Aldhelm, a youth of sixteen, joined the poor monastery which had been founded by a Scot more learned than rich, named Meldum, after whom the place had its name of Meldum's Byrig, or Malmesbury. The place was so poor that the monks had not enough to eat. Aldhelm obtained a grant of the monastery, rebuilt the church, gathered religious companies about him, and inspired in them his zeal for a pure life. He was a musician and a poet; played, it is said, all the instruments of music used in his time. His letters, and his Latin verse, chiefly in praise of chastity, survive, but those English songs of his which were still on the lips of the people in King Alfred's day are lost to us. William of Malmesbury has recorded, on King Alfred's authority, that Aldhelm was unequalled as an inventor and singer of English verse; and that a song ascribed to him, which was still familiar among the people, had been sung by Aldhelm on the bridge between country and town, in the character of an English minstrel or gleeman, to keep the people from running home directly after mass was sung, as it was their habit to do, without waiting for the sermon. Another story is, that on a Sunday, at a time when many traders from different parts of the country came into Malmesbury, Abbot Aldhelm stationed himself on the bridge, and there, by his songs, caused some of those who would have passed to stay by him and, leaving their trade until the morrow, follow him to church.

10. Bede, born in 673, was a child in arms when Cædmon sang the power of the Creator and his counsel, and the young Aldhelm had begun his work at Malmesbury. When seven years old—that is to say, about the time of the death of Abbess Hilda-Bede was placed in the newly-founded monastery of St. Peter, at Wearmouth. Three years later the associated monastery of St. Paul was opened at Jarrow, on the banks of the Tyne, about five miles distant from St. Peter's. Bede, then aged ten, was transferred to the Jarrow monastery. life, punctual in all formal exercises of devotion, and employing his whole leisure, pen in hand, for the advancement of true knowledge. He digested and arranged the teaching of the fathers of the Church, that others might with the least possible difficulty study the Scriptures by the light they gave. He produced, in a Latin treatise on The Nature of Things, a text-book of the science of his day, digested and compacted out of many volumes. His works are almost an encyclopædia of the know.

There he spent his

TO A.D. 731.] BEDE'S ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

23

ledge of his time. He drew it from many sources, where it lay hidden in dull, voluminous, or inaccessible books, and he set it forth in books which could be used in the monastery schools, or be read by the educated for their own further instruction. The fame of the devout and simple-minded English scholar spread beyond our shores. A pope in vain desired to have him brought to Rome. He refused in his own monastery the dignity of abbot, because "the office demands household care; and household care brings with it distraction of mind, which hinders the pursuit of learning." He was thus at work in his monastery, thirtysix years old, at the time of the death of Aldhelm.

It was in those days that Roderick the Goth lost Spain to the Arabs.

In 731, when in his fifty-ninth year, Bede finished the most important of his works, that known as his Ecclesiastical History. That History of the English Church was virtually a History of England brought down to the date of its completion, and based upon inquiries made with the true spirit of a historian. Bede did not doubt reported miracles, and that part of the religious faith of his time supplies details which we should be glad now to exchange for other information upon matters whereof he gives too bare a chronicle; but, whatever its defects, he has left us a history of the early years of England—succinct, yet often warm with life; business-like, and yet child-like in its tone; at once practical and spiritual, simply just, and the work of a true scholar, breathing love to God and man. We owe to Bede alone the knowledge of much that is most interesting in our early history. Where other authorities are cited, they are often writers who, on the points in question, know no more than Bede had told them. Bede died in the year 735, three years after the completion of his History. He wrote in Latin, then the language of all scholars; but in his last days, under painful illness, he was urging forward a translation into English of the Gospel of St. John. One of his pupils said to him, when the end was near, "Most dear master, there is still one chapter wanting; do you think it troublesome to be asked any more questions?" He answered, "It is no trouble. Take your pen and make ready, and write fast." Afterwards, says the pupil, who gave, in a letter that remains to us, the narrative of Bede's last days, when the dying scholar had been taking leave of his brethren in the monastery, and bequeathing among them his little wealth of pepper, napkins, and incense, "the boy said, 'Dear master,

there is yet one sentence not written.' He answered, 'Write quickly.' Soon after the boy said, 'The sentence is now written.' He replied, 'It is well. You have said the truth. It is ended. Receive my head into your hands, for it is a great satisfaction to me to sit facing my holy place, where I was wont to pray, that I may also sitting call upon my Father.' And thus on the pavement of his little cell, singing 'Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost,' when he had named the Holy Spirit he breathed his last, and so departed into the heavenly kingdom."

II. The year of the death of Bede, 735, is the supposed date of the birth of Alcuin. Alcuin was bred from infancy in the monastery of York. He was there in the time of Egbert, who, in 735, received the pall as second Archbishop of York, and who is said to have founded in York monastery the famous school in which Alcuin was taught. The fame of the York school and library spread to the court of Charlemagne. Noble youths came from afar to be taught theology by Egbert, and other knowledge by his vice-master Albert who in the year 766 succeeded him in the archbishopric. Albert, with Alcuin's help, increased the fame of the school, and continued to be zealous beyond all others for the enrichment of the library. During the fourteen years of the archbishopric of Albert, Alcuin had in the York monastery immediate charge over the school and library. What he learnt from the books he told in his own words to his pupils, and with some of the best of them he established life-long friendships. One of his friends and pupils, Eanbald, in 780 became Albert's successor in the archbishopric. Alcuin had once been to Rome with Albert on a search for books; now he was sent again, that he might use the opportunity of a mission to fetch the archbishop's pall, and bring with it more books to the York library. Thus Alcuin chanced to be, in 781, at Parma when Charlemagne was passing through that town on the way home from the crowning of his infant son Louis, afterwards Louis le Débonnaire, as King of Aquitaine, and of his second son, Pepin, as King of Lombardy.

