same time earnestly expresses his disbelief in a rumour which
had reached his ears that the two kings of the Franks and the Angles
were plotting his own deposition from the papacy, and the appointment
of a Frankish ecclesiastic in his place. This, however, was probably
an idle rumour, set afloat by some of Hadrian’s enemies in order to
work upon the fears of the elderly pontiff. Offa, himself, seems to
have received the legates of the Holy See with reverence and to have
availed himself of their help in regulating the affairs of his new
archbishopric. Moreover, he ordained, probably as a thank-offering for
the papal assistance in this matter, that his kingdom should send a
yearly offering of 365 _mancuses_ (about £130), one for each day in the
year, to the holy see.
There were, however, some difficulties connected with the frequent
English pilgrimages to Rome; too frequent according to Alcuin for the
good repute of the Anglo-Saxon dames who engaged in them; and too
frequent, as the tax collectors of Charles the Great considered, by
reason of the number of merchants who, under the guise of holiness,
transacted a profitable business in the transport of specie and
merchandise. These difficulties were, however, set right by a friendly
letter from Charles to the effect that true pilgrims should receive all
due protection from him, but that merchants masquerading as pilgrims
must pay the regular customs dues. This letter, written in 796, was
accompanied by the present of a belt, a Hunnish sword and two silken
vestments, part of the huge spoil taken in the previous year from the
robber hold of the Avars. It seems to have healed an old estrangement
between the two kings dating from 789, the result of the failure of
matrimonial negotiations between them. Charles had solicited the
hand of Offa’s daughter for his son and namesake, and Offa had been
willing to consent, on condition that Charles’s daughter, Bertha,
should become the bride of his son, Ecgferth. On this point, however,
the negotiations broke down, owing to Charles’s well-known reluctance
to part with any of his daughters. For a short time the relations
between the two kingdoms were sorely strained, and decrees forbidding
the entrance of merchants were issued by either angry sovereign, but
gradually the dispute died down, perhaps partly owing to the mediation
of Alcuin, who was English by birth and loyal to his English friends,
but Frank by adoption and a true subject to Charles. At last, as
we have seen, all wounds were healed by the application of an Avar
baldric, a sword and two mantles.
Offa died in 796, and his son and successor Ecgferth followed him to
the grave in four months. This untimely death of a young and hopeful
prince was, according to monastic writers, a punishment for the many
crimes of his father, especially for the execution of the East Anglian
Ethelbert. Cenwulf, who succeeded to the Mercian throne, was not of
Offa’s line, though like him a collateral descendant of Penda. Of his
reign, which lasted well on into the ninth century (796–821), nothing
need here be said, save that in its third year he invaded Kent, which
had revolted from his rule and set up a rival king named Edbert Pren,
possibly a descendant of the old Kentish line. Edbert was defeated and
taken prisoner by the soldiers of Offa, who, after cutting out his
tongue and chopping off his hands, sent him as a prisoner into Mercia.
With all its vaunted prosperity, the central kingdom does not seem to
have made great progress in civilisation since the days of Penda.
* * * * *
Save for some conflicts with Wales, in which the Cymri appear generally
to have been worsted, the history of the WEST SAXON kingdom in the
eighth century consisted chiefly of that protracted struggle with
Mercia which has been briefly sketched in the foregoing pages. But
the story of the death of Cynewulf in 786 is told in the Chronicle
with such vividness and in such detail that an attempt must be made to
reproduce it here. Cynewulf, a kinsman of the victorious Cuthred, had
expelled that king’s successor, Sigebert, and driven him into exile.
After thirty years of reigning, Cynewulf had to meet the face of the
avenger, Sigebert’s brother, Cyneheard, who is called in the Chronicle
“the Etheling”. Learning that the king, slenderly guarded, was visiting
a woman at Merton, Cyneheard with a band of his _gesiths_ surrounded
the house and rode through the gate of the great courtyard to the
door of the lady’s bower. Surprised and unable to summon his guards,
the king rushed to the door, and in the narrow entrance defended
himself bravely and with success till he caught sight of the Etheling.
Then with a sudden burst of rage he dashed forward, sorely wounded
his enemy, but was himself surrounded and slain by Cyneheard’s men.
