regular laws and institutions, addicted to commerce, and instructed in many of the useful arts of industry, on the other. We all know how among barbarous nations, the passions are roused by the excitement of war and rapine. Life-whether their own or their enemies, is held cheap; expeditions for the purpose of plunder are held to be most honourable exploits, and they are unscrupulous as to the horrors attending them. The character of the northern tribes was unusually bold, enterprising and ruthless. They felt a stern delight in braving the storms of a tempestuous ocean, and the perils of descents on unknown and hostile shores. The foray ended, the parties engaged in it returned to their homes and peaceful occupations. They were owners and occupiers of land as well as sailors and warriors. In their maritime adventures, the same men were often alternately merchants and pirates.

The first incursions on the coast of England were probably planned and undertaken by some of the boldest and fiercest spirits of the north. Plunder was their sole object, and after a successful inroad they loaded their ships with booty, and the close of summer was the signal for their voyage homeward. The expeditions of these marauders prepared the way for other classes of adventurers. They were led by chiefs of the highest rank and included vast numbers of the free Udallers, the very pith and marrow of the population. These were not merely actuated by the love of plunder, but they fled from the encroachments of a tyrannical power unknown to their fathers to seek for freedom and independence in a foreign land. They were colonists in the proper sense of the word. They sought a country, more fertile than their own, where they might establish communities living under their own cherished laws, and practise in freedom the arts which were necessary to their subsistence; but they were prepared to carve out their new inheritance with their swords. Such, we believe, were, in large proportion, the men who in the ninth and tenth centuries invaded, conquered and settled large districts of Anglo-Saxon England-the men who founded the Norman chivalry and the Norman architecture. Ruthless as were the contests which preceded and accompanied their first regular immigration, such a class of free and independent settlers could not but eventually add to the strength and resources of the people among

whom they mingled. They brought with them not only an aptitude for civilization, but many of its elements; they have left to posterity indelible traces of their free spirit, their intelligence and their industry which it has been our business to follow. It cannot be thought, that the same men who in the century of Alfred the Great, colonized Iceland, founding there a free republic with wise laws and institutions, who thence prosecuted further important discoveries, and who made that northern isle a school from which the Scalds and Saga-writers sent forth a body of popular literature unrivalled by any nation of that or succeeding ages, that the fellows of such men in the same century brought to England only their swords and their battle axes-brute strength and unmitigated barbarism.

XIII.

GRIMBALD'S CRYPT.

"The church of St Peter's, in the city of Oxford, is one of the oldest in England, and exhibits architectural remains of different ages, of much interest to the antiquary. Beneath it is an old and venerable crypt, commonly called Grimbald's crypt,' supposed to have been built by Grimbald in the reign of King Alfred the Great. Dr Ingram, in his Memorials of Oxford, gives the following account of it.

The Crypt, commonly called Grimbald's Crypt, after all the controversies and criticisms to which the name of Griymbold has given birth, still continues an interesting object of curiosity to antiquaries and architects; nor

is there any reason to doubt, that it was built before the Norman Conquest. In its general style, it very much resembles the vaulted crypt of Winchester Cathedral; which is attributed to St Ethelwold; and the oldest part of Canterbury crypt, which is undoubtedly earlier than the time of Lanfranc. It contains two rows of short pillars, ranging from east to west, and two of square pilasters attached to the main walls. Each row consists of four pillars, the capitals of which are well executed, two being ornamented with some curious sculptures. The vaulting is composed of semicircular arches of hewn stone; which, according to Hearne, was brought from an old quarry, disused since Henry III d's reign, behind South Hinksey. The present entrance to the crypt is through a large buttress, which though of great age is obviously much more recent than the chancel. There are traces of two other entrances; one at the west end, and another on the north side; from the latter was a winding staircase, leading into the chancel above. Over one of the doors, which are square-headed, is a transom-stone having a semicircle carved upon it. At the east end there appears to have been an altar. The crypt is thirty-six feet long twenty feet ten inches wide, and nine feet high.

"The present crypt," adds Dr Ingram in a note "has been generally considered by those antiquaries who have paid the greatest attention to the subject to be the original one here mentioned, and coeval with the foundation of St Neot's hall, the earliest on record, which was situated on the north side of the church; and there was discoved not long since a vaulted subterraneous passage, leading into the crypt in this direction, the doorway of which still remains."

Notwithstanding the opinion of so able an antiquary as the author of the remarks just quoted, it has been held by others that the style of architecture, which presents itself in this crypt, is characteristic of an age later than that of king Alfred. The reader is referred to the passage-probably an interpolation-in Asser's Life of Alfred, given in pp. 94-96 of this volume. "The authenticity of this passage," says Dr Ingram, "has been much disputed, but it is of importance, even if considered as an early interpolation of the original work of Asser, whose death is recorded in the year 910 in the Saxon Chronicle. All the MSS. seem to be now lost. Spelman, Usher, and Stillingfleet argue against the passage: Twyne, Wood, Hearne and Wise support it... It is also to be observed, that from Twyne's commentary on the passage it it appears there were copies of Asser extant, containing an account of the building of St Peter's church by St Grimbald, and its consecration by the bishop of Dorchester."