THE SAXON CHRONICLES.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1521, 26 February 1886, Page 3

THE SAXON CHRONICLES.

The lay nobles being wilfully ignorant how to write, all historywriiinu, as well as other pen-work, was t<> the clergy, and so we find all the sources from which early history is drawn to be monkish chronicles—"stories" written by the churchujen in the quiet nooks and retreats which the institution they served provided for them. As might be expected, sve get frequent mention of events which immediately concern the order of the writers. Was any new abbey founded, we get the fullest information about the size of the house, the extent o 4 'the lands attached to it, and the amount of its revenue. If any bnroii or prince have fleeced a religious houoe, we are sure to hear of it at length, and some times not in the sweetest or softest of language; and it is to be feared that, in the warmth of their zeal for the Holy Church, the writers often painted the devil a little blacker than he really was, and threw so much dirt at the people who were against them that they have remained spattered and spotted until this day. Many events which would have been more interesting to posterity are omitted, or are very scantily noticed ; aud one cannot help feeling that less room given to what is mentioned, aud more given to what is not, would have been an advantage of considerable importance. Again, the nationality of the writer 1 sometimes breaks out in rude bursts of anger or of scorn. The writers of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle have very severely handled the Gorman invaders, describing them as guilty of all manner of crimes ai d wrongs ; and the Norman monks, when they mention the English at all, do so in language which shows that they held them no higher than the swine they tended, or at most as living bipeds whom it was a duty to enslave. It is only by reading both with a certain amount of uillidence that a fair estimate can he lormed of the truth of either. But on the whole we have great cause to rejoice over what we po«tMss. Without these chronicles, the era which we, because ol our ignorance about it, cad the Dark Age would be wrapped in perpetual gloom ; we should have had but a tc w landmarks, such an are furnished by the Statute-books, the ro;is ot manors, and the bare records of towns, to guide us in our search atter the hudory of those times. There would have been no connected chronicle < t events from which to shape a hist' ry, and to direct from one great landmark to another. Domesday liook would have stood alone like some great mountain surrounded by ! water-bearing certain internal evidence of what it was, but without an atom of assistance from any other j thing to say how it came there. The (charter of Henry 1., copi< 8 of which were hidden away iu abbeys, uutil Archbishop Langton pulled them out and buiit up the Great Charter upon tin m, would perhaps have come next, like another mountain peak, standing nut of the silent waters of Time ; but the information to be got from it wou d have been of a rather speculative character, had it not been that William, the monk of .Malmcobury, Henry of Huntingdon, and other diligent scribes, told us all they knew about it, and invested the isolated charter-roll with renl historic interest. Reigns in which no public mark was tiniiie on parchments so as to tell the children yet unborn what their fathers hud done would have passed our untie aud remained for ever in the dark had not these same men written she): t accounts of them and drawn, as thev have done, vivid little wordpictures, in which we si e a very great deal iu a very small space. Stephen's reign, for instance, would have been a s>rt of undefined b'ot hud not the monks jotted down bits of information here and there. We shou'd have had

a vague notion that it was a very bud time for England, but we should have known nothing at all for certain about it if the nameless writer in the Saxon chronicle had not written his story — and it is nn account of men who wore " garments of blood " —in which he speaks of 1100 castles being in the land, how the rich men made the poor work at their castles, and how the cables were " filled with devils and with evil men; " how " the land was all ruined by their deeds, and it was said openly that Christ and His saints slept." Besides the fact that these chronicles are nearly the only source#

from which early history can be derived, there is in them much that is very attractive on other scores. Throughout, even in the parts where the longest bows are pulled—and they are sometimes very long indeed—they bear signs of the complete faith the writers had in the truth of what they were writing—they have a cool freshness reminding of the quiet homes where they were written, and a terse, quaint st\lo of expression which is very forcible.—From " Cassell's Popular Educator