Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination Page 5

  In an embroidered alb of the twelfth century, humankind is depicted as a man caught in the interlaced coils of a dominant absorbing pattern. The nature of the embroidery here reveals another design—that is to say, the design of Englishness itself. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries the most rich and elaborate embroidery was known throughout Europe as opus anglicanum; England’s most famous luxury and most celebrated export was finely wrought silk with gold patterns and coloured grounds. There are 113 examples in the Vatican inventory of 1295 and various feats of English workmanship are to be found in France, Spain, Belgium and Italy. It was truly a native art, with origins at least as early as the ninth century. It is perhaps no accident, then, that “complex part writing” for the organ has been described as a “fine native tradition”7 or that the “polyphonic carol” is “a uniquely English phenomenon.” 8 Throughout this volume the English interest in pattern and elaborate decoration will become apparent; it is aligned with the affection for bold outlines and complex surface coverings in which frames and figures are interlaced or interwoven.

  Art, therefore, is known to be artifice; it may eschew interiority or depth for the sake of striking ornament and exciting contour. But it may not lack significance, since the art of the surface is itself a bold one. Consider what interlace may mean in a different context. It has been often said of Elizabethan theatre, for example, that it was distinguished from all other European drama in its capacity to interweave comic and serious episodes; popular drama of the sixteenth century is prodigal of scenes and characters which, as it were, exist simultaneously. One historian of that drama has described the interplay between comedy and tragedy with the further reflection that, when “strand eventually coheres with strand, the effect recalls Spenser’s ‘interlacement’ in The Faerie Queene.” 9 These writings are all of a piece, with many figures in view; the concern is for elaboration and “intrigues” rather than principle or emotion.

  In turn The Faerie Queene has been compared with a manuscript illumination, with a tapestry, and with a stained-glass window in an English church, because of its delicate links, its interconnecting scenes, and its profusion of principal and subordinate figures; in that poem there is no single or intense emotional stress, since “the conflict of character and motive is undeveloped.”10 The “interest in exact detail and love of pattern are traditional in English art from its earliest appearance, and are to become firmly established as time goes on.” 11 In architecture, too, “the characteristic English development lay in decoration rather than in pure architecture’;12 in stained glass the passion was for the “ornamental patterns” of the windows in Salisbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey,13 while the eloquent prose of Sir Thomas Browne is preoccupied with “the making of mosaic patterns with fragments of knowledge.”14

  What manner of imagination is this? It is one that eschews purity of function for elaboration of form, that strays continually into anecdote and detail, that distrusts massiveness of conception or intent, that avoids “depth” of feeling or profundity of argument in favour of artifice and rhetorical display. The twentieth-century architectural historian Sir John Summerson has remarked that Renaissance art made its way in England only “as a mode of decorative design”;15 the diamond patterning to be seen at St. John’s College, Cambridge, is typical in this respect, and sixteenth-century portraiture in all its elaboration of ornamental detail comes close to abstract and decorative pattern.

  In the earliest examples of architecture this passion for decoration may in part be regarded as the horror of vacuity, of blankness, that emerges in the poetry of the Anglo-Saxons. Has this something to do with their horrified refusal of the blank landscape all around them? Art is then the alternative to nature. It has, in fact, been suggested that “the special gifts of the Anglo-Saxons may have lain in decoration rather than in architecture,” 16 and the same predilection can be seen in the decorated patterns of the great nave at Ely and the richly inscribed stone of Durham Cathedral no less than in the eight bands of carving within the south porch of Malmesbury Abbey. There is a concern for “rich surface display” 17 in Wells Cathedral which anticipates the ornamental coverings of Victorian upholstery and the flatness of Pre-Raphaelite painting. It can also be seen in the rococo of the Georgian period, in the ornamental ironwork of the Great Exhibition, in the floral wallpaper of William Morris. The open elaboration of the Lloyds Building and the Pompidou Centre, by Richard Rogers, can also be understood in this context. It is everywhere in the English sensibility. We seem to have come a long way from Anglo-Saxon art and poetry but, in the imagination, there is no distance at all.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Rare and Singular Bede

