Part 3

The Austin canons, as they were commonly called, made their way across the Channel at the beginning of Henry’s reign. The circumstances of their earliest settlement illustrate the intimate connexion between the religious and the national revival in England. Their first priory was founded in 1108 by the English queen Matilda--“Maude the good queen,” as they gratefully called her--in the soke of Aldgate, just within the eastern wall of London. Part of its endowment was furnished by the estates of an old English cnihtengild whose members surrendered their property for the benefit of the new community. The house was dedicated to the Holy Trinity; its first prior, Norman by name, was a native of Kent who had studied in Gaul under S. Anselm; through Anselm he was enabled to bring the Augustinian order under the notice of Matilda, whose confessor he afterwards became. How he lavished all his funds on the furnishing of his church and the stocking of his library; how the starving brotherhood set out a row of empty plates in the refectory to attract the sympathy of the citizens who were taking their Sunday stroll round the suburb and peeping curiously in at the windows of the new building; how the pitying burgher-wives vowed each to bring a loaf every Sunday; and how the plates in the refectory were never empty again[184]--is a story which need not be repeated in detail. Some fifteen years later Rahere the king’s minstrel threw up his post at court to become the head of an Austin priory which he built on a plot of waste marshy ground along the eastern border of Smithfield. He dedicated his establishment to S. Bartholomew and attached to it an hospital for the relief of the sick and needy. Every day--so tradition told--Alfhun, the master of the hospital, went about the city as the Little Sisters of the Poor do to this day, begging in the shops and markets for help towards the support of the sick folk under his care. Most likely he was himself a London citizen; his name is enough to prove him of genuine English birth.[185] Another famous Augustinian house was that of Merton in Surrey. There the brotherhood devoted themselves to educational work. Their most illustrious scholar--born in the very year in which their house was founded, 1117--is known to us already as Thomas the son of Gilbert Becket. At the other end of England, Walter Lespec, the noblest character among the lay barons of the time, found comfort for the loss of an only son in “making Christ his heir”--devoting to God’s service the heritage which had been destined for his boy, and founding the priory of Kirkham in Yorkshire on the spot where the lad had expired.[186] Before the close of Henry’s reign the Austin canons had acquired such importance that two of their order were raised to the episcopate, one even to the primacy of all Britain. After five years of vacancy the metropolitan chair of Canterbury was still too vividly haunted by memories of S. Anselm for Henry and Roger to venture on trying to fill it from the ranks of the latter’s party; they gave it to Anselm’s old friend and suffragan, Ralf, bishop of Rochester.[187] But when Ralf, who at the time of his election was already an aged man, died in 1122, the seculars, headed by Roger of Salisbury, made a successful effort to secure a non-monastic primate. Not daring, however, to go the full length of appointing one of themselves, they took a middle course and chose a canon regular, William of Corbeil, prior of S. Osyth’s at Chiche in Essex.[188] The strict monastic party counted the new sort of canons very little better than the old ones. William himself, however, was a perfectly blameless churchman, whose worst fault was a constitutional timidity and shrinking from political responsibilities which made him powerless to stem the tide of worldliness among his suffragans, though he at least kept the metropolitan chair itself safe from contaminating influences. The case of the other Augustinian prelate is a specially interesting one. Henry, who so irritated both his English and Norman subjects by his general preference for foreign churchmen, had nevertheless chosen for his own spiritual adviser a priest whose name, Eadwulf, shows him to have been of English origin, and who was prior of an Augustinian house at Nostell in Yorkshire. The king’s last act before he left England in 1133, never to return, was to promote his confessor to a bishopric. Twenty-three years before, following out a cherished plan of S. Anselm’s, he had caused the overworked bishop of Lincoln to be relieved of part of his enormous diocese by the establishment of a new see with the great abbey of Ely for its cathedral and the monks for its chapter.[189] He now lightened the cares of the archbishop of York in like manner by giving him a new suffragan whose see was fixed at Carlisle. Eadwulf was appointed bishop; naturally enough he constituted his chapter on the principles of his own order; and Carlisle, the last English bishopric founded before the Reformation, was also the only one whose cathedral church was served by canons regular of the order of S. Augustine.[190]

[184] The history of H. Trinity, Aldgate, is printed in the appendix to Hearne’s edition of William of Newburgh, vol. iii. pp. 688–709.

[185] The story of S. Bartholomew’s and its founder comes from “Liber fundacionis ecclesiæ S. Bartholomæi Londoniarum,” a MS. of Henry II.’s time, part of which is printed in Dugdale’s _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. i. pp. 292–295. The remainder is as yet unprinted; but Dr. Norman Moore has published in the _S. Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports_, vol. xxi. pp. xxxix.–cix., a translation made about A.D. 1400; the 22d chapter of this (pp. lxix., lxx.) contains the account of Alfhun.

[186] The stories of all these Austin priories are in Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pts. i. and ii. Merton is in pt. i. pp. 245–247; Kirkham, _ib._ pp. 207–209.

[187] Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), pp. 221–223; Will. Malm., _Gesta Pontif._, l. i. c. 67 (Hamilton, p. 126). The king wanted to appoint Faricius, abbot of Abingdon; his choice was opposed by the seculars, who wanted one of their own party. This the monks of Christ Church resisted, but, as Faricius was obnoxious because he was an Italian, they finally all agreed upon Ralf, and the king confirmed their choice.

[188] Eng. Chron. a. 1123; Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 7; Gerv. Cant., _Actus Pontif._ (Stubbs, vol. ii.), p. 380. On S. Osyth’s see Will. Malm., _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 731 (Hamilton, p. 146).

[189] Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), pp. 195, 211; Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 60; Will. Malm., _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 445 (Hardy, p. 680); _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 185 (Hamilton, p. 325).

[190] On Carlisle and Eadwulf (or Æthelwulf) see Joh. Hexham, a. 1133 (Raine, vol. i. pp. 109, 110); and Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. i. pp. 141–145.

Meanwhile a mightier influence than theirs was regenerating all the Churches of the West--our own among the number. Its root was in a Burgundian wilderness; but the seed from which it sprang was of English birth. Harding was an Englishman who spent his boyhood in the monastery of Sherborne in Dorset, till he was seized with a passion for wandering and for study which led him first to Scotland, then to Gaul, and at last to Rome. It chanced that on his return thence, passing through the duchy of Burgundy, he stopped at the abbey of Molêmes. As he saw the ways and habits familiar to his childhood reproduced in those of the monks, the wanderer’s heart yearned for the peaceful life which he had forsaken; he took the vows, and became a brother of the house. But when, with the zeal of a convert, he began to look more closely into his monastic obligations, he perceived that the practice of Molêmes, and indeed of most other monasteries, fell very far short of the strict rule of S. Benedict. He remonstrated with his brethren till they had no rest in their minds. At last, after long and anxious debates in the chapter, the abbot determined to go to the root of the matter, and appointed two brethren, whose learning was equalled by their piety, to examine diligently the original rule and declare what they found in it. The result of their investigations justified Harding’s reproaches and caused a schism in the convent. The majority refused to alter their accustomed ways; finding they were not to be reformed, the zealous minority, consisting of Robert the abbot, Harding himself (or Stephen, as he was called in religion), and sixteen others equally “stiff-necked in their holy obstinacy,” left Molêmes, and sought a new abode in the wilderness. The site which they chose--in the diocese of Chalon-sur-Saône, not far from Dijon--was no happy valley, no “green retreat” such as the earlier Benedictine founders had been wont to select. It was a dismal swamp overgrown with brushwood, a forlorn, dreary, unhealthy spot, from whose marshy character the new house took its name of “the Cistern”--_Cistellum_, commonly called Citeaux. There the little band set to work in 1098 to carry into practice their views of monastic duty. The brotherhood of Molêmes, left without a head by their abbot’s desertion, presently appealed to the archbishop of Lyons and the Pope, and after some negotiation Robert, willingly or unwillingly, returned to his former post. His departure gave a shock to the foundations of the new community; zeal was already growing cold, and of those who had followed him out from Molêmes all save eight followed him back again. Those eight--“few in number, but a host in merit”--at once chose their prior Alberic to be abbot in Robert’s stead, while the true founder, Stephen Harding, undertook the duties of prior. Upon Alberic’s death in 1110 Stephen became abbot in his turn, and under him the little cistern in the wilderness became a fountain whose waters flowed out far and wide through the land. Three-and-twenty daughter-houses were brought to completion during his life-time. One of the earliest was Pontigny, founded in 1114, and destined in after-days to become inseparably associated with the name of another English saint. Next year there went forth another Cistercian colony, whose glory was soon to eclipse that of the mother-house itself. Its leader was a young monk called Bernard, and the place of its settlement was named Clairvaux.[191]

