whom he brought with him from Denmark. By this time large advances had been made towards the amalgamation of the races. Writing of the year 1036, Malmesbury1 says that the citizens of London, 'from long intercourse with these barbarians' (the Danes), had almost entirely adopted their customs.' The Danes adopted with facility the Anglo-Saxon tongue, though importing into it many Danish words, and probably breaking down to a great degree its grammatical structure. The secular laws of Canute, addressed to both races equally, are written in Anglo-Saxon. All that the cold North could supply, the English nationality had now received. The stubborn hardihood and perseverance which were illustrated in the Drakes, the Cooks, the Stephensons, of later days, were, by this large infusion of Danish blood, rooted in the English nature. The intellectual activity and literary culture of the South, together with the great Roman tradition of political order and vigorous administration, were still wanting; and these were supplied by means of the Norman conquest.

Malmesbury, p. 205 (Bohn's series).

PRELIMINARY CHAPTER.

SECTION II.

THE NORMAN PERIOD.

1066-1350.

IN the age at which we are arrived, two classes of men only cultivated literature, the clergy and the minstrels. The local centres at which learning was to be obtained were of two kinds, the universities and the monasteries. Poetry and light literature were comparatively independent of such aids; yet the form and development even of these could not but be largely dependent on the social and moral condition of the classes among whom they were circulated. The intellectual achievements, therefore, of the clergy-both Saxon and Norman-the means of selfculture which they had at their disposal, and the degree of success with which they availed themselves of those means the different classes of poets, their nationality, the traditional or other materials upon which they worked, and the furtherance or obstruction which they met with in the temper and habits of the time-all these matters must now be successively touched upon. What we have named the Norman period embraces more than two centuries and a half, and includes the long conflict between two opposing elements, which terminated, on the whole, in favour of what was English, yet so that the national language, literature, and prevailing opinions, were all deeply coloured by French words and French thoughts.

For many years after the Conquest the Saxon clergy

were in no mood or condition to betake themselves to the tranquil pursuits of learning. Before that catastrophe, religious fervour and rigour of discipline had long been on the wane amongst them. We read of much laxity of manners, of bishops holding two or more sees at once, of priests so ignorant of Latin as to be unable to say mass without innumerable blunders. The Conqueror, who, with all his cruelty and pride, hated hypocrisy and empty profession with all his heart, would not tolerate these relaxed ecclesiastics, and by the nomination of Lanfranc (a native of Italy, but for many years prior of Bec, in Normandy) to the see of Canterbury, inaugurated a great reformation in Church matters. Some few of the Saxon bishops, as the noble St. Wulstan of Worcester, Agelric of Chichester, and one or two others, were left in possession of their sees; the rest had to make way for Normans. Nor was this all. Had the unworthy only been deposed, and the worthy still allowed to look forward to advancement to be obtained through desert, the Saxon clergy might still have held together, and with renewed strictness of life a revival of learning might have taken place among them. But the repeated insurrections of the English exasperated the fiery temper of the Conqueror; and after having quelled them, and thus overturned the power of the laity, he made an ordinance that no monk or clergyman of that nation should be suffered to aspire to any dignity whatever." Thus cut off from the hope of due recognition for merit the Saxon clergy were deprived of one of the chief incentives to study. One may be sure that from that time the more ambitious among them would make haste to learn French, and would rather disguise their nationality than avow it. Yet there was at least one monastery, in which a literary work, begun in happier times two centuries before, was carried on by Saxon monks, and in the Saxon tongue.

1 Malmesbury, p. 287.

This is the

continuation of the Saxon Chronicle, composed in the monastery of Peterborough. It ends abruptly in the

first year of the reign of Henry II. (1154), the writer or writers being by that time probably unable to resist any longer the universal fashion of employing Latin for any serious prose work. William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Caradoc,-all these, and many others, were writing history at this very time, and all, as a matter of course, wrote in Latin. The AngloSaxon, too, being no longer taught in schools, nor spoken in the higher circles of society, had lost very much of its original harmony and precision of structure; and when the annalist found himself using one inflection for another, or dropping inflections altogether, he may well have thought it high time to exchange a tongue which seemed crumbling and disintegrating under his hands, for one whose forms were fixed and its grammar rational. Little did the down-hearted monk anticipate the future glories, which, after a crisis of transformation and fusion, would surround his rude ancestral tongue.

Yet literature and learning were not negligently or even unsuccessfully prosecuted in England during this which we call the Norman period; and this is a fact which we must learn to see in its true light, in order to understand aright the rise of English literature in the fourteenth century. Again, the intellectual awakening which spread to England in the eleventh and twelfth, and produced valuable literary results there in the thirteenth century, cannot be understood except in connection with the general European movement of mind which ensued upon the consolidation of society following the long troubled night of the dark ages. Something must therefore be said about the origin of that movement, about the course it took, and about the great thinkers whose names are for ever associated with it.

Strange as it may seem, the revival of intellectual

activity at the end of the eleventh and in the twelfth century is clearly traceable to the labours and the example of Mahometans. Charlemagne, indeed, had made a noble effort in the ninth century to systematise education, and to make literature and science the permanent denizens of his empire, but the wars and confusion of every kind which ensued upon the partition of that empire among his sons extinguished the still feeble light. A happier lot had befallen the powerful and populous kingdoms founded by the successors of Mahomet. Indoctrinated with a knowledge of the wonderful fertility and energy of the Greek mind, as exemplified especially in Aristotle and Plato, by Syrian Nestorians (whose forefathers, fleeing from persecution into Persia after the council of Chalcedon, carried with them Syriac versions of the chief works of the Greek philosophers, and founded a school at Gondisapor), Haroun-al-Raschid (whose reign was contemporary with that of Charlemagne), and Al Mamoun, his successor, saw and assisted in the commencement of a brilliant period of literary activity in the nations of Arabian race, which lasted from the ninth to the fourteenth century. Among the Arabian kingdoms none entered into this movement with more earnestness and success than the Moorish kingdoms in Spain. We hear of the Universities of Cordova, Seville, and Granada; and the immense number of Arabic manuscripts on almost every subject contained at this day in the library of the Escurial at Madrid attests the eagerness with which the Moorish writers sought after knowledge, and the universality of their literary tastes. Of their poetry, and the effect which it had on that of Christian Europe, we shall speak presently. Their proficiency in science is evidenced by the remarkable facts which William of Malmesbury relates of Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II. After having put on the monastic habit at Flory, in France, his thirst for knowledge led 1 Sismondi's Literature of the South of Europe.