We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr
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an oak tree in the earth-cave.
This cavern is age-old; I am choked with longings.
Gloomy are the valleys, too high the hills,
harsh strongholds overgrown with briars;
a joyless abode. The journey of my Lord so often
cruelly seizes me. There are lovers on earth,
lovers alive who lie in bed,
when I pass through this earth-cave alone
and out under the oak tree at dawn;
there I must sit through the long summer’s day
and there I mourn my miseries …
Along with the misery and mourning, the poet, then, understands that there are good married lives to be had. She has been forced out of her community, into the woods. We used to think of Anglo-Saxon Britain as being very heavily wooded. In fact, modern historians of the landscape tell us, much of the country had been opened up for farming for a thousand years or more.
There’s a strong sense in this poem of life being literally close to the earth, and surrounded by foliage. That’s an obvious separation from our lives today. Back then, even impressive towns were tiny and dangerous. Here is a fragment of an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem about Durham, rare in being written after the Norman Conquest:
All Britain knows of this noble city,
its breathtaking sight: buildings backed
by rocky slopes appear over a precipice.
(And, particularly if you pass through by train, Durham is pretty much like that today. But hang on:)
Weirs hem and madden a headstrong river,
diverse fish dance in the foam.
Sprawling, tangled thicket has sprung up
there; those deep dales are the haunt
of many animals, countless wild beasts.
Archaeologists tell us that Anglo-Saxon Britain was studded with trading towns and urban centres huddled around churches, even if most of them, being made of wood and straw, have long disappeared. Durham, like York, got its sense of itself through the saints and missionaries buried there.
But what about the rest of the people? What sense of history did they have? Who did they think they were? We know we live in the twenty-first century. But by seven or eight centuries after the Roman legions had left, most British had no real sense of how their own history connected to that of the rest of mankind. There’s a wonderful eighth-century poem in which an Anglo-Saxon wanders through the ruins of Bath:
Wondrous is this stone-wall, wrecked by fate;
the city-buildings crumble; the works of the Giants decay.
Roofs have caved in, towers collapsed,
barred gates are broken, hoar frost clings to mortar,
houses are gaping, tottering and fallen,
undermined by age. The Earth’s embrace,
its fierce grip, holds the mighty craftsmen;
they are perished and gone.
So who were these craftsmen, who used techniques no longer understood, and built such walls? Wrongly, the Anglo-Saxon poet, himself a representative of the people who destroyed the Romano-British world, thinks they must have been destroyed by the plague, a contemporary problem; and he imagines them as being like bigger Anglo-Saxons – warriors bestriding courts where
… Once many a man
joyous and gold-bright, dressed in splendour,
proud and flushed with wine, gleamed in his armour …
Interesting, isn’t it, that passing reference to wine? But this Anglo-Saxon tourist is most impressed that these extraordinary people washed themselves, a pleasure which he almost salivates over:
Stone houses stood here; a hot spring
gushed in a wide stream; a stone wall
enclosed the bright interior; the baths
were there, the heated water; that was convenient.
They allowed the scalding water to pour
over the grey stone into the circular pool …
And in ‘The Seafarer’, the poem quoted earlier, we get a similar strong sense that the world has decayed since the great days of – presumably – the Romans. That poet speaks of:
Days little durable,
And all arrogance of earthen riches,
There come now no kings nor Cæsars
Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.
Howe’er in mirth most magnified,
Whoe’er lived in life most lordliest,
Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!
Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.
Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.
This pessimism, so different from the Christian celebration of Caedmon, is something we should take with a pinch of salt. Anglo-Saxon Britain was full of advanced and sophisticated craftsmanship, from ornate goldwork to well-built ships and fine vellum books. No serious historian of the age now regards it simply as a time of anarchy and disaster. But if there is pessimism it is surely driven by politics – the restless, bloody tribal struggles that convulsed all of Britain, from the Picts in northern Scotland to the lands of the Jutes in southern England. Local warlordism isn’t much fun even for the warlords. It isn’t until the 800s, as the kingdom of the west Saxons pushed back against its Mercian, Northumbrian and Viking enemies, that the possibility of a dominant nation, an ‘England’, begins to emerge. Alfred the Great first managed to unite Wessex with Mercia, and then reached out until he could call himself the king of all the Anglo-Saxons. We know from a life written by the Welsh cleric Asser that Alfred was brought up on English poetry, though we don’t know what that was. As a ruler he was much more than a warlord, a highly ambitious and cultured figure, in touch with the latest developments on the Continent. Alfred personally oversaw the translation of key European Christian texts from Latin into English. He imported French and German men of letters. He began – almost, it seems, single-handedly – to forge a coherent English culture.
Despite the devastating effects of the Norse raids on monasteries, with their books, we might from this point have expected a steady growth and flowering of English poetry.
It didn’t happen. At least, it didn’t happen for another three centuries, again because of dynastic politics, in this case the unwanted arrival of those transplanted Vikings with their strange foreign tongue, the Normans. Eventually, the violent collision between Anglo-Saxon English and Norman French would produce a supple, flexible new language. But the hugely disruptive collision of the Conquest meant that there is a long gap after 1066 before we hear again the authentic voice of ordinary British people expressed in verse in their own language. No doubt it once existed. But it’s gone, and gone forever.
If the prose of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is to be believed, it would have been a poetry of lamentation. The Chronicle ends by describing the coronation of the man it calls simply Count William, who despite earlier promises ‘laid taxes on people very severely’. He and Bishop Odo then ‘built castles far and wide throughout this country, and distressed the wretched folk, and always after that it grew much worse. May the end be good when God wills!’
But there was more to this than the clash of Anglo-Saxons and Normans. Recent scholarly work points out that the pre-Norman Conquest court of Cnut, king of most of Scandinavia as well as England (and the Canute who mocked himself by ordering back the waves)