[191] For the Life of S. Stephen Harding, and the early history of Citeaux and its order, see Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. cc. 334–337 (Hardy, pp. 511–517); Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), pp. 711–714; and _Gallia Christiana_, vol. iv. pp. 980–984.

From Burgundy and Champagne the “White Monks,” as the Cistercians were called from the colour of their habit, soon spread over France and Normandy. In 1128 they crossed the sea and made an entrance into their founder’s native land; William Giffard, bishop of Winchester, founded the abbey of Waverley in Surrey for twelve monks from the Cistercian house of Aumône in Normandy.[192] The movement spread rapidly in all directions. In 1131 Walter Lespec the founder of Kirkham, zealous in every good work, established in the heart of the Yorkshire wolds a “daughter of S. Bernard,” the abbey of Rievaux;[193] far away on the Welsh border, in the valley of the Wye, Tintern was founded in the same year by Walter de Clare.[194] The story of another famous Yorkshire house, Fountains, is a curious repetition of that of Citeaux itself. Thirteen monks of the Benedictine convent of S. Mary at York, fired by the example of the newly-established brotherhood at Rievaux, determined, like Stephen Harding and his friends at Molêmes, to go forth into the wilderness where they might follow the Cistercian rule in freedom. But when they asked their abbot’s leave to depart it was sternly refused. Archbishop Thurstan, to whom they appealed for support, came in person to plead their cause with the abbot, and was so insolently received that after a stormy scene in the chapter-house he laid the convent under interdict, and walked out followed by the zealous thirteen “with nothing but the clothes on their backs.” The warmly-sympathizing primate gave them a temporary shelter in his own home; at Christmas he bestowed upon them for their dwelling a lonely valley called Skeldale, near Ripon, “full of thorns and enclosed by rocks,” and for their maintenance the little township of Sutton. They at once chose one of their number, Richard by name, as abbot, and went forth under his guidance to settle in their new abode, although the cold of a Yorkshire winter was at its bitterest, and they had not where to lay their heads. In the middle of the valley stood a great elm--“thick and leafy as elms are wont to be.”[195] That tree was the original abbey of our Lady of Fountains. Its spreading branches formed a roof to shelter the little band of monks; “their bread was supplied to them by the archbishop, their drink by the streamlet which ran through the valley,” and which, as in the case of Citeaux, suggested a name for the future house. In this primitive dwelling they fulfilled their religious exercises in peace and contentment till the winter was past, when they began to think of constructing a more substantial abode. They had no mind to follow their own inspirations and set up an independent rule of their own; in all humility they wrote to S. Bernard (who since the death of S. Stephen Harding was universally looked up to as the head of the Cistercian order), telling him all their story, and beseeching him to receive them as his children. Bernard answered by sending to them, with a letter full of joyous welcome and hearty sympathy, his friend and confidant, Godfrey, to instruct them in the Cistercian rule. They had now been joined by ten more brethren. But the elm-tree was still their only shelter, and their means of subsistence were as slender as at the first. Presently there came a famine in the land; they were reduced to eke out their scanty store of bread with leaves and stewed herbs. When they had just given away their two last loaves--one to the workmen engaged on the building, the other to a passing pilgrim--this supreme act of charity and faith was rewarded with a supply sent them by the lord of Knaresborough, Eustace Fitz-John. At last, after struggling on bravely for two years, they found it impossible to continue where they were, with numbers constantly increasing and means at a standstill; so the abbot went to Clairvaux and begged that some place might be assigned to them there. S. Bernard granted the request; but when Abbot Richard came back to fetch the rest of the brotherhood he found that all was changed. Hugh, dean of York, had just made over himself and all his property to Fountains. It was the turn of the tide; other donations began to flow in; soon they poured. Five years after its own rise the “Fountain” sent out a rivulet to Newminster; after that her descendants speedily covered the land. Justly did the brotherhood cherish their beloved elm-tree as a witness to the lowly beginnings whence had sprung the mightiest Cistercian house in England. It bore a yet more touching witness four centuries later, when it still stood in its green old age, the one remnant of the glory of Fountains which the sacrilegious spoiler had not thought it worth his while to touch.[196]

[192] Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. v. pp. 237, 241.

[193] _Ib._ pp. 274, 280, 281.

[194] _Ib._ pp. 265, 267, 270.

[195] So says the historian of Fountains. How this can have been, in Yorkshire and at Christmas-time, I cannot pretend to explain.

[196] The story of Fountains is in the _Narratio_ of Hugh of Kirkstall, in _Memorials of Fountains_ (Walbran, Surtees Soc.), and Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. v. pp. 292 _et seq._ See also Will. Newb., l. i. c. 14 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 50). The elm was standing in Leland’s day.

The influence of the Cistercians was different in kind from that of the earlier monasticism. The life of the Benedictines was, so to say, in the world though not of it. They sought tranquillity and retirement, but not solitude; the site of an abbey was chosen with a careful eye to the natural resources of the place, its accessibility, and the advantages which it offered for cultivation and production of all kinds. A Benedictine house almost invariably became, and indeed was intended to become, the nucleus of a flourishing lay population, either a cluster of rural settlements, or, not unfrequently, a busy, thriving town. But by the close of the tenth century, although the palmy days of the Benedictine fathers as the guardians of art and literature were in part still to come, the work in which they had been unrivalled for five hundred years, as the missionaries, cultivators and civilizers of Europe, was well-nigh accomplished; and the position into which they had unavoidably drifted as owners of vast landed property protected by special privileges was beginning to show its dangerous side. On the one hand, the secularizing spirit which had made such inroads upon the Church in general was creeping even into the cloister. On the other, the monasteries were growing rich and powerful at the expense of the parochial and diocesan organization. The laity were too apt, while showering their pious gifts upon the altars of the religious houses, to leave those of their own parish churches naked and uncared-for; and the growing habit of diverting the tithes of various estates and districts to the endowment of some abbey with which they were quite unconnected was already becoming a distinct abuse. Against all this the scheme of the Cistercians was a direct protest. They refused to have anything to do with tithes in any shape, saying that monks had no right to them; their houses were of the plainest possible construction: even in their churches scarcely an ornament was admitted to soften the stern grandeur of the architecture; there were no broidered hangings, no delicate paintings, no gold and silver vessels, no crucifixes glittering with enamel and precious gems; they hardly allowed, even for the most solemn rite, the use of any vestment more ornate than the simple white surplice or alb; and their ordinary habit, made from the wool of their flocks, was not black like that of the Benedictines, but the natural white or gray, for they looked upon dyeing as a refinement useless to men who had renounced the cares and pleasures of this life as well as the deceitfulness of riches.[197] Their aim was to be simply voices crying in the wilderness--a wilderness wherein they were resolved to dwell, as much as possible, alone. Their rule absolutely forbade the erection of a house even of their own order within a certain distance of another. But the cry that came forth from the depth of their solitude thrilled through the very hearts of men, and their influence spread far beyond the number of those who actually joined the order. It was the leaven of that influence, more than all others, which worked on and on through the nineteen years of anarchy that followed Henry’s death till it had leavened the whole lump, regenerated the Church, and made her ready to become in her turn the regenerator of the state and the nation. Already, before the order of Citeaux had been half a century in existence, William of Malmesbury, himself a member of one of the most ancient and famous of English Benedictine abbeys, could describe it as the unanimously acknowledged type of the monastic profession, the ideal which served as a mirror to the diligent, a goad to the negligent, and a model to all.[198]

[197] See abstract of rule in Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. v. pp. 224, 225.

