CHAP. VI. the Danelaw. 937. 955. the next two years we know only the close, the renewed expulsion of Eric, and the fresh submission of Wessex and the Danelaw to Eadred.' But short and uneventful as the struggle was, it was the last; for with the submission of 954 the long work of Elfred's house was done. Dogged as his fight had been, the Dane at last owned himself beaten; from the moment of Eadred's final triumph all resistance came to an end; and the close of the under-kingdom proclaimed that the north was brought into the general organization of the English realm. The policy of the great ealdormanries however triumphed again over that of national union. Though Eadred in 954 "took," like Æthelstan, “to the kingdom of the Northumbrians," he made no attempt to restore the direct rule of Athelstan's early years. He contented himself with reducing the under-kingdom to an earldom, and governing it through an Englishman instead of a Dane. Oswulf, who had till now held a semi-independent position as "high-reeve" of Bernicia, was set over both Bernicia and Deira as earl of the Northumbrians. The School at Dunstan seems to have accompanied the king into Northumbria after its subjugation, at least as Glastonbury. possibly be a mere blunder for Eric's reception in 949, as given in the Worcester Chronicle (D), which knows nothing of these later events. 1 The account in the Chronicle differs widely here from that of the later Saga of Hakon the Good (Laing's "Sea-kings," i. 318), which takes this Eric for a son of Harald Fair-hair, who enters Northumbria for plunder, encounters a king named Olaf, "whom King Eadmund had set to defend the land," and falls in battle against fearful odds. 2 Eng. Chron. (Worc.), a. 954. CHAP. VI. far as Chester-le-Street, where he saw the remains Wessex and of St. Cuthbert still resting in the temporary refuge the Danelaw. 937955. 3 which they had found after their removal from Lindisfarne;1 and it was probably under his counsel that Eadred resolved to put an end to the subject royalty of the north and to set up the new earldom of the Northumbrians. The abbot's post probably answered in some way to that of the later chancellor; and as we find the hoard in his charge at the end of the reign, he must then have combined with this the office of the later treasurer. Of the details of his political work however during this period nothing is told us. But of the intellectual and literary work which he was carrying on throughout the reign we are allowed to see a little more. It was in fact in these nine years that the more important part of his educational work was done. If much of his time was necessarily spent at Winchester or with the royal court, the bulk of it seems still to have been given to his Abbey of Glastonbury, and to the school which was growing up within its walls. He himself led the way in the work of teaching. Tradition told of the kindliness with which he won the love of his scholars, the psalms sung with them as they journeyed 4 1 Stubbs, "Mem. of Dunst." p. 379. 2 In 949 at the close of a grant to Reculver we find "Ego Dunstan indignus abbas rege Eadredo imperante hanc domino meo hereditariam Cartulam dictitando composui, et propriis digitorum articulis perscripsi" (Cod. Dip. 425). 3 Stubbs, "Mem. of Dunst." Introd. lxxxvi. lxxxvii. 4 It is an amusing contrast to the common portraiture of Dunstan that at his own Canterbury a hundred years after his CHAP. VI. the Danelaw 937 955. together, the vision that comforted Dunstan for the loss of one little scholar as he saw the child borne Wessex and heavenwards in the arms of angels. In the library of Glastonbury some interesting memorials of his scholastic work were preserved even to the time of the Reformation, books on the Apocalypse, a collection of canons drawn from his Irish teachers, passages transcribed from Frank and Roman law-books, notes on measure and numbers, a pamphlet on grammar, a mass of biblical quotations, tables for calculating Easter, and a book of Ovid's Art of Love which jostled oddly with an English homily on the Invention of the Cross.1 From its remote site in the west, Glastonbury threw off an offshoot into Central Britain. In 955 Æthelwold, Dunstan's chief scholar and assistant in his educational work, received from Eadred a gift of the Abbey of Abingdon," a house which we noted as death he was regarded as the patron and protector of schoolboys. Once, in Anselm's time, when the yearly whipping-day arrived for the Cathedral school the poor little wretches crowded weeping to his shrine and sought aid from their "dear father Dunstan." Dunstan it was, so every schoolboy believed, who sent the masters to sleep, and then set them quarrelling till the whipping blew over. 1 "Memor. of Dunst." Intr. cx.