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Ireland and the Making of Britain
to raise themselves above the chaotic and muddy ignorance
in which the others flounder. They are almost alone, and
on their death the others sink again into the mire." 1
They
feel their impotence and decrepitude, and are filled with
gloom and foreboding for their country and countrymen.
The Synod of Pincanhalth, held in 790, recalls, as in an
epitaph, the "days when we had righteous kings and
dukes and bishops, of whose wisdom Northumbria still
smells sweetly." Bede, dividing the history of the world
into six periods, says that the fifth, which stretches from
the return of Babylon to the birth of Christ, is the senile
period; the sixth is the present "aetas decrepita, totius
morte saeculi consummanda." The last paragraph of
Bede's history ends in a note of doubt concerning times
"so filled with commotions that it cannot yet be known
what is to be said concerning them or what end they will
have." His pessimism was well founded. Wars and
dissensions were in a fair way to kill English learning but
little after its birth and the work of destruction begun
by the English themselves was almost carried to completion
by the Danes. Outside of the work of Alcuin and Alfred
there is almost a literary waste from the eighth cen-
tury to the revival of Anglo-Latin literature in the twelfth,
and this among the French conquerors. No historian of
like mold with Bede was to arise in the succeeding cen-
turies and tho the book of Simeon of Durham pre-
serves the remnants of a lost Northumbrian history the
period from the death of Bede to 870 is difficult and dark
of comprehension in English history. There are periods
in English history, as during the century and a half that
preceded the coming of Augustine, and the century and
a half that followed the French conquest, when the
iTaine, I. 68.
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