  The Venerable Bede was born in a small and obscure village near Jar-row, in Northumbria, in or about 672, and nothing is known of his parents except that according to early commentators they were of humble origins; he was not the first English writer whose modest beginnings spurred an ambition and aspiration towards great achievement. At the age of seven he was taken to the monastery at Wearmouth; someone must have recognised his abilities, therefore, and caused him to be enrolled in what was then an orthodox course of education.

  At this early age he began to memorise the Latin psalmody and hymnal, with the help of an Anglo-Saxon gloss, so that he might participate in all the Divine Offices of the monks; he then began to work upon Latin grammar and metrics, so important for the understanding of plainchant. He suffered from an impediment in his speech, however, but he was cured while writing about the miraculous relics of St. Cuthbert. This personal experience should be recalled when examining his many descriptions of miraculous healing which purblind readers have ascribed to credulity or superstition.

  He was educated under the tutelage of Abbot Benedict, and later of Abbot Ceolfrid, both of them important figures in seventh-century England. The young oblate was transferred to the neighbouring monastery of Jarrow, where he was to remain for the rest of his quietly exacting life. At the age of nineteen he became a deacon, and the fact that he was appointed some six years before the customary time suggests that he was already notable for his learning. He was ordained priest at the age of thirty and, by his own testimony, then began his commentaries upon the Bible. From that time forward he rarely travelled beyond the confines of the monastery, and never left Northumbria; he was one of those English writers of whom it can confidently be said that he saw the universe within the context of a specific geographical place. Like Blake and Bunyan he was granted intimations of the spiritual world upon his own spot of earth, and the writing poured forth as from a spring.

  At the close of his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum Bede added a short autobiographical passage in which he declared that for almost thirty years he had laboured in his cell and had produced on a rough calculation some sixty-eight “books,” including commentaries upon Mark and Luke as well as Isaiah and Daniel, histories of the saints and books of hymns and epigrams, histories and text-books on poetry and chronology. It was a noble achievement. His was a life devoted to reading and chanting, writing and teaching; although he was well aware of events in the outer Anglo-Saxon world, with the death of kings and the rivalry of abbots, nothing could affect his dedication to his constant and assiduous work; he might almost have been born a scholar and writer, and he persevered in this course until the very close of his life.

  The remains of Jarrow still stand, with stone walls, small squared windows and carved stone; the dedication stone, marking its foundation in 685, can be found in the wall above the arch of the chancel. Housing some two hundred monks, Jarrow was a large foundation which, according to Benedictine rule, had independent status as a house of prayer and learning. Something of the old tribal structure remained, with an abbot, normally of royal lineage, ruling his band of brothers as “chieftain to the community.” 1 On the abbot’s death the leadership of the monastery was given to one of his kinsmen. Thus the society within the walls of the religious establishment copied the wider gove
rnance of England. The Latin word for town, civitas , was in turn applied to monasteries. But just as the observances of Celtic (that is, British) Christianity were being supplanted by the Benedictine (that is, continental) rules of the Anglo-Saxon monks, so the ethos and purpose of English monasteries were slowly being transformed. A letter of Bede’s to Egbert, Bishop of York, condemns those bishops “given to laughter, jokes, idle tales, feasting and drunkenness” who are at once lazy and unlearned, and denounces those who purchase monasteries in order to fill them with their own followers and concubines; all these abuses the Benedictine rule was designed to extirpate. There were of course centres and occasions of Celtic piety, particularly within the hermitic tradition, but the ancient order of faith had degenerated through the very fact of its longevity. The Benedictine dispensation was in turn responsible for, and responsive to, a fresh movement of devotion to learning. It is the single most important context for the transmission and preservation of Anglo-Saxon literature.

