THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

appears to have remained a more general possession. In this, the first of the Germanic lands to have been brought into
the sphere of the Western Church, Latin never seems to have precluded the survival and development of a vigorous,
vernacular literary tradition. Certain aspects of religious instruction, notably those based on the sermon and the
homily, naturally used English. The most important of the surviving sermons date from late in the Anglo-Saxon era.
The great monastery of Winchester in the royal capital of Wessex (and later of all England) is credited with a series of
educational reforms in the late tenth century which may have influenced the lucid, alliterative prose written for the
benefit of the faithful by clerics such as Wulfstan (d. 1023), Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of York (the author
of the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, ‘Wolf’s Sermon to the English’), and Ælfric (c. 955-
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c. 1010), formerly a monk at Winchester and later Abbot of Eynsham (whose two series Catholic Homilies and Lives
of the Saints suggest a familiarity with the idioms of Old English poetry). The Scriptures, generally available only in
St Jerome’s fourth-century Latin translation (the so-called Vulgate version), were also subject to determined attempts
to render them into English for the benefit of those who were deficient in Latin. Bede was engaged on an English
translation of the Gospel of St John at the time of his death and a vernacular gloss in Northumbrian English was
added in the tenth century to the superbly illuminated seventh-century manuscript known as the Lindisfarne Gospels.
A West Saxon version of the four Gospels has survived in six manuscripts, the formal, expressive, liturgical rhythms
of which found a muted echo in every subsequent translation until superseded by the flat, functional English of the
mid-twentieth century.
The religious and cultural life of the great, and increasingly well-endowed, Anglo-Saxon abbeys did not remain
settled. In 793 - some sixty-two years after Bede had concluded his History at the monastery at Jarrow with the
optimistic sentiment that ‘peace and prosperity’ blessed the English Church and people - the neighbouring abbey at
Lindisfarne was sacked and devastated by Viking sea-raiders. A similar fate befell Jarrow in the following year. For a
century the ordered and influential culture fostered by the English monasteries was severely disrupted, even
extinguished. Libraries were scattered or destroyed and monastic schools deserted. It was not until the reign of the
determined and cultured Alfred, King of Wessex (848-99), that English learning was again purposefully encouraged.
A thorough revival of the monasteries took place in the tenth century under the aegis of Dunstan, Archbishop of
Canterbury (c. 910-88), Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester (?908-84), and Oswald, Bishop of Worcester (d. 992). From
this period date the four most significant surviving volumes of Old English verse, the so-called Junius manuscript, the
Beowulf manuscript, the Vercelli Book, and the Exeter Book. These collections were almost certainly the products of
monastic scriptoria (writing-rooms) although the anonymous authors of the poems may not necessarily have been
monks themselves. Many of the poems are presumed to date from a much earlier period, but their presence in these
tenth-century anthologies indicates not just the survival, acceptability, and consistency of an older tradition; it also
amply suggests how wide-ranging, complex, and sophisticated the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon period was. While
allowing that the surviving poems are representative of the tradition, many modern scholars none the less allow that
what has survived was probably subject to two distinct processes of selection: one an arbitrary selection imposed by
time, by casual destruction, or by the natural decay of written records; the other a process of editing, exclusion,
excision, or suppression by monastic scribes. This latter process of anonymous censorship has left us with a generally
elevated, elevating, and male-centred literature, one which lays a stress on the virtues of a tribal community, on the
ties of loyalty between lord and liegeman, on the significance of individual heroism, and on the powerful sway of
wyrd, or fate. The
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earliest dated poem that we have is ascribed by Bede to a writer named Cædmon, an unskilled servant employed at the
monastery at Whitby in the late seventh century. Cædmon, who had once been afraid to take the harp and sing to its
accompaniment at secular feasts, as divinely granted the gift of poetry in a dream and, on waking, composed a short
hymn to God the Creator. Such was the quality of his divine inspiration that the new poet was admitted to the
monastic community and is said to have written a series of now lost poems on Scriptural subjects, including accounts
of Christ’s Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection. Bede’s mention of Cædmon’s early fear of being a guest ‘invited to
sing and entertain the company’ at a feast suggests something of the extent to which poetry was a public and
communal art. It also suggests that a specifically religious poetry both derived from, and could be distinct from,
established secular modes of composition. Bede’s story clearly indicates that the poetry of his day followed rules of
diction and versification which were readily recognized by its audience. That audience, it is also implied, accepted
that poetry was designed for public repetition, recitation and, indeed, artful improvisation. The elaborate,
conventional language of Old English poetry probably derived from a Germanic bardic tradition which also accepted
the vital initiatory role of a professional poet, or scop, the original improviser ofa song on heroic themes. This scop,