[198] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. c. 337 (Hardy, p. 517).

How deeply the spirit of religious enthusiasm had penetrated among the people we see in the story of S. Godric. Godric was born in the last years of the Conqueror or the earliest years of the Red King at Walpole, a village in the north-western marshlands of Norfolk; thence his parents, Ælward and Ædwen, seem to have removed to a place on the river Welland, near Spalding in Lincolnshire. They were apparently free rustics of the poorest class, simple, unlearned, upright folk, who taught their three children to say the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and brought them up in the fear of God; other education they could give them none, and of worldly goods just as little. In the dreary fenland round the shores of the Wash agriculture and industry were almost unknown, and the population subsisted chiefly on whatever they found left behind by the waves on the long reaches of shining sand that lay exposed whenever the tide was out. As a boy Godric once wandered thus nearly three miles out to sea in search of food for himself and his parents; as he was retracing his steps, laden with part of a large fish which he had at length found dead upon the sand, he was overtaken by the returning tide; press onward as he might, the waves came surging higher and higher, first to his knees, then to his waist, then to his shoulders, till to the boy’s excited fancy their gurgling rose even above his head, and when at last he struggled to land with his burthen, it seemed to him that only a miracle had brought him through the waters in safety. Presently he began an independent life as a wandering chapman, trudging from village to village and selling small wares to country-folk as poor as himself. The lad was gifted with a wisdom and seriousness beyond his age; after some four years of this life he became associated with some merchants in the neighbouring towns; with them he visited the castles of the local nobles, the markets and fairs of the local trading centres, and at length made his way as far as S. Andrews in Scotland, and after that to Rome. He next, entering into partnership with some other young men, acquired a fourth share in the profits of one trading-vessel and half the ownership of another. Very soon his partners made him captain of the ship. In the long, blank days of his boyhood by the shore of the Wash he had learned to discern the face of both sea and sky; and his sturdy frame, steady hand, and keen observant eye, as well as his stedfast thoughtful temper, fitted him for a skilful seaman no less than for a successful merchant. The young sailor’s heart, however, was not wholly set upon money-getting. As he tramped over the fens with his pack upon his back he had been wont to soothe his weariness with the holy words of prayer and creed learnt at his mother’s knee; as he guided his bark through the storm, or outran the pirates who were ever on the look-out for such prey, he did not miss the lesson specially addressed to those who “go down to the sea in ships.” Wherever his business took him--Scotland, Britanny, Flanders, Denmark--he sought out the holy places of the land and made his offerings there. One of the places he visited most frequently was S. Andrews; and on his way back from thence he rarely failed to turn aside to S. Cuthbert’s old home at Holy Isle and his yet more lonely retreat at Farne, there to spend hours in ecstatic meditation upon the hermit-life which he was already longing to imitate. At last he took the cross and went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On his return, weary of independence, he became steward to a rich man who intrusted him with the whole management of his household; soon, however, he grew so disgusted with the thievery among the servants, which he saw but could not prevent, and with the master’s indifference to it, that he threw up his situation and went off on another pilgrimage, first to S. Gilles in Provence and then to Rome. He came home to his parents, but he could not stay; he must go back yet a third time, he told them, to the threshold of the Apostles; and this time his mother accompanied him. At a period when religious men of greater experience in this world’s affairs were pouring out heart-rending lamentations over the corruptions of Rome, it is touching to see that she still cast over this simple English rustic the spell which she had cast of old over Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop. It was in the land of Wilfrid and Benedict, in the wild Northumbria, with its long reaches of trackless moor and its mighty forests, scarcely penetrated save by the wild beasts, that Godric at last found refuge from the world. He sought it first at Carlisle, then a lonely outpost on the western borders of the moors, just beginning a new life after its conquest by William Rufus. His hopes of remaining there in obscurity were, however, defeated by the recognition of a kinsman, doubtless one of the Red King’s colonists, and he fled yet further into the wilderness. Weeks and months of lonely wandering through the forest brought him unexpectedly to an aged hermit at Wolsingham; there he remained nearly three years, tending the old man until his death; then a vision of S. Cuthbert sent Godric off again, first on another journey to Holy Land, and then to a hermitage in Eskdale near Whitby. Thence the persecution of the lord of the soil drove him to a surer refuge in the territory of S. Cuthbert. He settled for a while in Durham and there gave himself up to practical works of piety, frequenting the offices of devotion, giving alms out of his penury to those who were yet poorer than himself, and constantly sitting as a scholar among the children in the church of S. Mary. His kinsman at Carlisle had given him a Psalm-book; whether he ever learned actually to read it is not clear; but he already knew by heart a considerable part of the Psalter; at Durham he learned the whole; and the little book, which he had carried in all his wanderings, was to the end of his life his most cherished possession. When asked in later years how one of his fingers had grown crooked, he answered with a smile that it had become cramped with constantly grasping this book. Meanwhile he was seeking a place of retirement within easy distance of the chief object of his devotion--S. Cuthbert’s shrine. His choice was decided by the chance words of a shepherd to his comrade: “Let us go water our flocks at Finchale!” Godric offered the man his sole remaining coin--a farthing--to lead him to the spot, and saw at once that he had reached the end of his wanderings.

Even to-day the scene is wild and solemn enough, to the traveller who, making his way from Durham over the lonely country-side, suddenly dips down into a secluded hollow where the ruins of Finchale Priory stand on a low grassy ledge pressed close between the rushing stream of Wear and the dark wooded hills which, owing to the sharp bend made by the river, seem to close round it on every side. But in Godric’s day the place was wilder still. The road which now leads through the wood was a mere sheep-track worn by the feet of the flocks as they made their way down to the river; the site of the priory was a thicket of briars, thorns and nettles, and it was only on a narrow strip of rocky soil hanging over the water’s edge and thinly covered with scant herbage that the sheep could find a foothold and the hermit a place for his dwelling. His first abode was a cave scooped in the rock; later on he seems to have built himself a little hut with an oratory attached. A large stone served him at once for table and pillow; but only when utterly worn out with a long day’s toil in clearing away the thickets and preparing the soil for cultivation would he lie down for a few hours of quiet vigil rather than of sleep; and on moonlight nights the rustics of the country-side woke with a start at the ring of the hermit’s axe, echoing for miles through the woodland. The spirit of the earlier Northumbrian saints seems to breathe again in Godric’s ceaseless labour, his stern self-mortification, his rigid fasts, his nightly plunges into the Wear, where he would stand in the hollow of the rocks, up to his neck in the stream, singing Psalms all through the winter nights, while the snow fell thick on his head or the waters froze around him. With the fervour of the older asceticism he had caught too its poetic tenderness. As he wandered through forest after forest from Carlisle to the Tees he had found like S. Guthlac of old that “he who denies himself the converse of men wins the converse of birds and beasts and the company of angels.” Noxious reptiles lay passive beneath his feet as he walked along and crawled harmlessly about him as he lay on the bare ground at night; “the hissing of a viper scared him no more than the crowing of a cock.” The woods of Finchale were thronged with wild beasts of every kind; on his first arrival he was confronted by a wolf of such enormous size that he took it for a fiend in wolf’s shape, and the impression was confirmed when at the sign of the Cross the animal lay down for a moment at his feet and then slunk quietly away. The toads and vipers which swarmed along the river-side played harmlessly about the floor of his hut, and basked in the glow of his fire or nestled between his feet, till finding that they disturbed his devotions he gently bade them depart, and was at once obeyed. A stag browsing upon the young shoots of the trees in his little orchard suffered him to put a halter about its neck and lead it away into the forest. In the long hard frosts of the northern winter he would roam about seeking for frozen or starving animals, carry them home in his arms and restore them to warmth and animation at his fire. Bird and beast sought shelter from the huntsman in the hermit’s cell; one stag which he had hidden from the followers of Bishop Ralf came back day after day to be petted and caressed. Amid the silence of the valley, broken only by the rustling of the wind through the trees, the ripple of the stream over its rocky bed, and the chirping of the birds who had probably given their name to the “Finches-haugh,” strains of angel-harps and angel-voices sounded in the hermit’s ears; and the Virgin-Mother came down to teach him how to sing to her in his own English tongue. As the years went on Godric ceased to shrink from his fellow-men; his mother, his sister, came to dwell near him in religious retirement; a little nephew was admitted to tend his cow. Some of the younger monks of Durham, among them the one to whom we owe the record of Godric’s life, were the devoted attendants of his extreme age; while from the most distant quarters men of all ranks flocked to seek counsel and guidance in every variety of circumstances, temporal and spiritual, from one whom not only all Durham but almost all England looked upon as a saint and a prophet.[199]

