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the Church in Rome and from Christianized Ireland, preaching peace and good-will.

REVIEW OUTLINE.-This chapter deals with the Anglo-Saxon people in their early home on the continent, before they had come in contact with Christianity. Where was this home? Into what tribes were they divided? Which one of these tribes furnished the names" England" and "English"? (The earliest form of these words was " Angleland" and "Anglisc.") Sum up for yourself their surroundings, pursuits, and beliefs. In what esteem was the poet held among them? Why? Pick out as many characteristics as possible of their early life, from the account given of Beowulf. What virtues and personal qualities make Beowulf, the young gothic Prince, the typical hero of our race in its early state? Grendel is called "God's denier "; was he so thought of by the original makers of the poem? Explain how such Christian references happen to occur in this pagan epic. When, where, and by whom was the poem, in all probability, put in its present form, and given a Christian coloring? (The full answer must be sought in Chapter II.) For reading in this period, see close of Chapter II.

CHAPTER II

OLD ENGLISH PERIOD

ANGLO-SAXON LITER

ATURE IN ENGLAND

I. THE COMING OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS TO ENGLAND Prehistoric England: the Britons. The very earliest inhabitants of Britain, the cavemen, and men of the stone age, gave way before the beginning of history to a Celtic people, a branch of the same race which inhabited France and Spain. The Celts of Great Britain were known to the Grecks as early as 300 B.C., when Pytheas, a Greek navigator and geographer, visited them; and a Greek writer of the same date mentions their island, calling it Albion, "the white land," from its gleaming chalk cliffs. The Celts who occupied Ireland and Scotland are known as Gaels; those who occupied England, as Cymri or Britons. They were farmers and herders of cattle, and lived in wattled huts fortified with ditches and mounds. Their religion was in the main a worship of the heavenly bodies; their priests, known as Druids, were astronomers and bards. The circle of huge stones at Stonehenge probably marks the site of their chief temple. In character the Britons were impetuous, imaginative, full of curiosity, and quick to learn. Their early literature, which gathers about the names of legendary poets such as Merlin and Taliesin, shows a delicate fancy, a kind of wild grace and love of beauty for its own sake, strikingly in contrast with the stern poetry of the Anglo-Saxons.

The Roman Occupation of Britain. In the year 55 B.C. Julius Cæsar crossed the straits from Gaul, and began the conquest of Britain. This was continued a hundred years later by the Emperor Claudius, who planted at Colchester the first Roman colony. Agricola became governor in 78 A.D., and built a great wall and line of forts to keep off the

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Coming of Anglo-Saxons to England

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Gaels of Scotland. The Roman capital was fixed at York, which, with its walls and towers, temples and public buildings, became "another Rome." Here, for three hundred years, the Victorious Legion, the flower of the Roman Imperial army, was stationed; and here Constantine was proclaimed ruler of the whole Roman world.

When the Roman legions crossed from Gaul there was a short space of fierce resistance. Many Britons fled to the fastnesses of Wales and Scotland, and there continued, even to our own day, their Celtic traditions. But the greater part seem soon to have submitted to the Romans, as if by a kind of fascination, even giving up their language to learn that of their conquerors. The Romans carried wherever they went their splendid civilization, and by the end of the fourth century England was dotted with towns and villas where, amid. pillared porticoes, mosaic pavements, marble baths, forums and hippodromes, a Roman emperor could find himself at home.

