MANNERS OF THE SAXONS.
[Illustration: ANCIENT SAXONS.]
1. I am now going to tell you what sort of people the Saxons were,
and how they lived after they were quite settled in England; for you
ought to know all about them, as they were our own ancestors, and
made a great many of our laws; and their language was English too,
although it has so much altered that you would hardly know it for the
same.
2. The Saxons were not Christians when they first came here; but
their religion was different from that of both the Druids and heathen
Romans; for they worshipped great images of stone or wood, that they
made themselves, and called gods; and from the names of their gods
and goddesses, our names of the days of the week are derived.
3. At length, the bishop of Rome, who was called the Pope, sent some
good men to persuade the Saxons to leave off praying to wooden idols,
and to worship the true God.
4. These missionaries first went to Ethelbert, king of Kent, who
was then Bretwalda, and reasoned with him, so that he saw how wrong
he had been, and not only became a Christian himself, but let the
missionaries go and preach among the people, who were baptized in
great numbers, and taught to believe in God and Jesus Christ.
5. The missionaries were all priests or monks; and some of them lived
together in great houses called monasteries, which they built upon
lands given them by the kings and nobles, on which they also raised
corn, and fed sheep and cattle.
6. They had brought from Rome the knowledge of many useful arts,
which they taught to the people, who thus learned to be smiths and
carpenters, and to make a variety of things out of metal, wood and
leather, which the Saxons did not know how to make before.
7. Then the priests could read and write, which was more than the
nobles, or even the kings could do; and they used to write books, and
ornament the pages with beautiful borders, and miniature paintings;
and the books, thus adorned, are called illuminated manuscripts.
8. Still the Saxons, or English, as I shall henceforth call them,
were very rough and ignorant as compared with the Romans.
9. Their churches and houses, and even the palaces of the kings, were
rude wooden buildings, and the cottages of the poor people were no
better than the huts of the ancient Britons.
10. The common people were almost all employed in cultivating the
land, and lived in villages on the different estates to which they
belonged; for the Saxon landlords were not only the owners of the
land, but of the people also; who were not at liberty, as they are
now, to go where they pleased; neither could they buy land for
themselves, nor have any property but what their lords chose. I will
tell you how it was.
11. The Saxon lords had divided all the land amongst themselves, and
had brought from their own countries thousands of ceorls, or poor
people, dependent on them, to be their labourers.
12. Each family of ceorls was allowed to have a cottage, with a few
acres of land, and to let their cattle or sheep graze on the commons,
for which, instead of paying rent, they worked a certain number of
days in each year for their lord, and, besides, gave him a stated
portion of those things their little farms produced; so that whenever
they killed a pig, they carried some of it to the great house; and
the same with their fowls, eggs, honey, milk and butter; and thus the
chief’s family was well supplied with provisions by his tenants, some
of whom took care of his sheep and herds, cultivated his fields, and
got in his harvests.
13. Then there were always some among them who had learned useful
trades, and thus they did all the kinds of work their masters wanted.
14. Yet, with all this, the poor ceorls generally had enough for
themselves, and some to spare, which they sold at the markets, and
thus were able to save a little money.
15. Their cottages were round huts, made of the rough branches of
trees, coated with clay, and thatched with straw. They had neither
windows nor chimneys; but a hole was made in the roof to let out the
smoke from the wood fire, kindled on a hearth in the middle of the
room; and they used to bake their barley-cakes, which served them for
bread, on these hearths, without any oven.
16. They made a coarse kind of cloth for clothing from the wool of
their sheep, a part of which was also given to their lord, and was
used to clothe the servants of his household, for the rich people got
a finer cloth for themselves, which was brought from other countries.
17. Great men usually wore white cloth tunics that reached to the
knee, with broad coloured borders, and belts round the waist. They
had short cloaks, linen drawers and black leather shoes, with
coloured bands crossed on their legs, instead of stockings. The
common people wore tunics of coarse dark cloth, and shoes, but no
covering on the legs.
18. But I must tell you something more about these country folks,
who, at the time, formed the great mass of the English population.
They were, strictly speaking, in bondage, for they could not leave
the place where they were born, nor the master they belonged to,
unless he gave them their freedom; they were obliged to serve as
soldiers in war time, and when the land was transferred to a new
lord, the people were transferred with it.
19. All they had might at any time be taken from them, and their sons
and daughters could not marry, without consent of their lord.
20. Yet these people considered themselves free, because they could
not be sold like the slaves; for I ought to tell you there was a
lower class of bondmen, called thralls, and there were regular slave
markets where they were bought and sold.
21. A landowner could sell a thrall just as he could sell an ox;
but he could not sell a vassal tenant, or, as they were called in
the Saxon times, a ceorl, or churl, without the estate to which he
belonged. The thralls were employed to do the hardest and meanest
work, and had nothing of their own.
22. The houses of the great men were very like large barns, and each
house stood on an open space of ground, enclosed by a wall of earth
and a ditch, within which there were stacks of corn, sheds for the
horses and cattle, and huts for the thralls to sleep in.
23. The principal room was a great hall, strewed with rushes, and
furnished with long oak tables and benches.
24. The windows were square holes crossed with thin laths, called
lattices, and the fire-place was a stone hearth in the middle of the
earthen floor, on which they used to burn great logs of wood, and let
the smoke go out at a hole in the door.
25. But the great people often had merry doings in these halls,
for they were fond of feasting, and used to sit at the long wooden
tables, without table cloths, and eat out of wooden platters or
trenchers with their fingers.
26. Boiled meats and fish, usually salted, were put on the table in
great wooden dishes, but roast meats were brought in on the spits
on which they were cooked, and handed round by the thralls, to the
company, who helped themselves with knives which they carried at
their girdles.
27. There was plenty of ale, and among the richest, wine also, which
they drank out of horn cups; and when the meats were taken away, they
used to drink and sing, and play on the harp, and often had tumblers,
jugglers, and minstrels to amuse them.
28. Then the visitors used to lie down on the floor to sleep, covered
with their cloaks; for very few people had bedsteads, and the only
beds were a kind of large bags, or bed-ticks, filled with straw, and
blocks of wood for pillows.
29. Such were the rough manners of our Saxon forefathers, who were,
however, in some respects a good sort of people, and you will be
sorry for them by and by, when you read how the Normans came, and
took away their lands, and made slaves of them. But I must first tell
you what happened in the Saxon times, after the Heptarchy was broken
up, and there was only one king of England.
QUESTIONS.
4. How were the Saxons converted to Christianity?
6. By what means did they learn many useful arts?
8. What was the condition of the common people?
15. Describe the cottages of the poor.
16. How did the Saxons dress?
21. What were ceorls? and what were thralls?
22. Describe the house of a Saxon chief.