in a wide stream; a stone wall
enclosed the bright interior; the baths
were there, the heated water; that was convenient.
They allowed the scalding water to pour
over the grey stone into the circular pool …
And in ‘The Seafarer’, the poem quoted earlier, we get a similar strong sense that the world has decayed since the great days of – presumably – the Romans. That poet speaks of:
Days little durable,
And all arrogance of earthen riches,
There come now no kings nor Cæsars
Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.
Howe’er in mirth most magnified,
Whoe’er lived in life most lordliest,
Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!
Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.
Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.
This pessimism, so different from the Christian celebration of Caedmon, is something we should take with a pinch of salt. Anglo-Saxon Britain was full of advanced and sophisticated craftsmanship, from ornate goldwork to well-built ships and fine vellum books. No serious historian of the age now regards it simply as a time of anarchy and disaster. But if there is pessimism it is surely driven by politics – the restless, bloody tribal struggles that convulsed all of Britain, from the Picts in northern Scotland to the lands of the Jutes in southern England. Local warlordism isn’t much fun even for the warlords. It isn’t until the 800s, as the kingdom of the west Saxons pushed back against its Mercian, Northumbrian and Viking enemies, that the possibility of a dominant nation, an ‘England’, begins to emerge. Alfred the Great first managed to unite Wessex with Mercia, and then reached out until he could call himself the king of all the Anglo-Saxons. We know from a life written by the Welsh cleric Asser that Alfred was brought up on English poetry, though we don’t know what that was. As a ruler he was much more than a warlord, a highly ambitious and cultured figure, in touch with the latest developments on the Continent. Alfred personally oversaw the translation of key European Christian texts from Latin into English. He imported French and German men of letters. He began – almost, it seems, single-handedly – to forge a coherent English culture.
Despite the devastating effects of the Norse raids on monasteries, with their books, we might from this point have expected a steady growth and flowering of English poetry.
It didn’t happen. At least, it didn’t happen for another three centuries, again because of dynastic politics, in this case the unwanted arrival of those transplanted Vikings with their strange foreign tongue, the Normans. Eventually, the violent collision between Anglo-Saxon English and Norman French would produce a supple, flexible new language. But the hugely disruptive collision of the Conquest meant that there is a long gap after 1066 before we hear again the authentic voice of ordinary British people expressed in verse in their own language. No doubt it once existed. But it’s gone, and gone forever.
If the prose of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is to be believed, it would have been a poetry of lamentation. The Chronicle ends by describing the coronation of the man it calls simply Count William, who despite earlier promises ‘laid taxes on people very severely’. He and Bishop Odo then ‘built castles far and wide throughout this country, and distressed the wretched folk, and always after that it grew much worse. May the end be good when God wills!’
But there was more to this than the clash of Anglo-Saxons and Normans. Recent scholarly work points out that the pre-Norman Conquest court of Cnut, king of most of Scandinavia as well as England (and the Canute who mocked himself by ordering back the waves) and the court of Edward the Confessor were open to Danish, German, French and Latin learning. English queens were notable early sponsors of what became French literature. Britain in this period was very much part of Europe, and its dynasties were interlinked with those of France, Sweden and Hungary. The cowherds spoke Anglo-Saxon; but on the coasts and in the towns you would have heard a chatter of Norse, Latin, French – and Welsh too. For the people speaking the old British or Celtic languages hadn’t gone away. What was their poetry like? Mostly oral, of course, and therefore mostly lost, of course. We have infuriatingly few fragments to go on, but there is an Irish poem about a fair in County Wexford, around the time of the Norman Conquest, which gives some idea of early non-English poetry in these islands:
There are the Fair’s great privileges:
trumpets, harps, hollow-throated horns,
Pipers, timpanists unwearied,
poets and meet musicians.
Tales of Find and the Fianna, a matter inexhaustible,
sackings, forays, wooings,
tablets, and books of lore,
satires, keen riddles:
Proverbs, maxims …
… The Chronicle of women, tales of armies, conflicts,
hostels, tabus, captures …
Pipes, fiddles, gleemen,
bone-players and bag-pipers,
a crowd hideous, noisy, profane
shriekers and shouters.
They exert all their efforts
for the king of seething Berba:
the King, noble and honoured,
pays for each art its proper honour.
That’s a translation, of course, by Professor Thomas Owen Clancy of Glasgow University. He makes it sound great fun – like a modern literary festival on acid. Not everybody in the so-called dark ages was having a miserable time.
2
It took hundreds of years for the elite language of Norman French to begin to mingle with the tongues of the Anglo-Saxons. For a long time, looking for English poetry we have to rely on very short lyrics, which nonetheless can remind us that Britain was a multi-ethnic place:
Ich am of Irlande
And of the holy lande
Of Irlande
Gode sire, pray Ich thee
For of saynte charite
Come and daunce with me
In Irlande
Oh, all right then. The lyrics of early medieval Britain are full of music and dancing, celebrations of spring and love. It’s as if the shuddering, ice-bound, rainy islands of so many Anglo-Saxon manuscripts had been transformed. Up to a point, they had been. Historians talk about the early-medieval