Meantime the lady’s cries aroused the king’s thegns who were in the
great hall, ignorant of what had happened, and they hastened to the
scene of tumult, each running as fast as he could. The Etheling, who
had no quarrel with them, offered them quarter and money in return for
peace, but they refused his terms and continued fighting, outnumbered
as they were, till they were all slain but one man, “and he,” says
the chronicler apologetically, “was [only] a Welshman, a hostage and
already sorely wounded”.
Next morning, when the main body of the king’s thegns, whom he had left
behind when he rode to Merton, heard what had happened, they galloped
to the house, headed by the Ealdorman Osric, but found the Etheling
in possession and the gate of the courtyard closed against them. A
parley was called, and Cyneheard offered the new-comers their own terms
in money and land if they would join his party and win for him the
kingdom, adding with uncomprehended irony: “There are kinsmen of yours
now with me in the house, and they, I know, will never leave me”. “No
kinsman,” answered the thegns, “can be dearer to us than our lord, and
we will never follow his murderer.” The offer of quarter which they in
turn made to the Etheling’s _gesiths_ was rejected with equal scorn.
“We care no more for your offer,” said they, “than did your comrades
for ours, and they”--now at last the truth came out--“were all slain
with the king.” Then followed fierce fighting round the gates, till at
last the king’s thegns, who were the stronger party, forced their way
in and slew the Etheling and all the men with him, save one who had
already received many wounds and was godson to Ealdorman Osric by whom
his life was preserved. Once again we note the unshakable fidelity of
the “comrades” to their lord.
On the death of Cynewulf, Beorhtric (786–802), a distant kinsman,
succeeded to the West Saxon throne. Royal genealogies were by this time
in much confusion, and all that the chronicler could say concerning
his descent was that “his right father’s kin goeth unto Cerdic”.
Beorhtric’s reign, in itself unimportant, is chiefly interesting to
us by reason of a certain competitor, for the time an unsuccessful
competitor, for the crown. This was none other than a young man named
Egbert, who, it was said, could trace his line back through a brother
of King Ine to Ceawlin and so to Cerdic. His father, Ealhmund, had
been under-king of Kent, whether under Mercia or Wessex it would be
difficult to say; indeed the whole of Egbert’s early career is veiled
in obscurity. All that seems to be certain is that he had pretensions
of some kind to the kingship of Wessex, which made him obnoxious to
Beorhtric and forced him to seek shelter at the Mercian court. Thence,
however, he was driven in 789 when Beorhtric obtained in marriage the
hand of Offa’s daughter, Eadburh. Ethelred of Northumbria having soon
after married another daughter of the same house, there was evidently
no safe resting-place in England for the fugitive prince, who betook
himself to the court of Charles the Great and there abode for thirteen
years till the death of his rival. In 802, Beorhtric died, and Egbert,
returning to England, seems to have been without opposition raised to
the West Saxon throne.
According to Asser, the biographer of Alfred the Great, the death of
Beorhtric was due to his wife. That daughter of Offa, if Asser may
be trusted, as soon as she had established her influence in the West
Saxon palace, “began in her father’s manner to act tyrannically”. She
undermined to the utmost of her power the king’s best counsellors by
slandering them to her husband, and those whom she could not thus
displace she removed by poison. A draught of poison which she had thus
prepared for a young man greatly beloved by Beorhtric was inadvertently
tasted by the king and caused his death, which of course involved
Eadburh’s downfall. Carrying with her great hoards of treasure, she
sought the Frankish court where her husband’s rival, Egbert, had so
lately been sheltered. As she stood in the hall of audience and offered
rich presents to the emperor, Charles said to her, perhaps in jest:
“Choose, Eadburh, which you will have, me or my son who stands here
with me under the dais”. She thoughtlessly answered: “If I may really
have my choice, I choose your son, inasmuch as he is the younger of the
two”. Whereupon Charles answered with a smile: “If you had chosen me,
you should have had my son, but now since you have chosen him you shall
have neither”. An improbable story truly, but one which shows the sort
of legend which already ere the end of the ninth century was springing
up around the name of Charlemagne. Eadburh, however, received from
the emperor the gift of a great abbey which she ruled for some time.
Then, being convicted of unchastity, she was expelled from the convent,
wandered over Europe, begging her daily bread, and died at last in
misery at Pavia. Such was the end of the daughter of the mighty Offa.
So detestable, says Asser, was the memory of Eadburh’s crimes that
for generations the West Saxons would not allow the wife of one of
their kings to be called queen, but would only allow her the title of
consort.