[199] The story of S. Godric is in _Libellus de Vitâ S. Godrici_, by Reginald of Durham (Surtees Society).

It was in 1122--two years after the wreck of the _White Ship_--that Godric settled at Finchale, and he dwelt there sixty years. He is the last of the old English saints; his long life, beginning probably before the Conqueror’s death and ending only seven years before that of Henry II., is a link between the religious life of the earlier England which had passed away and that of the newer England which was arising in its place. The spiritual side of the revival was in truth closely connected with its national side. All the foreign influences which the Norman conquest had brought to bear upon the English Church had failed to stamp out her intensely national character; nay, rather, she was already beginning to lead captive her conquerors. One of the most striking signs of the times was the renewal of reverence for those older English saints whose latest successor was striving to bury himself in the woodlands of S. Cuthbert’s patrimony. Normans and English hushed their differences before the grave of the Confessor; Lanfranc was forced to acknowledge the sanctity of Ælfheah. At Canterbury itself the memory not only of Lanfranc but even of Anselm was still eclipsed by that of Dunstan. The very changes introduced by Norman prelates or Norman patrons, their zeal for discipline or their passion for architectural display, worked in the same direction. It was in the old minster of S. Werburg that Earl Hugh of Chester had placed the Benedictine colony whose settlement helped to bring about the appointment of Anselm as primate; it was in honour of another early Mercian saint, Milburg, that Roger of Shrewsbury reared his abbey at Wenlock. Bishop Richard of London planted the Austin canons at Chiche over the shrine of S. Osyth; Bishop Roger of Salisbury planted them at Oxford over that of S. Frideswide. The foundation of a bishop’s see at Ely brought a fresh lustre to the glory of S. Etheldreda; and the matchless church at Durham on which two of the very worldliest and worst of Norman prelates, William of S. Calais and Ralf Flambard, lavished all the splendour that art could devise or wealth procure, was one vast monument to the honour of S. Cuthbert. Literary activity was re-awakened by a like impulse. Two successive precentors of Canterbury, Osbern and Eadmer, had already worked up into more elaborate biographies the early memorials of S. Dunstan. Eadmer’s best inspiration came to him indeed from a nearer source; his most valuable work is the history of his own time, which he grouped, as in a picture, around the central figure of his own master, Anselm. It was doubtless from that master that he had learnt a breadth of sympathy which extended far beyond his local associations at Canterbury. The saints of the rival archbishopric, Wilfrid and Oswald, found in him a new biographer. In the northern province, Simeon and his fellow-monks were busy at Durham with the story of their own church and its patron, Cuthbert. In the south, again, Faricius, the Italian abbot of Abingdon, was writing a life of S. Ealdhelm; while almost every church of importance in central and southern England was throwing open its archives to the eager researches, and contributing its memorials of early Mercian and West-Saxon saints to swell the hagiological collections of a young monk at Ealdhelm’s own Malmesbury.

There was one cathedral monastery in the west of England where the traditions of a larger historical sentiment had never died out. The scriptorium at Worcester had been for more than a century the depository of the sole contemporary edition of the English Chronicle;[200] and there alone the national history continued to be recorded in the national tongue down to the early years of Henry I. In the middle of his reign the monks of Peterborough, probably in consequence of the loss of their own records in a fire which destroyed their abbey in 1116, borrowed a copy of the Chronicle from Worcester, and wrote it out afresh for their own use, with additions from local history and other sources. It is only in their version that the earliest Chronicle of Worcester has been preserved to us. But they did more than transcribe the story of the past. When the copyist had brought his work down to the latest event of his own day--the sinking of the _White Ship_ in 1120--another scribe carried on the annals of Peterborough and of England for ten more years, in the native speech of the land; and when he laid down his pen it was taken up by yet another English writer whose notices of contemporary history, irregular and fragmentary though they are, still cast a gleam of light across the darkness of the “nineteen winters” which lie between the death of the first King Henry and the coming of the second.[201]

[200] In strictness, we must except the years 1043–1066, when the Abingdon Chronicle is also contemporary.

[201] On the school of Worcester and its later influence, and the relations between the Chronicles of Worcester and Peterborough, see Green, _Conquest of England_, pp. 341, 342 and notes, and p. 370, note 2; and Earle, _Parallel Chronicles_, Introd.

Precious as it is to us, however, this English chronicle-work at Peterborough was a mere survival. Half its pathetic interest indeed springs from the fact that it stands utterly alone; save in that one abbey in the Fens, English had ceased to be a written tongue; the vernacular literature of England was dead. If the reviving national sentiment was to find a literary expression which could exercise any lasting and widespread influence, the vehicle must be not English but Latin. This was the work now taken up by the historical school of Worcester. Early in the twelfth century a Worcester monk named Florence made a Latin version of the Chronicle. Unhappily, he infused into his work a violent party spirit, and overlaid the plain brief statements of the annals with a mass of interpolations, additions and alterations, whose source it is impossible to trace, and which, adopted only too readily by later writers, have gone far to bring our early history into what until a very recent time seemed well-nigh hopeless confusion. But the very extent of his influence proves how true was the instinct which led him--patriot of the most narrow, insular, exaggerated type, as the whole tone of his work shows him to have been--to clothe the ancient vernacular annals in a Latin dress, in the hope of increasing their popularity. If English history has in one way suffered severely at his hands, it owes him a debt of gratitude nevertheless upon another ground. While the last English chronicle lay isolated and buried in the scriptorium at Peterborough, it was through the Latin version of Florence that the national and literary tradition of the school of Worcester made its way throughout the length and breadth of the land, and inspired a new generation of English historians. Simeon of Durham, copying out and piecing together the old Northumbrian annals which had gone on growing ever since Bæda’s death, no sooner met with the chronicle of Florence than he made it the foundation of his own work for the whole space of time between Ælfred’s birth in 848 and Florence’s own death in 1118; and from Simeon it was handed down, through the work of another local historian, to be incorporated in the great compilation of Roger of Howden.[202] Henry of Huntingdon, who soon after 1125, at the instigation of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, began to collect materials for a history of the English, may have learnt from the same source his method of dealing with the English Chronicle, though he seems, naturally enough, to have chiefly used the copy which lay nearest to his own hand at Peterborough. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of England, a finer and subtler intellect than that of either Florence or Simeon or Henry had caught the historical impulse in an old West-Saxon monastery.