Alcuin then was, what Bede had been, the foremost scholar of his time, and Charlemagne sought aid from him as an intellectual ally. He invited Alcuin to his court, where in the winter, when fighting was not in season, Charlemagne studied himself and compelled all his family to study, and whence he would compel his people also to receive instruction under Alcuin's

TO A.D. 804.]

ALCUIN AND CHARLEMAGNE.

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directions. Having returned to York and obtained leave of absence from his superior, Alcuin went, therefore, in 782, to the court of Charlemagne, and took with him some of his best pupils as assistants. In the empire of Charlemagne his work was virtually that of a Minister of Public Instruction, the emperor supporting with despotic power every act of his for the establishment of well-disciplined schools throughout the land. There was also Charlemagne's own Palace School, which some believe to have been the germ of the first university, that of Paris. But 1215 is the date of the earliest record of a place of education called the University of Paris, and Alcuin went to the court of Charlemagne in the year 782. He remained with Charlemagne eight years, and then returned to York; Charlemagne, who had sought to retain him, still maintaining direct relations by investing Alcuin with the office of ambassador to Offa, King of Mercia. After a stay of not quite two years in England, Alcuin returned in the year 792, and spent the rest of his life in the service of Charlemagne, as faithful friend to him and to his empire. Wealth and power were at Alcuin's disposal, but he spoke of himself as "the humble Levite," and was single-hearted in austere performance of his duty. He was strict in discipline, and faithful in counsel to his headstrong master, as his extant correspondence shows. In his theological writing, Alcuin chiefly occupied himself with attack on heresy; but he wrote also text-books to provide means for efficient teaching in his schools, and he was energetic in repression of the love of wine and of the chase that had defied Church discipline.

The scriptorium, or writing-room in the monastery--which once was what the printing-office is to us-Alcuin developed with an energy that ensured rapid multiplication of good books. The hunting monks were bribed to industry by being allowed to chase as many beasts as would yield skins to meet the demand from the scriptorium for parchment. Wine-bibbing monks were told that it was better to copy books than to tend vineyards, by as much as reading lifted the soul higher than wine. But the books to be copied must be those which directly sought to raise men to a contemplation of the God of Christians. As a youth at York, Alcuin had hidden Virgil under his pillow from the eyes of the brother who came with a cane to rouse the sleepers to nocturns; in his later years Alcuin could see in Virgil no more than a heathen liar. "The good monk," he said, "should find enough to content him in the Christian poets." Throughout

Alcuin's writings, which include 232 letters, and some inscriptions, epigrams, and poems, there is a hard sense of duty for the love of God, but there is little liveliness of fancy. He was a thoroughly practical man, who carried into the empire of Charlemagne the same administrative ability which he had shown as schoolmaster and librarian in the monastery of York, labouring always with all his powers to bring men to knowledge, that they might come near to God. He worked on difficult material, a fact which may account for some of his severity; and when he died, in 804, he was in some trouble with his imperial master for misconduct of the monks in his own abbey of St. Martin's, at Tours.

12. Meanwhile, the spirit of the people was expressed also in song. Apart from "Beowulf," and Cædmon's " Paraphrase," each existing in a single manuscript, the main body of the First English poetry that has come down to us has been preserved in two collections, known as the EXETER BOOK and the VERCELL: Book. Each is named from the place where it was found. The Exeter Book is a collection of poems given, with other volumes, to the library of his cathedral by Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, between the years 1046 and 1073. The other volume was discovered in 1823, in a monastery at Vercelli, in the Milanese, where it had been mistaken for a relic of Eusebius, who was once Bishop of Vercelli, and died in 371.

Among the pieces in these volumes are three of considerable length, by a poet named Cynewulf. His name comes down to us, because he had a peculiar way of distributing the letters of it among the verses in some part of each of his poems. In the Vercelli Book is Cynewulf's Elene, a poem of 2,648 lines, on the legend of St. Helen, or the Finding of the True Cross by the mother of Constantine. In the Exeter Book we have Cynewulf's legend of Juliana, martyr in the days of Emperor Maximian, and a series of poems which have unity among themselves, and have been read as a single work, Cynewulf's Christ. Cynewulf deals with Scripture history and legend in a devout spirit, and his poems are interesting, although their earnestness is not quickened by any touch of genius. He was probably, as Jacob Grimm suggests, a Cynewulf, Bishop of Lindisfarne, who died in the year 780; certainly of that century, and not Cynewulf, Abbot of Peterborough, who died Bishop of Winchester in 1008.

Among other poems in the two collections we have in the Exeter Book the Traveller's Song, which is sometimes thought