Recall of the Roman Legions: the Anglo-Saxon Invasion. -This was the state of England when there began that remarkable series of movements on the part of the wild Germanic tribes, which we know as the "migrations." About the end of the fourth century, urged by a common impulse, tribe after tribe swept southward; some by sea, to harry the coasts of Gaul and Britain, some over the Alps and the Pyrenees, to batter at the gates of Rome, to plunder the rich islands of the Mediterranean, and to found a kingdom in Africa. "Whelps from the lair of the barbaric lioness" (as an ancient chronicler calls them), the fierce Teutonic warriors, armed with "rough-handled spears and swords of bronze," swept down upon the countries of Southern Europe, carrying terror and death everywhere. In the year 410 the Roman legions were recalled from Britain to guard the imperial city, and the Celtic inhabitants, weakened by three centuries of civilized life, were left to struggle unaided against the pirate bands of Jutes, Saxons, and Angles, which appeared every spring in increasing numbers upon their coast. The Celts did not yield to these savage invaders as readily as they had done to the polished Romans. From the middle of the fifth century, when the

first band of Jutes landed on the Isle of Thanet, to the time when the invaders had subjugated the island and set up the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, a hundred and fifty years of warfare elapsed, during which all the monuments which Rome had left were ruined if not obliterated. Many Celts fled, as in the times of the Roman invasion, into Wales and Scotland; many were killed; but a great number were undoubtedly absorbed by the invading race During these years of struggle there began to grow up, about the person of an obscure Celtic leader, that cycle of stories which was to prove so fruitful of poetry both in France and England, the legends of Arthur, founder of the Round Table, and defender of the western Britons against the weakening power of Rome and the growing fury of the barbarians.

Earliest Celtic and Roman Traces in the Language.Now, also, began the fusion of other languages with the Anglo-Saxon, a fusion destined gradually to transform the primitive speech of our Teutonic ancestors into modern. English. The earliest Celtic words absorbed by the Saxon speech were such as have been preserved in geographical names, such as Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon (from Celtic Avon, and Ox or Esk, meaning water), Holcomb (from comb, meaning valley), Ben Nevis (from ben or pen, meaning mountain.) The words down and slough, describing characteristic features of the island landscape, belong also to these first borrowings. We must remember that the Celtic language, in the remoter parts of the country, was preserved after the Teutons had established themselves, and that wherever the two races met, along the disputed borderland, the process of fusion went on. The amount contributed by the Celts to our language remained, however, surprisingly small.

Along with the first Celtic borrowings, our speech gathered up a few words which had been left behind by the Roman occupation. They are words that suggest an imperial military civilization: street (which appears in the name of the old Roman road, Watling Street, running from Dover to Chester, and is derived from strata via, a paved way); wall, fosse, and port (from Latin vallum, fossa, and portus); the endings for place names, coln, as in Lincoln (Latin colonia,

colony), and chester or caster, as in Winchester and Doncaster (Latin castra, camp). These early borrowings, from Celtic and Latin, were in themselves slight; but they are important as the beginnings of a process by which, gathering successively from many sources, English became the richest of modern languages.

II. THE LITERATURE OF NORTHUMBRIA

The Christianizing of England.—The partial union of the Celtic and the Saxon races which took place in England after the Saxon conquest, was to have a great influence upon English character and English literature. But the greatest immediate influence exerted upon the victorious Saxon tribes was that of the Christian religion, with which they now for the first time came into full contact. The literature of this period shows very little trace of the bright Celtic imagination, but it is nearly all deeply colored by Christianity.

Christianity had gained some obscure foothold in England before the Anglo-Saxon invasion. During the Roman occupation a church or two had been built, and the emperor Diocletian had extended his persecution of the followers of Christ even to this far-off colony. But it was not until after the Saxon conquest that the new religion took a firm hold. The Christian teaching came into England in two different streams, one from Rome, one from Ireland, which country had been won from heathenism several centuries before. The first stream began late in the sixth century, with the coming of Augustine, who converted to the new faith Ethelbert, king of Kent, and his whole people. Little by little, after the advent of this graat missionary among the Saxons in the south of England, the new creed drove out the old, winning its way by the authority with which it spoke of man's existence beyond the grave.

This stream of religious influence which came from Rome centred chiefly in south and central England, in the kingdom of Wessex. It produced some schools of learning, but almost no literature. It is to the north and east, to the kingdom of Northumbria, which felt the influence of the Irish monks,

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