[202] On Simeon, see Bishop Stubbs’s preface to Roger of Howden, vol. i. (Rolls ed.); Mr. Arnold’s prefaces to Simeon, vol. i., and Henry of Huntingdon (_ibid._); and Mr. Hodgson Hinde’s preface to Simeon (Surtees Soc.).

William of Malmesbury was born some three or four years before the Conqueror’s death,[203] in or near the little town in Wiltshire from which his surname was derived. One of his parents seems to have been Norman, the other English.[204] They early destined their son to a literary career; “My father,” he says, “impressed upon me that if I turned aside to other pursuits, I should but waste my life and imperil my good name. So, remembering the recommendation to make a virtue of necessity, I persuaded myself, young as I was, to acquire a willing taste for that to which I could not in honour show myself disinclined.” It is plain that submission to the father’s wishes cost no great effort to the boy. As he tells us himself, “Reading was the pleasure whose charms won me in my boyhood and grew with my growing years.”[205] His lot was cast in a pleasant place for one of such a disposition. Fallen though it was from its ancient greatness, some remnants of its earlier culture still hung about Malmesbury abbey. The place owed its rise to an Irish recluse, Maidulf, who, in the seventh century sought retirement from the world in the forest which at that time covered all the northern part of Wiltshire. Maidulf, however, was a scholar as well as a saint; and in those days, when Ireland was the light of the whole western world, no forest, were it never so gloomy and impenetrable, could long hide an Irish scholar from the eagerness of the disciples who flocked to profit by his teaching. The hermitage grew into a school, and the school into a religious community. Its second abbot, Ealdhelm, is one of the most brilliant figures in the history of early West-Saxon learning and culture. The architecture of Wessex owed its birth to the churches which he reared along the edge of the forest-tract of Dorset and Wiltshire, from the seat of his later bishopric at Sherborne to his early home at Malmesbury; its Latin literature was moulded by the learning which he brought back from Archbishop Theodore’s school at Canterbury; and the whole ballad literature of southern England sprang from his English songs. The West-Saxon kings, from Ine to Eadgar, showered their benefactions upon the house of one whom they were proud to call their kinsman. It escaped as by a miracle from the destruction of the Danish wars; and in the Confessor’s reign its wealth and fame were great enough to tempt the diocesan bishop, Herman of Ramsbury, into a project for making it the seat of his bishopric. Darker times began with the coming of the first Norman abbot, Turold, whose stern and warlike character, more befitting a soldier than a monk, soon induced the king to transfer him to Peterborough, as a check upon the English outlaws and their Danish allies in the camp of refuge at Ely. His successor at Malmesbury, Warin, alienated for his own profit the lands and the treasures which earlier benefactors had lavished upon the abbey, and showed his contempt for the old English abbots by turning the bones of every one of them, except Ealdhelm, out of their resting-places on either side the high altar, and thrusting them into a corner of one of the lesser churches of the town, with the mocking comment: “Whosoever is mightiest among them may help the rest!” William’s boyhood, however, fell in happier days. About the time of his birth Warin died, and the next abbot, Godfrey, set himself to a vigorous work of material, moral and intellectual reform which must have been in full career when William entered the abbey-school.[206] The bent of the lad’s mind showed itself in the subjects which he chose for special study out of the general course taught in the school. “Logic, which serves to give point to our discourse, I tasted only with my ears; to physic, which cures the diseases of our bodies, I paid somewhat closer heed. But I searched deeply into the various branches of moral philosophy, whose dignity I hold in reverence, because it is self-evident to those who study it, and disposes our minds to virtuous living;--and especially into history, which, preserving in a pleasing record the manners of times gone by, by example excites its readers to follow that which is good and shun that which is evil.”[207] Young as he was, his studious habits gained him the confidence of the abbot. Godfrey’s darling scheme was the formation of a library; and when at length he found time and means to attempt its execution, it was William who became his most energetic assistant. “Methinks I have a right to speak of this work,” he tells us with pardonable pride, “for herein I came behind none of my elders, nay, if it be not boastful to say so, I far outstripped them all. I rivalled the good abbot’s own diligence in collecting that pile of books; I did my utmost to help in his praiseworthy undertaking. May those who now enter into our labours duly cherish their fruits!”[208]

[203] This conclusion, which seems the only one possible, as to the date of William’s birth is that of Mr. W. de Gray Birch, _On the Life and Writings of Will. of Malmesbury_, pp. 3, 4 (from _Trans. R. Soc. of Lit._, vol. x., new series).

[204] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. iii. (Hardy, p. 389).

[205] _Ib._ prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, p. 143).

[206] The history of Malmesbury is in Will. Malm.’s _Vita S. Aldhelmi_, i.e. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. (Hamilton, pp. 332 _et seq._)

[207] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, p. 143).

[208] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 271 (Hamilton, p. 431).

It is not difficult to guess in what department of the library William took the deepest interest. Half Norman as he was by descent, the chosen literary assistant of a Norman abbot,[209] it was natural that his first endeavour should be to “collect, at his own expense, some histories of foreign nations.” As he pondered over them in the quiet cloisters of the old English monastery which by this time had become his home, the question arose--could nothing be found among our own people worthy of the remembrance of posterity?[210] He had but to look around him, and the question answered itself. To the antiquary and the scholar Malmesbury was already classic ground, where every step brought him face to face with some memory of the glories of Wessex under the old royal house from which Ealdhelm sprang. To Ealdhelm’s own fame indeed even the prejudices of Abbot Warin had been forced to yield, and a new translation of the saint’s relics in 1078 had been followed by a fresh outburst of popular devotion and a fresh influx of pilgrims to his shrine. Every year his festival brought together a crowd of devotees, of sick folk seeking the aid of his miraculous powers, and--as generally happened in such cases--of low jesters seeking only to make their profit out of the amusement which they afforded to the gaping multitude. The punishment of one of these, who was smitten with frenzy and only cured after three days’ intercession on the part of the monks, during which he lay chained before the shrine, was one of the most vivid recollections of William’s childhood.[211] In the vestiary of the abbey-church he beheld with wonder and awe the chasuble which, as a quaint legend told, the saint in his pious abstraction of mind had once hung upon a sunbeam, and whose unusual length helped to furnish a mental picture of his tall stately form.[212] Among the older literary treasures which served as a nucleus for the new library, he gazed with scarcely less reverence on a Bible which Ealdhelm had bought of some foreign merchants at Dover when he visited Kent for his consecration.[213] The muniment-chest was full of charters granted by famous kings of old, Ceadwalla and Ine, Ælfred and Eadward, Æthelstan and Eadgar. In the church itself a golden crucifix, a fragment of the wood of the Cross, and several reliquaries containing the bones of early Gaulish saints were shown as Æthelstan’s gifts, and the king himself lay buried beneath the tower.[214] On the left of the high altar, facing S. Ealdhelm’s shrine, stood a tomb which in William’s day was believed to cover the remains of a scholar of wider though less happy fame than Ealdhelm himself--John Scotus, who, flying from his persecutors in Gaul, was said to have established a school under Ælfred’s protection at Malmesbury, and to have been there pricked to death by his pupils with their styles in the little church of S. Laurence.[215] The scanty traces of a vineyard on the hill-side which sheltered the abbey to the north were associated with a visitor from a yet more distant land. In the time of the Danish kings there came seeking for admission at Malmesbury a stranger of whom the brotherhood knew no more than that he was a Greek and a monk, and that his name was Constantine. His gentle disposition, abstemious habits, and quiet retiring ways won him general esteem and love; his whole time was spent in prayer and in the cultivation of the vineyard which he planted with his own hands for the benefit of the community; and only when at the point of death he arrayed himself in a pallium drawn from the scrip which he always carried at his side, was it revealed to the astonished Englishmen that he had been an archbishop in his Eastern home.[216]

[209] Godfrey was a monk of Jumièges; Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 271 (Hamilton, p. 431).

