We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr

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СКАЧАТЬ said Britain had five languages: English, by which he meant the Germanic dialects of Anglo-Saxon; British, close to what we would call Welsh; Irish; Pictish – another ancient British language from Scotland, now vanished; and Latin, which he said ‘is in general use among them all’.

      Latin was the language of the monasteries; yet it is only thanks to the monasteries that we have any early English surviving at all. In fact a single book, presented to Exeter monastery around 1070, contains the single greatest trove of Anglo-Saxon poetry, in a mishmash of Germanic dialects. This is a language which takes root for just long enough that it can’t be torn up again by the next wave of invaders, the Scandinavian Vikings; and it’s still buried inside the mouths of everyone who speaks modern English today.

      Caedmon’s world, the great, humane monasteries of the north-east, would soon be obliterated. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle the record for the year 793 reads:

      Dire portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people. They consisted of immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying into the air. A great famine immediately followed those signs, and a little after that in the same year, on 8 June, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter.

      Eventually Caedmon’s tongue found its defender in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. Meanwhile, the thread of human thought and communication ran mainly in Latin. Even the old British scripts used for cutting language into stone and onto slate, runes and ogam were simplified versions of Latin letters. So having no Latin in a monastery was, even for a cowherd, a huge disability. What was miraculous to Caedmon’s contemporaries was that he used the earthy, rhythmic old German way of making poetry and applied it directly to a religious subject.

      I hope it’s obvious by now that Caedmon wouldn’t have thought of himself as English – England as a country name didn’t yet exist. His very name is probably Celtic, and alongside the Irish he’d have known in his monastery there were almost certainly Scandinavians too. It wasn’t at all obvious that the west Saxons and their language would eventually triumph, or that the people of the biggest bit of the archipelago would one day call themselves English. Politically, everything was still up for grabs. We know this by looking at other early poems. For instance, ‘The Battle of Maldon’ is about a defeat of the English by the Danes, while ‘The Battle of Brunanburg’ describes a close-run-thing victory by Aethelstan, the ruler of Wessex, often described as the first King of England, over an alliance between the Viking King of Dublin, the King of the Picts and the Scots.

      As the relentless warfare went on, almost everywhere Christianity was gaining ground. But outside the monasteries, almost everywhere, the older beliefs remained potent. This was a world still confused about the contradictions between the old Norse warrior culture, which was pagan and toughly pessimistic, and Christianity. The enormous poem Beowulf – not even set, by the way, in Britain but in Denmark – is famously confused between its Christian vision and its pagan funerals. Beowulf is famous but it’s not much fun, except in the modern translation and rewriting by Seamus Heaney. Instead, here’s something from the wonderful ecstatic poem ‘The Dream of the Rood’, in which the anguish of daily life is confronted by God Almighty, who seems to be something like a young Saxon chieftain:

      then the young warrior, God Almighty,

      stripped himself, firm and unflinching. He climbed

      upon the cross, brave before many, to redeem mankind.

      I quivered when the hero clasped me …

      … now I look day by day

      for that time when the cross of the Lord,

      which once I saw in a dream here on earth,

      will fetch me away from this fleeting life

      and listening to the home of joy and happiness

      where people of God are seated at the feast

      in eternal bliss …

      Here is a Warrior Christ, more like a Viking than a Hebrew figure, sitting down for a good old-fashioned feast – the early British didn’t have much to compare things to, beyond their own lives and culture.

      What sustained them? Apart from the hope of heaven, the answer is the security of their extended families or clans: thirty-five distinct tribes were recorded around the time of Caedmon’s hymn. The most heavily populated areas were still the lowland farming territories, whose forests had been felled, and land ploughed, in prehistoric times. The Anglo-Saxon landscape was already old and heavily marked by the huge expansion of farming in the Bronze Age, and the burial mounds, castles and henges of earlier Britons. Caedmon’s people lived in a haunted landscape. Much of the infrastructure of Romano-British culture remained semi-intact. The new Saxon settlement of Lundenwic, just to the west of the walls of Roman Londinium, had well-built-up river embankments and trade facilities. To the north, towns such as Newcastle kept their Roman names well into the 400s; York was a well-established Christian centre from Roman times.

      People lived in their local tribal polities, but they travelled widely. Saxon roads, unmetalled, have rarely survived, but Roman roads were still being heavily used, and archaeology confirms that there was a vigorous shipping economy and trade with the Continent. Whether trading, raiding or fishing, the Anglo-Saxon British were at least as much a seafaring race as the British of the time of Raleigh, or Nelson. Hardly any of their boats survive, for obvious reasons, but there are two substantial ships, one from the famous Sutton Hoo burial, and the other from Graveney in Kent. Modern reconstructions of these clinker-built vessels (that is, overlapping planks, pinned together) suggest that they could travel long distances at around ten knots, a considerable speed, using a coarse cotton sail. Though very different from the sleeker Viking longships, these Saxon vessels could also be rowed at speed up rivers and along coasts, and beached very easily. Large numbers of finds by archaeologists and amateurs using metal detectors show that Anglo-Saxon Britain traded extensively across the North Sea and the Channel. Discoveries of French and German pottery and glass, and Continental coins, confirm that this was a well-connected culture. In a famous poem, ‘The Seafarer’, here translated by the modern poet Ezra Pound, we get a vivid sense of what this really meant. Addressing the soft-living, wine-drinking landlubbers, the poet reminds them:

      … how I in harsh days

      Hardship endured oft.

      Bitter breast-cares have I abided,

      Known on my keel many a care’s hold,

      And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent

      Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head

      While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,

      My feet were by frost benumbed.

      Chill its chains are; chafing sighs

      Hew my heart round and hunger begot

      Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not

      That he on dry land loveliest liveth,

      List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,

      Weathered the winter, wretched outcast

      Deprived of my kinsmen;

      Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur СКАЧАТЬ