Mercia and East Anglia; the strife raged all along the line between London and Chester, the King's men throwing up works to guard the shires they were winning back foot by foot. Essex seems to have been mastered in 913, Staffordshire and Warwickshire within the next few years. In 915, the Danish rulers of Bedford and Northampton gave their allegiance to the great King of Wessex; Derby and Leicester fell before his sister. The Norsemen struggled hard against Edward's iron bit; but the whole of East Anglia and Cambridge yielded to him in 921. By the end of the following year, he was master of Stamford and Nottingham; Lincolnshire seems to have been the last of his conquests. In 924, all the English, Danes, and Celts in our island chose Edward, the champion of Christianity against heathenism, for their Father and Lord. England, as we see, was speedily becoming something more than a geographical name. Alfred had been King of the South; Alfred's son had won the Midland; Alfred's grandsons were now to bring the North under their yoke. The Danes drove the many quarrelsome English kingdoms into unity in sheer selfdefence; much as in our own time the Austrians helped Italy to become one nation. The Saxon Chronicle in 941 names the Five Danish Burghs which overawed Mercia, and which have had so great an influence on the tongue now spoken by us. Long had these been in Danish thraldom; they were now, as the old English ballad of the day says, loosed by Edward's son. Northumberland, under her Danish kings, was still holding out against the Southern Overlord. At length, in 954, the last of these kings dropped out of history; and Eadred, the son of Edward and the grandson of Alfred, became the one King of all England, swaying the land from the Frith of Forth to the English Channel.1 Wessex, it is easy to see, was to our island much what Piedmont long afterwards became to Italy, and Brandenburg to Germany. It is not wonderful then that in the Tenth Century the literature of Wessex was looked upon as the best of models, and took the place of the Northumbrian literature of Bede's time. Good English prose-writers must have formed themselves upon King Alfred; English 'shapers' or 'makers' must have imitated the lofty lay, which tells how Alfred's grandsons smote Celt and Norseman alike on the great day of Brunanburgh. The Court of Winchester must in those days have been to England, what Paris has nearly always been to France: no such pattern of elegance could elsewhere have been found. For all that, were I to be given my choice as to what buried specimen of English writing should be brought to light, I should ask for a sample of the Rutland peasantry's common talk, about the year that Eadred was calling himself Kaiser of all Britain.2 Such a Eadred was like King Victor Emmanuel, who has no underkings below him; Eadred's father was like Kaiser William. 2 Kemble's Charters, ii. 304. sample would be as precious as the bad Latin, the parent of the New Italian, which may be read on the walls of Pompeii. By Eadred's time, two or three generations of Norsemen and Angles must have been mingled together; the uncouth dialect, woefully shorn of inflections, spoken in the markets of Leicester and Stamford, would be found to foreshadow the corruptions of the Peterborough Chronicle after 1120. The country, falling within a radius of twenty miles drawn from the centre of Rutland, would be acknowledged, I think, as the cradle of the New English that we now speak. To go further afield; all the land enclosed within a line drawn round from the Humber through Doncaster, Derby, Ashby, Rugby, Northampton, Bedford, and Ipswich (this may be called the Mercian Danelagh) helped mightily in forming the new literature: within this boundary were the Five Burghs, and the other Danish strongholds already named. Just outside this boundary were Southern Yorkshire and Northern Essex, which have also had their influence upon our tongue. Alfred's grandsons, on their way home to Winchester from their Northern fields, would have been much astonished, could it have been foretold to them that the Five Burghs, so lately held by the heathen, were to have the shaping of England's future speech. This New English, hundreds of years later, was to be handled by men, who would throw into the far background even such masterpieces of the Old English as the Beowulf and the Judith. Some writers, I see, upbraid the French conquerors of England for bereaving us of our old inflections; it would be more to the purpose to inveigh against the great Norse settlement two hundred years before William's landing. What happened in Northumbria and Eastern Mercia will always take place when two kindred tribes are thrown together. An intermingling either of Irish with Welsh, or of French with Spaniards, or of Poles with Bohemians, would break up the old inflections and grammar of each nation, if there were no acknowledged standard of national speech whereby the tide of corruptions might be stemmed. When such an intermingling takes place, the endings of the verb and the substantive are not always caught, and therefore speedily drop out of the mouths of the peasantry. In our own day this process may be seen going on in the United States. Thousands of Germans settle there, mingle with English-speakers, and thus corrupt their native German. They keep their own words indeed, but they clip the heads and tails of these words, as the Dano-Anglians did many hundred years ago. About the year 970, another work was compiled in Northern English, the Lindisfarne Gospels. I give a specimen of words, taken from these, side by side with the corresponding West Saxon. A great many of the corruptions of the Old English, already found in the Psalter and Rushworth Gospels, are here repeated. Two or three of the forms, given in the second column, are not peculiar to the North. 1 See a specimen of these in my Appendix, Chapter VII. |