How wonderfully crude and incomplete must have been these first essays towards a knowledge of the universe! We think of Elfric, in his guesses at scientific truth, as a blind man groping aimlessly and hopelessly for the light. Another Elfric, sometimes confounded with the grammarian, was Archbishop of Canterbury, and died the next. year after our Elfric was made Abbot of Malmesbury; and a third, commonly called Bata, was Archbishop of York at the same time. The latter revised and enlarged the Latin Colloquium, above referred to, and adapted it to the use of scholars.

The very last work produced during the Anglo-Saxon domination in England was a Latin prose biography entitled The Life of Edward the Confessor. It was written anonymously, and dedicated to Queen Edith, the widow of the saintly king. The author, whoever he may have been, was, without doubt, intimately acquainted with the family of the great Earl Godwin and with Harold, the last of the Saxon kings; and "he put his heart into a narrative of those events before the Norman Conquest, in which Godwin and his sons, Harold and Tostig, were chief actors."

More than three hundred years have passed since the first English prose book was written; a new era, political, social, and literary, is about to dawn upon England; the feeble domination of the Anglo-Saxons is upon the point of giving place to the more energetic rule of the Normans; upon the ruins of the old and effete commonwealth a new fabric is to be erected, and from the simple yet forceful language of the Anglo-Saxons a new tongue, more elegant and of far different capabilities, is to be evolved. The meagreness of our literature at the time of the Norman Conquest, the scarcity of books, especially English books, is nothing short of astonishing. Let us see. There were Bede's translation of St. John's Gospel; King Alfred's Orosius and Boethius, his translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, his Hand-Boc, his Apologues, and his translation of Gregory's Pastorals; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and a work

of small value called Ethelwold's Chronicle; the books of Ethelwold and Dunstan on the Monastic Rule; the Homilies and other works of Elfric the Grammarian. These works, nearly all of which were translations, included almost the whole of our English prose literature up to the close of the eleventh century.

There were several reasons for this exceedingly slow progress in the art of book-making. Chief among these was the almost universal ignorance to which we have already alluded, and the exclusive confinement of learning to the narrow circle of the priesthood. The art of printing had not yet been discovered, and the multiplying of books was, at best, a slow and exceedingly laborious process. The materials for book-making were not only very scarce, but very expensive.

"From the conquest of Alexandria by the Saracens at the beginning of the seventh century, when the Egyptian papyrus almost ceased to be imported into Europe, to the close of the tenth, about which time the art of making paper from cotton rags seems to have been introduced, there were no materials for writing except parchment, a substance too expensive to be readily spared for mere purposes of literature."*

After the Norman Conquest, still other causes impeded the progress of learning and the growth of our literature, and we shall find that, during the next four hundred years, the number of prose works written in English was scarcely increased.

REFERENCES.

HISTORICAL STUDIES.

The history of England during the Anglo-Saxon domination (4491066). Consult

Knight's History of England. Vol. I.

Green's History of the English People. Chap. I.

Hume's History of England. Vol. I.

*Hallam: Middle Ages, IX., i.

Thierry's Norman Conquest. Vol. I.

Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons.

Palgrave's History of the English Commonwealth.

Kemble's Saxons in England.

Stubbs's Constitutional History of England.

Creasy's English Constitution.

LITERARY STUDIES.

Taine's English Literature. Chap. I.

Hart's Syllabus of Anglo-Saxon Literature.

Hadley's Brief History of the English Language, in Webster's Dictionary.

Carpenter's Anglo-Saxon Reader.

Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader.

BEDE: See Wright's Biographia Literaria; The Works of the Venerable Bede, edited by Dr. Giles (1840); Morley's Early English Writers.

KING ALFRED: See the histories above mentioned; also Life of Alfred the Great, by Thomas Hughes; Palgrave's History of the Arglo-Saxons ; Six Old English Chronicles, in Bohn's Antiquarian Library.

ALCUIN: See Guizot's History of Civilization; Van Laun's History of French Literature.

CHAPTER II.

THE TRANSITION PERIOD.

Modern English-Attempted Proscription of the English VernacularTrevisa-Monastic Chronicles: Turgot, Simeon, Eadmar, William of Malmesbury, Ordericus Vitalis, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Geoffrey Gaimar, Henry of Huntingdon, William of Newbury, Roger de Hoveden, Giraldus Cambrensis, Roger of Wendover, Matthew Paris, Ralph Higden-Athelard of Bath, Roger Bacon-The Schoolmen : Anselm, John of Salisbury, Alexander of Hales, Duns Scotus, Occam, Realists and Nominalists-Transition English: The Ancren Riwle, Proclamation of Henry II., Sir John Mandeville.

In the year 1154 the last entry was made in the AngloSaxon Chronicle, and with it the Anglo-Saxon language ceased to exist. In the year 1362 the English language was authorized to be used in the courts-at-law and in all legal proceedings throughout England. The two hundred years which had elapsed between these two dates was a period of confusion-a time of transition from the old order of thinking and doing and speaking to new modes of life and a new world of thought and speech. It was the period of fusion between the diverse Saxon and Norman elements whereby a new people, possessing all the most admirable qualities of the old, was evolved. During this time, French was the language of the court and of the educated classes. The laws were administered in French, and legal documents were written in Latin. At first there was an attempt on the part of the Norman invaders to banish entirely the English vernacular, and to substitute their own language instead. For upwards of two hundred years no English was taught in the schools. Ralph Higden, a Benedictine monk, who died in the year 1363, says: "Children in scole agenes the usage and maner

of alle other nacionnes beeth compelled for to leve her owne langage and for to constrewe here lessouns and here thingis in Frensche, and so they haveth sitthe that the Normans come first into Englond. Also gentil mennes children beeth ytaught for to speke Frensche from the tyme that thei beeth rokked in her cradel, and kunneth speke and playe with a childes brooche. And uplondische (country) men wole likne hem self to gentil men, and fondeth with grete bicynesse for to speke Frensche for to be the more ytold of. . . . The foresaid Saxon tonge is abide scarsly with fewe uplondische men. All the langages of the Northumbres, and specially at Yorke, is so scharp slittinge and frotynge (harsh) and unschape, that we southern men may that langage unneth (uneasily) understonde."*

The noblemen were in the habit of sending their children to France to be educated, in order that they might escape the barbarisms of their own country. Students in the universities were forbidden to speak English, but were, by law, enjoined to converse either in French or in Latin.

Learning was still chiefly confined to the monasteries, and the writers of books were ecclesiastics-monks or priests. As a matter of course, nearly all books were composed in Latin. As in France, during the time of Erigena, so now, in England, every religious house of importance had its scriptorium, or writing-room, where ancient manuscripts were restored, copied, and illuminated, where scholarly dissertations upon religious subjects were written, and where entries were regularly noted in the chronicle or register of the monastery. Of the different kinds of prose writings thus produced, the most important, as well as the most numerous, were those now known as monastic chronicles. These were, for the most part, the uninteresting annals of some particular locality, but occasionally they

Higden's Polychronicon, Trevisa's Translation, I., 59.