[210] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, p. 142).

[211] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 275 (Hamilton, pp. 438, 439).

[212] _Ib._ c. 218 (p. 365).

[213] _Ib._ c. 224 (pp. 376–378).

[214] _Ib._ c. 246 (p. 397).

[215] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 240 (Hamilton, p. 394), and _Gesta Reg._, l. ii. c. 122 (Hardy, p. 190). The story seems however to be false. It probably originated in a confusion, first between John Scotus and John the Old-Saxon, who was nearly murdered by the monks of Athelney; and secondly, between both these Johns and a third scholar bearing the same name, who is mentioned by Gotselin of Canterbury as buried at Malmesbury, but whose real history seems to be lost. See Lanigan, _Eccles. Hist. of Ireland_, vol. iii. pp. 300, 301, 315, 316, 318–320.

[216] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 260 (Hamilton, p. 415).

Under the influence of surroundings such as these William began his studies in English history. But he was brought to a standstill at the very threshold for lack of a guide. From the death of Bæda to his own day, he could not by the most diligent researches discover a single English writer worthy of the name of historian. “There are indeed certain records of antiquity in the native tongue, arranged according to the years of our Lord after the manner of a chronicle, whereby the times which have gone by since that great man (Bæda) have been rescued from complete oblivion. For of Æthelweard, a noble and illustrious man who set himself to expound those chronicles in Latin, it is better to say nothing; his aim indeed would be quite to my mind, if his style were not unbearable to my taste.”[217] The work of Florence was probably as yet altogether unpublished; it was certainly not yet finished, nor does it appear to have been heard of at Malmesbury. That of Eadmer, whose first edition--ending at the death of Anselm--must have been the last new book of the day, received from William a just tribute of praise, both as to its subject-matter and its style; but it was essentially what its title imported, a _History of Recent Events_; the introductory sketch prefixed to it was a mere outline, and, starting as it did only from Eadgar’s accession, still left between its beginning and Bæda’s death a yawning chasm of more than two centuries which the young student at Malmesbury saw no means of bridging over save by his own labour.[218] “So, as I could not be satisfied with what I found written of old, I began to scribble myself.”[219]

[217] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. i. (Hardy, pp. 1, 2).

[218] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. i. (Hardy, p. 2).

[219] _Ib._ prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, pp. 143, 144).

Such, as related by the author himself, was the origin of William’s first historical work, the _Gesta Regum Anglorum_ or _Acts of the English Kings_, followed a few years later by a companion volume devoted to the acts of the bishops. He was stirred by the same impulse of revived national sentiment which stirred Florence of Worcester to undertake his version of the Chronicle. But the impulse acted very differently on two different minds. William’s _Gesta Regum_ were first published in 1120, two years after the death of Florence. The work of Florence, although he never mentions it, had doubtless reached him by this time, and must certainly have been well known to him before he issued his revised edition in 1128. To William, indeed, the Chronicle had no need of a Latin interpreter; and he probably looked upon Florence in no other light. He set before himself a loftier aim. In his own acceptation of the word, he is the first English historian since Bæda; he is in truth the founder of a new school of historical composition. William’s temper, as displayed in his works, might form the subject of a curious psychological study. It is a temper which, in many respects, seems to belong rather to a man of the world in our own day than to a monk of the twelfth century. He has none of the narrowness of the cloister; he has little of the prejudices common to his profession or his age; he has still less prejudice of race. The Norman and the English blood in his veins seem completely to neutralize each other; while Florence colours the whole story not only of the Norman but even of the Danish conquest with his violent English sympathies, William calmly balances the one side against the other, and criticizes them both with the judicial impartiality of a spectator to whom the matter has a purely philosophical interest. The whole bent of his mind indeed is philosophical, literary, artistic, rather than political. With him the study of history is a scientific study, and its composition a work of art. His aim is to entertain his readers quite as much as to instruct them. He utterly discards the old arrangement of events “by the years of our Lord,” and groups his materials in defiance of chronology on whatever plan seems to him best adapted to set them in the most striking and effective light. He never loses sight of his reader; he is always in dread of wearying him with dry political details, always seizing an opportunity to break in upon their monotony with some curious illustration, some romantic episode, some quaint legend, or--when he reaches his own time--some personal scandal which he tells with all the zest of a modern newspaper-writer. His love of story-telling, his habit of flying off at a tangent in the midst of his narrative and dragging in a string of irrelevant tales, sometimes of the most frivolous kind, is positively irritating to a student bent only upon following the main thread of the history. But in William of Malmesbury the main thread is often of less real value than the mass of varied adornment and illustration with which it is overlaid. William is no Bæda; but, Bæda excepted, there are few of our medieval historians who can vie with him in the telling of a story. His long and frequent digressions into foreign affairs are often of great intrinsic value, and they show a depth of insight into the history of other nations and a cosmopolitan breadth of thought and feeling quite without parallel in his time. His penetration into individual characters, his power of seizing upon their main features and sketching them to the life in a few rapid skilful strokes--as in his pictures of the Norman kings or of the Angevin counts--has perhaps not many rivals at any time. Even when his stories are most utterly worthless in themselves, there is a value in the light which they throw upon the writer’s own temper or on that of the age in which he lived. Not a few of them have a further interest as fragments saved from the wreck of a popular literature whose very existence, but for William and his fellow-historians, we might never have known. The Norman conquest had doomed to gradual extinction a vast growth of unwritten popular verse which, making its way with the wandering gleeman into palace and minster, hall and cottage, had coloured the whole social life and thought of England for four hundred years. The gleeman’s days were numbered. He had managed to hold his ground against the growing hostility of the Church; but the coming of the stranger had fatally narrowed his sphere of influence. His very language was unintelligible to the nobles who sat in the seat of his former patrons; _jongleur_ and _ménestrel_ from over sea had taken in the king’s court and the baron’s castle the place which the gleeman had once filled in the halls of ealdorman and thegn, and only the common people still hailed his appearance as a welcome break in the monotonous drudgery of their daily life. Before his day was quite over, however, the new school of patriotic historians had arisen; and they plunged into the mass of traditional and romantic lore of which he was the depositary as into a treasure-house from whose stores they might fill up the gaps and deck the bare outlines of the structure which they were building up on the meagre foundations of the Chronicle. Florence was the first to enter upon this somewhat dangerous process. William drank more deeply of a stream whose source lay at his own door: a simple English ballad which the country-folk around Malmesbury in his day still chanted as they went about their work was the spell by which S. Ealdhelm had drawn their forefathers to listen, first to his singing and then to his preaching, four hundred years before.[220] The same spell of song, handed on from generation to generation, and passing from the gleeman’s lips into the pages of the twelfth century historians with William at their head, has transformed the story of the later royal house of Wessex into a romance that too often only serves to darken the true character of the period which it professes to illustrate. What it does illustrate is not the tenth century but the twelfth. It helps us to learn something of the attitude of the national revival towards the national past, by showing us the England of Æthelstan and Eadmund, of Eadgar and Dunstan, not as it actually was, but as it appeared to the England of Henry I. and Roger of Sarum,--to the England of Florence of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury.

[220] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 190 (Hamilton, p. 336).

