FROM JUSTINIAN TO LUTHER

 

IV

BEDE AND THE VIKINGS

 

Since the coming of St. Augustine only two generations had passed when the Christian literature of England began to bloom. It began with two names of which any nation might be proud, Aldhelm and Bede. Books and a love of books had been brought to England in abundance by Theodore and Hadrian. They were accompanied on their journey to England by Benedict Biscop, Abbot of Wearmouth, who made seven visits to Rome and never came back without quantities of books, not to mention masons and church ornaments. Aldhelm and Bede are acquainted with the standard Latin poets, heathen and Christian, as well as the great Latin fathers. Very soon England was on a level with the Continent and with Ireland in the apparatus of scholarship, and the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels and the sculptured Ruthwell cross remain to tell us what English art could produce before England was devastated by the Danes.

St. ADHELM

St. Aldhelm (d. 709), Bishop of Sherborne, was a pupil of Theodore at Canterbury. He knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and took a lead in the intellectual movement of the time, though, like some other learned scholars, he found arithmetic a troublesome science. He excelled as a musician and a poet, and when he found that people were unwilling to listen to his sermons, he stood on a bridge and sang until he secured their attention. Some of his intricate Latin writings remain, but unhappily his English poems, loved by King Alfred, have perished. Like Wilfrid, he was keenly interested in architecture. His great churches at Malmesbury and Sherborne were rebuilt in later times, and even the little Saxon church of St. Lawrence, Bradford-on-Avon, though sometimes considered a specimen of his work, is probably of the tenth century. More admirable than his zeal for material buildings was his sincere desire to promote union between the English and the Celts of Devon and Cornwall. He treated the Celts as men who could be convinced by reasons, with the result that many conformed to the usages which he advocated. He visited Rome during the pontificate of Sergius I and there received a grant of privileges for his monasteries.

BEDE

Bede (d. 735), monk of the monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul at Wearmouth, was the most important writer of his age. The library collected by Benedict Biscop enabled him to sum up in himself all the learning that could then be known in western Europe. He knew Greek and possibly knew Hebrew. And he could write limpid Latin, with a scholar's instinct for the most trustworthy evidence and an artist's sense of the arresting and the picturesque. His scientific books include works on grammar and chronology; his strictly theological works consist mainly of commentaries and homilies. His chief historical work is his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a book which has won for Bede the title of the Father of English History. It is largely drawn from different local sources, often oral, blended with admirable art. He loved to read and meditate upon the Scriptures, and from the beginning to the end of his career he manifested a spirit of intense and gentle piety.

When a little boy in the monastery of Jarrow, a pestilence so thinned the number of the monks that the Abbot Ceolfrith was left to chant the services alone. For a week he did it alone, and then the dreariness of the sacred task became more than he could bear. But the boy was eager to help his teacher, and the two together persevered, singing the whole of the daily services until there were others ready to take their part in the choir. Few stories are so touching as the story of Bede's death. The day of his death was the Feast of the Ascension, May the 26th, 735. In spite of increasing weakness he had continued to lecture and to dictate his English translation of the Gospel of St. John, saying, “I do not want my boys to read what is false”.

When the festival came and all others had gone to join in the procession of the day, Bede and his scribe reached the last chapter of the Gospel, and in the evening the last sentence. After a while the youth said, “Now it is finished”.

“Well”, said Bede, “thou hast spoken truly: It is finished”.

Then, lying on the pavement of his cell, he chanted the doxology, and as he uttered the words 'the Holy Ghost' he breathed his last. He was buried at Jarrow, but his relics were placed in the twelfth century in a precious casket in the beautiful Galilee of the cathedral church of Durham. The casket and its contents were plundered at the Reformation, though the hones of St. Cuthbert in the same church were fortunately so buried as to escape destruction or dispersion.

THE ENGLISH PILGRIMS

Anglo-Saxons, no less than Celts, were addicted to pilgrimages. In Great Britain, as elsewhere, the Holy Land and Rome were the two lodestars of the pious wanderers. The former was hallowed with memories of the Redeemer, the latter was 'the threshold of the apostles'. The Abbot Adamnan of Iona wrote a treatise De locis sanctis, written by him from the dictation of Arculfus, a Frankish bishop who had visited Palestine and had been shipwrecked on the British coast. An abridgement of the book was written by Bede. In the eighth century one of the most famous of English pilgrims was Willibald. With his father and brother he traversed France and northern Italy. His father died in Lucca; but Willibald went on to Rome, Syracuse, Ephesus, Damascus, and Jerusalem. He proceeded to Constantinople, and returned to Italy in 729, having been absent from England nine years. He then became a monk of Monte Cassino and in 739 was sent by Pope Gregory III to help St. Boniface in the work of converting Germany. Boniface made him bishop of the Middle-Frankish see of Eichstatt, where he died and was buried in 786. His life was written by a nun of the convent of Heidenheim, who probably based it on notes by Willibald himself. In the time of St. Boniface great numbers went from England to Rome. The stream had begun to flow about 653, when Benedict Biscop paid his first visit to Rome, to be soon followed by Wilfrid, who had been his companion for part of the way. In reference to Wilfrid’s journey his friend Eddius Stephanus says expressly that “as yet that road was untrodden by our nation”.

The moral dangers which beset the pilgrims, especially the women, were obvious to prudent eyes. Boniface deplores the habit of Englishwomen going to Rome as frequently fatal to their chastity. And when the Abbess Ethelburga of Fladbury found her projected pilgrimage impracticable, Alcuin, in the spirit of St. Gregory of Nyssa, assured her that it was no great loss. “Expend the money which thou hast gathered for the journey on the support of the poor; and if thou givest as thou canst, thou shalt reap as thou wilt”.

The coming of the Danish Vikings threatened the whole of the growing life of England. Late in the eighth century they began their raids on the eastern coast. It is probable that they were hard pressed on the Continent by the advance of Charlemagne and his conquest of their Saxon neighbors. At first they came to plunder monasteries and villages, and soon departed. Gradually they began to stay longer and to plunder farther inland, always manifesting a special hatred of everything that was Christian. Then they wintered in East Anglia, and in 867 advanced into Northumbria, captured York, and became masters of nearly all the country between the Forth and the Humber; where the Christianity and the civilization which had taken root for two centuries were almost annihilated. In 870 the Danes became masters of Mercia; they ravaged the lands between the Humber and the Thames; the great monasteries, including Crowland, Peterborough, and Ely, were sacked. Edmund, the King of East Anglia, was killed. It was said that he was killed by Danish arrows for refusing to abandon the faith of Christ, and his shrine at Bury St. Edmunds afterwards became the most famous in England. Only Wessex remained unconquered.