  There was a common dormitory and common refectory at Jarrow but Bede, given his high occupation as commentator and historian, was granted a separate hut or cell of stone in which to live and work. Situated somewhere to the south of the principal buildings, between the church and the river, it was approximately ten feet square with a wooden screen separating the space for prayer and meditation. In the area adjoining lay, perhaps, the codices upon which he worked. Bede would have recited the Divine Office each day, but whether he engaged in the normal routine of husbandry and field labour is open to doubt. There must also have been a larger scriptorium which he visited and used each day; here a few monks would be engaged in translation, transcription and manuscript illumination, preparing the Word of God and contributing texts for a select and devout audience. Here, again, lie some of the origins of English literature.

  The monastery with its scriptorium was truly what King Alfred called, at a later date, a house of knowledge. In Anglo-Saxon literature, there are accounts of burnished books, inscribed in letters of gold and covered with precious jewels; they are treasures of “gold and godweb” designed to illumine and glorify the scriptures but also powerfully to impress the sensibilities of the pagan English. In themselves they became sacred objects; water used to be poured over the Book of Durrow before being collected and given to ailing cattle. The Codex Amiatinus was created at Jarrow; the skins of 1,550 calves were required in order to provide the parchment, and two men were needed to carry it. It served as a reliquary or casket as well as a text. Sometimes, too, the book would speak—“the bird’s feather often moved over my brown surface, sprinkling meaningful marks.” 2 The art of illumination makes the English tradition paradigmatic of the whole Western spiritual tradition which, unlike that of the East, favours learning rather than looking. The parchment would have been tanned and then scraped with a knife before being smoothed with a pumice-stone; it was whitened with fine particles of chalk, and then ruled with lines before pen and ink were devoted to its illumination. The scriptorium itself represented “contempt of earthly things,” a sacred concept of writing which survived until the twentieth century and into W. H. Auden’s “cave of making.”

  Yet the world kept on breaking through. There are marginalia, or doodles, upon the edge of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts which provide some evidence of circumambient life. A dog trots across the bottom of one page of Andreas , a long poem on the ministry of St. Andrew, while a later page is marked with the half-erased name of “Eadgith” or Edith. In the margin of another manuscript are found the words “Writ thus odde bet; ride aweg; Aelfmaer Patta fox, thu wilt swingan Aelfric cild,” which may loosely be translated as “Write like this or better; ride away; Aelfmaer Patta the fox, you will flog the boy Aelfric.” Patta is the teacher and Aelfric the pupil set to work upon transcription. “Ride away” may suggest the child’s longing to be gone.

  There are passages in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum which also evoke the true nature of the Anglo-Saxon world, and of its monasticism in particular. One of them concerns the departure of the abbot of Monkwearmouth, Ceolfrid, on a final pilgrimage to Rome. On Thursday morning, 4 June 716, he stood upon the altar of the monastic church with a burning censer in his hand; he bade the monks farewell and gave them the kiss of peace, but the sound of loud weeping from the assembly interrupted the chant of the litanies. An age of violence was also an age of ready emotionalism. He and the brethren then advanced in procession to the bank of the Wear, where the monks fell upon their knees as he and a few close companions boarded a boat. “The deacons of the church embarked with them, carrying lighted candles and a golden cross. After crossing the river, he venerated the cross, mounted his horse and rode off.”3 There is revealed here, in the carrying of the golden cross and the lighted candles across the river, an intrinsic respect for ritual and display; in a world racked by storms of every description, where life itself may be short and harsh, the glowing gold and the candlelight afford a fleeting vision of sacredness.