-xii. "Several of these pieces," says Prof. Stubbs, "contain British glosses, and furnish some of the earliest specimens of Welsh." 2 Chron. Abingd. (ed. Stevenson), vol. i. 124. Ethelwold "disposuit ultra-marinas partes adire, causâ se imbuendi seu sacris libris seu monasticis disciplinis perfectius: sed prævenit venerabilis regina Eadgifu, mater regis Eadredi, ejus conamina, dans consilium regi ne talem virum sineret egredi de regno suo. Placuit tunc regi Eadredo, suadente matre sua, dare venerabili Athelwoldo quendam locum, vocabulo Abbandun." Vit. Æthel Its influence on English literature. CHAP. VI. the Danelaw. 937955. growing up in the eighth century by the side of Wessex and the Thames, and which had since been ruined by the incursions of the Danes. Settling there with a few clerks from Glastonbury,' the new abbot soon gathered a school whose activity more than rivalled that of the house from which it sprang. From these two centres the movement spread through Wessex and Mercia. In both the impulse given by Alfred had been checked, but not arrested, by the stress of war. So large a part of the mass of our early literature has been lost that we can hardly draw any conclusion from the scarcity of its remains in the period which followed the king's death; indeed the larger and more literary tone of the English Chronicle through the reign of Eadward the Elder is a sufficient proof that the earlier intellectual movement had still its representatives through the first years of the struggle with the Danelaw. Even when in Æthelstan's day the Chronicle sinks into meagre annals, a fortunate chance reveals to us, in the battle-songs and deathsongs embedded in its pages, the existence of a mass of English verse of which all memory would otherwise have perished. Side by side, too, with this statelier song we catch glimpses of a wilder and woldi, Chron. Abingdon (ed. 'Stevenson), vol. ii. 257. Did the writ "ne exeas regno" already exist? 1 "Quem statim secuti sunt quidam clerici de Glastoniâ, hoc est Osgarus, Foldbirchtus, Frithegarus, et Ordbirchtus de Wintonia, et Eadricus de Lundoniâ." Vit. Ethelwoldi, Chron. Abingd. (ed. Stevenson), ii. 258, an interesting passage, as showing from how wide a range Glastonbury had drawn. 2 See the mention by Will. of Malmesbury of a book written in Æthelstan's time. "Gest. Reg." (ed. Hardy), i. p. 209. (A. S. G.) more romantic upgrowth of popular verse, which CHAP. VI. wrapped in an atmosphere of romance the lives of Wessex and kings such as Æthelstan and Eadgar.1 Dunstan's own youth indeed, his zeal for letters, and the fact that he found books and teachers to meet his zeal, show that the impulse which Ælfred had given was far from having spent its force in his grandson's days. But there can be no doubt that the foundation of the two schools at Glastonbury and Abingdon gave to this impulse a new strength and guidance. It is from them that we must date the rise of the second old English literature, a literature which bears the stamp of Wessex, as the first had borne the stamp of Northumbria. In poetry this literature was, no doubt, inferior to its predecessor; there was nothing to rival the verse of Cadmon or the poems of Cynewulf. But the later time may justly claim as its own the creation of a stately historic verse of which fragments remain in the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon, or the death-songs of Eadgar or Eadward. The love of poetry was seen even in the series of translations to which we really owe our knowledge of the earlier Northumbrian song. Save for a few lines embedded in Bæda or graven on 1 Malmesbury has preserved for us in his "Gesta Regum" prose versions of some of these ballads. The ballads of Ethelstan are:-(1) The Birth of the King; (2) the Drowning of Eadwine; (3) The Craft of Anlaf. There are besides three ballads of Eadgar: (1) The Slave Queen; (2) Eadgar and Ælfthryth; (3) Eadgar and the Scot-King. How vigorous this ballad literature was we see from the preservation of these down to the twelfth century, when they were introduced by the writers of the time into our history, much to its confusion. the Danelaw. 937 955. |