We must not take William as an average specimen of the monastic culture and intelligence of his day. In any age and in any circumstances he would probably have been a man of exceptional genius. But his outward life and surroundings were those of the ordinary monk of his time; and those surroundings are set in a very striking light by the fact, abundantly evident from his writings, that such a man as William could feel himself thoroughly at home in them, and could find in them full scope for the developement of his powers. It was in truth precisely his monastic profession which gave him opportunities of acquiring by personal experience, even more than by wide reading, such a varied and extensive knowledge of the world as could hardly be obtained in any other circumstances. A very slight acquaintance with William is enough to dispel all notions of the medieval monk as a solitary student, a mere bookworm, knowing no more of the world and of mankind than he could learn from the beatings of his own heart and within the narrow circle of the brotherhood among whom he dwelt. A community like that of Malmesbury was in active and constant relations with every rank and class of society all over the kingdom. Its guest-hall stood open alike to king and bishop, to Norman baron or English yeoman, to the high-born pilgrim who came back from a distant shore laden with relics and with tales of the splendours of Byzantium or the marvels of Holy Land, to the merchant who came to sell his curious foreign wares at the local fair and to pay his devotions, like S. Godric, at the local shrine, as well as to the monk of another house who came, perhaps, to borrow a book from the library, to compare notes with the local history, or to submit some literary question to the judgement of the great local scholar, whoever he might happen to be. All the political news, all the latest intellectual speculations, all the social gossip of the day, found its way thither by one or other of these channels, and was discussed within the safe shelter of the inviolable convent-walls with a boldness and freedom impossible amid the society of the outside world, fettered by countless bonds of custom, interest, and mutual dependence. The abbot ranked as a great noble who sat among earls and bishops in the meetings of the Great Council, whom they treated almost as an equal, and whom they came, with a train of secular clerks and lay followers, to visit and consult on matters of Church or state or of their own personal interests. If the king himself chanced to pass that way, it was matter of course that he should lodge in the monastery. William’s vivid portraits of all the three Norman kings were doubtless drawn, if not from the observation of his own eyes, at any rate from that of his friend Abbot Godfrey; his portrait of Henry I. was in all likelihood painted from life as the king paid his devotions before S. Ealdhelm’s shrine or feasted at the abbot’s table in the refectory, or--quite as probably--as William, in his turn, sat in the royal hall discussing some literary question with his friend and patron, the king’s son Earl Robert of Gloucester, if not actually with the king himself. The hospitality of the abbey was repaid by that which greeted its brethren wherever they went, on business for their house or for themselves. The monk went in and out of castle or town, court or camp, as a privileged person. Such a man as William, indeed, might be sure of a welcome anywhere; and William, indefatigable as a student, was almost equally so as a traveller. The little sketches of town and country which illustrate his survey of the dioceses of England in the _Gesta Pontificum_ must have been made on the spot. He had seen the marvels of Glastonbury;[221] he had probably taken down the legend of S. Eadmund of East-Anglia on the very site of the martyrdom;[222] he had seen with his own eyes the Roman walls of Carlisle, and heard with his own ears the rough Yorkshire speech, of which, puzzling as it was to a southerner, he yet learned enough to catch from some northern gleeman the echo of Northumbria’s last heroic lay, the lay of Waltheof at the gate of York;[223] he had, we cannot doubt, wandered with delight up that vale of Severn which he paints in such glowing colours, and been drawn to write the life of S. Wulfstan by a sight of his church and his tomb at Worcester. His own cell at Malmesbury was the garner in which treasures new and old, of every kind, gathered from one end of England to the other, were stored up to be sifted and set in order at leisure amid that perfect tranquillity, that absolute security from outward disturbance and worldly care, which to the modern student is but a hopeless dream.

[221] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 91 (Hamilton, pp. 196–198); _Gesta Reg._, l. i. c. 20 (Hardy, pp. 32–34); _Antiq. Glaston._, _passim_.

[222] _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 74 (Hamilton, pp. 152–155); _Gesta Reg._, l. ii. c. 213 (Hardy, p. 366).

[223] _Gesta Reg._, l. iii. c. 253 (Hardy, p. 427).

The new intellectual movement, however, was by no means confined to the cloister. Clerk and layman had their share in it; king and queen encouraged it warmly, and their sympathy with the patriotic revival which animated it was marked enough to excite the mockery of their Norman courtiers, who nicknamed them “Godric and Godgifu.”[224] Learning and culture of every kind found a ready welcome at the court; Henry never forgot the favourite maxim of his youth, that “an unlettered king is but a crowned ass.”[225] His tastes were shared by his good queen Maude, who had received in her aunt’s convent at Romsey such an education as was probably given to few women of her time; and in her later years, when the king’s manifold occupations beyond sea left her alone in her palace at Westminster, the crowd of poor and sick folk on whom she bestowed her boundless charities was almost equalled by that of the scholars and poets who vied with each other to gain her ear by some new feat of melody or of rime.[226] Her stepson Earl Robert of Gloucester was renowned as a scholar no less than as a warrior and a statesman; to him William of Malmesbury dedicated his chief historical works, as to a comrade and an equal in the world of letters; it may even be that the “Robert” of whom we once catch a glimpse, sitting in the library at Malmesbury, eagerly turning over its treasures, and suggesting plans of work to the willing friend at his side, is no other than the king’s son.[227] The secular clergy had no mind to be outstripped by the regulars in literary activity; Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, a nephew of the justiciar, urged his archdeacon Henry of Huntingdon to compose a _History of the English_ in emulation of the _Gesta Regum_. Nor did history alone absorb the intellectual energy of the time. Natural science had its followers, among them the king himself, who studied it in characteristically practical fashion at Woodstock, where he kept a menagerie full of lions, leopards, camels, lynxes and other strange beasts collected from all parts of the world;[228] and the “Bestiary” of an Anglo-Norman poet, Philip de Thaun, found a patroness in his second queen, Adeliza of Louvain. A scholar of old English race, Adelard of Bath, carried his researches into a wider field. Towards the close of the eleventh century he had crossed the sea to study in the schools of Tours and Laon. At the latter place he set up a school of his own, but he soon quitted it to enter upon a long course of wandering in distant lands. He crossed the Alps, made his way to the great medical school at Salerno, thence into Greece and Asia Minor, and finally, it seems, to the great centre of Arab culture and learning at Bagdad, or what we now call Cairo. Thence, after seven years’ absence, he returned to England soon after the accession of Henry I., and published his first book, a philosophical allegory dedicated to Bishop William of Syracuse, whose acquaintance he had made in his travels. He next opened a school, apparently in Normandy, for the diffusion of the scientific lore which he had acquired in the East. He had picked up, among other things, an Arabic version of Euclid, and the Latin translation which he made of this became the text-book of all succeeding mathematicians for centuries after. But his teaching of the physical science of the East was vehemently opposed by western scholars; his own nephew, who had been one of his pupils at Laon, was among his opponents, and it was in the shape of a discussion with this nephew that Adelard put forth, under the title of _Quæstiones Naturales_, a plea for a more free inquiry into the principles of natural science, instead of the blind following of old authorities which had hitherto contented the scholars of the West.[229] In the last years of Henry’s reign he seems to have returned once more to settle in his native land.[230] His career shows how daring was the spirit of enterprize now stirring among Englishmen, and how vast was the range of study and experience now thrown open to English scholars. We see that England was already within reach of that wider world of which her Angevin kings were soon to make her a part.

[224] _Ib._ l. v. c. 394 (p. 620).

[225] _Ib._ c. 390 (p. 616).

[226] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 418 (Hardy, p. 650).

