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Ireland and the Making of Britain
like a nurse's fairy-tale, explaining everything, recom-
mencing and breaking off its phrases, making
ten turns
about a simple detail, so low was it necessary to stoop to
the level of this new intelligence, which had never thought
1
or known anything." And the ignorance is such that the
teacher himself needs correction.
The arrival of the Danes merely accentuated a condi-
tion that had arisen from internal causes and that left
the English almost as putty in their hands. The
demoralization wrought by the terror of the Danish
sword never left the natives till the time came when they
fell an easy prey to a handful of Frenchmen from Nor-
mandy and Angevin. The picture painted by Wulfstan,
bishop of Worcester, of the aborigines of the country is
painful in the pitifulness of the degradation it depicts and
the total loss of manhood that had fallen on the once fierce
Saxons. The Danes, whom Irish power wielded by King
Brian had crushed, were able nevertheless to turn England
into a compound, and its inhabitants into a slave popula-
tion. Progress and learning
under such conditions were
ludicrous dreams, and beneath the deep of ignorance
which Alfred had depicted there were other and crueler
deeps into which the unresisting English were thrust by
their oppressors. It is hard to conceive of the forms of
cruelty which Danish brutality could have employed so
to subdue the English to moods meeker than that of lambs
led to the slaughter. "For a long time now," says
Wulfstan in his sermon Ad Anglos, still extant in Anglo-
Saxon, "there has been no goodness among us either at
home or abroad, but there has been ravaging and onset on
every side again and again. The English have now for a
long time been always beaten in battle and made great
iTaine, Hist of Eng. Lit.. I. 64.
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