CHAP. VII. The Great Ealdormen. 955988. Andredsweald encouraged the making of sea-salt along the coast of Kent.1 Salt-workers indeed were found along the whole southern shore. Metal wares also may here and there have made their way to market: for we find mention of an iron-mine as still being worked in Kent in the seventh century, and in the ninth there were lead-works in the valley of the Severn. The rest of the trade of the country was in the hands of the chapman or salesman who journeyed from hall to hall. His wares must often 3 2 have been of the costliest kind. The growth of the noble class in power had been accompanied by a corresponding growth in wealth; and the luxury of their dress and personal ornaments is witnessed by every document of the time. The thegn himself boasted of his gems, of his golden bracelets and rings; his garments were gay with embroidery and lined with costly furs, the rough walls of his house were often hung with silken hangings, wrought with figures or pictures. We hear of tables made of silver and gold, of silver mirrors and candlesticks; while cups and basins of the same precious metals were stored in the hoards of the wealthier nobles.* To supply these costly goods as well as the meaner wares of lesser folk must have been the work of the chapman, and gave an importance to this class which 1 Ecgberht makes a grant of salt-works here, with a hundred and twenty loads of wood from the weald to feed the fires. Another grant allows waggons to go for six weeks into the king's forest. Cod. Dip. 234, 288. 2 Cod. Dip. 30. 3 Cod. Dip. 237. 4 See the numerous instance given by Sharon Turner, "Hist. Angl.-Sax." iii. cap. 5. passed away as the customer learned to seek the trader instead of the trader making his way to the customer, and the chapman died down into the pedlar. It was seldom that the travelling merchant ventured to travel alone. In a law of Elfred chapmen are bidden to "bring the men whom they take with them to folk-moot, and let it be stated how many of them there are, and let them take such men with them as they may be able afterwards to present for justice at the folk-moot; and when they have need of more men with them on their journey, let them declare it, as often as their need may be, to the king's reeve in presence of the gemot."2 To move over the country indeed with costly wares was hardly safe at a time when ordinary travellers went in companies for security, and even the clergy on the way to synods were forced to travel together. The highways in fact were infested with robbers, and the outlaw was, through the legal usages of the day, a frequent trouble on the road. The roads too were often rough and hardly traversable; the repair of ways and bridges, though an obligation binding on every landowner, was so often neglected, that the Church had to aid in the work by laying on her offenders the penance of building bridges over deep waters and foul ways.' 3 1 The chapman is first mentioned in the laws of Hlothere (Thorpe, "Anc. Laws," i. 33), and in those of Ine (ib. p. 119). "If a chapman traffic up among the people, let him do it before witnesses." 2 Thorpe, "Anc. Laws," i. 83. 3 Lingard, "Ang. Sax. Church," i. 107. 4 Ibid. i. 336. CHAP. VII. The Great Ealdormen. 955988. Its difficulties. CHAP. VII. The Great Ealdormen. 955988. The gleeman. The safety of travelling was perhaps hardly increased by the presence of other wanderers from hall to hall, who played almost as great a part in the domestic life of the wealthier class as the chapman himself. The visits of the gleeman and the juggler or " tumbler” were welcome breaks in the monotony of the thegn's life. It is hard not to look kindly at the gleeman, for he no doubt did much to preserve the older poetry which even now was ebbing away. When Christianity brought with it not only a new vehicle of writing in the Roman characters, but the habit of writing itself, it dealt a fatal blow at the mass of early poetry which had been handed down by oral tradition. Among the Franks Charles the Great vainly strove to save the old national songs from perishing by ordering them to be written down. In England Ælfred did what he could to save them by teaching them in his court. We see them indeed lingering in men's memories till the time of Dunstan. But the heathen character of the bulk of them must have hindered their preservation by transfer to writing, and custom hindered it yet more, for men could not believe that songs and annals handed down for ages by memory could be lost for want of memory. And no doubt the memory of the gleeman handed on this precious store of early verse long after the statelier poems of Cadmon or Cynewulf had been set down in writing. But useful as their work may have been, and popular as were both gleeman and tumbler,' the character of the class seems to have been low, and that of their stories is marked 1 Eadgar himself speaks of them as "dancing and singing even to the middle of the night." by the repeated prohibition addressed to the clergy CHAP. VII. to listen to harpers or music, or permit any jesting or playing in their presence. With learning indeed the stress of war had dealt roughly since the time of Ælfred. The educational effort which he had set on foot had all but ceased, for the clergy had sunk back into worldliness and ignorance; not a book or translation, save the continuation of the English chronicle, had been added to those which Elfred had left, and the sudden interruption even of the chronicle after Eadward's reign shows the fatal effect which the long war was exerting on literature. Dunstan resumed Elfred's task, not indeed in the wide and generous spirit of the king, but with the activity of a born administrator. It was the sense that the cause of education was the cause of religion itself that inspired Ælfred and Dunstan alike with their zeal for teaching. It was this too that gave its popular and vernacular character to the new literature. In Elfric, a scholar of Ethelwold's school at Winchester,' we see the type of the religious and educational popularizer. He aids the raw teacher with an English grammar of Latin; he helps the unlearned priest by providing for him eighty English homilies in all as a course of teaching for the year; he assists Bishop Wulfwig and Archbishop Wulfstan by furnishing them with pastoral letters to their clergy. His homilies were so greedily read, that his admirers begged from him some English lives of the saints, 1 Lingard, "Angl. Sax. Church," ii. 311 et seq. The Great Ealdormen. 955. 988. Revival of learning. CHAP. VII. The Great Ealdormen. 955 988. Chronicle of and the prayer of a friend, Æthelweard,' drew him into editing and writing an English version of the Bible, which, omitting such parts as he judged unedifying for the times, he carried on from Genesis to the book of Judges. It was not only in religious writings that the followers of Dunstan carried on the work of literary revival. The historic impulse which had been given by Ælfred and had promised so great a future for our annals in the days of Eadward had died down under his successors. Of no reigns have we in fact more meagre particulars, so far as their military and political events are concerned, than of the reigns of Eadmund, Eadred, Eadwig, and Eadgar. The great Chronicle of Worcester seems to have remained suspended during this period, nor do we know of any other record which could have supplied its deficiency. But the intellectual activity of Dunstan's school could hardly fail in the end to fix upon a work so congenial as that of historical composition. To Dunstan himself we owe the life of Eadmund, the martyr-king of East-Anglia, since it was at his suggestion that Abbo, the most notable of the French scholars, was summoned from Fleury, and induced to undertake it. His great assistant, Ethelwold of Winchester, was possibly the author of the last continuation of the Chronicle of Winchester, the meagre and irregular annals from the death of Eadward the Elder to the death of Eadgar, which must have been put together in Eadward the Martyr's reign, and 1 This Æthelweard was possibly the ealdorman of that name, whose chronicle has been mentioned. See p. 51, note 1. (A. S. G.) |