[227] “In historicis nos narrationibus occupatos detorsit a proposito tua, Rodberte, voluntas. Nuper enim cum in bibliothecâ nostrâ sederemus, et quisque pro suo studio libros evolveret, impegisti in Amalarium de Ecclesiasticis Officiis. Cujus cum materiam ex primâ statim tituli fronte cognosceris, amplexus es occasionem quâ rudimenta novæ professionis animares. Sed quia confestim animi tui alacritatem turbavit testimoniorum perplexitas et sermonum asperitas, rogasti ut eum abbreviarem. Ego autem ... munus injunctum non aspernanter accepi.” ... (Will. Malm. _Abbreviatio Amalarii_, prolog.) Mr. Birch (_Will. Malm._, p. 43) takes this Robert to be the earl. But does not the phrase about “nova professio” rather suggest a new-made monk of the house?

[228] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 409 (Hardy, p. 638).

[229] On Adelard, see Wright, _Biog. Britt. Litt._, vol. ii. pp. 94–100.

[230] “In Perdonis ... Adelardo de Bada, 4s. et 6d.” Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter) p. 22--among the “Nova placita et novæ conventiones” of Wiltshire. Mr. Hunter (_ib._, pref. p. xxi.) takes this to be the traveller, but Mr. Wright doubts it.

What gave scope for all this social, moral and intellectual developement was, to borrow a phrase from the Peterborough Chronicler, “the good peace” that Henry, like his father, “made in this land.”[231] The foundations of the political and administrative system by which that peace was preserved inviolate to the end of his reign were laid in the three years succeeding the battle of Tinchebray--the brightest period of Henry’s prosperity, and the only time in his life when he himself could enjoy, on both sides of the sea, the tranquillity which he fought to secure. In England, indeed, from the day when he drove out Robert of Bellême in 1103 to his own death in 1135, the peace was never broken save by an occasional disturbance on the Welsh border. Even in Wales, however, the settlement of the Flemings and the appointment of a “Saxon” bishop to the see of St. David’s[232] were doing their work; and though in Henry’s later years the restlessness of the Welsh princes and people twice provoked him to march into their country, the danger from them was never great enough to mar the general security of the realm. From Scotland there was still less to fear; its three successive kings, Eadgar, Alexander and David, were the brothers of the good queen Maude and the faithful allies of her husband. But in Henry’s dominions beyond the sea, the state of things was very different. In the duchy of Normandy the year 1110 saw the opening of a new phase of politics, the beginning of a train of complications in which England seemed at the moment less directly concerned than in the earlier struggles between the king and the barons, but which in the end exercised an important influence on the course of her after history by bringing her into contact with the power of Anjou. Before we can trace the steps whereby this came to pass, we must change our line of thought and study. We must turn aside from the well-worn track of English history to travel awhile in less familiar paths; we must leave our own land and make our way into the depths of Gaul; we must go back from the broad daylight of the twelfth century into the dim dawn of the ninth, there to seek out the beginnings and thence to follow the romantic story of the house of Anjou.

[231] Eng. Chron. a. 1087.

[232] Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 68.

CHAPTER II.

THE BEGINNINGS OF ANJOU.

843–987.

The cradle-land of our Angevin kings, the original county of Anjou, was a small territory in central Gaul, lying about the lower course of the river Loire and that of its affluent the Mayenne[233] or Maine. Its chief portion consisted of a wedge-shaped tract hemmed in between the right bank of the Loire, which bounded it on the south, and the streams of Loir, Sarthe and Mayenne, which flowed round it on the north and west; along its southern border stretched a belt of alluvial soil which in winter and in rainy seasons became a vast flood-drowned fen, swallowed up by the overflowing waters of the Loire; to the northward, the country consisted chiefly of level uplands broken here and there by patches of forest and tiny river-valleys, and rising in the west into a range of low hills, which again died down into a fringe of swampy meadow-land along the eastern bank of the Mayenne. A narrow strip of ground on the southern bank of the Loire, with a somewhat wider strip of hilly and wooded country beyond the Mayenne, completed the district to which its earliest known inhabitants, a Gallic tribe called Andes or Andegavi, have left their name. A few miles above the angle formed by the confluence of the two rivers, a lofty mass of black slate rock thrown out from the upland furnished a ready-made fortress important alike by its natural strength and by its geographical position, commanding the main lines of communication with central, northern and southern Gaul through the valleys of the Loire and its tributaries. Under the Roman conquerors of Gaul the place was called Juliomagus; the hill was crowned by a lofty citadel, and strengthened by a circuit of rampart walls; while from its crest a road struck eastward along Loire-side into the heart of central Gaul, another followed the westward course of the river to its junction with the sea, and others struck southward and northward into Aquitania and across the upland into the basin of the Seine. In the middle of the fourth century a Christian bishop, probably one of a band of mission-preachers who shared with the famous S. Martin of Tours the work of evangelizing central Gaul, laid beside the citadel of Juliomagus the foundations of a church, which in after-time grew into the cathedral of S. Maurice; and it is from the extent of the diocese over which his successors ruled that we learn the extent of the civil jurisdiction of Juliomagus. A later bishop, Albinus, left his name to the great abbey of S. Aubin, founded in Merovingian days on the slope of the hill just outside the city wall; a monastery dedicated to S. Sergius grew up to the north, in a low-lying marshy meadow by the river-side; while the place of the Roman prefects was taken by a succession of Frankish counts, the delegates first of the Merovingian kings of Neustria and then of the Karolingian emperors; and the Roman name of Juliomagus itself gave way to a native appellation cognate with that of the district of which it was the head--“Andegavis,” Angers.[234]

[233] From the point where the Sarthe joins it, this river is now called the Maine. In the middle ages it had but one name, _Meduana_, from its source to its junction with the Loire. The old nomenclature is far more convenient for historical purposes.

[234] The ecclesiastical history of Angers is in _Gallia Christiana_, vol. xiv. col. 543 _et seq._

City and county acquired a new importance through the political arrangements by which the Karolingian realms were divided between the three sons of the Emperor Louis the Gentle. By a treaty made at Verdun in 843, the original Frankish kingdom and its Saxon dependencies, answering roughly to what we call Germany now-a-days, fell to the second brother Louis; the Gallic conquests of the Franks, between the Moselle, the Rhone, the Pyrenees and the ocean, were the share of the youngest, Charles the Bald; while the necessity that the eldest brother Lothar, as Emperor, should hold the two capitals, Rome and Aachen, involved the creation in his favour of a middle kingdom consisting of a long narrow string of countries reaching from the Frisian to the Pontine marshes. Although the limits thus fixed were afterwards altered more than once, the main lines of this treaty left indelible traces, and from that day we may date the beginning of modern France and modern Germany. The tripartite division, however, was soon overthrown by the extinction of the elder or Lotharingian line; the incongruous middle kingdom fell asunder and became a bone of furious contention between its two neighbours, and the imperial crown itself was soon an object of rivalry no less fierce. On the other hand, the extent of territory actually subject to Charles the Bald fell far short of the limits assigned to him by the treaty. Even Charles the Great had scarcely been able to maintain more than a nominal sway over the vast region which stretched from the southern shores of the Loire to the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean Sea, and was known by the general name of Aquitania; its princes and its people, wrapped in the traditions of Roman culture and Roman greatness, held disdainfully aloof from the barbarian conquerors of the north, and remained utterly indifferent to claims of supremacy which each succeeding Karolingian found it more and more hopeless to enforce. To the west, again, in the peninsula of Britanny or Armorica, the ancient Celtic race preserved, as in the Welsh hills of our own island, its native tongue, its primitive laws and customs, and its separate political organization under a dynasty of native princes who owed, indeed, a nominal allegiance to the West-Frankish overlord at Laon, but whose subjection to him was scarcely more real than that of the princes of Aquitania, while their disaffection was far more active and far more threatening; for the pirate fleets of the northmen were now hovering about the coast of Gaul as about that of Britain; and the Celts of the Breton peninsula, like the West-Welsh of Cornwall, were ever ready to make common cause with these marauders against the Teutonic conquerors of the land.