  The quiet life of Bede was succeeded by a no less peaceful death. In his sixty-third year he knew that he was dying; he continued to teach his monastic pupils but spent the rest of each day and most of each night in song and prayer. He chanted the Latin scriptures and repeated by heart many old English poems—perhaps those he had learnt as a child near Jarrow—but when he reached the words of one antiphon, “Do not leave us orphans,” he burst into tears. His pupils wept with him, crying even as they studied under his instruction, but until almost the moment of death he kept them at their work of dictation. “Learn quickly now, for I don’t know how long I shall live . . . write quickly.” Here is an indication of his fervour for learning. He distributed his few “treasures”—pepper, handkerchiefs, incense—and then he was told by one of his pupils that there was still one sentence to be written.

  “Write it then.”

  “It is written.”

  “Good. It is finished.”

  He sat upon the floor of his cell, singing, until he died.

  So ended a life of incessant labour and prodigious learning. His reputation was unrivalled in Europe as well as in his own country. “It seems right to me,” a monk from Jarrow wrote, “that the whole race of the English in all provinces wherever they are found, should give thanks to God that he has granted to them so wonderful a man in their nation.”

  The seventh and eighth centuries were, perhaps, the most learned period in the nation’s history. Bede was one of a number of scholars and clerics of impeccable if somewhat insular Latin scholarship. There was, in fact, such a literary phenomenon as “Anglo-Latin” characterised “by a lavish display of vocabulary designed to impress by the arcane nature of its learning . . . in obscure, learned-sounding words, such as archaisms, grecisms and neologisms,”4 a style which haunts English prose in the work of such writers as Robert Burton and Thomas Browne. The sixteenth-century term was “euphuism” but there has always been an affection for it within the English imagination; it represents almost a deliberate parody of learning or, rather, a delight in ornate language and pattern rather than in profound scholarship for its own sake.

  One of its principal Anglo-Saxon exponents was Bede’s contemporary Aldhelm, who composed epistles and treatises in an elaborate and sometimes obscure prose; he also wrote Latin verse in continuous octosyllables, and continued the native inheritance by writing puzzles or mysteries or enigmata . He had been educated in the cathedral school of Canterbury under the tutelage of an African scholar named Hadrian, this salient fact alone suggesting the range of scholarship and civilisation existing in seventh-century England. Hadrian had arrived with the Greek scholar Theodore of Tarsus; Theodore was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Vitalian, and together with Hadrian established a school which according to Bede “attracted a large number of students,” who studied “poetry, astronomy and the calculation of the church calendar” as well as holy scripture. Bede testifies to the efficacy of their instruction by noting that in his time there were still Englishmen “as p
roficient in Latin and Greek as in their native tongue.” 5 In the ninth century King Alfred lamented the loss of such learning, but such attainments would also be rare in the twenty-first century.

  The tradition of the cathedral school never entirely died, even in the worst periods of Danish invasion, so that we can point justifiably to a continuous legacy of learning in England. It is the source, for example, of “fly-ting,” or scholastic “contest,” preserved in the wisdom literature of the Anglo-Saxons, by means of which two scholars would address each other upon a particular theme and practise all their skills of rhetoric; the same competitions were part of the curriculum in medieval schools and continued within the Inns of Court of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is a tradition which helped to create Tudor drama—itself often performed in the halls of the Inns—and thus the theatrical renaissance of the late sixteenth century.

  The texts of the Anglo-Saxon schools included the Evangelia of Juvencus, the Carmen and Opus Paschale of Sedulius and Arator’s De Actibus apostolorumtogether with other works from the corpus of Christian Latin literature. Virgil’s Aeneid was also widely known and quoted, as well as the work of other classical writers such as Lucian and Persius; it is an impressive list for scholars of any period, but it provides direct evidence for the beginning of “classics” in the English educational system. It is often remarked, with some surprise, that the administrators and politicians of the nineteenth century were accustomed to take quotations from, or make allusions to, the authors of classical antiquity. Yet as early as the seventh century the English bishops and abbots, who were the true administrators of the nation, were equally capable of making reference to Ovid, Virgil, Cicero, Pliny and others. There is, again, a continuity.